A federal judge granted the Department of Justice‘s request to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys members, tossing the most serious criminal judgments stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, dismissed with prejudice the indictment against former Proud Boys Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, closing a case that had resulted in some of the most significant convictions arising from the Capitol riot.
The ruling follows a series of actions by the Trump administration in which the president commuted the sentences of Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola while issuing a full pardon to former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio. In April, the Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to vacate the four men’s convictions and remand the case so prosecutors could seek dismissal. The appeals court granted that request in May.
In Friday’s seven-page opinion, Kelly said the executive branch has broad constitutional authority over charging decisions and that precedent required the court to grant the government’s unopposed motion. In dismissing the case with prejudice, Kelly’s order permanently bars the federal government from bringing the same charges against the four defendants again.
“The Executive’s primacy in criminal charging decisions is long settled,” Kelly wrote, adding that courts have “no power” to deny a prosecutor’s request to dismiss charges simply because they disagree with the government’s decision.
Kelly emphasized, however, that granting the motion should not be viewed as an endorsement of the administration’s handling of Jan. 6 prosecutions.
“Because the decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution … are solely the Executive’s, no one should mistake the Court’s granting the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” he wrote.
“There is little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks” Kelly later added. “President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — whether those views are based on fact or fiction — are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the Executive Order.”
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The judge also devoted the final section of the opinion to describing the gravity of Jan. 6, framing it as an attack on the constitutional process of peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next.
Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl were convicted in 2023 of seditious conspiracy and other felonies tied to the attack. Pezzola was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of multiple other felonies, including assaulting police officers and destroying government property after using a stolen police shield to break a Capitol window.
