President Trump has now won, from an extremely reluctant federal judge, a final victory over all of the criminal cases against his political allies who staged a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol more than five years ago.
In a 15-page decision issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington, D.C., granted Trump’s request to dismiss the last of the criminal charges that had been prosecuted for that assault on January 6, 2021.
The judge wrote: “This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed.”
Even though Trump last year had pardoned almost all of the hundreds who had been convicted of those crimes at trials or by guilty pleas, he wanted to go further. For nine individuals convicted of the most serious crimes, who were not fully pardoned but were released from further prison time, Trump wanted the courts to erase the underlying charges. A future federal government, perhaps in a Democrat’s Presidency, could potentially revive those charges.
However, dismissing the charges is not the last of what President Trump wants to do for the January 6 rioters. This week, now well into his second term, he indicated that he wants to reward all of those involved with payments from the U.S. Treasury totaling $1.8 billion, to compensate them for the harm he argues was done to them by the law and the courts. That so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” plan remains tied up in the courts.
Judge Mehta indicated that he felt he had almost no choice but to dismiss the original charges against the final nine rioters and to prevent any future prosecution of them, mainly because federal law gives prosecutors wide discretion to make charging decisions.
Federal court rules allow prosecutors to dismiss existing charges, “with leave of court.” The judge said the scope of that court role “is not well defined,” but he wound up concluding that his role was quite narrow. However, he did compel the Justice Department to make a stronger case for dismissing the charges than it had made to him initially. After further review, he granted the request.
He summed up his final conclusion this way:
“Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-old pillar of our democracy – the peaceful transfer of presidential power – to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.”
Trump, too, was charged with crimes for encouraging his followers to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to protest his loss of the 2020 election – a loss that Trump has never acknowledged and continues to challenge. After he won election to a new term in 2024, all charges against him were dropped. Those charges, however, were not dropped in a way that kept them from being revived after Trump is no longer President. Potentially, he could pardon himself.
Tuesday’s decision will remain on the court records as United States v. Rhodes, et al. (meaning “Rhodes and others”). The nine individuals involved in the case included Elmer Stewart Rhodes and eight other members of the “Oath Keepers,” a violent militia group. Rhodes was one of their leaders.
Six of the nine rioters were convicted of the most serious of all of the charges made by prosecutors: a plot to commit sedition against the U.S. government, under a Civil War era law rarely used in modern cases.
The Oath Keepers’ prison sentences ranged from 18 years for Rhodes to three years for another rioter. One ultimately benefitted from a Supreme Court decision narrowing the scope of one of the charges. His sentence was reduced to only the jail time he had already served.
While the Trump Administration’s Justice Department sought to eliminate all of the underlying criminal charges at issue in this case, it did not question the validity of the charges or of the evidence, and it made no claim that prosecutors had acted wrongly or that any of the individuals’ rights had been violated.
“Remarkably,” Judge Mehta wrote, “the government does not maintain that dismissal is in the public interest to rectify a fundamental error or a grave injustice.” Its main point, he noted, was that, with the charges left outstanding on the court record, the individuals could be exposed to “harassment,” perhaps by a new trial in the future.
That claim of potential “harassment” is similar to the one that the President and other Administration officials have offered to justify their plan to provide millions in Treasury payments to the President’s followers who faced investigation and prosecution for the January 6 assault.
The heavy political controversy surrounding that plan had been a complication for the President’s nomination of Todd Blanche to be U.S. Attorney General, but that apparently has been removed. The full Senate may vote on Blanche’s nomination later this week; he is expected to be approved. Blanche is a former private lawyer for Trump and is now Acting Attorney General.
