A federal judge nominated by Donald Trump during his first term reluctantly agreed on Friday to grant the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy convictions against leaders of the Proud Boys who were convicted by a jury of serious crimes during the attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.
The US district judge Timothy Kelly noted in a seven-page memorandum that the Proud Boy leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl were all convicted of multiple crimes, including seditious conspiracy, and a fourth member of the group, Dominic Pezzola, was convicted of assaulting an officer and “breaking a Capitol window, thereby helping to create the first entry point through which hundreds of rioters streamed into the building”.
Pezzola’s destruction of the window was recorded in a social media video that quickly became one of the iconic images of the day.
Nordean, Biggs and Rehl were all sentenced to long prison terms in 2023. Upon returning to office in 2025, Trump commuted their sentences as part of a sweeping order granting clemency to about 1,500 people who had been charged with or convicted for participating in the Capital attack. However, their convictions were kept in place.
In April, the DoJ requested that an appeals court overturn the convictions. The appeals court approved the motion in May, sending the ruling back to Kelly. Kelly, in Friday’s memo, said he was granting the motion as “it is hard to see how any other course … could make practical sense. Denying the motion would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated”.
Kelly, in Friday’s filing, went on to note that he was granting the motion to dismiss the prosecutions even though the request was clearly based not on facts or the law, but on Trump’s desire to excuse the violence of his supporters.
“[T]here is little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks,” Kelly observed. “President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the US 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”.
Kelly also noted that the case was initiated “while President Trump was still in power” in the days after the attack.
“As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event,” Kelly wrote. “It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government – Congress – that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called ‘nothing less than a miracle.’”
“Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people – no matter their partisan preferences – will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework,” the Trump-appointed judge concluded.
