Judge reluctantly dismisses Oath Keepers’ Jan. 6 charges

A federal judge on Tuesday yielded to an unopposed motion from federal prosecutors to dismiss criminal charges against members of the conservative militia group related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The permanent dismissal applied to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven other Oath Keepers affiliates.

Rhodes specifically received 18 years in prison for conspiracy, obstruction, and evidence tampering, which President Donald Trump commuted upon returning to office for his second term. Rhodes’ attorney, James Lee Bright, released a Tuesday statement celebrating the outcome. Seditious conspiracy charges should never have been brought to begin with, he wrote. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, the same judge who sentenced Rhodes, freely shared his reluctance to approve the motion in his Tuesday order.

What remarks did the judge make against the dismissals? Absolving the defendant’s crimes ran contrary to the public interest, he wrote. However, merely disagreeing with how prosecutors exercised their charging authority did not empower the court to flatly deny that charging authority, Mehta argued. There’s no question of prosecutorial impropriety, meaning the court must honor the executive branch's authority, he continued.

Mehta noted that the case at hand marked the final prosecution against individuals tied to Jan. 6. Closing the book by dismissing the charges diminished the solemnity of that day and denigrated the work of prosecutors and police officers to hold those involved accountable, he wrote. Prosecutors excused criminal acts that caused the peaceful transfer of presidential power, the centuries-old pillar of American democracy, to buckle, he added.

Dig deeper: Read Carolina Lumetta’s report on pardoned Jan. 6 defendants reflecting on crime and punishment.