On July 11, 2026, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly vacated the federal convictions of four Proud Boys leaders who had been found guilty by a jury of conspiring to use force to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election — along with related charges — for their roles in the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol. The ruling was not disputed. Judge Kelly, appointed to the federal bench by Trump during his first term, found no legal basis to preserve the convictions after Trump had commuted the defendants’ sentences to time served. The four men left court without criminal records. Separately, Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys chairman who received the longest prison sentence handed down in any January 6 case at 22 years, had already been fully pardoned by Trump in January 2025. His conviction was erased before the July 11 hearing. The Justice Department has also moved to vacate the convictions of eight Oath Keepers members convicted in a related trial. That motion is still pending. July 11 was the formal legal end of the most serious accountability the justice system had established for the events of January 6.
What the Charge Was and Why It Mattered
The charge at the center of both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers cases was seditious conspiracy, defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2384. In plain terms, it is a federal crime for two or more people to agree to use force to overthrow the government, to wage war against it, or to use force to prevent a law of the United States from being carried out. The maximum sentence is 20 years in federal prison per count. It is one of the most serious charges in the federal criminal code. The government used it here specifically because the evidence showed, in its view, that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers did not simply show up at the Capitol on January 6 — they organized, planned, and coordinated in advance to use force to stop the certification of the election results. The government did not apply the charge to the thousands of people who attended the rally on the National Mall or to the many who entered the Capitol building without organizing the attack. It was used for people who, two separate juries found beyond a reasonable doubt, had agreed with others to use force to stop the transfer of power from happening.
Who Was Convicted and What They Were Sentenced To
The Oath Keepers were tried first. In November 2022, a federal jury convicted Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, of conspiring to use force to stop the transfer of power, along with evidence tampering. Kelly Meggs, the Florida chapter leader, was also convicted. Six additional Oath Keepers members were convicted of the same charge or related offenses in separate proceedings: Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, Joseph Hackett, and David Moerschel. In May 2023, Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Meggs received 12 years. It was the first successful prosecution of this kind in the United States in decades. The Proud Boys were tried in a separate case that ran for months. Prosecutors presented thousands of encrypted Signal messages, video footage from January 6, and testimony about the group’s internal structure and planning. The evidence showed that in the weeks before January 6, Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio had created a hand-picked subgroup called the Ministry of Self Defense to organize and lead the group that day. Internal messages showed members using ‘1776’ as shorthand for what they intended to accomplish. On May 4, 2023, a jury convicted Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl of the conspiracy charge. A fifth member, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of the conspiracy count but convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding, robbery of personal property of the United States, and other charges. Pezzola was the defendant seen on video smashing a Capitol window with a stolen police riot shield. In August and September 2023, all five were sentenced. Tarrio received 22 years, the longest sentence imposed in any case arising from January 6. Nordean received 18 years. Biggs received 17 years. Rehl received 15 years. Pezzola received 10 years. The sentences for the five Proud Boys totaled 82 years.
What Trump Did: Pardons and Commutations
On January 20, 2025, hours after his second inauguration, Trump signed clemency orders covering approximately 1,500 people charged or convicted in connection with January 6. For the vast majority, this meant full pardons, which erase the conviction entirely and restore civil rights. Tarrio was among those who received a full pardon. His conviction and the 22-year sentence attached to it were erased. Rhodes was released from federal prison the following day, January 21, 2025, after his sentence was commuted to time served. But 14 defendants, including the four remaining Proud Boys leaders and the Oath Keepers members, received commutations rather than pardons. A commutation cancels the remaining prison sentence and releases the defendant from custody, but it does not erase the conviction. A person whose sentence is commuted remains a convicted felon under federal law. The administration did not offer a public explanation for why these 14 received commutations rather than full pardons. The result was that by January 21, 2025, all of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders were out of prison, but the four Proud Boys and eight Oath Keepers still had felony convictions on their records.
What the Justice Department Did Next
On April 14, 2026, the Department of Justice filed motions in federal court asking that the remaining convictions of the 14 defendants be vacated entirely. The DOJ said the dismissals were in the interests of justice. The filings were made by the department under Attorney General Pam Bondi. The prosecutors who had built and won the cases were no longer at the department. Most of the attorneys from the DOJ’s National Security Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia who had worked on the January 6 prosecutions had resigned or been reassigned during the departmental restructuring of 2025. The department did not acknowledge any error in the original prosecutions. It offered no legal argument that the verdicts were wrong or that the defendants were innocent. It invoked prosecutorial discretion, the executive branch’s authority to decide whether to continue pursuing a case. The institution that had called these prosecutions a landmark in holding accountable those who used force to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power was now asking the courts to erase them.
July 11: The Convictions Are Vacated
Judge Timothy Kelly presided over the Proud Boys trial. He was appointed to the federal bench by Trump during his first term. When the DOJ filed its motion to vacate in April, the legal situation was clear. Under settled federal law, when both the government and the defendants jointly ask a court to dismiss a criminal case and there is no active trial underway, a federal judge has very limited authority to refuse. The judge found no legal basis on which to preserve the convictions against the joint request of the defendants and the Justice Department that had originally prosecuted them. Reporting described the judge as saying his hands were tied. On July 11, 2026, Judge Kelly granted the motion. The convictions of Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola were vacated. The four men who had been sentenced to a combined 60 years in federal prison for their roles in the January 6 attack left court without criminal records.
What Remains
The motion to vacate the Oath Keepers convictions remains pending before U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta. The same legal standard that governed the Proud Boys proceeding would apply: if the government and the defendants jointly ask for dismissal without an ongoing trial, the court has narrow grounds to refuse. If Judge Mehta grants the motion, Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, and the six other Oath Keepers members with convictions still standing will leave court without criminal records. There will then be no one with a conviction for conspiring to stop the transfer of power remaining from January 6. The broader picture is this: approximately 1,200 people were charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol attack. After Trump’s January 2025 clemency actions, the large majority of those cases were dismissed. The prosecutions that took years to build, the trials that produced months of evidence in open court, the verdicts that juries returned after deliberation, and the sentences that federal judges imposed are being erased case by case. What happened on January 6 is not in dispute. The events are documented in trial transcripts, congressional investigation records, and thousands of hours of video evidence. But the legal determination that those events constituted federal crimes is no longer standing. The Proud Boys convictions are gone. The chairman was pardoned. The others were commuted and then vacated. The Oath Keepers are next.