Trump's Own Judge Calls Jan. 6 Case Dismissal Politically Motivated

The Judge Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Let's be precise about what happened here, because the details matter. Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were convicted by a jury of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. A fourth Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola, was convicted of assaulting an officer and smashing a Capitol window with a riot shield, an act captured on video that became one of the defining images of that day. These were not close cases. These were not technicalities.

Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl were sentenced to long prison terms in 2023. Trump commuted their sentences when he returned to office in 2025, but crucially, their convictions remained on the books. Then in April of this year, the DOJ asked an appeals court to throw out those convictions entirely. The appeals court approved the motion in May and kicked it back down to Kelly. So on Friday, Kelly did what he legally had to do.

But he wasn't quiet about it. According to The Guardian, Kelly wrote in his memo that there is "little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks." He then spelled it out: Trump's views about the January 6 prosecutions, "whether those views are based on fact or fiction," are well known. A sitting federal judge, one Trump himself put on the bench, just formally documented in court filings that the DOJ is doing the president's political bidding rather than pursuing justice.

He Called January 6 What It Actually Was

Here is where Kelly's memo gets genuinely remarkable. He did not quietly process the paperwork and move on. He used the filing to deliver a history lesson nobody in the current administration wants to hear.

"As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event," Kelly wrote, per The Guardian. "It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government. 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.'" He invoked Reagan. A Trump-appointed judge invoked Ronald Reagan to remind the Trump DOJ what they're actually dismantling.

Kelly also pointed out, almost acidly, that the original seditious conspiracy case was initiated while Trump was still in power, in the days immediately following the attack. This prosecution was not some partisan revenge fantasy cooked up by Democrats. It was started under Trump, finished under Biden, and is now being unwound under Trump again. That full arc is sitting right there in Kelly's memo.

The Mechanics of Letting Insurrectionists Walk Free

Kelly was blunt that he had no real practical choice but to grant the dismissal, even though he clearly found the whole exercise repugnant. "It is hard to see how any other course could make practical sense," he wrote, as reported by The Guardian. "Denying the motion would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated." The appeals court had already wiped out the convictions in May. All Kelly was doing at this point was tidying up the wreckage.

That procedural reality is worth sitting with for a second. By the time this landed back on Kelly's desk, the convictions were already gone. The DOJ worked the appeals process, got what it wanted from a higher court, and left the district judge holding a broom with nothing to sweep up. Kelly dismissed the case because there was nothing left to dismiss. The damage was already done at the appellate level, which is where this administration is doing most of its real work.

What Exactly Is the DOJ Doing Right Now

The Department of Justice, whose stated purpose is to enforce federal law impartially, asked a court to throw out jury convictions for seditious conspiracy against men who helped lead a mob into the United States Capitol. How is this legal? Technically, prosecutors have broad discretion to drop cases. That discretion has rarely, in the history of American law, been used to vacate jury verdicts in cases involving attacks on Congress during a constitutional process.

This is not a case of new evidence emerging. It is not a case of prosecutorial misconduct being uncovered. The Guardian's reporting makes clear that Kelly himself acknowledged the dismissal request is not grounded in facts or law. The government is not arguing these men are innocent. It is arguing, essentially, that the president would prefer they not be convicted felons. That preference is now official DOJ policy.

The Closing Paragraph That Will Be Ignored

Kelly closed his memo with a warning that deserves more attention than it will get. "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," he wrote, per The Guardian.

Read that again slowly. A judge Donald Trump appointed is warning, in a legal document, that American democracy might not survive another 250 years if the country keeps going like this. He is doing it in the very filing where he is being forced to set free men convicted of conspiring to stop the peaceful transfer of power. The irony is so thick you could choke on it.