The seditious conspiracy convictions of four Proud Boys leaders are gone — and the only question left is whether the prosecutors who weaponized a Civil War-era statute against American citizens will ever answer for it.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly signed off on the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the case against Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. The convictions are vacated. The men go free. But the legal machinery that put them in prison for years remains fully intact, staffed by the same people, ready to be deployed again.
This matters because seditious conspiracy was designed for genuine armed rebellion against the republic. Before January 6, the DOJ had barely touched the statute in decades. Branding protesters — however disruptive, however destructive — as conspirators against the government told every American: challenge the regime, and we will brand you a traitor.
The dismissal came through procedural necessity, not judicial enthusiasm. The D.C. Court of Appeals had already vacated the convictions in May after the DOJ moved to overturn them in April. Kelly wrote that denying the motion "would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated." He granted it because he had no practical alternative.
Kelly made his feelings plain. "President Trump's views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — whether those views are based on fact or fiction — are well known," he wrote, per both The Guardian and CBS News. He called January 6 "a perilous event" and "an attack on a coordinate branch of government" and "an attack on the Constitution's mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power." The judge is entitled to his view. What matters for ordinary Americans is the legal weapon deployed in its aftermath.
CBS News framed the Proud Boys as "far-right" and the events as an "attempted insurrection." The Guardian called it an "attack on the US Capitol by Trump supporters." Both outlets buried the most telling detail: the prosecution was initiated, as Kelly himself noted, "while President Trump was still in power" in the days after the attack. Trump's own DOJ launched the case. Biden's DOJ prosecuted it to the hilt. That's the bipartisan failure. Both parties agreed: use the heaviest legal hammer available against citizens who showed up to protest the certification of an election.
Nordean, Biggs, and Rehl were convicted of seditious conspiracy in 2023 and drew long prison sentences. Pezzola was convicted of assault and smashing a Capitol window with a riot shield — an act The Guardian noted became "one of the iconic images of the day." Violence against officers and destruction of government property are already crimes with serious penalties. Seditious conspiracy was the overreach — the charge designed to make examples of men whose real offense was opposing the transfer of power.
Trump commuted their sentences in January 2025 but left the convictions standing. It took until April for his DOJ to move to vacate them entirely. If these convictions were unjust — and they were — the half-measures demand their own explanation.
The convictions are vacated. The men are free. But the prosecutors who brought the case, the FBI agents who built it, and the institutional actors who green-lit the most aggressive legal theory against American citizens in a generation still have their badges, their pensions, and their power. No one has been held accountable. If there's no consequence for turning seditious conspiracy on protesters, there's nothing stopping the next DOJ from doing the same thing — to anyone, for any reason.
