The Department of Justice — the same one that spent three years telling us a bunch of guys in Viking helmets nearly toppled the Republic — just filed paperwork asking a federal court to throw out the seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders.
We need to talk about what “seditious conspiracy” actually means, because the media sure as heck wasn’t going to explain it to you. This is a charge so extreme, so rarely used, that it hadn’t been successfully prosecuted in decades before the Biden DOJ dusted it off for January 6. The last time anyone got convicted of seditious conspiracy was back when people were plotting actual armed rebellions. But Biden’s prosecutors looked at Stewart Rhodes and a handful of Proud Boys members and thought, “Yeah, this is basically the same thing as the Civil War.”
Rhodes — the Oath Keepers founder who got slapped with an 18-year sentence — was convicted partly because his group stockpiled weapons at a hotel in Virginia. Weapons that were never brought to the Capitol. Never deployed. Never used. They sat in a Holiday Inn while the “insurrection” consisted of people wandering through the Rotunda taking selfies with the statuary.
Eighteen years. For guns that stayed in a hotel room.
The DOJ’s filing is almost comically bureaucratic in its surrender. Prosecutors wrote that “the government’s motion to vacate in this case is consistent with its practice of moving the Supreme Court to vacate convictions in cases where the government has decided in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of a criminal case is in the interests of justice.” Translation from lawyer-speak: “We overcharged these people for political reasons and we’d like to quietly make it go away now, please.”
The motion covers a whole roster of names the media spent years painting as domestic terrorists. Oath Keepers members Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, and Jessica Watkins. Proud Boys members Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola. Former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio already received a pardon from President Trump. Now the rest of them are getting their convictions erased entirely.
Nicholas Smith, the attorney for Nordean, put it perfectly: “We don’t want a precedent that says physical confrontation between protesters and law enforcement means seditious conspiracy.” No kidding. Because if that’s the standard, then every Antifa rioter who threw a Molotov at a federal courthouse in Portland should be doing 20 years in a supermax right now.
(Funny how that standard only applies in one direction, isn’t it?)
Remember what they told us. CNN had “SEDITIOUS CONSPIRACY” in their chyron for weeks like they’d just cracked the Rosetta Stone. MSNBC hosts were practically weeping with joy when the convictions came down. “This proves it was an insurrection!” they screamed. “This is the most serious charge since the Civil War!” Legal analysts went on television and called these convictions “historic” and “airtight.”
Airtight. And now the government itself is popping the seal.
President Trump had already commuted the sentences of over 1,500 January 6 defendants back in January 2025. That was the first domino. But commutations leave the conviction on your record — you’re out of prison but still branded a felon. This motion goes further. This wipes the slate. This says the conviction itself was politically motivated, and the court should treat it like it never existed.
That’s not clemency. That’s an admission.
We all watched this happen in real time. The Biden administration needed January 6 to be an insurrection because they needed Trump supporters to be insurrectionists. They needed the seditious conspiracy charges because “trespassing” and “parading in a Capitol building” didn’t sound scary enough to justify the FBI kicking down doors at 5 AM. The whole thing was a production — from the prime-time congressional hearings with their Hollywood lighting consultant (yes, that was real) to the prosecutors reaching for charges that hadn’t seen daylight since the 1800s.
And now it’s over. The DOJ just took a knee.
The only question left is whether anyone in the media has the decency to admit they sold the American public a lie about January 6th. They told us these protesters were the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. They told us seditious conspiracy was the only charge serious enough to match the gravity of what happened. And now the government — their own government — is asking a court to erase every word of it.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for the correction. These are the same networks that still haven’t apologized for three years of Russian collusion coverage. They’ll just memory-hole the seditious conspiracy convictions and move on to the next manufactured crisis.
But we won’t forget. And neither will every January 6th attendee who had their lives destroyed by prosecutors playing politics with the most extreme charge in the federal criminal code.
The insurrection narrative just lost its crown jewel. Good riddance.
