Ranking Member Raskin’s Statement on Trump DOJ’s Motion to Vacate Proud Boys’ and Oath Keepers’ January 6 Convictions

Washington, D.C. (April 15, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, released the following statement after the Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal appeals court to vacate the convictions of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, and other Oath Keepers leaders, as well as four Proud Boys leaders—Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola—who were convicted of felonies including seditious conspiracy for their roles in the January 6 attack:

“This is an appalling and dangerous turn of events. The Department of Justice is now acting like in-house counsel for the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. 

“In November 2022, after a grueling eight-week trial and the introduction of mountains of evidence, a unanimous jury convicted the two leaders of the Oath Keepers of seditious conspiracy for their roles in leading the insurrectionary attack on the United States Capitol and the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021. Seditious conspiracy means conspiracy to overthrow, destroy or put down the government of the United States by force. 

“Rhodes had recruited and propagandized his followers, amassed a huge store of weapons, and staged armed ‘quick reaction force’ teams in Virginia to ferry weapons into Washington for the attack on the Capitol. Meggs spearheaded the effort to breach the Capitol, leading his followers inside in a military-style ‘stack’ formation. The sentencing judge called Rhodes ‘an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to its democracy,’ and applied the terrorism enhancement against him at sentencing. The judge sentenced Rhodes to 18 years and Meggs to 12 years behind bars. Amazingly, House Republicans appeared so unbothered by all of this that they recently allowed Rhodes to remain in a reserved front-row seat at their first hearing seeking to challenge the report and work of the January 6 Select Committee with lies and disinformation.

“In May 2023, after a four-month trial, a unanimous federal jury convicted four Proud Boys leaders for their roles in leading the attack. The evidence was overwhelming and horrific. Dominic Pezzola ripped a riot shield from a police officer and used it to smash open a Capitol window, allowing the first wave of rioters to stream into the building. Joseph Biggs tore down security fencing and led a mob directly into the Capitol, later calling January 6 a ‘warning shot’ to the government. Zachary Rehl sprayed a police officer directly in the face with a chemical agent and then bragged that he was ‘so fucking proud’ of the Proud Boys’ ‘raid of the capitol.’ Ethan Nordean helped organize the chain of command for the attack, as a leader of the so-called ‘Ministry of Self-Defense’ and personally breached barricades and tore down the fencing protecting the Capitol. 

“The Trump-appointed sentencing judge was so appalled by the violence the defendants unleashed against our Constitution and government that he applied a federal terrorism enhancement to their sentences. He found their crimes were calculated to influence the actions of government through violent threats and the use of violent force.

“These men together coordinated and directed the worst mass attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812. They established chains of command, recruited rioters and prepared them for violent insurrection, and personally participated in the initial breaches of the Capitol that day. Their conduct was so extreme even by January 6 standards that when President Trump took office and pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants, including other violent rioters and vicious cop-beaters, he declined to give these ring-leader insurrectionists full pardons. He only commuted their sentences; their crimes were simply too sweeping, too dangerous and too well-documented.

“But now, sinking in the polls and giving up on normal political dialogue as his foreign and domestic policy debacles pile up all around him, Donald Trump returns to his most fanatical base. He now proposes to go further than just granting these convicted felons a pardon and the removal of civil disabilities. His Administration is asking federal courts to vacate their criminal convictions entirely and dismiss their original indictments with prejudice—meaning that their convictions and prosecutions would disappear and they could never be prosecuted again for their criminal actions on January 6. 

“These astounding motions are a humiliation for American democracy. They constitute an attempt to vaporize the verdicts rendered unanimously by American jurors who considered all the evidence, and to pretend that these seditious conspiracies against our government never happened. The same DOJ that prosecuted these men and secured their criminal convictions beyond any reasonable doubt is now asking a court to whitewash their crimes and pretend that they never led the insurrectionist mob that beat, crushed in doors, wounded, injured and hospitalized 140 of our law enforcement officers, disfiguring and disabling some of them for life. 

“These motions are part of Donald Trump’s continuing campaign to placate and curry favor with the extreme Right, which acts as his private sworn militia. 

“This is an insult to the jurors who heard the evidence and did their civic duty, to the judges who presided over these cases and sentenced these criminals, and above all to the heroic officers who were wounded, bloodied, and broken defending our democracy on that terrible day. The Trump Administration, together with congressional Republicans’ sham subcommittee to investigate the January 6 investigators, is trying to erase in Orwellian fashion the historical record of what the mob’s leaders actually did to support Donald Trump’s Big Lie and order to ‘fight and fight like hell’ against the peaceful transfer of power. And yet the American people will not forget what these men did, no matter how hard Republicans try to destroy the truth and historical memory.”