Politics|Judge Pained as He Grants Dismissal of Jan. 6 Charges Against Oath Keepers

A federal judge expressed deep regret on Tuesday as he granted a request by the Justice Department to throw out criminal charges against eight members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia who were charged with seditious conspiracy for the central role they played in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The move by the judge, Amit P. Mehta, came less than a month after one of his colleagues in Federal District Court in Washington made a similarly pained decision to dismiss Jan. 6-related charges against five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, who also played a key part in the Capitol attack. The twin rulings, which both judges made claiming that their hands were tied by the law, amounted to a final erasure of the vast investigation into Jan. 6, the largest criminal inquiry undertaken in the Justice Department’s 156-year history.

Confessing that he wished for “a different ending,” Judge Mehta blasted the Justice Department’s request for a dismissal in the case, saying it bestowed “unearned grace” on the Oath Keepers defendants — including on their leader Stewart Rhodes — “by wiping their records clean.”

He also took pains to recall the profound damage that occurred on Jan. 6 to people at the Capitol as well as to the nation’s politics, refusing to ignore either one as President Trump has sought to play down the violence of the attack and has repeatedly asserted that the rioters themselves were wronged by efforts to hold them accountable and deserve financial restitution.

“Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day,” Judge Mehta wrote, “denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle.”

In an almost elegiac tone, Judge Mehta, an Obama appointee, acknowledged that he was bound to “give way to the primacy of the executive branch,” which has wide latitude in making decisions in criminal prosecutions. But the judge seemed unable to bite his tongue entirely, chiding the prosecutors who had requested the dismissal even as he acceded to them.