President Donald Trump’s top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., has asked a court to throw out the convictions for several members of extremist groups that led the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
On his first day back in office, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 Capitol rioters, which effectively wiped out about 1,270 convictions and ended criminal proceedings against the remaining defendants.
Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 people found guilty of organizing and leading the attack, including former members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, which freed them from prison but meant they were still classified as felons.
Now, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia asking for the convictions to be tossed out completely.
“The United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,” Pirro wrote.
The motion cited Trump’s commutations but didn’t provide any other reasoning behind the decision. The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and the other defendants who were “only” granted commutations had been convicted of the most serious crimes, including seditious conspiracy, for trying to overthrow Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
They challenged their convictions in hopes of expunging their records altogether and were facing a deadline to file their arguments about why the government had overreached with the charges, The New York Times reported.
Defending the convictions would have likely required the DOJ to argue that the far-right groups were acting on behalf of Trump, according to the Times.
Prosecutors had argued during the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy trial that members of the group acted as “Donald Trump’s army” to keep the president in office via violent force.
By asking the court to toss the guilty verdicts, Pirro avoided implicating the president in the Capitol riots.
The former Fox News host and New York County judge has treated her office as the president’s personal law firm, aggressively supporting his federal crackdown in D.C. and pursuing cases against his enemies—even when the cases are not winnable.
Trump has never said why he chose not to grant full pardons to the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper defendants.
For more than a year, Rhodes, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison, had been advocating for a full pardon so he could own a gun, vote, and receive veterans benefits.
As long as the convictions stood, he and his fellow defendants were “second-class citizens,” he complained.
Last month, Rhodes traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida, to personally lobby the president, thought it was apparently to no avail.
The move came after Rhodes declared he was no longer “MAGA” over the president’s war with Iran, and instead considered himself an “American-only patriot” and “American Christian Nationalist.”
