This week, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta did something he made clear he did not want to do. He dismissed the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and eight co-defendants — the last standing prosecution tied to January 6, 2021 — because the Justice Department itself asked him to. Rhodes had been sentenced to 18 years. Juries had already convicted him and five other Oath Keepers of conspiring to use force to keep Congress from certifying a presidential election. And now, at the government’s own request, that conviction is gone.
Mehta didn’t dress it up. In his ruling, he wrote that the dismissal “diminishes the gravity of that day, 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.” That’s not the language of a judge going along easily. That’s a judge on record saying: I am doing this because I have to, not because I agree with it.
I want to be direct about something before I go further, because I know exactly how this piece will get read by people looking for a team to root for. This isn’t a Trump piece. It isn’t an anti-Trump piece either. UNJ doesn’t do those, and I don’t write them. What I write about is whether the people who are supposed to hold power accountable are actually doing it — consistently, regardless of whose administration benefits.
Here’s the question I keep coming back to: if a case like this can be built for years, taken to trial, argued in front of a jury, upheld, and then unwound by the same government that built it — what was any of it worth? Not just to the people in that courtroom. To the next person weighing whether storming a building to stop a legal process is a chargeable, career-ending, decade-in-prison decision, or an inconvenience that gets sorted out two administrations later.
That’s not a hypothetical concern dressed up as principle. It’s the actual mechanism by which deterrence works or doesn’t. Laws don’t deter people because of what’s written on the page. They deter people because of what actually happens to the last guy who broke them. When the answer to “what happens if you storm the Capitol with weapons and a plan” becomes “it depends on who’s president when your appeals run out,” you haven’t just changed one man’s sentence. You’ve changed the incentive structure for everyone watching.
I’d say the exact same thing if the shoe were on the other foot — if a future administration moved to unwind convictions against, say, people who firebombed a federal building during 2020’s unrest, or attacked ICE facilities, or engaged in any other politically-coded violence prosecutors spent years building cases around. Political violence is political violence. The Capitol riot, targeted attacks on federal property, ambushes on law enforcement — accountability for all of it should survive a change in who’s in the Oval Office. The moment it doesn’t, you don’t have a justice system anymore. You have a scoreboard that resets every four to eight years, and everybody involved knows it.
There’s also a version of this conversation that gets lost because it’s less satisfying than picking a side: the people this decision actually costs. The prosecutors and FBI agents who spent years building an airtight case, testified, and watched a jury agree with them — Mehta specifically flagged what this does to them. Capitol Police officers who were on the floor that day, some of whom left the force afterward, dealing with injuries that didn’t heal on the news cycle’s timeline. Those are real people whose work just got told, by their own government, that it didn’t ultimately matter. I don’t think that’s a small thing to shrug off in either direction.
None of this means I think every Jan. 6 defendant deserved maximum sentences forever, or that clemency reviews are inherently illegitimate — presidents have pardon power for a reason, and reasonable people disagree about where mercy belongs in cases like these. What troubles me isn’t mercy. It’s the total dismissal of the underlying case, at trial’s end, after conviction, framed not as clemency but as the government deciding the prosecution itself shouldn’t have happened. That’s a different and more corrosive move than a pardon. A pardon says: you did it, and I’m choosing to forgive it. A dismissal like this says: it didn’t really happen, or didn’t really matter.
For the readers who come to UNJ tired of both cable news teams — the ones performing outrage on cue depending on the day’s ratings needs — here’s my actual ask: hold this standard for whoever’s in power next, too. If a future DOJ under a different party moves to quietly unwind prosecutions tied to political violence its own base committed, I’ll write that piece with the same tone I’m writing this one. That consistency is the entire point. The day we only get outraged about accountability when it’s convenient for our side is the day we’ve stopped actually caring about accountability at all.
Rule of law isn’t a slogan for bumper stickers. It’s a promise that the rules apply the same way regardless of who’s asking for an exception. This week, that promise took a hit. Not because a judge was weak — Mehta’s ruling makes clear the opposite — but because the system built a pressure valve that lets a case just… stop mattering. That should worry anyone who wants their kids to grow up believing consequences are real, not negotiable depending on the news cycle.