Judge Dismisses the Jan. 6 Seditious Conspiracy Case Against Stewart Rhodes and Seven Oath Keepers at the Justice Department’s Request

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta on Aug. 4, 2026, granted the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven other members of the group. Juries had convicted Rhodes and five other Oath Keepers of conspiring to use force to stop the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mehta had sentenced Rhodes to 18 years in prison, calling him “an ongoing threat and peril to this country.” The Trump Justice Department moved in April 2026 to vacate those convictions and later to drop the case outright. Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of nearly every Jan. 6 defendant on his first day back in office in January 2025.

The seditious conspiracy convictions were the most serious verdicts obtained in the Capitol riot prosecutions, and their erasure removes the last standing judicial finding that an organized group tried to stop the transfer of power by force. In his order, Mehta wrote that “today’s epilogue 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.” A lawyer for Rhodes said the charge should never have been brought, calling it a “thought crime.”

The case is dismissed. Three former Capitol riot prosecutors appeared on Capitol Hill the same week to urge the Senate not to advance judicial nominees who decline to say who won the 2020 election; the White House said all of the president’s nominees went through a “rigorous vetting process.”