Judge calls Jan. 6 attack on Capitol ‘perilous event’ in dismissal order
Proud Boys leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, and Zachary Rehl were convicted of seditious conspiracy and multiple other crimes for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and sentenced to long prison terms in 2023. A fourth member of the group, Dominic Pezzola, was convicted of assaulting an officer and breaking a Capitol window, “thereby helping to create the first entry point through which hundreds of rioters streamed into the building,” according to court records. A social media video captured Pezzola destroying the window, and the footage became one of the iconic images of the day.
Upon returning to office in 2025, Trump commuted the defendants’ sentences as part of a sweeping clemency order covering about 1,500 people charged with or convicted for participating in the Capitol attack. Their convictions, however, remained in place. In April, the Department of Justice requested that an appeals court overturn the convictions. The appeals court approved the motion in May, sending the case back to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, for dismissal.
In a seven-page memorandum on Friday, Kelly said he was granting the motion to dismiss because “it is hard to see how any other course … could make practical sense. Denying the motion would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated.”
The judge went on to note that the request was “clearly based not on facts or the law, but on [President Trump’s] desire to excuse the violence of his supporters.” He added that the case was initiated “while President Trump was still in power” in the days after the attack.
“[T]here is little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks,” Kelly observed. “President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the US Capitol on January 6 – whether those views are based on fact or fiction – are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them.”
Kelly wrote that the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 “was a perilous event.” He added: “It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government – Congress – that the Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called ‘nothing less than a miracle.’”
“Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people – no matter their partisan preferences – will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework,” the Trump-appointed judge concluded.