The January 6 prosecutions came to a quiet, unheralded end this week after a federal judge dismissed the final seditious conspiracy case against various Oath Keeper defendants, including the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Judge Amit Mehta, who oversaw numerous January 6–related cases, penned a fitting afterword to the saga.
“This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6,” he wrote in an opinion granting dismissal of the remaining cases. “That book is now closed. 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. The court cannot write a different ending.”
Everything the judge wrote was true. But that was not enough for at least one of the defendants. Edward Vallejo filed a motion on Tuesday that asked for Mehta’s “unconstitutional” remarks to be stricken from the court record. He argued that the judge’s language violated his Fifth Amendment right to the presumption of innocence. Mehta has yet to rule on his motion.
No matter how many motions are filed, however, neither Trump nor those who plotted against Congress on his behalf can reverse the historical record. Vallejo’s denialist coda gives Americans the opportunity to consider how things went wrong. There is no shortage of blame to be allocated for the incomplete efforts to hold those responsible for January 6 accountable for their crimes, though surely some deserve a larger share of it than others.
Even though it was the victim of the attack, Congress itself deserves plenty of blame. Like Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden administration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer responded too slowly to the crisis that crossed their doorstep. The House did not introduce articles of impeachment against Trump until January 11 and did not vote to impeach him until January 13. There was no need for such a delay; the crime literally occurred in the halls of Congress itself. We all saw it on television. The lawmakers saw it in person.
This unconscionable delay belied the gravity of Trump’s acts and ignored the urgency of removing him. House impeachment managers did not formally refer the sole article of impeachment—incitement to insurrection—until January 25, five days after Trump left office. This languid pace gave him time to rally supporters and build a counternarrative to defend himself. It also raised novel questions about whether the Senate could impeach a former president at all, an excuse wielded by some GOP senators to justify not voting to convict him.
By the time the Democratic-led Senate got around to holding a trial on February 9, it was already too late. Here, more blame goes to the Republican senators who declined to convict Trump in that trial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled ahead of the final vote by senators that he would not vote to convict Trump, thus providing the necessary cover for many of his colleagues to do the same.
Seven Republican senators ultimately voted to convict Trump. The other 43 senators shamed themselves and betrayed their oaths of office by voting to acquit him. If Trump’s second term truly represents a permanent and irreversible decline in American democracy, as well as this country’s power and prosperity, then that vote will be seen as the moment of no return for this nation.
The apex of Republican cowardice came from Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader at the time. In addition to signaling his intention to vote for acquittal despite the president’s obvious guilt, McConnell gave a floor speech after the Senate vote where he essentially tried to backfill a rationale for these seeming contradictions. “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day,” he told his colleagues.
He instead argued that as Trump was no longer holding office, he was thus not “constitutionally eligible for conviction.” While this was a position he could not have taken if Democrats had acted with more urgency, it was an erroneous claim in any event. If you take McConnell’s framing to its logical conclusion, a president could commit any number of impeachable offenses in the final days of his term without any fear of consequences. Whatever its flaws may otherwise be, the Constitution is not that poorly designed.
Garland will always carry most of the blame for the failed efforts to hold Trump criminally accountable after the January 6 insurrection. Some mistakes were clear at the time and are even more obvious in hindsight. The FBI did not open an investigation into the fake-elector scheme, for example, until April 2022. Garland did not appoint special counsel Jack Smith until that November. Trump was not indicted for the January 6–related offenses until August 1, 2023.
That lack of haste apparently came from leadership decisions to prosecute lower officials first while working toward an ultimate case against Trump. By delaying the case against Trump, however, Justice Department officials guaranteed that he would not face trial until he was actively on the campaign trail as a 2024 candidate. It also ensured that any hiccups on appeal could delay a trial until after the 2024 election.
But it would go too far to blame everything on Garland and Smith. For one thing, the Justice Department ultimately prosecuted more than 1,500 lesser participants in the January 6 cases before Trump returned to power. Many of them had already been convicted and sentenced by the time Trump pardoned all but a few of them on the first day in office. Pardons can erase the consequences of a conviction and immunize people for other criminal conduct. But they cannot, for better or for worse, undo what has already happened.
Most importantly, it is now clear in hindsight that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority would have thwarted almost any meaningful attempt to prosecute Trump for January 6. The court’s presidential immunity ruling—and its heretical vision of the separation of powers—is well known by this point. But the court worked against accountability for January 6 in two other significant ways.
First, the justices unanimously read the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause out of the Constitution in Trump v. Anderson in March 2024. Conservative legal scholars first proposed in the summer of 2023 that Trump’s role in the insurrection could automatically disqualify him under the Reconstruction-era clause. The Colorado Supreme Court reached the same conclusion in December and ruled that state election officials could not include his name on the ballot for the then-upcoming GOP primary.
The following March, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states could not enforce the clause themselves against candidates for federal office, even though states enforce every other constitutional qualification for federal candidates. Five of the six conservative justices then ruled that Congress had the exclusive power to enforce the clause, effectively preventing the lower federal courts from concluding that Trump was disqualified, either. The court’s ruling was transparently outcome-driven, unmoored from precedent, and barely grounded in actual legal reasoning.
Second, the court also undercut the prosecutions of some January 6 defendants by narrowing one of the laws used to charge them. Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, it is a federal crime to “otherwise obstruct, influence, or impede any official proceeding.” Federal prosecutors charged a handful of defendants under the premise that their actions on January 6 had obstructed the joint session of Congress that was convened to count the electoral votes that Joe Biden had won.
Five of the six conservative justices and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that the provision in question, Section 1512(c)(2), only applied in narrow circumstances. The preceding provision, Section 1512(c)(1), makes it a federal offense to “impair” the “availability or integrity for us in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or […] other things used in the proceeding.” Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that the use of “otherwise” limited 1512(c)(2)’s scope to destruction of evidence as described in the preceding section.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett countered that the majority “simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said.” In her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, she criticized the court for doing “textual backflips” to reach its desired conclusion. When Congress drafted the statute in response to the Enron scandal, Barrett noted, the first section was meant to close the “Enron gap” about destroying documents in existing federal law. The second section, she explained, “reflects Congress’s desire to avoid future surprises.” A president-led insurrection on Capitol Hill certainly counted as one.
The Fischer ruling’s impact was modest on the January 6 prosecutions themselves but significant as a propaganda weapon. It gave Trump and his allies the opportunity to publicly discredit all January 6 cases as prosecutorial overreach, even though prosecutors actually undercharged many defendants. (Most were only charged with trespassing on federal property.) By overreaching to narrow federal white-collar offenses, the high court’s conservative majority (sans Barrett) gave its imprimatur to perceptions that the cases against Trump and his allies were somehow unjust.
Even the Supreme Court’s misjudgments pale in comparison to the greatest culprit of all: the American people. Disqualification was constitutionally prescribed, but it was ultimately unnecessary if voters had simply declined to return Trump to the White House. Criminal proceedings against Trump may have continued in a lesser form if he had not retaken command of the Justice Department last year. By returning an anti-constitutional president to the White House, tens of millions of Americans failed to preserve their own democratic institutions and traditions. They squandered the sacrifices of countless Americans over the last 250 years who worked, fought, and sometimes died to build a self-governing republic to pass down to their children.
This is an uncomfortable thing to reckon with. U.S. politics has long operated on the principle that while the American people can be misguided or misled, they are never truly mistaken. In this instance, however, Americans had full possession of the facts. We saw what happened on January 6 on our televisions. We saw how he conducted himself during his first term and what he promised to do if he won again. We were warned over and over again. And yet we failed. The country can’t rebuild in the future without accepting that basic fact.
That brings me to the court filing from one Edward Vallejo, an Arizona man who was among the last defendants before Judge Mehta. He and his lawyers filed a motion on Tuesday to strike what they described as “unconstitutional dicta” from the judge’s ruling on Monday. Dicta is a Latin legal term for the writing in a judicial opinion that is not part of the decision’s actual reasoning. It generally carries little to no weight as precedent.
“Ed Vallejo was innocent before trial and he is innocent now,” the motion stated. “The Court’s dismissal of the indictment with prejudice based on deference to prosecutorial discretion does not open the door for judicial opinion regarding disputed elements of an offense never finally adjudicated.” Mehta’s statements, it argued, “incorrectly injected advisory opinions that are contrary to the presumption of innocence and unfair to an innocent man.”
Describing Vallejo as “innocent” is not quite right. On January 6, he and some of his fellow Oath Keepers were part of an armed “quick reaction force” in nearby Virginia that was waiting to join the fight on Capitol Hill if summoned. He had even written that morning in favor of a “guerrilla war” against the government. While he and his colleagues weren’t brought into D.C. that day, prosecutors charged Vallejo and his associates with seditious conspiracy for their role in the plot against Congress.
The historical record is clear: A federal jury convicted Vallejo in 2023, and he was sentenced by Mehta to three years in prison that summer. He even expressed remorse after his conviction when asking the judge for leniency. “I wish I never associated myself with Stewart Rhodes,” he reportedly told the judge. “I thought our democracy was being undermined and was doing anything I could to protect it. I see now how wrong I was.”
Vallejo emphasized this week that he was legally innocent because his conviction had been vacated by an appeals court, then insinuated that it was vacated because the case against him was flawed. In reality, the conviction was vacated by the D.C. Circuit at the Justice Department’s request so that it could ask Mehta to dismiss the case against him and the other seditious-conspiracy defendants. There is no substantive basis to say that his rights were violated, and the Justice Department itself does not even claim as much on Trump’s behalf.
“The government does not say that the charges were legally deficient or that the evidence presented is insufficient to sustain Defendants’ convictions,” Mehta wrote. “It confesses to no prosecutorial misconduct, nor does it assert any denial or compromise of a defendant’s rights. And it does not identify any legal error that resulted in an unfair trial or a wrongful conviction (except perhaps as to the obstruction of an official proceeding counts). Remarkably, then, the government does not maintain that dismissal is in the public interest to rectify a fundamental error or a grave injustice.”
Instead, the Justice Department gave an unconvincing medley of claiming to protect the defendants from future “harassment,” to “effectuate” Trump’s sweeping Inauguration Day pardon (which explicitly excluded these defendants), and because the public interest “has already been vested.” That last part may be closest to the truth. History will be clear about what happened on January 6 and who was responsible for it. All the pardons, vacaturs, and denialist official websites in the world can’t erase the truth. If nothing else, that record may allow future generations of Americans to learn from the disastrous mistakes of this one.
