Let me tell you something. When a federal judge dismisses the last criminal case against January 6 defendants and uses the word ‘reluctantly’ to describe letting Americans go free, that right there tells you everything you need to know about who these people really serve. Because it’s not you. It’s not me. And it’s certainly not the 1,600 families who spent four years wondering if their husband, their dad, their son was coming home.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion that ‘this is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed.’ He said he ‘reluctantly’ dismissed the charges against the final eight defendants. Reluctantly. Like freeing Americans from a prosecutorial meat grinder is something you have to hold your nose to do.
Here’s what happened: President Trump, on his very first day back in office, January 20, 2025, issued sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly 1,600 people prosecuted for being at the Capitol. The White House called it what it was: correcting a historic wrong. These were people, many of them, who walked through a building they pay for with their tax dollars, and the Biden Justice Department treated them like they’d stormed Normandy beach.
But six people, including Stewart Rhodes and his Oath Keepers co-defendants, didn’t even get full pardons. Trump commuted their sentences. Commuted. Not pardoned. So the Justice Department under Trump had to file a motion to dismiss the remaining cases, and Judge Mehta had to oblige. But he wanted you to know he was sad about it. 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 to buckle.’
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsI’m sorry, your honor, but where was this energy when Nancy Pelosi was spending $20 million of our money on a made-for-TV committee? Where was the gravity when people were sitting in solitary confinement for years without due process? I’ve got four kids. If one of them got locked up for walking through a government building and nobody told me when they’d get out, I’d be at every door in Washington banging on it until someone answered.
Now, I know what the other side says. A Lawfare study from June 2026 found that 97 of the roughly 1,500 pardoned people have been arrested, prosecuted, or convicted for other crimes since. Fourteen charged with sex crimes. Six with domestic violence. And that’s terrible. Nobody’s defending criminals. But you know what? That’s 97 out of 1,500. That’s about 6 percent. You know what the recidivism rate is for the general federal prison population? Around 40 percent. So maybe, just maybe, the J6 crowd wasn’t exactly the super-predator army the media made them out to be.
Here’s what really burns me. Mitch McConnell stood up in the Senate after January 6 and gave this big speech blaming Trump, said it would put democracy in a ‘death spiral.’ Then he voted to acquit. Said the courts would handle it. The courts. The same courts that just spent four years grinding through 1,600 cases against people who showed up to a protest. The same courts where a judge can’t even dismiss a case without writing a eulogy for the prosecution.
The system didn’t hold. It collapsed under the weight of its own arrogance. And the people who ran it think you’re too busy carpooling to notice.