A federal judge in Washington has dismissed the remaining seditious conspiracy charges against four members of the Proud Boys, the far-right extremist group whose leaders were convicted of plotting to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The ruling by US District Judge Timothy Kelly, issued on Friday, closes what had been one of the most significant prosecutions to emerge from the Capitol riot, in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Judge Kelly — himself a Trump appointee from the president's first term — granted the Justice Department's motion to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the charges cannot be brought again in the future. The ruling applied to four of the five Proud Boys members convicted after a jury trial: Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola. A fifth defendant, former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio, had already received a presidential pardon; Kelly had sentenced Tarrio to 22 years in prison, the longest term handed down in any Capitol riot case. The four men covered by Friday's ruling had their prison sentences — ranging from 10 to 18 years — commuted by Trump but were not included in his mass pardons, making the formal dismissal of their cases a necessary additional step.

The outcome had become a near certainty after Trump, on the first day of his second term in January 2025, signed an executive order granting sweeping clemency to participants in the Capitol attack, which he had long characterised as a "national injustice" and an example of government "weaponisation." The Justice Department subsequently moved to abandon all remaining January 6 prosecutions. Kelly acknowledged in his seven-page ruling that the executive branch cannot be compelled by the courts to pursue prosecutions, leaving him little legal basis to preserve the convictions. A separate request by the Justice Department to dismiss seditious conspiracy convictions against members of the Oath Keepers, another extremist group convicted in related proceedings, is still pending before a different judge.

Despite granting the motion, Kelly was explicit that his ruling carried no endorsement of the government's decisions. "No one should mistake the Court's granting of the Government's motion for its agreement with those decisions," he wrote. He described the January 6 attack as "a perilous event" — an assault on police officers and on the constitutional mechanism for the peaceful transfer of power. His ruling closed with a pointed reflection on the future of American democracy: "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 dismissal marks the latest milestone in the unwinding of a prosecution effort that, under the Biden administration, had brought criminal cases against nearly 1,600 people. The Proud Boys trial had been considered a landmark, with juries in Washington convicting the group's leaders of seditious conspiracy — a rarely used and historically serious charge. Friday's ruling effectively erases those convictions from the public record, drawing a formal legal line under one of the most consequential chapters in recent American political history.