Judge grants DOJ’s motion to dismiss case against Proud Boys over Jan. 6

A federal judge just erased seditious conspiracy convictions against Proud Boys members, and he did it because the DOJ asked him to, not because a jury changed its mind or an appeals court found error. That's worth sitting with for a second. Seditious conspiracy is about as serious as federal charges get short of treason. It's not a paperwork mix-up. Dismissing it "with prejudice" means it can never be brought again, ever, against these men.

We understand the instinct here. A lot of Americans watched the Jan. 6 prosecutions and felt the Justice Department was settling scores rather than pursuing justice evenly. Trump pardoned or commuted sentences for hundreds of defendants on his way back into office, and there's a real argument that some of those cases were overcharged or politically inflected. Fair enough. But there's a difference between clemency, which is a president's constitutional prerogative, and having his own DOJ walk into court and ask a judge to vacate convictions on the most serious charges tied to an attack on the Capitol. One is mercy. The other looks like the executive branch rewriting the historical record of what happened that day.

Judge Kelly is a Trump appointee, which will fuel every conspiracy theory in both directions, but that's beside the point. The point is that a jury heard evidence and convicted these men of conspiring seditiously. Vacating that isn't forgiveness. It's a statement that it never should have counted as a crime at all.

If Republicans want credibility on law and order, on holding people accountable when they storm a building housing Congress and disrupt certification of an election, we can't cheer when convictions for exactly that get vaporized because the politics changed. That's not draining a swamp. That's building a new one with better friends in it.