Last Jan. 6 case is dead, but history’s verdict on Trump’s coup remains

The final prosecution to come out of Donald Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, attempted coup is officially dead. On Aug. 4, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta reluctantly granted the Trump Justice Department’s request to dismiss what remained of the seditious conspiracy case against Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and seven of his followers, closing the last open file in the criminal reckoning for the assault on the Capitol.

Between mass pardons, commutations, and now this final dismissal, every formal legal verdict against the men who tried to overthrow the United States government at Trump’s direction has been erased from the books.

“This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of Jan. 6,” Mehta wrote. “That book is now closed.”

But a court record is not the same thing as the truth, and truth does not vanish because a Justice Department motion says so. Even as he signed the order he had no power to refuse, Mehta made sure his own verdict was entered into that closed book.

“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,” he wrote.

Rhodes was no minor player in the Jan. 6 drama. A jury convicted him and five other Oath Keepers of conspiring to use force to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election, and Mehta sentenced him to 18 years, calling him “an ongoing threat and peril to this country.”

Trump pardoned nearly every Jan. 6 defendant on his first day back in office. In April, his Justice Department went further, moving to vacate the Oath Keepers’ convictions outright. This week’s dismissal was the last piece removed from what had been the most serious criminal case to come out of the insurrection.

Rhodes’ lawyer declared on social media that seditious conspiracy was a “thought crime” that should never have been charged. That is the message Trump wants America to absorb: that a coup attempt was speech, an armed assault on the Capitol was a protest, and lying about a stolen election is just politics. It is the same capitulation the White House now demands of the judiciary.

As Mehta’s order came down, former federal prosecutors were on Capitol Hill urging senators not to confirm Trump judicial nominees who won’t say plainly that Joe Biden won in 2020. “The danger we face,” former prosecutor Brendan Ballou testified, “is that future court cases that will determine whether our democracy continues may be decided by people who deny the reality of Jan. 6.”

People’s World called out the coup for what it was on the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, itself, before the fires on the National Mall had even gone out: “Trump has been telling us who and what he is. A fascist has occupied the White House.… The events in Washington make it totally undeniable.”

One Supreme Court immunity ruling and a second Trump term later, every prosecutor who tried to hold him accountable has been overruled, fired, or otherwise prevented from doing their job. As Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert said when Special Counsel Jack Smith first dropped his case, Trump’s escape from the courtroom “does not retroactively validate his illegal, unconstitutional, and democracy-destroying activities.… If not the courts, history will judge them appropriately.”

That verdict of history will not be pardoned away. It will record that Donald Trump summoned a mob to Washington, told them to march on the Capitol, watched for hours as they beat police officers and hunted his own vice president, and then told the rioters, “We love you. You are very special.”

It will record that Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and hundreds of other white supremacist foot soldiers answered that call with organized, armed violence aimed at overturning an election. No commutation changes what the world watched live. No DOJ motion undoes the five deaths in the attack’s first 36 hours or the four officers who later took their own lives.

The lesson of this final dismissal is not that the coup didn’t happen. It is that the legal system, on its own, cannot be counted on to stop a fascist movement that has captured the presidency, the DOJ, and much of the federal bench. Only political power can do that now.

Trump’s MAGA machine is not finished; it is mid-stride, using gerrymandered maps, attacks on vote-by-mail, and openly racist voter suppression schemes to entrench minority rule before voters can stop it. The one remaining check is the ballot box.

A massive turnout in this fall’s midterms, one big enough to flip control of Congress, is the roadblock that can slow this runaway train, restore oversight, and give the country a fighting chance to make sure history’s verdict is the only one that matters.

As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.

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