A letter to a cop who bled for the Capitol.
Aug 05, 2026
A few days ago, a federal judge, reluctantly and under pressure from the Trump Justice Department, vacated the last remaining convictions of the Oath Keepers who attacked the Capitol on January 6.
When I learned what the judge had done, I began wondering how any of us might explain it to a cop who’d been beaten up while defending the Capitol and the lawmakers inside it. At that level what counts is decency and common sense, things you won’t necessarily learn from law school.
My response, below, follows the epistolary format I have used in other recent posts because it cuts to the emotional quick. It’s a letter of apology to any and every cop who bravely and selflessly fended off that mob.
It isn’t pretty.
Dear Officer…
You stood in that tunnel on the West Front. You took a baton to the ribs, a face full of bear spray, and watched a rioter rip the badge off your chest. You were one of roughly 140 officers hurt that day, maybe more. Some counts run past 150.
Traumatic brain injuries, crushed spinal discs, chemical burns in the eyes and lungs – these were your rewards. Four of the officers who fought back that day later took their own lives. You know the story. You lived part of it.
Now let me tell you what happened just recently.
On August 4, a federal judge did something he told the country he didn’t want to do. He dismissed the last standing convictions against the Oath Keepers, the militia group whose leaders a jury found guilty of seditious conspiracy, guilty of organizing armed force to block the peaceful transfer of the presidency.
The judge, Amit Mehta, didn’t say the original trial, over which he had presided, was flawed. He didn’t say the evidence was thin. He flatly acknowledged the opposite: the government had identified no legal error, no misconduct, no constitutional violation, nothing wrong with the verdict at all. According to court filings, the Trump Justice Department had asked him to erase it anyway, and under the rules that govern this corner of the law, the decision to keep prosecuting a case belongs to the executive branch, not the courts. So, Mehta had almost no room to say no.
There’s a little history here worth remembering.
In January 2025, Trump granted sweeping clemency to nearly all the January 6 defendants, and most of them got full pardons that closed their cases for good. A jury, with Mehta presiding, had previously convicted several leaders of the Oath Keepers, including founder Stewart Rhodes, of seditious conspiracy for their role in the Capitol attack — and for them, Trump chose commutation instead of a pardon.
A commutation ends the punishment, but leaves the convictions standing, on the books, as history’s verdict. This week’s ruling vacates those very convictions. It doesn’t just forgive the men who came armed to stop the count of your fellow citizens’ votes. It erases the fact that a jury of Americans ever found them guilty of trying.
A pardon says: we forgive what you did. A vacatur says: it’s as if you never did it.
Think about what that means for you. You went into that tunnel and took the beating so that the vote certification could happen, so that power could pass the way it’s supposed to.
Twelve jurors sat through the Oath Keepers’ seditious conspiracy trial, weighed the encrypted messages and the stashed rifles and the stack formations moving up the Capitol steps, and convicted these men of trying to stop exactly what you paid for with your body.
The government has now told you, in effect, that none of it needs to stay written down. Not because you were wrong. Not because the jury was wrong. Because the administration decided it no longer wanted the record to say what it says.
And here’s the part that should rankle the most. This same administration has no trouble at all standing behind law enforcement when the officers are doing its bidding. Keep in mind how it talks about ICE agents carrying out mass deportations. It’s a full-throated defense, no daylight, no hesitation.
But officers who defended Congress against an attack organized in the president’s name and on his behalf get a different kind of loyalty. They get commutations discreetly upgraded to erasure, for the men who assaulted them.
I don’t say this to make you a prop in someone else’s argument. I say it because you deserve to hear it stated plainly. The administration’s reverence for “the men and women in blue” turns out to be conditional. It runs deep when the blue is enforcing its priorities. It runs thin when the blue got hurt stopping an attack that served its own political interest.
I want to be fair to the other side of this debate, because you’ll hear it, and you should be able to answer it. Defenders of the decision will tell you this is nothing more than a president using the constitutional power that every president has: the discretion to decide which prosecutions the government keeps pursuing. They’ll point out, correctly, that Judge Mehta himself said he had no legal basis to block it. They’ll say a second Trump term is entitled to close the book on January 6 however it sees fit, and that dismissing a case isn’t the same as saying it was baseless.
That argument isn’t crazy. It’s the argument the law actually allows.
But it doesn’t answer the question that is likely gnawing at your gut: whether the people who run this country still think what happened to you that day is worth remembering as a crime.
The law says the executive gets to decide. It doesn’t say the executive’s choice is cost-free, or that officers like you don’t get to notice – and damn – what it costs.
You bled for the idea that the vote count would go forward, no matter who didn’t like the result. The record of who tried to stop that shouldn’t depend on who’s sitting in the Oval Office five years later.
Your fellow citizens are forever indebted to you for doing your duty and helping to save our democracy on one of its darkest days. Your example remains a beacon as the darkness deepens.