Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl had been convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy, while Dominic Pezzola had been convicted of assaulting an officer and breaking the Capitol window that opened an entry point during the January 6, 2021 attack. [1]

Donald Trump's 2025 clemency order commuted sentences while initially leaving convictions in place; DOJ asked an appeals court in April 2026 to overturn them, the appellate court vacated them in May and returned the matter to Kelly, and the district judge granted the government's dismissal request in a Friday, July 10 memorandum. [1]

In his seven-page memorandum, Kelly wrote that denying dismissal could not revive convictions the appeals court had already vacated, yet he also said the executive request rested on Trump's clemency policy rather than facts or law and repeated the historical jury record. [1]

No verified topic-matched X status emerged from the documented searches, so exoneration and impunity remain rival partisan frames rather than attributed consensus, while the Guardian's sequence preserves what each institution did and did not decide.

The district dismissal was therefore not an acquittal, a new jury verdict, a merits exoneration or Kelly's independent reversal of the convictions; it was the final district-court step after clemency, DOJ's request and appellate vacatur had changed the case's legal posture, and Kelly's criticism did not by itself reinstate them.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin