Lawfare Daily: The Justice Department Throws Out the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper Cases
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
The Justice Department has moved the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to drop the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases, the last remaining criminal matters arising from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Lawfare’s editor in chief, Benjamin Wittes, sits down with four contributors who had intimate involvement with the cases to discuss the decision: Senior Editor Roger Parloff, who covered both trials; Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, who investigated both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers; Public Service Fellow Troy Edwards, who prosecuted the Oath Keepers case; and James Pearce of Washington Litigation Group, who worked on the prosecution as well.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think all of those convictions should stand. |
| 0:04.6 | Every single one of the January 6th conviction should stand because every single one of them went through a fair due process and constitutional process of trial by jury or plea process with discovery. |
| 0:15.6 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare with Lawfare Senior Editors, Roger Parloff, |
| 0:24.1 | and Michael Feinberg, Lawfare Public Service Fellow, L.T. Edwards, and James Pierce of the |
| 0:31.7 | Washington Litigation Group. This sort of people who really would have pushed back about this have already been fired or resigned for pushing back against other things. |
| 0:42.3 | There is nobody at an executive level who was very involved in these cases who still remains. |
| 0:48.1 | And in terms of the larger, more prominent J6 cases, a lot of those people are gone at the line level too. |
| 0:57.6 | Today we're talking about the Justice Department's decision to drop the cases against |
| 1:04.7 | oathkeepers and proud boys, which had been on appeal. These are the highest value, most egregious January 6th cases, |
| 1:15.5 | the ones that involved seditious conspiracy. This is the final step in making the history of |
| 1:22.8 | January 6th into a legal nullity. So guys, I want to start with just describing who we have on the show today vis-a-vis these |
| 1:38.5 | questions. |
| 1:39.3 | So most listeners will remember that Roger Parloff sat through both of these cases, which were quite extended |
| 1:49.4 | in district court and live tweeted them for lawfare. But, Roger, start by telling us a little bit |
| 1:58.3 | about how you engage the Oathkeepers in Proud Boys cases, and then |
| 2:02.9 | in order, Mike, L.T. and James talk about your involvement with these cases slash investigations. |
| 2:14.4 | Yeah, it was exactly that. I sat through all of them, and I live tweeted, and you can find those somewhere on the |
| 2:23.5 | internet, the site then known as Twitter. |
| 2:28.2 | And I think we tried to, we did try to put some of those on lawfare. |
| 2:33.1 | Some take a long time to load. But I think the, |
| 2:38.6 | roughly speaking, I think the oath keepers was around 28 days of trial. Troy, does that sound |
| 2:47.0 | right in there? For trial one of four? |
... |
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