D.C. Drops Lawsuit against Proud Boys, Oath Keepers over Jan. 6 Attack

The Washington Post

19:40 JST, March 18, 2025

The D.C. attorney general’s office has dropped a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying in a court filing that the city was unlikely to recover enough money to justify continuing legal action against the far-right groups and others it had sought to hold responsible for the riot.

The suit, filed by former D.C. attorney general Karl A. Racine after similar challenges from police and lawmakers, marked the first effort by a government agency to hold individuals and organizations civilly liable for the violence at the Capitol that day. A federal judge in Washington granted the District’s request to dismiss the case Friday.

The suit was fashioned after a modern version of an 1871 law known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which was enacted after the Civil War to safeguard government officials carrying out their duties and protect civil rights. A similar challenge ultimately prevailed against groups involved in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

“Given the challenges currently facing the District and the relatively small potential recoveries the District could obtain, OAG’s resources are now needed and best used elsewhere,” an OAG spokesperson said in a statement. The District had been seeking unspecified damages, as well as payment for expenses such as attorneys’ fees and court costs.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, there was a wave of civil cases and criminal prosecutions that splintered the organizations and sent many members to prison before sweeping clemency from President Donald Trump. Among them were group leaders named alongside more than 30 others in the city’s suit, including Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, both of whom juries convicted of seditious conspiracy for their part in attempting to block the peaceful transition of power.

Lawyers for Rhodes, Tarrio and others in the suit have argued that the government overstated their clients’ roles in the events of the day. John Pierce, an attorney representing Rhodes, called the prosecutions and this case “one of the greatest overreaches in the history of the American judicial system.”

“We are very pleased to see that the District of Columbia has come to the same conclusion as the American public and President Trump – the narrative that January 6th was some sort of armed insurrection to overthrow the government was false from the very beginning,” Pierce said in a statement.

Tarrio posted on X about the District’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, writing: “Another exoneration? If God is with us … Who can be against us. Romans 8:31.”

When the suit was filed Racine (D) held a news conference pledging accountability for those “conspiring to terrorize the District of Columbia, for unlawfully interfering with our country’s peaceful transition of power and for assaulting our men and women in blue.”

More than 140 officers were wounded in the attack. A female rioter was shot and killed by police inside the Capitol, and one officer succumbed to two strokes that were partly attributed to the stress of the attack. Three people died as a result of medical emergencies suffered during the riot. Four police officers later died by suicide.

Trump has made the events of Jan. 6 a personal focus as he and his MAGA base have sought to recast the events of that day, referring to attack participants as patriots and the prosecutors who oversaw their cases as criminals. He pardoned virtually all Jan. 6. defendants and commuted the sentences of the remaining 14 in one of his opening acts as president.

Ed Martin, Trump’s selection to lead the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, which oversaw Jan. 6 cases, has fired prosecutors who handled that work or investigated Trump. And newly appointed attorney general Pam Bondi announced a Justice Department investigation into whether resources spent on Capitol riot investigations came at the expense of the safety of D.C. residents.

Heidi Beirich, who co-founded the nonprofit Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said far-right extremists groups see the new administration’s policies as sanctioning their actions, backing many of the same anti-immigration, anti-diversity and anti-LGBTQ+ policies they have been pushing for years.

The Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence, are designated as a terrorist group in Canada and New Zealand. The Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group, all but collapsed under prosecution, but its ideology and belief in a constitutional right to armed revolt lives on in other militia-style groups.

“How could these movements not be emboldened?” Beirich said. “All the things that the Trump administration is dismantling are the exact same things that these groups saw as destroying America.”

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D) has taken a less muted approach to Trump’s focus on matters impacting D.C. than Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), who in public comments has sought to find common ground with the president. Because D.C. is not a state, Congress has outsize authority over its affairs – especially amid a Republican ruling trifecta. Trump in an interview last month told reporters the federal government should “take over” the city.

Last week, Schwalb, whose office is independent from the mayor, joined 19 other Democratic attorneys general in suing the Trump administration in federal court this month, arguing that the recent mass layoffs of thousands of federal probationary employees were conducted illegally. In January, he also joined other states in suing to block Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. Schwalb at that time did not say anything publicly about the lawsuit.

Rhodes, Tarrio, other Proud Boys leaders and Jan. 6 defendants returned to the Washington area last month for the sprawling annual Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in Maryland. While in town, they held a news conference in front of the U.S. Capitol where they repeated claims that Jan. 6 prosecutions were politically motivated and announced plans to file a lawsuit against the Justice Department. Later that day, U.S. Capitol Police arrested Tarrio for simple assault following what police said was an exchange with one of the protesters.

Last month, a judge awarded the Proud Boys’ naming rights to a historic Black church that sued the organization after its Black Lives Matter sign was vandalized by group members in 2020.

Although the District is dropping its suit, Edward Caspar, the co-chief counsel at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said his organization is committed to continuing its ongoing lawsuit on behalf of the seven U.S. Capitol Police officers.

“We want to hold responsible those we think are primarily responsible for the harms caused by the Jan. 6 attack,” Caspar said.