Erasing The Verdict. Rewriting The Record. Building The Infrastructure For Next Time.
Erasing The Verdict. Rewriting The Record. Building The Infrastructure For Next Time.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #866: Paid Subscriber Edition — Tuesday, April 14th, 2026
The free article told you what happened.
This expansion tells you what it means.
And what it means…is considerably more dangerous than erasing twelve convictions.
Signal
Two things happened simultaneously today that the coverage is not connecting.
The DOJ asked a federal appeals court to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leadership.
The filing was signed by Jeanine Pirro.
Those two facts together are the signal.
Jeanine Pirro is not a career federal prosecutor. She is a former Fox News personality, a longtime Trump loyalist, and the current US Attorney for the District of Columbia…a position that places her in direct command of federal prosecution in the nation’s capital.
The DOJ’s filing argues…in language the court will now be asked to accept as the official position of the United States government….that what happened on January 6th …was a protest that got out of hand…rather than a coordinated seditious conspiracy.
This is not the position of the career prosecutors who tried these cases across three separate trials.
This is the position of the political appointees who replaced them.
The institutional memory of what those trials established…the evidence…the testimony…the jury findings…is being actively overwritten by the people the president installed to do exactly that.
Pattern
Here is the pattern operating underneath today’s action. And it connects directly to the broader doctrine of this administration.
Step one…pardon.
On Day One of the second term, pardons to over 1,000 January 6th defendants. The sentences disappear. The men walk free.
Step two…commute the remainder.
The fourteen most serious defendants…those who led the seditious conspiracy charges …receive commuted sentences rather than pardons. Their records remain. Their convictions stand. For now.
Step three…vacate the convictions.
Today. The DOJ asks the court to erase not just the sentences but the verdicts themselves. The legal record of what happened. The official governmental acknowledgment that January 6th was a coordinated violent attack on the transfer of power.
This is a three-step sequence.
It has been executed methodically over fifteen months. And today’s move completes the arc.
The doctrine operating behind this move…and why it’s not about the past. The three implications that extend far beyond January 6th. Why the timing of today’s filing is not coincidental. And what the completed sequence now makes possible that wasn’t possible before.
This is the analysis that doesn’t make the evening news.
