They Dismissed the Case. Now the Only Footprint Left Is Ours.

I testified in Judge Mehta’s courtroom several times.

I sat in that witness chair and told the truth about what happened on January 6th. What I saw. What I lived through. What it cost me. I did it because it was a continuance of my service to my country. I believed testimony mattered. Evidence mattered. That a federal courtroom was still a place where accountability would take place… and it was. Until it wasn’t.

Here’s what I want to be clear about: the courts are still holding the line. Judge Mehta followed the law. The Constitution is still the Constitution and he uses it as his roadmap while this administration is using it as toilet paper. When cases get dismissed, it’s not because judges are corrupt or broken (usually). It’s because the law requires it when the government itself decides to walk away from its own prosecution.

That’s what happened here. And that’s the part that makes me sick.

Todd Blanche and this DOJ didn’t just pardon the January 6th rioters. They went further. They’ve been proposing using taxpayer money, a slush fund, to pay, to reward the people who stormed that building. People who beat police officers. People who called me racial slurs while I was in uniform trying to protect the lives of the members they elected to represent them. And now the same administration is pulling the plug on prosecutions like this one, because it makes their fearless leader look bad. As if he needed any help looking bad, but I digress.

I’ve testified in a federal courtroom. I watched the process work exactly the way it’s supposed to. A jury convicted Stewart Rhodes and his counterparts. Evidence was presented, testimony was given, a verdict was reached. The system did its job. And then the people running the executive branch decided the outcome was inconvenient and started tearing it down from the inside.

That’s not the courts failing. That’s a President and an Attorney General choosing to protect their private militia over the officers who stopped them.

Here’s what the dismissal leaves behind: the lack of a footprint.

Not one the footprint of the men and women responsible for what happened that day. Not the footprint of a President who watched it unfold on television and let it keep going. Not the footprint of an Attorney General who has spent the last year deciding that the men who attacked democracy deserve compensation, not consequences.

The only footprints still visible now belong to the police officers who held the line.

We’re the ones left holding the record for that day.

I testified because I believe in accountability and that it would add to a body of truth that couldn’t be erased. And in a narrow sense, that’s still true. It’s in the transcript. It’s on the docket. It happened and the entire world had a front row seat. But accountability? That’s been deliberately, systematically dismantled by people who took an oath to uphold the law and chose to use it as cover instead.

The message being sent right now is that what happened on January 6th was either acceptable or inevitable. That the people responsible for it bear no responsibility. And now the president and the maga world blame the police for what happened.

I’m not angry at the courts. I’m angry at the people who showed up at the Capitol with weapons, a plan and bad intentions and walked away with pardons and paychecks, and in this case, their cases against them thrown out because the DOJ decided justice was optional.

The record exists. My testimony exists. The truth of what happened on January 6th exists. And I will keep saying it, in whatever room will have me, for as long as it takes.

Because if we don’t hold the line on the record, there is nothing left to hold.