Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, scorched Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Justice, now led by his own former criminal defense lawyer, for asking a federal appeals court to vacate the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In other words, to erase the record altogether.

“This is an appalling and dangerous turn of events,” Raskin said in a statement. “The Department of Justice is now acting like in-house counsel for the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.”

Raskin noted that the two leaders of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, were convicted of seditious conspiracy by a unanimous jury for their roles in leading the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and for trying to block the peaceful transfer of power. “Seditious conspiracy means conspiracy to overthrow, destroy or put down the government of the United States by force,” Raskin noted.

The evidence against the two was so strong, Raskin pointed out, that the “sentencing judge called Rhodes ‘an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to its democracy,’ and applied the terrorism enhancement against him at sentencing.” Rhodes and Meggs were sentenced to 18 and 12 years in prison, respectively.

“Amazingly, House Republicans appeared so unbothered by all of this that they recently allowed Rhodes to remain in a reserved front-row seat at their first hearing seeking to challenge the report and work of the January 6 Select Committee with lies and disinformation,” Raskin added.

Raskin also laid out the “overwhelming and horrific evidence” against four Proud Boys leaders. One tore down security fencing and called January 6 a “warning shot” to the government. Another “sprayed a police officer directly in the face with a chemical agent and then bragged that he was ‘so fucking proud’ of the Proud Boys’ ‘raid of the capitol,’” for example.

“Their conduct was so extreme even by January 6 standards that when President Trump took office and pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants,” the Trump-appointed judge “declined to give these ring-leader insurrectionists full pardons. He only commuted their sentences,” Raskin added.

But now, as his "foreign and domestic policy debacles pile up all around him, Donald Trump returns to his most fanatical base,” Raskin continued. He explained that by trying to vacate the criminal convictions and dismissing the original indictments with prejudice, the convictions and prosecutions “would disappear and they could never be prosecuted again for their criminal actions on January 6.”

“These astounding motions are a humiliation for American democracy,” Raskin said. “The same DOJ that prosecuted these men and secured their criminal convictions beyond any reasonable doubt is now asking a court to whitewash their crimes and pretend that they never led the insurrectionist mob that beat, crushed in doors, wounded, injured and hospitalized 140 of our law enforcement officers, disfiguring and disabling some of them for life.”

He called it an “Orwellian” attempt to eliminate the historical record of what the insurrectionists did to “support Donald Trump’s Big Lie and order to ‘fight and fight like hell’ against the peaceful transfer of power.”

Let’s hope the appeals court agrees. Better yet, may Americans vote in massive numbers to reign in the lawbreaking, corrupt Trump administration and dump its enablers in Congress.