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Glenn Kirschner spent more than thirty years as a federal prosecutor. He stood up in court every day and said “Glenn Kirschner for the United States.” He means that. When he tells you the Department of Justice has lost its bearing, it carries the weight of someone who built their professional life inside those walls.
He joined us for this episode of The Wire Tap to talk about what’s happening to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convictions — and what the Trump administration’s move to erase them actually means.
“They’re Trying to Whitewash History”
Glenn didn’t mince words about what the DOJ’s vacatur motions represent.
“It’s insane that they’re trying to whitewash history. First from the courts, by not only delivering pardons — and cleansing the Department of Justice of heroic public servants who brought these people to justice — they’re trying to now dismiss convictions in cases that are over and done.”
In his experience, there is only one legitimate reason to revisit a completed conviction. “The only time I ever saw — and was ever involved in — revisiting an old conviction was when there was some new DNA evidence, some newly discovered evidence that came to our attention. And then I wanted to make sure that whatever conviction we obtained in the first instance was right and was just. And if it wasn’t, we were going to make it right.”
That standard — new evidence, potential wrongful conviction, a good-faith effort to honor constitutional rights — is nowhere in these motions. The DOJ cited no error. No innocence claim. No factual defect. What people may not intuitively understand about prosecutors, Glenn said, is that “the good ones — and most of us are good ones — we also vigorously protect the rights of those that we investigate, those that we prosecute, those that we convict. We are there to represent the Constitution.”
That is not what is happening here. “I don’t think George Orwell could have envisioned what today’s federal government — specifically the executive branch — has become.”
Personal Stakes
Glenn has skin in this that goes beyond professional outrage.
He worked murder cases with Mike Fanone a quarter century ago. They traveled together to the farthest reaches of rural Virginia chasing a killer. When the mob beat Fanone nearly to death on January 6, Glenn took it personally. “That was one of my friends, one of my former colleagues, coworkers. I took it very personally.”
Since then, he has come to know all four of the officers who became the face of law enforcement heroism that day — Harry Dunn, Mike Fanone, Aquilino Gonel, and Daniel Hodges. “I’ve become fast friends with all of them.”
But his connection to the Oath Keepers trials runs even deeper. “The lead prosecutors who handled the Oath Keepers trials — plural — and the Proud Boys trial were some of my, not just former colleagues, but former supervisees. Because many of them started as homicide AUSAs in my homicide section when I was chief. Some of them I tried cases with.”
He named Kate Roccozzi specifically. “She was just among the best of the best and was one of the de facto leads on the Oath Keepers trials. I tried Kate’s first murder trial with her. And as I have often said about her, I probably learned more from her than she learned from me.”
He sat in those courtrooms. He was covering the trials for MSNBC — watching his friends, his former colleagues, his trial partners bring the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys to justice. “Frankly, I would have preferred to be at counsel table as a prosecutor myself rather than sitting in the audience as a journalist covering it for MSNBC.”
And then the purge. “When I see Jeanine Pirro, who is now the U.S. attorney at my former beloved professional home — when I see her and, before her, Ed ‘Stop the Steal’ Martin, taking some of the best not just homicide prosecutors, national security prosecutors, public corruption prosecutors that our country has to offer, because they were working at the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office on January 6th cases, and demoting them down to misdemeanor work.” He paused. “You don’t take your nation’s most accomplished prosecutors in those arenas and bust them down to misdemeanor work. That is actually a public safety concern to the people of Washington, D.C. and the nation.”
Making the Court Complicit
Glenn zeroed in on something in the DOJ’s motions that isn’t getting enough attention — the restitution trap.
“That’s one of the things that has me so upset about these attempted dismissals of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convictions. Because they’re trying to make the court complicit — tacitly complicit, but complicit nonetheless — in their quest to steal our tax dollars.”
Here’s the mechanism: Jeanine Pirro’s motion asserts that dismissal is “in the interests of justice.” If the judges grant the motions, they will essentially be co-signing that factual assertion. “That will give the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys ammunition to hold up that dismissal and say — you see? Even the judges agree I was wrongfully prosecuted. Now I want millions of dollars of taxpayer money to make me whole.”
He named the precedents already in motion. “Just like Mike Flynn pulled. Just like Steve Bannon is trying to pull. Just like the Ashley Babbitt situation — who was breaching the Capitol, trying to get at our legislators, trying to stop the certification of a presidential election. They gave her a payout.”
“This is — you can’t make this up — and it is the rule of law turned on its head. It’s maddening.”
And it doesn’t stop there. “We have seen some of the J6ers who Trump pardoned go out and reoffend, including committing some of the most heinous crimes against children. And I don’t think Donald Trump cares one whit what he has wrought. He has actually created additional victims by delivering pardons that should never, never have been delivered in the first instance.”
The SPLC and the Logic of Targeting
We pivoted to the DOJ’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center — an organization that, from Glenn’s prosecutorial vantage, represents exactly the kind of civic infrastructure that helps law enforcement do its job.
“Going after an organization that goes after the KKK — you would think our government would embrace organizations that are going after that kind of horrific racism and extremism.”
When Glenn looked at the actual indictment, his reaction was visceral. “It made my blood begin to boil, because it is such a ruse being perpetrated by Todd Blanche and Kash Patel when they say, well, they were giving money to people inside these organizations.”
He knew immediately what that accusation actually described. “That’s exactly what our law enforcement agencies do. That’s exactly what our intelligence agencies do. Because that’s how you infiltrate those organizations.”
He gave the example from his own career. “Chris, I did a version of that when I would covertly arrest a member of a gang, and I wanted to flip that person without the other gang members knowing. We would silently flip them. We would release them back out into the gang, and then they would provide us information we needed to take the entire gang down.”
The suggestion that this constitutes support for criminal activity drew a sharp response. “If somebody were to say, yeah, Glenn, you see, that’s you supporting the criminal efforts of this gang — I would say, are y’all effing kidding me? We see what you’re doing.”
His read on where the SPLC case goes: “I have a feeling this will fall apart. Just like we saw the James Comey prosecution, the Letitia James prosecution. They couldn’t even competently issue subpoenas against Jerome Powell or the Fed. These people can’t prosecute straight. They can’t shoot straight. They can put people through hell in the interim — hiring lawyers, being dragged through vindictive court proceedings. But with every failed prosecution, Donald Trump and his flunkies, his lapdogs, his sycophants become weaker, not stronger. Because you’re exposing the fact that the wannabe dictator doesn’t have the power to pull off successful prosecutions. That emboldens people to stand up to him.”
Judge Mehta and the Road Back
There was genuinely good news to discuss. Glenn was “so excited” about Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling that Donald Trump does not have presidential immunity from a civil suit for what he did on and around January 6.
The implications for a future prosecution are significant. “The implications of that ruling, moving forward to a time when Donald Trump leaves power — and he will leave power — that will give DOJ, it will give the federal prosecutors the opportunity to rebring the criminal case for the January 6th crimes, for felonies for which he stood indicted until he got reelected.”
He drew a direct line to what Judge Chutkan would have ruled. “I feel confident saying she would have ruled that these were not official acts of a president of the United States. These were the acts of a candidate slash private person, so we can proceed to trial. Now we have a virtually identical ruling on the same facts from Judge Mehta saying, of course, there’s no immunity for what he did on January 6th.”
The civil suit filed by police officers and Democratic legislators can now move forward. “It is a really important tell for how that issue should be resolved in the future, when and if the criminal case is re-brought. And it better be re-brought if we want to keep our republic.”
To Those Still in the System
Glenn had a message for anyone considering a career in federal prosecution — or already inside the system navigating what it has become.
“I never in my life thought I would tell an aspiring prosecutor, somebody who wanted to join the Department of Justice, don’t do it. But now is not the time to do it. And I’ve kind of mourned that as I’m saying it. But I couldn’t in good conscience tell anybody to go work for Todd Blanche. Because unfortunately the Department of Justice has lost its bearing and it is no longer doing the work of the American people. It’s doing the work of dear leader in the oval office.”
The alternative: “Do it on the state level. We have district attorney’s offices, commonwealth’s attorney’s offices, state’s attorney’s offices in all 50 states and in Washington D.C. And that is where 98, 99% of the criminal litigation, both prosecution and criminal defense, gets done. Go there, build your skills.”
His conviction about what comes next was unambiguous. “When the rule of law comes back into the light of day at the Department of Justice — and I absolutely believe it will — you’re going to be all the more better equipped to come in and then help us. I intend to go back. I can’t not go back and be part of the cleanup and accountability mission.”
The scale of what that mission will require is not lost on him. “There’s going to be so much work to repair and reform and rebuild the Department of Justice and to hold accountable every last Trump-associated person who’s committing crimes against the American people — out in the harsh light of day, they’re doing it openly and notoriously. Those people will have to be brought to justice or else I don’t think we get to keep our republic.”
He framed the historical stakes plainly. “If we fail on the accountability mission the third time — Richard Nixon in ‘74, we failed to hold accountable. Donald Trump in 2021, we failed to hold accountable. If we fail a third time, what we’re doing is sending the signal that we just don’t care if people try to destroy American democracy, committing crimes in the process. We don’t care, and we’re not going to hold you accountable. That is a recipe for the end of American democracy.”
The Work Continues
On this side of the conversation, the view from Kyiv: day 1,470-plus of this war, and the topic of American democratic backsliding doesn’t stop just because the guns are firing somewhere else. It creates its own problem here — a lot of people in Europe and Ukraine are watching the instability in American politics and asking what comes next when those structures start falling apart, when they cease to uphold their perceived end of the bargain.
Glenn’s answer to that question isn’t despair. It’s engagement. “Everybody engaging in every way you can. Phone banking, postcard writing, whatever it is. Engaging feels good. And the more people that engage, the better shot we have.”
We have the entire Signal archive. We have the Telegram accounts still on the desktop. The indictments are read and catalogued. We bring on Daniel Hodges and Sergeant Gunnell. We keep these voices alive.
We’re not going to let them forget.
