Oath Keepers Leader is sentenced to 18 years in the January 6 sedition case

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Thursday for his seditious conspiracy conviction for his role in helping mobilize the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol on January 1. 6, 2021.

The verdict, handed down by the Federal District Court in Washington, was the most severe sentence to date in the more than 1,000 criminal cases that resulted from the attack on the Capitol — and the first to be increased because it met the legal definition of terrorism.

It was also the first given to one of 10 members of the Oath Keepers and another far-right group, the Proud Boys, who were convicted of sedition in connection with the January 6 events.

For Mr. Rhodes, 58, the sentence marked the end of a tumultuous and unusual career that included military service, a stint on Capitol Hill and a law degree from Yale. His role as founder and leader of the Oath Keepers thrust him into the limelight and will now send him to prison for what will likely be most of his remaining days.

In a dramatic, nearly four-hour hearing, Judge Amit P. Mehta rebuked Mr. Rhodes for years of trying through his leadership of the Oath Keepers to “turn American democracy into violence.”

“You, sir,” continued Judge Mehta, addressing the defendant directly, “are a constant threat and a danger to this country, to the Republic and the fabric of our democracy.”

When the hearing began, prosecutors urged Judge Mehta to sentence Mr. Rhodes to 25 years in prison, arguing that accountability for the violence at the Capitol and that American democracy was at stake.

Kathryn L. Rakoczy, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, told Judge Mehta that Mr Rhodes had been calling for attacks on the government for more than a decade and that his role in the January 6 attack was part of a long-standing pattern. .

The leader of the Oath Keepers, Ms Rakoczy said, exploited his talents and influence to push his followers to reject the results of the 2020 election and eventually mobilized them to storm the Capitol in two separate military “stacks” in a violent attempt to put President Donald J. Trump in office.

“It’s behavior that threatened and continues to threaten the rule of law in the United States,” she said.

Ms. Rakoczy also noted that Mr. Rhodes had shown no remorse for undermining the lawful transfer of power and continued to advocate political violence. Just four days ago, she said, Mr Rhodes gave an interview from prison, repeating the lie that the election had been marred by fraud and claiming that the government was “going after those on the political right”.

“It won’t stop until it stops,” Mr Rhodes said during the interview, adding that the country needed “regime change”.

As if to prove the government’s position, Mr Rhodes – in an orange prison smock and his trademark black eye patch – delivered a defiant speech to the court, blaming the news media for demonizing the Oath Keepers for leading the attack on the Capitol. He also compared himself to the Soviet-era dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and to the beleaguered protagonist in the Kafka novel “The Trial.”

“I am a political prisoner,” Mr Rhodes said.

The hearing opened a week of sentencing proceedings for eight other members of the Oath Keepers who were convicted in two separate trials – in November and January – on charges that included not only seditious conspiracy but obstruction of a congressional proceeding to hold the 2020 election. certify . One of Mr Rhodes’s deputies, Kelly Meggs, who once ran the group’s Florida chapter, was due to be sentenced later on Thursday.

The trial to convict all the defendants began Wednesday, when some police officers and congressmen testified about the horror they experienced on January 6.

Several spoke tearfully on the witness stand, describing lingering symptoms of post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt, especially after many of their colleagues resigned and some died by suicide in the months following the attack.

“I’m an introverted, depressed shell of my former self,” said Harry Dunn, a Capitol police officer who met members of the Oath Keepers in the Capitol rotunda. When Mr. Dunn called the officers injured on January 6 “real oath keepers,” he cast an angry look at Mr. Rhodes and other members of the group in court.

In court documents filed this month, prosecutors dwelt on the importance of severely punishing Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates, stating that acceptance of political violence was growing in the United States and that long prison terms were needed as a deterrent to future unrest.

“As this court is well aware, the response of the justice system on Jan. 6 bears a heavy responsibility for determining whether Jan. 6 will be an outlier or a turning point,” the prosecutors wrote. “If left unchecked, this impulse threatens our democracy.”

In court on Thursday, prosecutors persuaded Judge Mehta to increase Mr Rhodes’ sentence by arguing that his repeated calls for violence against the government and his plan to drop an arsenal of weapons outside Washington in an emergency on January 6 should be penalised. as an act of terrorism.

“This wasn’t blowing up a building,” said Mrs. Rakoczy. But “organizing an armed force” and advocating a “bloody civil war” came “quite close,” she said.

The government had asked for the terrorism amendment to be applied in four previous January 6 cases, but judges — including Judge Mehta — had rejected the requests each time.

From the beginning of the hearing, Mr. Rhodes’ lawyers – Phillip Linder and James L. Bright – were limited in their attempts to ask for clemency because they could not fully claim that Mr. Rhodes was remorseful or no longer a threat to the government. , knowing that his voice winder statement to the court was imminent.

Mr Bright decided not to say anything. When Mr. Linder spoke, he simply said that the administration had tried to make Mr. Rhodes “the face of January 6,” but that figures like Mr. Trump were more responsible for the mayhem and violence in the Capitol that day .

In the end, Judge Mehta said he imposed a harsh sentence because seditious conspiracy was “one of the most serious crimes an individual can commit in America.”

He also scolded Mr. Rhodes, telling him that he had not been persecuted for his political beliefs, but rather because he was “willing to take up arms and foment revolution” simply because he did not like the results of an election .

“That’s what you did,” Judge Mehta said. ‘You are not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. You are here because of your actions.”

The trial of Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Meggs and three other defendants – Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell – was a landmark in the Justice Department’s extensive investigation into the U.S. Capitol bombing. The convictions of Mr Rhodes and Mr Meggs for seditious conspiracy were the first time federal prosecutors won a sedition case since 1995, when a group of Islamist militants were found guilty of conspiracy to bomb several monuments in New York.

At the beginning of the month, four members of the Proud Boys – including their former leader, Enrique Tarrio – were also convicted of sedition and are expected to be sentenced in August in a series of hearings.

Jeffrey S. Nestler, one of the plaintiffs, opened Mr. Rhodes’ trial by telling the jury that in the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the election, the Oath Keepers leader and his subordinates “had devised a plan for armed insurrection. to shatter a foundation of American democracy”: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Closing the government’s case, Mr Nestler stated that the Oath Keepers had plotted against Mr Biden, ignoring both the law and the will of the voters, as they disliked the results of the election .

During the trial, prosecutors showed the jury hundreds of coded text messages from Oath Keepers members, which revealed that Mr Rhodes and some of his followers were enslaved by the bizarre fear that Chinese agents had infiltrated the US government and that Mr Biden — which she called a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party — could cede control of the country to the United Nations.

Prosecutors also sought to demonstrate how Mr. Rhodes was desperate to contact Mr. Trump during the post-election period and convince him to take extraordinary measures to retain power.

For example, in December 2020, Mr. Rhodes posted an open letter on his website urging Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law more than two centuries old that he said would give the president the power to raise militias. shouting like the Oath Keepers to quell the “coup” – reportedly led by Mr Biden and Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president – ​​seeking to dethrone him.

As part of the plot, prosecutors alleged, Mr. Rhodes stationed a “rapid response force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Virginia, ready to rush their guns to Washington if their compatriots in the Capitol needed them. . .

Zach Montague reporting contributed.