Oath Keepers founder no longer banned from D.C., U.S. Capitol
A federal judge on Monday lifted travel restrictions imposed last week on the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group, Stewart Rhodes, that barred him from entering Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Capitol or its grounds without the court’s permission.
Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes by a federal jury in 2022 in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who has called Rhodes a threat to the country and to democracy.
President Trump, in one of his first acts back in office, commuted Rhodes’ sentence to time served as part of the mass clemency for some 1,500 people who took part in the Capitol riot. Rhodes was immediately released from prison upon receiving his commutation, and soon turned up at the U.S. Capitol.
On Friday, Mehta imposed the travel restrictions on Rhodes and seven other Oath Keepers convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. The order changed their conditions of release, barring them from entering Washington, D.C., or the Capitol or its grounds.
That same day, the new Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., Ed Martin, responded in a court filing that Rhodes was no longer subject to court supervision because of the president’s commutations.
Mehta on Monday tossed out his previous order imposing the location restrictions and explained his reasoning.
In a new order, Mehta said that after Trump’s act of mass clemency, “all relevant actors” moved forward as if the commutations only addressed the defendants’ time in custody and not the terms of their supervised release.
U.S. Probation Offices began supervising defendants, defense counsel moved to change the conditions of release and the Justice Department responded to those requests, Mehta said.
Now, however, Mehta said it was “reasonable” that the Justice Department interpreted Trump’s Jan. 6 commutations to cover the defendants’ prison sentences and wipe away their terms of supervised release.
That reading is further supported, Mehta wrote, by the fact that Trump’s commutation order is unconditional.
“It is not for this court to divine why President Trump commuted Defendants’ sentences, or to assess whether it was sensible to do so,” Mehta’s order said. “The court’s sole task is to determine the act’s effect.”
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