Posted on 05/25/2023 12:24:35 PM PDT by thegagline
The founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in prison for orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the US Capitol in a bid to keep President-elect Joe Biden out of the White House after the 2020 election.
Stewart Rhodes is the first person charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack to be sentenced for seditious conspiracy, and his sentence is the longest that has been handed down so far in the hundreds of Capitol riot cases.
It’s another milestone for the Justice Department’s sprawling Jan. 6 investigation, which has led to seditious conspiracy convictions against the top leaders of two far-right extremist groups that authorities say came to Washington prepared to fight to keep President Donald Trump in power at all costs.
Before handing down the sentence, the judge told a defiant Rhodes that he is a continued threat to the US, saying it’s clear Rhodes “wants democracy in this country to devolve into violence.”
“The moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be ready to take up arms against your government,” US District Judge Amit Mehta said.
*** Prosecutors had sought 25 years for Rhodes, who they say was the architect of a plot to forcibly disrupt the transfer of presidential power that included “quick reaction force” teams at a Virginia hotel to ferry weapons into DC if they were needed.
The weapons were never deployed.
***
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
didn’t mean it to seem like I was attacking you, I am just so frustrated with the double standard of justice
OK... I get it. No problem.
There does appear to be a lot of details that people here are missing about the Oath Keepers.
The most important being that a number of them made plea deals, and quite literally cooperated with DOJs investigation.
I do not know whether or not any of these folks gave testimony at Rhodes’s trial. I did manage to find some information about one of them—William Todd Wilson.
(Before I get slammed for “Capitol Riot” stuff, keep in mind that I did not write that article or give it a title.)
A document filed with the court (I assume as part of his plea deal, possibly shown to the grand jury to obtain an indictment against Rhodes and others) shows some pretty damaging stuff.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.242905/gov.uscourts.dcd.242905.1.0.pdf
Of course, under duress, anyone could be convinced to agree to anything. But if this document was made available to the Rhodes trial jury, Rhodes was screwed—unless Wilson’s credibility and/or motives could be put into question.
(And, as I was trying to point out in my earlier post, if the if DOJ or FBI had the information in this document on January 5, they could have made arrests on January 5—before any activity took place at the Capitol building. The conspiracy is the crime in this instance—not the crime itself.)
Yes, and in Australia, also, the rights of citizens are being eroded. During the Covid epidemic, anyone who dissented was treated very harshly and many lost their careers. There are also laws on the books that make anyone suspect of "terrorism" a lost cause - they can be locked up forever. And terrorism is defined very widely.
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