Left: D.C. District Judge Amit Metha (District Court). Right: President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Monday, Dec. 16, 2024, in Palm Beach, Florida (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, file). Inset: Stewart Rhodes on Jan. 6, 2021 (DOJ).
A U.S. District judge on Wednesday made his feelings clear about the possibility of President-elect Donald Trump granting a pardon to one of the architects of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who sentenced Stewart Rhodes to 18 years in prison after the Oath Keeper founder was found guilty of seditious conspiracy, made the comments while sentencing one of Rhodes’ allies for his role in Jan. 6, Politico reports.
“The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved is frightening and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” the judge reportedly said.
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Metha, a Barack Obama appointee, sentenced 44-year-old William Todd Wilson to a year of home detention and three years probation after he pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, according to The Washington Post. Trump has said as early as his “first day” in office, that he plans on pardoning all those who took part in the riot, although he hasn’t yet laid out any specific plans to do so. As president, he can pardon anyone charged with a federal crime.
Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, was convicted in November 2022 of plotting to use violence to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral win to keep Donald Trump in power. At trial, prosecutors had presented jurors with evidence of a plan between Rhodes and his codefendants — Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs, Ohio State Regular Militia founder Jessica Watkins, retired Navy Lieutenant Commander Thomas Caldwell, and Florida Oath Keepers member Kenneth Harrelson — to stockpile a cache of weapons in a hotel room in Arlington, Virginia, and tried to procure a boat to ferry them across the Potomac River to the Capitol.
On Wednesday, Metha said the order to disperse the weapons “came from a madman.”
“Just to speak those words out loud ought to be shocking to anyone,” Metha said, according to the Post.
Metha is not the first judge to voice his concerns about the mass pardoning of Jan. 6 rioters. As Law&Crime previously reported, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols last month was hearing arguments about delaying the trial of defendant Edward Jacob Lang, who proudly posted his involvement in the riot on his social media accounts, according to federal prosecutors. Since the election, a tidal wave of requests has come from Jan. 6 defendants to delay their cases until after the inauguration.
Nichols reportedly suggested Trump should refrain from pardoning everyone involved in the siege.
“It would be beyond frustrating and disappointing if there were blanket pardons for Jan. 6 defendants or anything close,” he said, according to reporter Jordan Fischer with Washington, D.C., CBS affiliate WUSA.
Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
