President Donald Trump supporter Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, convicted on charges relating to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, talks to reporters outside the DC Central Detention Facility after being released from a jail in Maryland, in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
A federal prosecutor is pushing back against a judge’s order that barred a recently sprung-from-prison Oath Keepers founder and one of the architects of the Jan. 6 Capitol breach from going into Washington, D.C. without court approval.
Ed Martin, the acting U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., asked U.S. District Court Judge Amit Priyavadan Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, to vacate his order barring Stewart Rhodes — and four codefendants — from visiting the nation’s Capitol, saying his 18-year prison sentence for his seditious conspiracy conviction was commuted this week under President Donald Trump‘s Executive Order “Granting Pardons And Commutation Of Sentences For Certain Offenses Relating To The Events At Or Near The United States Capitol On January 6, 2021.”
The defendants, the prosecutor wrote, “are no longer subject to the terms of supervised release and probation, as the Executive Order ‘commute(d) the sentences’ of these defendants.”
“As the terms of supervised release and probation are included in the ‘sentences’ of the defendants, the Court may not modify the terms of supervised release; the term is no longer active,” Martin added. “The United States hereby indicates that the Order must be vacated.”
Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate disbarred by the Montana Supreme Court for professional misconduct, founded the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government militia group, in 2009.
Rhodes was convicted in 2022 of plotting to disrupt a joint session of the U.S. Congress that had been counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election win. At trial, prosecutors presented jurors with evidence of a plan between Rhodes and his four codefendants to stockpile a cache of weapons with the idea of trying to procure a boat to ferry them across the Potomac River to the Capitol.
Metha said then 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.
Following his promise on Monday, the day he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned and commuted the sentences of Jan. 6 defendants, leading to Rhodes’ release.
Two days later, Rhodes met with at least one lawmaker at the Capitol, defending his actions during the riots.
After that visit, Metha issued his order effective Friday.
“You must not knowingly enter the District of Columbia without first obtaining the permission from the Court,” the order said. “You must not knowingly enter the United States Capitol Building or onto surrounding grounds known as Capitol Square and consisting of the square block bounded by Constitution Avenue, N.W. and N.E., to First Street, N.E. and S.E., to Independence Avenue, S.E. and S.W., to First Street, S.W. and N.W., without first obtaining the permission from the Court.”
David Harris and Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
