A federal judge reversed himself Monday and vacated an order he filed Friday barring Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers, from the nation’s capital city and the U.S. Capitol building.
At the request of the interim U.S. attorney for D.C. recently appointed by President Donald Trump, the judge ruled that Rhodes and several other Oath Keepers will no longer have to report to probation officers or follow any specific orders of the court after Trump commuted prison sentences imposed for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The judge ruled that the commutations will extend to their post-sentence supervision.
“It’s a clear victory for the January 6 defendants,” said Edward Tarpley, one of Rhodes’s attorneys. “We were shocked by the court’s order Friday restricting Stewart Rhodes’s travel to D.C. We’re grateful the judge acknowledged that in his opinion, that it should not have been issued.”
Tarpley said Rhodes was “very happy” by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta’s new ruling, and that he would probably be returning to Washington at some point. “One thing you can depend on with Stewart Rhodes,” Tarpley said, “he’s not bashful about talking to people.”
Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy for organizing members of his group from across the country to stash a large arsenal of weapons across the Potomac River from the Capitol and be prepared to enforce martial law on Jan. 6 or later if requested by Trump.
After Trump issued pardons last week for nearly all of the roughly 1,600 people charged in the insurrection, Rhodes headed from a Maryland prison to D.C., where he spoke to reporters outside the D.C. jail and in a congressional office building. Rhodes said he was lobbying for pardons for the nine Oath Keepers and five members of the Proud Boys who received only commutations, which do not restore one’s civil rights.
All but one of those nine Oath Keepers were found guilty of seditious conspiracy or conspiracy to obstruct Congress. The remaining eight were sentenced to prison terms followed by periods of “supervised release,” which have been imposed in nearly every case so courts might monitor defendants for a time after they leave incarceration. Rhodes even told reporters at the D.C. jail that his next move was to “report to my probation officer.”
Many Jan. 6 defendants also received “stay away orders” as part of their sentences, instructing them not to enter the area around the Capitol and in some cases the entire city. In initially researching the legal issue of a pardon, Mehta wrote, he found legal support for continuing posttrial conditions even after a commutation.
But after Mehta entered an order Friday saying Rhodes and the other seven Oath Keepers were barred from the city, interim U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin filed a motion seeking their release from all sentence conditions. According to Martin, the term “sentence” should be construed to include both custodial and noncustodial components, so when Trump commuted their sentences, their terms of release were “no longer active.”
Mehta ruled that a fair reading of Trump’s proclamation of pardons and commutations could mean an unconditional end to all sentences, and noted some presidents had attached conditions to their previous actions. “The unconditional quality of President Trump’s Proclamation,” Mehta wrote, “thus can reasonably be read to extinguish enforcement of Defendants’ terms of supervised release.” He said the conditions are not dismissed, but the defendants are “no longer bound by the judicially imposed conditions of supervised release.”
Tarpley and the other Oath Keepers defendants also filed a motion Friday joining the U.S. attorney in seeking unconditional release. He said he and the other defense lawyers “couldn’t believe supervised release was left out of the [commutation] equation. We always believed commutation included the entire sentence.”