A little over two years ago, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington obtained a landmark conviction against Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, on charges of seditious conspiracy for the role he played in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Friday, the same office — now led by one of President Trump’s appointees, Ed Martin — effectively assumed the role of Mr. Rhodes’s defense lawyer, filing court papers that sought to reverse a federal judge’s order from earlier in the day that barred him and other convicted members of the far-right group from visiting Washington without permission.
The move was a stunning reversal for the prosecutors office, which for more than four years led the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack.
Since taking office as interim U.S. attorney this week, Mr. Martin has been working to execute Mr. Trump’s directive to end any Jan. 6-related criminal cases that are still active, filing a blizzard of motions in Federal District Court in Washington to dismiss them — sometimes drawing angry responses from judges.
The judge’s order barring Mr. Rhodes from Washington came after the far-right leader appeared on Tuesday at the local jail in Washington where many Jan. 6 defendants had been held in recent years. The next day, Mr. Rhodes — known for his piratical black eyepatch — showed up near the scene of the riot: a Dunkin’ Donuts shop in the Longworth House Office Building, adjacent to the Capitol.
As part of the evidence at Mr. Rhodes’s trial, the jury heard a recording of him threatening violence in the days shortly after Jan. 6.
If Trump was “just gonna let himself be removed illegally, then we should have brought rifles,” Mr. Rhodes said in the recording. “We could have fixed it right then and there.”
On Friday morning, Judge Amit P. Mehta, who oversaw Mr. Rhodes’s case, issued an order altering the terms of his supervised release, saying he could no longer enter Washington without the judge’s permission. Unlike hundreds of other Jan. 6 defendants, Mr. Rhodes was not fully pardoned by Mr. Trump; his 18-year prison term was reduced to time served. So Judge Mehta asserted control over his conditions of release.
In the court papers filed after Judge Mehta’s order, Mr. Martin claimed that Mr. Rhodes was in fact “no longer subject to the terms of supervised release” under the clemency order Mr. Trump issued on Monday. Mr. Martin signed the papers personally, an unusual move for a U.S. attorney who typically has subordinates file court papers.
In a statement, Mr. Martin sought to compare Mr. Rhodes’s situation with those of members of the Biden family and a general who served as Mr. Trump’s top military adviser in his first administration but fell from his graces.
“If a judge decided that Jim Biden, General Mark Milley, or another individual were forbidden to visit America’s capital — even after receiving a last-minute, pre-emptive pardon from the former president — I believe most Americans would object,” the statement said. “The individuals referenced in our motion have had their sentences commuted — period, end of sentence.”
Mr. Martin was, to say the least, an unusual choice to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which took the lead in prosecuting members of the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
He himself was a prominent member of the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The day before the assault on the Capitol, he called in a speech for “die-hard true Americans” to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.”
According to his own social media posts, he also appears have to been at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy,” he wrote in one post. “Ignore #FakeNews.”
Moreover, Mr. Martin is still listed as a board member of the Patriot Freedom Project, one of the most prominent fund-raising organizations working to help pay legal fees for Jan. 6 defendants. He has also represented some of those defendants himself, squaring off against the very same federal prosecutors he now leads.
The friction over Mr. Rhodes came as tensions were already running high between Mr. Martin’s office and the federal bench in Washington. While the judges have grudgingly gone along with Mr. Martin’s motions to dismiss Jan. 6 cases, some of them have done so in orders declaring that nothing — not even a presidential decree — can erase what happened that day.
“The dismissal of this case cannot undo the ‘rampage that left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage,’” Judge Tanya S. Chutkan wrote in a decision formally ending the case against John Banuelos, who was charged with firing a pistol into the air on the grounds of the Capitol.
“It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who ‘struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them,’” Judge Chutkan continued, quoting court filings in another Jan. 6 case. “It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”
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