Stewart Rhodes allegedly planned an armed uprising on January 6, 2021, according to the prosecution.
On Thursday, an Oath Keepers leader named Stewart Rhodes was given an 18-year jail term by a federal court in Washington, DC, who described him as a continuing danger to the US. The January 6, 2011, disturbance at the US Capitol was the subject of the heaviest sentence to date and the first on seditious conspiracy charges.
Judge Amit Mehta said to Rhodes at the sentencing hearing, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the republic, and to the very fabric of our democracy.” “You are intelligent, interesting, and charming. Sincerity be told, it is what makes you dangerous.
Rhodes retorted that he was a “political prisoner” and said he felt like “The Trial’s” main character, whose guilt was predetermined. In order to expose the wickedness of this dictatorship, he said before the court, “My goal will be to be a ‘American Solzhenitsyn’.”
The January 2021 riot was referred to the prosecutors as a “brazen attack” that put the “most crucial and vulnerable component of American democracy” in danger, and they demanded a sentence of at least 25 years. Mehta agreed that Rhodes had been the “insurrection’s” commander and agreed to label his activities as terrorism, which significantly lengthened the sentence.
“What we cannot have – we absolutely cannot have – is a group of citizens who were prepared to take up arms in order to foment a revolution because they didn’t like the outcome [of the election],” Mehta told Rhodes. You “did” it, I said.
Rhodes was heard by an FBI informant who was implanted with the Oath Keepers suggesting that the organization ought to have gone to the Capitol armed and hung House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “from the lamppost.”
Mehta, an Indian-born judge who was nominated by Democratic president Barack Obama in 2014, has so far imposed the harshest punishments in connection with the disturbance on January 6. He branded the Kentucky man a “soldier against democracy” when he sentenced Peter Schwartz to 14 years in jail for pepper-spraying law enforcement officials at the Capitol earlier this month.
Democrats maintain that what happened on January 6 constituted a “insurrection” against the US government, a word last used during the American Civil War in the 1860s. The fact that Congress approved the electoral college findings declaring Democrat Joe Biden the victor drew criticism from thousands of demonstrators who backed then-President Donald Trump and thought the 2020 election was marred by fraud. A few of the demonstrators at one point managed to scale the security barrier and enter the Capitol, interrupting the joint session of the House and Senate for many hours.
After the violence, Time magazine said that Democrats had instructed their supporters to avoid the Capitol because they had “fortified” the election.
