Jan. 6 Pardon For Oath Keeper Would Be ‘Frightening’: Judge

LOADING ERROR LOADING A federal judge appeared to warn this week about the dangers of pardoning a leader of the Oath Keepers amid signals from President-elect Donald Trump that he is considering wide-ranging pardons related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta invoked the case of Oath Keepers leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes III as he doled out a sentence to a different member of the extremist group who had pleaded guilty to conspiring to stop the transfer of power in 2021. “The notion that Stewart Rhodes could be absolved of his actions is frightening and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country,” Mehta said Wednesday during the sentencing of former North Carolina Oath Keeper chapter leader William Todd Wilson, according to The Associated Press. When he sentenced Rhodes to 18 years in prison last summer — the second-most severe penalty among all the Jan. 6 cases so far — there wasn’t much remorse shown by the Oath Keeper leader, just as there had not been when Rhodes testified on his own behalf at his weeks-long trial. He went on to declare: ”My goal will be to be an American Solzhenitsyn to expose the criminality of this regime.” The comparison Rhodes made between himself, a leader of an extremist group found guilty of plotting to stop the transfer of presidential power with a riot on Jan. 6, and that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel-winning Russian author and dissident thrown into a gulag for eight years after being charged with anti-Soviet crimes — and by some accounts, credited for destroying an empire — was not well received by Mehta.