Stewart Rhodes and members of the Oath Keepers who were convicted on seditious conspiracy charges will be allowed to return to Washington, D.C., after Donald Trump’s hand-picked U.S. attorney pushed a judge to drop restrictions on their travel following the president’s clemencies.
The federal judge who tried members of the far-right militia group issued an order last week that prevented Rhodes and seven other defendants from entering Washington, without the court’s permission, after Trump commuted their sentences to time served.
A single-page order from District Judge Amit Mehta on Friday was issued one day after Rhodes strolled through congressional office buildings, speaking to reporters and meeting with at least one member of Congress following his release from federal custody.
Ed Martin — acting U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C — filed a motion to dismiss the judge’s terms, arguing that Trump’s commutations mean that Rhodes and his allies are no longer subject to the court’s supervision.
On Monday, Mehta agreed to drop the restrictions.
“It is not for this court to divine why President Trump commuted Defendants’ sentences, or to assess whether it was sensible to do so,” Mehta wrote. “The court’s sole task is to determine the act’s effect.”
But Mehta is keeping their sentences on the books.
“The President’s act of clemency did not alter this court’s original sentences, which remain ‘intact,’” he wrote.
In 2023, Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison after a jury agreed that he conspired with members of his group to break into halls of Congress in what prosecutors described as an act of terrorism.
Trump commuted his sentence — along with the sentences of 13 other Capitol rioters, including Oath Keepers members who were similarly convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy — to time served. Rhodes was released from prison earlier this week.
Before he was tapped to fill the role as the top prosecutor in Washington, succeeding Matthew Graves, who led the largest federal investigation in Department of Justice history with the prosecution of more than 1,600 people in connection with January 6, Martin had served as a board member with a legal group trying to free those same defendants.
Martin — a prominent “Stop the Steal” activist” — is now tasked with overseeing the office that handled those prosecutions. He is working to dismiss the remaining cases.
“The individuals referenced in our motion have had their sentences commuted — period, end of sentence,” Martin said in a statement Friday.
Last month, with the looming prospect of Trump clemencies for the defendants in his courtroom, Mehta said a potential pardon for Rhodes “is frightening and ought to be frightening to anyone who cares about democracy in this country.”
“You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and its democracy and the very fabric of this country,” Mehta told Rhodes during his sentencing hearing in 2023. “You are smart, you are compelling, and you are charismatic. Frankly, that is what makes you dangerous.”
In court filings this week responding to requests to toss charges for the remaining defendants, judges are barely hiding their contempt for Trump’s sweeping pardons for virtually every member of the mob — and warning against attempts to rewrite the history of the Capitol attack and downplay the staggering display of violence.
District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s federal election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, wrote that Trump’s pardons “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.”
This story was first published on January 24 and has been updated with developments
