oath Archives - Home Safety Tech Pros

DC moves to drop civil suit against Oath Keepers, Proud Boys

homesafetytechpros — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 09:45:59 +0000

Background: FILE – In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo violent rioters, loyal to President Donald Trump, storm the Capitol in Washington (AP Photo/John Minchillo); Insets L-R: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes after being released from a jail in Maryland, in Washington, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana); FILE – Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio rallies in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 17, 2019 (AP Photo/Noah Berger).

The Washington, D.C., Attorney General’s Office has moved to dismiss — with prejudice — a civil lawsuit against two far-right extremist groups and several other individuals for their participation in the Jan. 6, attack on the Capitol following “long delays” in the case, telling the court that the government no longer believes the case is worth pursuing.

“The Attorney General has determined that, notwithstanding the virtue and propriety of this case, the District’s limited law enforcement resources must now be committed elsewhere in the service of District residents, taking into account both the growing challenges the District faces and the relatively small recoveries the District stands to obtain on its remaining common law causes of action,” the OAG’s office wrote in the five-page filing explaining its decision to drop the suit against Proud Boys International, LLC and the Oath Keepers.

As Law&Crime previously reported, the civil complaint was initially filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington in December 2021 and sought millions of dollars in damages from the groups.

Proceedings were held up as many of the defendants were among the thousands of people prosecuted and convicted for their involvement in the Capitol riot. Among the most notable defendants were Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, both of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Rhodes was serving 18 years in federal prison before his sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump in January, while Tarrio had been sentenced to 22 years and was given a full and complete pardon by the president.

The onetime highly anticipated lawsuit was announced with gusto by then-Attorney General Karl Racine, who likened the conservative, pro-Trump mob’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election to the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.

“A very different but familiar enemy, inflamed by a sitting president and other elected officials, wearing military fatigues and red, white and blue,” attacked the national seat of legislative government on Jan. 6, Racine said. “It was like 9/11 — a planned terrorist attack, but this time, our own citizens were hellbent on destroying the freedoms and ideals on which our country was founded, and continues to aspire to achieve.”

Calling the incident “gutless” and traumatizing for members of law enforcement, Racine said the taxed-without-representation federal district had “chosen to speak truth through this lawsuit” by targeting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.

The suit was premised on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. It also employs another closely related federal law that increases liability for violations of the act and several common law tort claims.

“[T]he Individual Defendants conspired together and participated in planning, promoting, financing, organizing, and carrying out the January 6th Attack,” the filing reads. “Defendants Proud Boys and Oath Keepers also participated in the conspiracy, playing a key role in the planning, promotion, financing, organizing, and carrying out of the January 6th Attack by lending their experience — and in some cases, organizational resources — to the planned January 6th Attack.”

Source link

The post DC moves to drop civil suit against Oath Keepers, Proud Boys appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.

Oath Keepers lawyer, Rhodes girlfriend sentenced for Jan. 6

homesafetytechpros — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 01:37:43 +0000

Background: Kellye SoRelle, former general counsel for the Oath Keepers, leaves federal court in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024 (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein). Inset: Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (Collin County (Tex.) Jail).

The Texas woman who once served as the lawyer for the extremist Oath Keepers group is headed for federal prison for actions she took during and after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Kellye SoRelle, 46, was sentenced to 12 months behind bars on Friday. She pleaded guilty in August to felony obstruction of justice and misdemeanor trespassing in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which supporters of Donald Trump violently breached the Capitol building as Congress was set to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory.

According to prosecutors, SoRelle, along with Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, entered restricted Capitol grounds at around 2:12 p.m., just as the initial violent breach of the Capitol building was underway.

“As she entered the restricted area, SoRelle live-streamed a video to Facebook, expressing her support for the actions of the rioters and urging others not to be afraid,” the DOJ said in a statement. “She described the scene as one of the ‘coolest damn things’ she had ever witnessed and framed the riot as a necessary step to prevent the United States from descending into communism and tyranny. SoRelle continued to document the riot over Facebook live-stream as she moved around the Capitol building with Rhodes and the other Oath Keeper affiliate.”

Prior to that, at around 1:30 p.m., SoRelle had messaged an Oath Keepers group that called itself the “Leadership intel sharing secured” group, saying: “We are acting like the founding fathers — can’t stand down. Per Stewart, and I concur.”

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who also oversaw the case against Rhodes — with whom SoRelle was romantically involved at the time of the Jan. 6 attack — told SoRelle that her offenses were indeed grave.

“What you were trying to cover up, and what you were encouraging others to cover up, is among the most serious conduct Americans can engage in,” Mehta told SoRelle at Friday’s sentencing, according to local CBS affiliate WUSA reporter Jordan Fischer. “Sedition.”

Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, also reportedly told SoRelle that her actions “shocked the conscience,” considering that she was a lawyer who used her status to promote Rhodes’ increasingly violent rhetoric, and that the consequences of her actions reached well beyond her.

“People listened,” Mehta said, according to WUSA. “People listened. And there are people sitting in jail today because of that. Whose lives have been ruined.”

Rhodes was convicted in November 2022 of seditious conspiracy and ultimately sentenced by Mehta to 18 years behind bars. SoRelle had announced in January 2022 that she was the acting head of the militia-style group after Rhodes’ arrest earlier that month.

On Jan. 6, after the violence at the Capitol had ebbed, SoRelle and Rhodes joined other Oath Keepers members for what prosecutors described as a “celebratory dinner.” However, that dinner was apparently cut short when that group “received word that law enforcement was either arresting or searching for individuals involved in the Capitol attack,” prosecutors said. SoRelle and the others left the restaurant and retrieved their things from their hotel before regrouping at a nearby gas station.

At that point, Rhodes turned off his cellphone, apparently afraid of being tracked by law enforcement, and gave it to SoRelle, who took it. SoRelle then conveyed messages on the messaging app Signal to Oath Keepers members and affiliates on behalf of Rhodes using her own phone. She urged Oath Keepers members to scrub their devices of evidence that they participated in the deadly riot, which resulted in multiple deaths and force lawmakers and staff to either flee the Capitol or shelter in place for several harrowing hours.

“Please delete any information you’ve posted regarding the DC op and your involvement,” SoRelle wrote to the group in the days after Jan. 6 “This thread will be deleted when possible.”

She also relayed instructions from Rhodes, who had turned off his phone to avoid being tracked, to “clean up all your chats,” prosecutors say.

“YOU ALL NEED TO DELETE ANY OF YOUR COMMENTS ABOUT WHO DID WHAT,” she also wrote, explaining that only the comment authors could delete their posts. According to the Justice Department, members of the Oath Keepers “complied” with these instructions, “deleting messages, photographs, and videos from their devices that could serve as evidence of their participation in the Capitol attack.”

Mehta also sentenced SoRelle to 36 months of supervised release and ordered her to pay $2,000 in restitution toward the estimated $2.8 million in damage and losses to the Capitol. His sentence is closer to the government’s request of 16 months behind bars than to SoRelle’s own request to be sentenced to time served plus probation, court records show.

In addition to the obstruction of justice charge, SoRelle was also originally charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and obstruction of an official proceeding, a widely-used charge that the Supreme Court ruled in June 2024 was wrongly applied to accused Jan. 6 rioters.

As Law&Crime has previously reported, Mehta deemed SoRelle mentally incompetent to stand trial in June 2023 following her September 2022 arrest. She was restored to competency in February 2024.

Source link

The post Oath Keepers lawyer, Rhodes girlfriend sentenced for Jan. 6 appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.

Jan. 6 rioter and Oath Keeper gets time served

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:10:02 +0000

Thomas Caldwell is seen wearing a blue hat outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (U.S. Attorney’s Office).

A U.S. Navy veteran and Oath Keeper who rioted on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol in a Depends adult diaper was sentenced to time served this week.

Thomas Caldwell, 70, learned that he will avoid any further time in custody at his sentencing hearing on Friday in front of U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee, court documents said. He served 53 days of incarceration at the Central Regional Jail in Virginia after his 2021 arrest.

Caldwell was acquitted of charges of seditious conspiracy. His conviction for obstructing Congress was overturned after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that it was wrongly applied to Jan. 6 defendants.

In their supplemental sentencing memo asking for the court to sentence Caldwell to 48 months, or four years of incarceration, prosecutors said Caldwell plotted with other affiliates of the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the certification of the 2020 presidential election. They said he joined the mob that attacked the Capitol.

“In his own words, Caldwell ‘heard that Pence f–––ed us … so I grabbed up my American flag and said let’s take the damn capitol’ and ‘let’s storm the place and hang the traitors.’”

Caldwell “climbed the steps after breaking 2 rows of barricades, then got on the parapets” and cheered as “the people in front of me broke through the doors and started duking it out with the pigs who broke and ran,” and “Then we started stealing the cops riot shields and throwing fire extinguishers through windows.”

In Caldwell’s view, “It was a great time,” court documents note.

“But when it became clear, roughly a week later, that law enforcement was investigating Caldwell and his associates, he destroyed evidence of their involvement in these crimes,” the government’s filing reads. “Caldwell’s efforts to obstruct the investigation into the attack on the Capitol, like his participation in the attack itself, show a disdain for the rule of law that merits the government’s recommended sentence.”

Caldwell’s lawyer, David W. Fischer, reacted in an email to The Associated Press, saying, “Mr. Caldwell was cleared of the four most serious counts and sentenced to no additional jail time by a highly respected federal judge.”

“Obviously, he should be considered for a pardon by President Trump,” the attorney added, referring to the returning president’s often-stated vows to grant clemency to Jan. 6 participants.

In court documents, Fischer said the government orchestrated an expensive, pre-dawn “Waco-style raid” on Caldwell’s home, “complete with a battering-ram tank, a dozen agents wielding machine guns, and laser dots pointed on Mrs. Caldwell’s forehead.”

“The FBI, as noted in previous filings, mistakenly believed that ‘Commander Tom’ — a reference to Caldwell’s Navy rank– was the ‘Commander’ of the Oath Keepers; that Caldwell was scouting an attack on the Capitol via a ‘pre-strike recce,’ which turned out to be a quest to determine the number and location of Port-o-Potties near the Ellipse and ended at Camelot D.C.; that Caldwell personally led a group of Oath Keepers inside of the Capitol; that Caldwell physically entered the Capitol based upon a picture of an outdoor construction tunnel; and that Caldwell plotted a pre-planned attack on the Capitol,” the defense filing reads.

“The U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, Michael Sherwin, admitted that his office engaged in fast-moving ‘shock and awe’ tactics to dissuade future events like January 6,” he added. “The Government was obviously in a rush to make January 6 related arrests, which resulted in an unnecessary pre-dawn raid of Caldwell’s farm.”

He was among a group of Oath Keepers accused of crimes related to the Jan. 6 riots, including leader Stewart Rhodes, Law&Crime reported.

His wife told a jury her husband wore “Depends” adult diapers that day, Law&Crime previously reported. She denied her husband had any intent to break the law or overthrow the government, claiming he had severe back pain that day from multiple surgeries. One such surgery, she said, required pinning her husband’s shoulder to keep it in its socket.

Adam Klasfeld contributed to this report.

Source link

The post Jan. 6 rioter and Oath Keeper gets time served appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.

Bar admission denied for applicant who won’t take constitutional oath

homesafetytechpros — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 20:22:09 +0000

Constitutional Law

Bar admission denied for applicant who won’t take constitutional oath

By Debra Cassens Weiss

December 9, 2024, 2:22 pm CST

A bar applicant who won’t take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and the New York Constitution has failed to demonstrate that she has the character and fitness to become an attorney. (Image from Shutterstock)

The applicant was a 30-year-old Nevada resident who graduated from law school in 2018 and passed the New York bar exam in July 2022, according to the memorandum and order decided and entered Dec. 5 by the Appellate Division’s Third Judicial Department of the New York Supreme Court. She was not identified in the per curiam order.

The woman “has made plain that she cannot unequivocally take and subscribe to an oath or affirmation that she will support” the state and federal constitutions, the appeals court said.

A member of the appeals court’s character and fitness committee had referred the matter for a formal hearing after an interview and an investigation. The applicant waived her right to a hearing.

The applicant has the burden of demonstrating that she has the character and fitness for admission, and she has not met the burden, the appeals court said.

Hat tip to the Legal Profession Blog, which noted the order.

Source link

The post Bar admission denied for applicant who won’t take constitutional oath appeared first on Home Safety Tech Pros.