Seditious conspiracy, which requires prosecutors to prove that defendants planned to forcibly prevent the execution of a U.S. law, is the gravest charge to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack. The government has secured 10 convictions for seditious conspiracy since last year, including three other Oath Keepers and a member of the far-right Proud Boys who pleaded guilty to the charge. Five Proud Boys leaders, including the group’s national chair Enrique Tarrio, are currently on trial on seditious conspiracy charges, as well.
Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers began planning to derail the transfer of power shortly after Biden was projected to be the winner of the 2020 election. Though Rhodes and other members of the group said they merely came to Washington to act as security details for speakers at Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally, members of the group later joined the mob breaching the Capitol building.
Nearly two dozen Oath Keepers entered the Capitol through the Columbus Doors near the rotunda before splitting into two groups and heading toward the House and Senate chambers.
The Oath Keepers also organized a large stockpile of firearms and other weaponry at a hotel in Arlington, Va., which they intended for use if the violence escalated even further. Vallejo remained stationed at the hotel, prepared to shuttle the weapons to D.C. if the group called on him, but it never did.
Members of the group remained stoic as the verdict was read aloud. Seated in a row of the public gallery were Tarrio’s mother; the mother of Ashli Babbitt, a Jan. 6 rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer while trying to breach the House chamber; and Nicole Reffitt, whose husband is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for obstruction of Congress’ Jan. 6 proceedings. They were also present earlier in the day when Jan. 6 defendant Richard Barnett — who is featured in famous images with his feet on a desk in then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite — was found guilty on eight charges related to the breach of the Capitol.
[ad_2]
#Oath #Keepers #guilty #seditious #conspiracy #tied #Jan #attack
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Emily Berret, who was an aide to Pelosi on Jan. 6, testified that the desk in the famous picture was hers, and she described the horror she experienced when she saw the image on the news while on lockdown with the speaker.
Barnett remained stoic as the verdict was read shortly before noon Monday. His partner, Tammy Newburn, was flanked in the public gallery by the mother of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she sought to breach the House chamber on Jan. 6 — and the mother of Enrique Tarrio, who was at the same moment in a courtroom two floors below facing charges of seditious conspiracy. Also seated alongside Newburn was Nicole Reffitt, the wife of Jan. 6 defendant Guy Reffitt, who is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
Barnett took the stand in his own defense, contending that he was “pushed” into the Capitol by the Jan. 6 mob and then roamed around looking for a bathroom until he stumbled into Pelosi’s suite. He said he took the envelope because he had bled on it and viewed it as a “biohazard.” He left an American flag on a side table inside the office as well. He said that he was angered by police actions outside the Capitol, disoriented after being maced in the rotunda and made overheated statements in the moment.
After he got home to Arkansas, Barnett quickly turned himself in, but claimed he lost his phone shortly after he arrived, and the Hike N Strike weapon was similarly missing.
Prosecutors forcefully rebutted Barnett’s contentions in tense cross-examination that caused Barnett to grow frustrated in front of the jury. Barnett described himself as a “fucking idiot” who made intemperate comments but said he shouldn’t be held criminally responsible for his actions.
They noted that he angrily berated Capitol Police officers inside the rotunda after leaving Pelosi’s suite, appearing to beckon the mob forward as he demanded the officers retrieve his misplaced flag. Though he didn’t deploy his stun weapon, prosecutors say its presence at his side presented a threat, and the jury agreed.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Barnett vowed to appeal the verdict and said he had “absolutely not” received a fair trial, chiefly because he faced a jury in liberal-leaning Washington, D.C.
“I think the venue should have been changed. This is not a jury of my peers. I don’t agree with that decision. But I do appreciate the process. And we are surely going to appeal,” Barnett said.
The prosecution asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to jail Barnett pending sentencing, but Cooper declined, allowing Barnett to remain under home detention until his sentencing, set for May 3.
While Barnett wasn’t accused of any violence on Jan. 6, prosecutors asking for Barnett to be put behind bars on Monday said the situation in Pelosi’s office could’ve been much worse if she’d been in her office when rioters like Barnett reached it.
“We can only imagine what would have happened if she had been there at that time,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Prout said.
Prout said Barnett lied when he took the stand last week and hasn’t taken responsibility for his actions. “Since the trial testimony last week, the defendant has been tweeting and has expressed no remorse for his conduct,” she said.
A defense attorney for Barnett, Joseph McBride, noted that Barnett has been on pretrial release since April 2021 without notable incident. “It doesn’t make sense to throw him in jail at this moment,” McBride said.
Barnett insisted to reporters that he had expressed remorse, but he declined to say exactly what he regretted.
McBride and his co-counsel, Brad Geyer, also defended the defense’s unusual tactic of laughing during portions of the government’s case. McBride said it was an appropriate reaction to prosecutors seeking to leverage some of McBride’s more outlandish political statements.
“We think that it’s absolutely objectionable, and ridiculous that a man could be on trial, and possibly be sentenced to the rest of his life in prison, and have tweets used against him — some political tweets,” McBride said. “So, we made a conscious decision to laugh at that because, at the end of the day, we don’t believe that that stuff had any place in this trial.”
[ad_2]
#Jan #intruder #sat #Pelosi #office #desk #convicted #charges
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO, the House’s former top attorney described his tenure battling a former president who tested the limits of executive power at every turn, resisting efforts at accountability in ways that previous chief executives had not. But he has faith that his work helped to stem future presidential attempts to push constitutional boundaries, lending more power to lawmakers.
“I just feel like the Biden administration and future administrations are not going to act like the Trump administration,” Letter said. “They’re not going to show such ignorance of our system and think that the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch. That’s not the way it works.”
Until the Capitol attack, Letter was convinced that his role in Trump’s first impeachment would’ve been the pinnacle of a job already marked by extraordinary legal confrontations. That changed on Jan. 6.
Letter was returning to the House floor from some basement vending machines when he ran into Speaker Nancy Pelosi being whisked from the Capitol under heavy guard. Don’t go back up there, one official told him. An angry mob had breached the building.
But Letter, in a panic, said he had to retrieve several giant binders that were full of sensitive strategy and scripts for the day’s proceedings. He opted to forgo evacuating with Pelosi and instead raced back to the chamber.
“I was the last person in before they locked the doors,” Letter recalled.
The attack on the Capitol led to the Jan. 6 select committee, where the House’s then-top attorney charted a legal strategy that Letter now describes as one of the hallmarks of his tenure.
Through his work on that panel, Letter secured at least two streams of information that became a core element of the committee’s voluminous findings: Trump’s confidential White House records and the Chapman University emails of attorney John Eastman, an architect of the then-president’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.
Letter also won court fights to obtain telephone records from Arizona GOP chair Kelli Ward, who took part in Trump world’s plan to send false electors to Congress. And he helped direct the House’s strategy to hold certain Trump advisers in contempt of Congress, which resulted in prosecutions of Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon.
“We had a whole enormous number of people that, as we now know, were putting together this massive, not just a conspiracy, but a whole bunch of conspiracies, to attack our democracy,” Letter said.
Additionally, Letter played a role in the select committee’s decision to subpoena five sitting Republican members of Congress to testify before the Jan. 6 select committee, including now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
He has moved on now that Republicans have gained the House majority, taking a new job as chief legal officer for Brady: United Against Gun Violence. That role bears a more significant connection to his Jan. 6 committee work than it may appear, in his view. Brady, he noted, had previously written a report that credited D.C.’s strict gun laws with limiting the damage rioters caused; if they had been able to stockpile firearms closer to the Capitol, it could’ve been much worse, the report said.
And he still remembers the Capitol attack vividly. Letter said he was one of the last to leave the House chamber on Jan. 6, recalling the scene in which Capitol Police officers aimed their firearms at a rear door that the pro-Trump mob had attempted to breach. He finally evacuated at around the same moment one rioter, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer.
Letter doesn’t remember hearing the shot. But that same evening, as he was processing his own trauma, he was still acting as an attorney — representing a sergeant-at-arms official who had attempted to administer medical aid to Babbitt and faced questions about the incident from Washington-area law enforcement.
He’d kept doing his job right after being evacuated from the chamber, too. Letter joined lawmakers at a safe location in the Capitol complex, where he continued to draft scripts to rebut potential challenges, should the House reconvene and continue the session (as it did later that night). But he noticed something else that bothered him — a group of House Republicans were crowded 10 feet away and refusing to wear masks, despite the raging pandemic and the limited availability of vaccines at the time.
“I’m not going to get killed by insurrectionists,” he remembers thinking. “I’m going to die of Covid.”
One of the most interesting challenges for the House counsel, Letter said, is having to technically be the lawyer for every member of the chamber — even those who would later battle the Jan. 6 select committee.
Though the position is filled by the speaker, the House general counsel is often called upon to represent individual members in legal disputes. Letter remembers successfully representing Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in a First Amendment case, even though she had also been considered one of Trump’s enablers in the election gambit.
But when lawmakers aim legal disputes at each other — as when McCarthy sued to block Pelosi from implementing a system of “proxy voting” amid the pandemic, or when Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) sued to overturn House fines for refusing to wear masks on the floor — Letter defaulted to representing the speaker and the institution as a whole.
Overall, Letter says he believes his efforts helped empower the institution of the House by putting teeth behind its subpoenas and earning court rulings that reinforced Congress’ power to obtain information to support potential legislation.
Republicans, who now hold the gavels of powerful investigative committees that Letter had previously aided, have fretted that some of the rulings during Letter’s tenure could cut against the House’s authority. One example the GOP notes is Democrats’ pursuit of Trump’s financial information through his accounting firm, which resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that established a test for the type of private information Congress could request from a sitting president.
While Letter acknowledged the criticism, he said he considered that case a “major victory” for Congress. The Supreme Court endorsed lawmakers’ sweeping power to demand information, he argued, and agreed they could obtain a president’s private information under specific circumstances, which the House ultimately met in that instance.
Mostly, he said, the rulings he pursued all the way to the Supreme Court were a function of Trump’s willingness to battle Congress more aggressively than any of his predecessors. But Letter hopes that marked a unique moment in history.
“I would hope that we’ll go back to a system where there are nowhere near as many fights in court,” he said.
[ad_2]
#Houses #legal #lieutenant #Trump #wars #speaks #Jan
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Defendant has failed to come forward with any evidence to support the claimed assertion of privilege. And, because the claimed assertion of executive privilege is unproven, Defendant cannot avoid prosecution for contempt,” Mehta wrote in the 39-page ruling.
It’s a significant decision in an area with little precedent: what current and former presidents must do to assert executive privilege. Mehta acknowledged that there’s not much to guide how courts should determine when a proper assertion has been made. But he said limited court rulings on the subject suggest there must be at least some formal evidence it occurred.
Mehta noted that two other Trump aides whom the House sought to hold in contempt — Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino — produced letters from Trump ordering them to assert executive privilege on his behalf. The Justice Department declined to prosecute the men, and Mehta indicated that the absence of a similar letter from Trump to Navarro led to a reasonable conclusion that Trump had not asserted executive privilege over his testimony.
Mehta’s ruling means that Navarro’s trial on two charges of contempt of Congress is likely to commence later this month. He faces a maximum sentence of a year in prison on each charge — one for refusing to testify and the other for refusing to provide documents — if convicted.
The select committee had hoped to interview Navarro about his coordination with former Trump adviser Bannon and efforts to strategize with members of Congress seeking to challenge the 2020 election results on Jan. 6, 2021, during the counting of Electoral College ballots. The committee recommended that Navarro be held in contempt in April 2022, and the full House quickly followed suit. The Justice Department charged him in June.
Mehta’s ruling also gutted a series of defenses Navarro had hoped to raise at his trial, including that he had a “good-faith belief” that he was immune from the committee’s subpoena. Mehta also agreed to prohibit Navarro from arguing that the select committee’s subpoena was invalid because the panel didn’t have a full complement of 13 members or a ranking Republican member appointed by GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Although he declined to say whether the committee was operating improperly, Mehta noted that Supreme Court precedent required Navarro to first raise his rules complaint with Congress itself. Because he didn’t do that, he effectively waived that argument. Navarro had argued that raising his complaints to Congress would have been “futile” because the House would have simply rejected them. But Mehta said the rules were clear.
“Neither the Supreme Court nor the D.C. Circuit has recognized a futility exception. … And, given the rationale of the rule, it is doubtful that higher courts would recognize one,” Mehta wrote.
The ruling essentially puts Navarro on a track similar to his close ally Bannon, who was tried and convicted of contempt of Congress in July. Bannon, like Navarro, had hoped to argue that he believed he was immune from testifying and that longstanding Justice Department precedents precluded Congress from subpoenaing advisers to former presidents. But in that case, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols relied on a decades-old appeals court ruling — United States v. Licavoli — to reject Bannon’s proposed defenses, ruling that prosecutors simply needed to show that Bannon deliberately refused to appear before Congress.
Mehta cited the case, as well, in tossing most of Navarro’s defenses.
“Defendant apparently believes the law applies differently to him,” he wrote of Navarro. “Because he is a former aide to the President of the United States, he contends, a more stringent state-of-mind standard applies, meaning that the government must be held to a higher burden of proof to convict him as opposed to the average person.”
[ad_2]
#Judge #denies #Navarro #effort #dismiss #contempt #case #defying #Jan #committee
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
