Sedition Sentence for Oath Keepers Leader Marks Moment of Accountability
A few hours after Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, was sentenced on Thursday to 18 years in prison for his role in a seditious conspiracy to instigate the pro-Trump violence of Jan. 6, Matthew M. Graves, the federal prosecutor who has overseen the government’s investigation of the Capitol attack, released a statement with a fact that underscored the landmark nature of the moment.
“More people were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the siege of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Mr. Graves wrote, “than any other criminal event since the statute was enacted during the Civil War.”
Nearly two and a half years after supporters of President Donald J. Trump stormed the Capitol in an effort to derail the peaceful transfer of power, Mr. Rhodes’s sentencing was the most high-profile statement of accountability yet for an episode that seems certain to occupy a dark place in American history and remains a flashpoint in American politics.
Amid the more than 1,000 criminal cases filed so far by the Justice Department against those who played a role in the attack, the prosecution of Mr. Rhodes, accused of plotting to mobilize his followers into storming the Capitol in two separate military-style “stacks,” stood out in a way that the judge who sentenced him, Amit P. Mehta, captured in court on Thursday.
Source: The New York Times
