THE LONG GAME | Oath Keepers Leader Stewart Rhodes Says He’s a Political Prisoner. Republicans Are Listening – By Mike Giglio (The Intercept) / June 4, 2023
TASHA ADAMS WON her divorce from Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes last month. Three days later, she turned her attention to the Washington, D.C., courtroom where he was set to be sentenced for seditious conspiracy. Prosecutors had asked the judge to give him 25 years in prison for his role in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6; his attorneys had requested time served. Adams was on the government’s side. She’d been with Rhodes as he’d gone from a 25-year-old Army veteran with a high school education to a Yale-educated lawyer and then founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, which she’d helped him build. Now she considered him a threat to the nation, as well as to herself and their six children. She’d recorded a statement for the prosecution to include with their sentencing request. In it, Adams described Rhodes using a backhoe to dig escape tunnels in the yard, grabbing a daughter by the throat, and precariously waving a loaded handgun in the air before pointing it at his head. (Rhodes has denied similar allegations from Adams in the past.) “I think the best thing for Stewart is to be in a place where he can’t harm anyone, or he can’t manipulate more people,” Adams had said in the statement. She hoped the judge would give Rhodes as long a sentence as possible.
As she watched his hearing, though, she wondered if that wasn’t what Rhodes wanted too. She’d expected him to express some conciliation — support, perhaps, for police affected by the riot at the Capitol. Instead, he attacked his trial as rigged and antagonized the judge who’d decide his fate. “A steep sentence here won’t help or deter people,” he said. “It will make people think this government is even more illegitimate than before.” He called himself “a political prisoner.”
Adams was considering how the harsher a sentence Rhodes received, the greater a cause célèbre he’d become on the right. This, she told me, as she followed the hearing on Twitter, would increase his chances for a pardon in a future Republican administration. In fact, Rhodes’s sentencing was playing out as one skirmish in a larger battle to determine how the history of January 6 will be written. From behind the bench, District Judge Amit Mehta, a Barack Obama appointee who also sits on the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, told Rhodes, “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country, to the Republic, and the very fabric of our democracy.” In his remarks beforehand, Rhodes, 58, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, had already issued his reply: “My only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2023/06/04/stewart-rhodes-oath-keepers-prison-sentence-pardon/
