Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes visits Capitol Hill after Trump clemency

WASHINGTON (AP) — An extremist group leader who orchestrated an assault on the U.S. Capitol four years ago defended his role in the attack as he returned to the scene of the crime on Wednesday, while judges who sentenced hundreds of rioters criticized the presidential pardons that have freed scores of them from prison.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes visited Capitol Hill after he was released from prison as part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping clemency order for the nearly 1,600 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy in one of the serious cases brought by the Justice Department in the siege that halted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory and left more than 100 police officers injured. Rhodes was found guilty of orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Trump in power.

On Wednesday, Rhodes insisted members of the Oath Keepers were not responsible for the violence that day.

“I didn’t lead anything. So why should I feel responsible for that?” Rhodes said.

Rhodes did not enter the building on Jan. 6 and said it was “stupid” that members of the Oath Keepers did.

“My guys blundered through doors,” he insisted.

Rhodes’ visit comes on the same day that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson revived a special committee to investigate the riot, an effort to defend Trump’s actions that day and dispute the work of a bipartisan committee that investigated the siege two years ago. Johnson said Wednesday that he would not second guess Trump’s decision to pardon the rioters and that “we believe in redemption, we believe in second chances.”

Rhodes, who arrived at on Capitol Hill wearing a Trump 2020 hat, said he was at the Capitol to advocate for the release of another defendant. Rhodes was among 14 Jan. 6 defendants whose sentences were commuted. He told reporters he would be pushing Trump to grant him a full pardon.

Judges in Washington’s federal court spent Wednesday dismissing a slew of cases against Jan. 6 defendants that were still pending. Several judges took the opportunity in written orders to lament the abrupt end to the prosecutions, saying Trump’s mass pardons won’t change the truth about the mob’s attack on a bastion of American democracy,

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said evidence of the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol is preserved through the “neutral lens” of riot videos, trial transcripts, jury verdicts and judicial opinions.

“Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies,” she wrote.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s election interference case before its dismissal, said the president’s pardons for hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters can’t change the “tragic truth” about the attack. Chutkan added that her order dismissing the case against an Illinois man who was charged with firing a gun into the air during the riot cannot “diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers” who defended the Capitol.

“It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake,” Chutkan wrote. “And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”

Chutkan and Kollar-Kotelly are among over 20 judges to handle the hundreds of cases produced by the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history. Kollar-Kotelly issued her written remarks in an order dismissing the case against Dominic Box, a Georgia man who was among the first group of rioters to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Other judges at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., spoke out against pardons for Capitol rioters before Trump’s second inauguration on Monday, when the Republican president pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of charges in all of the 1,500-plus Capitol riot criminal cases.

District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump nominee, said in November that handing out blanket pardons to Capitol rioters would be “ beyond frustrating and disappointing.” Nichols expressed his criticism during a hearing at which he agreed to postpone a Jan. 6 riot defendant’s trial until after Trump’s return to the White House.

During a hearing last month, District Judge Amit Mehta said it would be “frightening” if Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is pardoned for orchestrating a violent plot to keep Trump in the White House after he lost the 2020 presidential election. Rhodes was serving an 18-year sentence when he was released from prison this week.

Box, who was featured in the HBO documentary “Four Hours at the Capitol,” was found guilty of charges including interfering with police during a civil disorder, a felony. The judge convicted Box last year after a “stipulated bench trial,” which meant she decided the case based on facts that both sides agreed to before the trial started.

Box was scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 21. More than 130 other convicted rioters were awaiting sentencing when Trump issued pardons.

John Banuelos, 39, of Illinois, was awaiting trial in a Washington jail when Chutkan dismissed charges that he climbed scaffolding outside the Capitol, pulled what appeared to be a gun from his waistband and fired two shots into the air.

“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor,” Chutkan wrote. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

Nearly 1,600 people were charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. More than 1,000 of them pleaded guilty. Approximately 250 others were convicted by a judge or jury after trials. Over 1,100 were sentenced, with more than 700 receiving a term of imprisonment ranging from several days to 22 years.

Over 130 police officers were injured during the riot. At least four officers who were at the Capitol later died by suicide. And Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.

Kollar-Kotelly said the heroism of officers who defended the Capitol “also cannot be altered or ignored.”

“Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building-our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world,” she wrote.

President Bill Clinton nominated Kollar-Kotelly, who has served on the bench since 1997. President Barack Obama nominated Chutkan, who has served on the same court since 2014.

Michael Kunzelman And Lisa Mascaro, The Associated Press