US judge rescinds order barring Oath Keepers leader from Washington DC

A federal judge has rescinded an order barring Stewart Rhodes, the former leader of the far-right Oath Keepers group, and several other defendants charged in connection to the 6 January2021 attack on Congress, from entering Washington DC and the US Capitol without permission from a court.

On Monday, the US district judge Amit Mehta stated in an order that while the court is declining to dismiss the supervised release terms entirely – as the justice department had requested – the defendants are “no longer bound by the judicially imposed conditions of supervised release.

“It is not for this court to divine why President Trump commuted Defendants’ sentences, or to assess whether it was sensible to do so,” Mehta wrote. “The court’s sole task is to determine the act’s effect.”

Mehta noted that the unconditional nature of Donald Trump’s proclamation “can reasonably be read to extinguish enforcement of Defendants’ terms of supervised release”.

He added, “it would be improper for the court post-commutation to modify the original sentences” and that “by virtue of the President’s commutation order, the court acknowledges that its conditions of supervision will not be enforced”.

The order on Monday comes just three days after the same judge issued the initial order restricting Rhodes and the others from entering Washington DC without permission from the court.

After that order was issued on Friday, the US Department of Justice, through acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin, intervened on behalf of Rhodes and other members of the militia group and asked Mehta to vacate the ban and dismiss the terms of supervised release.

In 2023, Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in orchestrating the breach of the Capitol on January 6.

But last week, he, and the seven others in this order, were amongst the 1,500 individuals granted blanket pardons or commutations by Trump shortly after he was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.

Rhodes left prison last Tuesday and was later spotted on Capitol Hill.