Outcome in Oath Keepers Trial Could Hold Lessons for Coming Jan. 6 Cases

Complicating issues even additional, a 3rd Oath Keepers trial is ready for February, although the eight defendants in that case haven’t been charged with sedition. This group counts amongst its ranks Mr. Meggs’s spouse, a middle-aged couple from Ohio and a former Broadway actor.

In between the 2 Oath Keepers trials is one other seditious conspiracy trial: that of 5 members of the far-right nationalist Proud Boys, which is ready to start on Dec. 19. As in Mr. Rhodes’s trial, the Proud Boys case will give attention to the group’s leaders — amongst them, Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, and a few of his prime lieutenants from Florida, Washington State and Pennsylvania.

Prosecutors are prone to base their case in opposition to the Proud Boys on lots of, if not 1000’s, of encrypted textual content messages that the federal government believes present how the group moved more and more towards utilizing violence to maintain Mr. Biden out of workplace within the weeks between the election and Jan. 6. They’re additionally prone to name some former Proud Boys as authorities witnesses, maybe together with two high-ranking members, Charles Donohoe and Jeremy Bertino, who pleaded responsible within the case.

However prosecutors plan to make use of a special — and novel — technique of their efforts to show the sedition expenses in opposition to the Proud Boys, suggesting that Mr. Rhodes’s trial will not be as a lot of a mannequin.

In convicting Mr. Rhodes, the federal government centered on the storehouse of weapons in Virginia, claiming that they fashioned the premise for the central ingredient of the sedition cost: that the Oath Keepers plotted to make use of power to cease the lawful switch of energy. Mr. Rhodes and most of his co-defendants didn’t commit any severe acts of violence themselves on Jan. 6, however the jury apparently discovered that the weapons stashed throughout the river offered a menace of power ample to convict.

Prosecutors on the Proud Boys trial intend to argue that Mr. Tarrio and his 4 co-defendants — Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola — instigated different members of the group and abnormal rioters to assault the police, resulting in a collection of consequential breaches of the Capitol’s safety.

“On Jan. 6, the defendants sought to harness the actions of others to attain their goal of forcibly opposing the lawful switch of presidential energy,” prosecutors wrote in latest court docket papers. “In so doing, the defendants used these people as ‘instruments.’”