Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia who was recently released from prison by President Trump, is free to enter Washington after a federal judge on Monday rescinded his own order from last week barring him from the city without permission.
The decision by the judge, Amit P. Mehta, to reverse himself was a minor development in the case of Mr. Rhodes who, until Mr. Trump granted him clemency on Inauguration Day, was serving an 18-year sentence on seditious conspiracy charges arising his role in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the move had a larger significance for the way it threw a spotlight on the actions of Ed Martin, President Trump’s new U.S. attorney in Washington, who came to Mr. Rhodes’ aid last week by arguing that Judge Mehta had overreached by issuing the travel order in the first place.
On Friday, Mr. Martin inserted himself into the case, in effect assuming the role of the far-right leader’s defense lawyer by asserting that Judge Mehta had no authority to control Mr. Rhodes’ movements after Mr. Trump commuted his prison term to time served.
In an order issued on Monday, Judge Mehta more or less agreed, conceding that the “unconditional” nature of Mr. Trump’s clemency proclamation — which covered all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack — meant that he could not impose restrictions on Mr. Rhodes’s movements now that he is out of custody.
Mr. Martin’s decision to go to bat for Mr. Rhodes was unusual for a number of reasons.
First, it was a stunning reversal for the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington, which has overseen all of the Jan. 6 criminal cases and secured the convictions of Mr. Rhodes and other members of the Oath Keepers in late 2022.
Moreover, Mr. Martin signed the court papers opposing Judge Mehta’s travel restrictions on Mr. Rhodes personally, an unusual move for a U.S. attorney who generally have subordinates file legal briefs.
Mr. Martin has also assigned two of his subordinates to undertake an internal investigation into the office’s use of an obstruction charge that was filed against many Jan. 6 defendants, according to an officewide email written by Mr. Martin that was obtained by The New York Times. The office stopped using the charge after the Supreme Court ruled last year that prosecutors had overstepped by employing it.
In the email, Mr. Martin described the use of the obstruction law as a “great failure of our office,” adding, “and we need to get to the bottom of it.”
He directed all prosecutors working under him to provide all “files, documents, notes, emails and other information” about their use of the law as part of what he called this “special project.” The obstruction count — known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512 — was brought against more than 250 defendants and accused them of interfering with the proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6 where Mr. Trump’s loss in the election was certified.
Mr. Martin said he expected a preliminary report about the use of the statute by Friday, but it remained unclear what he intends to do with the findings.
Judge Mehta ordered Mr. Rhodes and several other members of the Oath Keepers to stay away from Washington unless they had his permission after Mr. Rhodes turned up in the city after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. During that trip, he visited a Dunkin’ on Capitol Hill and the local jail where many Jan. 6 defendants had been held.
Over the weekend, Mr. Rhodes also attended a Trump event in Las Vegas, sitting in an area behind the president with another notorious far-right figure: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who led an armed standoff against federal land management officials in 2014.
Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers took part in that standoff, which ended when the Bureau of Land Management ended its attempts to seize the Bundy family’s cattle in an effort to solve a dispute over the Bundys’ refusal to pay grazing fees to the federal government.
