A federal judge rescinded an order barring Stewart Rhodes, former leader of the far-right Oath Keepers group, and several other defendants charged in connection to the January 6, 2021, attack on Congress, from entering Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Capitol without permission from a court, the Guardian reports. On Monday, Judge Amit Mehta said that while he was declining to dismiss the supervised release terms entirely – as the Justice Department requested – the defendants were “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 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."
After Mehta's initial order was issued on Friday, the Department of Justice, 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. Last week, he, and the seven others in this order, were among the 1,500 individuals granted blanket pardons or commutations by Trump shortly after he was inaugurated. Rhodes left prison last Tuesday and was later spotted on Capitol Hill.
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