The Oath Keepers sedition trial continues Friday with more witness testimony. The trial day will be short since presiding U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta has ordered all Friday trial days to end at 12:30 PM ET, a boon for jurors hearing hours of testimony while reviewing mountains of evidence in what is expected to be a trial that will stretch for another four to five weeks.
This week, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike delivered opening statements, and the Justice Department only just started to haul witnesses up for testimony before jurors. Laying out this case has been a massive undertaking for the department; the sedition charges brought against defendants Elmer Stewart Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson, Kelly Meggs, and Thomas Caldwell are the most serious in the whole of the Department of Justice’s probe of Jan. 6, 2021.
Sedition is rarely prosecuted and even when it is, it is not often prosecuted successfully by the federal government. Proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a challenge generally speaking, but with the double-edged sword of the First Amendment, the line between free speech and seditious speech is thin.
Nonetheless, the evidence trotted out by the Justice Department in this first official week of the trial has raised a high bar for Oath Keepers to overcome, and jurors have only heard from a few of the 40-some witnesses expected to appear.
To catch up on what you may have missed, check out the Daily Kos breakdown from each trial day here, here, and here.
RELATED STORY: Sedition trial Day 3 witness: Oath Keeper leader told me he was in touch with Secret Service
We will be underway shortly. Jurors are walking into the courtroom now.
Proceedings are off to a running start with the first witness called by prosecutors.
We jump right in with our first witness today. The DOJ calls US Capitol Police Special Agent Ryan McCanley.
USCP Special Agent McCanley was near the Capitol on Dec. 12, 2020. He is reviewing a map of DC with AUSA Jeffrey Nestler and points to the intersection where he was: 1st and Maryland AVE NE, just near SCOTUS. He was just monitoring the crowd and noticed a cameraman.
The cameraman "kind of looked like press," McCanley said. The cameraman looked interested in the group, so that piqued his interest too. When he looked, what did he see? A man with a cowboy hat, wearing an eyepatch. It was Stewart Rhodes.
Jurors see a video clip of a speech that Rhodes delivered in DC on December 12, 2020.
Rhodes’s remarks were a mish-mash of pleas that directly addressed Trump as well as members of the crowd rallied before him.
DC was inundated that day with thousands of pro-Trump rallygoers, most of them Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The Million MAGA march held just a month earlier on Nov. 14 had a far less successful turnout. The Dec. 12 rally ended with bloodshed after at least four people were stabbed.
Agent McCanley testifies that Rhodes wore a badge on Dec. 12, 2020 that would permit him entry into the Capitol.
Records show that the badge was first issued to Rhodes in June 1998 by US Rep Ron Paul when Rhodes was a legislative aide for Paul. It had long expired by 12/12/20.
A swing and a miss:
FBI Special Agent Byron Cody is now on the stand after testimony from USCP Agent McCanley lasted just a few minutes.
Cody is testifying about tips he received, statements and messages he reviewed off Rhodes’s seized cell phone.
I think I have the wrong spelling on the USCP Agent - it is not "McCanley" but McCamley. Apologies.
More texts from Rhodes to members of the Oath Keeper leadership chat are reviewed in court by FBI Agent Byron Cody:
