Judge Lifts Travel Curbs on Jan. 6 Convicts After DOJ Protest

(Bloomberg) -- A judge has lifted an order that barred Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers extremist group, and several of his former associates from traveling to Washington after the US Justice Department intervened on their behalf.

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The order on Monday from US District Judge Amit Mehta means that Rhodes and seven of his co-defendants found guilty of felony crimes in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are free to visit Washington and the Capitol complex.

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The Oath Keepers defendants were among 14 people whose sentences were commuted by Trump on his first day in office. Under Trump’s mass clemency action, the rest of the more than 1,500 people charged in the Capitol assault received full pardons if they’d already been convicted or had pending cases dropped.

Mehta explained in Monday’s order that there was uncertainty after Trump signed the Jan. 20 clemency order if the sentence commutations applied solely to the prison time or also to periods of supervised release. He wrote that he imposed the stay-away order because that had become standard practice in Jan. 6 cases as a condition of release.

Washington’s interim US Attorney Ed Martin had asked Mehta to undo the travel restriction, arguing that Trump’s commutations covered the entirety of sentences. Mehta wrote that was a “reasonable” interpretation because Trump’s order was “unconditional.”

“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. Some of his colleagues have denounced the mass clemency in written orders dismissing other Jan. 6 cases.

Lawyers for Rhodes and a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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