Oath Keepers' founder Rhodes fires lawyers, seeks delay in Capitol riot trial
Source: Yahoo! News
Collin County Sheriff's Office via AP
The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers fired his attorneys on Tuesday, just a few weeks before he’s slated to go on trial for seditious conspiracy over his group’s alleged involvement in the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In a 20-page filing, Stewart Rhodes complained that his previous attorneys, Phil Linder and Lee Bright, had not mounted an aggressive enough defense and had left him without complete access to the evidence Rhodes intends to present at trial. Rhodes also previewed new elements of the defense he hopes to lay out, and has asked for a delay in the scheduled Sept. 26 trial date.
Asked for comment, Bright indicated he would await a response from the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which is overseeing the various cases related to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, declined to comment on Rhodes’ request for a delay. The request is the latest twist in the most complex and significant criminal case to emerge from the attack on the Capitol. More than 300 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial, with an increasing number of felony defendants facing conviction and sentencing. But Rhodes’ case is perhaps the most complicated of all.
Prosecutors have portrayed him as the ringleader of a sprawling conspiracy to prevent the transition of power to Joe Biden, encouraging Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to seize voting machines and to deputize the Oath Keepers as a state-sanctioned force to help him remain in power. The indictment of Rhodes and eight others facing seditious conspiracy charges indicated that the group amassed heavy weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Va. but never deployed them. Prosecutors also have expressed interest in a Jan. 5 meeting between Rhodes and Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio in a Washington, D.C. parking garage.
Rhodes contends that his arrest — in January 2022 — has left him with a year less to prepare for trial than many of his codefendants who were arrested and charged within weeks of the attack on the Capitol. “Rhodes’ case has been fast-tracked onto a faster schedule than any other Jan. 6 case,” wrote Ed Tarpley, a Louisiana-based defense attorney who signed onto the docket in the case Tuesday afternoon. “Rhodes faces a multi-count, multi-codefendant trial in the most complex case of all Jan. 6 cases, in which prosecutors have openly said they seek life imprisonment for Rhodes. Even the misdemeanor Jan. 6 defendants have been allowed more time to prepare for trial. Every single one of them.”
Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/news/oath-keepers-founder-rhodes-fires-212608145.html
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I did Nazi that coming.
that "Special Master" demand might be next with a new set of lawyers! 