With pardons for Jan. 6 rioters by President-elect Donald Trump potentially just days away, former counsel and onetime stand-in president to the far-right Oath Keepers Kellye SoRelle was sentenced on Friday.
SoRelle pleaded guilty to obstructing justice and telling members of the extremist group to delete texts after Jan. 6, 2021. Though prosecutors had sought a 16-month sentence, presiding U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced her to 12 months in prison plus 36 months of supervised release. SoRelle was ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution and complete 120 hours of community service.
SoRelle’s public defender had filed a heavily redacted motion to delay the hearing just days earlier and asked the judge to wait until at least March to render the sentence, but Mehta was unwilling to delay any longer.
SoRelle was first arrested in September 2022 and indicted alongside fellow Oath Keeper Donovan Crowl, a former Marine, and James Beeks, a former Broadway actor who marched with Oath Keepers on Jan. 6.
Crowl, a member of the Ohio State Regular Militia, marched up the Capitol steps behind Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins and others on Jan. 6. Crowl was found guilty at a bench trial in July 2023 of conspiracy to obstruct an official congressional proceeding and impeding officers.
Beeks was acquitted of the conspiracy charge after all others were dropped. (Beeks denied ever being a formal member of the Oath Keepers and told prosecutors that while he might have associated with them, it was only because he had been misled by the group.)
SoRelle, meanwhile, faced similar charges, including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and obstructing justice for the tampering of evidence.
When she was first indicted, she pleaded not guilty to everything. That changed several months later when she struck a deal with federal prosecutors.
According to the Justice Department, SoRelle assumed leadership of the Oath Keepers once the group’s founder Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes — who doubled as her boss and, for a time, boyfriend — was arrested on seditious conspiracy charges.
The newfound role was a natural fit, prosecutors argued, because SoRelle had already spent more than a year peddling pro-Trump conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. She was intimately close to Rhodes and trusted by him, U.S. attorneys said.
But after all hell broke loose on Jan. 6, prosecutors said SoRelle acted as Rhodes’ conduit, using her cell phone to share his messages with the group surreptitiously. In those messages, she told members of the Oath Keepers to delete their text chains or other communications that could be used against them in court later.
SoRelle and Rhodes had fled Washington, D.C., together by car after Jan. 6, traveling back to Texas as Rhodes weighed how the Oath Keepers could regroup and amass more weapons if needed for another uprising once Biden was formally inaugurated.
When Rhodes took the stand in his own seditious conspiracy case, he testified under oath that it was SoRelle who had instructed him — not the other way around — to nuke chats and texts that discussed what Oath Keepers were up to before, during and after Jan. 6.
That allegation was met with deep skepticism by Judge Mehta: He told Rhodes the claim didn’t “pass the laugh test.”
One of the texts found on SoRelle’s phone, for example, showed her telling Oath Keepers after Jan. 6: “Per SR, clean up all your chats.”
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