‘Deranged leadership’: Oath Keeper who entered Capitol on J6 turns on…

Source: Politico | June 1, 2023 | Kyle Cheney

‘Deranged leadership’: Oath Keeper who entered Capitol on Jan. 6 turns on Stewart Rhodes

Roberto Minuta, the third Jan. 6 defendant to be sentenced for seditious conspiracy, got 4.5 years in prison.

Roberto Minuta, one of more than a dozen Oath Keepers who surged with a mob into the Capitol on Jan. 6, lashed out at the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, on Thursday as he prepared to face sentencing for his conviction on seditious conspiracy.

Minuta said Rhodes was part of a “deranged leadership” that turned the Oath Keepers “into a political ‘rah-rah Trump’ disaster” that duped many of the group’s members into criminal activity.

“I was misled and naive,” Minuta said, shortly before U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta sentenced him to 4½ years in prison.

Mehta credited Minuta’s comments and expressions of remorse for his actions but said his efforts to downplay his actions and involvement were belied by his clear violent intentions in the weeks preceding Jan. 6.

“Steeping yourself and cloaking yourself in this tradition of the founders and violent uprising and believing that the Second Amendment allows individual citizens to gather up arms to battle their government?” Mehta said. “The law doesn’t permit that.”

Minuta is the third Jan. 6 defendant sentenced for seditious conspiracy, the gravest charge leveled by prosecutors against about a dozen defendants charged for their role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Mehta sentenced Rhodes last week to 18 years in prison, the longest sentence handed down yet in the 1,000 cases prosecuted stemming from the violent Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. Mehta also sentenced Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs to 12 years in prison last week. Their sentencings are the start of the most significant reckoning for the Jan. 6 rioters whom prosecutors have described as the key drivers of the violence and chaos.

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