jessica watkins crowl

meggs had explosives /grenades in RV1?

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OMFG

Justice Department moves to toss seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to throw out the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who were sentenced to prison terms for leading members of the far-right extremist groups in attacking the U.S. Capitol to keep President Donald Trump in office over five years ago.

Trump commuted the prison sentences of several Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders last January in a sweeping act of clemency for all 1,500-plus defendants charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

The request by the Justice Department would go a step further and erase all the convictions for extremist group leaders, including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who didn’t receive pardons last January.

The move to abandon the convictions represented a stunning reversal from the Biden administration, which hailed the guilty verdicts as a crucial victory in its bid to hold accountable those responsible for what prosecutors described as an attack on the heart of American democracy. It’s part of the Trump administration’s continued efforts to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack and downplay the violence carried out by the mob of Trump supporters that left more than 100 police officers injured.

AP correspondent Ben Thomas reports the Justice Department is seeking the dismissal of seditious conspiracy convictions over the Capitol Riot.

In court filings, prosecutors asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to vacate the convictions so that the government can permanently dismiss the indictments.

Man charged with planting pipe bombs before the Jan. 6 riot argues Trump's mass pardons apply to him

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“The government’s motion to vacate in this case is consistent with its practice of moving the Supreme Court to vacate convictions in cases where the government has decided in its prosecutorial discretion that dismissal of a criminal case is in the interests of justice — motions that the Supreme Court routinely grants,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing signed by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

Juries in Washington, D.C., convicted the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders of orchestrating violent plots to stop the peaceful transfer of power after Trump’s 2020 election loss to Democratic President Joe Biden.

The department’s dismissal request also includes the convictions of Oath Keepers members Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson and Jessica Watkins and Proud Boys members Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.

Other extremist group members, including former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio, received pardons from Trump on the first day of his second term in the White House.

Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison after he and several lieutenants were convicted in one of the most consequential cases arising from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Prosecutors said Rhodes and his followers stockpiled guns for possible use by “quick reaction force” teams at a Virginia hotel, but they never deployed the weapons.

Nordean’s attorney, Nicholas Smith, said they are grateful to the Justice Department for its “wise decision” in seeking dismissal of the convictions.

“We don’t want a precedent that says that any physical confrontation between protesters and law enforcement means a crime akin to treason, such as seditious conspiracy,” Smith said.

Former Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who was dragged into the mob and suffered a heart attack after a rioter shocked him with a stun gun, was disappointed but not surprised by the latest milestone in the dismantling of Capitol riot prosecutions.

“I would remind Americans that these were traitors to this country,” Fanone said. “They planned, incited and carried out an insurrection.”

ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

Richer covers the Justice Department and federal courts. She joined The AP in 2013 and is based in Washington.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/oath-keeper/ct outburst

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/two-january-6th-defendants-and-the-consolidation-of-right-wing-extremism

in March, Guy Reffitt, a supporter of the far-right militia group the Texas Three Percenters, became the first person convicted at trial for playing a role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After three hours of deliberations, a federal jury found Reffitt guilty on all five counts, including entering a restricted area with a firearm and obstructing an official proceeding. After the verdict, Reffitt returned to the section of the District of Columbia jail where, for more than a year, the mostly white rioters have been held separately from the jail’s mostly Black and brown general population. The January 6th defendants call it the “patriot wing.” Each night, they sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” together.

Reffitt resumed his jailhouse pastime, playing Magic: The Gathering—a card game that involves wizards, spells, and strategy—with Jessica Watkins, a bartender and militia leader from rural Ohio who is awaiting trial on seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and four other charges. Watkins has pleaded not guilty. Of the more than eight hundred people charged with participating in the insurrection at the Capitol, Reffitt and Watkins have been accused of some of the most significant crimes.

Since meeting in jail, they have become close friends. With other defendants, they helped start the tradition of singing the national anthem, Watkins said. She taught Reffitt how to play Magic using copies of cards that her fiancé had sent her. In a message sent on a jail-approved e-mail system, Watkins called the game “cardboard crack,” because it’s so addictive. “I tear the pictures in half neatly to make two magic cards, and I’ve taught my fellow inmates to play,” she wrote. Reffitt, in a message of his own, said that he loves Magic as well. “It’s a very intellectual game and keeping focus can be strained in this environment,” Reffitt wrote. “We tune out the loud noises when we can, the noise level is very stressing.”

Reffitt and Watkins are unlikely friends. He is a forty-nine-year-old father of three, and has worked as an oil-rig manager in Asia and the Middle East. His wife, Nicole, describes him as “arrogant” and an “alpha male.” Watkins’s life has been much less settled. Nearly a decade younger than Reffitt and designated male at birth, Watkins began living as a woman after serving in the Army from 2001 to 2003, including a tour in Afghanistan. In e-mail exchanges that involved hundreds of messages, each of them described their lives before January 6th, and their views of the attack on the Capitol. They expressed certainty that law-enforcement officials had staged the attack, entrapping them and hundreds of other protesters. Watkins called January 6th “a setup.” The correspondence revealed an intense bond underpinned by wild conspiracy theories and a deep-rooted sense of grievance. Reffitt said, “Jess is my friend and probably always will be.”

Stephen Brennwald, an attorney for a different January 6th defendant, said in a court hearing last fall that the atmosphere in the jail was so intense that his client, Thomas Sibick, feared retaliation if he didn’t participate in the nightly singing of the national anthem. During an evening phone call, Sibick, who has been charged with assaulting a Capitol Police officer and has pleaded not guilty, told Brennwald that he needed to put down the phone and go sing the anthem with other January 6th defendants. “They’ll be angry if I don’t go over there,” Sibick said, according to Brennwald. In the hearing, Brennwald said that the political views of defendants in the so-called patriot wing were growing increasingly extreme. The unit is “radicalizing the people who are there,” Brennwald said. “It’s, like, this herd mentality. . . . It was almost cultlike.” (A jail official said in a court filing that the group is housed separately from the general population “for their own safety and security.”)

John Cohen, who served as the acting chief of intelligence for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President Biden until this April, said in an interview that the bond Reffitt and Watkins have formed is emblematic of a consolidation of right-wing extremism that has taken place since January 6th. “One of the things that make the current threat environment complicated for law enforcement and intelligence is the blending that occurs,” Cohen said. “People who may have come from very different ideological backgrounds or somewhat different ideological backgrounds are coalescing around certain things.” In the seventeen months since the insurrection, Cohen said, a unit of some nine hundred analysts had picked up on a number of disturbing patterns. “Anti-government militia, hard-core white supremacists, and even people more from the anarchist movement have come together,” he said. Their goals are explicit: “assassination of elected officials, and violent activities to resist government activities, or programs.”

The ideological hardening was predictable, and predicted, after the attack on the Capitol, according to Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the D.H.S.’s Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention during the Trump Administration. “On January 6th, we had neo-Nazis hanging out with a bunch of otherwise just MAGA people,” Neumann said, in an interview. “That’s an opportunity to recruit.”

Some groups involved in the insurrection have increased in size, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks domestic extremist groups. The Proud Boys, whose members prosecutors said were key conspirators on January 6th, have grown from forty-three chapters in 2020 to seventy-two in 2022. Their over-all membership appears to have risen as well, despite multiple investigations, indictments, and the arrest of the Proud Boy leader, Enrique Tarrio. Susan Corke, the center’s director of intelligence, said that far-right members of the Republican Party are normalizing anti-government conspiracy theories and talk of political violence. “People like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert—what was extreme is now acceptable for people in elected office,” Corke said. Greene and Congressman Louie Gohmert have visited the D.C. jail where Watkins and Reffitt are being held. Greene has compared the conditions there to a “prisoner of war” camp. Gosar, Boebert, and Gohmert did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Greene said that she “has denounced political violence repeatedly.”

Watkins and Reffitt followed different paths to January 6th. Watkins, who was raised in Ohio and upstate New York, enlisted in the Army after graduating from high school in the spring of 2001. She completed Ranger training before serving in Afghanistan. After leaving the military, in 2003, she changed her name to Jessica Watkins. In a 2005 interview with the Rochester City Newspaper, an alternative weekly, Watkins said that she had always felt more like a girl than a boy while growing up, a feeling that continued into adulthood. “I graduated from basic training and I still wanted to be a girl. I thought, ‘What the heck is wrong with me? Maybe when I graduate Airborne school I’ll be tougher.’ Same thing.” After Ranger training, Watkins felt the same. “I still wanted to be a girl.” After a close friend died in combat, Watkins said that she placed a gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. “The bullet was struck by the firing pin,” Watkins told the newspaper. “It was just a dead bullet. It’s uncommon.”

By 2019, Watkins’s life had stabilized. She was thirty-six and running a pirate-themed bar, the Jolly Roger, with her fiancé, in Woodstock, a village of three hundred about forty miles northeast of Columbus. That year, she founded her own group, the Ohio State Regular Militia, to do aid work after tornadoes left tens of thousands of residents without power. Business slowed as COVID spread, in 2020. After the killing of George Floyd that spring, Watkins and members of her militia, armed and in uniform, served as self-appointed security guards during racial-justice protests in Ohio and Kentucky. On November 7, 2020, the day that Biden was declared the winner of the Presidential election, Watkins and two other members of her militia appeared outside the state capitol in Columbus. Armed and in uniform again, they positioned themselves between two opposing groups of protesters on the front lawn of the building; a passerby could easily have mistaken them for members of the National Guard.

Ten days later, prosecutors say, Watkins sent a text message to one of her recruits. “Our way of life as we know it is over. . . . It is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights,” Watkins wrote. “If Biden get [sic] the steal, none of us have a chance in my mind. We already have our neck in the noose.” In other text messages, she urged potential new militia recruits to attend a basic training that she said a Marine drill sergeant would lead. “I need you fighting fit by innaugeration [sic].” According to prosecutors, Watkins was also in contact with members of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing group that includes many current and former members of the military and law enforcement. She joined an online meeting with the Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, and others.

In the first days of the new year, according to prosecutors, Watkins was one of a number of Oath Keepers who coördinated the transport of weapons and ammunition to sites outside Washington, to be used by “quick reaction force” teams in support of a plot to block Biden from taking office. On January 6th, federal prosecutors say, Watkins and about a dozen others, all wearing camouflage and tactical gear, approached the Capitol on foot. “Y’all, we’re one block away from the Capitol now,” Watkins said, in a walkie-talkie-style conversation recorded that day. “I’m probably gonna go silent when I get there, because I’m gonna be a little busy.”

At 2:35 p.m., Watkins and others dressed in camouflage moved in a “stack” formation up the east steps of the Capitol, passing through the mob to enter the building. They roamed the halls for about an hour. At one point, Watkins urged a group of rioters to breach a line of police guarding the Senate chamber. “Push, push, push,” she said, according to an indictment. “They can’t hold us.” Others from Watkins’s stack peeled off to look for Nancy Pelosi. After leaving the building, Watkins returned to Ohio and boasted about her experience on Parler, a social-media app popular with conservatives. “So these were the fuckweed cops killing Patriots, and assaulting us when we WERE peaceful,” Watkins wrote. “Our election was stolen, an offense that cannot and should not go unchallenged. Extreme times call for extreme measures.” Eleven days later, her neighbors were awakened by flash-bang grenades. F.B.I. agents had come to arrest Watkins. She wasn’t home, but she turned herself in the following day.

Watkins, second from left, marched down the front steps of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.Photograph by Jim Bourg / Reuters / Alamy

Until Donald Trump announced his run for President, in 2015, Guy Reffitt showed little interest in politics. He devoured Trump’s books, including “The Art of the Deal,” according to his wife, Nicole. “Guy was head over, I mean, from the minute when Trump started talking,” she said, in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near their home in a suburb of Dallas. Reffitt’s work history in the oil industry followed an arc of success, followed by disappointment. He started out as a blue-collar roughneck, performing manual labor on rigs, and worked his way up to serving as a high-paid rig manager employed around the world. He proudly recalled working in Saudi Arabia, the U.K., the Netherlands, Thailand, China, and a half-dozen other nations. “I have always loved to see other places on this small planet. Everyone should be so adventurous,” he wrote in a message. “I have filled two complete Passports with Visa’s [sic] and stamps. I have been traveling since 2008.”

When Trump secured the Republican nomination, Nicole said, the family was living comfortably in Penang, Malaysia, on Reffitt’s annual income of more than two hundred thousand dollars. Their three children, two girls and a boy, attended private school. The Reffitts lived in a condominium with an ocean view, and travelled around Asia and Europe. Their prosperity ended after the price of oil collapsed, in 2016. Reffitt lost his job, and his family initially lived off savings. Soon, they returned to Texas broke. “We had no money, like, literally, and Guy didn’t let me know how bad that was,” Nicole said. Eventually, Reffitt found work installing sunrooms.

In the summer of 2020, as Trump vilified racial-justice protesters as “terrorists,” Reffitt began spending time with members of the Three Percenters, a militia group founded on the unproven claim that just three per cent of American colonists took up arms against the British. He began showing up at protests and acting as a self-appointed security guard, protecting private property. The Reffitts hosted a mixer for the local branch of the militia at their home, with brisket, potato salad, and beer. “Guy was excited,” Nicole recalled. “COVID really had people in a bad place, and that, I’m sure, goes across the board. And he needed an outlet, and he found it there.”

U.S. Homeland Security officials were concerned about this type of dynamic, according to Neumann, the former D.H.S. official in the Trump Administration. As the pandemic intensified, she warned that the loss of jobs and the social isolation that occurred during the pandemic could lead to radicalization. “When you take a stressor like this, and the entire nation of the United States experiences it, your pool just expanded massively, your denominator got huge,” Neumann said. She tried to get her superiors to address the issue, but her request went nowhere.

On January 6th, Reffitt arrived at the Capitol along with thousands of other Trump supporters. Dressed in a helmet and a tactical vest, he carried a .40-calibre Smith & Wesson pistol, zip ties, and a helmet-mounted video camera. At Trump’s Stop the Steal rally, the device recorded Reffitt boasting about wanting to assault members of Congress. “We’re all gonna drag them motherfuckers out kicking and screaming,” he said. “I don’t give a shit. I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every fucking stair on the way out. Fuck yeah. And Mitch McConnell, too. Fuck ’em all.”

A snippet of police radio played at his trial captured one officer’s horror as she watched Reffitt advance ahead of other members of the crowd. “We have an individual breaching the west terrace up the stairs,” she shouted. “We need backup!” Two officers quickly arrived, and, after Reffitt refused to turn back, they fired impact projectiles, pepper balls, and finally pepper spray to stop him. As Reffitt washed out his eyes with bottled water, rioters streamed up the steps and into the Capitol. He chose not to enter the building, and left for Texas the following day.

While Reffitt was in Washington, his eighteen-year-old son, Jackson, had been trying to warn the F.B.I. about his father. Two weeks before the assault on the Capitol, Jackson sent an online tip to the Bureau that his father seemed to be planning “something big.” On the afternoon of January 6th, he got a call back from an F.B.I. agent. “Your timing is impeccable,” Jackson recalled telling the agent, who did not laugh.

After Reffitt returned to Texas, Jackson secretly recorded his father boasting of his exploits in Washington, and shared the recording with an agent. He also described a heated conversation in which Reffitt warned Jackson and his sixteen-year-old sister not to turn him over to law-enforcement officials. “Traitors get shot,” Reffitt told his children. A few days later, the F.B.I. arrested Reffitt in an early-morning raid. At Reffitt’s trial in March, Jackson testified against his father and helped prosecutors convict him of obstruction of justice. Nicole, though, was defiant after the verdict. She said that her husband had been victimized and urged other January 6th defendants to reject plea bargains. “They are making a point out of Guy. And that is to intimidate the other members of the ‘one-sixers.’ And we will all fight together.”

Reffitt became the first person convicted at trial for his role in the Capitol riot.Illustration by Dana Verkourteren / San Francisco Chronicle / AP

Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen. At a rally in Texas in January, he declared the prosecutions of the January 6th rioters “a disgrace.” He said, “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly. We will treat them fairly. And, if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” Last month, in Wyoming, Trump called the detainees “political prisoners.” Polls show that the proportion of Americans who believe that violent attacks against the government can be justified is rising. A January Washington Post survey found that one in three respondents supported such acts, twice the level in 2010. The D.H.S.’s National Terrorism Advisory System is now issuing warnings at the fastest rate since it was created, in 2011. In February, D.H.S. issued its sixth warning in a little more than a year to local law-enforcement officials: “Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation.”

Law-enforcement officials say that they have learned from the January 6th riot and become more adept at responding to potential threats. They point to a rally last September, outside the Capitol, that was organized by supporters of the January 6th defendants. Law-enforcement officials were alarmed when they spotted calls online for protesters to storm the building once again, kidnap members of Congress, and put them on trial. The agency expanded its intelligence gathering and worked closely with the F.B.I. and local law-enforcement agencies to make plans to contain protesters if extreme rhetoric sparked violence. Most important, they publicly announced their extensive preparations. Extremists took note, messaging one another not to go to Washington, and dismissed the protest as a “trap by the Feds.” The rally fizzled. The actions that D.H.S. took read like a checklist of the steps that the agency had failed to perform prior to January 6th.

But Cohen, the former acting head of intelligence at D.H.S., is in no way reassured. A white supremacist’s mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store in May, which claimed the lives of ten Black people, demonstrated law enforcement’s inability to contain the threat. “In my thirty-eight-plus years of law enforcement, this is the most complex threat environment I’ve ever seen,” Cohen said. “We have unacceptable levels of violence by people who are influenced and inspired by content they see online.” Cohen, who is now the executive director of the Program for Countering Hybrid Threats at the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit, added, “I am really fucking concerned about where we are.”

Neumann, the former D.H.S. Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, has an additional fear: a second Trump Administration. The former President’s return to the Oval Office would signal to white supremacists and other right-wing groups that they have “an ally in government,” Neumann said. “I think you would see mass resignations, not just at D.H.S. but across the government.” Neumann and other former Trump Administration officials said that Trump and his allies were initially slowed by their lack of experience in running large government agencies. “But toward the end they were figuring it out,” Neumann said. “And it concerns me that the damage they could do would far exceed what they did in their four years in power. Exponentially worse—because he has no constraints at that point.”

In spring, Watkins and Reffitt played their last game of Magic together. Watkins was moved from the patriot wing to a women’s unit in the District of Columbia jail at her own request. She and other trans women in the jail had supported a class-action lawsuit, filed by the local A.C.L.U. chapter and public defenders, demanding that trans people be housed according to their gender identity. District officials eventually settled the suit, but Watkins’s cause drew little attention or backing among January 6th defendants and their supporters. A fund-raising page set up by Watkins’s fiancé attracted fewer donations than the pages of other Capitol attack defendants.

Reffitt’s wife, Nicole, believes that Watkins is being discriminated against by both the right and the left. “Because of her situation, people feel like she doesn’t deserve the same support,” Nicole said. “I feel like there is some hypocrisy, though, to it, because I feel like if she was more left she would have more attention, and because she’s conservative there she sits.” As Watkins was escorted out of the patriot wing, the other inmates sang “an honorary ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” Guy Reffitt wrote, “I’m happy for her to be free of the male dialogue.”

Reffitt, who is scheduled to be sentenced later this month, is unrepentant. He remains convinced that law-enforcement officials staged the riot and entrapped him and other protesters. Shortly after he was convicted, Reffitt wrote that the riot was caused not by Trump supporters but by “a very concerted operation of out [of] control police officers.” He said he has requested their body-cam video and is planning an appeal.

In Watkins’s framing, what happened on January 6th was the fault of an election system that she feels can no longer be trusted. “I believe every election should be automatically contested and audited by both political parties independent of each other,” she wrote. “Then the results brought before the American people in an open forum and open source for review by anyone.” What Watkins is proposing would remove a cornerstone of American democracy—both sides, win or lose, agreeing to accept the results provided by state and local election officials, and peacefully transferring power.

For Cohen, the former D.H.S. intelligence official, the deliberate spread of false election-fraud claims is a recipe for continued polarization and violence. “I’ve seen intelligence calling on people to go self-deploy as poll watchers, to take actions to determine whether people should be legitimately voting,” he said. “We can anticipate as we get closer to the midterms that polarization will increase.” He added, “The more that’s out there, the higher the likelihood that someone will consume that disinformation and act in response to it.”

Alice Wilder contributed reporting.

More on the January 6th Attack

When the Capitol was breached, a New Yorker reporter became the sole journalist in the Senate chamber to witness its desecration.
Inside the chamber, Luke Mogelson captured raw, visceral footage of the siege.
Should Americans refer to the Sixth of January as a protest, an act of treason, or something else?
What the January 6th papers reveal.
How a mother of eight became one of the riot’s biggest mysteries, and a fugitive from the F.B.I.
The violence was what Donald Trump wanted.
If America is to remain a democracy, Trump must be held accountable.

Andrea Bernstein is a co-host of the podcast “Will Be Wild” and the author of “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.”

Ilya Marritz is a co-host of the podcast “Will Be Wild.”

https://americangulag.org/jessica-watkins/

jessica Watkins is part of the Oathkeepers organization. She played a role in the social media pages for the group, posting images of other members at the event. Though her actions and behavior were non-violent, Watkins and company did “storm” the Capitol on Jan 6th.

Please keep in mind that in the United States, every citizen charged with a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

First Name(s): Jessica
Last Name(s): Watkins
Case Number: 1:21-cr-28
Arrest Location: Dayton, OH
Judge: Zia M. Faruqui
Entry Last Updated: 06/08/2022
Date Docket Downloaded: 10/30/2021
Currently Incarcerated: Yes
**Support Jessica Watkins:** Click here to help cover Jessica's legal and living expenses

Charges

Conspiracy (1) Obstruction of an Official Proceeding and Aiding and Abetting (2) Destruction of Government Property and Aiding and Abetting; Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds (3) Tampering with Documents or Proceedings (4)

Case Status

Arrested 1/18/21. Indicted 1/21/21 and initial appearance held 2/12/21 where she pleaded not guilty to all counts. Remains in custody.

Interested Party's Lawyer

Charles Tobin

Interested Party's Lawyer

Lauren Russell

Interested Party's Lawyer

Maxwell Mishkin

USA Attorney

Ahmet Baset

Ahmet Muhkatir Baset US ATTORNEY'S OFFICE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 555 4TH STREET, N.W., Room 4209 Washington, D.C. 20530 202 252 7097-ahmed.baset@usdoj.gov-LEAD ATTORNEY-ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED Designation: US Assistant Attorney

USA Attorney

Alexandra Hughes

Alexandra Stalimene Hughes DOJ-nsd 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20004-202 353 0023-Alexandra.Hughes@usdoj.gov LEAD ATTORNEY-ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED-Designation: Assistant U.S. Attorney-

USA Attorney

Jeffrey S Nestler

Jeffrey S. Nestler US ATTORNEY'S OFFICE 555 FOURTH ST, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20530 202-252-7277-jeffrey.nestler@usdoj.gov LEAD ATTORNEY, ATTORNEY TO BE NOTCED: Designation: US Assistant Attorney

USA Attorney

Justin Todd Sher

Justin Todd Sher US DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE 950 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20530 202 353 3909-justin.sher@usdoj.gov LEAD ATTORNEY, ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED, Designation: US Assistant Attorney

USA Attorney

Kathryn Leigh Rakoczy

Kathryn Leigh Rakoczy US ATTORNEY'S OFFICE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA555 Fourth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20530, kathryn.rakoczy@usdoj.gov, LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED, Designation: US Assistant Attorney

USA Attorney

Troy Edwards, Jr.

Troy A. Edwards, Jr. US ATTORNEY'S OFFICE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 555 Fourth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20530, troy.edwards@usdoj.gov LEAD ATTORNEY, ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED, Designation: US Assistant Attorney

USA Attorney

Louis Manzo

Louis J. Manzo DOJ-CRM- 1400 New York Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20002 202 616 2706, louis.manzo@usdoj.gov, LEAD ATTORNEY, ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED. Designation: US Assistant Attorney

Prison Name

Jessica Watkins Inmate #376520 Correctional Treatment Facility-DC CTF 1901 D Street, SE Washington, DC 20003

Please note: Prisoner mail is reviewed by guards. Please keep messages of encouragement to a general and/or religious nature. For example, do not mention the events of Jan. 6th or other current events under criminal investigation.

Information on Writing/Encouragement

*Prisoner mail is reviewed by guards. Please keep messages of encouragement to a general and/or religious nature. For example, do not mention the events of Jan. 6th or other current events under criminal investigation.

Case Documents

Associates

In the news

Photos

U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is working to detain Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes following the release of text messages he allegedly sent that detailed his intentions for Jan. 6.

As Rhodes prepares for trial in connection with the sedition conspiracy case alleging that he and members of the far-right extremist organization conspired to halt the certification of President Joe Biden's victory. On Thursday, January 20, lawyers for the federal government released a memo in district court with details about the evidence in the case and Rhodes alleged involvement.

“The weight of the evidence of Rhodes’s dangerousness is immense,” the lawyers said in their memo. Text messages Rhodes sent are at the center of the investigation.

According to Rolling Stone, Rhodes “'spearheaded' the conspiracy to block the peaceful transfer of power." The government also wrote that Rhodes needs to be detained to 'protect the community, ensure his return to court, and safeguard the integrity of evidence and the proceedings.'”

"The filing offers choice new details, including a text Rhodes allegedly sent a co-conspirator on Christmas Day 2020, discussing their plan to intimidate Congress on Trump’s behalf during the proceedings on Jan. 6: 'The only chance we/he has is if we scare the shit out of them,” Rhodes wrote, “and convince them it will be torches and pitchforks time if they don’t do the right thing.'”

Lawyers also highlighted messages that detailed Rhodes' promotion of violence. “From November 2020 through January 2021,” it states, “Rhodes regularly used the terms ‘civil war’ and ‘revolution’ to describe the necessary path forward.”

The latest report follows the Justice Department's press release on Jan. 13 detailing the charges being brought against the Oath Keepers. According to court documents, Rhodes, a resident of Grandbury, Texas, and Edward Vallejo, of Phoenix, Ariz., are facing charges in connection with the events leading up to the Capitol insurrection.

In addition to Rhodes and Vallejo, the nine other members of the far-right group include: "Thomas Caldwell, 67, of Berryville, Virginia; Joseph Hackett, 51, of Sarasota, Florida; Kenneth Harrelson, 41, of Titusville, Florida; Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama; Kelly Meggs, 52, of Dunnellon, Florida;Roberto Minuta, 37, of Prosper, Texas ; David Moerschel, 44, of Punta Gorda, Florida; Brian Ulrich, 44, of Guyton, Georgia, and Jessica Watkins, 39, of Woodstock, Ohio. In addition to the earlier charges filed against them, they now face additional counts for seditious conspiracy and other offenses."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/roger-stone-aide/

roger Stone associate Kristin Davis is behind a new column blaming Women for America First for being behind the organizing of the "Stop the Steal" rally and saying that Stone had nothing to do with it, reporter Nancy Levin discovered Sunday.

Writing in a conspiracy theory publication, Davis explained that all Stone did was stand outside his hotel with an entourage waiting for a car to pick them up.

"I booked Roger to speak at the Rally to Save America the night prior and was led to believe by Women for America First that he was supposed to speak the following afternoon on January 6th, at a rally they organized which featured President Donald J. Trump. After a completely peaceful rally on January 5th, which attracted thousands of brave American patriots, we woke up the next morning expecting to attend the rally at the Ellipse," the column read.

"However, despite Women for America First promoting Stone as a speaker and insisting that they were sending a transport for Mr. Stone and our team to the Willard Hotel, the escort never came," the piece continued. "As we were waiting, the staff at the Hotel Willard asked anyone congregating in the lobby to stay out of the cold to step outside in order to adhere to COVID-19 guidelines set forth by the Mayor of Washington, D.C. A simple walk outside, which lasted mere minutes, is the first part of the dishonest conspiracy theory by the mainstream media and Democrat (sic) elected officials that Mr. Stone was somehow organizing the insurrection, or had some sort of advance knowledge of what was going to happen later that day."

Raw Story has never reported that Stone was part of the organizing of the event, but those members of the Oath Keepers militia who were working as the security for Stoneare accused of being linked to the plotting of violence.

Justice Department filings showed Jessica Watkins saying to allies that the task "sounds like a sweet gig," meaning the guarding of Stone.

"Looks like we might be security for Roger Stone, if we end up rolling with the Oath keepers(sic)," Watkins texted Donovan Ray Crowl on Jan. 1. Crowl texted back later that day saying, it "should be fun."

Crowl was cited for believing that there would be a "literal war" in the United States on Jan. 6.

Crowl's lawyer said in the court documents that his client wasn't doing anything other than security on Jan. 6, but other messages prosecutors got showed that the Oath Keepers were coordinating with "30-40" people during the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Watkins and Crowl were both indicted on charges of conspiracy, conspiracy to injure an officer and destruction of government property.

Stone appears to be denying that he and the security had discussed anything outside of their work for him.

Women for America First was behind the rally, according to permits requested from the Parks Service.

See the screen capture of the excerpt from Nancy Levin:

https://news.yahoo.com/suspected-oath-keeper-extremists-brought-140329602.html

no lnx pix

Alia Shoaib

Sat, July 9, 2022

Prosecutors outlined new allegations against suspected Oath Keepers charged in relation to the Capitol riot.

The Friday filing claims one co-defendant of the Oath Keeper leader had a "death list."

It also claims that one purportedOath Keeper transported explosives to Washington DC on Jan. 6.

The Justice Department leveled new accusations against suspected members of the far-right Oath Keepers on Friday relating to their involvement in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

A co-defendant of Oath Keep leader, Stewart Rhodes, had a "death list" with the name of a Georgia election official, and another co-conspirator came to Washington with explosives, they said.

Nine Oath Keepers, including leader Stewart Rhodes, have been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol riot. All nine have pleaded not guilty.

The new accusations are laid out in a 28-page filing, viewed by Insider, which includes evidence prosecutors plan to introduce against the Oath Keepers during their trial in September.

Prosecutors will aim to prove that the group extensively prepared for violence and plotted to stop Joe Biden from rightfully assuming the presidency.

The new filing states that during a search of charged co-defendant Thomas Caldwell's Virginia home weeks after the riot, a document was found with the words "DEATH LIST" handwritten across the top.

The list included the name of a Georgia election official and a purported family member of the official, [LADY RUBY?] both of whom had become targets of unfounded accusations of being involved in voter fraud in the 2020 election.}:

In a statement through his attorney,Caldwell, a retired Navy intelligence officer,denied the allegations to The Washington Post: "The DOJ's claim that I intended to assassinate election workers is an absolute, 100% disgusting lie."

Prosecutors have previously accused the Oath Keepers of setting up a so-called "quick reaction force," or QRF, outside of Washington, DC, which included firearms stashed at a Virginia hotel.

In the new filing, prosecutors further stated that there was evidence that at least one alleged Oath Keeper, Jeremy Brown, transported explosives to the Washington DC area on the day of the Capitol attack.

The government last September also seized two illegal short barrel firearms from Brown's residence and military ordinance grenades from his RV, which was the same vehicle he used to travel to Washington DC on the day of the riot, the filing said.

Brown has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor counts relating to the riot and is not one of the nine Oath Keepers to have been charged in the seditious conspiracy indictment.

Prosecutors also allege in the filing that co-conspirators, including Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, and Jessica Watkins, discussed and prepared for violent conflict with government actors between January 6 and Inauguration day on January 20.

Prosecutors also say two bomb-making recipes in suspected Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins' home after a search weeks after the riot, which they say is evidence of her preparation to use force against the government.

Watkins' indictment alleges that she recruited several people for a "military-style basic" training class the group organized for the beginning of 2021.

A lawyer for Rhodes, Phillip Linder, told CNN that Rhodes had no knowledge of any plans for violence and did not participate in the violence at the Capitol.

Rhodes said on Friday that he would testify in front of the January 6 committee and waive his 5th Amendment rights under the condition that his testimony is broadcast live.}:

The Oath Keepers, a militia-styled vigilante group, recruits current and former members of the military and law enforcement and sees the current US government as illegitimate.

The group's more mainstream members fled the group in droves after January 6, Rachel Carroll Rivas, a senior research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Insider's Laura Italiano.

The Oath Keepers had 88 chapters at the end of 2020, Carroll Rivas said. One year after the insurrection, the number of chapters has dropped by more than half, to 39.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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https://heavy.com › news › jessica-watkins

Jessica Watkins of Oath Keepers: 5 Fast Facts | Heavy.com

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