On his first full day of freedom, Stewart Rhodes—who was convicted of orchestrating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack—returned to Capitol Hill. He was released from prison on Tuesday after President Trump commuted his sentence. When Rhodes was spotted at a Dunkin' Donuts in the Longworth House Office Building, a spot open to the public, the Oath Keepers founder said he did not go into the Capitol building on Wednesday, the Hill reports. Rhodes said he wasn't exactly invited by a member of Congress but was lobbying for the release of Jeremy Brown, a fellow Oath Keeper still in prison. "We're advocating members of Congress, advocating that he be given a pardon also," he told reporters.
Rhodes said he still wants a full pardon for himself, too, from Trump. "I think all of us should be pardoned," he said. The shocking news of Rhodes' arrival swept through the congressional staff, per the Hill. A woman went up to Rhodes to tell him he shouldn't be there. "You are welcome [to] First Amendment free speech, but it is disrespectful," she said, adding, "please tell your story elsewhere." He told reporters that "certain people, in her mind, don't deserve free speech and should be wiped off the face of the planet when it comes to their free speech." Lawmakers were equally stunned, per the AP. "Does he still constitute a threat to public safety? Does he constitute a threat to American constitutional democracy?" asked Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin.
On the same day, judges in Washington's federal court were dismissing cases against Jan. 6 defendants that were still pending. Several of them included criticism of the prosecutions ending in their orders. US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said video, trial transcripts, and jury verdicts will remain as evidence of the attack. "Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies," she wrote.
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Judge Tanya Chutkan said Trump's pardons can't change the "tragic truth" of the attack, and the dismissal she was issuing of a case before her cannot "diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers" who defended the Capitol on that day. "It cannot whitewash the blood, feces and terror that the mob left in its wake," Chutkan wrote, per the AP. "And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America's sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power." (More Stewart Rhodes stories.)
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