Days Before Trump Takes Office, Former Oath Keepers Lawyer Sentenced
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.”
“SR” was shorthand for “Stewart Rhodes,” SoRelle told the judge last year when she went before him to formally change her plea. Half of the charges she faced, including conspiracy to obstruct proceedings in the Capitol on Jan. 6, were dropped in the bargain, and she copped to telling Oath Keepers to delete messages.
SoRelle was often shoulder-to-shoulder with Rhodes as the Oath Keeper founder publicly called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and raise members of the group to his side. She attended private calls orchestrated by Rhodes where he discussed plans to stop the transfer of power, and SoRelle was also the former counsel to Latinos for Trump and was present for a key meeting between Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on the eve of the insurrection.
On Jan. 6, SoRelle never went inside the Capitol but was with Rhodes stalking its grounds and livestreaming the violence.
She was heard in a livestream from the day urging: “They broke the barrier, they got up there, they may end up inside before it’s all said and done, and that’s OK, too!”
“That’s how you take your government back, you literally take it back,” SoRelle said.
As the rioting was erupting and roughly a half hour before Oath Keepers breached the Capitol, SoRelle sent a text to Oath Keepers leadership, saying they were “acting like the founding fathers.”
“Can’t stand down. Per Stewart, and I concur,” she wrote.
Throughout the day, SoRelle seemed to relish in the attack, writing that it was “hilarious,” and she agreed with Rhodes when he remarked to her that lawmakers inside the Capitol were “shitting their pants” inside.
As she awaited trial, SoRelle underwent a mental competency evaluation. Both prosecutors and her defense attorney agreed she wasn’t fit to stand trial. The precise reasons she was deemed incompetent were kept under seal, and public court records only attributed the decision to a “mental disease or defect.”
Memorably, it was SoRelle who served as co-counsel in a lawsuit filed just days Jan. 6 that sought to declare Trump president by invoking the fantasy world of “The Lord of the Rings” and comparing Trump to a displaced “true king” of Gondor.
In a bid for leniency ahead of sentencing, SoRelle’s public defender said she was manipulated by Rhodes after meeting him in Texas in 2017.
Calling him a “classic grandiose, bombastic, manipulative cult leader,” SoRelle’s lawyer said Rhodes “used her in every way” and “enmeshed SoRelle in his paranoid, conspiratorial obsessions that were the basis of the movement.”
In 2020, SoRelle said her husband at the time gave her an ultimatum: Choose him or choose politics. She chose politics and began to isolate herself from her family, her sentencing memorandum states.
SoRelle’s lawyer told the judge before Friday that it was highly unlikely that SoRelle was ever seen as a leader, noting that as early as 2019, confidential human sources who left the Oath Keepers said she was “crazy.”
“Her lawyering cannot have been taken seriously [nor] provided any inspiration to the troops,” her lawyer wrote on Jan. 15.
Rhodes was using SoRelle for her Texas prosecutor bonafides at the time, the lawyer argued.
Today, SoRelle says she’s lost her marriage and family and has been indefinitely suspended from practicing law in Texas.
In court on Friday, CBS reported that SoRelle told Mehta: “I deeply regret association with Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers.”
Rhodes is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy.
