Thursday, June 19, 2025

One bad apple

Trump gave a blanket pardon to the January 6 insurrectionists - about 1,500 capitol police and building assailants - without any review, insisting they were all patriots wrongly accused of a crime.  Several have been arrested again for subsequent crimes.  Now, the DOJ is seeking a life prison sentence for one of them, Edward Kelley.

Kelley was convicted in November of conspiracy to murder employees of the United States, solicitation to commit a crime of violence and influencing or retaliating against federal officials by threat.

[...]

While the Justice Department had argued that Trump’s pardons extended to crimes discovered during law enforcement operations stemming from the Jan. 6 investigation, it argued that the pardons didn’t apply to Kelley.

Kelley’s crimes were motivated “by a desire to initiate a civil war and to retaliate for his previous arrest,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo. They said that in a call in March, Kelley compared his conduct to that of the colonists during the American Revolution.

[...]

The Justice Department also alleged that Kelley “possessed and viewed child sexual abuse material” for “years” and that a forensic examination revealed he “took steps to delete [child sexual abuse material] from his laptop.”

  NBC


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