Former Oath Keepers attorney and girlfriend admits telling extremists to delete Jan. 6 texts
Kellye SoRelle, the former general counsel representing the extremist Oath Keepers group — and onetime girlfriend to that network’s imprisoned former leader and convicted seditious conspirator Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes — pleaded guilty on Wednesday to two charges tied to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
SoRelle, 45, pleaded guilty to felony obstruction of justice and a single misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds. According to The Associated Press, she will be sentenced on Jan. 17, 2025, just weeks short of the four-year mark of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that left 140 police officers injured and led to at least seven deaths, a bipartisan 2022 Senate report concluded.
As Law&Crime reported, the formal guilty plea has been anticipated. In an unopposed motion on July 8, the Austin, Texas, resident requested transportation to Washington, D.C., to enter her plea formally after a plea agreement was struck. A copy of her plea agreement was entered onto the docket late Wednesday.
The judge handling her case, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, deemed SoRelle mentally incompetent to stand trial in June 2023 following her September 2022 arrest. She was restored to competency in February.
She was originally charged with felony conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, felony obstruction an official proceeding, felony obstruction of justice by tampering with documents, and misdemeanor entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds.
Two of these counts relied on an obstruction statute only recently narrowed by the Supreme Court in its Fischer v. United States ruling. The maximum sentence for the felony charge she pleaded guilty to on Wednesday is 20 years, though she is expected to receive far less.
Prosecutors accused SoRelle of telling members of the Oath Keepers to withhold records from a grand jury probe into the attack on the Capitol. SoRelle had assumed leadership of the far-right network in January 2022 after Rhodes was arrested. SoRelle is also known for being caught on camera with Rhodes both outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and, arguably more memorably, appearing in documentary footage taken Jan. 5 that recorded her underground parking garage meeting with Rhodes and Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, then-leader of the Proud Boys, and others.
Prosecutors never alleged that SoRelle forced her way inside the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Tarrio, like Rhodes, was convicted of seditious conspiracy and is now serving out a 22-year sentence for his effort to stop the peaceful transfer of power, along with a number of his co-defendants. Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years.
At Rhodes’ trial he told jurors that he was advised by SoRelle to delete messages shared among Oath Keepers after the attack on the Capitol. Mehta had chuckled politely at that assertion at sentencing, saying “that doesn’t pass the laugh test.”
Rhodes was a Yale graduate, Mehta said in May 2023, and, he added, Rhodes had spent years practicing criminal defense work.
“I find it hard to believe he accepted advice from SoRelle about how to behave after [Jan. 6],” he remarked.
According to Jordan Fischer, a reporter from CBS affiliate WUSA who attended the plea hearing Wednesday in Washington, D.C., when SoRelle was asked by the judge if she understood that when she sent a message saying “Per SR, clean up all your chats,” it was a “direction to delete evidence.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“SR” is an abbreviation for “Stewart Rhodes.”
At the Oath Keepers seditious conspiracy trial, evidence and testimony from Rhodes illuminated claims that SoRelle had urgently told members of the network to “clam up” about Jan. 6 after the Capitol assault unfolded. She acted as a sort of conduit for Rhodes, prosecutors told a jury, communicating for him through her cellphone since his was turned off as the couple drove more than a thousand miles back to Texas from Washington, D.C. Rhodes also made SoRelle his main point person between the Oath Keepers network and those leading the pro-Donald Trump “Stop the Steal” movement, including Roger Stone and Ali Alexander.
The imprisoned seditious conspirator put blame squarely on SoRelle when testifying, saying she sent the messages of her own volition. But prosecutors argued there was a manipulation of SoRelle by Rhodes to do his bidding and that he exploited her weaknesses. Some hints of that allegedly manipulative past seemed to seep out of Rhodes when he testified: unprompted, he boasted of his sexual encounters with SoRelle and smiled and laughed from the witness box as he described her alleged sexual proclivities and how she was a “sub” or intimately submissive to him.
