Federal prosecutors said members of the Oath Keepers nationalist group who participated in the January 6th domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol had a “corrupt” intent to prevent Congress from fulfilling its Constitutional duty to certify the November 2020 election, USA Today reports.
“The object here is to scare Congress into halting the proceeding. The defendants intend to act corruptly by their show of force,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler told U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta during a motion hearing in which the 15 members of the Oath Keepers sought to have charges against them dropped. “The defendants here are corrupt because they intended to intimidated Congress … into stopping what Congress was doing,” Nestler said.
At one point during the hearing, one of the defendants’ lawyers argued that the trial should be moved because the defendants could not get a fair trial in Washington, DC because DC residents lacked “traditional values.”
Mehta seemed incredulous at many of the arguments made by the defense lawyers, at one time saying “This brief … reads less like a legal brief than something you might read on a blog. And that’s not acceptable.”