A pardoned Oath Keeper is demanding more after having his conviction lifted, against the judge’s “reluctant” dismissal and accusing him of “unconstitutional” conduct.
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Edward Vallejo, a resident of Phoenix, Arizona, was involved in the Oath Keepers’ plotting around the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol that attempted to disrupt the certification of Donald Trump’s election loss. According to a report from Arizona’s Family, authorities said Vallejo “oversaw a ‘Quick Reaction Force’ at a Virginia hotel that was prepared to deploy an arsenal of weapons into Washington if needed.” Despite being prepared with a cache of weaponry, the Washington Post noted in its own report that he “was not called into action.”
After Trump issued a blanket pardon to all January 6 defendants at the start of his second term, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta relented to federal pressure and agreed to lift the seditious conspiracy charges against Vallego and the other Oath Keeper defendants. The Post called this move “the last step in the legal process to wipe out penalties from the Jan. 6 riot, cementing President DonaldTrump’s bid to unravel the largest federal investigation in U.S. history.”
In doing so, however, Mehta used his Tuesday ruling to excoriate the government’s attempts to meddle in the case, and insisted that the legal bases for the men’s convictions remain sound, writing that the Oath Keeper defendants received “unearned grace by wiping their records clean” after juries found them guilty of “crimes against the United States itself.”
“The government does not say that the charges were legally deficient or that the evidence presented is insufficient to sustain Defendants’ convictions,” Mehta wrote. “It confesses to no prosecutorial misconduct, nor does it assert any denial or compromise of a defendant’s rights.”
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He added: “This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6. That book is now closed,” Mehta wrote. “Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy — the peaceful transfer of presidential power — to buckle[.] The court cannot write a different ending.”
In a response to this ruling, Vallejo’s legal team submitted a new filing on Wednesday, demanding that Mehta’s comments be removed from the record, calling them “unconstitutional.” It also accused his original trial of being “marred by serious prejudicial errors,” including “errors in jury selection and use of inadmissible hearsay.”
“Ed Vallejo was innocent before trial and he is innocent now,” the filing read. “The Court’s dismissal of the indictment with prejudice based on deference to prosecutorial discretion does not open the door for judicial opinion regarding disputed elements of an offense never finally adjudicated. The Fifth Amendment’s presumption of innocence further counsels against advisory statements regarding culpability based on the trial prosecutor’s version of the fact [sic] that have not been finally established to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt and affirmed on appeal.”
It continued later: “The Court correctly granted the motion to dismiss with prejudice based on the government’s exercise of discretion but incorrectly injected advisory opinions that are contrary to the presumption of innocence and unfair to an innocent man. The Court’s commentary adopted wholesale the government’s theory of the case while ignoring the substantial defense case for innocence.”
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