If there’s one thing Donald Trump is good at, it’s making attorneys get attorneys, AKA … MAGA. Case in point: Kellye SoRelle, a lawyer for the Oath Keepers militia group, who was just indicted by a grand jury for crimes relating to the January 6 Capitol Riot. In this she joins her former clients, including Head Oaf Stewart Rhodes, in the January 6 defendants’ club. She didn’t quite make it to the sedition tier, but she was apparently with Rhodes the entire day of the Capitol Riot, so … fingers crossed.
The four-count indictment charges SoRelle with obstruction of an official proceeding for her efforts to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory, as well as conspiracy to obstruct the same, entering a restricted building, and obstruction of justice. This last relates to SoRelle’s alleged efforts to “corruptly persuade” her confederates to “withhold records, documents, and other objects from an official proceeding” and “alter, destroy, mutilate, and conceal objects with intent to impair the objects’ integrity and availability for use in such a Grand Jury investigation.”
Let’s take a wild shot in the dark that this is a reference to a January 8, 2021, Signal message from what was described in court documents as an attorney for the Oafs in a group chat addressing Rhodes and his pals:
YOU ALL NEED TO DELETE ANY OF YOUR COMMENTS REGARDING WHO DID WHAT. You are under zero obligation to leave them up. You/we have not yet gotten a preservation order instructing us to retain those chat comments. So DELETE THEM. I can’t delete them because this is a legacy Signal chat that doesn’t let me delete comments. Only the comment author can delete a comment. So GET BUSY. DELETE your self-incriminating comments or those that can incriminate others. Start now …
Yes, well, hmmm.
If your attorney counsels you that it is very cool and very legal to destroy evidence of crimes just because the police haven’t yet come knocking at your door, you should probably get another lawyer. And if you are the lawyer who gave such advice, you should probably lawyer up yourself ASAP. Also, perhaps ask your law school for a refund of tuition paid.
For her part, SoRelle insists that this wasn’t an instruction to destroy evidence. “It wasn’t ‘go delete their stuff or destroy your phones.’ It was ‘quit talking to each other, stop creating witnesses, stop confessing stuff. Preserve your rights,’” she told independent journalist Nate Thayer. “‘Call me and I will explain your rights.’”
YES, WELL, HMMM.
If indeed SoRelle is this soon to be ex member of the bar, it wouldn’t be her first foray into outside the box legal theories. She previously filed suit on behalf of “Latinos for Trump” against every member of the 117th Congress, as well as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Mark Zuckerberg, urging the court to “muster the same courage displayed by the Founding Fathers of our Republic, who so willingly and boldly sacrificed their blood, their tears, their fortunes, whether meager or vast, and even their very lives, to win their freedom from a tyrannical monarchy across the ocean.” By which she meant that the judge should declare every federal election in 2020 invalid because coronavirus accommodations violate the Help America Vote Act. Obviously!
SoRelle claims that her phone was seized by the FBI a year ago after she “accidentally stumbled across the deep state ties” to MyPillow pumper Mike Lindell. Apparently this has something to do with white shoe law firm Kirkland & Ellis … and, shit, who knows, probably aliens.
After yesterday’s indictment, SoRelle tweeted, “So the clear question is.. of [sic] I am the patsy. That means the entire election challenge front was all a set up for the conservatives, because they are all protected. Good luck y’all. They won’t stop with me.”
Counselor Crazypants was released on her own recognizance after an initial appearance before a federal judge in Austin yesterday.
Watch this space, kids, to find out if Mike Lindell Deep States poor Kellye like a Chinese packet capture fired by an Italian space laser.
[Nate Thayer / WaPo / US v. SoRelle, Docket via Court Listener]
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