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Tag: sedition

  • Trump said Democratic video is seditious. Experts doubt that

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    After Democratic lawmakers who are military and intelligence agency veterans posted a video urging U.S. service members not to carry out illegal orders, President Donald Trump attacked the lawmakers on Truth Social, saying they had committed sedition.

    The lawmakers’ Nov. 18 video featured Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona and U.S. Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, and Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania. 

    In the video, the lawmakers introduced themselves and said which military branch or intelligence agency they served in. Then, taking turns, the lawmakers said: 

    “We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community who take risks each day to keep Americans safe. We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military. But that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse legal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution. We know this is hard, and that it’s a difficult time to be a public servant. But whether you’re serving in the CIA, the Army, our Navy, the Air Force, your vigilance is critical. And know that we have your back. Because now, more than ever, the American people need you. We need you to stand up for our laws, our Constitution, and who we are as Americans.”

    The video did not specify what orders the lawmakers were referring to.

    In one of Trump’s first Truth Social posts about the video, he said, “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” 

    Another one of Trump’s Nov. 20 posts said, “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand – We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”

    In another post, Trump wrote, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump also reshared Truth Social posts from other users who said the lawmakers should be indicted or hanged.

    His statements followed other Republicans criticizing the video. 

    Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “Stage 4” Trump Derangement Syndrome in an X post. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., told Fox News, “It is inconceivable that you would have elected officials that are saying to uniformed members of the military who have taken an oath that they would defy the orders that they have been given to execute their mission.”

    Legal experts told PolitiFact that Trump’s sedition accusation doesn’t hold up. They said they see no path for charging the Democratic lawmakers under any form of sedition law. 

    “Absolutely not,” said Rod Smolla, a Vermont Law and Graduate School law professor. “They are not conspiring to overthrow the government — they are expressing their views critical of orders coming from the president that they believe are illegal.”

    In a Nov. 20 press briefing several hours after Trump’s posts, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if the president wanted “to execute members of Congress.” Leavitt said he didn’t. She said the lawmakers’ video encouraged service members to defy the president’s “lawful orders,” which “could inspire chaos, and it could incite violence, and it certainly could disrupt the chain of command.” 

    The lawmakers’ video referred to unlawful orders, not lawful ones.

    On Nov. 19, Slotkin posted an excerpt on X from a panel discussion during which she said some service members have expressed concerns about recent U.S. military activity off the coast of Venezuela. Legal experts have told PolitiFact that military strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the U.S. suspects of carrying drugs raise legal questions.

    Slotkin and the other Democratic lawmakers released a joint statement following Trump’s Truth Social posts, saying: “What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.”

    Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., speaks at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, on June 26, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (AP)

    What is sedition?

    Sedition broadly refers to anti-government conduct and takes two forms: libel and conspiracy.

    “Seditious libel” refers to anti-government speech. From the 1798 Sedition Act to the 1918 Sedition Act, laws targeting seditious speech have been controversial because they clashed with the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech. 

    Courts began ruling against such laws in the late 1950s, culminating in the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brandenburg vs. Ohio, which set a high bar for conviction based on speech. The court said the conduct resulting from speech needed to be imminent, likely and intended by the speaker.

    That and other judicial decisions made clear that “even speech that advocates lawbreaking in the abstract is protected,” said Timothy Zick, a College of William & Mary law professor. And in this case, the lawmakers “are urging that the law be upheld, not violated.”

    The other form is “seditious conspiracy.” Under this law, it is a crime for two or more people to “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” or levy war against the U.S. government, or to use force to take government property, oppose the authority of the government or prevent “the execution of any law.”

    Carlton Larson, a University of California-Davis law professor, said the seditious conspiracy statute likely would not apply to the lawmakers’ comments. The law “requires an agreement to commit certain unlawful actions,” Larson said. “Encouraging the military not to obey unlawful orders is not an agreement under the seditious conspiracy statute.”

    The repeated use of the phrase “by force” in the legal statute is a key feature legally protecting the lawmakers’ video, experts said.

    The video doesn’t include anything “indicating an agreement to use force against the authority of the United States,” said Geoffrey S. Corn, the chair of criminal law at Texas Tech University and director of its Center for Military Law and Policy.

    On Truth Social, Trump also misled by saying seditious actions are subject to the death penalty. The law says someone convicted can be fined or imprisoned for up to 20 years, not put to death.

    What does military law say about following unlawful orders?

    Legal experts said the Democratic lawmakers have a point about service members’ ability to challenge what may be unlawful acts. However, the experts said determining what is lawful can be challenging for service members, and they could face high penalties if they get it wrong. 

    The Operational Law Handbook for judge advocates general says, “In rare cases when an order seems unlawful, do not carry it out right away, but do not ignore it either. Instead, immediately and respectfully seek clarification of that order.” While orders from the chain of command are presumed lawful, the handbook says, the order would be “manifestly illegal” if “a reasonable person would recognize the wrongfulness” and, if so, “soldiers have a duty to disobey it.”

    The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations concurs, saying an order “may be inferred to be lawful,” but if the order is “patently illegal,” such as the murder of a civilian or noncombatant, “this inference does not apply.”

    And Army Talent Management, the document that outlines the branch’s leadership doctrine, says, “Army professionals serve honorably by obeying the laws of the Nation and all legal orders. Army forces reject and report illegal, unethical, or immoral orders or actions.”

    Dru Brenner-Beck, a military law attorney based in Colorado, said the video accurately restated the law that applies to to U.S. forces, their duty of obedience and their obligation to support and defend the Constitution. 

    “It is not subversion,” Brenner-Beck said. “However, it is remarkable that members of the United States government should feel that such a video was necessary.”

    Still, for service members, the guidance for determining what is a manifestly unlawful order is “pretty vague,” said David Luban, a Georgetown University law professor.

    While there is no duty to obey an illegal order, “a service member who disobeys because he or she believes the order is illegal will likely be subject to prosecution by court-martial for willful disobedience,” Corn said. 

    In that scenario, the defendant would have to establish to the judge that the order was illegal, and “not just that he or she believed it was,” Corn said. “If the military judge concludes that the order was legal, this defense would not be allowed.”

    Richard D. Rosen, an emeritus law professor at Texas Tech and retired Army colonel, said if he were on active duty, he would advise soldiers to ignore the video. 

    “While lawmakers may score political points, soldiers who follow their advice could be imprisoned, receive a dishonorable or bad conduct discharge, and lose all pay and allowances,” Rosen said. 

    At the same time, there are risks to not questioning a potentially illegal order, Corn said. “Obedience to a clearly or manifestly unlawful order is no defense to a crime that arises from that obedience.” 

    Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said he supports the general message in the video but acknowledged that it can be hard to determine an order’s legality, Fox News reported. 

    “You can’t disobey the Constitution,” Reed said. “The issue, though, on a practical sense to me, is that determination is often very difficult to make.”

    PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.

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  • Rachel Maddow’s ‘Prequel’ is a deceptively framed history of the radical right

    Rachel Maddow’s ‘Prequel’ is a deceptively framed history of the radical right

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    Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, by Rachel Maddow, Crown, 416 pages, $32

    “American democracy itself was under attack from enemies within and without,” Rachel Maddow writes in Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. If you’re not sure whether she is speaking of the past or the present, that’s because she wants to conflate the two.

    Prequel is a deeply flawed and deceptively framed history of right-wing radicalism in the United States on the eve of American entry into World War II. Maddow’s treatment of this well-worn topic draws principally from primary sources generated from the protagonists of her story, a collection of private spies and anti-fascist activists, as well as contemporary press reporting, sundry government documents, and a narrow base of secondary sources, one that noticeably omits prominent works in the field. Deficiencies in her sources, methods, and analyses make for a book that recapitulates past passions at the expense of sober reflection and reality.

    Maddow opens with her strongest case study, covering the German-born Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck, who tried to push Americans toward neutrality by using personal connections with Congress to spread noninterventionist literature. She then switches focus to her weakest case study, that of populist Democratic governor and senator Huey “Kingfish” Long and his influence on the Nazi sympathizers Philip Johnson and Gerald L.K. Smith. Maddow does not clarify why Long, who died in 1935, is discussed here. But her tone and source selection imply that she agrees with the Kingfish’s contemporary critics that his populism and demagoguery made him a proto-fascist and a political gateway drug for more radical figures, like Johnson and Smith.

    Maddow then abruptly changes focus to the dark history of American segregation and its influence on Nazi racial science, following the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger’s travels through the American South. Then she circles back to more-prominent characters, such as the American fascist Lawrence Dennis, the antisemitic preacher Charles Coughlin, and the abstruse spiritualist (and leader of the fascist Silver Shirts) William Dudley Pelley, among others.

    The book’s first half is occasionally productive. The chapter on Pelley does a good job of exploring the roots of his ideology: his conflation of anti-communism with antisemitism, his eclectic spiritualism, his millenarian Christianity. And the chapter on American race law is a haunting look at how American legislatures maintained racial hierarchy and what the Nazis learned from their practices.

    But what narrative value she creates is relinquished by her analytical leaps, which conflate fascism with phenomena that were already well-grounded in American life well before the 1920s. And Maddow never directly states the size and scope of the groups she covers, such as the German American Bund and the Silver Shirts; instead we get such vague phrases as “many,” “a lot,” and “an insane number.” This makes it easier to confuse the breadth of Maddow’s cast of characters for the depth of their influence. (According to historian Francis MacDonnell’s Insidious Foes, the German American Bund never attracted more than 25,000 members and the Silver Shirts maxed out at 15,000.)

    The book’s meandering journey narrows in later chapters, as Maddow argues that German propaganda had a pervasive influence on “isolationist” congressmen. She presents the propagandists’ efforts as far more effective than they were, giving the impression that they were the root of Americans’ general desire to stay out of World War II. She pays only lip service to the deeper roots of “isolationism,” with a mere passing reference to the fallout from World War I. She does not mention the post-WWI revelations of Allied and American propaganda, the widespread alarm at the armaments industry’s intimate relationship with the government, or the Great War’s domestic abuses of civil liberties. (When Sen. Ernest Lundeen (R–Minn.) denounces a draft bill as “nothing short of slavery,” she dismisses him as “shrill.”) Instead, she writes as though the desire to remain neutral simply stemmed from abroad, stripping noninterventionism of its historical context and arguing that the “threads of isolationism, antisemitism, and fascism were becoming an ominously tight weave.”

    To make her case, Maddow retells a well-worn story about Viereck’s use of the congressional frank, a taxpayer-funded mailing service, to distribute what Maddow calls “pro-German mailings.” In fact, it was predominately literature that advocated neutrality. As historian Douglas M. Charles argued in J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists, “All Viereck managed to accomplish was a wider distribution of anti-interventionist literature that, in any event, did not lead Americans to reassess their views on the Allies.”

    Her book culminates in the 1944 sedition trial, in which the United States federal government charged a heterogeneous and largely unaffiliated assortment of 30 defendants, which included far-right figures like George Sylvester Viereck, Lawrence Dennis, and William Dudley Pelley, for sedition under the 1940 Smith Act. She presents the episode as a missed opportunity to uproot homegrown fascism. In fact, the Justice Department filed its flimsy charges on politically motivated grounds—a clear threat to constitutionally protected speech and association, no matter how unsympathetic the defendants could be.

    Throughout Prequel, Maddow displays a systemically uncritical use of her source material, frequently presenting the self-gratifying hyperbole of fascist propagandists and the motivated reasoning of anti-fascist reporters as gospel.

    Whether she knows it or not, Maddow is dredging up a thesis from the past, written in the wake of World War II when passions were high and perspectives blinkered. This view does have some academic adherents, and she cites their work: Bradley W. Hart’s Hitler’s American Friends, James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model, Sarah Churchwell’s Behold, America, Steven J. Ross’s Hitler in Los Angeles, and others. But she drives her thesis beyond the confines of her evidence in a manner that these scholars do not. Hart, for example, hedges where Maddow does not, acknowledging that the “United States was not at risk of an imminent fascist takeover in the late 1930s” when he argues that there was “fertile terrain in which dictatorship might be able to take root.” Yet Maddow leaves the impression that there was a risk of an imminent fascist takeover in the 1930s, with German propaganda fertilizing that fertile terrain.

    Meanwhile, there is a sizeable body of work that challenges Maddow’s thesis and that of her source material. Such works include established scholarship such as Leo Ribuffo’s The Old Christian Right, Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief, and Bruce Kuklick’s recent Fascism Comes to America, to name a few. While these works do not downplay the pernicious ideologies of the far right nor their presence in American life, they do not sensationalize or dehistoricize them nor assign them more influence than they deserve. Lipstadt, who has devoted much of her career to combating the radical right’s penchant for Holocaust denial, dedicated an entire chapter of Beyond Belief to challenging American anxieties about a Nazi “fifth column”—the very fears that Maddow is trying to resurrect. While Nazi Germany did have spies and propagandists in the U.S., Lipstadt cautioned that “they never constituted a network with the scope and power the press attributed them.”

    In Insidious Foes, MacDonnell argues that while odious and illiberal, right-wing extremists “never posed any real danger to the republic”; instead, a media echo chamber constructed the perception of a vast and powerful far right. He also makes a good case that Germany’s propaganda effort was “spectacularly unsuccessful” and ultimately did more damage to the noninterventionist cause than it aided it. Ribuffo‘s classic The Old Christian Right (a work that Maddow mentions in her author’s note but does not cite) similarly argued that the fear of these groups was a “brown scare” that often “exaggerated both [the far right’s] power and its Axis connections.”

    How does Maddow square her findings with those of these earlier works? We do not know, because she does not tell us.

    In closing the book, Maddow invites the reader to take inspiration from the work of Americans who sought to stop homegrown fascists by “any means at hand,” assessing their legacies as worth remembering and emulating. Yet Maddow omits the pernicious legacy that followed from using “any means at hand” and violating the very norms her heroes sought to protect. They created the destructive and restrictive myth of isolationism, which held that it was an absence of American power from the world’s stage that directly led to the rise of fascism abroad. They actively colluded with a foreign power—Great Britain—to interfere in American elections and manipulate American media. And they helped stoke the panic that led to Japanese internment and spurred the growth of the domestic security state. The latter, ironically, soon boomeranged against the left.

    Those legacies are also worth remembering if we are to preserve liberty from an ever-present threat—not from enemies within our ranks or outside our walls, but within ourselves.

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    Brandan P. Buck

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  • Oath Keepers Founder Sentenced To 18 Years For Seditious Conspiracy

    Oath Keepers Founder Sentenced To 18 Years For Seditious Conspiracy

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    The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in a seditious conspiracy to disrupt the electoral count, the stiffest punishment to date to stem from the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. What do you think?

    “Well, at least he overthrew the government.”

    Fiona Lassetter, Seaweed Artisan

    Body Language Fact: Did You Know?

    “Strange considering that Trump is still secretly the president.”

    Ivan Winter, Unemployed

    “Luckily, he’ll be out in time for the 2042 insurrection.”

    Ben Kadapul, Hike Navigator

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  • Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

    Proud Boy testifies in sedition trial about far-right group being the ‘tip of the spear’ on January 6 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The sole Proud Boy to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection to the US Capitol riot testified on Wednesday that members of the far-right organization believed the country was barreling toward revolution and that they were the “tip of the spear.”

    Jeremy Bertino, a top lieutenant to Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, testified as part of a cooperation deal that he struck with prosecutors against Tarrio and four other members of the Proud Boys charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.

    “We had a big fight on our hands. It was going to be an uphill battle, and everyone had turned against us,” Bertino testified. “My belief was that we had to take the reins and pretty much be the leaders that we had been building ourselves up to be.”

    His testimony allowed prosecutors to show jurors how the events of January 6, 2021, unfolded in the mind of a top member of the organization as he watched it online from his North Carolina home, sending messages to his “brothers” about targeting then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assuring them that members of the far-left group Antifa weren’t there to stop them.

    Some of the messages featured in court were from defendants in the case, whom Bertino said he would “take a bullet for.” But Bertino and the five defendants – Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola – rarely made eye contact during the testimony.

    There was not a premeditated or specific plan to storm the Capitol, Bertino testified, adding that getting the Proud Boys to communicate and work together was like “herding cats.” The Proud Boys had several group messages from the days before the riot where members mentioned descending on the Capitol building, according to exhibits shown by prosecutors.

    As court challenges to the 2020 election failed, members of the Proud Boys – who saw themselves as the “foot soldiers of the right” – began to believe the country was headed toward an “all-out revolution,” Bertino testified.

    “I felt it coming,” he said.

    The Proud Boys believed that the government was controlled by “commies,” he testified, and they began to turn against the police, whom the group increasingly saw as their enemy. Everybody in the organization felt “desperate,” including Tarrio, Bertino told the jury.

    “His tones were calculated,” Bertino said of Tarrio. “Cold, but very determined. He felt the exact same way that I did.”

    Members also were inspired by then-President Donald Trump’s reference to their organization in a 2020 presidential debate, where he told the group to “stand back and stand by.” Bertino testified that there were “nonstop requests for membership” after the debate, specifically from people who wanted to attend rallies, and that the group did less vetting of new members to keep up with applications.

    During cross examination, Bertino said that he thought the Proud Boys had a goal to stop the 2020 election but had no knowledge of how that goal would be achieved.

    “I didn’t have a direct idea of where they were going, how they were going to get there.”

    Bertino was not in Washington, DC, on the day of the riot because he was at home recovering from a stab wound he suffered during a previous pro-Trump rally, but he testified that he watched on a livestream video. He saw the mob as starting the “next American revolution,” and told others Proud Boys he was brought to tears during the attack.

    “I was happy, excited, in awe and disbelief that people were doing what they said they would do,” Bertino told the jury. When the crowd descended on the Capitol building, “it meant that we influenced people, the normies, enough to make them stand for themselves and take back their country and take back their freedom,” he said.

    In chats to other Proud Boys, Bertino encouraged members to move forward, telling them that he could see the Capitol building on a livestream and that no members of Antifa would be at the building to stop the pro-Trump mob.

    Bertino also messaged: “They need to get peloton” – which he testified was a misspelled reference to Pelosi. “She was the talking head of the opposition and they needed to remove her from power,” he said.

    By the evening of January 6, Bertino grew angry at Trump supporters for leaving the Capitol building, he told the jury.

    “The way I felt at the moment, if we give that building up, we were giving up our country,” Bertino testified. He sent encrypted messages to other Proud Boys members, saying that “we failed,” and “Half measures mean nothing,” and, referring to lawmakers inside the Capitol, “Fuck fear: They need to be hung.”

    “Once they took that step, there was no coming back from it,” Bertino testified Wednesday. “And they decided basically to balk and walk away after creating all that chaos down there.”

    “The revolution had failed,” he continued, “because the House was still going to go on and certify the election.”

    Bertino told the jury that after January 6, he tried to delete what he saw as incriminating messages on his phone and he wasn’t fully truthful with FBI agents when they asked him about the Capitol attack.

    “I guess it’s a natural instinct to protect yourself and protect those you love,” Bertino testified.

    “I love them,” he said of the five defendants. “I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to them. Still don’t.”

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  • First weeks of Proud Boys sedition trial marked by courtroom drama and fighting | CNN Politics

    First weeks of Proud Boys sedition trial marked by courtroom drama and fighting | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The preliminary stage of the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy related to the 2021 US Capitol attack has been a chaotic wind-up that included contentious fights during jury selection, debates over evidence and defense lawyers threatening to withdraw from the case.

    But while opening arguments are expected Thursday, the bickering in the courtroom is likely to continue.

    Tensions between federal prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge have grown increasingly hostile and confrontational over the past three weeks, and the judge has repeatedly pushed back the start of the trial to deal with the endless fighting.

    District Judge Timothy Kelly delivered a stark warning to all the lawyers on Wednesday: “Everyone take note – you talk over me, and contempt will be coming down the line. It’s going to be a long trial.”

    The five defendants – Enrique Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs – have all pleaded not guilty.

    The three weeks of courtroom drama began before Christmas with the jury selection process, which was plagued by a constant struggle for prosecutors and defense attorneys to agree on jurors who didn’t have strong opinions on the far-right Proud Boys group.

    Some defense attorneys, like Rehl’s lawyer Carmen Hernandez, fought for the dismissal of nearly every potential juror who mentioned previous knowledge, however slight, of the Proud Boys. Other attorneys, including Tarrio’s lawyers Nayib Hassan and Sabino Jauregui, said they were suspicious that people who claimed to not know much about the Proud Boys could be lying so they can get on the jury and find their client guilty.

    Wednesday, Kelly mediated fights over potential exhibits. During one heated moment, Hernandez said she would withdraw from the case if Kelly allowed prosecutors to show the jury a specific video.

    The video has not been shown publicly, but Hernandez said it was taken before January 6, 2021, and was “highly prejudicial.”

    Kelly was not pleased by the inference the lawyer would quit.

    “You, Ms. Hernandez, had said something like you were going to withdraw from the case if I didn’t make certain decisions,” Kelly said. “And I want to make it clear that I don’t really care about that… it’s not even clear if I would let you out of the case.”

    “It isn’t a threat,” Hernandez replied. “I’m not in the habit from threatening to withdraw from a case.”

    Another defense attorney, Nick Smith, said that he too would leave the case over a video the government wants to play for the jury, though Kelly did not address his threat.

    Kelly did allow prosecutors to use video of a 2020 presidential debate when then-President Donald Trump said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” The comments, Kelly said, showed “an additional motive to advocate for Mr. Trump (and) engage in the charged conspiracy” to keep Trump in power.

    Roger Roots, a defense lawyer who joined Pezzola’s legal team just before the trial, also got in hot water with the judge. Roots suggested that he planned to tell the jury Pezzola was acting in self-defense on January 6 against police officers who were high on pepper spray.

    “I know you just joined the case last week but there is no evidence of that,” Kelly said, telling Roots the time had passed to make any self-defense arguments.

    Meanwhile, Biggs’ attorney Norman Pattis had his law license suspended last week for six months.

    Pattis, representing right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in the defamation case brought by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, had improperly released court documents.

    The files included two years of Jones’ text messages, medical records from some of the Sandy Hook families and other confidential discovery items.

    Kelly has not yet ruled on Pattis’ status, but he did allow two other attorneys who had defended other Proud Boys and therefore had potential conflicts to serve on the case.

    Pattis, however, tweeted Wednesday that “six months off sounds good about now.”

    The constant turmoil has left some defense attorneys repeatedly asking for the trial to be moved to a different courthouse or further delayed, though they don’t all agree (Smith said he wouldn’t consent to delaying the trial for any reason “up to and including a zombie apocalypse”).

    Prosecutors have not been saved from the judge’s scrutiny either – most notably when they claimed they couldn’t provide evidence binders to defense lawyers because their office had run out of dividers, and they hadn’t been authorized to buy new ones.

    In the past three weeks, lawyers for the five defendants have repeatedly criticized government lawyers for how they have handled the case.

    Hernandez said the prosecutors were acting “immature” and said, “it reminds me of when my kids were little.”

    Roots told Kelly that the department was using “cutthroat strategies.”

    By Wednesday evening, Assistant US Attorney Jason McCullough asked the judge to reiterate his “order on decorum” in the courtroom.

    “We are going to be in front of a jury soon and we need to take this up a couple levels,” McCullough said.

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