Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter sentenced to Llfe in assassination plot
A Tennessee man pardoned by President Donald Trump for taking part in the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has been sentenced to life in prison for hatching a separate plot to assassinate the law enforcement officers who investigated his role in the riot.
The life term imposed on the man, Edward Kelley, came during a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, Tennessee. Kelley was convicted at a trial there in November of charges that included conspiracy to murder federal employees and threatening federal agents.
During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that in 2022, while Kelley was at home facing charges in his Jan. 6-related case, he formed a group “that was preparing for armed conflict against the United States government” – specifically, the FBI. Kelley, a former Marine, had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
He made a list of nearly 40 people who had been involved in his arrest or who had helped to search his home as part of the Jan. 6 investigation, targeting them for assassination, prosecutors said. Kelley also planned to attack an FBI office in Knoxville, prosecutors said, using improvised explosive devices attached to vehicles and drones.
He was ultimately turned in by one of his co-conspirators who secretly recorded him.
Just weeks before his conviction in Knoxville, Kelley was also found guilty of assault, civil disorder and obstruction of an official proceeding by a federal judge at a bench trial in Washington for his role in the Capitol attack.
Prosecutors say he wore a gas mask and a tactical helmet when he showed up Jan. 6 and scuffled with a Capitol Police officer, throwing him to the ground.
Kelley then used a long piece of wood to shatter a window near the Senate Wing door, breaching the building, prosecutors say. After he got in, they said, he helped kick open a nearby door, allowing more members of the mob to enter the building.
Before he was sentenced in that case, however, he was pardoned by Trump as part of the sweeping clemency the president granted to the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack.
Kelley’s lawyers sought to have his assassination case thrown out as well, arguing that the crimes he was charged with had emerged from the Jan. 6 investigation and thus were covered by Trump’s pardon.
But Judge Thomas Varlan, who presided over the assassination case, rejected that argument, saying the plot to murder law enforcement officers took place in Tennessee, not Washington, and unfolded well after the events of Jan. 6.
In court papers filed to Varlan last month, prosecutors said that Kelley had shown no remorse for his crimes and “continues to believe he was justified in targeting East Tennessee law enforcement for assassination.”
The prosecutors told Varlan that during a recorded phone call with an associate last November, while he was in jail awaiting trial, Kelley complained that he was being wrongfully prosecuted.
“I’m here unjustly, man,” he said. “I’m a patriot, and I’m never ever going to apologize for trying to keep your family safe. Sometimes there’s casualties. I’m one of them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.