A jury delivered the Justice Department another victory in its prosecution of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, returning a guilty verdict on rarely-used seditious conspiracy charges for all four members on trial in its second prosecution of the group.
Ed Vallejo, Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett and David Moerschel each received a guilty verdict for their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in which members of the militia group used a “stack” formation to force their way into the building.
The verdict comes just two months after a separate trial for five other members of the group, with that jury laying down a seditious conspiracy verdict for Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the group.
Seditious conspiracy — used to charge those who plot to overthrow the government — carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison and hadn’t been used successfully since a 1990s terrorism case.