By Steve Neavling
A federal judge ruled Monday that former President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardons for Jan. 6 rioters do not extend to the separate crimes of one participant who plotted to kill law enforcement officers investigating him.
Edward Kelley, convicted on Jan. 6 charges after prosecutors showed he was the fourth rioter to breach the Capitol and had assaulted law enforcement, was pardoned by Trump along with more than 1,500 others. But Kelley was also charged in a separate case with conspiring to murder law enforcement officers involved in the investigation. A federal jury in Tennessee convicted him on those charges in November, and he is scheduled to be sentenced May 7.
The Justice Department has taken conflicting positions on whether Trump’s pardon covers additional crimes discovered during Jan. 6 investigations, including cases where guns were found in rioters’ homes. But prosecutors have consistently argued that Kelley’s murder plot fell outside the scope of the pardon.
U.S. District Judge Thomas A. Varlan, a George W. Bush appointee in Tennessee’s Eastern District, agreed, ruling that Trump’s action “does not apply to defendant’s convictions for conspiracy to murder employees of the United States (Count 1), solicitation to commit a crime of violence (Count 2), and influencing a federal official by threat (Count 3).”
Varlan wrote that the pardon “does not encompass defendant’s Tennessee Case because this case involved separate offense conduct that was physically, temporally, and otherwise unrelated to defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case and/or events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Kelley’s plot “was separated from the defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case by years and miles” and could not reasonably be expected to be covered by Trump’s mass pardon, Varlan ruled.
“Trial evidence established that defendant took independent, volitional action to prepare for a violent attack against federal officials in Knoxville — actions that are causally attenuated from the events of January 6, 2021,” Varlan wrote. “His acquisition of firearms, ammunition, and explosive materials, coordination with Austin Carter and Christopher Roddy to train for combat, and his distribution of a list of targeted victims are all intervening actions taken without direct or proximate relation to January 6, 2021, though perhaps in relation to the investigation of conduct occurring on January 6, 2021 — a form of relation that is, as mentioned before, notably absent from the text of the pardon.”
