Alabama Man Convicted of Seditious Conspiracy in US Capitol Riot

An Alabama man affiliated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia group pleaded guilty Wednesday to seditious conspiracy for his actions leading up and through the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, making him the first person involved in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol to be convicted of the rarely used charge.

The sentencing guideline range for Joshua A. James, who also pleaded guilty to a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, was estimated to be from 7¼ to nine years in prison.

The 34-year-old from Arab, Alabama, acknowledged getting into a physical altercation with a police officer while inside the Capitol and participating in a plan to use force to hinder or delay the transfer of presidential power. James also agreed to cooperate with authorities investigating the riot, including testifying before a grand jury.

Authorities say James and others affiliated with the group rode golf carts to the Capitol, moved through the crowd in a military-style “stack” formation and went into the building.

James was accused of pushing past officers who tried to stop rioters from moving toward the Rotunda, joining others who confronted officers, and profanely proclaiming the building was his. A week before the riot, James said in an encrypted chat that he believed teams within the militia group were adequately armed, prosecutors said in court records.

While four other people connected with the Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to obstruction of Congress and a lesser conspiracy charge, James is the first among the 11 people associated with the group to plead guilty to a seditious conspiracy charge.

The seditious conspiracy prosecution is the boldest publicly known attempt so far by the government to prosecute those who attacked the U.S. Capitol. The group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, and others have pleaded not guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges. A seditious conspiracy conviction carries a maximum penalty of 20 years, compared with five years on the lesser conspiracy charge facing other group members.

Those charged with seditious conspiracy are accused of working together to use force to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power. Authorities say participants discussed their plans in encrypted chats, traveled to the nation’s capital from across the country, organized into teams, used military tactics, stashed weapons in case they felt they were needed, and communicated with each other during the riot.

Prosecutors say the group set up a “quick reaction force,” or QRF, that kept guns at a hotel in nearby Arlington, Virginia, and were prepared to bring the weapons into Washington if Rhodes or associates believed the need arose. Days before the attack, one defendant suggested getting a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River. In the end, the QRF teams didn’t bring guns into Washington.

At the Capitol, Oath Keepers marched in two teams in stack formation, with team members advancing forward with one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them.

More than 750 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. Over 220 riot defendants have pleaded guilty, more than 100 have been sentenced, and at least 90 others have trial dates.

The longest prison sentence handed down so far to a Jan. 6 rioter was given to Robert Palmer of Largo, Florida.

Palmer, who was sentenced to 5½ years in prison, acknowledged hurling a wooden plank at officers protecting a Capitol entrance, spraying a fire extinguisher, and then throwing it when it was done.

The attack resulted in the deaths of five people, including a police officer. More than 100 officers were injured. Rioters caused over $1 million in damage.

Supreme Court Sides With GOP in Alabama Election Map Case

Washington — 

The Supreme Court on Monday put on hold a lower court ruling that Alabama must draw new congressional districts before the 2022 elections to increase Black voting power. The high court order boosts Republican chances to hold six of the state’s seven seats in the House of Representatives.

The court’s action, by a 5-4 vote, means the upcoming elections will be conducted under a map drawn by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature that contains one majority-Black district, represented by a Black Democrat, in a state in which more than a quarter of the population is Black.

A three-judge lower court, including two judges appointed by former President Donald Trump, had ruled that the state had likely violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black voters by not creating a second district in which they made up a majority, or close to it.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito, part of the conservative majority, said the lower court acted too close to the 2022 election cycle.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined his three more liberal colleagues in dissent.

The justices will at some later date decide whether the map produced by the state violates the landmark voting rights law, a case that could call into question “decades of this Court’s precedent about Section 2 of the VRA,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent.

That decision presumably will govern elections in 2024 through the end of the decade in Alabama and could affect minority political representation elsewhere in the country, too.

Alabama lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional districts following the results of the 2020 census. Several groups of voters sued, arguing that the new maps diluted the voting power of Black residents.

In a unanimous ruling in late January, the three judges said that the groups were likely to succeed in showing that the state had violated the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the panel ordered lawmakers to redraw the districts so Black voters would be a majority, or close to it, in two districts, not one. The ruling ran more than 200 pages.

The panel wrote that “we do not regard the question … as a close one.”

Alabama asked the Supreme Court to put the ruling on hold while it appeals, and the justices agreed. The state argued that it drew the new map guided by race-neutral principles and that the new map is similar to past maps.

More than a dozen mostly Republican-led states had filed a brief urging the justices to side with Alabama and allow it to use the maps it originally drew.

Deuel Ross, a lawyer for Alabamians who sued, called the state’s congressional districts “a textbook case of a Voting Rights Act violation” and said the high court’s decision to intervene is disheartening.

The facts are clear, Ross, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “Alabama’s current congressional map violates the Voting Rights Act,” he said. “The litigation will continue, and we are confident that Black Alabamians will eventually have the congressional map they deserve — one that fairly represents all voters.”

Roberts, who typically votes against consideration of race, wrote that he shares some of Alabama’s concerns, but still would have let the redrawn districts govern the 2022 election and have future elections governed by the ultimate outcome in the case.

Kavanaugh, writing to explain his vote, stressed that the court has repeatedly declined in the past to change the rules close to an election.

“When an election is close at hand, the rules of the road must be clear and settled. Late judicial tinkering with election laws can lead to disruption and to unanticipated and unfair consequences for candidates, political parties, and voters, among others. It is one thing for a State on its own to toy with its election laws close to a State’s elections. But it is quite another thing for a federal court to swoop in and re-do a State’s election laws in the period close to an election,” he wrote in an opinion Alito joined.

Taking issue with Kavanaugh, Kagan noted that the lower court ruled months before any votes will be cast.

She criticized the conservatives for using the emergency application process known as the shadow docket “to signal or make changes in the law, without anything approaching full briefing and argument.”

US Agencies Probe Migrant Exploitation in Alabama Chicken Industry

Enterprise, Ala. — 

At least three federal agencies last year began investigating working conditions for migrants in this growing southern hub for the U.S. poultry industry, according to people familiar with the probes.

The agencies have been looking for evidence of exploitation of Hispanic migrants in the area after an unusually large number of unaccompanied minors were released from federal shelters to sponsor families here last year, these people told Reuters.

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services probe focused on whether minors were falling victim to traffickers exploiting them for labor, three sources familiar with the investigations said. While investigators have discovered no evidence of child trafficking, they found “exploitative” working conditions for some migrants, the sources added, without providing more details.

The U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, for their part, have also investigated staffing and work conditions in the area, people familiar with those probes told Reuters. None of the probes have yet led to criminal charges or civil penalties, and it’s unclear whether they will.

Spokespeople at the three agencies declined to comment on ongoing investigations. Some details of the probes were first reported by Bloomberg Law.

The investigations follow worries among federal employees overseeing the release of unaccompanied minors caught crossing the Mexican border into the United States. These officials were concerned by the growing number of kids headed to Enterprise, where poultry farms and processing plants offer high demand for employment.

Reuters on Monday profiled one recently arrived Guatemalan minor who uses false identification to work at one plant near Enterprise. The teen found a job with ease, forgoing school as she races to repay debts to smugglers who got her across the U.S. border.

The U.S. government has been on heightened alert for trafficking of migrant minors into the poultry industry since 2014, when authorities discovered Guatemalan teens working without pay and living in ramshackle trailers at an Ohio egg farm.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees Homeland Security Investigations, has said under President Joe Biden that it is shifting its enforcement focus at places of work. Instead of arresting workers for immigration violations, it is targeting employers who exploit undocumented migrants.

Poultry industry workers in and around Enterprise told Reuters that migrants, including minors, easily obtain fake credentials and supply those to staffing firms who help them find work in area plants.

The firms, they said, sometimes dock workers’ pay for services, including transportation to and from the workplace, and deny them benefits like overtime pay, sick days, time off and medical coverage.

Labor law experts say large poultry processors at times have relied on staffing firms to avoid liability for hiring undocumented laborers. The staffing firms, as the direct employers, by law become responsible for vetting applicants and determining if they are allowed to work.

A previous federal investigation into the hiring of poultry workers in Alabama led to criminal convictions last October.

The federal trial in northern Alabama illustrated abusive practices by one staffing firm there and how lucrative the migrant-recruiting business can be. The jury convicted a married couple, Deivin and Crystal Escalante, on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to transport migrants illegally.

According to court documents and transcripts from the trial, the Escalantes supplied undocumented workers, including several minors, to a plant owned by Mar-Jac Poultry Inc. in Jasper, Alabama.

The Escalantes pleaded not guilty and are now awaiting sentencing. They referred questions to Gregory Reid, Deivin’s lawyer. Reid told Reuters that Mar-Jac contracted the couple because of their connections in the local Hispanic community.

Mar-Jac, based in Gainesville, Georgia, hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. Linda Cox, Mar-Jac’s human resources manager, said the poultry processor cooperated in the investigation and “had a written contract with the contractor requiring lawful workers.”

In trial testimony, Deivin Escalante said that Mar-Jac paid the couple $175 per day for each worker. The Escalantes then paid employees around $120 a day, he said. Over three years, the couple received over $16 million in revenue from Mar-Jac, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Before federal agents arrested the couple in October 2020, the Escalantes bought multiple properties and luxury cars.