Kellye SoRelle Finds Out
Kellye SoRelle Finds Out
An intriguing but sad J6 defendant outcome.
There are 4,011 people listed in the MAGA Meltdown Maltego Graph and the 10th highest in terms of links is Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia. Much less well known is Kellye SoRelle, an attorney from Texas whom I learned today was not just the Oath Keepers counsel, she was also dating Rhodes. She just accepted a plea deal for her role in the January 6th attack.
This woman is the poster child for what not to do when dealing with groups of irregulars. Unpacking how she got to this point will provide a number of real world examples of things I’ve repeatedly and strongly advised against.
Attention Conservation Notice:
This is going to be a “something for everyone” sort of post. No matter if you’re advising or participating, attacking or defending, there is just so much to see in the episodes involving this woman. This is as close as it gets around here to a mandatory read.
Highlights:
Here are the articles I collected that mention SoRelle directly.
The chronology here is:
SoRelle and Rhodes meet spring of 2020.
Participation in Oath Keepers update call 2020-11-09.
Present for parking garage meeting 2021-01-05.
Advises destruction of chats 2021-01-07.
Undated breakfast with Rhodes and Mike Flynn associate Seth Keshel.
Undated travel to Michigan collecting affidavits on election fraud.
Participation in many group discussions on Signal.
Arrested 2022-09-01.
There are a couple things in the Kellye SoRelle plea deal article that make my hair stand on end.
Mehta last year found that SoRelle was not competent to stand trial because of an apparent mental illness and agreed to pause her case until she recuperated.
A public defender for SoRelle said her client is indigent.
The nature of SoRelle’s condition has never been made public, but look at this from her competence hearing.
Judge Mehta ordered the defendant to begin treatment near Junction, Tex., where she lives, while both sides searched for an inpatient hospital facility where she could be held for months to determine whether competence could be restored. The reports and the nature of SoRelle’s condition were not made public.
What sort of a mental condition would require an unpredictable period of time in an in-patient psychiatric facility in order to restore function? The only episodic condition I can think of that would lead to temporary incompetence is bipolar type 2.
If you’ve never encountered someone bipolar, when in a manic episode they don’t sleep very much, they’re emotionally very intense, and they have irrational levels of self confidence. This is something that comes up over and over in online social movement spaces, every year since 2011 I’ve seen at least one situation where someone experiencing mania makes an awful mess of things.
Conspiracy & Obstruction:
Rhodes had at least six months of knowing SoRelle before he brought her into the 2020-11-09 Oath Keepers update call. It sounds like they were intimate before the insurrection planning began. He had to have known something was amiss, but once the action started she was on the toboggan till the end of the ride.
SoRelle has a law degree and she may still have her bar card after all of this. It’s essentially impossible to get an attorney disbarred in Texas, unless they’re stealing from a client. She was acquainted with the concepts of both conspiracy and obstruction of justice. And yet she was counseling Rhodes and Oath Keepers in general, serving as liaison to various groups, and both she and Rhodes were using her phone to direct obstruction efforts after the attack failed.
Two of the four charges in her indictment are from Title 18 § 1512 Obstruction of Justice and are related to concealment after the crime.
Title 18 § 1512(k) Whoever conspires to commit any offense under this section shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense the commission of which was the object of the conspiracy.
Title 18 § 1512(b)(2)(A)-(B) cause or induce any person to—
(A) withhold testimony, or withhold a record, document, or other object, from an official proceeding;
(B) alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal an object with intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding;
I learned something here - namely that 18 § 1512(k) is a conspiracy statute. I had assumed I was going to find 18 § 371 Conspiracy being used, as conspiracy was implicitly mentioned in the reporting. I didn’t realize there were other statutes that covered this.
If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
If you’re a regular reader you have no doubt seen my periodic outbursts about not creating evidence in the first place, and definitely not deleting it after the fact. Had the Signal chat participants selected an eight hour message retention, the system would have purged messages before law enforcement had the chance to preserve them. That isn’t a flawless defense, there’d still be a mens rea angle to it, but without a way to start maybe it would never get to that point in the first place.
Exposure:
The reporting does not state when SoRelle began sliding into mania and we can only determine a “no later than” ending date based on when court proceedings resumed. What does she know that a prosecutor would want to know?
She was present for the Oath Keepers update on 2020-11-09. She will know what was said, what the mood of the attendees was, and she might have an invite list, or access to a recording of the call.
She was present in the parking garage on 2021-01-05, with Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers, Enrique Tarrio of Proud Boys, Bianca Gracia from Latinos for Trump, where Tarrio was also leader for Florida. There was a fifth individual who filmed the event and there’s a tall Caucasian guy who is obviously with them but I don’t know who he is.
She attended an undated breakfast with Stewart Rhodes and Seth Keshel, a known associate of Mike Flynn. This point really frustrates me, because I think I collected it before I knew much about the network of former military officers invoiced in the attack, so I don’t have an article that connects directly to that event. It’s not something made of whole cloth, it might be in the 337 pages of text from 1:22-cr-00015-APM, I’m just not sure of the provenance, and now it matters much more than it did when I first noticed it. (20 minutes later: There was mention of breakfast in the text messages, it’s not sufficient to support what I put on the graph. This is bugging me, the kind of bugging where I won’t stop until I get the particulars.)
She has documents and email from her work for both Oath Keepers and Latinos for Trump. These things would normally be under attorney client privilege, but they are discoverable due to the crime fraud exception.
Today’s Find:
Harry Litman has some coverage on today’s plea deal and it’s got a surprise in it.
If you start listening at 4:12 you’ll find Harry stating that she told people to “clam up”
and start deleting stuff during the Rhodes trial in 2022. I think Harry misspoke here, I think he means the activity in January of 2021. If she really did that in 2022 it’s a bit shocking and says a lot about her mental condition at the time. But her arrest did come at the start of September, 2022.
Another Find:
Today I learned that not only were SoRelle and Rhodes romantically involved, but that Enrique Tarrio was the head of Latinos for Trump in Florida. First, recall that IIB got rebooted a year ago specifically due to All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic, Especially Roger Stone. And take a look at this graph, which shows a confluence of domain names and IP addresses for some of the people using Stone’s Power 10 Twitter social botnet.
One of the people at the parking garage meeting was Latinos for Trump cofounder Bianca Gracia, who owns the Twitter account @BiancaforTexas. @RealLatinos4US is suspended but there is a useful capture of @RealLatinos4US in the Wayback Machine.
Here are the full set of accounts that were using that system.
AnitaStaver
annvandersteel
ArtHall19
BMcAdory9
breeadail
ChanelRion
ChantellEvon3
Chrismc44
FabMAGADiva
GrrrGraphics
HenryGrullon4
HispanicTrumpTX
HunterchickUSA
JeffreyPeck7
KarenLadybug1
MarcoGutierrez
MaryGraceMedia
MatStaver
mike_liuzzi
NatasjaYonce
RealLatinos4US
Realpersonpltcs
rhowardbrowne
ScottJeanSummer
shannonag21
sheikhazad
sthomasturnali
TheRightMelissa
thesteeltruth
TruthMattersUSA
WeAreAmericanos
I recognize Ann Vandersteel as a fellow traveler with Bill Mitchell, whom I nicknamed Boomer Beavis. Mitchell is, or at least was employed by Yippy, as was wannabe Secretary of Retribution Ivan Raiklin. Yippy funded the 2019 Digital Soldiers conference that Mike Flynn ducked due to Qanon friction.
OANN reporter Chanel Rion, seen here in Ukraine with Andriy Derkach and Rudy Giuliani, also played a role in the Arizona fraudit, operating with Christina Bobb. Evan Cochran faces attention from The 65 Project along with Bobb for the false declaration she authored, but which he signed, certifying there were no more classified documents at Mar A Lago. Rion only shows up in passing, but Christina Bobb is mentioned on 391 pages in the Arizona Cyberninjas FOIA Data.
Much of those pages are over 9,000 inane, chatty text messages with Cyberninjas CEO Doug Logan. There are tiny hints sprinkled all over, but you’d need to know what to look for in advance, or it would be a LONG slog to digest it.
Conclusion:
I’ve written quite a bit about the judgment and tradecraft necessary to avoid both criminal liability, and obstruction charges, should you goof on that first requirement somewhere along the path.
I think this post is likely to become frequently referenced canon for IIB. There’s just SO much that is SO drastically wrong in what Rhodes & SoRelle were doing here. The most gobsmacking thing is that BOTH of them are attorneys, and Rhodes was hobnobbing with current and former law enforcement.
There are 75 days until the election, then 76 days till the inauguration. Trump appears to be losing it, experiencing a combination of decompensation and dementia. There will be a little setback for Harris when RFK finally does withdraw, then she’ll have Trump foaming at the mouth during the debate in September and I expect a steady upwards trend from there.
Somewhere in these next 151 days things are going to cross from rhetorical, to conspiratorial, and then on into kinetic. Like I’ve been saying since 2017, We’re Gonna Fight.
If you’re looking for a bright spot in all this, the largest FBI investigation in history started January 6th, 2021. They had made 1,200 arrests by the third anniversary, that means 1,200 phones seized, 1,200 computers seized, 1,200 email accounts searched, all of that who talks to whom is already known. The FBI is known to have about 15,000 informant slots nationally and with that attack an bunch of dead end Islamophobic stuff got cut and a whole bunch of new players are circulating in right wing spaces. Given how Oath Keepers and Proud Boys performed the masses are utterly unprepared for that sort of attention.
And as for you, constant reader? Look all you want, but do your utmost to remain a silent observer. Sooner or later this is going to take a very ugly turn.