Potential NC witnesses loom large in Jan. 6 sedition cases against extremist groups

As the federal crackdown on the Proud Boys’ and the Oath Keepers’ roles in the Capitol riot continued to deepen this week, two North Carolina members of the targeted extremist groups loom as key witnesses in the prosecution.

Proud Boys member Charles “Yut Yut” Donohoe of Kernersville and William Todd Wilson, an Oath Keeper from Newton Grove, have already pleaded guilty to related offenses and agreed to cooperate with the government.

Both, according to court documents, were high-ranking members of their respective groups and privy to the planning and events of Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to protest his election loss to Joe Biden.

On Monday, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four of his top lieutenants were indicted and charged with seditious conspiracy and other crimes tied to the attack. The sedition charges, the most serious filed so far in the sprawling criminal investigation that has led to almost 850 arrests, carry a maximum 20-year sentence.

They were announced three days before the start of televised hearings of a special Jan. 6 House committee, which has been investigating the insurrection for the past 11 months.

The indictment alleges that Proud Boys leaders conspired to overturn the government by stopping congressional certification of Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election. Fueled by Trump’s unfounded claims of vote fraud, hundreds of his supporters mobbed the Capitol, smashing windows, breaking down doors, overwhelming police guarding the building and sending members of Congress fleeing for safety.

Five deaths have been linked to the violence. Some 140 police offers were injured. About $1.5 million in damages to the Capitol occurred.

Donohoe, the N.C. president of the Proud Boys and a former Marine, was charged with Tarrio and the others in an earlier indictment but accepted a plea deal in April. According to documents in his case, Donohoe was a member of an inner circle of Proud Boys members who planned and directed the group’s effort to oppose “the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” on Jan. 6.

Seditious conspiracy, according to the U.S. Code, is defined, in part, as a plan “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law.”

Monday’s indictment against the Proud Boys is only the second time sedition charges has been lodged by the U.S. Justice Department in its prosecution of the Capitol attackers, the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history.

In January, prosecutors also handed down a seditious-conspiracy indictment against 10 members of the the Oath Keepers, a right-wing group whose members include current and former military and law enforcement officers. All previously swore an oath to protect the country from “enemies foreign and domestic.”

Another group of Oath Keepers, including former High Point police Officer Laura Steele, has been charged in a separate indictment.

Wilson, who lives about 170 miles east of Charlotte, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in May. On Jan. 6, he was the first of the Oath Keeper conspirators to breach the Capitol. He then joined other members of the mob to pry open the Rotunda doors from the inside to allow more rioters inside, prosecutors say.

Afterward, according to court documents, Wilson was in a private suite at a Washington hotel with other Oath Keepers when the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, made a phone call and repeatedly urged the unidentified person who picked up to tell Trump to issue a call for the Oath Keepers and similar groups to forcibly resist the defeated president’s ouster.

The individual refused to let Rhodes talk to Trump directly, documents show. After the call ended, Rhodes told the group, “I just want to fight.”

The House hearings on Jan. 6

Some legal experts say the new filing against the Proud Boys indicates a broadening effort by the Justice Department to explore possible ties between Trump and the White House to the planning and execution of the riot.

“It shows that [the] DOJ is eliciting useful information from witnesses and especially cooperating defendants that they are using to make additional cases,” former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance told Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.

“The question is whether they will be able to move above this level to people in and around the White House and show a conspiracy or at least communication between them. The Jan. 6 Committee certainly seems to think it’s there.”

Trump’s role in spurring the attack is expected to be the centerpiece of the televised hearings by the House committee beginning Thursday night.

“We cannot leave the violence of Jan. 6th — and its causes — uninvestigated,” U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said at the start of the probe.

“The American people deserve the full and open testimony of every person with knowledge of the planning and preparation for Jan. 6th,” said Cheney, one of only two Republicans who agreed to join the committee’s investigation.

“We must know what happened here at the Capitol. We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House – every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.”

At least 23 North Carolinians have been arrested in connection to the violence. They range in age from 19 to 64 and include an avowed white supremacist, a Pilot Mountain couple who took their 14-year-old son inside the Capitol during the riot, and a Sylva tea shop owner, among others.

Other defendants with N.C. ties include:

▪ Billy Knutson, a former North Carolina rapper now living in South Dakota, who prosecutors say wrote lyrics based on the Capitol violence and used video he shot inside the building on Jan. 6 in his music videos.

▪ Cleveland Meredith of Hayesville, who prosecutors said drove to Washington heavily armed but arrived too late to take part in the Jan. 6 rallies supporting Trump. He was later arrested and charged with sending a text on Jan. 7 to a Georgia family member in which Meredith said he was “thinking about heading over to Pelosi (expletive’s) speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV.”

Meredith pleaded guilty in September to interstate communication of threats and was sentenced to 28 months in prison.

This story was originally published June 8, 2022 at 6:20 AM with the headline "Potential NC witnesses loom large in Jan. 6 sedition cases against extremist groups."

Michael Gordon

The Charlotte Observer

704-358-5095

Michael Gordon has been the Observer’s legal affairs writer since 2013. He has been an editor and reporter at the paper since 1992, occasionally writing about schools, religion, politics and sports. He spent two summers as “Bikin Mike,” filing stories as he pedaled across the Carolinas.