Jessica Watkins: Oath Keepers member and Army veteran sentenced to 8.5 years in prison for January 6

Jessica Watkins, an Army veteran and member of the far-right Oath Keepers, was sentenced Friday to 8.5 years in prison for participating in a plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election culminating in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Judge Amit Mehta said Watkins’ efforts at the Capitol were “aggressive” and said she did not have immediate remorse, even though she has since apologized.

“Your role that day was more aggressive, more assaultive, more purposeful than perhaps others’. And you led others to fulfill your purposes,” Mehta said. “And there was not in the immediate aftermath any sense of shame or contrition, just the opposite. Your comments were celebratory and lacked a real sense of the gravity of that day and your role in it.”

At trial, prosecutors showed evidence that Watkins founded and led a small militia in Ohio and mobilized her group in coordination with the Oath Keepers to Washington, DC, on January 6. Watkins and her counterparts ultimately marched in tactical gear to the Capitol and encouraged other rioters to push past police outside the Senate chamber.

“I was just another idiot running around the hallway,” Watkins told the court before the sentence was handed down Friday. “But idiots are responsible, and today you are going to hold this idiot responsible.”

Two of Watkins’ codefendants, Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs, were sentenced Thursday to 18 and 12 years in prison, respectively, for seditious conspiracy.

Unlike Rhodes and Meggs, Watkins was acquitted of the top charge of seditious conspiracy, but convicted of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding – which carries the same 20-year maximum prison sentence as seditious conspiracy – as well as other felony charges.

“Nobody would suggest you are Stewart Rhodes, and I don’t think you…