Trump supporters who bought his lies about the last election face reality in court

WASHINGTON — With just days left until the 2024 election, Donald Trump supporters who fell for his lies about fraud in the last election continue to face legal consequences for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, even as Trump managed to stave off his own criminal trial and again become the Republican presidential nominee.

On Friday afternoon, a young Trump supporter who stormed the Capitol faced sentencing inside a federal courthouse in Washington, just a few hundred feet from the crime scene. Caleb Berry, now 23, who stormed the Capitol along with members of the far-right Oath Keepers group, stood before the judge in a black shirt and apologized to everyone in the courtroom, and to the country.

Berry had pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding and cooperated with the government, testifying at two trials for fellow Oath Keepers. At one trial, Berry testified that Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs — who was convicted of seditious conspiracy — told a group of fellow members on the east front of the Capitol that they “were going to stop the vote count” before they formed a military stack and headed into the building “like a battering ram.”

While it might seem strange to say, Berry told the judge Friday, he is thankful to federal prosecutors for bringing the case against him, saying they gave him a “stern wake-up call” that took him off the “path of radicalization” he was on. Berry called his conduct “foolish” and said he let his emotions get the best of him because he thought he was doing something “for the greater good,” but he had now come to realize that was “entirely false.” Berry said he’ll regret his decisions “for the rest of my life.”

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who oversaw the trial of numerous Oath Keeper defendants — including founder Stewart Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy along with other members — said it is important for Americans to understand the seriousness of the evidence against the group, noting that he’d read some comments online disparaging the case. He spoke about the massive cache of weapons that the Oath Keepers had stashed across the river in Virginia in preparation for Jan. 6, weapons that Rhodes expressed regret over not bringing to the Capitol that day.“What this group did and planned for was violence,” Mehta said. “The words…