Oath Keepers approach the U.S. Capitol in “stack” formation, prosecutors say in this indictment of nine members. The arrow points to Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs.
Two weeks after a federal judge warned him to tone down his “bombastic” language and keep “fringe” views out of his court, a lawyer for two Oath Keepers members wrote a legal brief likening COVID-19 vaccines to the Holocaust.
Counsel for Oath Keepers Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs and member Kenneth Harrelson received an unmistakable instruction from U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta to not turn his courtroom into a forum for conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.
“The court will not allow this case to become a forum for bombastic arguments […] or propagating fringe views about COVID-19 or vaccinations,” Mehta wrote in a minute order, telling the Oath Keepers’ lawyers not to file a document with the proposed chapter heading “SCOTUS Could Not Have Foreseen the Holocaust.”
“To this court’s knowledge, the D.C. Department of Corrections does not require any person held there to accept a COVID-19 vaccine,” the order continued. “If that is the intended basis of Defendants’ motion, they must file a brief of no more than five pages (excluding exhibits) establishing such a mandatory policy before the court will accept a longer filing.”
The Oath Keepers’ lawyer Bradford L. Geyer originally requested permission to file a 129-page document. Judge Mehta kept him to a 45-page limit, which the attorney honored. But Geyer neither shelved the Shoah analogies that the judge flagged as “bombastic” nor dispensed with the “fringe” viewpoints.
In his legal brief, the lawyer criticized the 1905 Supreme Court decision of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which held more than a century ago that vaccine mandates are legal and constitutional.
“U.S. Courts afford almost mythical qualities to Jacobson—a decision issued before the genocide and Holocaust of WWII, horrors so profound that all civilized nations came together and promulgated Nuremberg protocols, unanimously adopted at every level of society and affirmed and reaffirmed in international law,” Geyer wrote.
The Nazi regime murdered six million Jews and millions of others belonging to persecuted groups. Yale researchers estimate that COVID-19 vaccines have saved some 279,000 lives as of this past July alone.
Drawing an analogy between the two, the Oath Keepers’ lawyer adopts the rallying cry for anti-genocide campaigners to signify that the Holocaust must never be repeated.
“The post-WWII world cried with a terrible cry, ‘Never again!’ yet courts have thus far spectacularly failed in their charge, and American jurisprudence must redeem itself in the face of great peril,” wrote Geyer, using the same language denounced by the Anti-Defamation League for “trivializing” the genocide.
The barbarism of Nazi medical experimentation on unwilling Jews and others—including high-altitude experiments, freezing experiments, malaria experiments, mustard gas experiments, poison experiments, forced sterilization, and other brutalities—inspired the Nuremberg Code principle of informed consent.
Invoking the history that led to the convictions of 16 Nazi doctors—seven of whom were executed—the Oath Keepers’ lawyer compared the regime’s medical experimentation to life-saving COVID-19 vaccines, the latter of which were approved in clinical trials on consenting people.
“Death camp survivors, some of whom were victims of involuntary experimentation, are keenly aware of what the 1905 Jacobson court could not have predicted: that when totalitarian regimes operate within a permissive environment, horrific outcomes are sure to result,” Geyer wrote.
The lawyer invoked totalitarianism in defense of clients associated with an extremist militia and accused of conspiring to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election as the democratically elected leader of the United States, in order to install the losing party, ex-President Donald Trump, for another term.
Geyer requested Meggs and Harrelson to be released to home confinement, on the grounds of preventing their inoculation against a virus that has killed more than 750,000 people in the United States.
Read the defense brief, below:
(Photo via court papers)