The trial of the Oath Keepers for Sedition was broken into two groups. David Moerschel was in the second group. Stuart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, and 3 others were in the first group.
The prosecution allegedly tampered with evidence in the first Oath Keeper trial (the one with Stuart Rhodes) and withheld a key witness from the defense.
The evidence is video footage from the Small House Rotunda (SHR), where Oath Keepers were protecting Officer Harry Dunn. The prosecution alleged that the Oath Keepers were not protecting Officer Dunn but rather hindering and intimidating him. There was a amateur journalist named Stephen Horn that was taking video in the Small House Rotunda while the Oath Keepers were there.
Stephen Horn met with the FBI in early 2021 and indicated to the FBI that he saw the Oath Keepers protecting Dunn in the SHR. Horn offered the FBI his unedited, high resolution video footage of the Capitol on Jan 6. The FBI declined saying they already had his video footage. Note especially that by early 2021 the FBI already had Horn's unedited video of the Oath Keepers in the Capitol.
When the first trial group went to trial in late 2022, the prosecution presented the defense a clip of Horn's video of the SHR, but it cut off right before you could see the Oath Keepers helping Officer Dunn. The clip itself is 48 seconds long, however, 10 seconds into the clip the video frame freezes while the video itself continues to run another 38 seconds.
The footage provided by the prosecution had strange characteristics that, on forensic analysis, leads to the suggestion that the footage was tampered with. Watch the video below:
In addition to the the actual video evidence of tampering, when the file the prosecution provided was examined in video editing software, even more forensic evidence of tampering emerged.
Circle 1 shows a video file frame by frame if you stretched it out from beginning to end. Notice that the first half of the video file has actual video footage. The second half is green. That should not be green. It should contain actual video footage. A video file will never look like that unless it was tampered with.
Circle 2 shows what the frame looks like at a point milliseconds before it enters the green area. Notice how the frame is all chopped up and has confused squares containing random images. That also will never happen without being tampered with.
Recall that over a year before the trial, the FBI told Stephen Horn that they had his unedited footage already. So the prosecution had the whole sequence of the Oath Keepers in the SHR.
The Oath Keeper trials lacked the benefit of Stephen Horn's footage. Below is the same footage from Horn that he himself edited to provide context and evidence of what he observed:
The prosecution allegedly withheld the knowledge of Stephen Horn as a witness of what transpired in the SHR. They made use of the defense knowledge gap to claim the Oath Keepers were not helping Officer Dunn (in Trial 1) and that the Oath Keepers were looking for Nancy Pelosi (in Trial 2). The defense became aware of this footage and witness only through an outside researcher in March of 2023, after both Trial 1 and 2 were concluded.
Prosecution Had Motive To Tamper With Evidence
In the first Oath Keeper Trial, the prosecution had motive to suppress exculpatory evidence from the SHR that the Oath Keepers were protecting Officer Dunn. The prosecution made a central point in trial 1 that the Oath Keepers were not protecting but hindering and intimidating Dunn. They called two witnesses: Officer Dunn and David Lazarus. Both of them them testified against the Oath Keepers.
However, investigative journalist Steve Baker has uncovered evidence that also suggests these two men allegedly perjured themselves. Below are Steve Baker's three video reports:
Youtube has marked the above video as age sensitive, which makes it harder to view. Click here to view it without restriction.
In the second Oath Keeper trial, the prosecution did not use Harry Dunn and David Lazarus again. Instead, they claimed that the Oath Keepers went looking for Nancy Pelosi. The defense was able to establish that there was no video evidence that showed the Oath Keepers moved out of the Small House Rotunda. However, there was no video evidence of the Oath Keepers in the SHR. The defense had to argue using "absence of evidence" instead of actual exculpatory evidence of their time and conduct in the SHR, which Stephen Horn's video and his testimony would have proved.
On on Feb 6, 2025, Stephen Horn posted on Twitter/X confirming that he observed the Oath Keepers protecting Harry Dunn. His witness would have been invaluable exculpatory evidence at trial. See the image below:
