On May 25, 2023, federal prosecutors achieved a groundbreaking victory over domestic terrorism when Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This was not a foregone conclusion. Unlike 38 states, the federal government has no domestic terrorism statute, and proving the lesser charge of sedition has been difficult in the past. But a 54-page analysis of the case, based on hundreds of pages of court documents, shows how prosecutors, working closely with law enforcement, were able to obtain a seditious conspiracy conviction with an “upward departure”—a sentence that goes beyond the recommended term. Rhodes is now serving a 16-year prison term in the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Md.
The analysis was not published by the U.S. government, a think tank, or an NGO. It was written by Maya Fernandez-Powell, a Georgetown University graduate student, in partial fulfillment of her Master’s in Applied Intelligence degree at the University’s School of Continuing Studies.
“This trial represents a legal breakthrough for the U.S. Government, as it broke precedent with decades of challenges and failures in convicting right-wing extremists for seditious conspiracy,” Fernandez-Powell wrote in her thesis, or Capstone. “Rhodes’s conviction set a new precedent and revealed that right-wing extremists could receive heavy sentences for their attempts to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power. Rhodes’s case paved the way for other Jan. 6 right-wing extremist leaders to be convicted and handed heavy sentences on seditious conspiracy charges.”
Fernandez-Powell’s advisor on the project was Rhian McCoy, P.h.D., who taught Fernandez-Powell in her Unconventional Threats and Counterterrorism course.
“I really enjoyed working on this with Maya,” McCoy says. “She’s sort of a professor’s dream: self-motivated, and her work ethic is undeniable, because anyone who’s done a long writing project, you know it can be a grind. But she persevered and had tenacity and delivered a really sophisticated, polished product with great professionalism.”
A Longtime Interest in Human Rights
Fernandez-Powell graduated in 2022 from Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where her senior thesis compared the rhetoric of far-right leaders in Western and Eastern Europe on the issues of immigration and democracy. A three-time All-League soccer player for the Georgetown Women’s Soccer team, she served as captain and contributed to four Big East titles.
Soccer and the disruption of the Covid pandemic are what led her to graduate school at Georgetown. All she needed was to find a program that dovetailed with her interest in extremist groups and human rights.
In the Applied Intelligence program, she discovered a field that dealt with these issues but approached them somewhat differently than the human rights groups she had studied since high school. Now, instead of other undergrads, her classmates included professionals from the military, law enforcement, and national security.
“The Applied Intelligence program was definitely different than what I studied in undergrad,” Fernandez-Powell says. “I hadn’t specialized in intelligence, but I had always been fascinated by how U.S. national security policy intersects with human rights and the other issues I explored.”
A Global Perspective
While a graduate student, Fernandez-Powell worked for the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights First and wrote several human rights reports. Among them is Dismantling Democracy, which was published in May 2024 after she traveled to Hungary and interviewed civil society leaders, human rights lawyers, journalists, and others who are alarmed by the autocratic leadership of Prime Minister Victor Orbán.
In May 2024, Fernandez-Powell received a Tropaia award for her outstanding work in the Applied Intelligence program. She is now a student at Georgetown Law Center, which makes her a “triple Hoya.”
Her supervisor at Human Rights First said he had mixed feelings about that move.
“I’m less than thrilled that you’ve left Human Rights First because you were an excellent (and I don’t say that lightly) researcher and colleague,” Brian Dooley, the group’s Senior Advisor, wrote on her LinkedIn page when she announced that she was going to law school. “Come back to this world when you’ve done the law degree: we need you.”
Fernandez-Powell says she is bringing to Georgetown Law a wealth of skills and knowledge she learned in the Applied Intelligence program, including the kind of precise writing and communications skills that are essential to the field.
Moving from the subject of human rights research to the related but distinct world of intelligence gathering and analysis “was a little out of my comfort zone,’ she says. “But I could see the connection. Human rights and U.S. national security are not mutually exclusive, but rather can be and should be intertwined.”
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