Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges moved on Thursday to block the release of Robert Rundo — the purported founder of a Southern California-based militant white supremacist group — a day after a lower court judge dismissed the criminal case Rundo was facing while accusing prosecutors of failing to pursue similar charges against “Antifa” members.
U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney ordered Rundo’s release on Wednesday, after ruling that federal prosecutors engaged in “selective prosecution” by pursuing suspected “far-right, white supremacist nationalists” but not “Antifa and other extremist, far-left groups.”
It wasn’t immediately clear if the appellate judges — who have blocked previous attempts by Judge Carney to dismiss the case — moved fast enough to actually stop Rundo from being released from lockup. The Federal Bureau of Prisons websites lists Rundo as being released on Wednesday. But prosecutors did not immediately respond to questions about Rundo’s current custody status.
Rundo, a 33-year-old Huntington Beach resident, is described by prosecutors as the founding member of the Rise Above Movement, a “combat ready, militant group” of white supremacists and “serial rioters.” Rundo was charged with recruiting and training others to take part in violence alongside him at political rallies in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley.
Hours after Judge Carney dismissed the charges against Rundo and ordered him released, federal prosecutors filed an emergency motion with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Prosecutors argued that with no bond conditions or travel constraints, Rundo once freed would be an “extreme flight risk” who would likely flee the United States for a non-extradition country before Judge Carney’s ruling could be appealed.
Rundo has “many foreign contacts” and “has traveled extensively to foreign countries to evade arrest,” prosecutors alleged in their written motion to the appellate court.
Prior to his arrest on the federal charges, prosecutors wrote that Rundo traveled to Ukraine, Germany and Italy in order to meet with members of white supremacist groups.
After the arrest of several co-defendants, prosecutors say Rundo once again flew to Ukraine, only to be located in London a few days later and sent back to the United States. Days later, prosecutors wrote, Rundo tried to book a flight to Moscow, but was denied boarding. So, prosecutors added, Rundo crossed the border into Mexico, flew to Cuba, Guatemala and finally El Salvador, where he was taken into custody and extradited to the United States to face his own indictment.
In 2019, Judge Carney threw out the charges against Rundo, ruling that the Anti-Riot act, which Rundo was charged under, was too broad in regulating free speech. That ruling was overruled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the criminal case was allowed to move forward.
But prosecutors say that in the period between the charges being dismissed and reinstated, Rundo fled the country, “utilized false identification documents” and ultimately ended up in Romania, where he was caught and once again extradited back to the United States.
Judge Carney in his ruling this week acknowledged that Rundo and other suspected Rise Above Movement members “openly promoted ideas the court finds reprehensible, and likely committed violence for which they deserve to be prosecuted.”
But, the judge also wrote that “by many accounts” members of “Antifa and other related far-left groups engaged in worse conduct and in fact instigated much of the violence that broke out” at the political rallies. The judge chastised prosecutors for not prosecuting members of far-left extremist groups who “went to the same protest and rallies and engaged in the same violent acts as alleged against the defendants in this case.”
Prosecutors acknowledged that counter-protestors potentially tied to left-wing groups were also arrested at the rallies. However, prosecutors argued, unlike the Rise Above Movement members, there was no evidence that the left-wing protester’s “coordinated group efforts to amplify their violent impact, let alone that they trained together to engage in combat fighting, used social media to recruit soldiers or traveled to multiple protests to assault people.”
The brief 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order temporarily blocking Rundo’s release from federal lockup gave no hint of whether or not the appellate judges will once again overrule Judge Carney and reinstate the criminal charges.
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