THE “OATH KEEPERS” AND JANUARY 6^TH, PART II

 

                                  …The Republican Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark)

 

In December 2020, the Oath Keeper’s leader wrote: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

 

Months before the 2020 election, Trump was suggesting the need to use an old Civil War Law.  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) also penned a New York Times opinion piece urging the use of the rarely used Civil War’s Insurrections Law if needed.

But after the nation had watched disturbing images of federal agents using tear gas to disperse peaceful protesters near the White House, government officials, including the defense secretary, Mark Esper, publicly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act any time for dealing with protests or rioters.

But Trump didn’t let the issue go, declaring later that Summer that he was still considering the law.  Other Trump supporters, like his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, had issued similar calls for Trump to consider declaring “martial law”.

“Our country’s going to change,” Trump said. “We’re not supposed to go in, unless we call it an Insurrection. But you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have to look at it.”

That message resonated with some of Trump’s most fervent supporters, particularly those extreme Oath Keepers.

“Whatever you think of him, the president’s words were taken by the more organized and hardened extremists as a call to action,” said Levin of California State University.  Trump’s public flirtation with the Insurrection Act fit into what Levin said was a longer, disturbing trend among far-right extremists who oppose the government.

In the 1990s, such “insurrectionist doctrine” was centered largely on a perceived threat to the Second Amendment right to own guns, and more radical advocates declared they would use violence to defend gun ownership, Levin said.

But over time, extremists brought the same logic to all sorts of issues, from federal land regulations to coronavirus restrictions and, in late 2020, to refusing to accept Biden’s electoral victory.

“Insurrectionist doctrine has morphed into a much broader argument that now tries to justify violent aggression against the routine functioning of government,” Levin said. “Last year, it was used as a dagger to interfere with the constitutional and peaceful transfer of power. That’s extraordinarily troubling, and the kind of conduct we only see in authoritarian regimes.”

By December 2020, Rhodes was explicitly tying his radical notions of a looming civil war to Trump’s decision about whether to invoke the law.

“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, wrote fellow Oath Keeper members, according to court documents.  Rhodes wrote: “Too late for that. Prepare your mind. body. spirit.”

Four days later, when The Associated Press (AP) and other news outlets declared the Democrat Joe Biden the winner, the documents say Rhodes told the Oath Keepers to “refuse to accept it and march en-masse on the nation’s Capitol.”

The recent indictment of Rhodes and 10 other members or associates was stunning in part because federal prosecutors, after a year of investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, charged them with seditious conspiracy.  That is the rarely-used Civil War-era statute reserved for only the most serious of political criminals.

But the documents also show how quickly Trump’s most fervent and dangerous supporters mobilized to subvert the election results through force and violence, even though there was no widespread election fraud and Trump’s Cabinet and local election officials said the vote had been free and fair.

Hundreds of people have been charged in the violent effort to stop the congressional certification of Biden’s victory.  Many were animated by Trump’s speech at a rally near the White House, just before the riot, where he said: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

 

                            …The Oath Keepers are a serious, armed, militia group

But for Rhodes and others, there was no need for Trump’s words of encouragement. Action was already planned.

The Oath Keeper’s members pledge to “fulfill the oath all military and police take to ‘defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’” and to defend the U.S. Constitution, according to its website.

Their group’s motto is: “Not on our watch!”

The Oath Keepers had engaged in a series of confrontations with the government during the 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The most notable was an armed standoff against the federal government at Bundy Ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada.

Then, when Trump was elected in 2016, while Rhodes insisted the Oath Keepers were nonpartisan, they came to the nation’s capital in January 2017, when Trump took office, to protect peaceful “American patriots” from “radical leftists.”

“During this time, Rhodes became increasingly conspiratorial, adopting and peddling a number of fringe right-wing conspiracy theories with the assistance of his friend Alex Jones, ”according to the book, Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group,” by University at Albany assistant professor Sam Jackson.  Alex Jones is a well-known conspiracy theorist and the “Infowars” host. 

When it looked like Trump was going to lose the 2020 presidential election to Biden, the Oath Keepers got to work, federal prosecutors have stated.

On Nov. 9, 2020, Rhodes instructed his followers during a GoToMeeting call to go to Washington to let Trump know “that the people are behind him,” and he expressed hope that Trump would call up the militia to help stay in power, the authorities say.

“It will be a bloody and desperate fight,” Rhodes warned. “We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”

The Oath Keepers worked as if they were going to war, discussing their weapons and their training.  Days before the attack on the Capitol, one defendant had suggested in a text message getting a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to their “waiting arms,” prosecutors say.

On Dec. 14, 2020, as the electors in the states cast their votes, Rhodes published a letter on the Oath Keepers’ website “advocating for the use of force to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

As that transition in Washington drew close, Oath Keepers spoke of an arsenal they would keep just a few minutes away for grabbing if needed. Rhodes is also accused of spending $15,500 on firearms and related equipment including shotguns, AR-15’s, mounts, triggers, scopes and magazines.

“Everyone coming has their own technical equipment and knows how to use it,” wrote Edward Vallejo, who is a member that was also charged in the conspiracy.

Oath Keepers staged the guns in hotels just outside of the District of Columbia.  Rhodes said they were “QRFs”, that’s military-speak for “quick reaction force”.

On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Oath Keepers’, Vallejo and others were on a podcast discussing the possibility of armed conflict.  The members turned up as a group, wearing camouflaged combat attire and in helmets. They entered the Capitol with the large crowds of rioters who had stormed past police barriers and smashed windows, injuring dozens of officers and sending lawmakers running.

The indictment against Rhodes alleges Oath Keepers formed two teams, or “stacks,” a military term. The first stack split up inside the building to separately go after the House and the Senate. The second stack confronted officers inside the Capitol Rotunda, the indictment says.

Other Trump supporters were getting in the fray, too.

The building was eventually breached. The congressional certification had been stopped.  Rumors circulated that the left-wing Antifa had breached our seat of American democracy. “Nope. I’m right here, these are Patriots,” Rhodes wrote to his leadership group in a secure chat.

“All I see Trump doing is complaining,” Rhodes wrote. “I see no attempt by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it in their own hands. They’ve had enough.”

One of the Oath Keeper “stacks” hunted for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but could not find her.  Members of Congress were cowering behind doors in fear and Pelosi had been taken to a secure location.  The siege continued for hours, until law enforcement finally gained control.  “We are acting like the founding fathers” one Oath Keeper wrote in the throes of the melee. “Can’t stand down.”

Jon Ryan Schaffer, an Oath Keeper was the first defendant to plead guilty in the Jan. 6 melee.  Schaffer also agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation and the Justice Department has promised to consider putting him in the witness security program, suggesting it saw him as a valuable cooperator in the probe.

Other cracks in the group are showing. Before his arrest, Rhodes sought to distance himself from those who have been arrested, insisting the members went rogue and there was never a plan to enter the Capitol.  There was discord among the group as early as the night of the attack.  Someone identified in the records only as “Person Eleven” blasted the group, calling it: “a huge fucking joke” and they called Rhodes “the dumbass I heard you were,” the court documents say.

After the riot, the North Carolina Oath Keepers branch said it was splitting from Rhodes’ group.  Its president told the local, The News Reporter newspaper it wouldn’t be “a part of anything that terrorizes anybody or goes against law enforcement.”

A leader of an Arizona chapter also slammed Rhodes and those facing charges, saying on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the attack “goes against everything we’ve ever taught…everything we believe in.”

The Oath Keepers are having money troubles as well. The group lost the ability to process any credit card payments online after the company demanded that Rhodes disavow the arrested members and Rhodes refused.  Rhodes said in a March interview for the far-right website Gateway Pundit.  “People are being instructed instead to mail in applications and dues.”

For a long time, it didn’t look as though Rhodes would be charged by the DOJ.  More than a dozen of his members were arrested on conspiracy accusations, and Rhodes was referred to in their indictments as “Person #One.”

But as the months wore on it seemed increasingly unlikely anyone would face anything more serious like “sedition”.  That term is for when two or more people in the United States. conspire to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.

That’s due in part because such charges are rarely used and are hard to win. The last time U.S. prosecutors brought a seditious conspiracy case was in 2010 in the alleged Michigan plot by members of the Hutaree militia to incite an uprising against the state government.  But a judge ordered acquittals on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial.  The last successful prosecution was in 1995 when an Egyptian cleric and nine followers were convicted of seditious conspiracy and other charges in a plot to blow up the United Nations, the local FBI’s building, and two tunnels and a bridge linking New York and New Jersey.

The Jan 6th investigation has been long and tedious. The FBI is still looking for suspects and agents have combed through a mountain of pages of evidence to link people with images from the day.

So far, more than 700 people have been charged. Most face lower-level crimes of entering a restricted building.  However, about 150 people have been charged with assaulting police officers at the Capitol.  And members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, have been indicted on simple conspiracy charges that would bring five years behind bars if convicted.

But Rhodes was arrested by a judge that ordered him held in custody.  After his hearing, his lawyers said he entered a not guilty plea and plans to fight the charges against him.

The author of the Oath Keepers book, said Rhodes has been good at staying out of trouble in the past, but his public rhetoric became much more inflammatory leading up to Jan. 6 attack.  “This is entirely speculation on my part, but perhaps Rhodes felt like he would no longer get the attention that he needed if he continued to be moderate and had to become more inflammatory in his rhetoric,” he said.

This issue is far from being over, and the ending probably won’t come for many months, maybe years.

(This 2 Part article was due to contributions from Associate Press (AP) reporters: Michael Kunzelman, Jacques Billeaud, Lindsay Whitehurst, Alanna Durkin Richer, Jake Bleiberg and Michael Balsamo).

Copyright G. Ater 2022