Oath Keepers leader points finger at colleagues in sedition trial
By Alan Feuer
At the height of the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, two dozen members of the Oath Keepers militia met outside the building with their leader, Stewart Rhodes.
When some of them reported that they had just come back from inside the Capitol, Rhodes was outraged, he testified in court earlier this week. Taking the stand at his own sedition trial, he said that those who had gone inside the building that day had done so of their own accord — and that he had never had a plan or had given any orders to go in.
“When I heard that they went in,” he told the jury, “I said, ‘That was stupid.’ ”
Testifying for a second day at the trial in U.S. District Court in Washington, Rhodes sought to wash his hands of much of what the Oath Keepers did on Jan. 6, laying the blame on several of his colleagues.
He told the jury that one of his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, who went inside the Capitol with others in the group, had gone “off mission.”
He also claimed — for the first time — that he had “nothing to do with” an armed “quick reaction force” made of up Oath Keepers that was staged in hotel rooms in Virginia, ostensibly to rush to the aid of compatriots if things at the Capitol went wrong.
Rhodes has firmly denied there was a plan to break into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, as the government has claimed. He has also argued that the Oath Keepers went to Washington that day on what he claims was a peaceful mission: to serve as bodyguards for pro-Donald Trump celebrities such as Ali Alexander, a Stop the Steal organizer, and Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump.
It is rare for a defendant, especially one of his prominence, to take the witness stand, but Rhodes, who holds a law degree from Yale, has been visibly confident in putting forward several intersecting arguments.
He spent much of the afternoon sparring with a prosecutor, Kathryn Rakoczy. Rakoczy’s questions seemed designed to both poke holes in the details of his account and to chip away at his broader credibility.
Rakoczy started, for example, by suggesting that Rhodes had soft-pedaled the nature of the Oath Keepers during his first turn on the witness stand Friday. She pointed out that while telling the jury about some of the missions the group had been involved in over the years, he had failed to mention several in which his members used weapons to confront government forces and challenge their authority.
From well before the trial began, lawyers for Rhodes have claimed that the armed “quick reaction force” in Virginia would have been mobilized only if Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, a move that Rhodes believed would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to take up arms in support of Trump.
Last week, Rhodes testified that he had established a similar force for a pro-Trump rally in Washington in November 2020, fearing that leftist activists were going to break into the White House and drag Trump into the streets. On Monday, he told the jury that as Jan. 6 approached, he no longer feared that the White House might be overrun and that an armed force was not needed.
He then suggested that his compatriots could have set up the reaction force without his knowledge.
But Rakoczy showed Rhodes a series of messages he exchanged with Meggs and others in the days leading up to Jan. 6 in which he seemed to be aware of the quick reaction force — or QRF.
“Ok We WILL have a QRF,” he wrote in one of the messages. “This situation calls for it.”
During more than three hours of questions, Rakoczy also sought to make another point: that Rhodes had planned to act on Jan. 6 even without the legal cover that would have been offered by Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
She showed Rhodes a message he had written saying that the Oath Keepers were going to “rise up in insurrection” against Joe Biden even if Trump never summoned them. What Rhodes had really wanted, Rakoczy said, was for Trump to call up the Oath Keepers to “serve as his private bodyguards to stay in power.”
Rhodes denied it.
To prove the seditious conspiracy charges against Rhodes, Meggs and their co-defendants — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — prosecutors must persuade the jury that the Oath Keepers plotted to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of power from Trump to Biden. Several government witnesses have already admitted under questioning from the defense that there was no explicit plan to storm the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.
That left Rakoczy with the task of using circumstantial evidence to argue that Rhodes had encouraged his compatriots to go into the building.
Rakoczy noted that, according to phone records, Rhodes had a call with one of his top lieutenants, Michael Greene, and Meggs just minutes before Meggs went into the Capitol with other Oath Keepers in what prosecutors have described as a military “stack.”
Rhodes admitted he was on the 90-second call but could not hear a thing that Meggs had said.
“For 90 seconds you sat on that dead air?” Rakoczy asked, sounding incredulous.
Rhodes said yes.
Bringing her questions to a close, Rakoczy reminded Rhodes that even after Jan. 6, he continued his attempts to reach Trump and persuade him to invoke the Insurrection Act. She suggested that the storming of the Capitol was for him “just a battle in an ongoing war.”
“You and the Oath Keepers were prepared to take steps to abolish this government?” she asked.
“We were prepared to walk the founders’ path, yes,” Rhodes said. “If the government steps outside of the Constitution, it puts you in a bad place.”