Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy in the January 6 investigation.
Photo by Philip Pacheco/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
A jury found Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes guilty Tuesday of engaging in a seditious conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from former President Donald Trump to now-President Joe Biden, handing the Justice Department a victory in a prosecution featuring the most significant charges connected to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy alongside Kelly Meggs, another member of the Oath Keepers, but the jury found three other members of the far-right group not guilty of that charge. Those three others — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell — were found guilty of separate charges.
The jury reached the verdict after just days of deliberations that were interrupted by the Thanksgiving holiday, capping a high-stakes trial that lasted nearly two months. During the weekslong trial, federal prosecutors presented evidence of the Oath Keepers planning ahead of the January 6 attack, and they showed jurors images of some members of the far-right group entering the Capitol in a military-style stack formation.
In several messages shown at trial, the Oath Keepers discussed January 6 as a moment for revolution — with one member saying the group “would be in the lead of 1776.2,” an apparent reference to the year in which American colonies declared independence from Britain.
“They claimed to wrap themselves in the Constitution. They trampled it instead,” said prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler, in a closing address to jurors. “They claimed to be saving the Republic, but they fractured it instead.”
Earlier in the trial, prosecutors played audio of a November conference call — recorded by at least one Oath Keepers member — in which Rhodes said the group was “very much in exactly the same spot that the Founding Fathers were in like March 1775.”
“There’s going to be a fight. But let’s just do it smart and let’s do it while President Trump is still commander in chief and let’s try to get him to do his duty and step up and do it,” Rhodes said.
In one of the most dramatic moments of the trial, jurors heard from Rhodes in-person.
Testifying in his own defense, Rhodes sought to distance himself from the conduct of fellow Oath Keepers members and denied that the far-right group never planned ahead of January 6 to breach the Capitol building. He told jurors it was “stupid” for those fellow members to go inside the Capitol as lawmakers gathered to certify the results of the 2020 election.
At trial, federal prosecutors said the Oath Keepers seized on the opportunity to enter the Capitol as members of a pro-Trump mob breached and ransacked it on January 6. Prosecutors pointed to a cache of weapons the Oath Keepers kept at a hotel outside Washington, DC, for a so-called “quick reaction force” that the group could deploy into the nation’s capital.
Just as he distanced himself from Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol, Rhodes sought to downplay the far-right group’s references to quick reaction forces, or QRFs, in his testimony before jurors.
“In our context,” Rhodes said, the meaning of QRF is broader than it is in the military.
“It gets used too often, frankly, and becomes confusing,” he added.
But with their relatively quick verdict, the jury rejected Rhodes’ defense and efforts to separate himself from the events of January 6.
This is a developing story.