Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy in the January 6 investigation.
Photo by Philip Pacheco/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes offered to testify live before the House January 6 panel.
His lawyer said that offer was rejected, but Rhodes will testify at trial about “who he is.”
Rhodes and four others are charged with seditious conspiracy in the highest-profile January 6 case.
Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes plans to testify in his own defense as he stands trial in the highest-profile prosecution stemming from the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, his lawyer said Monday.
As opening statements began at trial, Rhodes’ lawyer Phillip Linder told jurors that they would hear from the Oath Keepers founder “himself about who he is.” Linder said Rhodes had offered earlier this year to testify live before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but he was denied.
“He’s going to do that, ladies and gentlemen, in this trial,” Linder said.
Linder’s remarks followed a more than hour-long opening statement from prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler, who said Rhodes and other Oath Keepers “concocted a plan for armed rebellion” in the weeks leading up to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Nestler presented jurors with messages in which Rhodes told Oath Keepers members that they “must refuse to accept Biden as a legitimate winner.”
In preparation for January 6, Nestler said, Rhodes and other Oath Keepers assembled “weapons of war” and brought them to a hotel room outside Washington, DC, where a so-called “quick reaction force” stood ready to ferry them to the nation’s capital.
“That was their goal, to stop by whatever means necessary the lawful transfer of presidential power, including by taking up arms against the United States government,”
The opening arguments unfolded at the start of the second week of the Oath Keepers’ trial, which began with jury selection the previous week. Through much of that week, prosecutors and defense lawyers worked to narrow down the pool of 120 jurors to 45, and then to the final panel of 12 — along with four alternates — that will hear evidence.
Jury selection featured a distinctly Washington, DC, group: An employee at the US Agency for International Development, a defense contractor whose wife works at the Justice Department, and a defense lobbyist.
Another potential juror said she was a social acquaintance of Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunne, who publicly testified in July before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The jury pool also included an elementary school principal who has a close friend who was close with a police officer who died in the days after the January 6 attack.
On Monday, Mehta defended the impartiality of the selected jury, noting that none of its members said they felt so strongly about January 6 that they would be biased against the Oath Keepers charged. The jury members similarly said they had not heard of the individual defendants and were not biased against the Oath Keepers.
“By and large,” Mehta said, the potential jurors came to the selection process with “no preconceived notions about the Oath Keepers or the defendants.”