Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy in the January 6 investigation.
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Jury selection is set to start in the trial of five Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy.
Oath Keepers plan to argue they were waiting on January 6 for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
The trial comes with high stakes for prosecutors and involves a charge with symbolic weight.
In the days after the 2020 election, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers group took to an invitation-only, encrypted group chat to call for civil war in response to President Donald Trump’s defeat.
“We aren’t getting through this without a civil war,” Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes wrote on November 5, 2020, according to court records. “Prepare your mind, body spirit.”
Now in jail and charged with seditious conspiracy, Rhodes is facing a different fight. On Tuesday, jury selection began in the trial of Rhodes and four other Oath Keepers members confronting the most serious charges to date in a prosecution stemming from the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
For the Justice Department, the trial comes with particularly high stakes. While its 20-year maximum prison sentence is equal to or even lesser than many other federal crimes, the seditious conspiracy charge carries a legal and symbolic significance — alleging not just a violation of the law but an attack on American democracy itself, legal experts said.
The trial is the first of three set in coming months to involve seditious conspiracy charges. A second group of Oath Keepers is set to stand trial in November, and members of another far-right group — the Proud Boys — are scheduled to go before a jury in December on seditious conspiracy charges.
The proceedings are expected to shed additional light on the plotting to forcibly stop the peaceful transfer of power at a time when the Justice Department is investigating the efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results. That investigation is unfolding at a time of heightened legal peril for the former president, who is separately facing an inquiry into his handling of classified records and a civil lawsuit filed by the New York state attorney general accusing him of engaging in years of financial fraud.
‘I just want to fight’
In pretrial hearings and court filings, federal prosecutors have drawn from encrypted messages and other evidence to detail a weekslong scheme to disrupt or outright block Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021. Prosecutors said Rhodes found inspiration from the first days after the November 2020 election in the popular uprising that brought down Yugoslavia’s president about two decades earlier.
“We must now do what the people of Serbia did when Milosevic stole their election,” Rhodes wrote on November 7, referring to Slobodan Milošević. “Refuse to accept it and march en-mass [sic] on the nation’s Capitol.”
In the weeks that followed, prosecutors said, the Oath Keepers amassed weapons and prepared so-called “quick reaction force,” or “QRF,” teams in support of their plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory. On January 6, the group kept a cache of weapons at a hotel just outside Washington, DC, prosecutors said.
“This was an organized, well thought-out plot to use force to prevent or hinder the US Congress’s ability to certify the lawful election of the President. It will be the first time you will hear the amount of coordination that went into it, the planning that went into it, the use of military-style tactics to further this conspiracy,” said Rizzy Qureshi, a former federal prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, which is spearheading the January 6 prosecutions. “You are going to see for the first time the significant evidence the government has recovered through search warrants, subpoenas and thousands of hours of surveillance footage.”
Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC.
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On January 6, the weeks of planning came to a head with Oath Keepers converging on Washington, DC, with some donning tactical gear and forming military-style “stack” formations to breach the Capitol alongside the pro-Trump mob. Once inside the Capitol, a group of Oath Keepers split up, with one half unsuccessfully attempting to push through a line of police officers guarding a hallway that led to the Senate chamber. The other half headed to the House in search of Speaker Nancy Pelosi but failed to locate her, prosecutors said.
Rhodes did not himself enter the Capitol on January 6, prosecutors said, but entered restricted grounds outside the building. Later on January 6, he went to the nearby Phoenix Park Hotel, where he attempted to call Trump and directly implore him to call upon the Oath Keepers and other groups to help stop the certification of Biden’s victory.
“I just want to fight,” Rhodes said after hanging up, according to court papers.
A graduate of Yale Law School and former Army paratrooper, Rhodes is set to stand trial alongside four Oath Keepers whom prosecutors have identified as some of his top lieutenants: Kelly Meggs; Kenneth Harrelson; Jessica Watkins; and Thomas Caldwell.
Just weeks before trial, the judge presiding over their case allowed the Oath Keepers to argue that they made their plans in preparation for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law empowering the president to employ the military to suppress civil disorder. Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee confirmed in 2014, opened the door for that argument over the objections of prosecutors, who argued that the Oath Keepers were trying to use the Insurrection Act as legal cover for their conduct.
But their defense has been hampered by the indictments of two top Oath Keepers members: Michael Greene, an Iraq war veteran designated as the “operations leader” for January 6, and Kellye SoRelle, the group’s general counsel.
Rhodes’ defense team had planned to call SoRelle as a witness, but her indictment on charges related to January 6 is likely to limit her ability to testify without putting herself in deeper legal jeopardy.
“Every time we put someone on the witness list, they get indicted,” Rhodes’ defense lawyer Phillip Linder said at a recent court hearing.