Five members of the Oath Keepers militia, including its founder Stewart Rhodes, “concocted a plan for armed rebellion” ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, a federal prosecutor told jurors Monday as the government began laying out its seditious conspiracy case against members of the far-right group.
“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,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler said in opening statements in the trial.
The defendants sought to “shatter a bedrock of American democracy,”
The seditious conspiracy charges against Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Kenneth Harrelson and Thomas Caldwell, represent the most serious accusations leveled by the Justice Department in its sprawling investigation of the Capitol breach.
The Oath Keepers brought gear and weapons because they sincerely thought Mr. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act, Mr. Linder said.
The defense hinges on the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows a president to deploy American troops inside the country. In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some of Mr. Trump’s allies urged him to invoke that law and unleash the military to help keep him in office.
Mr. Rhodes “believed in good faith that Trump could invoke this, and if he did, then the president could ask them to do whatever the president wanted them to do,” Mr. Linder said. “They were ready to react at President Trump’s request.”
Other Oath Keepers members entered the Capitol as a team in “stack formation,” a single-file military tactic, and some of them later clashed with law enforcement in what Mr. Nestler compared to an invading army.
The trial, which could last six weeks or longer, is expected to feature videos from the day of the attack as well as communications in which the five defendants discussed surrounding the Capitol and then boasted about what happened. Even after they failed to stop Congress from certifying the election results, Mr. Nestler said, the group continued to seek ways to stop the transfer of power before Inauguration Day.
“My only regret is that they [the Oath Keepers] should have brought rifles,” Mr. Rhodes allegedly said on Jan. 10, in audio Mr. Nestler played in court. “We could have fixed it right then and there.”
Yet some posters/people seem to think january 6th was not big deal since biden was still sworn in.
thehill.com
www.businessinsider.com
