Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes categorically denied any plan to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and said at his seditious conspiracy trial Monday that he was not involved in members’ stockpiling of firearms near Washington.
Oath Keepers’ leader Rhodes denies conspiracy to enter Capitol on Jan. 6
“You never talked about, never planned, never even implied [entering]?” Rhode’s attorney Phillip A. Linder asked.
“No. All my effort was [aimed] at what Trump was going to do,” said Rhodes, who started testifying on Friday.
Rhodes’s statement of his intentions reinforced key elements of his defense: that there was no order, decision or agreement by him or four co-defendants to prevent by force the swearing-in of President Biden; that members were present in Washington as a “peacekeeping” force providing security to Republican VIPs; and that Rhodes’s goal was to get Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to overturn the presidential election.
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But in his testimony, Rhodes also implicated other Oath Keepers defendants, and gave U.S. prosecutors wide opening to attack his credibility in cross-examination, which began late Monday morning.
Rhodes maintained that he was not aware that co-defendant and accused Florida state Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs led a group of Oath Keepers in tactical gear through the East Capitol Rotunda doors with other rioters. Rhodes said he told Meggs doing so was “stupid,” because “it was not on mission and it opened the door for our political enemies to persecute us.”
Prosecutors have alleged that Rhodes and at least 10 co-conspirators brought and staged firearms near Washington, including at a Ballston hotel with rooms assigned to armed “Quick Reaction Force” teams from North Carolina, Arizona and Florida. But on Monday Rhodes said, “I wasn’t involved in that,” except that he had offered Meggs a place to store his guns separately.
Rhodes testified that he was “not looped in” to communications on Jan. 6 by co-defendant Jessica Watkins, an Ohio militia founder who prosecutors allege narrated her actions inside and out of the Capitol over a recorded walkie-talkie radio style app Zello. He denied that he ordered Meggs to go into the building on a phone call that video showed Meggs was engaged in just as he began leading other Oath Keepers toward the building.
“I was unaware of any of that communication,” Rhodes said of Watkins, saying he did not even know she was in Washington that day, “I was on none of those chats.”
“There were no communications at all” with Meggs, Rhodes added, saying that Meggs had called him but, “I couldn’t hear him and he just dropped off again.”
It was unclear how jurors were receiving Rhodes testimony, after hearing him use more violent and inflammatory rhetoric in writings and recordings presented by prosecutors.
Four days after the Capitol riot, Rhodes was recorded trying to urge Trump that it was not too late to use paramilitary groups to stay in power by force, and that on Jan. 6, “We should have brought rifles. We could have fixed it right then and there. I’d hang f—— Pelosi from a lamppost,” boasting that he would have killed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
“There’s gonna be combat here on U.S. soil no matter what. … It’s coming — you can’t get out of this.,” Rhodes told a witness who he urged to deliver his message to Trump.
On Monday in court, Rhodes agreed with his lawyer’s suggestion that his talk of civil war was “rhetoric and bombast.”
“Of course it was. I had a couple drinks at dinner along with Kellye,” Rhodes said, referring to Kellye SoRelle, an Oath Keepers attorney and Rhodes’s girlfriend.
But Rhodes, charged with attempting to obstruct justice for allegedly ordering members to delete evidence of communications and actions on Jan. 6, also blamed and implicated SoRelle.
“I told them they have a right to remain silent. She added, ‘delete stuff,’” Rhodes said, “We had a conversation about that.”
Source: WP
