Oath Keepers Leader Sought to Get Message to Trump After Jan. 6

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/us/politics/oath-keepers-trump-jan-6.html

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Four days after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, held a secret meeting in the parking lot of a Texas electronics store.

Mr. Rhodes had gone to see a soldier-turned-I.T.-expert who, he had been told, could get an urgent message to President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Rhodes wanted to persuade Mr. Trump to maintain his grip on power despite the violence at the Capitol and offered to mobilize the members of his group to help him stay in office.

“I’m here for you and so are all of my men,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Mr. Trump, typing his words into a cellphone and handing it to the man in the belief that he would pass the message on to the president. “We will come help you if you need us. Military and police. And so will your millions of supporters.”

A description of that cloak-and-dagger scene was offered to the jury on Wednesday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates, all of whom are facing charges of seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack on the Capitol. By the end of the day, prosecutors at the trial had all but reached the end of their evidence and were expected to rest their case on Thursday morning.

When the government’s presentation concludes it will be a milestone in the trial, which is taking place in Federal District Court in Washington. It will also be an important step for the Justice Department’s broader investigation of the Capitol assault.

The seditious conspiracy charges confronting Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — are among the most severe and politically significant to have been filed so far against any of the 900 people charged in connection with Jan. 6.

The success or failure of the prosecution could influence how the storming of the Capitol is perceived by the public and affect another trial set for mid-December in which five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, also stand accused of seditious conspiracy.

As one of their final witnesses, prosecutors called to the stand the man who met with Mr. Rhodes in Texas: Jason Alpers, a software designer who helped found a cybersecurity firm called Allied Security Operations Group. The company was instrumental in working with outside advisers to Mr. Trump — including the lawyer Sidney Powell — in promoting a conspiracy theory that voting machines had been used to cheat in the 2020 election.

Mr. Alpers, a former Army psychological operations expert, told the jury that he met Mr. Rhodes and a lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, on Jan. 10, 2021, outside a Fry’s Electronics store near Dallas. He offered his phone to Mr. Rhodes as a means of conveying a message to Mr. Trump, but ultimately gave both the phone and a recording of the encounter to the F.B.I.

In the recording, which was played on Wednesday for the jury, Mr. Rhodes can be heard telling Mr. Alpers that if Mr. Trump did not hold on to power, there would be “combat here on U.S. soil” and that thousands of Oath Keepers would most likely join the fray.

When Mr. Alpers told Mr. Rhodes that he did not want civil war and did not condone the chaos at the Capitol, the Oath Keepers leader said that he had only one regret about that day.

“We should have brought rifles,” Mr. Rhodes said, adding, “We could have fixed it right then and there.”

Mr. Alpers said he was horrified by Mr. Rhodes’s remarks and had second thoughts about passing any messages to Mr. Trump or to people in his orbit.

“Asking for civil war to be on American ground and, understanding as a person who has gone to war, that means blood is going to get shed on the streets where your family is,” he testified. “That’s not a distant land, that’s right there.”

From the outset of the trial, some of the strongest evidence prosecutors have presented to the jury has come directly from the mouth of Mr. Rhodes, who has emerged as a man obsessed with supporting Mr. Trump and keeping Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the White House. Recordings and text messages have shown Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, to have been in thrall to baseless fears that Mr. Biden was a “puppet” of the Chinese government bent on the destruction of the country he had just been chosen to lead.

One former member of the group testified last month that he had called the authorities in November 2020 after sitting through a video meeting during which Mr. Rhodes urged his followers to “fight” on behalf of Mr. Trump.

“The more I listened to the call,” the witness, Abdullah Rasheed, told the jury, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”

Other former Oath Keepers have testified that they believed Mr. Rhodes’s language about using violence to support Mr. Trump and his personal attacks against Mr. Biden became increasingly extreme, even dangerous, in the months between the election and the final certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.

One former member told the jury that he quit the organization in December 2020 after Mr. Rhodes posted a letter on the Oath Keepers’ website urging Mr. Trump to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged. In the letter, Mr. Rhodes also begged Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two-centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.

In the message Mr. Rhodes sought to pass through Mr. Alpers, he warned Mr. Trump that he and his family would be “imprisoned and killed” if Mr. Biden managed to take office, urging him to use “the power of the presidency” to stop his opponent.

“Go down in history as a savior of the Republic,” Mr. Rhodes wrote, “not a man who surrendered it to deadly traitors and enemies who then enslaved and murdered millions of Americans.”

Despite the efforts by prosecutors to depict Mr. Rhodes as a man prepared to derail the election, as one trial witness put it, “by any means necessary,” some government witnesses have admitted under questioning from the defense that they were not aware of any predetermined plan to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 and interfere with the certification process.

To win a conviction on the seditious conspiracy charge, prosecutors need to convince the jury that Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants entered into an agreement to use force to disrupt the execution of laws governing the transfer of presidential power.

For reasons that remain unclear, prosecutors decided not to call as witnesses any of the three former Oath Keepers who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges and cooperated with the government’s investigation of Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants.

One of the cooperating witnesses, William Todd Wilson, told the government during his plea negotiations that on the evening of Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes was still trying to persuade Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. By Mr. Wilson’s account, Mr. Rhodes tried to get an intermediary to call the president from a hotel near the Capitol and have him mobilize the Oath Keepers to forcibly stop the transition of power.

Another cooperating witness, Joshua James, was poised to testify that Mr. Rhodes at one point hatched a plan to have a group of Oath Keepers surround the White House and keep away anyone — including members of the National Guard — who tried to remove Mr. Trump from the building.

Before the defense begins its case, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes and the others are likely to make arguments seeking to dismiss the charges, claiming a lack of evidence — a common maneuver in criminal trials.

Mr. Rhodes, who has promised from the start that he will testify, could take the witness stand by the end of the week.