WASHINGTON - On Jan. 4, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, an anti-government group, went online to summon his army of followers into action.
In an urgent plea on the Oath Keepers website, Rhodes wrote that it is “CRITICAL” that “all patriots” travel to Washington on a “security mission” in support of then-President Donald Trump’s “fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic.”
“We Oath Keepers are both honor-bound and eager to be there in strength to do our part,” Rhodes implored.
This was not the first time Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale-educated lawyer, had rallied his troops around the former president. At Rhodes’ direction, members of the Oath Keepers, the militia he founded in 2009, had attended numerous Trump events over the years.
But coming after months of increasing vitriol by Rhodes and others about an imaginary leftist plot against Trump that had to be stopped at all costs, the consequences of his call to action proved deadly.
Five people, including a Capitol Police officer, died and more than 100 others were injured when an estimated 800 Trump supporters, including members of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other right-wing groups, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in an effort to overturn Trump’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election.
In the two months since the bloody assault, a growing body of evidence has emerged that members of the Oath Keepers and other far-right organizations, determined to stop Biden from becoming president, began plotting the attack months in advance.
To date, the FBI has arrested nearly a dozen people associated with the Oath Keepers, including nine recently indicted on conspiracy charges of forming a military formation known as a “stack” to breach the Capitol. As the FBI investigation proceeds, more arrests involving members of the Oath Keepers are likely, experts say.
While Rhodes himself did not enter the building, he was photographed with members of the stack outside the Capitol after the attack.
Rhodes has not been charged with any crime and denies planning the attack. If he is worried about potential charges, he is not letting on.
"There is going to be resistance,” he told ’ Alex Jones on Jan. 30. “The only question is, what will be the spark?”
The FBI says it does not investigate groups or ideologies. Still, investigators are examining the role far-right extremist leaders played in planning and coordinating the attack, according to current and former officials.
While members of the Oath Keepers and other far-right groups made up a fraction of the Jan. 6 rioters, they played an “outsize role” in the attack, according to a recent analysis by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
“Without the involvement of experienced militant networks, it is unlikely that the Capitol siege would have succeeded in going as far as it did,” the report said.
Rhodes could not be reached. A VOA request for comment emailed to the Oath Keepers went unanswered.
Rhodes has long denied that the Oath Keepers are “anti-government.” But according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists, Rhodes leads "one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the U.S." with several thousand members, most current and former members of the military and law enforcement.
The Oath Keepers see themselves as part of a broader “patriot’’ movement. At its core, the movement believes that government is infringing on their rights such as the right to carry firearms. In recent years, they've embraced increasingly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Although the organization disavows violence, several members have been convicted of serious crimes over the past decade.
Rhodes, 55, has spent more than two decades in the Libertarian and militia trenches, starting with his first job out of college in the late 1990s as a staffer in the Washington office of then-Rep. Ron Paul, the controversial Libertarian U.S. House member from Texas.
After graduating from Yale Law School in 2004, Rhodes, who identifies as a Mexican American, volunteered for Paul’s unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 2008 presidential campaign, defending the congressman .
Then-Sen.Barack Obama, a Democrat, won the election as the first African American president.
Right-wing fears that Obama would usher in communism drove anti-government activists to create a national movement, according to Hampton Stall, creator of Militia Watch and a senior researcher at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
"It is really kind of the first time that these militia movements went national," Stall said.