Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.
He secured a clerkship on the Arizona Supreme Court, in part thanks to his unusual life story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident, followed by marriage, college and an Ivy League law degree.
He turned to forming a group rooted in anti-government sentiment, and his message resonated. He gained followers as he went down an increasingly extremist path that would lead to armed standoffs, including with federal authorities at Nevada's. It culminated last year, prosecutors say, with Rhodes engineering a plot to violently stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming president.
For Rhodes, it will be a position at odds with the role of greatness that he has long envisioned for himself, said his estranged wife, Tasha Adams. He recovered and was working as a valet in Las Vegas when he met Adams in 1991. He was 25, she was 18. She quit when she got pregnant with their first child, and the couple moved back in with her family. They worried about her but didn't want to push too far for fear of losing her altogether. By then, Rhodes was the center of her orbit.
After the Arizona clerkship, the family bounced to Montana and back to Nevada, where he worked on Paul's presidential campaign in 2008. That's when Rhodes also began to formulate his idea of starting the Oath Keepers. He put a short video and blog post on Blogspot and"it went viral overnight," Adams said. Rhodes was interviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but also more mainstream media figures such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly.
Rhodes was a compelling speaker and especially in the early years framed the group as"just a pro-Constitution group made up of patriots," said Sam Jackson, author of the book"Oath Keepers" about the group. A membership fee was a requirement to access the website, where people could join discussion forums, read Rhodes' writing and hear pitches to join militaristic trainings. Members willing to go armed to a standoff numbered in the low dozens, though, said Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group.
As the Oath Keepers escalated their public profile and confrontations with the government, Rhodes was leaving behind some of those he once championed. Jennifer Esposito hired him as her lawyer after the group's early outing in Quartzsite, but he missed a hearing in her case because he was at the Bundy Ranch standoff. A judge kicked Rhodes off the case, and no lawyer would represent her.
"I said, 'Why are we going — so we can say we protected Trump? We are not going to get anywhere near Trump,'" Mack said."I said, 'This was crazy.' All the other board members voted with me, and Stewart was mad."He wasn't the only board member to walk away as they saw the direction of the group close up, Van Tatenhove said.
Arroyo said that hadn't been approved by any authority and argued that pointing a gun in the wrong direction along the border could stir an international problem. He refused to go.
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