Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, believes that the group serves not as “a militia” but as a vanguard of “the militia,” a notion rooted in his reading of the Second Amendment.
from taking power. He implored Trump to call up members of the Oath Keepers and other armed Americans to serve as part of a Presidentially sanctioned militia. “When [Rhodes] believed that the President would issue an order invoking the Insurrection Act, he was prepared to follow it,” his lawyers wrote, in a pretrial motion. “The Government would like this Court to believe that is sedition, when in fact, it is the opposite. It is loyalty to an oath taken in defense of the Country.
If the jury convicts Rhodes and his co-defendants of seditious conspiracy—attempting to overthrow the government or opposing, by force, any execution of its laws or authority—they would face up to twenty years in prison. Rhodes, who has a law degree from Yale, is likely to testify in his own defense.
After Rhodes’s arrest, Phillip Linder, a well-regarded Dallas attorney, and his partner, James Lee Bright, became his defense lawyers., the lawyer who’d spread Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, reportedly hired Linder and Bright via her new foundation, as well as paid defense bills for another Oath Keeper charged alongside Rhodes; a senior member of the Proud Boys; and other defendants in January 6th cases.
In Rhodes’s hands, however, the militia are a self-selected, amorphous force that—though he denies this—is partisan in nature. This is “the militia” that Rhodes, in his open letters, was asking Trump to call up with the Insurrection Act. Before his arrest, Rhodes told me that he was disappointed that Trump had failed to do this. “I wish Trump would have done what I said he should do,” Rhodes said. “Call us up. Look at the Insurrection Act. It says he can call—he can use either the U.S.
In another of his books, published in 2012, Vieira envisions a scenario in which a U.S. President creates a new militia “at one stroke”—by invoking the Insurrection Act. Once he has thousands of militiamen “under his personal command,” this hypothetical President could then embark upon what Vieira calls “the Eight ‘I’s Policy: illuminate, investigate, interrogate, implicate, indict, inculpate, incarcerate, and infame.
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