PHOENIX (AP) – Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in American history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising graduate of Yale Law School.
He won a scholarship to the Arizona Supreme Court, thanks in part to his unusual life story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident, followed by marriage, college and a Ivy League law.
The office was another stepping stone from a difficult beginning. But instead of fitting in, Rhodes looked angry and aggrieved.
He spoke to his colleagues about how the Patriot Act, which gave the government more surveillance powers after the 9/11 attacks, would erode civil liberties. He referred to Vice President Dick Cheney as a fascist for supporting the Bush administration’s use of “enemy combatant” status to detain prisoners indefinitely.
“He saw this titanic struggle between people like him who wanted individual freedom and the government that would try to take that freedom away,” said Matt Parry, who worked with Rhodes as a clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan.
Rhodes alienated his moderate Republican boss and eventually quit the job. Since then he has ordered his life around a thirst for greatness and a deep distrust of government.
He went on to form a group rooted in anti-government sentiment and his message resonated. He gained followers as he pursued an increasingly extremist path that would lead to armed confrontations, including with federal authorities at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch. It culminated last year, prosecutors say, with Rhodes masterminding a plot to violently prevent Democrat Joe Biden from becoming president.
Rhodes, 57, is due back in court Tuesday, but not as an attorney. He and four others linked to the Oath Keepers are on trial for seditious conspiracy, the most serious criminal charge brought by the Justice Department in its sweeping prosecution of the rioters who attacked the Capitol. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.
Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs are the first defendants on Jan. 6 to go on trial under a little-used Civil War-era law against trying to overthrow the government or, in this case , block the transfer of the presidency. power
The trial will shine a spotlight on the secretive Rhodes group founded in 2009 that has grown to include thousands of claimed members and loosely organized chapters across the country, according to Rachel Carroll Rivas, acting deputy director of research for the U.S. Intelligence Project. Southern Poverty Law Center. .
For Rhodes, it will be a position at odds with the role of greatness he has long envisioned for himself, said his estranged wife, Tasha Adams.
“I was going to achieve something amazing,” Adams said. “I didn’t know what it was, but I was going to get something incredible and devastating.”
Rhodes was born in Fresno, California. He traveled back and forth between there and Nevada, sometimes living with his mother and sometimes with grandparents who were migrant farm workers, part of a multicultural extended family that included Mexican and Filipino relatives. His mother was a minister who had her own radio show in Las Vegas called Dusty Buckle, Adams said.
Rhodes joined the Army right out of high school and served nearly three years before being honorably discharged in January 1986 after breaking his back in a parachute accident.
He recovered and was working as a valet in Las Vegas when he met Adams in 1991. He was 25, she was 18.
She had a sense of adventure that was attractive to a young woman raised in a middle-class family in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A few months after the couple started dating, Rhodes accidentally dropped a gun and shot her in the eye. He now wears an eye patch.
Adams’ family had set aside money for her to go to college, but after their wedding, Rhodes decided he had to go to school first. He told her that she would have to quit her job teaching ballroom and country dancing and instead support them both by working full-time as a stripper so she could focus on doing a great job at school, according to Adams. They married, but she found stripping to be degrading and clashed with her conservative Mormon upbringing, she said.
“Every night the ride was so bad. I just threw up every night before we got in, it was so horrible,” Adams said. Rhodes would pressure her to go further, increase her exposure or contact with men to make more money, she said. “It was never enough…I felt like I had given up on my soul.”
She quit smoking when she became pregnant with their first child and the couple moved back in with their family. They were worried about her, but they didn’t want to go too far for fear of losing her altogether. Rhodes was then the center of his orbit.
Rhodes’ attorney declined to make him available for an interview, and Rhodes declined to answer a list of questions sent by The Associated Press.
After finishing college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rhodes went to work in Washington as a staffer for Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican congressman, and later attended Yale, with stints as an artist in between and sculptor Paul did not respond to a request for comment.
Rhodes’ college transcripts earned him admission to several top schools, Adams said. While at Yale, Adams cared for his growing family in a small apartment while winning an award for an article arguing that the George W. Bush administration’s use of the status of an enemy combatant to hold indefinitely without charge persons suspected of supporting terrorism was unconstitutional. .
After the Arizona office, the family moved back to Montana and back to Nevada, where he worked on Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008. That’s when Rhodes also began formulating his idea to create 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 by more mainstream media figures such as Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly.
He formally launched the Oath Keepers in Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 2009, where the first shot of the American Revolution was fired.
“We know that if a day comes in this country in which a full-fledged dictatorship or a tyranny would come, from the left or the right, we know that it can only happen if these men, our brothers in arms, stand together and fulfill with unconstitutional and illegal orders,” Rhodes said in his Lexington speech, which drew no news coverage.
The group’s stated goal was to get members of the military, first responders and current police officers to live up to the promise they made to defend the Constitution against enemies. The Oath Keepers issued a list of orders that its members would not obey, including disarming citizens, conducting warrantless searches, and detaining Americans as enemy combatants in violation of their right to jury trials.
Rhodes was a compelling speaker and especially in the early years he 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.
With this benign framing and his political connections, Rhodes leveraged the growing power of social media to fuel the growth of the Oath Keepers during Barack Obama’s presidency. Membership records leaked last year included about 38,000 names, although many people on the list have said they are no longer members or were never active participants. One expert last year estimated membership at a few thousand.
The internal dialogue was much darker and more violent about what members perceived as imminent threats, particularly to the Second Amendment, and the idea that members should be ready to fight and recruit their neighbors to fight as well.
“Time and time again, Oath Keepers lays the groundwork for individuals to decide for themselves whether violent or criminal activity is justified,” said Jackson, an assistant professor at the University at Albany.
A membership fee was a requirement to access the website, where people could join discussion forums, read Rhodes’ writings, and listen to proposals to join military training. However, members willing to go armed to a confrontation with dozens killed, said Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group.
Clashes with the government began in 2011 in the small Arizona desert town of Quartzsite, where local government was in turmoil as officials clashed with each other, the police chief was accused of misconduct and several police employees had been suspended. A couple of years later, Rhodes began asking members to form “community readiness teams,” which included military-style training.
The Oath Keepers were also featured in one event in anti-government circles: the standoff with federal agents at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch in 2014. Later that year, members took to rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, armed with AR-15 style. , to protect businesses from riots after a grand jury declined to indict a police officer in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
The following year, Oath Keepers guarded a southern Oregon gold mine, the owners of the mining claims being in a dispute with the government. However, Rhodes was never arrested.
As the Oath Keepers increased their public profile and their confrontations with the government, Rhodes gradually left behind some of those he defended. Jennifer Esposito hired him as her attorney after the group’s first outing in Quartzsite, but missed a hearing in her case because she was at the Bundy Ranch standoff. A judge threw Rhodes off the case and no attorney would represent her.
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