Four months after he was found guilty of seditious conspiracy and two other charges related to the U.S. Capitol incursion on Jan. 6, 2021, Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III decried the verdicts as “pre-ordained” results from a “guaranteed-conviction zone.”
He also warned conservatives that Jan. 6 was “only the beginning of a political persecution campaign aimed at all of you.”
In his first extended comments since being found guilty on three charges and not guilty on two others, Rhodes told The Epoch Times he was prosecuted for “who I am” and “what I said,” not for any criminal actions on Jan. 6.
Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell were accused by federal prosecutors of a seditious conspiracy to attack the Capitol and prevent a joint session of Congress from certifying the Electoral College votes from the 2020 presidential contest between President Donald Trump and Joseph Biden Jr.
Only Rhodes and Meggs were found guilty of seditious conspiracy in the first Oath Keepers trial that ran from Sept. 27 to Nov. 29, 2022.
Rhodes faces a May 25 sentencing hearing. The seditious conspiracy charge alone carries a potential 20-year prison term.
He and his four co-defendants filed for acquittal or a new trial, but a ruling has not yet been made on those motions.
“I did not enter the Capitol. Nor did I instruct anyone else to enter the Capitol,” Rhodes said in a 46-page reflection written from his cell at the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia..
The U.S. Department of Justice relied heavily on communications between members of the Oath Keepers in encrypted chats, online meetings, text messages, and a push-to-talk radio app as evidence in prosecuting conspiracy charges against the Oath Keepers and associates.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy began her closing argument on Nov. 18, 2022, by turning some of Rhodes’ words against him.
“‘We are not getting through this without a civil war,’” she quoted Rhodes as saying two days after the 2020 election. “‘Prepare your mind, body and spirit.’”
Rakoczy took those words to mean that Rhodes “called for war with all of its horrors and all of its violence to oppose the results of a presidential election.”
Rakoczy said a “mountain of evidence” introduced at trial “has shown that in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, these five defendants joined together and agreed to do whatever was necessary, up to and including the use of force, to stop the lawful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joseph Biden.”
In an open letter to Trump on Dec. 14, 2020, Rhodes asked, “Will you take your place in history as the savior of our republic, right up there with President Washington and Lincoln?”
Or, he asked, would Trump fail to act, “Leaving We the People to fight a desperate revolution/civil war against an illegitimate usurper and his Chicom puppet regime?”
The words of Rhodes and his co-defendants “were not the mere rantings and ravings of old men at a barbershop,” Rakoczy argued. “These defendants repeatedly called for the violent overthrow of the United States Government and they followed those words up with action.”
