The letter was shown to the jury at the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes and four subordinates. It showed the intensity of their efforts to stop the transfer of presidential power.
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Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, is on trial on federal charges of seditious conspiracy.
WASHINGTON — In December 2020, hours after the Electoral College cast its votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, posted a letter on his website urging President Donald J. Trump to undertake a series of unprecedented — and possibly illegal — moves to stay in office.
Telling Mr. Trump the country was at war with “Communist China” and a secret army of “willing American agents,” Mr. Rhodes beseeched the president to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give Mr. Trump the power to call up the National Guard and militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.
The open letter, which was shown on Friday to the jury at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates on seditious conspiracy charges, demanded that Mr. Trump take more wild steps to maintain his grip on power.
Mr. Rhodes instructed the president to seize data from digital voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged; declassify a trove of the nation’s secrets; and then perform a WikiLeaks-style “data dump,” exposing a supposed cabal of corrupt judges, law enforcement officers and state election officials.
All of this was followed by a threat of violence against Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, his vice president-elect.
“If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Mr. Rhodes told Mr. Trump, “We the People will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”
The open letter — one of two missives Mr. Rhodes wrote to the president after the election — was posted publicly nearly two years ago, but it was used by prosecutors at the trial to show the lengths to which Mr. Rhodes was willing to go to stop Mr. Biden from entering the White House.
The letter also echoed some of the baseless arguments that advisers to Mr. Trump — including Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser — had used around that time in a failed bid to persuade him to use the military to seize some of the nation’s voting machines.
ImageThomas Caldwell, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lieutenants, arriving at the federal courthouse in Washington, where he is on trial alongside Mr. Rhodes and others on charges including seditious conspiracy.Credit…Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Mr. Rhodes’s trial, which has been in session for a week in Federal District Court in Washington, is the first in the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack to focus on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most serious crime that prosecutors have brought so far against any of the nearly 900 people charged in the assault.
Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — are also facing two other conspiracy counts. One accuses them of plotting to obstruct the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. The other charges them with working together to prevent federal officers from discharging their duties that day.
Over the past several days, prosecutors have introduced a trove of evidence — encrypted text messages, a recording of an Oath Keepers video meeting and testimony from former members of the group. They deployed the evidence to depict Mr. Rhodes as in thrall to fears that the Chinese government had helped rig the election against Mr. Trump and that leftist antifa activists were abetting the plot with violence on the ground whenever Trump supporters gathered in protest.
The jury has seen evidence that Mr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers marshaled weapons — including assault-style rifles and cut-off pool cues — while preparing to attend two pro-Trump rallies in Washington before Jan. 6: one called the Million MAGA March, on Nov. 14, 2020, and a subsequent gathering known as the Jericho March, on Dec. 12.
At both events, lawyers for the group and witnesses have said, the Oath Keepers used their military and law-enforcement training to set up channels of communication and to conduct reconnaissance. They also staged armed “quick reaction forces” outside Washington that were ready to rush to the aid of their associates in the city if things got out of hand.
The defense has argued that even though the Oath Keepers used military-style tactics to prepare for the events, they were not involved in violence in November or December. Lawyers for the group have also said that none of the thousands of text messages seized by government contain any evidence that Mr. Rhodes or his members planned for violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Instead, the lawyers have said, the Oath Keepers had prepared for defensive maneuvers against antifa, believing that leftist counterprotesters would attack Trump supporters that day. The group was also waiting, the lawyers have said, for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, they claim, that would have given them standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.
ImageMr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers have said they were preparing for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act following his election loss in 2020.Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Several times during the week, prosecutors have introduced tantalizing bits of evidence about Mr. Rhodes’s connections to Mr. Trump or to people in his orbit.
On Thursday, for example, John Zimmerman, a former Oath Keeper from North Carolina, told the jury that he believed Mr. Rhodes had a contact in the Secret Service who worked with Mr. Trump. Then on Friday, prosecutors showed the jury a text message from Mr. Rhodes to his lieutenants saying that he had been busy through December 2020 “on back channel working groups trying to advise the president.”
Mr. Rhodes sent other messages to a group chat called F.O.S. — for Friends of Stone, a reference to Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser. In a message to the Stone group chat on Dec. 11, 2020, Mr. Rhodes repeated his call for Mr. Trump to summon the militia with the Insurrection Act.
“If he doesn’t do that, then we will have to fight against an illegitimate Biden regime and the deep state with him,” Mr. Rhodes wrote. “It will be a bloody and desperate fight.”
On the evening of Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Rhodes was still trying to persuade Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, according to court papers released in May. The government claims that Mr. Rhodes tried to get an intermediary to call Mr. Trump and have him mobilize the Oath Keepers to forcibly stop the transition of presidential power.
Even four days after the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes was still trying to get a message to Mr. Trump, begging him not to give up on the fight to keep the White House, the jury is expected to hear at some point from a government witness.
The witness recorded a meeting with Mr. Rhodes at which he could be heard complaining that the rioters at the Capitol did not have any weapons.
“My only regret is that they should have brought rifles,” Mr. Rhodes said, adding, “We could have fixed it right there and then.”
Source: nytimes.com
