The man behind a far-right anti-government militia whose members breached the halls of Congress on 6 January, 2021 said they made a “stupid” decision to do so.
While testifying in his own defence in a trial on charges of seditious conspiracy against the government, Stewart Rhodes denied that his Oath Keepers militia had ever planned to storm the US Capitol, after federal prosecutors spent the last several weeks reading dozens of text messages showing the group’s members preparing for violent action that day.
He also denied instructing the group’s counsel to tell members to delete those potentially incriminating messages, claiming that she acted on her own.
“I told her to exercise their right to remain silent and to stop blabbing,” he said about Kellye SoRelle, who was separately charged for her role in the Capitol riots. “She took it upon herself to add that part of the message. It didn’t come from me.”
Later, despite Ms SoRelle’s insistence that they were not, he claimed that “we were dating.”
After a federal prosecutor asked him whether he exerted some control over Ms SoRelle, he smirked.
“Do we have to get into kink, really?” he replied. “Outside the bedroom, she’s definitely a ‘type A.’ Inside the bedroom, she switches to a sub.”
Previously in the trial, prosecutors shared text messages that suggested the two were involved in a romantic relationship.
In his first full day of testimony, Mr Rhodes claimed that Oath Keepers who breached the halls of Congress went “off mission” from the group’s goal that day: to protect and escort groups in Washington DC to protest what Mr Rhodes has falsely characterised as the “unconstitutional” 2020 presidential election. But some of those Oath Keepers are his co-defendants.
“I think it was stupid to go into the Capitol,” he told the jury in federal court. “One, because it wasn’t our mission … And two, it opened the door for our political enemies to persecute us. And that’s what happened, and here we are.”
Mr Rhodes claimed one of his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, went “off mission” by entering the Capitol.
He said there were roughly 100 members of the group in Washington DC that day, as a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to forcefully overturn the 2020 presidential election in an attack fuelled by the former president’s baseless narrative of widespread voter fraud.
“I didn’t want them getting wrapped up into all the nonsense with Trump supporters,” Mr Rhodes told the jury. “My goal was to make sure that no one got wrapped up in that Charlie Foxtrot going on inside the Capitol.”
Mr Rhodes has insisted that he encouraged and prepared for then-President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act
But he said that he had “nothing to do with” a “quick reaction force” of weapons stashed in a nearby hotel room in Virginia, which lawyers for Mr Rhodes had previously argued was to be used in the event Mr Trump used the Insurrection Act to call up the group’s arms.
Investigators and federal prosecutors have presented reams of evidence, including text messages and video, appearing to show Oath Keepers energising supporters for weeks after the 2020 election with violent rhetoric.
On cross examination on Monday, assistant US attorney Kathryn Rakoczy sought to debunk Mr Rhodes’ rosier depiction of the Oath Keepers’ founding, arguing that the group envisioned “forcible opposition of the government” from the start.
She also doubted that Ms SoRelle would have relied on Mr Rhodes’ name without telling him in her instruction to Oath Keepers to delete what would become evidence of conspiracy.
Ms Rakoczy also showed him a series of messages he shared with Mr Meggs and others in which he seemed to be aware of a quick reaciton force.
“We WILL have a QRF,” he wrote. “This situation calls for it.”
Last week, prosecutors shared a covertly recorded audio clip from four days after the Capitol riots in which Mr Rhodes said that his “only regret” was that he did not bring rifles with him that day.
He also said he would “f****** hang” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “from the lamppost.”
When asked if his comments were “rhetoric or bombast” on Monday, Mr Rhodes said “of course it was.”
“I had a couple drinks along with Kellye,” he said. “I was concerned about what I saw happen in 2020 and concerned about the same agenda to really pull a coup.”
