DALLAS — Two veteran Dallas attorneys are embarking on an “extremely novel” defense in the biggest criminal trial of their careers.
Phillip Linder, 56, and James Lee Bright, 52, were hired to defend Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, a Granbury resident accused of attempting to orchestrate an armed overthrow of the U.S. government at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rhodes is the government’s key target in the massive and historic Capitol riot prosecution that has resulted in more than 870 arrests. The Montana native and four other alleged Oath Keepers are the first Jan. 6 defendants to stand trial for seditious conspiracy, a rare Civil War-era charge that calls for up to 20 years behind bars.
Seditious conspiracy involves any plot to “overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force” the U.S. government. It also covers any attempts to prevent the execution of any of its laws. The stakes are high for the Justice Department, which last secured a seditious conspiracy conviction at trial nearly 30 years ago.
Linder is a Baylor law school graduate, endurance cyclist, part-time municipal judge and former Dallas County prosecutor with 30 years of criminal defense experience. Bright, an SMU graduate, has served as president of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and practiced law for more than 25 years.
Together they are attempting to show that Rhodes and other Oath Keepers believed former President Donald Trump was planning to invoke the Insurrection Act in January 2021, thus giving the militia approval to take up arms and prepare for conflict.
The 200-year-old law gives the president the power to deploy the military and militias to suppress domestic insurrection, but it also has been used in times of civil unrest. Its most recent use was in 1992 when four Los Angeles police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King were acquitted, leading to widespread riots.
Linder made national headlines last week with his opening statement to the jury at the Washington, D.C., trial. He told jurors that the defendants “had no part in the bulk” of the violence during the mob siege on the Capitol.
“You may not like what you see and hear our defendants did, but the evidence will show that they didn’t do anything illegal that day,” Linder told the jury.
While Rhodes was on the Capitol grounds, he never entered the Capitol building or deployed quick response teams, according to court records.
Bright wrote in a legal filing last month that the case involves the “intersection of two vague, broad, centuries-old laws [seditious conspiracy and the Insurrection Act] that ironically share similar characteristics.”
“But here … the government potentially argues via several filings and various motions that asking a President to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress a seditious conspiracy is itself a seditious conspiracy,” the filing said.
The Oath Keepers is a far right militia that prosecutors consider an anti-government extremist group. Rhodes is one of more than two dozen North Texans who have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Prosecutors said Rhodes and his associates had planned and practiced for “unconventional warfare” with roadblocks, convoy operations and “hasty ambushes” in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. They said militia members, outfitted in tactical gear as if ready for war, chose a nearby Virginia hotel as a base for heavily armed quick-response teams that Rhodes arranged to supply arms to the insurgents at the Capitol. Other Oath Keepers, the government alleges, looked for volunteers to cross the Potomac to supply more arms to the “ground teams.”
Linder told jurors that his client was in Washington on Jan. 6 to handle security, and that Rhodes, a former attorney, is “extremely patriotic” and a constitutional expert. Linder also said Rhodes did not plan to cause any harm and called some of the defendants’ rhetoric “free speech and bravado.”
The attorneys said they will begin presenting their defense over three weeks.
Bright said he got the case when another Dallas attorney referred him to Rhodes. Bright then asked Linder to help. The two friends share an office with other lawyers and have tried cases together over the past dozen years.
Linder said they met with Rhodes shortly after his January arrest when he was in federal custody in North Texas.
“He knew that we knew what we were talking about so he decided he wanted to use us,” he said. “Lee and I both decided this would be a great case to try.”
Linder is no newcomer to large and complex criminal cases. He has tried two dozen murder cases, including capital murder, as well as large cartel narco-terrorism and white-collar fraud cases.
But the six-week Oath Keepers trial, he said, is unique for several reasons. First, it has “constitutional implications” for concepts like free speech and the peaceful transfer of power following an election, he said.
“There’s a lot of big legal theories that are being litigated in this trial,” Linder said.
The case also involves more government evidence than Linder has seen before — more than 10 terabytes’ worth, he said. That includes thousands of hours of video footage from surveillance cameras and police body-worn cameras; radio transmissions from multiple law enforcement agencies; location history from thousands of digital devices and other data from searches of those devices.
And the prosecution is still turning over material to the defense, a move he called unusual.
“The jury is seated and we’re still getting discovery,” said Linder, who’s tried more than 200 cases before a jury. “I’ve never been in a case like this.”
Mother Jones has reported that a nonprofit formed by Dallas lawyer Sidney Powell helped pay for Rhodes’ legal defense. Powell, a strong Trump ally, has spread false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and played a role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Linder and Bright declined to discuss their funding, saying only that their involvement in the case had no connection to Powell.
Courtroom regulars
Both defense lawyers have been regulars in large, multi-defendant drug and fraud cases in North Texas federal court.
Linder said about half of his cases involve large federal drug conspiracy cases and the remainder are white-collar charges involving business, mortgage, tax and health care fraud.
The Dallas native began his trial career in the Dallas County District Attorney’s office in 1992. He worked his way up to the office’s Organized Crime Section, handling large drug conspiracy cases. After nearly four years, he left to establish a defense practice and became one of a small group of lawyers approved to take capital murder cases.
One of those cases was featured on "The First 48," an A&E television show.
Linder says in his online biography that his Baylor finance and accounting degrees make him uniquely qualified to handle white-collar business fraud cases in state and federal courts. His clients have included doctors, lawyers and professional athletes. He’s also a past president of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and has served on lawyer disciplinary committees.
“You don’t get one of those positions without being a stand-up guy,” friend and colleague Roger Haynes said.
Haynes, a defense attorney who shares an office with Linder and has known him for years, said Linder enjoys the challenge of representing defendants in high-profile cases.
Linder, a self-described conservative Republican and the son of a retired federal Treasury Department agent, explored running for Dallas district attorney in 2009. He hired a consulting firm, met with Republican leaders and gave interviews about his thoughts on how the office should be run before bowing out.
His hobby is long-distance cycling, and he travels the country participating in two or three 100-mile events each year. Haynes said his friend has gotten many others into the sport.
“He’s kind of a Type A leader personality,” he said.
Linder said in an interview last year with Attorney at Law Magazine that his two-wheel obsession began in college when he started riding motorcycles. A bad crash in 2001 landed him in the hospital and he switched to bicycles.
Frisco attorney James Whalen has known Linder since his colleague was a young prosecutor and has tried cases with him. He called Linder “someone you can depend on.”
He’s one of a relatively small group of North Texas criminal defense attorneys whom you go to if you have money to spend and are indicted in a complex federal criminal case, Whalen said. But Linder, like Whalen, also takes court appointments to help lower-income defendants.
Whalen said Linder has a style similar to his in trials.
“He’s not bombastic,” he said. “He doesn’t hog the spotlight or need to.”
Whalen said his friend was excited to get the Rhodes case and had been looking forward to the challenge.
“It’s a very unique case and a unique set of facts,” he said.
Centuries-old laws
Bright captured the limelight in 2014 not for his legal arguments but for his wardrobe selection.
A Dallas judge threw him out of her courtroom when he showed up wearing shorts after a knee operation. Bright had just undergone the surgery and was in a knee brace, which he said prevented him from putting on long pants.
Judge Etta Mullin refused to allow him into her courtroom. Bright accused Mullin of discriminating against him and filed a motion to have her removed from the case. The incident, along with other complaints, later resulted in a reprimand against her by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.
Bright said he has handled more than 100 trials. A Dallas native, he went to college in Virginia and received his law degree in Tennessee. He also has a graduate degree from SMU. His hobbies, like his partner’s, are adventurous: alpine climbing, fishing and hunting.
Bright’s 35-page brief detailing the history and legal basis for the Insurrection Act said the government’s own evidence shows Rhodes was “actively lobbying and preparing” for the president to invoke the law. His client never intended to deploy the armed quick response teams unless Trump actually did so, he said.
“The defendants were simply acting in anticipation of what would have been lawfully given orders under the Insurrection Act,” the filing said. “What the government contends was a conspiracy to oppose United States laws was actually lobbying and preparation for the President to utilize a United States law.”
Bright wrote that Rhodes and the other defendants were “acting in reasonable reliance upon Trump’s own statements” and his broad authority under the law.
“Neither the courts nor Congress could have prevented him from calling forth the militia or armed forces … in response to the civil unrest and riots in Washington, D.C.,” Bright said in his filing.
Mark Lassiter, a Dallas attorney who shares an office with Linder and Bright, said the defense will hinge on whether jurors believe the Oath Keepers really thought Trump would invoke the rarely used law. He said Linder and Bright are just the attorneys to pull it off.
“Phillip has tried hundreds of cases of all shapes and sizes,” Lassiter said.
Bright said Rhodes will be the last defense witness and his testimony should last a couple of days.
“It’s an uphill battle, but we’re making some good headway,” he said last week. “Nothing’s won on the first day. … We have a plan, we have a strategy.”
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