1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Oath Keepers founder wouldn’t have taken part in Jan. 6 attack without cover ‘from someone higher up the chain’: son



Perhaps no one is anticipating the trial of the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, which is scheduled to begin Sept. 27, more than Dakota Adams, his estranged son.

“My opinion on Stewart is that if he ever gets out of prison, he’s going to be a threat to my family,” Adams told Raw Story. “If he gets out, he has a right to unsupervised visitation. I would strap on body armor and follow him around the house with a firearm to ensure that he doesn’t try to kidnap my younger siblings and flee the country.”

Adams, who is 25, legally changed his name to avoid carrying forward his father’s lineage. The eldest of Rhodes’ children, Adams has two other adult siblings and three siblings who are still minors. Adams and other family members have previously detailed years of abuse that they say they experienced at the hands of Rhodes, who founded the far-right Oath Keepers militia group in 2009.

“If anyone would have asked if I would feign a tearful reconciliation to wear a wire and put him in prison, I would have agreed in a heartbeat,” Adams said.

Adams became estranged from Rhodes and drifted from the far-right movement his father helped lead in 2017. That rupture began a process of mourning the loss of his paternal relationship and resenting Rhodes for failing his family, Adams said. But by 2020, the year Rhodes took an extreme turn towards more violent rhetoric and alignment with Trump, Adams said he had “pretty much run out of venom” in his feelings about his father.

Now, as an astute critic of the far-right milieu of the Oath Keepers and someone intimately familiar with Rhodes’ patterns of behavior, Adams is keenly monitoring preparations for the seditious conspiracy trial of Rhodes and eight codefendants, and the next round of hearings by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.

Adams said he is certain that his father wouldn’t have decided on his own to participate in an attack on the US Capitol.

“I believe that Stewart wouldn’t have gone into the 6th without cover or assurances from someone higher up the chain,” Adams told Raw Story. “I believe he was an expendable asset. He’s probably going to go down swinging in his three-ring-circus trial, believing that someone like Trump or DeSantis will come along later and pardon him, and he will rise again like a phoenix.”

The Oath Keepers actions on Jan. 6 — with members breaching the Capitol in two separate “stacks,” with directions to hunt for lawmakers, and others staged across the Potomac River in armed “quick reaction forces” — are a departure from Rhodes’ tactical posture in the past, Adams said.

Rhodes was critical of a proposal by libertarian activist Adam Kokesh in 2013 to stage an armed Second Amendment march into Washington, DC, which would have violated the district’s prohibition against firearms and put participants in the position of deciding whether to defy arrest.

“Stewart’s personal take on that was that it was stupid,” Adams said. “If any shootings took place, they were going to be starting the first battle of the civil war in a kill trough as they came over the bridge over the Potomac River. It would create the perception that they were weak and they were the aggressors, which is the worst way to start a war.”

Similarly, Adams said, Rhodes initially discouraged members from joining the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in response to a call by Ammon Bundy in late 2015.

“Waiting out a siege in the Capitol with Nancy Pelosi as a hostage — all that’s going to do is get you hanged,” Adams said. “I don’t think [Rhodes] would have done it unless he thought he had an out, it was acting on orders from someone else, and he had to be desperate.”

Adams said Rhodes lived with the fear of being indicted for his involvement in the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada in 2014 for years, and believed that a Democratic administration increased his odds of arrest.

In 2015, Adams said that Rhodes accepted an invitation to meet two FBI agents at an Appleby’s restaurant in Kalispell, Montana. Rhodes claimed to the family that he laid down a hard line to the agents about the risk of a civil war, but Adams said the meeting marked the end of the Oath Keepers’ participation in armed standoffs, and Rhodes spiraled into a deep depression shortly afterward.

Adams said he believes the Oath Keepers’ increasing alignment with Donald Trump after the 2016 election was a tack by Rhodes to get out from under the thumb of the FBI. While others in the Oath Keepers were preoccupied with purported election fraud in late 2020, Adams observed that many of Rhodes’ posts on the Oath Keepers website, which has been taken down, were paranoid rants about the FBI.

Rhodes’ past dealings with the FBI have made him an object of suspicion within far-right and conservative circles, along with the fact that he remained free until January 2022 — almost a year after the arrest of the first Oath Keepers members in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. Adams rejects the proposal that Rhodes was an asset in a so-called “fedsurrection.”

“I do not think Stewart was acting as a federal asset,” Adams said. “That was all Stewart. That was all the kind of s*** Stewart would do if he was given clearance from some higher authority, that everything was going to be okay, that he would be pardoned.”

While he doesn’t have direct knowledge of the Oath Keepers’ activities after 2017, Adams said he suspects that Rhodes was reporting to either Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, or Roger Stone, a political strategist and longtime confidant of the former president, on Jan. 6.

Intense speculation has focused on a phone call by Rhodes from a suite in the Phoenix Hotel following the attack on the Capitol in which Rhodes reportedly asked an unidentified individual to let him speak to President Trump. William Todd Wilson, an Oath Keeper who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, overheard “Rhodes repeatedly implore the individual to tell President Trump to call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power,” according to the statement of facts accompanying Wilson’s guilty plea. The unidentified individual denied Rhodes’s request to speak directly with Trump, according to the statement of facts, and after the call ended, Rhodes told the others in the room: “I just want to fight.”

“Whoever Stewart was calling from that hotel room — I would bet, if anyone were taking the odds, that was Michael Flynn or Roger Stone that rebuffed him and refused to compromise Trump,” Adams told Raw Story.

Joe Flynn responded on behalf of his brother, Michael Flynn, to a request for comment from Raw Story.

“Lol you guys are f*****g clowns,” he said in a text message.

An attorney for Stone said his client has never had any dealings with Rhodes.

“Please let me say in no uncertain terms, Mr. Stone has never met, talked to, or otherwise interacted with Mr. Rhodes,” Grant J. Smith said in an email to Raw Story. “Everything you assert below is based on the guesses and conjecture of an estranged son. Unequivocally, Mr. Stone did not participate in anything you have described below. Please don’t report on something as flimsy as your statements below, no matter how tempting it may be.”

A spokesperson for the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia declined to comment on the Oath Keepers case.

Kellye SoRelle, the general counsel for the Oath Keepers and someone Rhodes has said he had a romantic relationship with, told Raw Story following her arrest last week: “I hope they get the real perpetrators — Flynn, Byrne, Powell, etc., those behind the Big Lie that set up the conservatives.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO; attorney Sidney Powell; and Joe Flynn, speaking on behalf of Michael Flynn, all rejected SoRelle’s characterizations.

Adams said he thinks there’s an outside chance that Rhodes will plead out and agree to turn state’s evidence if he feels that he’s been betrayed or written off by members of Trump’s circle. It would probably take something like Trump hinting during a campaign speech that Rhodes was a federal asset.

“Short of that, I think he’s going to go down swinging,” Adams said. “He is going to play for time, and make a lot of noise, and build his resume for his return. What I would prepare for in the trial is a clown show, full three-ring circus.”

Overall, Adams is feeling bullish about the federal prosecution of the Oath Keepers and the next round of January 6th Committee hearings.

“I think Stewart’s trial is going to be a trial run for indicting Donald Trump, possibly using some of the same logic of Stewart commanding the stack and the QRF; in the same way, [they could argue] Trump orchestrated the mob that attacked the Capitol,” Adams said. “And it’s a stepping stone for indicting Trump’s inner circle, people like Stone and Flynn.

“I think a conviction of Stewart is going to lay the groundwork for going up the chain on the sedition track,” Adams continued. “My personal take is that Stewart’s trial and the second round of January 6th Committee hearings is a prelude for Trump’s arrest. That’s the way you go after an autocrat. You have to take on the public perception battle as much as anything else. You have to attack every dimension simultaneously. Convicting Stewart for seditious conspiracy for running a paramilitary embedded with the mob that attacked the Capitol is one way to do that.”

https://www.rawstory.com/dakota-adams/

[Rick Plant]

So, these insurrectionists are all going down and all they can do is yell and scream as they attempt to gaslight their gullible base.

QAnon freak Marjorie Taylor Greene claims "they are not insurrectionists".

Is she trying to say storming the Capitol to overthrow the government is not an insurrection?

Is the Republicans using fake electors instead of real electors not an attempt to steal the election?

These radicals have no justification for their treason and all they can do is cry about it.           


Jan. 6 rally organizer says government is seeking information from her in grand jury investigation



Federal investigators are seeking information from Women for America First, which hosted the “Save America Rally,” as part of a wide-ranging probe into fundraising by the Trump campaign after the election, the alternate electors scheme and the Jan. 6 rally headlined by President Trump, which set the stage for the attack on the US Capitol.

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon tweeted on Friday night that Women for America First was among clients that had been “served w/ extremely broad subpoenas, or warrants for phone/device.”

Amy Kremer, the organization’s chair, retweeted Dhillon on Saturday morning, writing, “I can confirm this.”

The New York Times and Washington Post have previously reported that the federal grand jury investigation is focusing on political fundraising by Trump through a political action committee set up after the 2020 election that promoted baseless election fraud claims. The Post also reported that at least one of the subpoenas sought information “about the plan to submit slates of phony electors claiming Trump won pivotal states.

The two outlets reported that the subpoenas were sent to former White House and Trump campaign staffers, with the Times naming William B. Harrison, a former White House aide who now works for Trump’s personal office; Julie Radford, chief of staff to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka; Nicholas Luna, another personal aide to Trump; and Sean Dollman, the chief financial officer of the 2020 campaign. The Times and Post reported that the subpoenas are seeking communications with lawyers involved in the fake electors scheme.

The revelation that Women for America First is among the entities that have received subpoenas, search warrants or a combination of the two adds a new dimension to the grand jury investigation. Dhillon told Carlson during an appearance on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Friday that three of her law firm’s clients received search warrants or subpoenas from what she called “the ‘Capitol siege’ section of the United States Department of Justice’s DC office.”

“They ask for all communications dating from a month before the election ’til two months after the election,” Dhillon said. “And they ask for all communications regarding dozens of people. And the categories are alternate electors, fundraising around irregularities around the election, and also a rally that happened before the January 6th situation at the Capitol — the Save America Rally.”

The news sent a ripple through the far-right media ecosystem. After turning himself in to authorities in Manhattan on charges of defrauding donors to a scheme to build a border wall, former White House strategist Steve Bannon appeared on Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s show on Friday, and claimed “there were 35 senior members of MAGA, Republican supporters of Donald Trump — the FBI rolled in on ’em.” In her interview with Carlson later on Friday, Dhillon placed the figure at “50 approximately.”

Kirk characterized Bannon’s statement as a “bombshell” and said that his guest “broke news” in a clip tweeted out to promote the interview.

Trump allies have framed the grand jury investigation as part of a persecution campaign by Democrats and the FBI against conservatives.

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor and a figurehead in the election denier movement, amplified the persecution theme in an interview with Bannon on Saturday.

“Really, what this latest thing, too, Steve is, I think you broke yesterday — really what it is, it’s basically, when they put out all these subpoenas, when they do all these things to all these different people, they’re basically telling you to sit down and shut up,” he said.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who was reportedly part of a group of Republican lawmakers who met with Trump in December 2020 to discuss a dubious legal theory positing that Vice President Mike Pence could single-handedly reject Biden electors and preemptively sought a pardon, told Bannon she had spoken to some of the individuals who received subpoenas on Friday.

“They’re building a conspiracy theory, a spider web,” Greene said. “They’re trying to lie about all of us and say that we were doing something on January 6th that we absolutely were not. Everything that we did was legal.” Greene went on to complain that the government is “trying to create a conspiracy that we were waging an insurrection — and we absolutely were not.”

Speaking with Greene, Bannon fumed, “This is all intimidation tactics. They think they’re going to scare people. And they’re not scaring people. They’re making our resolve — we’ve got steely resolve now. You’re not going to scare anybody. You’re not going to intimidate anybody. We’re going to break you. We’re going to break you. The FBI, we’re going to break you. We’re going to win a sweeping victory on November the 8th, and then we’re going to cut off your money.”

https://www.rawstory.com/women-for-america-first/

[Rick Plant]

DC judge rejects *another* request by a Jan 6 defendant to get "change of venue" to move his trial out of DC.

John Nassif argued media coverage could bias jurors.

Judge: " Courts have successfully empaneled juries and conducted trials in the locations of highly publicized crimes".

[Rick Plant]

Big delay in sentencing in Jan 6 case of Army veteran Landon Copeland of Utah. Postponed until December to allow for new forensic evaluation of Copeland.

Copeland, of Utah, gave jailhouse interview after Jan 6 in which he predicted Trump would return to office before 2024.

[Rick Plant]

Justice Dept filing: "Breakthroughs in the defensive line on both the left and right flanks caused the entire police line to collapse and individual officers were swallowed by the crowd and many officers were assaulted as they waited in a group to retreat through doors and stairwells up onto the inaugural stage".

[Rick Plant]

Oath Keepers leader follows Trump's lead and demands own 'special master' for his case



On Tuesday, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, on trial for his role in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, submitted a court filing trying to take a page out of former President Donald Trump's book, and demand the court appoint a special master to advise on his case.

The filing notes that there are "10 terabytes of data" in the discovery process, and that a special master could help facilitate reviewing all of this information.

"Discovery in this case is more massive than the discovery in many cases where courts have appointed special masters to help manage discovery," said the filing. "For example, the Whitmer-kidnapping-plot case in the U.S. District of Michigan in 2021, the Bundy prosecutions in the U.S. District of Nevada both used special masters to manage, compile, dispense and compartmentalize discovery that was less massive than the discovery in this case. Rhodes requests appointment of a special master in this case."

As Lawfare's Roger Parloff noted on Twitter, "this motion is signed only by Rhodes' attorney Edward Tarpley, whom Rhodes tried to substitute last week for the 2 representing him for mos. With trial starting 9/27, Judge said no way. The other 2 said they'd let Tarpley sit at counsel table, but that was about it."

The Oath Keepers are a far-right paramilitary group, consisting mainly of current and retired military and law enforcement, who pledge to refuse to follow orders that violate their interpretation of the Constitution. They first gained national prominence when they joined in the armed standoff against federal agents at the Bundy Ranch in 2014, and are accused of carrying out an organized "military stack" assault at the Capitol on January 6. Rhodes and 10 other Oath Keepers face charges of seditious conspiracy.

Trump's special master request, granted by a right-wing judge in Florida earlier this month, is widely considered by experts to be a stall tactic against the investigation into classified documents hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The Justice Department has threatened to appeal certain elements of that ruling, including the injunction that blocks them from reviewing certain documents, but has signaled they are open to one of Trump's candidates to be special master, former New York District Judge Raymond Dearie.

https://www.rawstory.com/stewart-rhodes-2658203907/

[Rick Plant]

Important news today in the Rhodes case.

Judge REJECTS Stewart Rhodes (latest) request to delay trial and to name a "special master" to review and manage voluminous evidence/discovery in the criminal case.

Trial remains on scheduled for Sept 27 in seditious conspiracy case.