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PHOENIX (AP) — Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.
He secured a
clerkship on the Arizona Supreme Court, in part thanks to his unusual life
story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident,
followed by marriage, college and an Ivy League law degree.
The
clerkship was one more rung up from a hardscrabble beginning. But rather than
fitting in, Rhodes came across as angry and aggrieved.
He railed to
colleagues about how the Patriot Act, which gave the government greater
surveillance powers after the Sept. 11 attacks, would erase civil liberties. He
referred to Vice President Dick Cheney as a fascist for supporting the Bush
administration’s use of “enemy combatant” status to indefinitely detain
prisoners.
“He saw this
titanic struggle between people like him who wanted individual liberty and the
government that would try to take away that liberty,” said Matt Parry, who
worked with Rhodes as a clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan.
Rhodes
alienated his moderate Republican boss and eventually left the steppingstone
job. Since then he has ordered his life around a thirst for greatness and deep
distrust of government.
He turned to
forming a group rooted in anti-government sentiment, and his message resonated.
He gained followers as he went down an increasingly extremist path that would
lead to armed standoffs, including with federal authorities at Nevada’s Bundy
Ranch. It culminated last year, prosecutors say, with Rhodes engineering a plot
to violently stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming president.
Rhodes, 57,
will be back in court Tuesday, but not as a lawyer. He and four others tied to
the Oath Keepers are being tried on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most
serious criminal allegation leveled by the Justice Department in its
far-reaching prosecution of rioters who attacked the Capitol.
Rhodes,
Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs are the
first Jan. 6 defendants to stand trial under a rarely used, Civil War-era law
against attempting to overthrow the government or, in this case, block the
transfer of presidential power.
The trial
will put a spotlight on the secretive group Rhodes founded in 2009 that has
grown to include thousands of claimed members and loosely organized chapters
across the country, according to Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director
of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
For Rhodes,
it will be a position at odds with the role of greatness that he has long
envisioned for himself, said his estranged wife, Tasha Adams.
“He was
going to achieve something amazing,” Adams said. “He didn’t know what it was,
but he was going to achieve something incredible and earth shattering.”
Rhodes was
born in Fresno, California. He shuttled between there and Nevada, sometimes
living with his mother and other times with grandparents who were migrant farm
workers, part of a multicultural extended family that included Mexican and
Filipino relatives. His mother was a minister who had her own radio show in Las
Vegas and went by the name Dusty Buckle, Adams said.
Rhodes
joined the Army fresh out of high school and served nearly three years before
he was honorably discharged in January 1986 after breaking his back in a
parachuting accident.
He recovered
and was working as a valet in Las Vegas when he met Adams in 1991. He was 25,
she was 18.
He had a
sense of adventure that was attractive to a young woman brought up in a
middle-class, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints family. A few months
after the couple started dating, Rhodes accidentally dropped a gun and shot out
his eye. He now wears an eye patch.
Adams’
family had set aside money for her to go to college, but after their wedding
Rhodes decided he should be the first to attend school. He told her she would
need to quit her job teaching ballroom and country dancing and instead support
them both by working full time as a stripper so he could focus on doing an
excellent job in school, according to Adams. They married, but she found
stripping degrading and it clashed with her conservative Mormon upbringing, she
said.
“Every night
the drive was just so bad. I would just throw up every single night before I
went in, it was just so awful,” Adams said. Rhodes would pressure her to go further,
increase her exposure or contact with men to make more money, she said. “It was
never enough ... I felt like I had given up my soul.”
She quit
when she got pregnant with their first child, and the couple moved back in with
her family. They worried about her but didn’t want to push too far for fear of
losing her altogether. By then, Rhodes was the center of her orbit.
Rhodes’
lawyer declined to make him available for an interview and Rhodes declined to
answer a list of questions sent by The Associated Press.
After
finishing college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rhodes went to work
in Washington as a staffer for Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican
congressman, and later attended Yale, with stints in between as an artist and
sculptor. Paul did not respond to a request for comment.
Rhodes’
college transcripts earned him entry to several top schools, Adams said. While
at Yale, Adams took care of their growing family in a small apartment while he
distinguished himself with an award for a paper arguing that the George W. Bush
administration’s use of enemy combatant status to hold people suspected of
supporting terrorism indefinitely without charge was unconstitutional.
After the
Arizona clerkship, the family bounced to Montana and back to Nevada, where he
worked on Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008. That’s when Rhodes also began
to formulate his idea of starting the Oath Keepers. He put a short video and
blog post on Blogspot and “it went viral overnight,” Adams said. Rhodes was
interviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but also more mainstream media
figures such as Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly.
He formally
launched the Oath Keepers in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2009, where
the first shot in the American Revolution was fired.
“We know
that if a day should come in this country when a full-blown dictatorship would
come or tyranny, from the left or from the right, we know that it can only
happen if those men, our brothers in arms, go along and comply with
unconstitutional, unlawful orders,” Rhodes said in his Lexington speech, which
didn’t garner any news coverage.
The group’s
stated goal was to get past and present members of the military, first
responders and police officers to honor the promise they made to defend the
Constitution against enemies. The Oath Keepers issued a list of orders that its
members wouldn’t obey, such as disarming citizens, carrying out warrantless
searches and detaining Americans as enemy combatants in violation of their right
to jury trials.
Rhodes was a
compelling speaker and especially in the early years framed the group as “just
a pro-Constitution group made up of patriots,” said Sam Jackson, author of the
book “Oath Keepers” about the group.
With that
benign-sounding framing and his political connections, Rhodes harnessed the
growing power of social media to fuel the Oath Keepers’ growth during the
presidency of Barack Obama. Membership rolls leaked last year included some
38,000 names, though many people on the list have said they are no longer
members or were never active participants. One expert last year estimated membership
to be a few thousand.
The internal
dialogue was much darker and more violent about what members perceived as
imminent threats, especially to the Second Amendment, and the idea that members
should be prepared to fight back and recruit their neighbors to fight back,
too.
“Time and
time again, Oath Keepers lays the groundwork for individuals to decide for
themselves, violent or otherwise criminal activity is warranted,” said Jackson,
an assistant professor at the University at Albany.
A membership
fee was a requirement to access the website, where people could join discussion
forums, read Rhodes’ writing and hear pitches to join militaristic trainings.
Members willing to go armed to a standoff numbered in the low dozens, though,
said Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group.
Showdowns
with the government began in 2011 in the small western Arizona desert town of
Quartzsite, where local government was in turmoil as officials feuded among
themselves, the police chief was accused of misconduct and several police
employees had been suspended. A couple years later, Rhodes started calling on
members to form “community preparedness teams,” which included military-style
training.
The Oath
Keepers also showed up at a watershed event in anti-government circles: the
standoff with federal agents at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch in 2014. Later that year,
members stationed themselves along rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, armed with
AR-15-style weapons, to protect businesses from rioting after a grand jury
declined to charge a police officer in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old
Michael Brown.
The
following year Oath Keepers guarded a southern Oregon gold mine whose mining
claim owners were in a dispute with the government. Still, Rhodes was never
arrested.
As the Oath
Keepers escalated their public profile and confrontations with the government,
Rhodes was leaving behind some of those he once championed. Jennifer Esposito
hired him as her lawyer after the group’s early outing in Quartzsite, but he
missed a hearing in her case because he was at the Bundy Ranch standoff. A
judge kicked Rhodes off the case, and no lawyer would represent her.
She has no
hard feelings, but Michael Roth, also represented by Rhodes in Quartzsite
lawsuits, is less forgiving. He compared Rhodes’s handling of his case to a
doctor walking out of an operating room in the middle of surgery.
“He clearly
just used us for publicity to gain membership in the Oath Keepers,” Roth said.
The neglect
culminated in a disbarment case eventually brought against Rhodes. He ignored
the allegations, missed a hearing and wasn’t even represented by a lawyer. The
commission examining the case in 2015 found his conduct as an attorney wouldn’t
normally get someone disbarred, but his refusal to cooperate did.
Meanwhile,
on the national stage, Donald Trump’s political star was taking off. His
grievances about things such as the “deep state” aligned with the Oath Keeper’s
anti-governmental stance. While Rhodes didn’t agree with Trump on everything,
the group’s rhetoric began to shift.
“With the
election of Trump, now the Oath Keepers have an ally in the White House,” Jackson
said.
For much of
the the Oath Keepers’ history, the federal government was the enemy, but
gradually the enemy became left-leaning people in the United States and antifa,
or anti-fascist groups, became the primary menace, he said.
Rhodes
wanted Oath Keepers to go to Cleveland to provide security for Trump — then set
to be the GOP presidential nominee — at the 2016 Republican National
Convention, even though no one had asked the group for protection, said Richard
Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who served on the Oath Keepers’ board for about
six years.
“I said,
‘Why are we going — so we can say we protected Trump? We are not going to get
anywhere near Trump,’” Mack said. “I said, ‘This was crazy.’ All the other
board members voted with me, and Stewart was mad.”
That was a
breaking point last straw for Mack.
He wasn’t
the only board member to walk away as they saw the direction of the group close
up, Van Tatenhove said.
“Once they
saw where he was going, they were a lot less comfortable,” he said. But Rhodes
always managed to weather the disagreements and hold onto power. “He was always
going to be the start and finish of the Oath Keepers.”
A voracious
reader and charismatic speaker, Rhodes drew people in and had a talent for
molding his message to his audience and holding onto power. He warmed to the
“alt-right” movement as its profile rose. Van Tatenhove knew he had to leave
when in 2017 he overheard a group of Oath Keepers, in a discussion in a grocery
store, denying that the Holocaust happened.
In 2018,
Rhodes went too far for Jim Arroyo, a former Army Ranger who serves as
president of an Oath Keepers chapter in Yavapai County, Arizona. He rejected a
push to send group members to the U.S.-Mexico border for an armed operation to support
the U.S. Border Patrol.
Arroyo said
that hadn’t been approved by any authority and argued that pointing a gun in
the wrong direction along the border could stir an international problem. He
refused to go.
“That’s when
he pretty much didn’t want anything to do with us,” said Arroyo, who eventually
broke away from the national Oath Keepers and hasn’t had contact with Rhodes in
over four years.
When Biden
won the 2020 election, prosecutors say, Rhodes started preparing for battle.
Rhodes and the Oath Keepers spent weeks plotting to block the transfer of
power, amassing weapons and setting up “quick reaction force” teams with
weapons to be on standby outside the nation’s capital, prosecutors say.
On Jan. 6,
2021, authorities say, two teams of Oath Keepers stormed the Capitol alongside
hundreds of other angry Trump supporters.
Rhodes is
not accused of going inside, but he was seen gathered outside the Capitol after
the riot with several members who did, prosecutors have said.
Defense lawyers
have accused prosecutors of twisting their clients’ words. They have argued
that the militia group came to Washington only to provide security at events
before the riot for right-wing figures such as Trump confidant Roger Stone and
that there was never a plan to attack the Capitol.
The case has
dealt a major blow to the Oath Keepers, in part because many people associated
with it want to be considered respectable in their communities, said Carroll
Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Of the approximately 30 Capitol riot
defendants affiliated with the Oath Keepers, nine have pleaded guilty to
charges stemming from the attack, including three who have pleaded guilty to
seditious conspiracy.
But that
doesn’t mean the ideas that Rhodes promoted have faded away.
“He came up
with a blueprint that is going to be used in the future by people we don’t even
know about,” Van Tatenhove said. “I think it’s very important for us to pay
attention.”
Whitehurst
reported from Washington.
Follow the
AP’s coverage of the Capitol riot at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege