WASHINGTON — When the Oath Keepers and their leader Stewart Rhodes answered former President Donald Trump’s call to travel to D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, they had far more than protest in mind, according to testimony by the militia’s former national spokesman before the January 6th Committee Tuesday.
“What it was going to be was an armed revolution,” said Jason Van Tatenhove, who left the group in 2017. “People died that day. Law enforcement officers died that day. There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol. This could have been the spark that started a new civil war.”
Five people who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 died within 24 hours of the riot, including U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was pronounced dead the following day after suffering multiple strokes. Four police officers who responded to the riot subsequently died of suicide, including one, D.C. Police Officer Jeffrey Smith, whose widow was in the audience Tuesday as Van Tatenhove testified before the committee.
Tuesday’s hearing, the seventh the committee has held over the past two months, focused on a tweet sent by Trump in the early morning hours of Dec. 19, 2020, and the way it “electrified and galvanized” his supporters, as Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) put it.
The tweet urged supporters to travel to D.C. on Jan. 6 – the day Electoral College votes would be certified by a joint session of Congress – promising it “will be wild.” The committee showed how Trump’s words lit up online communities of supporters and prompted immediate action from Women for America First director Cindy Chafian, who changed the date of a planned rally from after the inauguration to Jan. 6. It also prompted overtures between two groups which had previously operated independently: the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
In court filings last March, the Justice Department published Facebook communications from Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs bragging about organizing “an alliance” between his group, Florida Three Percenters and the Proud Boys. Meggs is one of nine Oath Keepers, along with Rhodes, now charged with seditious conspiracy.
On Tuesday, though, the committee presented evidence that their communications went much deeper. According to logs obtained by the committee, Rhodes and former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio were in a “Friends of Stone” chat with long-time Trump confidante and Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander. The committee also detailed the groups’ relationships with former Trump National Security Adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and InfoWars host Alex Jones. All four men spoke at the Ellipse on Jan. 5, the day before Trump himself spoke, and multiple Oath Keepers were working Stone’s personal security detail on Jan. 6. One of them, Joshua James, pleaded guilty to felony charges of seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding in March.
The committee also presented evidence that Alexander, fellow rally organizer Kylie Kremer and others knew Trump was planning on directing the crowd at the Ellipse to the Capitol on Jan. 6 – despite some his own closest advisers being unaware.
“Tomorrow: Ellipse then US Capitol,” Alexander allegedly wrote in a text obtained by the committee. “Trump is supposed to order us to the Capitol at the end of his speech but we will see.”
In a text to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell beginning “this stays between us,” Kremer wrote that “POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’” That claim was backed up by a draft tweet obtained from the National Archives in which Trump would have told his supporters ahead of time about a march to the Capitol after his Jan. 6 speech. That tweet was never sent, but it was marked “PRESIDENT HAS SEEN.”
Instead of sending the tweet, Trump repeatedly pushed his supporters to the Capitol in his speech – ad libbing multiple calls to action that weren’t in the written version, according to the committee.
“A single scripted reference to Mike Pence became eight. A single scripted reference to a march to the Capitol became four, with the president ad libbing that he would be joining them himself,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL).
The former president did not, ultimately, join the crowd at the Capitol himself – although according to testimony from an aide to his chief of staff, he endeavored desperately to do so – but dozens of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers did. And when the assault on the Capitol failed to stop the certification of Electoral College votes, according to one of those Oath Keepers who pleaded guilty in May, Rhodes called someone close to Trump and urged him to “call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power” by invoking the Insurrection Act.
That, according to Van Tatenhove, was the clearest glimpse of what the Oath Keepers’ vision for the country is.
“We’ve got to stop with this dishonesty and the mincing of words and just call things what they are,” he said Tuesday. “[Stewart Rhodes] is a militia leader. He has grand visions of being a paramilitary leader, and the Insurrection Act would have given him a path forward with that. The fact that the president was communicating, whether directly or indirectly messaging, that gave him the nod. And all I can do is thank the gods that things did not go any worse that day.”
The January 6th Committee’s next hearing was expected to be July 21 in primetime. Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) promised it would return to the events of Jan. 6 itself and offer the public a minute-by-minute accounting of what Trump was doing in the White House.
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