When federal prosecutors on Jan. 13 indicted a right-wing leader for “seditious conspiracy” related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, they rightly focused attention on the key goal of both rioters and Trump-linked plotters: subversion of a presidential election.
One must rush to add the caveats that 1) many or even most rioters weren’t aiming at real insurrection and 2) there is still no evidence the rioters and the Trump team were in cahoots or that the Trumpsters planned the riot itself.
The new indictments are aimed at just 11 hotheaded defendants who, rather than merely being caught up in momentary passions, preplanned a violent assault.
These loons apparently think they are latter-day Sons of Liberty, but they come across in the indictment as just stupid SOBs.
It’s easy to make either too much or too little of the actions of these leaders of a group called the Oath Keepers. On one hand, its members seem to have delusions of grandeur and a collective fetish for paramilitary gear that they (thankfully) lacked the practical savvy to use effectively. To read their internal communications, as cited in the indictment, is to marvel at how harebrained their scheme was.
Oath Keepers leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, perhaps unintentionally, laid out the group’s plan amazingly concisely in one “hangout chat” post written on Christmas Day in 2020: “I think Congress will screw [President Donald Trump] over. The only chance we/he has is if we scare the s*** out of them and convince them it will be torches and pitchforks is [sic] they don’t do the right thing. But I don’t think they will listen.”
As amateurish as the messages repeatedly appear, the intended result and plans for violence were deadly serious. The indictment said that beginning two days after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Rhodes was telling his followers that “we aren’t getting through this without a civil war.” Two days after that, he already was outlining a plan, based on a similar event in Serbia, to “storm the Parliament” after first going through what he later called a refresher course on “military style basic” training — because “it will be a bloody and desperate fight.” On Dec. 22, he wrote that if Joe Biden tried to take office, then “we will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them.”
The explicit goal throughout these messages was for group members to travel from places across the country to Washington, D.C., with the aim of stopping the electoral vote count from occurring on Jan. 6. To that end, they came armed with a wide variety of weapons and combat gear, with firearms aplenty readily available for a series of “quick reaction force” teams and perhaps the use of special boats to shuttle team members across the Potomac River.
In what prosecutors say is a direct contravention of federal anti-sedition law, the members planned “to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power.” When Trump’s rally turned into the riot this group had eagerly anticipated and planned for, the members didn’t just join the mob but entered the Capitol complex in a militarylike “stack” formation, all the while looking for but failing to find House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Minus the violence and the occupation of the Capitol, that’s exactly what Trump’s associates were trying to do, too: use political tumult and what Trump himself pre-advertised as a “wild” rally to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress into rejecting duly certified electoral votes. That is not technically sedition, but it was in the same broad moral ballpark. Both the Oath Keepers and Trump’s plotters were acting subversively to upend the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Trump, by multiple accounts, was thrilled when the mob swarmed into the Capitol, even if his own associates didn’t plan for things to go that far.
Even though events worked in their favor, the plotters never had much of a chance of achieving their ultimate aim. Still, the vote-blocking attempt did huge damage to public faith in our constitutional system.
The Oath Keepers planned for bloody insurrection. Some of Trump’s associates attempted a form of subversion. The former were temporarily dangerous, even if ludicrously (and fortunately) incapable. The latter, and the House and Senate members who backed them, were no less nefarious. Their undemocratic machinations let them claim, as cowards often do, an arm’s-length deniability, even as the militia morons chased the faux-patriotic martyrdom that usually awaits the patsies for a malevolent cause.
