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    Trump Embraces Extremism as He Seeks to Reclaim Presidency

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    As he gets his presidential campaign underway, Donald J. Trump has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.He stands with the mob.Mr. Trump sent a video statement of support to a fund-raiser hosted by a group calling itself the Patriot Freedom Project on behalf of families of those charged with attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “People have been treated unconstitutionally, in my opinion, and very, very unfairly, and we’re going to get to the bottom of it,” he said. The country, he warned, “is going communist.”The video underscored just how much the former president has aligned himself with forces that used to be outside the mainstream of American politics as he seeks to reclaim the White House through a rematch with President Biden in 2024. With the Justice Department targeting him as well as some of his violent allies, Mr. Trump’s antigovernment jeremiads lately sound like those once relegated to the outer edges of the political spectrum.He has embraced extremist elements in American society even more unabashedly than in the past. The video comes as Mr. Trump has been using music sounding like a QAnon theme song at recent rallies and hosting for dinner Kanye West, a rap star under fire for antisemitic statements, and Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist.And it comes just two days after the conviction of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, placed Mr. Trump at the spiritual heart of a seditious conspiracy to illegitimately keep power in a way that is unparalleled in American history.Mr. Trump’s acceptance, if not outright courtship, of the militant right comes as the Republican establishment blames him for the party’s failure to do better during the November midterm elections. Republican officeholders, led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the party leader in the upper chamber, argue that Mr. Trump’s promotion of candidates based on fidelity to his false claims about the 2020 election cost them seats.“Trump is doubling down on his extremist and cult leader profile,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present” and a history professor at New York University. “For someone of Trump’s temperament, being humiliated by people turning away from him will only make him more desperate and more inclined to support and associate with the most extremist elements of society. There is no other option for him.”His former dinner guests fanned the flames on Thursday with fresh incendiary comments on the Infowars show of Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist. “I like Hitler,” said Mr. West, who now goes by the name Ye, adding that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” He added that “we got to stop dissing Nazis all the time,” and he denied that the Holocaust happened.At another point, Mr. Fuentes voiced his support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, calling himself “very pro-Putin” and “very pro-Russia.” Ye agreed: “I am also.”The verdict in the Oath Keepers case underscored Mr. Trump’s alignment with a right-wing militia deemed a danger by the government. The trial effectively established that there was an illegal plot to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his defeat in the 2020 election, whether the former president was directly involved or simply inspired it through the lies he spread.What to Know About Donald Trump TodayCard 1 of 4Donald J. Trump is running for president again, being investigated by a special counsel again and he’s back on Twitter. Here’s what to know about some of the latest developments involving the former president:Documents case. More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Case

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      A jury in federal court in Washington convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and one of his subordinates for a plot to keep Donald Trump in power.Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted on Tuesday along with one of his subordinates of seditious conspiracy as a jury found them guilty of seeking to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power through an extensive plot that started after the 2020 election and culminated in the mob attack on the Capitol.The jury in Federal District Court in Washington found three other defendants in the case not guilty of sedition and acquitted Mr. Rhodes of two separate conspiracy charges.The split verdicts, coming after three days of deliberations, were a landmark — if not total — victory for the Justice Department, which poured enormous effort into prosecuting Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants.The sedition convictions marked the first time in nearly 20 trials related to the Capitol attack that a jury had decided that the violence that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, was the product of an organized conspiracy.Seditious conspiracy is the most serious charge brought so far in any of the 900 criminal cases stemming from the vast investigation of the Capitol attack, an inquiry that could still result in scores, if not hundreds, of additional arrests. Mr. Rhodes, 57, was also found guilty of obstructing the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 and of destroying evidence in the case. On those three counts, he faces a maximum of 60 years in prison.Nearly two years after the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 and what led up to them remain at the center of American politics and the subject of multiple investigations, including an inquiry by the Justice Department into any criminal culpability that Mr. Trump and some of his allies might face and an exhaustive account being assembled by a House select committee.The conviction of Mr. Rhodes underscored the seriousness and intensity of the effort by pro-Trump forces to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, and was the highest-profile legal reckoning yet from a case related to Jan. 6.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.But it is not clear how much effect it might have on broader public perceptions that have hardened, largely along partisan lines, over the past two years. Mr. Trump, written off as a political force in the days after the attack, is again a candidate for president, embraced by a substantial portion of his party as he continues to promote the lie that the election was stolen from him.Mr. Rhodes was convicted of sedition along with Kelly Meggs, who ran the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers at the time the Capitol was stormed. Three other defendants who played lesser roles in the planning for Jan. 6 — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — were found not guilty of sedition.Mr. Rhodes was also acquitted of two different conspiracy charges: one that accused him of plotting to disrupt the election certification in advance of Jan. 6 and the other of planning to stop members of Congress from discharging their duties that day.Mr. Meggs, who led a group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol, and Ms. Watkins, who went in separately and was recorded on a digital walkie-talkie app, were both convicted of conspiracy to stop the election certification. Along with Mr. Harrelson, they were also found guilty of the count of conspiracy to interfere with members of Congress during the attack. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding and destroying evidence in the case.Taken as a whole, the verdicts suggested that the jury rejected the centerpiece of Mr. Rhodes’s defense: that he had no concrete plan on Jan. 6 to disrupt the transfer of presidential power and to keep Joseph R. Biden Jr. from entering the White House.But the jury also made the confusing decision to acquit Mr. Rhodes of planning in advance to disrupt the certification of the election yet convict him of actually disrupting the certification process. That suggested that the jurors may have believed that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 erupted more or less spontaneously, as Mr. Rhodes has claimed.“The government did a good job — they took us to task,” said James Lee Bright, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers. Mr. Bright added that he intended to appeal the convictions. No sentencing date was set.In a statement on Tuesday night, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noted the convictions against all five defendants.“The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” he said.A charge that traces back to efforts to protect the federal government against Southern rebels during the Civil War, seditious conspiracy has been used over the years against a wide array of defendants — among them, far-right militias, radical trade unions and Puerto Rican nationalists. The last successful sedition prosecution was in 1995 when a group of Islamic militants was found guilty of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks.The Oath Keepers sedition trial began in Federal District Court in Washington in early October. In his opening statement, Jeffrey S. Nestler, one of the lead prosecutors, told the jury that in the weeks after Mr. Biden won the election, Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy”: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.Mr. Nestler also closed the government’s case last week, declaring that the Oath Keepers had plotted against Mr. Biden, ignoring both the law and the will of the voters, because they hated the results of the election.“They claimed to be saving the Republic,” he said, “but they fractured it instead.”In between those remarks, prosecutors showed the jury hundreds of encrypted text messages swapped by Oath Keepers members, demonstrating that Mr. Rhodes and some of his followers were in thrall to outlandish fears that Chinese agents had infiltrated the United States government and that Mr. Biden — a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party — might cede control of the country to the United Nations.The messages also showed that Mr. Rhodes was obsessed with the leftist movement known as antifa, which he believed was in league with Mr. Biden’s incoming administration. At one point during the trial, Mr. Rhodes, who took the stand in his own defense, told the jury he was convinced that antifa activists would storm the White House, overpower the Secret Service and forcibly drag Mr. Trump from the building if he failed to admit his defeat to Mr. Biden.Prosecutors sought to demonstrate how Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, became increasingly panicked as the election moved toward its final certification at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Under his direction, the Oath Keepers — whose members are largely former law enforcement officers and military veterans — took part in two “Stop the Steal” rallies in Washington, providing event security and serving as bodyguards for pro-Trump dignitaries.Throughout the postelection period, the jury was told, Mr. Rhodes was desperate to get in touch with Mr. Trump and persuade him to take extraordinary measures to maintain power. In December 2020, he posted two open letters to Mr. Trump on his website, begging the president to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged.In the letters, Mr. Rhodes also urged Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” — purportedly led by Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president — that was seeking to unseat him.“If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Mr. Rhodes told Mr. Trump, “we the people will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”As part of the plot, prosecutors maintained, Mr. Rhodes placed a “quick reaction force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Va., ready to rush their weapons into Washington if their compatriots at the Capitol needed them. Mr. Caldwell, a former Navy officer, tried at one point to secure a boat to ferry the guns across the Potomac River, concerned that streets in the city might be blocked.Mr. Rhodes tried to persuade the jury during his testimony that he had not been involved in setting up the “quick reaction force.” But he also argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, it would have given the Oath Keepers the legal standing as a militia to use force of arms to support the president.On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Rhodes remained outside the Capitol, standing in the crowd like “a general surveying his troops on the battlefield,” Mr. Nestler said during the trial. While prosecutors acknowledged that he never entered the building, they claimed he was in touch with some of the Oath Keepers who did go in just minutes before they breached the Capitol’s east side.Even with the convictions, the government is continuing to prosecute several other Oath Keepers, including four members of the group who are scheduled to go on trial on seditious conspiracy charges on Monday. A second group of Oath Keepers is facing lesser conspiracy charges at a trial now set for next year, and Kellye SoRelle, Mr. Rhodes’s onetime lawyer and girlfriend, has been charged in a separate criminal case. More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Points Finger at Colleagues in Sedition Trial

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      Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia, testified that he did not order anyone to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that he had nothing to do with an armed force waiting nearby.WASHINGTON — At the height of the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, two dozen members of the Oath Keepers militia met outside the building with their leader, Stewart Rhodes.When some of them reported that they had just come back from inside the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes was outraged, he testified in court on Monday. Taking the stand at his own sedition trial, he said that those who had gone inside the building that day had done so of their own accord — and that he had never had a plan or had given any orders to go in.“When I heard that they went in,” he told jury, “I said, ‘That was stupid.’”Testifying for a second day at the trial in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Rhodes sought to wash his hands of much of what the Oath Keepers did on Jan. 6, laying the blame on several of his colleagues.He told the jury that one of his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, who went inside the Capitol with others in the group, had gone “off mission.”He also claimed — for the first time — that he had “nothing to do with” an armed “quick reaction force” made of up Oath Keepers that was staged in hotel rooms in Virginia, ostensibly to rush to the aid of compatriots if things at the Capitol went wrong.Mr. Rhodes has firmly denied there was a plan to break into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, as the government has claimed. He has also argued that the Oath Keepers went to Washington that day on what he claims was a peaceful mission: to serve as bodyguards for pro-Trump celebrities like Ali Alexander, a Stop the Steal organizer, and Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump.It is rare for a defendant, especially one of his prominence, to take the witness stand, but Mr. Rhodes, who holds a law degree from Yale, has been visibly confident in putting forward several intersecting arguments.He spent much of the afternoon sparring with a prosecutor, Kathryn Rakoczy. Ms. Rakoczy’s questions seemed designed to both poke holes in the details of his account and to chip away at his broader credibility.Ms. Rakoczy started, for example, by suggesting that Mr. Rhodes had soft-pedaled the nature of the Oath Keepers during his first turn on the witness stand on Friday. She pointed out that while telling the jury about some of the missions the group had been involved in over the years, he had failed to mention several in which his members used weapons to confront government forces and challenge their authority.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that even when the Oath Keepers have undertaken nominally defensive operations — serving, say, as self-appointed protectors of residents and businesses during periods of unrest — local law enforcement leaders have expressed exasperation at their involvement.From well before the trial began, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes have claimed that the armed “quick reaction force” in Virginia would have been mobilized only if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to take up arms in support of Mr. Trump.Last week, Mr. Rhodes testified that he had established a similar force for a pro-Trump rally in Washington in November 2020, fearing that leftist activists were going to break into the White House and drag Mr. Trump into the streets. On Monday, he told the jury that as Jan. 6 approached, he no longer feared that the White House might be overrun and that an armed force was not needed.He then suggested that his compatriots could have set up the reaction force without his knowledge.But Ms. Rakoczy showed Mr. Rhodes a series of messages he exchanged with Mr. Meggs and others in the days leading up to Jan. 6 in which he seemed to be aware of the quick reaction force — or Q.R.F.“Ok We WILL have a QRF,” he wrote in one of the messages. “This situation calls for it.”Mr. Rhodes suggested that despite this apparent confirmation, his colleagues could have hashed out the details for the force without him — noting, as he often did during his day on the stand, that he did not like to micromanage as a leader.“Sir, the buck stops with you in this operation, right?” Ms. Rakoczy asked.“I’m responsible for everything that everyone did?” Mr. Rhodes responded.During more than three hours of questions, Ms. Rakoczy also sought to make another point: that Mr. Rhodes had planned to act on Jan. 6 even without the legal cover that would have been offered by Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.She showed Mr. Rhodes a message he had written saying that the Oath Keepers were going to “rise up in insurrection” against Joseph R. Biden Jr. even if Mr. Trump never summoned them. What Mr. Rhodes had really wanted, Ms. Rakoczy said, was for Mr. Trump to call up the Oath Keepers to “serve as his private bodyguards to stay in power.”Mr. Rhodes denied it.To prove the seditious conspiracy charges against Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Meggs and their co-defendants — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — prosecutors must persuade the jury that the Oath Keepers plotted to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of power from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Several government witnesses have already admitted under questioning from the defense that there was no explicit plan to storm the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.That left Ms. Rakoczy with the task of using circumstantial evidence to argue that Mr. Rhodes had encouraged his compatriots to go into the building.She pointed out that as rioters were storming toward the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes compared the attack to the country’s founders destroying the house of the governor of Massachusetts during the Revolutionary era. Mr. Rhodes acknowledged he had made that comparison, but claimed at the time that he did not know the extent of the violence at the Capitol.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that, according to phone records, Mr. Rhodes had a call with one of his top lieutenants, Michael Greene, and Mr. Meggs just minutes before Mr. Meggs went into the Capitol with other Oath Keepers in what prosecutors have described as a military “stack.”Mr. Rhodes admitted he was on the 90-second call but could not hear a thing that Mr. Meggs had said.“For 90 seconds you sat on that dead air?” Ms. Rakoczy asked, sounding incredulous.Mr. Rhodes said yes.Bringing her questions to a close, Ms. Rakoczy reminded Mr. Rhodes that even after Jan. 6, he continued his attempts to reach Mr. Trump and persuade him to invoke the Insurrection Act. She suggested that the storming of the Capitol was for him “just a battle in an ongoing war.”“You and the Oath Keepers were prepared to take steps to abolish this government?” she asked.“We were prepared to walk the founders’ path, yes,” Mr. Rhodes said. “If the government steps outside of the Constitution, it puts you in a bad place.” More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Sought to Get Message to Trump After Jan. 6

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      One of the government’s final witnesses in the seditious conspiracy trial of members of the far-right group described attempts by Stewart Rhodes to urge Donald J. Trump to keep his grip on power.Four days after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, held a secret meeting in the parking lot of a Texas electronics store.Mr. Rhodes had gone to see a soldier-turned-I.T.-expert who, he had been told, could get an urgent message to President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Rhodes wanted to persuade Mr. Trump to maintain his grip on power despite the violence at the Capitol and offered to mobilize the members of his group to help him stay in office.“I’m here for you and so are all of my men,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Mr. Trump, typing his words into a cellphone and handing it to the man in the belief that he would pass the message on to the president. “We will come help you if you need us. Military and police. And so will your millions of supporters.”A description of that cloak-and-dagger scene was offered to the jury on Wednesday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates, all of whom are facing charges of seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack on the Capitol. By the end of the day, prosecutors at the trial had all but reached the end of their evidence and were expected to rest their case on Thursday morning.When the government’s presentation concludes it will be a milestone in the trial, which is taking place in Federal District Court in Washington. It will also be an important step for the Justice Department’s broader investigation of the Capitol assault.The seditious conspiracy charges confronting Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — are among the most severe and politically significant to have been filed so far against any of the 900 people charged in connection with Jan. 6.The success or failure of the prosecution could influence how the storming of the Capitol is perceived by the public and affect another trial set for mid-December in which five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, also stand accused of seditious conspiracy.Some of the strongest evidence prosecutors have presented to the jury has come directly from the mouth of Mr. Rhodes.Jim Urquhart/ReutersAs one of their final witnesses, prosecutors called to the stand the man who met with Mr. Rhodes in Texas: Jason Alpers, a software designer who helped found a cybersecurity firm called Allied Security Operations Group. The company was instrumental in working with outside advisers to Mr. Trump — including the lawyer Sidney Powell — in promoting a conspiracy theory that voting machines had been used to cheat in the 2020 election.Mr. Alpers, a former Army psychological operations expert, told the jury that he met Mr. Rhodes and a lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, on Jan. 10, 2021, outside a Fry’s Electronics store near Dallas. He offered his phone to Mr. Rhodes as a means of conveying a message to Mr. Trump, but ultimately gave both the phone and a recording of the encounter to the F.B.I.In the recording, which was played on Wednesday for the jury, Mr. Rhodes can be heard telling Mr. Alpers that if Mr. Trump did not hold on to power, there would be “combat here on U.S. soil” and that thousands of Oath Keepers would most likely join the fray.When Mr. Alpers told Mr. Rhodes that he did not want civil war and did not condone the chaos at the Capitol, the Oath Keepers leader said that he had only one regret about that day.“We should have brought rifles,” Mr. Rhodes said, adding, “We could have fixed it right then and there.”Mr. Alpers said he was horrified by Mr. Rhodes’s remarks and had second thoughts about passing any messages to Mr. Trump or to people in his orbit.“Asking for civil war to be on American ground and, understanding as a person who has gone to war, that means blood is going to get shed on the streets where your family is,” he testified. “That’s not a distant land, that’s right there.”From the outset of the trial, some of the strongest evidence prosecutors have presented to the jury has come directly from the mouth of Mr. Rhodes, who has emerged as a man obsessed with supporting Mr. Trump and keeping Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the White House. Recordings and text messages have shown Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, to have been in thrall to baseless fears that Mr. Biden was a “puppet” of the Chinese government bent on the destruction of the country he had just been chosen to lead.One former member of the group testified last month that he had called the authorities in November 2020 after sitting through a video meeting during which Mr. Rhodes urged his followers to “fight” on behalf of Mr. Trump.“The more I listened to the call,” the witness, Abdullah Rasheed, told the jury, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”Other former Oath Keepers have testified that they believed Mr. Rhodes’s language about using violence to support Mr. Trump and his personal attacks against Mr. Biden became increasingly extreme, even dangerous, in the months between the election and the final certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.One former member told the jury that he quit the organization in December 2020 after Mr. Rhodes posted a letter on the Oath Keepers’ website urging Mr. Trump to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged. In the letter, Mr. Rhodes also begged Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two-centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.In the message Mr. Rhodes sought to pass through Mr. Alpers, he warned Mr. Trump that he and his family would be “imprisoned and killed” if Mr. Biden managed to take office, urging him to use “the power of the presidency” to stop his opponent.“Go down in history as a savior of the Republic,” Mr. Rhodes wrote, “not a man who surrendered it to deadly traitors and enemies who then enslaved and murdered millions of Americans.”Despite the efforts by prosecutors to depict Mr. Rhodes as a man prepared to derail the election, as one trial witness put it, “by any means necessary,” some government witnesses have admitted under questioning from the defense that they were not aware of any predetermined plan to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6 and interfere with the certification process.To win a conviction on the seditious conspiracy charge, prosecutors need to convince the jury that Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants entered into an agreement to use force to disrupt the execution of laws governing the transfer of presidential power.A video of Mr. Rhodes speaking during an interview with the House Jan. 6 committee was shown at a hearing in June.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressFor reasons that remain unclear, prosecutors decided not to call as witnesses any of the three former Oath Keepers who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges and cooperated with the government’s investigation of Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants.One of the cooperating witnesses, William Todd Wilson, told the government during his plea negotiations that on the evening of Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes was still trying to persuade Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. By Mr. Wilson’s account, Mr. Rhodes tried to get an intermediary to call the president from a hotel near the Capitol and have him mobilize the Oath Keepers to forcibly stop the transition of power.Another cooperating witness, Joshua James, was poised to testify that Mr. Rhodes at one point hatched a plan to have a group of Oath Keepers surround the White House and keep away anyone — including members of the National Guard — who tried to remove Mr. Trump from the building.Before the defense begins its case, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes and the others are likely to make arguments seeking to dismiss the charges, claiming a lack of evidence — a common maneuver in criminal trials.Mr. Rhodes, who has promised from the start that he will testify, could take the witness stand by the end of the week. More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Bought Arsenal of Weapons Ahead of Jan. 6

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      The prosecution in the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes and other members of the militia introduced evidence that he spent as much as $20,000 on rifles, ammunition and other equipment.In the days before a pro-Trump mob — including members of his own organization — broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, went on a cross-country weapon-buying spree.Setting out for Washington from Texas, his home state, Mr. Rhodes stopped at least six times, bank records show, purchasing items like assault-style rifles, ammunition and scopes. Sometimes he dropped into gun shops and sometimes he conducted the transactions in parking lots with private sellers he met online.By the time he reached his destination, prosecutors said on Monday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates on seditious conspiracy charges, the Oath Keepers leader had spent as much as $20,000 on what amounted to a small arsenal that included at least three rifles and an Israeli-made semiautomatic shotgun.Prosecutors have not yet told the jury precisely what Mr. Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed as he and a lawyer for the Oath Keepers, Kellye SoRelle, made their way from Texas, through Mississippi and Tennessee, to the Hilton Garden Inn in Vienna, Va., where they stayed on Jan. 6.But the purchases took place as Mr. Rhodes was overseeing the creation of what he has called an armed “quick reaction force” that was staged in other hotel rooms in Virginia, ready to rush to the aid of Oath Keepers stationed at the Capitol if they found themselves in need.The armed contingent is central to the Justice Department’s case that Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — committed seditious conspiracy by plotting to use violence to stop the transfer of power from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.While the “quick reaction force” — often referred to as the Q.R.F. — was never deployed to Washington and its weapons remained in Virginia, prosecutors opened the trial two weeks ago by telling the jury that Mr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy.”“The point of the Q.R.F. was to prevent Biden from taking power in whatever form that took,” an F.B.I. agent, Sylvia Hilgeman, testified on Monday. “I think the Q.R.F. was meant to occupy D.C.”The government has already described how several Oath Keepers stashed their weapons in rooms at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va., six miles from downtown Washington, leaving them in the care of compatriots who were prepared to ferry them across the Potomac River into the city.On Monday, prosecutors showed the jury surveillance camera footage from the Comfort Inn of various Oath Keepers wheeling rifle cases and duffel bags on luggage carts down the hotel’s hallways. The carts were at times so full that one member of the group, Edward Vallejo, had to get a running start to push a cart out of an elevator and move it around a corner.The prosecutors also showed the jury a map put together from cellphone data and credit card records that plotted the movements of more than two dozen Oath Keepers arriving in the Washington area from states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.“There were a lot of firearms cases,” a former Oath Keeper testified last week about the quick reaction force. “I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military.”The armed group is also key to the Oath Keepers’ defense.Phillip Linder, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers, has told the jury that the force was never meant to be used as part of an offensive assault against the Capitol. Rather, Mr. Linder has said, the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, he claimed, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Mr. Rhodes did not enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, and none of the Oath Keepers defendants who went into the building that day were believed to have brought weapons.Prosecutors revealed on Monday that one day before the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes sent several night-vision devices he had bought to a woman named Marsha Lessard, who ran an organization called the Virginia Freedom Keepers.Ms. Lessard, an associate of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, had a permit with other organizers for a protest on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Members of her group also took part in a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020, during which Jason Sullivan, Mr. Stone’s onetime social adviser, urged listeners to “descend on the Capitol” on Jan. 6 and ensure that lawmakers inside “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”Earlier in the day, prosecutors showed the jury some sexually explicit text messages that Mr. Rhodes had swapped with Ms. SoRelle, the lawyer, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, suggesting that the two had more than the usual lawyer-client relationship.The messages were apparently introduced to chip away at one of the Oath Keepers’ possible defenses: that members of the group had been acting on Ms. SoRelle’s professional advice when they believed the “quick reaction force” could have been legally called up by Mr. Trump.Even after fleeing Washington on Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes continued buying stockpiles of guns and ammunition, the government has said in court papers filed before the trial began. As Mr. Biden’s inauguration neared, Mr. Rhodes — accompanied by Joshua James, an Oath Keepers member from Alabama — made multiple trips to purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of weapons, scopes, magazines, holsters and firearm maintenance equipment.Mr. James pleaded guilty in March to seditious conspiracy and has been cooperating with the government’s prosecution. The jury could soon hear from him and other Oath Keepers who have entered guilty pleas.If Mr. James does appear as a witness, he could tell the jury what he told prosecutors as part of his plea deal: that in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes told him and his fellow Oath Keepers to be prepared to secure the perimeter of the White House and use “lethal force” to stop anyone, including members of the National Guard, from removing Mr. Trump from the building.Mr. James could also testify that he stored some of Mr. Rhodes’s arsenal in a storage shed in Alabama after Mr. Rhodes instructed him that he should “be prepared for violence in the event of a civil war.”Under cross-examination by James Lee Bright, a lawyer for Mr. Rhodes, Ms. Hilgeman, the F.B.I. agent, acknowledged that as Jan. 6 came to an end, the Oath Keepers took the weapons that they had stashed with the quick reaction force home with them.“So the armed rebellion was unarmed?” Mr. Bright asked.“The armed rebellion wasn’t over,” Ms. Hilgeman said. 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      Kellye SoRelle’s Journey From Lawyer for Oath Keepers to Defendant

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      The lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, has been charged with working with the far-right militia to disrupt the 2020 election. Now, her text messages — and testimony — could emerge as evidence at their trial.In the normal course of business, lawyers like Kellye SoRelle wear a variety of hats for their clients: They might keep secrets for them, offer them advice or defend them against charges.But Ms. SoRelle has a far more fraught relationship with one of her biggest former clients: the Oath Keepers militia.Last month, Ms. SoRelle was indicted on conspiracy charges, accused of working with the far-right group in its monthslong plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.Now, she has found herself at the center of a battle over whether her text messages — and testimony — can be used as evidence at the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, and four of his subordinates.The struggle between the defense and prosecution over how to define Ms. SoRelle’s role at the trial revolves around the issue of attorney-client privilege, which generally bars lawyers from disclosing private information about their clients.The dispute has become more complicated because the Oath Keepers may seek to call Ms. SoRelle as a witness in the case and defend themselves against some of the charges they are facing by claiming they were merely following her instructions in what is known as an advice-of-counsel defense.The boundaries of attorney-client privilege often become a matter of legal dispute. Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are fighting to use the protections of attorney-client privilege — and executive privilege — to limit the scope of a grand jury investigation into the role that Mr. Trump played in seeking to overturn his defeat in the election. Other lawyers for Mr. Trump are facing the prospect of becoming witnesses against him in a separate Justice Department inquiry into his handling of classified documents.On Monday night, before the Oath Keepers trial resumed in Federal District Court in Washington on Tuesday, prosecutors filed court papers asking a judge to set aside attorney-client privilege and admit text messages that Ms. SoRelle had swapped with Mr. Rhodes in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In one of the messages, from Dec. 29, 2020, Mr. Rhodes complained that he was getting tired of showing up at pro-Trump rallies in Washington where members of his group and other Trump supporters would simply “wave a sign, pray or yell.”“They won’t fear us,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Ms. SoRelle, “till we come with rifles in hand.”Prosecutors argued that the incendiary message should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because Ms. SoRelle, despite having described herself as the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, did not perform any legal work for the group until after the Capitol was attacked.Ms. SoRelle also played “an active role in the conspiracy” to disrupt the certification of the election, prosecutors wrote, so any communications between her and the Oath Keepers should be exempt from privilege under what is known as the “crime-fraud exception.”Based in Texas, Ms. SoRelle first emerged into the public eye one day after Election Day when, as a member of a group called Lawyers for Trump, she raised claims in a widely seen video that election workers in Detroit had committed voter fraud. Around the same time, prosecutors say, the Oath Keepers began to work for her as bodyguards.By the following month, she had signed her name to two open letters to Mr. Trump that Mr. Rhodes had posted on the Oath Keepers website. The letters, introduced as evidence at the trial last week, called on Mr. Trump to take a series of aggressive steps to remain in power, including invoking the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given Mr. Trump the authority to mobilize militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.While Mr. Rhodes has so far been the focus of the trial, testimony turned on Tuesday to one of his co-defendants, Jessica Watkins, an Ohio bar owner who ran her own militia in the state.Prosecutors introduced that evidence that Ms. Watkins had discussed cutting off pool cues to serve as “antifa smashers” at pro-Trump rallies in Washington and sought to recruit and train people to join the Oath Keepers at the events.One of the recruits sent a message to Ms. Watkins in mid-November of 2020 asking, “So should I get comfortable with the idea of death?”“That’s why I do what I do,” Ms. Watkins responded.Both defense lawyers and the government have claimed that Ms. SoRelle was, for a time, romantically involved with Mr. Rhodes, though she has said that is not true. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.Regardless of how she felt about Mr. Rhodes, there is no doubt that she did things for — and with — him that went beyond the typical services rendered to a legal client.The day before the Capitol attack, Ms. SoRelle accompanied Mr. Rhodes to a meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol where the two encountered Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, and Mr. Tarrio’s longtime associate, Bianca Gracia, the leader of a group called Latinos for Trump. Mr. Tarrio is facing seditious conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol attack.On Jan. 6, Ms. SoRelle followed Mr. Rhodes into a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, giving a celebratory play-by-play of the mob breaching barriers at the building on a Facebook livestream.“That’s how you take your government back,” she said. “You literally take it back.”After Mr. Rhodes fled Washington that day, fearing the authorities were after him, Ms. SoRelle took possession of his cellphone, the government said in the papers filed on Monday. Prosecutors claim that within two days, she had started sending orders in Mr. Rhodes’s name to other Oath Keepers, telling them to delete any incriminating messages and to stop discussing their roles in the Capitol attack.“CLAM UP,” she wrote at one point. “DO NOT SAY A DAMN THING.”For more than a year after Jan. 6, it remained unclear whether Ms. SoRelle would be charged. Even though the F.B.I. seized her phone and eventually arrested more than 20 members of the Oath Keepers — including Mr. Rhodes — she remained at large.During that time, she often told reporters she was cooperating with the government’s inquiry into the group and also claimed to have spoken repeatedly to staff investigators working with the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have said that it was only after Ms. SoRelle agreed this summer to testify at the trial on his behalf that the F.B.I. arrested her.The lawyers have further said they may call Ms. SoRelle as a witness, hoping that she bolsters one of Mr. Rhodes’s chief defenses in the case.The government has accused Mr. Rhodes of staging a heavily armed “quick reaction force” in hotel rooms in Virginia that was poised to rush to the aid of their compatriots at the Capitol if things got out of hand.While Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have not disputed that there was a quick reaction force, they have argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, as Mr. Rhodes recommended, it would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to use force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Ms. SoRelle gave this legal strategy her professional stamp of approval, telling the Oath Keepers they could “lawfully assist” Mr. Trump in putting down an insurrection, Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers said in court papers last month.The lawyers have argued that if Mr. Rhodes was simply following legal advice, he could not be held accountable for showing “any unlawful intent.”The gambit, however, is far from certain to work. While no one knows what Ms. SoRelle will do if called to the witness stand, she has repeatedly told reporters that she will exercise her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. More

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      Stewart Rhodes is Not the Only Oath Keeper on Trial

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      The stories of the four other members of the far-right militia also facing charges of seditious conspiracy help flesh out the group’s role around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.When the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the Oath Keepers militia opened last week in Federal District Court in Washington, prosecutors focused much of their attention on the organization’s founder and leader, Stewart Rhodes.That was for good reason: The government’s evidence suggests that Mr. Rhodes was the central force driving the far-right group to disregard the results of the 2020 election and to ultimately seek to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power from Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.But as the trial unfolds over the next several weeks, the spotlight will fall on Mr. Rhodes’s co-defendants: Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell. Their stories help to flesh out how the group came to play such a prominent role in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in the White House despite his loss in the election.Here is a look at each of them and what the jury may hear about their individual roles in the plot to storm the Capitol and disrupt the democratic process on Jan. 6, 2021.“Sir Yes Sir,” Kelly Meggs, one of Mr. Rhodes’s co-defendants, wrote in a Facebook message after President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesKELLY MEGGSMr. Meggs, a car dealer from Dunnellon, Fla., a small town north of Tampa, was the leader of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter on Jan. 6, having taken over the position two weeks earlier from its previous chief, Michael Adams. Mr. Adams, who testified at the trial last week, said he had resigned the post in protest over Mr. Rhodes’s increasingly violent language, including calls for a “bloody war” against the Biden administration.From an early stage, Mr. Meggs, outraged by the results of the election, seemed prepared to join that fray according to Facebook messages seized by the government. And after Mr. Trump posted a tweet on Dec. 19, 2020, inviting supporters to a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, Mr. Meggs reacted enthusiastically.“He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” he wrote. “Sir Yes Sir!! We are headed to DC.”Around the same time, Mr. Meggs claimed to have organized an “alliance” between the Oath Keepers and other far-right groups — among them, the Proud Boys and the Florida chapter of the Three Percenter militia movement, the Facebook messages show. While much of the planning seems to have revolved around efforts to combat leftist activists from antifa, who were expected to harass Trump supporters on Jan. 6, Mr. Meggs discussed bringing mace, gas masks and batons to Washington for the rally that day.Mr. Meggs also played an instrumental role in the Oath Keepers’ getting the job of providing security to Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser, who was scheduled to speak at rallies on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. Lawyers for the group have used the security job as part of their defense strategy, suggesting the Oath Keepers did not go to Washington to attack the Capitol, but rather to protect pro-Trump dignitaries.On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Meggs was part of a military-style “stack” that entered the east side of the Capitol and, according to prosecutors, moved through the Rotunda toward the House of Representatives in search of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Should Mr. Rhodes testify at the trial, as expected, he is likely to say that Mr. Meggs went “off mission” by going into the building and that he did so without instructions from any Oath Keepers leaders.KENNETH HARRELSONTwo days before the Capitol attack, Mr. Meggs named Mr. Harrelson, a welder and Army veteran from Titusville, Fla., as the leader of his “ground team,” prosecutors say.But not much is known about Mr. Harrelson’s activities or beliefs in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, in large part because he had no social media accounts and deleted most of his cellphone messages after the Oath Keepers left Washington that day..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The jury will eventually hear evidence that Mr. Harrelson brought rifles to a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va., as part of a so-called “quick reaction force” designed to rush into Washington and aid the Oath Keepers at the Capitol if things went wrong.The jurors will also likely hear how Mr. Harrelson entered the building with one of the military “stacks” and joined Mr. Meggs in search of Ms. Pelosi.Mr. Harrelson’s lawyers chose not to give an opening statement to the jury, but they have said he had no idea the Oath Keepers intended to storm the Capitol and had only gone to Washington to take part in the group’s security work. The quick reaction force also never brought their weapons from Virginia into Washington.Jessica Watkins used a digital walkie-talkie app to communicate on Jan. 6, and prosecutors intend to play chatter from it to document how she marched to and then entered the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersJESSICA WATKINSMs. Watkins, an Army veteran and bar owner from rural Ohio, ran her own militia in that state and joined up with the Oath Keepers around the time of the election. Like others in the group, she was disturbed by the results of the election and considered the prospect of a Biden presidency to be “an existential threat,” court papers say.“Biden may still be our President,” she wrote to an associate in November 2020. “If he is, our way of life as we know it is over.”She quickly added: “Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights.”On Jan. 6, Ms. Watkins used a digital walkie-talkie app called Zello to communicate with her fellow Oath Keepers and with dozens of others who were on the same channel, “Stop the Steal J6.” Prosecutors intend to play a recording of their chatter to the jury, providing a real-time, firsthand account of Ms. Watkins marching toward the Capitol and entering the building where she was met by paintballs and stun grenades from the police.As a transgender woman, Ms. Watkins may have the most interesting personal story of any of the Oath Keepers defendants, and her lawyer, Jonathan Crisp, said during his opening statement last week that he intends to use it to humanize her for the jury.While the details remain unclear, Mr. Crisp said that Ms. Watkins found it challenging to spend years in hypermasculine organizations like the Army and the Oath Keepers.Thomas Caldwell took charge of assembling the armed “quick reaction force” that the Oath Keepers stationed at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesTHOMAS CALDWELLThough he was not a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, Mr. Caldwell, a former naval officer who once held a top-secret clearance, was intimately involved with each of the Oath Keepers’ events in Washington after the election.He let several members of the group stay on his 30-acre property in Berryville, Va., while they attended the so-called Million MAGA March on Nov. 14, 2020.Then, in advance of a second pro-Trump rally in the city on Dec. 12, Mr. Caldwell — a self-described “crusty intel guy” — wrote an “ops plans,” advising his compatriots to bring “striking weapons” and possibly firearms to the event. The guns, and each of their bullets, he wrote, should be wiped down thoroughly before the gathering and discarded after use.As Jan. 6 approached, Mr. Caldwell took charge of assembling the armed “quick reaction force” that would be stationed at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va. At one point, he considered a plan to use a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to his fellow Oath Keepers at the Capitol, evidence has shown. More

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      Witness in Oath Keepers Sedition Trial Says Leader Promoted Violent Approach

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      “It sounded like we were going to war against the United States government,” a former member of the militia group testified.WASHINGTON — Two days after news organizations called the 2020 election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, held a video meeting with his members to discuss bringing weapons to a Stop the Steal rally in Washington that month and to urge them to “fight” on behalf of President Donald J. Trump.Listening to the meeting was Abdullah Rasheed, a Marine Corps veteran and a member of the far-right group from West Virginia. During testimony on Thursday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates, Mr. Rasheed told the jury that he was so disturbed by what he heard during the meeting that he recorded the conversation and ultimately called the F.B.I. to alert them about Mr. Rhodes.“The more I listened to the call,” he said, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”The testimony by Mr. Rasheed, a heavy-equipment mechanic, was clearly intended to bolster accusations by the government that Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — committed seditious conspiracy by using force to oppose Mr. Biden’s ascension to the White House.The five Oath Keepers are the first of nearly 900 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, to face trial on sedition charges, the most serious crime that prosecutors have brought against any of the defendants.Even as testimony proceeded, in another case in the same Federal District Court in Washington, Jeremy Bertino became the first member of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy charges. As part of a deal with the government, Mr. Bertino agreed to testify against Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ former chairman, and four other members of the group at their upcoming trial.The Proud Boys trial, scheduled for December, is likely to feature accusations that members of the group were instrumental in several breaches of the Capitol’s defenses and helped to rile up other protesters in assaulting the police. Charles Donohoe, a Proud Boys leader from North Carolina, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and assault charges in April and has been cooperating with the government against others in the group.On Tuesday, prosecutors at the Oath Keepers trial played several clips of Mr. Rasheed’s recording for the jury. The jurors heard Mr. Rhodes make baseless claims about foreign interference in the election and declare that he would welcome violence from leftist antifa activists because that would give Mr. Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call on militias like his own to quell the chaos.“We’re not getting out of this without a fight,” Mr. Rhodes said. “There’s going to be a fight. But let’s just do it smart, and let’s do it while President Trump is still commander in chief.”While Mr. Rasheed initially called an F.B.I. tip line to complain about Mr. Rhodes not long after the meeting took place, the bureau did not reach out to him until March 2021, two months after the Capitol was attacked. He also tried to warn other law enforcement agencies, he testified, writing to the Capitol Police that Mr. Rhodes was “a friggin’ wacko that the Oath Keepers would be better without.”Mr. Rasheed’s turn on the witness stand came between testimony from two other former Oath Keepers: Michael Adams, the onetime leader of the group’s Florida chapter, and John Zimmerman, who once ran a chapter in Cumberland County, North Carolina.Both men told the jury how they became involved with the Oath Keepers amid the street protests in the summer of 2020 out of concern about the leftist antifa movement but eventually, like Mr. Rasheed, became disillusioned by Mr. Rhodes’s extreme rhetoric.Mr. Adams was the administrator of the video meeting that Mr. Rasheed recorded and told the jury that he was put off by Mr. Rhodes’s claims that the election had been stolen as well as by his personal attacks against Mr. Biden, who he repeatedly referred to as a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party.The Oath Keepers are accused of plotting to use violence to keep Mr. Trump in office after his defeat at the polls.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesIn December, after Mr. Rhodes wrote two open letters to Mr. Trump, urging the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up militias like the Oath Keepers to quell potential violence from the left, Mr. Adams was further disillusioned, he said. Unable to serve with a group that was considering using force in a manner he felt might be illegal, he left the Oath Keepers for good.Mr. Zimmerman, an Army veteran who once ran an emergency preparedness store, told the jury a similar story. He testified that shortly after the so-called Million MAGA March — a pro-Trump rally that took place in Washington in November 2020 — he was horrified when Mr. Rhodes proposed a brazen new plan for going after antifa.Because antifa often attacked the “weak and elderly,” Mr. Zimmerman said, Mr. Rhodes suggested that, at future pro-Trump rallies, the Oath Keepers should sucker their opponents into fighting by dressing up as old people or as parents pushing strollers.“If we could entice them to attack us,” said Mr. Zimmerman, who wore a mask reading “Front Toward Enemy” as he took the witness stand, “then we could give them a beat down.”Much of the testimony Thursday homed in on the ways that antifa loomed large in Mr. Rhodes’s imagination and how the leftist movement has played a central role in the arguments that he and his co-defendants have raised against the charges they used force to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.Since the trial began on Monday, lawyers for the Oath Keepers have told the jury that their clients never had a plan to use violence at the Capitol but instead took measures to prepare for violence from antifa, including the creation of an armed “quick reaction force” staged outside Washington in hotel rooms in Virginia.Mr. Zimmerman told the jury that during the Million MAGA March he helped to oversee a similar armed force that was staged at Arlington National Cemetery. Stashed in his oversized RAM ProMaster van, he said, were 12 to 15 assault-style rifles, a half-dozen handguns and several sawed-off pool cues that were to be used in case he needed to rush to the aid of his compatriots in the city.Mr. Rhodes talked incessantly about antifa, Mr. Zimmerman said, telling his fellow Oath Keepers that they had to prepare for violent attacks from the movement even before the election took place. At a pro-Trump rally in North Carolina in September 2020, Mr. Zimmerman recalled, Mr. Rhodes coordinated the militia’s efforts to protect Trump supporters with someone he claimed was in the Secret Service.One of the oddities of the Oath Keepers trial is that few of the facts presented so far are in dispute. That has allowed the defense and prosecution to effectively set aside the question about what the group did on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it and focus instead on the reasons that they did it.Central to this dispute about intent has been the purpose of the “quick reaction force” and the role that antifa played in Mr. Rhodes’s decision to employ them not only on Jan. 6, but also at the Million MAGA March in November and at another pro-Trump rally in December.Indeed, prosecutors began on Thursday by showing the jury an “ops plan” that Mr. Caldwell, a former naval officer, had drafted in advance of a rally in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020.Fearing there might be trouble from antifa, Mr. Caldwell advised his compatriots in the plan to bring “striking weapons” to the rally, suggesting a specific brand of tomahawk called the “Zombie Killer.”Mr. Caldwell also recommended the militia’s leaders should consider bringing firearms as well, especially those that could not be traced to any members. The guns — and each of their bullets — should be wiped down thoroughly before the event, Mr. Caldwell wrote, and discarded after use.While Mr. Caldwell’s plan clearly stated that it was meant to detail steps for confronting “antifa and other criminal elements,” prosecutors suggested that it showed a proclivity for violence that was ultimately turned on members of Congress.“If we’d had guns I guarantee we would have killed 100 politicians,” Mr. Caldwell wrote that evening in a Facebook message that prosecutors showed the jury Thursday. “They ran off and were spirited away through their underground tunnels like the rats they were.” More