Oath Keepers Plotting Before Capitol Riot Awaited
‘Direction’ From Trump, Prosecutors Say
The suspects discussed conveying “heavy weapons” into
Washington and began to train for “urban warfare” even before Election Day,
court papers said.
By Alan
Feuer
Feb. 11,
2021
Chilling
new details emerged on Thursday about the plot by the Oath Keepers militia
group to attack the Capitol as prosecutors said that members discussed a brazen
plan to ferry “heavy weapons” in a boat across the Potomac River into
Washington and began training sessions “for urban warfare, riot control and
rescue operations” well before Election Day.
The new
accounts about the Oath Keepers’ role in the Capitol assault came on the third
day of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial and included
allegations that a member of the militia group was “awaiting direction” from
Mr. Trump about how to handle the results of the vote in the days that followed
the election. “POTUS has the right to activate units too,” the Oath Keepers
member, Jessica M. Watkins, wrote in a text message to an associate on Nov. 9,
according to court papers. “If Trump asks me to come, I will.”
The Justice
Department has brought charges against more than 200 people in the attack on
the Capitol last month, but the case against Ms. Watkins and her two
co-defendants, Thomas E. Caldwell and Donovan Crowl, is among the most serious
to have emerged from the vast investigation. Prosecutors say that the three
Oath Keepers, who are facing conspiracy charges, appear to have worked with
other far-right extremist groups and “began plotting to undo” the results of
the election only days after it occurred.
Shortly
after the three militia members were arrested last month, prosecutors said that
they were some of the first rioters to have planned their part in the attack on
the Capitol instead of merely storming the building spontaneously. Federal
agents said that Mr. Caldwell, a 66-year-old former Navy officer, had advised
his fellow militia members to stay at a particular Comfort Inn in the
Washington suburbs, noting that it offered a good base to “hunt at night” — an
apparent reference to chasing left-wing activists. Ms. Watkins, a 38-year-old
bar owner from Ohio, apparently rented a room at the hotel under an assumed
name, the agents said.
In a pair
of court papers filed on Thursday, prosecutors offered further evidence that
the three Oath Keepers planned the attack, citing text messages reaching back
to November. In one message from Nov. 16, prosecutors say, Mr. Crowl told Mr.
Caldwell, “War is on the horizon.” One week later, court papers say, Mr.
Caldwell wrote Ms. Watkins saying he was “worried about the future of our
country,” adding, “I believe we will have to get violent to stop this.”
Similar
themes were also being struck around the same time by the founder and leader of
the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, who told the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
on Nov. 10 that he had men stationed outside Washington prepared to act at Mr.
Trump’s command. At a rally in the city on Dec. 12, Mr. Rhodes called on Mr.
Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, suggesting that a failure to do so would
result in a “much more bloody war.”
Both court
papers filed on Thursday referred to Mr. Rhodes’s role in stoking the rampage,
suggesting that he too may be a focus of the federal investigation.
The Oath
Keepers, who largely draw their membership from former law enforcement and
military personnel, appear to have coordinated before the Capitol attack with
other extremist groups, prosecutors say. According to the court papers, Mr.
Caldwell sent a text to an associate just before Christmas saying he was
“expecting a big turn out of the Proud Boys,” the far-right nationalist
organization, in Washington on Jan. 6.
More than a dozen members of the Proud Boys have been charged in connection
with the riot at the Capitol, including a group from Kansas City charged on
Thursday with breaching the building.
Five
separate major cases have been filed against members of the Proud Boys in the
past few weeks, but investigators are working toward putting together an
overarching case that shows how several members of the group worked together in
the days and weeks before the riot to plan to disrupt the certification of the
Electoral College vote, according to an official familiar with the
investigation. That case will also lay out how the Proud Boys arranged travel
and funding for the trip to Washington, the official said.
Days before
the riot, prosecutors say, Mr. Caldwell reached out to a contact associated
with another group, the Three Percenters, an extremist gun rights militia that
takes its name from the supposed three percent of the U.S. colonial population
that fought the British Army. In a text message, Mr. Caldwell suggested finding
a boat that “could handle a Potomac crossing” and could carry a “Quick Response
Team” with “heavy weapons” to militia members already at the Capitol.
Mr.
Caldwell asked a federal judge to release him from custody this week, saying he
was an injured Navy veteran with more than 30 years of experience with
top-secret matters. He also noted that while he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6,
he was not part of the “stack” of Oath Keepers in tactical military gear that
physically breached the building.
In the papers
filed on Thursday, prosecutors countered that that hardly mattered given that
Mr. Caldwell was “a key figure who put into motion the violence that
overwhelmed the Capitol.” They noted that in his text messages he described
killing and mutilating people who held views that opposed his and referred to
political adversaries as “socialists,” “savages,” “maggots” and “cockroaches.”
When
federal agents searched Mr. Caldwell’s house in Virginia last month, they
discovered a document titled “Death List” that contained the name of an
unidentified election official from another state, prosecutors said. The agents
also found a pistol that was “intentionally built to look like a cellphone,”
prosecutors say.
In a search
of Ms. Watkins’s home, court papers say, agents discovered numerous firearms, a
paintball gun, pool cues cut down to “baton size,” plastic zip ties and a
recipe for making “a destructive device.”
Prosecutors
say Ms. Watkins may have had this arsenal because she believed the prospect of
Joseph R. Biden Jr. becoming president was “an existential threat.”
“Biden may
still be our president,” she wrote in a text message on Nov. 17. “If he is, our
way of life as we know it is over. Our Republic would be over. Then it is our
duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights.”
By the end
of December, prosecutors said, Ms. Watkins, a military veteran, was making
plans to go to Washington on the day of the attack on the Capitol.
“We plan on
going to DC on the 6th” because “Trump wants all able bodied Patriots to come,”
she wrote to Mr. Crowl on Dec. 29.
“If Trump
activates the Insurrection Act,” she added, “I’d hate to miss it.”
Katie
Benner contributed reporting.
Alan Feuer
covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about
mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption
and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The
Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
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