From the witness stand on Thursday, former Oath Keeper John Zimmerman of North Carolina recounted to jurors how in September 2020, he watched the extremist group’s founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, take a phone call from someone Rhodes claimed was an active-duty Secret Service agent.
Zimmerman admitted he didn’t hear the person on the other end of that call, but he assumed what Rhodes told him was true.
“From the questions Stewart was asking, it sounded like it could’ve been [a Secret Service agent,” Zimmerman said.
It also wasn’t clear to him precisely what Rhodes and the alleged Secret Service agent discussed during the September 2020 call. But according to his sworn testimony before jurors Thursday, Rhodes told him he spoke to the agent about “parameters” and other logistics for an upcoming Trump rally that month in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The Oath Keepers, Zimmerman told jurors, were worried about clashes between rally-goers and Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist or “antifa” advocates at the Trump rally. This was a recurring theme for the far-right group.
Rhodes told Zimmerman and others on multiple occasions that those groups were violent and would “attack mothers with children” or “beat old people in the street.”
A spokesperson for the Secret Service did not immediately return a request for comment to Daily Kos on Thursday but in a statement to the Associated Press, agency spokesman Anthony Gugliemi said it wasn’t all that unusual for “protest groups” to contact the Secret Service and inquire about restrictions for events, particularly firearms restrictions.
Gugliemi said Thursday he wouldn’t be able to trace that call without “more information.”
This May, William Todd Wilson—another Oath Keeper who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for his attempt to stop the transfer of power on Jan. 6—told the Justice Department that he, too, witnessed Rhodes make a phone call of potentially major significance to the broader Jan. 6 probes unfolding both at the DOJ and in Congress.
Wilson claimed that he listened to Rhodes call someone who served as an intermediary to former President Donald Trump at around 5 PM on Jan. 6.
The Capitol had not even been fully cleared of the mob yet.
But Wilson and Rhodes were at the Phoenix Park Hotel just blocks from the Capitol when that call took place, Wilson said. He told investigators that Rhodes asked the intermediary to get Trump on board with invoking the Insurrection Act so groups like the Oath Keepers could be called up to aid his unconstitutional bid to stay in power. Wilson said the intermediary refused to connect Rhodes to Trump directly.
Zimmerman was not in D.C. on Jan. 6. It wasn’t something he wanted any part of, he told jurors Thursday.
He joined the group in August 2020, though there was no formal ceremony and he never paid any dues. The North Carolina chapter was disjointed and disorganized, he said. In short order, however, Zimmerman started to streamline communications between members and took on a leadership role that often prompted him to help sort out event logistics.
The Nov. 14, 2020 ‘Million MAGA March’ was the beginning of the end of his relationship with Rhodes and the Oath Keepers as he once knew it, he told jurors.
Zimmerman said he was part of a “quick reaction force” that stationed itself near Arlington Cemetery in nearby northern Virginia. He and another Oath Keeper from North Carolina, Doug Smith, sat in a van with 10 to 15 long rifles and several pistols. They were prepared to act rapidly if needed, he said. They never left the van.
By the end of the day, they were tired. Rhodes wanted them to drive into D.C. They didn’t.
Zimmerman told jurors Rhodes was irritated during a meeting that followed. Rhodes wanted things to go differently and he wanted Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, or at least, have cause for it. Oath Keepers should have disguised themselves as elderly people or mothers pushing baby carriages, Zimmerman recounted the former ringleader telling members.
Rhodes said this would have prompted Black Lives Matter or “antifa” advocates to attack Trump supporters and Oath Keepers. That was all the reason they would need to “give them a beatdown” and start a fracas, he said.
Zimmerman said this dynamic struck him as wrong, and not at all what he signed up for.
“You can’t trick people into attacking you so you can give them a beatdown. That’s not what you do,” he testified.
On cross-examination, Stanley Woodward, an attorney for defendant Kelly Meggs, pressed Zimmerman to explain why the Oath Keepers set up the quick reaction force for the Nov. 14 rally and kept pushing the private security detail angle.
A similar quick reaction force was established in the run-up to Jan. 6 at a hotel in northern Virginia. Prosecutors say this was an integral bit of planning for the Oath Keepers to launch their armed rebellion when called upon.
“Our whole point for November was to be a part of the Million MAGA March and support President Trump. It was never about providing a security detail... I don't care how many times it is said 'that's obviously what we do,’” Zimmerman said.
Other witnesses were also called by prosecutors on Thursday including Abdullah Rasheed, a former heavy equipment mechanic who served in the Marines.
Rasheed spoke extremely quietly, often mumbling his testimony with his head tucked low as he revealed that it was he who secretly recorded the Nov. 9, 2020, GoTo Meeting where Rhodes rallied over 100 Oath Keepers for more than two hours.
Prosecutors say that call was distinctly about planning for Jan. 6. The defense argues the meeting was about the Nov. 14 Million MAGA March. But in court earlier this week, assistant U.S. Attorney Rakoczy said when the group met on Nov. 9, the Nov. 14 march had not even been scheduled yet.
Rasheed testified that he recorded the call because it scared him.
“It felt like we were going to war against the U.S. government,” Rasheed said.
During cross-examination, defense attorneys worked to cast doubt on Rasheed’s credibility. He has changed his name six times, they noted. It was introduced moments later that Rasheed has also pleaded guilty in the past to aggravated sexual assault of a child. Presiding U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta reminded jurors after Rasheed left the stand that the prior criminal history of a witness should not influence their judgment of the evidence before them.
Rakoczy tried to do a bit of damage control for jurors after the revelation anyway.
Why did Rasheed change his name so many times and why did he do it again so close to the trial?
He still reads text messages flowing back and forth in Oath Keeper chats, he said. “The general concept,” he explained was that “snitches get stitches.”
“I don’t want my wife to have stitches, you know?” he said.
By changing his name, however, it is worth noting that Rasheed could have been angling to skirt registration as a sex offender.
Another witness, Michael Adams of Florida, also testified Thursday. Adams joined the Oath Keepers roughly a decade ago. The organization was lackluster then and the website was mostly defunct—especially the chat features for members, he said. Adams wanted to improve on it and found a phone number for Rhodes listed in the group’s directory. He got in touch with Rhodes right away and before long, Adams became the Oath Keeper’s Florida coordinator and migrated members to use the encrypted messaging app Signal.
Under Adams, things ran smoothly for a bit with Florida Oath Keepers holding weekly GoTo meetings. Adams interacted with other Florida members too, like Meggs. Meggs would later become the Florida leader.
By 2020, as the election bore down, things really started to shift for Adams. He didn’t go to the Million MAGA March in November 2020 and by December, he told jurors, he found himself questioning whether he wanted to be a member of the group at all.
The “rhetoric” had grown too zealous and when Rhodes published not one, but two, open letters to Trump on the Oath Keepers website demanding the 45th president invoke the Insurrection Act, Adams was deeply unsettled.
In the open letters, Rhodes urged Trump to call on the Oath Keepers and treat them as his militia. Rhodes said, “we the people have no choice” but to have a “bloody revolution [and/or] civil war” if Trump allowed Biden’s victory in the election to stand.
“I didn’t feel like I was a part of this ‘we,’” Adams said. “This wasn't my ideology and I didn’t want to be associated with that.”
Adams resigned from the Oath Keepers just before Christmas and in a resignation letter sent via text to fellow Oath Keepers, including Rhodes, Adams highlighted the “unchained rhetoric” that prompted his decision. He was a businessman, he explained, with licenses to keep. Participating in any sort of activity that could be “turned against them” was not an option for him.
“No sweat brother, I understand,” Rhodes replied.
Without missing a beat, Rhodes then asked Adams if he could show him how he set up remote conference calls.
Adams did not come to Washington on Jan. 6.
“I’m not a protest guy to begin with,” he said. “And I was not interested in any of the things going on here.”
During a break in witness testimony—and when jurors were not in the room—assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler alerted Judge Mehta to a disturbance brewing with John Moseley, the former attorney to defendant Meggs who has since been disbarred.
Nestler said Moseley contacted a media coalition for lawyers on the case and vowed to publish a witness statement taken from U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn by the FBI. That statement, known as a “302,” is under protected status. Moseley argued it was not because it related to information Dunn already put on the record publicly to the Jan. 6 committee.
Moseley’s understanding was wrong, Nestler said.
Judge Mehta was visibly irritated by the stunt.
“If he releases any material subject to a protective order, he will be held in contempt of court,” Mehta said before addressing reporters observing the trial and live-tweeting proceedings.
“And you can all tweet that out so he can see it,” Mehta added.
An attorney for Officer Dunn did not return a request for comment.
Tasha Adams, the estranged wife of Elmer Stewart Rhodes, however, did offer her take to Daily Kos about the trial as the third day of proceedings came to a close.
She believes the prosecution is doing a “fantastic job” and unwinding the defense. “Stewart, however, likely sees it very differently,” she said.
“I think he sees this all as smoke and mirrors and that when he gets up there, he's going to straighten it all out for that poor, confused jury. He thinks he'll show them that he's a good guy, with noble intentions, and that everything he did was strictly legal. Patriotic, even,” she said. “I believe Stewart is incapable of self-doubt. The closest thing he could have to doubt would be if maybe he sees an even larger moment in time as his great, ‘meant to be’ [moment]. He might wonder if he is destined to receive a pardon later. So if he does start to get nervous with the prosecution's absolute destruction of his case, he'll imagine it's only because something even greater is coming for him.”
The seditious conspiracy trial continues Friday. Daily Kos will have live coverage here and on Twitter.
Zimmerman admitted he didn’t hear the person on the other end of that call, but he assumed what Rhodes told him was true.
“From the questions Stewart was asking, it sounded like it could’ve been [a Secret Service agent,” Zimmerman said.
It also wasn’t clear to him precisely what Rhodes and the alleged Secret Service agent discussed during the September 2020 call. But according to his sworn testimony before jurors Thursday, Rhodes told him he spoke to the agent about “parameters” and other logistics for an upcoming Trump rally that month in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
The Oath Keepers, Zimmerman told jurors, were worried about clashes between rally-goers and Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist or “antifa” advocates at the Trump rally. This was a recurring theme for the far-right group.
Rhodes told Zimmerman and others on multiple occasions that those groups were violent and would “attack mothers with children” or “beat old people in the street.”
A spokesperson for the Secret Service did not immediately return a request for comment to Daily Kos on Thursday but in a statement to the Associated Press, agency spokesman Anthony Gugliemi said it wasn’t all that unusual for “protest groups” to contact the Secret Service and inquire about restrictions for events, particularly firearms restrictions.
Gugliemi said Thursday he wouldn’t be able to trace that call without “more information.”
This May, William Todd Wilson—another Oath Keeper who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy for his attempt to stop the transfer of power on Jan. 6—told the Justice Department that he, too, witnessed Rhodes make a phone call of potentially major significance to the broader Jan. 6 probes unfolding both at the DOJ and in Congress.
Wilson claimed that he listened to Rhodes call someone who served as an intermediary to former President Donald Trump at around 5 PM on Jan. 6.
The Capitol had not even been fully cleared of the mob yet.
But Wilson and Rhodes were at the Phoenix Park Hotel just blocks from the Capitol when that call took place, Wilson said. He told investigators that Rhodes asked the intermediary to get Trump on board with invoking the Insurrection Act so groups like the Oath Keepers could be called up to aid his unconstitutional bid to stay in power. Wilson said the intermediary refused to connect Rhodes to Trump directly.
Zimmerman was not in D.C. on Jan. 6. It wasn’t something he wanted any part of, he told jurors Thursday.
He joined the group in August 2020, though there was no formal ceremony and he never paid any dues. The North Carolina chapter was disjointed and disorganized, he said. In short order, however, Zimmerman started to streamline communications between members and took on a leadership role that often prompted him to help sort out event logistics.
The Nov. 14, 2020 ‘Million MAGA March’ was the beginning of the end of his relationship with Rhodes and the Oath Keepers as he once knew it, he told jurors.
Zimmerman said he was part of a “quick reaction force” that stationed itself near Arlington Cemetery in nearby northern Virginia. He and another Oath Keeper from North Carolina, Doug Smith, sat in a van with 10 to 15 long rifles and several pistols. They were prepared to act rapidly if needed, he said. They never left the van.
By the end of the day, they were tired. Rhodes wanted them to drive into D.C. They didn’t.
Zimmerman told jurors Rhodes was irritated during a meeting that followed. Rhodes wanted things to go differently and he wanted Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, or at least, have cause for it. Oath Keepers should have disguised themselves as elderly people or mothers pushing baby carriages, Zimmerman recounted the former ringleader telling members.
Rhodes said this would have prompted Black Lives Matter or “antifa” advocates to attack Trump supporters and Oath Keepers. That was all the reason they would need to “give them a beatdown” and start a fracas, he said.
Zimmerman said this dynamic struck him as wrong, and not at all what he signed up for.
“You can’t trick people into attacking you so you can give them a beatdown. That’s not what you do,” he testified.
On cross-examination, Stanley Woodward, an attorney for defendant Kelly Meggs, pressed Zimmerman to explain why the Oath Keepers set up the quick reaction force for the Nov. 14 rally and kept pushing the private security detail angle.
A similar quick reaction force was established in the run-up to Jan. 6 at a hotel in northern Virginia. Prosecutors say this was an integral bit of planning for the Oath Keepers to launch their armed rebellion when called upon.
“Our whole point for November was to be a part of the Million MAGA March and support President Trump. It was never about providing a security detail... I don't care how many times it is said 'that's obviously what we do,’” Zimmerman said.
Other witnesses were also called by prosecutors on Thursday including Abdullah Rasheed, a former heavy equipment mechanic who served in the Marines.
Rasheed spoke extremely quietly, often mumbling his testimony with his head tucked low as he revealed that it was he who secretly recorded the Nov. 9, 2020, GoTo Meeting where Rhodes rallied over 100 Oath Keepers for more than two hours.
Prosecutors say that call was distinctly about planning for Jan. 6. The defense argues the meeting was about the Nov. 14 Million MAGA March. But in court earlier this week, assistant U.S. Attorney Rakoczy said when the group met on Nov. 9, the Nov. 14 march had not even been scheduled yet.
Rasheed testified that he recorded the call because it scared him.
“It felt like we were going to war against the U.S. government,” Rasheed said.
During cross-examination, defense attorneys worked to cast doubt on Rasheed’s credibility. He has changed his name six times, they noted. It was introduced moments later that Rasheed has also pleaded guilty in the past to aggravated sexual assault of a child. Presiding U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta reminded jurors after Rasheed left the stand that the prior criminal history of a witness should not influence their judgment of the evidence before them.
Rakoczy tried to do a bit of damage control for jurors after the revelation anyway.
Why did Rasheed change his name so many times and why did he do it again so close to the trial?
He still reads text messages flowing back and forth in Oath Keeper chats, he said. “The general concept,” he explained was that “snitches get stitches.”
“I don’t want my wife to have stitches, you know?” he said.
By changing his name, however, it is worth noting that Rasheed could have been angling to skirt registration as a sex offender.
Another witness, Michael Adams of Florida, also testified Thursday. Adams joined the Oath Keepers roughly a decade ago. The organization was lackluster then and the website was mostly defunct—especially the chat features for members, he said. Adams wanted to improve on it and found a phone number for Rhodes listed in the group’s directory. He got in touch with Rhodes right away and before long, Adams became the Oath Keeper’s Florida coordinator and migrated members to use the encrypted messaging app Signal.
Under Adams, things ran smoothly for a bit with Florida Oath Keepers holding weekly GoTo meetings. Adams interacted with other Florida members too, like Meggs. Meggs would later become the Florida leader.
By 2020, as the election bore down, things really started to shift for Adams. He didn’t go to the Million MAGA March in November 2020 and by December, he told jurors, he found himself questioning whether he wanted to be a member of the group at all.
The “rhetoric” had grown too zealous and when Rhodes published not one, but two, open letters to Trump on the Oath Keepers website demanding the 45th president invoke the Insurrection Act, Adams was deeply unsettled.
In the open letters, Rhodes urged Trump to call on the Oath Keepers and treat them as his militia. Rhodes said, “we the people have no choice” but to have a “bloody revolution [and/or] civil war” if Trump allowed Biden’s victory in the election to stand.
“I didn’t feel like I was a part of this ‘we,’” Adams said. “This wasn't my ideology and I didn’t want to be associated with that.”
Adams resigned from the Oath Keepers just before Christmas and in a resignation letter sent via text to fellow Oath Keepers, including Rhodes, Adams highlighted the “unchained rhetoric” that prompted his decision. He was a businessman, he explained, with licenses to keep. Participating in any sort of activity that could be “turned against them” was not an option for him.
“No sweat brother, I understand,” Rhodes replied.
Without missing a beat, Rhodes then asked Adams if he could show him how he set up remote conference calls.
Adams did not come to Washington on Jan. 6.
“I’m not a protest guy to begin with,” he said. “And I was not interested in any of the things going on here.”
During a break in witness testimony—and when jurors were not in the room—assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Nestler alerted Judge Mehta to a disturbance brewing with John Moseley, the former attorney to defendant Meggs who has since been disbarred.
Nestler said Moseley contacted a media coalition for lawyers on the case and vowed to publish a witness statement taken from U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn by the FBI. That statement, known as a “302,” is under protected status. Moseley argued it was not because it related to information Dunn already put on the record publicly to the Jan. 6 committee.
Moseley’s understanding was wrong, Nestler said.
Judge Mehta was visibly irritated by the stunt.
“If he releases any material subject to a protective order, he will be held in contempt of court,” Mehta said before addressing reporters observing the trial and live-tweeting proceedings.
“And you can all tweet that out so he can see it,” Mehta added.
An attorney for Officer Dunn did not return a request for comment.
Tasha Adams, the estranged wife of Elmer Stewart Rhodes, however, did offer her take to Daily Kos about the trial as the third day of proceedings came to a close.
She believes the prosecution is doing a “fantastic job” and unwinding the defense. “Stewart, however, likely sees it very differently,” she said.
“I think he sees this all as smoke and mirrors and that when he gets up there, he's going to straighten it all out for that poor, confused jury. He thinks he'll show them that he's a good guy, with noble intentions, and that everything he did was strictly legal. Patriotic, even,” she said. “I believe Stewart is incapable of self-doubt. The closest thing he could have to doubt would be if maybe he sees an even larger moment in time as his great, ‘meant to be’ [moment]. He might wonder if he is destined to receive a pardon later. So if he does start to get nervous with the prosecution's absolute destruction of his case, he'll imagine it's only because something even greater is coming for him.”
The seditious conspiracy trial continues Friday. Daily Kos will have live coverage here and on Twitter.