Will Carless, Grace Hauck and Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY
Sun, October 3, 2021,
The law enforcement officers described what they could offer the Oath Keepers:
“I have a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance and SWAT,” one wrote on the membership application.
"Communications, Weapons, K9 Officer for local Sheriffs office 12 years to present," another wrote.
“I am currently working as a deputy sheriff in Texas,” a third typed.
These men, who had sworn to uphold the law, signed up to join an armed, extremist, anti-government group.
The Oath Keepers trade in conspiracy theories and wild interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Its members have been involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. Some face charges in connection with their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The statements are part of a massive trove of data hacked from the Oath Keepers website. The data, some of which the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets made available to journalists, includes a file that purportedly provides names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of almost 40,000 members.
A search of that list revealed more than 200 people who identified themselves as active or retired law enforcement officers when signing up. USA TODAY confirmed 20 of them are still serving, from Alabama to California. Another 20 have retired since joining the Oath Keepers.
One man who filled out the form claimed he was a federal police officer and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.
These men are probably a small fraction of the law enforcement officers who joined the militia over the years, since the majority of people listed did not volunteer information about their employment. The leaked data does not indicate whether the people on the list are dues-paying members.
Founded after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2009 by Yale Law School graduate Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers refuse to acknowledge the authority of the federal government. Members issue a conspiracy-laden declaration of orders they will refuse to enforce, including disarming the American people.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, said weeks before the Capitol riot Jan. 6 that his group was "armed, prepared to go in if the president calls us up."
Rhodes has long claimed that the group, which experts said is the largest unauthorized militia in the country, is made up primarily of active and retired law enforcement officers and military personnel.
Just one Oath Keeper serving in a police or sheriff's department is too many, said Daryl Johnson, a security consultant and former senior analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Oath Keepers subscribe to anti-government conspiracy theories, so the fact that officers belong to an organization that believes in this type of stuff really calls into question their discretion and their ability to make sound judgments,” Johnson said.
Jan. 6 prosecutions: Oath Keepers had ‘corrupt’ intent when they stormed Capitol, DOJ says as defendants seek case dismissal
Guilty plea: Fourth suspected Oath Keeper pleads guilty to Capitol riot conspiracy, obstruction
More concerning is the fact that the Oath Keepers make their members swear an oath of allegiance, much like the police and military, Johnson said. That creates a dangerous conflict of interest.
“They look at the U.S. government as an enemy,” he said. “When it comes down to a crisis situation or an investigation involving other militias, where is this person’s allegiance? Most likely with the Oath Keepers and not the police department.”
Scott Dunn, who left the Oath Keepers board of directors in 2019 after disagreements with Rhodes, said the group's membership form asked people to list their relevant skills.
Rhodes "wanted to use that information as a searchable database, so we could punch in Oklahoma, and it would show us all the different specialties around Oklahoma, or we could search for a specific type of skill, and it would show which members had that skill," he said.
James Holsinger, a lieutenant with the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Maryland, is on the list. Holsinger is running for sheriff in the county, where Hagerstown is located.
He did not respond to several requests for comment.
On the form, Holsinger purportedly wrote that he “designed and implemented tactical rescue drills” and had “experience with an assortment of weapons (lethal and nonlethal).”
Officers joined the Oath Keepers
USA TODAY contacted dozens of active-duty and retired officers to ask why they joined the Oath Keepers. Most didn't respond; nearly everyone who did said they were no longer members. One retired Marine and correctional officer said he supports the group.
In 20 cases, law enforcement agencies or the men themselves confirmed they were still employed. Among the officers identified on the membership list are:
An officer at the Louisville Metro Police Department who was involved in a shooting in 2018.
A former U.S. Army member who joined the New York Police Department and a former U.S. Army captain who joined the Chicago Police Department. Both are still police officers there.
An 80-year-old, part-time officer at the Ashley County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas.
A corrections officer in Riverside, California.
Maj. Eben Bratcher, operations chief with the Yuma County Sheriff's Office in Arizona, is among them. Bratcher told USA TODAY he recalled receiving newsletters from the group for "some time."
"I may have signed up many years ago but do not recall any specifics," Bratcher said. "I do know that I unsubscribed some time ago due to the sheer volume of email I received."
A note attributed to Bratcher on the sign-up list reads, "We have 85 sworn officers and Border (of) Mexico on the South and California on the West. I've already introduced your web site to dozens of my Deputies."
Bratcher said he didn't recall writing that. "It is probable that I spoke to numerous people about the new organization," he said.
Constable Joe Wright of Collin County, Texas, said he joined in 2012, when he was running for office for the first time.
"To be honest, I felt pressured to join it in this county for political support," Wright said. "The Oath Keepers, if you didn’t support them, you were going to get bad reviews."
Wright said he didn't know much about the group at the time. He said he remembers receiving a box of Oath Keepers paraphernalia, including brochures and stickers, after signing up. He said he threw it in the trash and hasn't engaged with the group since being elected in the county northeast of Dallas.
"I don’t support them," Wright said. "I’m not into radical. I’m into doing my job."
Officers say they're no longer members
Several officers admitted signing up but claimed their membership expired long ago.
For example, Michael Lynch, an officer with the Anaheim Police Department in California, said he joined the Oath Keepers many years ago, but he didn’t renew his membership when he learned more about the group.
"I didn't get anything out of it," he said in an interview. "There was no local chapter or anything, so when it came time to renew, I was like, I'm not sending another $40."
Lynch was the officer who boasted of his undercover, surveillance and SWAT training.
“Obviously, we had no knowledge of this,” said Sgt. Shane Carringer, an Anaheim spokesman. “We will look into what options we have as a department while considering what rights our officer has."
Other departments have suspended or investigated officers for associating with the group.
Always an extremist group, but lately more extreme
It’s unclear from the hacked data exactly when the officers in question signed up. Experts on the Oath Keepers said the group has changed since its founding in 2009.
What started during the Obama administration as a group to fight what it saw as federal government overreach developed into a more hateful and paranoid organization, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked the Oath Keepers since their inception.
“Rhodes and company have become much more radical,” Beirich said.
The Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said, founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories, and it's always had an anti-government bent.
Kelly Meggs, according to the FBI, is the leader of the Oath Keepers in Florida, and was arrested and charged with participating in the Capitol riot.
She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers.
“I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. "You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”
J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said she understands how law enforcement officers could have joined the Oath Keepers years ago without knowing much about it.
Lynch, the officer in Anaheim, said he joined in 2016 after talking to recruiters at a booth at a gun show in Las Vegas. He said he thought they were an alternative to the National Rifle Association.
"People join stuff all the time without doing any due diligence," MacNab said. "And for years, the only due diligence you could have done was on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website, and most police officers would immediately dismiss that as biased."
For most Americans, joining the Oath Keepers is an act protected by the First Amendment. But several Supreme Court cases have established that police departments can place broad limits on what their employees may say or write and what organizations they belong to.
Most officers are under the false impression that the First Amendment gives them the right to say just about anything on social media or in public, said Val Van Brocklin, a former federal prosecutor who trains police departments on using social media.
"The vast majority of cops in the country don't understand this," Van Brocklin said. "A public employer does not have to pay you for your insubordination or dishonorable conduct that sullies the badge and the uniform."
Contributing: Aleszu Bajak, Dan Keemahill, Mike Stucka
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oath Keepers hack exposes law enforcement officers across US
Oath Keepers Panicked That the Left Would ‘Decapitate’ Them After Failed Capitol Putsch
Kelly Weill
Fri, October 1, 2021
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty
In the weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the leader of far-right group the Oath Keepers encouraged members to borrow money to hoard fuel, in advance of what the group claimed would be a Biden administration attack on the power grid. All the while, the group was making almost daily withdrawals from a crowdfunding site, totaling nearly $30,000.
A leaked trove of Oath Keepers messages, uploaded by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets this week, reveals some of the group’s communications after members participated in the Capitol attack. Prominent in the leak are paranoid email blasts from the group’s founder, Stuart Rhodes, who told members that the Biden White House was about to “conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike” on Oath Keepers under the guise of a massive power outage. Those conspiratorial fears were frequently accompanied by appeals to spend money.
One week after the Capitol attack, while Donald Trump still held office, Rhodes sent an email pleading for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to cling to power, leaked emails show. (Although the message is addressed to Trump, it is unclear whether Rhodes sent it to him or merely included its text in an email to Oath Keepers.) Part of Rhodes’s justification, a mere seven days after the Capitol riot, was the supposed threat from the left, which he thought would begin attacking pro-Trump families.
Plea Deals Are Tearing the Oath Keepers Apart
“The domestic enemy wolves will be at the door of all your supporters as well,” Rhodes wrote. “Liberty-loving American constitutionalists will have no choice but to honor their oaths and defend both the Constitution and their families when the communists and obedient Deep State minions come for them (as they are already planning on doing).”
Like others on the far right, Rhodes appeared to believe conspiracy theories about Trump secretly holding onto damaging secrets that would destroy the left. Rhodes encouraged Trump to leak those supposed secrets on fringe sites like 8chan.
“At the very least, do the mass declassification and data dump,” Rhodes wrote. “You still have absolute authority as President and Commander-in-Chief to declassify any files held by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Use trusted elite units you know are still loyal to the Constitution to get it done (to seize the servers and dump the data on 4Chan, 8Chan, etc).”
Rhodes included the text of that letter in an email blast to Oath Keepers titled “OATH KEEPERS WARNING ORDER PART I.” In it, Rhodes warned followers of the “very high possibility” that the Biden administration would supposedly take out the power grid and begin carrying out targeted strikes on conservatives.
“Within the short term, we face a very high possibilty [sic] of an intentional ‘comms down’ scenario where black hats take down/shut down all communications in the US - No cell service, no internet, no land lines. A comms blackout. This could also include a take down of electrical power. An intentional power blackout. Worst case scenario would be an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] strike,” Rhodes told Oath Keepers on Jan. 13. “The purpose of such a comms down/blackout will be to minimize our ability to communicate and to pin people in their homes as the black hats and their terrorist allies conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike to arrest or otherwise take out patriot leaders, potential leaders, and highly skilled personnel.” (The reference to the “night of the long knives” was the second time Rhodes compared the Biden administration to Nazis in that email.)
Rhodes encouraged followers to plan for militia-led evacuations of homes during the fantasy power grid attack, and to hoard fuel, even going into debt if necessary. “Get all the fuel you can - gas, diesel, NOW,” he wrote. “Get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks and into portable containers. Get all you can. You will need it. Borrow money or charge it if you have to.”
Rhodes did not return requests for comment on whether he believed such attacks were still imminent.
Those leaked email comments show a continued ratcheting-up of Oath Keepers rhetoric, even after the Capitol riot.
Rhodes claims to have been uninvolved and unaware of Oath Keepers’ efforts to breach the Capitol. In speeches at D.C. rallies before Jan. 6, however, he preached a similar brand of anti-left apocalypticism, which extremism monitors described as a warning sign before the Capitol attack. During one such speech, in December, he called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and warned that “if he does not do it now while he is Commander in Chief, we’re going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.”
Rhodes also appeared to support court-based efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. In a Jan. 28 email, Oath Keepers lawyer Kellye Sorelle sent an email blast to the group stating that “Stewart agreed to allow me to send out an email to all the chapters requesting assistance.”
Sorelle asked members of the group for help finding documentation “for all 50 states regarding their orders/policy changes modifying their absentee ballot process, the use of drop boxes, voter registration changes and certification information for the machines used for elections. I also need evidence from the counties/states documenting that the data/ballots are not maintained for 22 months as required by law.”
Sorelle did not return requests for comment about the nature of her request, and whether Oath Keepers mobilized to help her. At the time of her request, Sorelle was involved in a baffling court case that cited a law from the fictional Lord of the Rings universe in an attempt to nullify Biden’s win. (The case was dismissed in September.)
Some of Rhodes’s emails during this period included requests for donations to the Oath Keepers. Although a public Oath Keepers fundraiser on the site GiveSendGo was a flop in spring 2021, the group was actively withdrawing tens of thousands from an account on the crowdfunding site RallyPay, leaked withdrawals show.
From Jan. 18 to Feb. 16, New Jersey Oath Keeper Edward Durfee made withdrawals from the account almost daily, totaling more than $28,000. Durfee, who is running for office in New Jersey, did not return requests for comment on Thursday (nor did he respond previously, when asked about allegations that Oath Keepers swindled application fees).
The purpose of the Oath Keepers’ RallyPay account is unclear. Leaked chat logs reveal the group “promoted” one such account in support of alleged Capitol rioter Jessica Watkins. The Oath Keepers have also run their own RallyPay fundraisers since at least October 2020.
Questions about money are laced through the leaked emails. In February, Rhodes emailed Oath Keepers asking for their help responding to a tornado in Alabama. Although the email called for volunteers, it also asked for donations. Two days later, Rhodes emailed again, informing followers that local first responders had declined the group’s services.
‘Prepared for Violence’: Prosecutors Are Closing in on Oath Keepers Leader
“The local PD has let us know they have enough man-power to cover their needs and the security need is not as bad as first anticipated. Therefore, we are standing down on this operation,” Rhodes wrote. Nevertheless, he noted, the Oath Keepers would like to keep the donations it had received for the Alabama mission.
“To those who donated to support this mission: we greatly appreciate your support,” he wrote. “Donors like you make what we do possible and we couldn’t do it without you. We hope you will simply let us use your donation to fund our future operations (no doubt we will be in the field again very soon) and our ongoing expenses. However, if you donated to this effort and do want a refund, email us and we’ll get it done.”
Refunds were a problem for the Oath Keepers in early 2021, as The Daily Beast previously reported. Multiple would-be Oath Keepers emailed the group, complaining that they had sent application fees but never heard back about membership.
One application came from a former leader of the Proud Boys, a different far-right paramilitary group. Leaked chat logs reveal that Jason Lee Van Dyke, who briefly served as the head of the Proud Boys, attempted to join the Oath Keepers in March. Van Dyke has previously been accused of using a Proud Boy chapter to surveil an enemy—a charge Van Dyke denies.
Van Dyke told The Daily Beast that Oath Keepers did not ask him about his Proud Boys affiliation. He said he joined the group’s chat briefly, but few people talked to him, even to onboard him as a member. Chat logs show him offering to pay a $50 membership fee, but being told that the group’s payment processors were currently down.
“I seem to recall a time when I might have been in their chat but I was in there for a little bit and as far as I know, that group is completely defunct,” Van Dyke told The Daily Beast. “I don't remember my password to get in there. They don’t have memberships to get in there anymore. If I remember correctly, that chat was dead as a doornail.”
Kelly Weill
Fri, October 1, 2021
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos Getty
In the weeks after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the leader of far-right group the Oath Keepers encouraged members to borrow money to hoard fuel, in advance of what the group claimed would be a Biden administration attack on the power grid. All the while, the group was making almost daily withdrawals from a crowdfunding site, totaling nearly $30,000.
A leaked trove of Oath Keepers messages, uploaded by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets this week, reveals some of the group’s communications after members participated in the Capitol attack. Prominent in the leak are paranoid email blasts from the group’s founder, Stuart Rhodes, who told members that the Biden White House was about to “conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike” on Oath Keepers under the guise of a massive power outage. Those conspiratorial fears were frequently accompanied by appeals to spend money.
One week after the Capitol attack, while Donald Trump still held office, Rhodes sent an email pleading for the then-president to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to cling to power, leaked emails show. (Although the message is addressed to Trump, it is unclear whether Rhodes sent it to him or merely included its text in an email to Oath Keepers.) Part of Rhodes’s justification, a mere seven days after the Capitol riot, was the supposed threat from the left, which he thought would begin attacking pro-Trump families.
Plea Deals Are Tearing the Oath Keepers Apart
“The domestic enemy wolves will be at the door of all your supporters as well,” Rhodes wrote. “Liberty-loving American constitutionalists will have no choice but to honor their oaths and defend both the Constitution and their families when the communists and obedient Deep State minions come for them (as they are already planning on doing).”
Like others on the far right, Rhodes appeared to believe conspiracy theories about Trump secretly holding onto damaging secrets that would destroy the left. Rhodes encouraged Trump to leak those supposed secrets on fringe sites like 8chan.
“At the very least, do the mass declassification and data dump,” Rhodes wrote. “You still have absolute authority as President and Commander-in-Chief to declassify any files held by the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc. Use trusted elite units you know are still loyal to the Constitution to get it done (to seize the servers and dump the data on 4Chan, 8Chan, etc).”
Rhodes included the text of that letter in an email blast to Oath Keepers titled “OATH KEEPERS WARNING ORDER PART I.” In it, Rhodes warned followers of the “very high possibility” that the Biden administration would supposedly take out the power grid and begin carrying out targeted strikes on conservatives.
“Within the short term, we face a very high possibilty [sic] of an intentional ‘comms down’ scenario where black hats take down/shut down all communications in the US - No cell service, no internet, no land lines. A comms blackout. This could also include a take down of electrical power. An intentional power blackout. Worst case scenario would be an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] strike,” Rhodes told Oath Keepers on Jan. 13. “The purpose of such a comms down/blackout will be to minimize our ability to communicate and to pin people in their homes as the black hats and their terrorist allies conduct a ‘night of the long knives’ decapitation strike to arrest or otherwise take out patriot leaders, potential leaders, and highly skilled personnel.” (The reference to the “night of the long knives” was the second time Rhodes compared the Biden administration to Nazis in that email.)
Rhodes encouraged followers to plan for militia-led evacuations of homes during the fantasy power grid attack, and to hoard fuel, even going into debt if necessary. “Get all the fuel you can - gas, diesel, NOW,” he wrote. “Get the fuel out of the underground storage tanks and into portable containers. Get all you can. You will need it. Borrow money or charge it if you have to.”
Rhodes did not return requests for comment on whether he believed such attacks were still imminent.
Those leaked email comments show a continued ratcheting-up of Oath Keepers rhetoric, even after the Capitol riot.
Rhodes claims to have been uninvolved and unaware of Oath Keepers’ efforts to breach the Capitol. In speeches at D.C. rallies before Jan. 6, however, he preached a similar brand of anti-left apocalypticism, which extremism monitors described as a warning sign before the Capitol attack. During one such speech, in December, he called on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and warned that “if he does not do it now while he is Commander in Chief, we’re going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war.”
Rhodes also appeared to support court-based efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. In a Jan. 28 email, Oath Keepers lawyer Kellye Sorelle sent an email blast to the group stating that “Stewart agreed to allow me to send out an email to all the chapters requesting assistance.”
Sorelle asked members of the group for help finding documentation “for all 50 states regarding their orders/policy changes modifying their absentee ballot process, the use of drop boxes, voter registration changes and certification information for the machines used for elections. I also need evidence from the counties/states documenting that the data/ballots are not maintained for 22 months as required by law.”
Sorelle did not return requests for comment about the nature of her request, and whether Oath Keepers mobilized to help her. At the time of her request, Sorelle was involved in a baffling court case that cited a law from the fictional Lord of the Rings universe in an attempt to nullify Biden’s win. (The case was dismissed in September.)
Some of Rhodes’s emails during this period included requests for donations to the Oath Keepers. Although a public Oath Keepers fundraiser on the site GiveSendGo was a flop in spring 2021, the group was actively withdrawing tens of thousands from an account on the crowdfunding site RallyPay, leaked withdrawals show.
From Jan. 18 to Feb. 16, New Jersey Oath Keeper Edward Durfee made withdrawals from the account almost daily, totaling more than $28,000. Durfee, who is running for office in New Jersey, did not return requests for comment on Thursday (nor did he respond previously, when asked about allegations that Oath Keepers swindled application fees).
The purpose of the Oath Keepers’ RallyPay account is unclear. Leaked chat logs reveal the group “promoted” one such account in support of alleged Capitol rioter Jessica Watkins. The Oath Keepers have also run their own RallyPay fundraisers since at least October 2020.
Questions about money are laced through the leaked emails. In February, Rhodes emailed Oath Keepers asking for their help responding to a tornado in Alabama. Although the email called for volunteers, it also asked for donations. Two days later, Rhodes emailed again, informing followers that local first responders had declined the group’s services.
‘Prepared for Violence’: Prosecutors Are Closing in on Oath Keepers Leader
“The local PD has let us know they have enough man-power to cover their needs and the security need is not as bad as first anticipated. Therefore, we are standing down on this operation,” Rhodes wrote. Nevertheless, he noted, the Oath Keepers would like to keep the donations it had received for the Alabama mission.
“To those who donated to support this mission: we greatly appreciate your support,” he wrote. “Donors like you make what we do possible and we couldn’t do it without you. We hope you will simply let us use your donation to fund our future operations (no doubt we will be in the field again very soon) and our ongoing expenses. However, if you donated to this effort and do want a refund, email us and we’ll get it done.”
Refunds were a problem for the Oath Keepers in early 2021, as The Daily Beast previously reported. Multiple would-be Oath Keepers emailed the group, complaining that they had sent application fees but never heard back about membership.
One application came from a former leader of the Proud Boys, a different far-right paramilitary group. Leaked chat logs reveal that Jason Lee Van Dyke, who briefly served as the head of the Proud Boys, attempted to join the Oath Keepers in March. Van Dyke has previously been accused of using a Proud Boy chapter to surveil an enemy—a charge Van Dyke denies.
Van Dyke told The Daily Beast that Oath Keepers did not ask him about his Proud Boys affiliation. He said he joined the group’s chat briefly, but few people talked to him, even to onboard him as a member. Chat logs show him offering to pay a $50 membership fee, but being told that the group’s payment processors were currently down.
“I seem to recall a time when I might have been in their chat but I was in there for a little bit and as far as I know, that group is completely defunct,” Van Dyke told The Daily Beast. “I don't remember my password to get in there. They don’t have memberships to get in there anymore. If I remember correctly, that chat was dead as a doornail.”
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