Who is Stewart Rhodes? Elmer Stewart Rhodes is the founder of the far-right, anti-government, and militaristic group “Oath Keepers.” More than 30,000 soldiers, military veterans, and law enforcement officers are members of this organization. He was charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on January 6.
His Wife & Children
The spouse of Stewart Rhodes is Tasha Adams. The couple began dating in high school and were eventually married at a young age. In contrast, Tasha Adams has been attempting to divorce Rhodes for the past five years.
Tasha Adams and Stewart Rhodes have six offspring. He has two daughters, Sedona Adams, 23, and Sequoia Adams, 19, as well as a son, Dakota Adams, 24. The identities of the remaining three children are unknown.
Tasha, the wife of Rhode, and her children have discussed their family life and his abusive behavior towards them. Tasha has also expressed her happiness at his imprisonment.
Wiki
Tasha Rhodes, whose real name is Natasha Adams, is notoriously recognized as Stewart Rhodes’ spouse. Tasha, who was born in 1972, is currently 49 years of age. On July the 11th, 2022, seven years younger than her husband, Tasha will celebrate her 50th birthday.
As stated previously, Tasha has been attempting to finalize her divorce for the past five years. Her former law firm dropped her as a client because she was unable to make timely payments.
Tasha currently describes herself as a journalist. However, she previously worked as a ballroom dancer and a stripper. She is also currently writing a book about her miserable marriage to Stewart.
Wears an Eyepatch
Stewart Rhodes’s ex-wife has discussed the loss of his eye. She said this happened when they were teenagers and their relationship was still fairly new.
She also claimed that Steward accidentally shot himself in the eye after dropping a gun. He used to wear a fake eye, but an infection made him take it off and put on an eyepatch instead.
What is Stewart Rhodes’ age? 1965 is the year of my birth. In 2022, Stewart Rhodes will be 56 years old. This year, he celebrated his 57th birthday on April 29.
According to his date of birth, Stewart’s zodiac sign is Taurus.
Family
Stewart Rhodes has not disclosed the names of his parents. Nevertheless, his mother had Native American and Hispanic ancestry.
Aside from this, his family has lived a private life away from the public eye.
Bio-Career
Elmer Stewart Rhodes is a Yale Law School graduate. Former US Army paratrooper and Republican Congressman Ron Paul’s staff member.
Rhodes established the Oath Keepers organization in 2009 and serves as its leader. The SLPC listed him as a known extremist. After he didn’t answer to two bar complaints filed against him in the Arizona federal district court in December 2015, the Montana Supreme Court took away his license to practice law. This was because he had broken the Montana Rules of Professional Conduct.
The Oath Keepers
As mentioned previously, Elmer Stewart Rhodes established the Oath Keepers in 2009. In Nevada, it was incorporated as a nonprofit organization. “Active-duty military, reserves, National Guard, police, military veterans, firefighters, and other first responders” can become full members of this group.
In 2016, Oath Keepers had 35,000 members. Charles Dyer, Richard Mack, and Wendy Rogers are a few of the prominent members of this organization.
Imprisoned for Participation in the Attack on the Capitol
Stewart Rhodes and ten others were charged with seditious conspiracy and other offenses in January 2022 for their alleged roles in the January 6 Capitol Riot. As part of Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election, the alleged conspiracy was to collect guns and give them to quick response force teams.
The federal judge turned down both of his requests to get out of jail while he was being tried for his part in the attack on the Capitol.
Net Worth
The net worth of Stewart Rhodes has not yet been made public. According to reports, annual dues for Oath Keepers members are $50, and a lifetime membership costs $1,000.
The Oath Keepers are exempt from paying taxes.
Biography
Stewart is the founder and director of Oath Keepers. He served as a U.S. Army paratrooper until he became disabled in a nighttime rough terrain parachuting accident. Stewart, a former firearms instructor and member of Rep. Ron Paul’s D.C. staff, penned the monthly column Enemy at the Gates for S.W.A.T. Magazine.
In 2004, Stewart graduated from Yale Law School, where his paper “Solving the Puzzle of Enemy Combatant Status” was awarded the university’s Miller Prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. He assisted in the teaching of U.S. military history at Yale, was a Yale Research Scholar, and is currently writing a book about the risks of applying the laws of war to the American people.
The Oath Keepers, an organization of retired and active military and police, have published a list of orders they will not obey:
- Directives to disarm the American population
- Directives to conduct warrantless searches of American citizens
- orders to detain U.S. citizens as “illegal enemy combatants” or to bring them before a military tribunal.
- The imposition of martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state
- orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
- any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
- Any order to force Americans to go to any kind of detention camp, no matter what the reason is.
- Orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control.”
- Any orders to confiscate the American people’s property, including food and other necessities. Any orders that get in the way of people’s rights to free speech, peaceful assembly, and to ask their government for help with problems.
The trial of Oath Keepers for treason will start.
Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia group, is charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
The jury selection process begins on Tuesday.
When Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and four other members of the far-right group stand trial on Tuesday for seditious conspiracy in last year’s attack on the Capitol, they will join a long list of individuals who have been charged with sedition, including Islamic terrorists, Puerto Rican nationalists, and radical left-wing unionists.
But Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates intend to use an unusual and risky defense to prove that they did not intend to use force against the government: They intend to tell the jury that when armed teams of Oath Keepers planned to rush into Washington from Virginia on January 6, 2021, they believed they would be carrying out legal orders from the president himself.
The attorneys for the five defendants will argue at the trial, which begins on Tuesday with jury selection, that the Oath Keepers waited on January 6 for President Donald J. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law from the American Revolution that gives the president broad authority to use the military to quell unrest in times of emergency.
As the trial in Federal District Court in Washington progresses, Mr. Rhodes is expected to testify that the Oath Keepers believed Mr. Trump would use the act, despite the fact that he never did.
He will argue that their plans for violence on January 6 should be viewed as a legal effort to assist the president, and not as an illegal attack against the United States.
The trial is anticipated to last four to six weeks.
It is the first of a number of cases in which far-right groups are accused of engaging in government-opposed activities.
In the coming months, the former leader of the nationalist group Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and four other group members will stand trial on charges of seditious conspiracy for their roles in the storming of the Capitol.
For Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, joining forces with Mr. Trump is a legal strategy that demonstrates how they have transitioned from a group formed during the Obama administration to combat what they viewed as an overreaching government to a group formed to defend presidential power after Mr. Trump assumed office.
Sam Jackson, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany and an expert on right-wing extremist groups, stated, “When the Oath Keepers first formed, their argument was fairly straightforward: the federal government was bad, and so-called patriots had to be prepared to fight against it.”
The difficulty of telling this story increased when a friend moved into the White House.
Prosecutors have stated in court documents and pre-trial hearings that Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates cannot avoid sedition charges by claiming that they believed the Insurrection Act gave them the right to use force in support of Mr. Trump as a militia.
Prosecutors argue that the act does not permit a president to send private armed groups to restore law and order, which the Oath Keepers feared would be lost on January 6 due to the actions of leftist counterprotesters.
Prosecutors have also asserted that Mr. Rhodes concocted the Insurrection Act defense well in advance of January 6 in order to conceal his plan to conceal a heavily armed “quick reaction force” of Oath Keepers in hotel rooms across the Potomac River in Virginia.
Prosecutors point to a video meeting held on November 9, 2020, in which Mr. Rhodes told other members of the armed group that they would “wait for the president’s orders.”
“This is the official phrase,” he stated.
And we must proceed in this manner because it safeguards you from legal trouble.
A disgruntled member of the group recorded and provided the government with a recording of the meeting.
Prosecutors intend to use this as one of several pieces of evidence at trial to demonstrate that Mr. Rhodes began plotting to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from becoming president just days after the election.
The government will present live testimony from cooperating Oath Keepers members, recordings of digital walkie-talkies used on January 6, and reams of encrypted Signal conversations between Mr. Rhodes and others in the days leading up to the attack.
Mr. Rhodes, for instance, sent a message to some of his members two days after the election urging them not to accept the results and warning, “We won’t get through this without a civil war.”
A few days later, he sent the Oath Keepers another message instructing them to “march in mass on the nation’s Capitol.”
According to the prosecution, Mr. Rhodes’ four co-defendants participated in his plot to halt the legal transfer of power in the coming weeks.
Among them were Kelly Meggs, the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, Kenneth Harrelson, another member from Florida, Jessica Watkins, an Ohio bar owner who ran her own militia in the state, and Thomas Caldwell, a former naval officer and F.B.I. employee from Virginia.
Lawyers for the Oath Keepers have repeatedly stated that the group traveled to Washington in the days preceding January 6 not to storm the Capitol, but to provide security at pro-Trump rallies for individuals such as Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser, and Ali Alexander, a prominent Stop the Steal organizer who had a permit for an event at the Capitol on the day of the attack.
Prosecutors assert that, despite the fact that some members of the group were bodyguards, they broke into the Capitol during the attack in two separate military “stacks” and that some of them went in search of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Others, who were part of the “quick reaction force,” remained in Virginia and “watched and waited on the outside” to deal with “worst case scenarios,” as Mr. Rhodes had written in a Signal chat that morning.
Mr. Rhodes never entered the Capitol on that day.
Instead, he remained outside with the group’s top attorney, Kellye SoRelle, who is facing charges unrelated to the riot.
Mr. Rhodes urged his followers to continue fighting against the new government even after the ceasefire that night.
He wrote, “Patriots storming their own Capitol to send a message to traitors is NOTHING in comparison to what is to come.”
As Mr. Biden’s inauguration approached, the prosecution claims Mr. Rhodes spent more than $17,000 on weapons, ammunition, and military equipment over the next two weeks.
He maintained contact with a few group members.
One of them called him 10 days after the attack to inquire about “next steps.”
Attempting to stop Mr. Biden and aid Mr. Trump was not what the Oath Keepers were originally intended to do.
Mr. Rhodes founded the organization in 2009, during the peak of the Tea Party movement.
Due to a gun accident, he gained notoriety for his black eyepatch.
He specifically sought out current and former law enforcement officers and military veterans who had taken an oath to disobey what they believed to be unconstitutional government orders.
During the administration of President Barack Obama, the group ran into numerous issues with the government.
In 2014, for instance, they arrived at a Nevada cattle ranch where Cliven Bundy and others engaged in a gun battle with federal land management officials.
After Mr. Trump’s election, however, Mr. Rhodes and his members seemed to embrace the new nationalism and suspicions of a deep-state conspiracy that had taken root in Mr. Trump’s administration.
They also appeared to have adopted a number of Mr. Trump’s enemies, such as Antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.
A year after the attack on the Capitol, when Mr. Rhodes was arrested, more than 20 other members of the group had already been charged.
This effectively disbanded the group’s leadership and rank-and-file members.
In Washington, two additional Oath Keeper groups will be tried in connection with the Capitol attack.
One will be tried in November, and the other at the start of the following year.
However, according to Mr. Jackson, who has studied the Oath Keepers for years, their far-right beliefs and authoritarian views are likely to remain unchanged regardless of what happens to the group as a whole.
Mr. Jackson stated, “Even if Rhodes is found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison, I do not believe this will alter the nature of extremism in America.”
There is a larger movement in this country that will continue to promote these ideas even if a particular group disappears.