Top Oath Keeper reveals a key secret of Jan. 6 | Will Bunch Newsletter

Do you ever feel like everything is on ice? Like when it’s time for pitchers and catchers to report for spring training, except the billionaires have locked them out. Or when the great James Harden is ready to finally win the 76ers an NBA title, but his hamstring isn’t. Or when Punxsutawney Phil insists there’s still another month of winter. It’s not always sunny in Philadelphia.

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It was easy to miss with all the bombs bursting in air and the rocket’s red glare of military jet fighters over Super Bowl LVI in Southern California this weekend, but a bombshell of a different sort went off some 3,000 miles to the east. In the nation’s capital, overlapping probes closed in on the truth about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

In a court filing seeking release from his jail cell, the best-known figure who’s been charged to date in the storming of the U.S. Capitol — Stewart Rhodes, longtime leader of the radical right-wing Oath Keepers, who played a key role in that day’s chaos — sought to defend his actions by lending credence to the notion that then-president Donald Trump was expected to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807. That would have allowed Trump to send in troops to quell the violence but also quite likely prevent that day’s certification of President Biden’s election victory. Simply put, it would’ve laid the foundation for a coup on U.S. soil.

In a 41-page filing seeking the pre-trial release of Rhodes, who was indicted on the serious charge of seditious conspiracy and taken into custody last month, his lawyers argue that Rhodes and his fellow Oath Keepers from as far away as Florida and Texas came to the D.C. area ahead of January 6 with rifles and suitcases full of ammunition for two reasons — neither of which involved storming the Capitol and preventing the certification. Instead, Rhodes’ attorneys argue, the Oath Keepers, many of whom are former military or ex-cops, were there to protect pro-Trump allies like his long-time adviser Roger Stone from expected clashes that week with leftists, or the so-called “antifa,” that never actually materialized.

More importantly, they claim the bulk of Rhodes’ armed men, calling themselves a “Quick Response Force,” or QRF, stayed outside of the capital district and waited at staging areas like a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va. They say they only planned to enter the fray on Capitol Hill if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which they fully expected to happen. The lawyers said the QRFs finally gave up waiting for the presidential command and went to dinner at a nearby Olive Garden.

“They were not there to storm the Capitol, to stop the certification, to takeover the government,” the brief argues. “They were waiting for President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. He did not, so Rhodes and the others did nothing.”

This is a critical contention, because it marks the first time that a key player in the January 6 chaos has publicly stated what other pieces of circumstantial evidence points to — that Trump and his allies not only envisioned but seriously considered some sort of emergency declaration that would have involved the National Guard or other troops in halting the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, as well as possible other actions like seizing voting machines.

Indeed, Rhodes’ notion seems to jibe with a January 5 email — its contents released by the House January 6 Committee — from Trump’s top aide, then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, who claimed the National Guard was on stand-by “to protect pro-Trump people.” Presumably that meant to protect them from the leftists branded by Fox News and others on the right as “antifa” — elements that had clashed with Trump supporters in the streets of Washington as recently as Dec. 12, 2020. A repeat of that showdown could have given Trump grounds to invoke the Insurrection Act or to declare the national emergency sought by ad hoc advisers like ousted national-security chief Michael Flynn.

Of course, the self-serving statement seeking to free Rhodes — whose estranged wife recently told CNN he is “a complete sociopath” — must be taken with a grain of salt. And Rhodes’ lawyers do in fact concede that some Oath Keepers did breach the Capitol on January 6, but insist they did so only to respond to the fatal shooting of rioter Ashli Babbitt by law enforcement.

But the disclosure by Rhodes — an ex-Army paratrooper with a degree from Yale Law School who once worked for Rep. Ron Paul — is one of many that builds a strong case about Trump’s flirtations with the framework for a coup to thwart Biden’s ascension to the presidency. And yet it raises as many new questions as it seeks to answer. One obvious one: Who was providing Rhodes with information about Trump and Insurrection Act? Another: Was this was discussed when Rhodes reportedly met the leader of Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and other right-wing extremists in a D.C. parking garage on the day before the insurrection?

Yet, the biggest unanswered question is that if there was a plan for Trump to declare an emergency on January 6, why wasn’t it carried out? Did Trump freeze when left-wing protesters stayed home that day and didn’t confront the Trumpists? Or did smarter Washington hands like Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair who was alarmed by the maneuverings of the 45th president, block Trump from employing the Guard or other troops? Or was the then-president merely too weak to carry off the plan for the likes of Rhodes, who reportedly texted on January 6 that “all I see Trump doing is complaining”?

This would explain why the House probers are so eager to find out what exactly Trump was doing when he returned to the White House on January 6, and adds even more urgency to last week’s disclosure that the ex-president’s phone logs from that afternoon contain gaps. Of course, the Rhodes filing is just the latest in a string of bombshells about Trump and his close allies conspiring to tamper with the election results — as in the infamous phone call to Georgia officials seeking to “find” 11,780 votes there — and muck with the proceedings of Congress on January 6, and then to hide key documents and destroy records about what was going on.

Indeed, the growing pile of evidence of a criminal conspiracy against the most critical workings of American democracy continues to raise the biggest unanswered question of all: What on earth is Attorney General Merrick Garland doing?

Question: Is Philadelphia a leader or follower? Long known for stagnation (Blue Route, ban on skyscrapers), Philly has more recently been an innovator (soda tax, [DA Larry] Krasner’s office). Whither the future? — Via Fletcher McClellan (@mcclelef) on Twitter

Answer: That’s a great question, Fletcher, and not easy to answer in a short space. But while the last decade has seen progressive victories in Philadelphia — both for ideas like pre-K/soda tax and for people like Krasner — that would have seemed impossible in the Frank Rizzo era, it’s hard for the city to own these wins. Look at the reactionary culture that blames Krasner for things he didn’t do (unsolved murders, the cops’ job) and rarely credits him for reducing the jail population or for freeing the wrongfully convicted. It’s likely the 2023 mayor’s race will include one or two true progressives, and probably a candidate pushing a return to 20th century “law and order.” Philadelphia’s voters will best answer your query.

The midterm elections were coming and the new-ish Democratic president knew he was in trouble. The narrow passage of his economic plan hadn’t stopped the fall of his approval rating, and his most ambitious new social program collapsed as some lawmakers from his own party abandoned him. So less than two years after taking office and boosting the hopes of liberals wanting to sharply reverse the so-called “Reagan revolution,” Bill Clinton took a pretty hard right turn. He even brought in a couple of Republican strategists (including the future right-wing loon Dick Morris) as the 42nd POTUS boosted the hiring of new cops in a tough-on-crime bill, worked with the GOP to “end welfare as we know it,” deregulated Wall Street, and talked up school uniforms for kids in urban schools. Politically, it worked — Clinton was easily re-elected in 1996 and even after his impeachment left office with high approval — even if those policies arguably flopped over time.

Flash forward to 2022 and it’s increasingly looking like Biden — also low in the polls, also reeling from the seeming implosion of his ambitious, progressive Build Back Better agenda — is eyeballing the Clinton comeback model, and veering to the right. It does seek to foil the Republican analogy that Biden is instead another Jimmy Carter — doomed by inflation, high gas prices and chaos abroad to be a one-term president. Biden’s latest bird-flip to his erstwhile progressive allies — an “America First” seizure of half of Afghanistan’s U.S.-based assets, on behalf of 9/11 victim families, when the Central Asian nation is on the brink of famine — isn’t the president’s only pivot. Biden has backtracked on promises around immigration and canceling student-loan debt. And given his current jag, it will be shocking if he doesn’t pick the most conservative of the three Black women he’s weighing for the Supreme Court (federal judge J. Michelle Childs). But this isn’t 1994. The suburban electorate who bailed out Clinton is watching Fox News now, and Biden may pay a price for alienating voters who weren’t yet born 28 years ago. Stay tuned.