How Trump's flirtation with an anti-insurrection law inspired Jan. 6 insurrection
Source: Washington Post
How Trump’s flirtation with an anti-insurrection law inspired Jan. 6 insurrection
By Devlin Barrett and Spencer S. Hsu
Today at 1:07 p.m. EST
Within days of President Donald Trump’s election defeat, Stewart Rhodes began talking about the Insurrection Act as critical to the country’s future.
The bombastic founder of the extremist group Oath Keepers told followers that the obscure, rarely used law would allow Trump to declare a national emergency so dire that the military, militias or both would be called out to keep him in the White House.
Appearing Nov. 9, 2020, as a guest on the Infowars program of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Rhodes urged Trump to invoke the act “to suppress the deep state” and claimed Oath Keepers already had men “stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option.”
Invoking the Insurrection Act was an idea sparked in conservative circles that spring as a means of subduing social justice protests and related rioting, a goal that Trump seemed to embrace when he called for state leaders to “dominate” their streets. By the end of the year, it had become a rallying cry to cancel the results of a presidential election. Now, private and public discussions of the law stand as key evidence in the cases against the Oath Keepers.
Earlier this month, Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy, ...
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/stewart-rhodes-insurrection-act-trump/2022/01/23/fa009626-7c47-11ec-bf02-f9e24ccef149_story.html
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