Even before Joe Biden was declared the winner of the November 2020 election, the Oath Keepers planned some sort of violent act to try to prevent Donald Trump from leaving office in January 2021, and they took advantage of the January 6th protest to undertake their plan, the Associated Press reports in an in-depth report.
The Oath Keepers communications include text messages and social media posts through some applications that may have been encrypted, according to a review of documents by the Associated Press. These communications and other evidence is what prompted the Department of Justice to charge 11 members of the group, including its leader Stewart Rhodes, with seditious conspiracy.
Rhodes and the Oath Keepers planned their travel to Washington, DC, as well as the staging of weapons and “Quick Response Teams” in the Virginia suburbs to get guns and bodies into the Capitol quickly.
The existence of the prior communications and a plan for supplying the domestic terrorists attacking the Capitol undermine conservative claims that the insurrection was a peaceful protest that turned violent. The question that needs to be answered is what contact, if any, did the Oath Keepers have with the Trump camp? And did Roger Stone–for whom the Oath Keepers were acting as a personal security force on January 5th and 6th–act as a liaison between the two groups?