Cyclopian Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers anti-government nationalist movement, claimed that his group was in Washington, DC January 5-6, 2021 to provide security to some of the VIPs participating in the “Stop the Steal” rallies.  Another defendant, a trans woman, said she went along with the violence because she “wanted to fit in” the male-dominated clique.

But according to Reuters, prosecutors undermined those excuses in their opening, describing a plot that went as far back as election week 2020, with Rhodes messaging his followers, “We must prepare for civil war.”  “It will be torches and pitchforks time if they (Congress) don’t do the right thing,” he wrote in another.

Prosecutors illustrated a long-designed plot to attack Congress to prevent them from certifying the results of the 2020 election for Democrat Joe Biden, with Jessica Watkins leading a mob down a corridor to the Senate side of the Capitol, telling the insurrectionists, “They can’t hold us!”  Her lawyer,  Jonathan Crisp, said that as a transgender woman, Watkins “never felt like she fit in and a lot of things she did that day were to try to fit in, good and bad.”

Federal prosecutors told jurors the Oath Keepers started to plan their January 6th actions soon after Biden was declared the winner of the election, with some veterans practicing “stacks,” military formations used to breach buildings. Others planned for an armed Quick Response Teams, staged at a hotel in Virginia, to scurry to the Capitol to reinforce the invaders.  Video from the hotel shows several men carrying what appear to be rifles into their hotel rooms.