The September release of hacked Oath Keepers data has turned out to be a treasure trove of revelations about the far-right patriot organization’s penetration into the ranks of established authorities, particularly law enforcement. The data not only showed a significant number of serving police officers in agencies around the country, but also that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection in which key members played leading roles actually sparked an increase in new enrollments.
A new analysis of the data by BuzzFeed News demonstrates how far the Oath Keepers’ reach has spread among elected officials: It identified some 28 members of the group who hold office in some elected capacity in locales around the country. When contacted, many of them demurred, saying they had let their memberships lapse, while others defiantly embraced the group’s extremism — while adamantly denying the group had any responsibility for the Jan. 6 violence.
The hacked data was released in late September by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a journalist collective. Among the data in the hack was the Oath Keepers’ Rocket.Chat server — a social-gathering forum built on an open-source communication platform — with messages from June 2020 and others sent between March and mid-September 2021. The data also included more than 10,000 emails from the inboxes of key Oath Keepers leaders and a membership list for the organization containing more than 38,000 email addresses.
BuzzFeed’s analysis identified 28 elected officials in the data “by cross-referencing the leaked data with information about thousands of state and local officials, comparing names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and other information.” After identifying them, it then set about contacting them to see if they could obtain comments or explanations.
The list includes officials ranging from state lawmakers to sheriffs to city council members and road superintendents. Their memberships ranged from yearlong to lifetime, while some said they only donated but did not join the Oath Keepers. Some claimed they had walked away because of the leadership’s frequently violent rhetoric.
A number, however, were unrepentant. These included:
• Chad Christensen, a Republican member of the Idaho House and the owner of a private detective agency. “People ask me if I’ll renounce my membership,” he told BuzzFeed. “I tell them there’s no way.”
• David Eastman, a Republican member of the Alaska House and an Army veteran. He told BuzzFeed that he “will always consider it a privilege to stand with those in the military and first responders who strive to keep their oaths to the Constitution.” Eastman has a long history of extremist rhetoric, including a 2017 remark suggesting that “poor women in rural Alaskan villages” became intentionally pregnant, and more recently for comparing President Biden to Adolf Hitler and the COVID-19 vaccine to Nazi experimentation on Holocaust victims.
• Mark Finchem, a Republican member of the Arizona House. Finchem was present at the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, photographed on the eastern staircase. He has been active in Oath Keepers since at least 2014, has organized events for the group in Arizona; on Twitter, he urged people to “Protect State Sovereignty, Join Oath Keepers!” Finchem hired lawyers in may to compose a letter defending the Oath Keepers, claiming that it is a “non-partisan association” and “can by no stretch of one’s imagination be considered ‘anti-government.’”
As Tim Steller noted earlier this year, Finchem initially attempted to claim that the Jan. 6 violence had actually been perpetrated by Antifa. He also complained about his subsequent loss of Twitter followers, saying, “Welcome to Soviet America” and wondering, “Where is the gulag in America?”
A number of other elected officials on the list told BuzzFeed they had left the Oath Keepers, many of them before the insurrection, but nonetheless supported the group’s ideas. Many made excuses for the group’s involvement in the Jan. 6 violence.
Brad Rogers, an Indiana sheriff who had traveled to Nevada in April 2014 to participate in the Bundy ranch standoff, speaking to the crowd about the “constitutional” role of sheriffs (“Sometimes we protect you from the criminals, but sometimes we have to step in and protect you from government,” he said), told BuzzFeed that he still believes “the federal government is out of control,” but that he had quit the Oath Keepers years before. He said he still agrees “with the tenets of the organization,” but felt it was “going down a path talking about violence and things of that nature that I won’t tolerate.”
The Oath Keepers’ “confrontational aspects” disenchanted South Dakota state Sen. Jim Stalzer with the organization, so that he has “totally broken” with the organization. But Stalzer—an acolyte of Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which promotes the nonsensical claim that sheriffs are the supreme law of the land—also expressed doubt about the Oath Keepers’ culpability for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“I’m sure there’s some rogue people who might have broken a window in Washington, but I very much believe it’s a good organization,” he said.
One of the ways the Oath Keepers, like all would-be vigilantes, have always avoided accountability — as they have from their origins, when a prominent Oath Keepers speaker was arrested for sexually abusing his young daughter — is to claim that anyone causing trouble or breaking the law wasn’t really a member of the organization. This lets them fob off the violent, black helicopter paranoia and outright incompetence that swirls around their activities (including the moment, at the 2014 Bundy Ranch standoff, that Oath Keepers and militiamen were drawing down on each other) as the mere side effect of the occasional irresponsible nonmember using their name.
Even though some 18 Oath Keepers have been charged with conspiracy to obstruct Congress based on their actions that day, and prosecutors are circling around founder/president Stewart Rhodes for his role in the conspiracy, Rhodes has himself been defending the people arrested so far, calling it a “political prosecution,” while blaming them at the same time for having gone “off mission.”
All of which demonstrates, once again, that patriot-movement vigilantes love to wrap themselves in the Constitution, but have zero accountability to anyone for their actions. For elected officials to condone such vigilantism should be a disqualification
Someone being voted into a local body, such as city council, “might not seem like a big deal,” Richard Carpiano, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, told BuzzzFeed. But it “raises a concern about to what degree this fringe ideology is invading our democratic institutions” as well as “their underlying worldview for the important decisions they have to make in their position—decisions that affect all their constituents.”
David Neiwert is a writer for Daily Kos, where this appeared.
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2021
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us