Trump Commutes Sentence of Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers Founder

When Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers militia, appeared in court in 2023 to be sentenced on sedition charges stemming from the storming of the Capitol, he angrily declared himself a “political prisoner,” echoing language that President Trump has also used to describe those involved with the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

And on Monday, when Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Rhodes’ 18-year prison term to time served, he effectively validated the far-right leader’s belief that his criminal prosecution was a kind of political persecution, as he had defiantly claimed.

Mr. Rhodes, who spent more than a decade running the Oath Keepers before his arrest in 2022, was in the Federal Correctional Institute in Cumberland, Md., when his grant of clemency was handed down. It remained unclear when he might be freed.

While Mr. Rhodes never entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, prosecutors said he oversaw a large contingent of Oath Keepers as they concocted “a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy” — the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Prosecutors also said he was on the Capitol grounds as military-style “stacks” of his militia’s members made their way into the building and other armed members stood ready as a “quick reaction force” at a hotel in Virginia in case things went wrong.

Even after the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes kept trying to keep Mr. Trump in office. Testimony at his trial showed that he sought to persuade a soldier turned I.T. expert who had ties to Mr. Trump to get the president a message, begging him to maintain his grip on power and offering to mobilize members of the Oath Keepers to keep him in the White House.

More than most Jan. 6 defendants, Mr. Rhodes left a voluminous paper trail of his increasingly violent thoughts after Mr. Trump lost the election and Joseph R. Biden Jr. was set to enter the White House. In private text messages and public open letters on the Oath Keepers’ website, he said his organization might have to engage in civil war to defeat his perceived enemies: a supposed coalition of the Democrats, leftist protesters and the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, at the height of the right-wing Tea Party movement, specifically recruiting former and current law enforcement officers and military veterans who swore an oath not to follow any orders from a government they believed to be unconstitutional.

Throughout President Barack Obama’s time in office, the group inserted itself into prominent conflicts with federal officials. They turned up, for instance, in 2014 at a cattle ranch in Nevada after its owner, Cliven Bundy, and others engaged in an armed standoff with federal land management officials.

But after Mr. Trump was elected the first time, Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers pivoted away from their anti-government views and seemed to embrace many of Mr. Trump’s own enemies and fixations — among them the so-called deep state and leftist movements like Black Lives Matter.

When he is released from prison, Mr. Rhodes will return to an organization in shambles. Prosecutors tried more than 20 members of the group in connection with Jan. 6. Their trials, which ended overwhelmingly in convictions, revealed, among other things, that Mr. Rhodes’s own vice president was an F.B.I. informant.