How Trump's flirtation with an anti-insurrection law inspired Jan. 6 insurrection
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Citizens for Ethics
@CREWcrew
Anyone who helped set the stage for January 6th, participated in the attack on the Capitol, or attempted to skirt responsibility for the insurrection needs to be held accountable.
washingtonpost.com
How Trumps flirtation with an anti-insurrection law inspired Jan. 6 insurrection
Oath Keepers and QAnon followers hoped the president would use the law to keep power after his election defeat.
5:00 PM · Jan 24, 2022
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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https://archive.fo/HUXGH
Within days of President Donald Trumps election defeat, Stewart Rhodes began talking about the Insurrection Act as critical to the countrys 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 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.
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