Florida’s militia movement grew for years before emerging at heart of Jan. 6 probe
WASHINGTON
Two Christmases ago, Kelly Meggs became
“state lead” of the Florida Oath Keepers.
He didn’t waste any time making a splash.
Just 12 days later, on
Jan. 6, 2021, the grandfather known as “Gator One,” accompanied by his wife, Connie, joined a violent mob photographed breaching the U.S. Capitol, part of a throng loyal to defeated President Donald Trump and bent on overturning the 2020 presidential election.
Their “stack” — a military-style line of mostly men in tactical gear marching through the mob — snaked through the crowd, each with a hand on the shoulder of the other, and into the building in one of the many shocking images from the assault, captured on video.
The arrest of the Floridian, who told a TV station he “can’t wait for our day in court,” and 10 other individuals on charges of conspiracy to commit sedition has cast a spotlight on the state’s outsized role in providing recruits for far-right and militia-type groups. The groups run the gamut, from the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to the Three Percenters, to name just three. On the most extreme end of the scale are neo-Nazis who demonstrated in Orlando recently while waving swastika flags.
Of the 10 men and one woman charged in a Jan 8, 2022, indictment with seditious conspiracy, the most serious counts yet lodged in the wake of the Capitol assault, four are Floridians, either Oath Keepers or affiliates. They are Kelly Meggs, 52, of Dunnellon; Kenneth Harrelson, 41, of Titusville; Joseph Hackett, 51, of Sarasota, and David Moerschel, 44, of Punta Gorda.
Another Floridian arrested earlier, 54-year-old Graydon Young, is believed to be among the first Oath Keepers to plead guilty and flip on his comrades, making him persona non grata with the national leader and founder, E. Stewart Rhodes, 56, of North Granbury, Texas.
Still another Florida Oath Keeper, retired Green Beret and two-time Bronze Star awardee Jeremy Michael Brown of Tampa, was arrested in October in connection with the breach. He was a 2020 congressional candidate before dropping out of the race. Brown, 47, offered fellow protesters a ride to Washington, proclaiming on the encrypted chat app Signal that he had
Several associates of Florida leader Kelly Meggs said the move on the Capitol was spontaneous. Some evidence suggests otherwise.
“plenty of Gun Ports left to fill,” according to charging documents.
More than 700 individuals have been arrested in connection with the Capitol riot. But the latest charges brought on Jan. 8 were the first time Justice Department lawyers invoked sedition, which applies to those who “conspire to overthrow, or put down, or destroy by force the Government of the United States.” It dramatically raised the stakes in the sprawling insurrection probe.
Although Floridians’ fingerprints appear to be all over the Capitol attack, many state residents with alleged Oath Keeper ties were far from Washington on Jan. 6. Some appear to limit their involvement to taking part in online group chats, where the subjects range from humdrum matters to gripes about Black Lives Matter to the inevitability of a civil war.
The names of purported members, past and present, were included in a leak of emails and other documents, obtained by a self-styled hacker group called Distributed Denial of Secrets. The group posted some of the cache online and shared additional data with journalists late last year, including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. OCCRP provided Florida-related documents to the Miami Herald for a joint investigation.
The Oath Keepers recruit at Florida gun shows, the Herald was told. The group has held training sessions at gun ranges, according to charging documents, including one session that was filmed and found its way onto YouTube.
The emails and other leaked records offer a window into the world as seen by Oath Keepers.
The Herald sought to contact those in the Florida leak.
Ken Letson, a retiree fixing up a house with his fiancée in Clearwater, first reached out to the group in 2016. He says he refrained from joining until five years later, less than a week after the Capitol riot. “I have had it and am more than ready to join,” he wrote the Florida chapter in an email on Jan. 12.
Since joining, Letson has participated in the group’s monthly Go-To Meetings, a virtual gathering he likens to a roundtable discussion.
“I don’t spend 24/7 with Oath Keepers every week,” he said in an interview. “I was just getting tired of the media beating down on Trump all the time. I didn’t know what I could do, or could’ve done.”
From what he can tell, the majority of members live in the west-central part of the state, and only those “that have been with the group for a while” get together on a regular basis at what he referred to as a “predetermined location.”
“They’re a laid-back group,” he added. “I think they’re patriots. I think their hearts are certainly in the right corner, if you will.”
A questionnaire for would-be members of the Florida chapter asks applicants to acknowledge that Oath Keepers is “not an anti-government or a hate group of any kind.” And yet calls to violence and revolution — before and after Jan. 6, 2021 — have been common. They have muddled the group’s message and divided its network.
Rhodes, one of the 11 charged in the sedition indictment, is a former Army paratrooper and firearms instructor who wears a patch over his left eye, the result of accidentally dropping a loaded gun while working as a firearms instructor. After the accident, he pursued a higher education, eventually becoming a graduate of Yale Law School, according to a profile in the Atlantic.
At a time when he was practicing law and authoring a libertarian blog, he founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, registering it as a nonprofit and serving as its chief spokesman in addition to his leadership role. Like him, many members were former military or past or present law enforcement. Membership fees were set at $50 a year.
During the summer of unrest after the death of George Floyd, Rhodes called on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. In the wake of those comments and the organization’s Jan. 6 involvement, several statewide chapters distanced themselves from the national organization, including those in Virginia, North Carolina and Arizona.
The Florida chapter — with a purported 2,700 members — did not.
“The militia movement, by and large, does always have this kind of antigovernment bent to it. But a lot of people join for different reasons,” said Alex Friedfeld, investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “They want to protect their communities, things of that nature. But
Rhodes’ more overt, aggressive rhetoric, explicity calling for revolution, made people uncomfortable, and so people have been peeling away.”
“It’s telling that the Florida chapter remained with the Oath Keepers,” Friedfeld added. “It gives kind of an insight into their state of mind.”
Although some of his members took part in entering the Capitol, Rhodes did not. As a result he remained free until the recent indictment, drawing fire from some relatives of Oath Keepers
‘‘ I was just getting tired of the media beating down on Trump all the time. I didn’t know what I could do, or could’ve done.
Oath Keeper Ken Letson
languishing in the Washington, D.C., jail, some of whom questioned where his loyalties lay.
Just days after his arrest, Rhodes sought release on bail while awaiting trial. His bid for freedom was not helped when his estranged wife described on Twitter how Rhodes had dug a network of escape tunnels at their house and kept unregistered vehicles in a nearby wooded area, presumably to facilitate a getaway. She tweeted a photo of him peering out of a hole in the ground.
Pretrial release was denied.
A FLORIDA NETWORK
The Florida chapter maintains a standard for new members, and its vetting process was spelled out in the records leak. The screening process includes a questionnaire that subjects applicants to a background check — optional for those with concealed weapons permits, since those permits require much of the same information.
Chapter applicants are asked if they support “Constitutional law and order,” and if they agree that the group is not antigovernment or a hate group, which supporters say is evidence of their good intentions but critics say is a fig leaf to cover illegality. They are required to acknowledge that Oath Keepers do not “discriminate on the basis of race, creed, gender or religion.”
The leak of communications, though, is rife with incendiary talk about race war, the supposed threat of Islam and the need to put the nation’s politicians in internment camps.
“I want to see them rounded up and put in leg irons,” a man using the handle Molon Labe Rebel Patriot wrote in a Jan. 20, 2021, email. “I would love to see [Chief] Justice [John] Roberts Speaker of the House [Nancy Pelosi] [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell [former Vice President Mike] Pence minority leader of the House [Kevin McCarthy] Directors of the FBI CIA NSA for a start all in leg irons.”
Molon Labe is an ancient Greek phrase of defiance, and the pseudonym was used by one of the men indicted along with Rhodes — Guyton, Georgia, resident Brian Ulrich. However, the man in the documents was looking to join an Oath Keepers group in Pennsylvania, suggesting it was someone other than the 44-year-old Ulrich.
On June 16, 2021, Molon Labe was back at it.
“I pray every day that there will be Martial Law and the Military will put Trump in charge. Those who took part in the Cupe (sic) and rigged the election against President Trump all need incarceration in FEMA camps for domestic political insurgents,” he said.
Miamian Eli Peraza emailed the Florida chapter — as well as the farright Proud Boys — several years ago, expressing interest.
Born in Cuba, Peraza said he admired the Oath Keepers’ strong stand on the Second Amendment. “These are patriots and heroes of this nation,” he said. “Police officers, military. They’re not terrorists.”
He never heard back. After the 2020 election, Peraza said he made a pledge to his family to stop following politics.
“I pretty much let go,” he said in an interview. “It takes from you, man. There’s conflict with people. They look at you odd. I don’t want to be part of that.”
One Floridian who was accepted into the Oath Keepers is William Beaver, a Wilton Manors landscaper who sports a droopy, white, Hulk Hogan-style mustache and joined more than 10 years ago.
Beaver, who ultimately became leader of the Southeast Florida chapter, said the group was dedicated to a simple mission: “To be ready against tyranny.”
That meant shooting targets at gun ranges and members’ properties and “prepping” for what he described as an inevitable conflict with the government. The Oath Keepers recruited many of their new members at the monthly West Palm Beach Gun & Knife Show, he said.
It wasn’t all militancy. They also got together to help clean up after hurricanes around the state, went hunting for deer and feral hogs and took fishing trips, he said.
Beaver said the group eventually became more radicalized, with several members traveling to take part in standoffs with the federal government at ranches in Nevada and Oregon — activities he described as “borderline legal.” He said he left the group around 2018.
His views remain the same. He believes, contrary to all credible evidence and dozens of court rulings, that the 2020 election was stolen and that violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was caused primarily by Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
He said he warned Oath Keepers he still kept in touch with not to go to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.
“It’s a set-up,” he said he told them.
After leaving the Oath Keepers, Beaver joined a similar organization.
“But I’m not going to name them.”
CLUES IN DISCOVERY
Search warrants, the indictment and other paperwork describe Meggs and other Floridians using an encrypted chat group labeled “OK FL DC OP
Jan 6” to organize ahead of the riot.
Several defendants associated with Meggs said the move on the Capitol was spontaneous. But some evidence suggests otherwise.
Communications obtained by prosecutors show Meggs participating in encrypted discussions with Oath Keepers leadership to plan the Jan. 6 assault over the course of two months, leading Florida chapter training sessions, coordinating travel and mapping out the deployment of weapons caches and “quick reaction forces,” or QRF in military parlance, in and around Washington.
Jeremy Michael Brown, the Tampa resident and former Green Beret arrested in October, took part in the discussions, records show. But what earned him special attention was putting his house on the market. The listing on the Zillow website included a photo of his home office, featuring a white board that seemed to sketch out ingredients for an assault, including a list of guns and explosive devices.
The sedition indictment identifies two post-election efforts to train Florida Oath Keepers for the Jan. 6 “operation.” On Nov.
22, the chapter held a training on “unconventional warfare.” An additional session on “ultimate training munitions” was planned on the day after Christmas, the charging document says.
Training may have started before the election, Rhodes’ attorney, Jon Moseley, said in an interview with McClatchy and the Miami Herald, at least based on information he recently obtained from “terabytes” of files shared with him by federal prosecutors.
A spokesman for the scene of one of those training sessions, the Ares Training Facility in Leesburg, said the range learned of the Oath Keepers connection when it received a subpoena from the Justice Department and began going through its files for waiver forms matching their names.
“We were given subpoenas for six people, and those six people from our understanding from the Department of Justice are in the Oath Keepers,” said Colin Johnson, an owner of Ares. “All we know is that they’re looking to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, which we are 100% in support of.”
Moseley noted that paramilitary training is illegal, a violation of the “Antiparamilitary Training Act” — a third-degree felony.
“They claim that they don’t do paramilitary training, or anything like that,” Moseley said. “All they do is straight ordinary gun training.”
Private militias are illegal in Florida and all 49 other states, according to the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Supreme
Court has upheld this, ruling that the Second Amendment protects “well-regulated” militias organized by the state, not private citizens.
Moseley, the attorney for Rhodes, said he is eager to speak with Meggs to gain an understanding — for the benefit of his own client — of what exactly happened leading up to Jan. 6.
But Moseley acknowledged that “it’s not that easy to talk to Kelly Meggs in jail,” adding, “It’s something I’m going to be asking about as soon as I get a chance.”
Moseley does not deny that Rhodes was in direct contact with the Florida contingent, participating in an encrypted chat group that discussed the plan as detailed in the indictment.
According to the Justice Department, Rhodes urged the Floridians to “refuse to accept” the election results, to “march en masse on the nation’s Capitol,” and evoked the example of Serbia in
2000, when a general strike and popular uprising forced dictator Slobodan Milosevic to accept defeat amid a disputed election.
“The quotes look bad,” Moseley said. “What can I say?”
Miami Herald staff writer Sarah Blaskey and researcher Monika Leal contributed to this report.
Kevin G. Hall, formerly an investigative reporter with the McClatchy Washington Bureau, now is North America editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
‘‘ It’s telling that the Florida chapter remained with the Oath Keepers. It gives kind of an insight into their state of mind.
Alex Friedfeld, investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism