Retired Navy intelligence officer Thomas Caldwell appeared to struggle with a problem all defendants have faced in court: trying to explain their references to violence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack as recorded on video and in text messages.
Don Siekerman, a 69-year-old retired police officer and former Army medic, said he was unaware of any plan to enter the Capitol or stop the election certification. If he had been the Oath Keepers ground commander in Washington as planned on Jan.
6, he said he would have “directed people away from the scene, not towards it”— but he got covid three days earlier. Despite his gentle demeanor and slow delivery on the stand — which he attributed to covid fog — his text messages were fiery. In a Nov. 6 Parler message, Siekerman called for “millions of American Patriots” with military training to be prepared for a looming “great confrontation,” writing, “There will be a cleansing of the freedom tree.”“Yes sir,” Siekerman replied.“Stewart Rhodes says we’re in for a bloody civil war, and your reaction is, ‘I’m in?’”The defense struggled at times to put on some evidence, after accusing prosecutors of muzzling its potential witnesses by criminally charging them. One Oath Keepers member described as Rhodes’s “battle buddy” on Jan. 6 invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in front of the jury. Another Oath Keepers board member and former vice president was outed as an FBI informant and did not appear, a leak that prosecutors wanted investigated. One key defense witness testified despite facing Jan. 6 charges. Michael Greene, described as Siekerman’s successor as the Oath Keeper’s operations coordinator for Jan. 6, told jurors there was no conspiracy or plan to breach the Capitol or to use force in any way.Rhodes’s discussion of civil war and call for Oath Keepers to be ready to lay down their lives to keep Trump in office was “nothing different than the old guy at the barbershop talking,” Greene said. The rioters, he said, were “a lot of old guys,” noting wryly, “I’m indicted with them.” Watkins unlike Caldwell or Rhodes entered the Capitol, for which she apologized to the jury, saying she would like more to apologize to the police against whom she yelled “Push!” with a mob trying to break through their lines to reach the Senate chamber. Watkins described herself as “gullible” and mad. She said she had been watching Alex Jones online Infowars show five hours a day after the 2020 election when she got “swept up” in the riot while still nursing injuries from a December accident in her basement while drinking. “I was in a lot of pain, pissed off that they stole the election, certified the election. And now I’m being crushed in a hallway, and they won’t even listen to me,” Watkins explained. “I reacted. It was stupid.”
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