Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.
The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.
Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”
At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.
“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.
“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.
“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”
Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot dragging on Epstein could, possibly, be owing to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.
Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”
He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”
The post Oath Keepers Founder Pardoned by Trump Warns Him Over Epstein Files appeared first on New Republic.
