by Charles Davis at Yahoo! News
- A leaked membership list suggests that Oath Keepers have infiltrated the Department of Homeland Security.
- More than 300 members of the paramilitary group describe themselves as current or former DHS employees.
- DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Just weeks after Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy for trying to violently overturn the 2020 election, a leak of the paramilitary group’s membership list has revealed that potentially hundreds of far-right extremists have infiltrated federal law enforcement, the Project on Government Oversight reported on Monday.
Launched in 2009, the Oath Keepers from the start tried to recruit from the military and law enforcement with an ostensible goal of upholding the US Constitution and having its members refuse unlawful orders, per the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels it an “extremist” group. In practice, that has meant, as on January 6, rejecting the rule of law — court orders and democratic processes that thwart far-right policy goals — in favor of conspiracy theories and armed resistance.
More than a decade of recruitment has led the group to collect at least 306 members who have described themselves as “current or former employees of the Department of Homeland Security,” according to POGO, which reviewed the leaked membership documents from the group in partnership with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
DHS agencies include US Customs and Immigration Services, the Transportation Security Administration, and the US Secret Service. Most of the self-described DHS employees asserted that they were retired, but at least one claimed to be an activity-duty Secret Service agent; another said they were a supervisor with Border Patrol, according to the documents reviewed by POGO.
The full membership list,…
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