An unverified database released in September 2021 shows that at least 470 people in Maryland have signed up for membership with a far-right paramilitary group called the Oath Keepers between the years 2009 and 2016. At least 20 of those members were confirmed by the Anti-Defamation League to be law enforcement and military officers and first responders.
The whistleblower site Distributed Denial of Secrets last year obtained and released the database of emails and a membership list of the Oath Keepers, which recently rose to prominence for its participation in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
No media organization, including Capital News Service, has independently verified the authenticity of the entirety of the data. In September, the Anti-Defamation League, a civil rights organization, used the data to independently confirm the membership of 81 elected officials nationwide.
In Maryland, the Anti-Defamation League confirmed previous or current Oath Keepers membership of 21 law enforcement officers, military members and first responders.
The Anti-Defamation League was not able to confirm that any elected officials were or are members of the Oath Keepers.
Capital News Service found approximately 474 Oath Keepers members in Maryland in the leaked database, about as many as Montana – the state with the most members per capita.
Most Oath Keepers found in the data are in Anne Arundel County, with about 60 sign-ups, but St. Mary’s County has the highest ratio of sign-ups for its population, with approximately 27 sign-ups per 100,000 people.
Oath Keepers was founded in 2009, just weeks after the inauguration of former President Barack Obama. Members take an “oath” to refuse to enforce unconstitutional orders from their leaders, with what’s deemed unconstitutional left up to individual interpretation.
Two-thirds of Oath Keepers, however, are estimated to be former members of military or law enforcement, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers’ leader and founder, has suggested that there are law enforcement members who are unofficially Oath Keepers members, according to Alex Friedfeld, investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. The organization has structured itself as a paramilitary organization.
The United States provided evidence to a jury on this month that Rhodes, who is on trial for seditious conspiracy charges arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, along with four others, had tried to send a message to former President Donald Trump, which would have asked him to mobilize their members in a last-ditch effort to stop the inauguration of then president-elect Joe Biden.
While the Anti-Defamation League has previously estimated that there are between 1,000 and 3,000 active members of the Oath Keepers, the militia group itself has declared as many as 38,000 members in its ranks. The data leak shows 36,188 people registered, though these records are retained even if someone ends their membership, and they do not include people considered unofficial members of the Oath Keepers. It’s not clear from the leak how many people are still active members.
Sign-ups spiked—both in Maryland and the United States broadly—in 2014, after the Oath Keepers gained national attention for their involvement in the May 2014 standoff between law enforcement and a Nevada cattle rancher. The standoff occurred just months before the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off civic unrest, where a St. Louis Oath Keepers chapter also made headlines posting themselves up on rooftops and monitoring protests, despite police instructions to stop.
After Trump was elected in 2016, Friedfeld said, the Oath Keepers’ anti-government message had to be downplayed, turning their fight away from the federal government and toward Democrats and the left. To them, “tyranny is always around the corner,” Friedfeld said.
“They talk in these absolutes,” he said. “And when you deal with absolutes, right, all of a sudden, the idea of working through the ballot box, of working through community organizing, goes out the window.”
He added, “The idea of using violence to achieve a political objective becomes a lot more plausible.”