Oath Keeper Leaders Make Texas Town
Birthplace of Revolution that Feds Crush

Capitol Inside
January 17, 2022

The Hood County seat of Granbury - a city whose namesake is a Confederate general who misspelled his own name - has reinforced its status as the headquarters for a new American revolution with the ascension of local lawyer Kellye SoRelle to the helm of the militant group that's been accused of firing the first shot last year on January 6.

A former prosecutor who ran for the Texas House in 2020 before a stint on Donald Trump's legal team for the election challenge, SoRelle announced this past weekend that she would be running the Oath Keepers as its general counsel as long as its founder and fellow Granbury resident Stewart Rhodes is behind bars. Rhodes was charged last week with seditious conspiracy along with 10 other Oath Keepers in an 84-page indictment that essentially accuses him of plotting the attack at the U.S. Capitol last year.

“I am currently acting as President of Oath Keepers in lieu of Mr. Rhodes until he is released,” SoRelle told Rolling Stone in an email on Friday. “He is not guilty of any of the outlandish charges and the organization stands with Mr. Rhodes.”

The FBI seized SoRelle's IPhone in September while building the case against the Oath Keepers. Her move to the director's chair could be a sign that she doesn't perceive herself to be a suspect in the orchestration of the mob attack that Trump was impeached for inciting.

A city where 92 percent of more than 11,000 residents are white, Granbury emerged as an early battlefield inright-wing mecca in 2016 when Hood County Clerk Katie Lang chose to openly break the law by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Lang backed down eventually amid the threat of sanctions - agreeing to let an assistant in the county agency perform the task instead. She was re-elected in 2018 when she crushed a Democratic challenger with 79 percent of the vote after running unopposed in the primary. But Lang's shine lost some luster after husband Mike Lang gave up a Texas House seat at the last minute in favor of a race for county commissioner that he ended up losing in the GOP primary election in 2020. SoRelle had planned to challenge Lang in the House District 60 race that year before he vanished from her sights.

But Rhodes wasn't the typical rioter as a former congressional aide who graduated from the nation's number one ranked law school at Yale University in Connecticut. That is a sign of an extremely high IQ on paper. Rhodes as a result would have a hard time pleading ignorant like many of the other co-combantants have amid the assertion that they'd believed Trump's bogus claims about the 2020 election being stolen.

Rhodes entered a plea of not guilty late last week after his apprehension by the FBI in Denton County two days before. He and the other alleged co-conspirators face the possibily of prison sentences as long as 20 years or more if convicted of the charges - the most serious that the Department of Justice has made to date.

The DOJ painted a portait of delusional grandeur at an extraordinary level last week in an 84-page indictment that accuses Rhodes of hatching the plan for the attempted coup several days after Trump's ouster at the polls in an attempt to prevent the lawful transfer of power when Congress was ratifying the Electoral College results.

Rhodes - according to the indictment - promoted the assault on Congress with messages in confidential chat rooms and social media with visions "tens of thousands" of patriot Americans converging on the Capitol in a modern-day version of Lexington - the first engagement in the Revolutionary War. Rhodes refers to the founding fathers in messages in the weeks leading up to the attack and after the mob breached the Capitol on January 6.

"Hey, the founding generation stormed the governors mansion in MA and tarred and feathered his tax collectors," Rhodes is quoted by DOJ as saying during the melee in online communiques. " And they seized and dumped tea in water."

The indictment cites a Rhodes post on November 22, 2020 that promised carnage. “It will be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided."

SoRelle finished in a distant third with less than 7 percent of the GOP primary vote in 2020 in a field of four in an open race for the House District 60 seat that State Rep. Glenn Rogers of Graford won eventually. But SoRelle was a newcomer to the area - and she found it impossible to get any traction with Jon Francis having a monopoly on money and support on the far right as the son-in-law of GOP megadonor Farris Wilks.

Rogers, the old-guard business establishment candidate in the contest, trailed Francis by 2 points in the first vote before a win in overtime. Francis effectively torpedoed SoRelle's hopes when he entered the competition for a delay in the filing deadline due to then-incumbent Mike Lang's last-minute decision to end a re-election campaign to clear the path for the Wilks family member.