communications to coordinate actions leading up to january 6. and prosecutors say rhodes was planning for violence well beyond january 6. they say in the week after the attack, on the capitol, he spend more than $17,000 on weapons and equipment and ammunition and before inauguration day he tried to organize local militia to oppose by force the transfer of power. ed lavendera joins us from plano, texas, outside of the courthouse. what will we see. reporter: well stewart rhodes is scheduled to appear in the next hour. it is a brief hearing for his initial appearance. the day after stuart rhodes was arrested in a suburb of the dallas-fort worth area and according to the 48 page indictment he is facing five criminal charges including that most serious carnal of seditious
conspiracy and federal prosecutors are saying that rhodes and others spearheaded an attempt to oppose the peaceful transfer of presidential power and plotting to prevent this transfer of power using force. in that indictment they detailed some stunning and new allegations that we have heard. the most we ve heard in the last year. the federal prosecutors say they intercepted communications that were used through the encrypted app signal in those text messages that they got and captured, prosecutors say that stewart rhodes texted we ll have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. that is what is going to have to happen. we are not going through this without a civil war. prepare your bond, mind and spirit. and the indictment going on to outline as he drove from texas up to washington, d.c. prior to
still here working inside of the building. so that is one of the complications with simply that, you know, before doing something like that, the attorney general wants to make sure that all of the additional work was done and that is what i m told happened in the intervening seven or eight months that this investigation has continued. we have additional information that you see in some of those pages. including the fact that this went beyond just january 6. that this was a conspiracy according to prosecutors that began the day a couple of days right after the election and continued well beyond january 6 where stewart rhodes and some of his other oath keepers talked about a civil war 2.0. talked about constituting militias that would resist president biden after he took office. that is part of the conspiracy that is being charged here by federal prosecutors. look, i think it is going to be a very interesting case to see whether this stands up in court.
ronaldo, i want to play another portion from stewart rhodes s attorney and he was speaking to brianna on new day and speak to his logic on how he s going to defenda his clien. they do believe they have will have to respond to antifa or be called up by the president. but they left it in virginia. so if they were going to do any of those things, they would have brought weapons with them into the capitol and they didn t do that. okay, the sound bite that i was thinking of this is what they believed. they were acting on what they believed. is being gullible a good defense? well, what you have to work with, obviously if you have as a defense attorney and i do represent clients on the defense side, you have to work with the facts you have. i think what he s trying to
but the charges are a very serious hurdle for them to overcome. reporter: and if stewart rhodes is convicted of the five criminal charges for the seditious conspiracy charge he alone he faced up to 20 years in prison. thank you, ed. now we re getting new insight into the justice department process that led to these charges. merrick garland balked at bringing the conspiracy charge. evan perez is here. why didn t he want to charge sedition originally. i think one of the factors was this is a charge so rarely brought in by the federal prosecutors. i talked to one prosecutor who told me that they don t even know if they have anybody who has actually previously brought this kind of charge, who is