In the first days of the new year, according to prosecutors, Watkins was one of a number of Oath Keepers who coördinated the transport of weapons and ammunition to sites outside Washington, to be used by “quick reaction force” teams in support of a plot to block Biden from taking office. On January 6th, federal prosecutors say, Watkins and about a dozen others, all wearing camouflage and tactical gear, approached the Capitol on foot. “Y’all, we’re one block away from the Capitol now,” Watkins said, in a walkie-talkie-style conversation recorded that day. “I’m probably gonna go silent when I get there, because I’m gonna be a little busy.”
At 2:35 p.m., Watkins and others dressed in camouflage moved in a “stack” formation up the east steps of the Capitol, passing through the mob to enter the building. They roamed the halls for about an hour. At one point, Watkins urged a group of rioters to breach a line of police guarding the Senate chamber. “Push, push, push,” she said, according to an indictment. “They can’t hold us.” Others from Watkins’s stack peeled off to look for Nancy Pelosi. After leaving the building, Watkins returned to Ohio and boasted about her experience on Parler, a social-media app popular with conservatives. “So these were the fuckweed cops killing Patriots, and assaulting us when we WERE peaceful,” Watkins wrote. “Our election was stolen, an offense that cannot and should not go unchallenged. Extreme times call for extreme measures.” Eleven days later, her neighbors were awakened by flash-bang grenades. F.B.I. agents had come to arrest Watkins. She wasn’t home, but she turned herself in the following day.
Until Donald Trump announced his run for President, in 2015, Guy Reffitt showed little interest in politics. He devoured Trump’s books, including “The Art of the Deal,” according to his wife, Nicole. “Guy was head over, I mean, from the minute when Trump started talking,” she said, in an interview at a Mexican restaurant near their home in a suburb of Dallas. Reffitt’s work history in the oil industry followed an arc of success, followed by disappointment. He started out as a blue-collar roughneck, performing manual labor on rigs, and worked his way up to serving as a high-paid rig manager employed around the world. He proudly recalled working in Saudi Arabia, the U.K., the Netherlands, Thailand, China, and a half-dozen other nations. “I have always loved to see other places on this small planet. Everyone should be so adventurous,” he wrote in a message. “I have filled two complete Passports with Visa’s [sic] and stamps. I have been traveling since 2008.”
When Trump secured the Republican nomination, Nicole said, the family was living comfortably in Penang, Malaysia, on Reffitt’s annual income of more than two hundred thousand dollars. Their three children, two girls and a boy, attended private school. The Reffitts lived in a condominium with an ocean view, and travelled around Asia and Europe. Their prosperity ended after the price of oil collapsed, in 2016. Reffitt lost his job, and his family initially lived off savings. Soon, they returned to Texas broke. “We had no money, like, literally, and Guy didn’t let me know how bad that was,” Nicole said. Eventually, Reffitt found work installing sunrooms.
In the summer of 2020, as Trump vilified racial-justice protesters as “terrorists,” Reffitt began spending time with members of the Three Percenters, a militia group founded on the unproven claim that just three per cent of American colonists took up arms against the British. He began showing up at protests and acting as a self-appointed security guard, protecting private property. The Reffitts hosted a mixer for the local branch of the militia at their home, with brisket, potato salad, and beer. “Guy was excited,” Nicole recalled. “COVID really had people in a bad place, and that, I’m sure, goes across the board. And he needed an outlet, and he found it there.”
U.S. Homeland Security officials were concerned about this type of dynamic, according to Neumann, the former D.H.S. official in the Trump Administration. As the pandemic intensified, she warned that the loss of jobs and the social isolation that occurred during the pandemic could lead to radicalization. “When you take a stressor like this, and the entire nation of the United States experiences it, your pool just expanded massively, your denominator got huge,” Neumann said. She tried to get her superiors to address the issue, but her request went nowhere.
On January 6th, Reffitt arrived at the Capitol along with thousands of other Trump supporters. Dressed in a helmet and a tactical vest, he carried a .40-calibre Smith & Wesson pistol, zip ties, and a helmet-mounted video camera. At Trump’s Stop the Steal rally, the device recorded Reffitt boasting about wanting to assault members of Congress. “We’re all gonna drag them motherfuckers out kicking and screaming,” he said. “I don’t give a shit. I just want to see Pelosi’s head hit every fucking stair on the way out. Fuck yeah. And Mitch McConnell, too. Fuck ’em all.”
A snippet of police radio played at his trial captured one officer’s horror as she watched Reffitt advance ahead of other members of the crowd. “We have an individual breaching the west terrace up the stairs,” she shouted. “We need backup!” Two officers quickly arrived, and, after Reffitt refused to turn back, they fired impact projectiles, pepper balls, and finally pepper spray to stop him. As Reffitt washed out his eyes with bottled water, rioters streamed up the steps and into the Capitol. He chose not to enter the building, and left for Texas the following day.
While Reffitt was in Washington, his eighteen-year-old son, Jackson, had been trying to warn the F.B.I. about his father. Two weeks before the assault on the Capitol, Jackson sent an online tip to the Bureau that his father seemed to be planning “something big.” On the afternoon of January 6th, he got a call back from an F.B.I. agent. “Your timing is impeccable,” Jackson recalled telling the agent, who did not laugh.
After Reffitt returned to Texas, Jackson secretly recorded his father boasting of his exploits in Washington, and shared the recording with an agent. He also described a heated conversation in which Reffitt warned Jackson and his sixteen-year-old sister not to turn him over to law-enforcement officials. “Traitors get shot,” Reffitt told his children. A few days later, the F.B.I. arrested Reffitt in an early-morning raid. At Reffitt’s trial in March, Jackson testified against his father and helped prosecutors convict him of obstruction of justice. Nicole, though, was defiant after the verdict. She said that her husband had been victimized and urged other January 6th defendants to reject plea bargains. “They are making a point out of Guy. And that is to intimidate the other members of the ‘one-sixers.’ And we will all fight together.”
Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen. At a rally in Texas in January, he declared the prosecutions of the January 6th rioters “a disgrace.” He said, “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6th fairly. We will treat them fairly. And, if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” Last month, in Wyoming, Trump called the detainees “political prisoners.” Polls show that the proportion of Americans who believe that violent attacks against the government can be justified is rising. A January Washington Post survey found that one in three respondents supported such acts, twice the level in 2010. The D.H.S.’s National Terrorism Advisory System is now issuing warnings at the fastest rate since it was created, in 2011. In February, D.H.S. issued its sixth warning in a little more than a year to local law-enforcement officials: “Mass casualty attacks and other acts of targeted violence conducted by lone offenders and small groups acting in furtherance of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances pose an ongoing threat to the nation.”
Law-enforcement officials say that they have learned from the January 6th riot and become more adept at responding to potential threats. They point to a rally last September, outside the Capitol, that was organized by supporters of the January 6th defendants. Law-enforcement officials were alarmed when they spotted calls online for protesters to storm the building once again, kidnap members of Congress, and put them on trial. The agency expanded its intelligence gathering and worked closely with the F.B.I. and local law-enforcement agencies to make plans to contain protesters if extreme rhetoric sparked violence. Most important, they publicly announced their extensive preparations. Extremists took note, messaging one another not to go to Washington, and dismissed the protest as a “trap by the Feds.” The rally fizzled. The actions that D.H.S. took read like a checklist of the steps that the agency had failed to perform prior to January 6th.
But Cohen, the former acting head of intelligence at D.H.S., is in no way reassured. A white supremacist’s mass shooting in a Buffalo grocery store in May, which claimed the lives of ten Black people, demonstrated law enforcement’s inability to contain the threat. “In my thirty-eight-plus years of law enforcement, this is the most complex threat environment I’ve ever seen,” Cohen said. “We have unacceptable levels of violence by people who are influenced and inspired by content they see online.” Cohen, who is now the executive director of the Program for Countering Hybrid Threats at the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit, added, “I am really fucking concerned about where we are.”
Neumann, the former D.H.S. Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, has an additional fear: a second Trump Administration. The former President’s return to the Oval Office would signal to white supremacists and other right-wing groups that they have “an ally in government,” Neumann said. “I think you would see mass resignations, not just at D.H.S. but across the government.” Neumann and other former Trump Administration officials said that Trump and his allies were initially slowed by their lack of experience in running large government agencies. “But toward the end they were figuring it out,” Neumann said. “And it concerns me that the damage they could do would far exceed what they did in their four years in power. Exponentially worse—because he has no constraints at that point.”
In spring, Watkins and Reffitt played their last game of Magic together. Watkins was moved from the patriot wing to a women’s unit in the District of Columbia jail at her own request. She and other trans women in the jail had supported a class-action lawsuit, filed by the local A.C.L.U. chapter and public defenders, demanding that trans people be housed according to their gender identity. District officials eventually settled the suit, but Watkins’s cause drew little attention or backing among January 6th defendants and their supporters. A fund-raising page set up by Watkins’s fiancé attracted fewer donations than the pages of other Capitol attack defendants.
Reffitt’s wife, Nicole, believes that Watkins is being discriminated against by both the right and the left. “Because of her situation, people feel like she doesn’t deserve the same support,” Nicole said. “I feel like there is some hypocrisy, though, to it, because I feel like if she was more left she would have more attention, and because she’s conservative there she sits.” As Watkins was escorted out of the patriot wing, the other inmates sang “an honorary ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” Guy Reffitt wrote, “I’m happy for her to be free of the male dialogue.”
Reffitt, who is scheduled to be sentenced later this month, is unrepentant. He remains convinced that law-enforcement officials staged the riot and entrapped him and other protesters. Shortly after he was convicted, Reffitt wrote that the riot was caused not by Trump supporters but by “a very concerted operation of out [of] control police officers.” He said he has requested their body-cam video and is planning an appeal.
In Watkins’s framing, what happened on January 6th was the fault of an election system that she feels can no longer be trusted. “I believe every election should be automatically contested and audited by both political parties independent of each other,” she wrote. “Then the results brought before the American people in an open forum and open source for review by anyone.” What Watkins is proposing would remove a cornerstone of American democracy—both sides, win or lose, agreeing to accept the results provided by state and local election officials, and peacefully transferring power.
For Cohen, the former D.H.S. intelligence official, the deliberate spread of false election-fraud claims is a recipe for continued polarization and violence. “I’ve seen intelligence calling on people to go self-deploy as poll watchers, to take actions to determine whether people should be legitimately voting,” he said. “We can anticipate as we get closer to the midterms that polarization will increase.” He added, “The more that’s out there, the higher the likelihood that someone will consume that disinformation and act in response to it.”
Alice Wilder contributed reporting.