Oath Keepers members paid dues to the rightwing militia’s then vice-president for up to almost a year after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and months after the organization and its founder, Stewart Rhodes, were named in court filings as participants in the assault, according to publicly accessible transaction records on the payment platform Venmo.
Those who made payments to an Oath Keepers leader on Venmo include an engineer whose employer provides satellite technology to US government agencies including the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security, a former Department of Homeland Security employee whose tenure at the agency overlapped with his membership in the group, and a 2022 candidate for the Wyoming state senate.
Others connected on Venmo to Rhodes or other organizational leaders include a US navy recruiting officer.
The Guardian corroborated the identity of some of the individuals making payments using earlier hacks and leaks of Oath Keepers membership rolls, payment records and internal communications.
Venmo transactions were public by default throughout most of the service’s history. Megan Squire is deputy director for Data Analytics and OSINT at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and from 2017 she was one of the first to use Venmo transactions to understand the internal structure of groups like the Proud Boys.
Squire said: “Venmo has had security issues since its inception. They have tried to fix them but only after high-profile privacy breaches involving people like Joe Biden.”
The Oath Keepers transactions were recorded on the profile of Jason Ottersberg, a Cheyenne, Wyoming, man who has been publicly identified as a senior leader in the Oath Keepers.
Ottersberg’s name, email address and a username – “seebeewyo” – were all revealed in a leak of information from the Oath Keepers website in 2021. Ottersberg is also named as the recipient on an Oath Keepers fundraising page on the extremist-friendly fundraising site Givesendgo.
Ottersberg’s current username on Venmo is based on his name, but a scrape of his account with the open-source intelligence tool Venemy shows that his original user name was nationalokvp, indicating that he was presenting himself as the Oath Keepers national vice-president.
The account’s transaction history shows payments to and from Ottersberg along with explanations of the payments.
On 1 September 2021, an account carrying the name Michael Ray Williams made a payment to Jason Ottersberg on Venmo with the message “OK dues”. The account’s avatar is a promotional image for Williams’s political campaign bearing the slogans “Michael Ray Williams Wyoming Senate District 11” and “Giving the power back to the people”.
In 2022, Michael Ray Williams ran for the Constitution party for the Wyoming state senate, but lost handily to the Republican Larry S Hicks. On the Constitution party’s website and Ballotpedia’s candidate survey he expressed anti-abortion, pro-gun and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.
Williams told Buzzfeed News in October 2021 that he was an Oath Keeper, but his payment of dues the month before confirms his ongoing links to the group at the time of his election campaign.
The Guardian contacted Williams for comment via email.
Others identified by the Guardian hold sensitive positions in business, the military and government. One of those identified is a senior figure at Space Systems Engineering at Echostar Corporation, headquartered in Englewood, Colorado.
Echostar is also a major government contractor in potentially sensitive areas. Last year, the company announced that its subsidiary Hughes won a contract to create a private 5G network at a US navy base on Whidbey Island in Washington state, and the previous year trumpeted its success in bidding for satellite services to the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Advanced Battle Management System project.
Historically, the DoD has been Hughes’s biggest client, according to US government spending records. Current Hughes contracts include supplying satellite services to the Department of Homeland Security. The person identified by the Guardian was involved in developing satellite-related technologies, including a project to gain limited access to Nasa satellites.
Another separate payment on 4 October 2021 came from an account of someone who was a DHS employee until June 2021, according to their LinkedIn profile. They had also recently applied for a job in a state department of corrections. A third person connected to Stewart Rhodes on Venmo and identified by the Guardian works in US navy recruitment in Texas.
Venmo records show that other accounts are connected to Stewart Rhodes and Ottersberg. A Venmo “friend” connection does not necessarily indicate that the parties have exchanged money, but it does indicate that the parties have recorded one another as telephone contacts.
Throughout 2021, at least nine people paid Ottersberg or were charged by him on Venmo with comments indicating that the payment was for dues, membership or a new membership.
In turn, Ottersberg appeared to funnel money onwards to Rhodes. On 24, 25 and 26 October, payments from him all mention “Stewart”, including one to an account in the name of Chad Rogers.
In January 2022, Rhodes was arrested in Plano, Texas, at the home of Chad Rogers, a licensed security officer. Later, during Rhodes’s trial, prosecutors detailed a 10 January 2021 meeting between Rhodes and Jason Alpers, a man who Rhodes believed could pass on his plea to Trump to retain the presidency by force if necessary. Alpers testified that Rogers was present at the meeting.
Squire, the SPLC deputy director, said of the new Oath Keepers revelations that “it’s amazing to me that they’re still using open, non-privacy focused payment solutions”.
She added: “They don’t seem to have institutional knowledge about previous things that have happened to other groups, so they repeat their mistakes.”
Despite Ottersberg’s apparently senior role in the Oath Keepers, and his access to key players including Rhodes, he has faced no known legal consequences for his membership in the group. The last publicly visible payment from his Venmo account, however, is to his wife, and is simply captioned “Lawyer”.
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