Stewart Rhodes’ wife says he planned for Trump to install Oath Keepers as his ‘brownshirts’

The estranged wife of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes says he planned for the militia group to be installed as former president Donald Trump's "brownshirts" — a reference to the paramilitary wing of Germany's Nazi Party.

Tasha Adams appeared on MSBNC on Wednesday night, shortly after Rhodes testified remotely from jail before the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol insurrection.

Rhodes reportedly testified for six hours, but Adams indicated that based on news reports, she doesn't believe he gave the committee much information about Jan. 6.

"He pled the Fifth (Amendment) mostly, and it appears he talked about himself a lot as well — the founding of the organization," Adams said. "He did not talk a lot about, from what I can tell, anything that happened in the last year and a half or so. He sort of pled the Fifth on that and ducked out."

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Asked about the evidence against Rhodes, one of 11 members of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy, Adams said she believes the Department of Justice has a strong case.

"He certainly planned all this," she said. "He certainly is behind all this. What I don't know is, are they able to make the connection to something bigger? Did he have a go-ahead from someone else? Why did he think this was OK for him to do, that he might get away with this?"

"Is there a larger connection, I don't know," she added. " But I think they certainly have a great case that he planned this, he planned to disrupt everything in order to convince Trump to declare the Insurrection Act — they would come in, everything would just be chaos, and somewhere in there, Oath Keepers would be placed in some — basically brownshirts for Trump."

Adams also discussed the escape tunnels Rhodes allegedly dug in their backyard due to his "constant fear of the feds." Her testimony about the escape tunnels recently helped convince a federal judge to deny Rhodes bond.

"They were long enough that the kids used to play in them and call to each other through them," Adams said of the tunnels. "And at the end of the escape tunnels, the eventual plan was they would lead up to a logging road, out in the National Forest behind the house that we lived in. There was an unregistered car that would be waiting."

"And then eventually we moved from there to another house in the middle of the woods, and he did something similar," she added. "He planned to booby trap the front of the property with razor wire, another unregistered car would be waiting for a different setup and a different plan. But it was our whole lives. Our whole lives were about his wanting to escape the feds ... . I never even knew what it was he was afraid of, until he started creating that as a reality, and eventually, yes, I think maybe they were wanting to come after them, and with good reason."

Watch the full interview below.

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