The Oath Keepers continued paying dues to the anti-government's vice president for nearly a year after the Jan. 6 attack.
The payments continued flowing to Venmo accounts linked to Oath Keepers senior leader Jason Ottersberg and came from an engineer whose employer does work for the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, while others linked to organization leaders -- including now-imprisoned founder Stewart Rhodes -- include a U.S. Navy recruiting officer, reported The Guardian.
“Venmo has had security issues since its inception," said Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics and open-source intelligence for the Southern Poverty Law Center. "They have tried to fix them but only after high-profile privacy breaches involving people like Joe Biden.”
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Dues and other payments were made through Ottersberg's accounts for months after Rhodes and other Oath Keepers were identified as participants in the U.S. Capitol attack, according to publicly accessible transaction records.
Ottersberg then appeared to funnel money to Rhodes, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy in November and sentenced in May to 18 years in prison for his role in planning the insurrection.
“It’s amazing to me that they’re still using open, non-privacy focused payment solutions," Squire said. “They don’t seem to have institutional knowledge about previous things that have happened to other groups, so they repeat their mistakes.”
