Why a potential Trump win, Jan. 6 pardons have one family fearing for their lives

It’s a chilly, drizzly fall afternoon in Eureka, Montana, population 1,380. Low clouds lace across the surrounding mountains, which have begun their descent into rust from the deep greens of summer.

Tasha Adams slowly makes her way home from work. She has spent the last seven hours cleaning a local medical facility — her first full-time employment after a line of semi-casual jobs stretching back years. Usually, one of her sons gives her a ride, but today she’s making the 30-minute walk, moving up Eureka’s main street, slightly pigeon-toed in her blue scrubs, carrying a tall cup of coffee bought by “a kind stranger who felt sorry for me.”

She passes Eureka’s welcome sign and the Exxon garage at the corner of Tobacco Road. She walks uphill, past Eureka Town Hall, a couple of thrift stores and Jax Cafe, ejecting its hot smell of patty melts and pancakes. At the top of the hill, she takes a breather, sitting down on a bench where scratches reveal many layers of paint, like the rings of a tree.

“I sit here because this is the only store where the owners are Democrats,” she says. “Also, it’s a good place to rest and think.”

Adams has a lot on her mind.

It’s a few weeks before the presidential election. While some fear democracy is at risk in this election, Adams fears her life and the lives of her six children are at stake.

Sixteen months earlier, Adams’ then-estranged husband, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in a seditious conspiracy that prosecutors said aimed for no less than the overthrow of American democracy. Rhodes, a pot-bellied, eye patch-wearing Yale educated lawyer, founded the Oath Keepers, a heavily armed, conspiracy theory driven “militia” whose members, prosecutors argued, were the key ground troops in the January 6 insurrection.

For Adams and her children, Rhodes’ incarceration brought a relief they had dreamed about for years. The man who they say abused, threatened and physically and mentally hurt them had  finally been caged. For the first time in decades, Adams told USA TODAY, she had been able to sleep. Hold down a job. Start to enjoy small things in life.

But as Adams sits on her bench, these fleeting feelings of security and calm have begun to drift like the clouds on the Montana mountainsides. For months now, former President Donald Trump has told anybody who asks that he plans to pardon many, if not all, of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who have been imprisoned. “Absolutely I would. If they’re innocent, I would pardon them,” Trump told the National Association of Black Journalists convention in July.

At a town hall in mid October, Trump called Jan. 6 “a day of love.” Two days later, he compared the jailed insurrectionists to people of Japanese origin held in U.S. internment camps during World War II. “Why are they still being held?” he asked.

“President Trump will make pardon decisions on a case-by-case basis,” a spokesperson for the Trump campaign told USA TODAY.

If Trump wins in November, and if he pardons Rhodes, Adams faces not only the ignominy of her ex-husband being publicly absolved for the seditious acts he committed. She also believes she faces very real danger.

“He is somebody that had a kill list — always,” Adams said, noting the list was something Rhodes kept in his head, rather than on paper.  “And obviously, now I'm on this list, and so are some of my kids, I'm sure.”

“I've got to keep him in jail,” she added. “I have to keep him in jail, and it can't fail — because I'm in a whole mess of trouble if I fail.”

In interviews near their home in Eureka in September, Adams and her eldest son, 27-year-old Dakota, laid bare their fear, anxiety, and plans for a possible second Trump presidency and ensuing pardon of Rhodes.

And they laid out their reasoning, detailing, as Tasha has in court documents, two decades of alleged abuse, threats and manipulation at the hands of the man often dubbed one of the masterminds of Jan. 6.

“If Stewart is released from prison, my minor siblings, especially, need to not be in the United States any more, before he has a chance to get to Montana,” said Dakota Adams. “I have absolutely no faith in any protection of the law whatsoever.”

At the core of their worry is that Rhodes, who has now spent more than two years in prison, is likely stewing and obsessed with how he believes he has been wronged by his family, Tasha and Dakota Adams said. Tasha Adams said it was her testimony in Rhodes’ prosecution that almost certainly prevented him from being released on bail before his trial — another thing he will resent, she said.

“I informed them all about his escape tunnels and the abuse and how he was always plotting to escape if federal agents came,” Adams said. “I’m sure he thinks if he was out on bail, he would have had more control over his legal case, and he would have won.”

Writer Jason Van Tatenhove, who once served as a spokesman for the Oath Keepers and who Rhodes lived with for eight months at the start of his divorce, said Adams and her family are right to be concerned. Van Tatenhove told USA TODAY Rhodes definitely had a kill list in his head.

Van Tatenhove also told the U.S. House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack that Rhodes even discussed creating a deck of cards for the Oath Keepers featuring people who he believed had wronged him and the country similar to the “Most Wanted” cards developed by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency during the Iraq war.

“It was based on the trading card pack the U.S. military put together of the most-wanted people to bring in dead or alive,” Van Tatenhove said. “He wanted to do something very much like that. He holds grievances pretty tight.”

Rhodes declined several requests for interviews, either in-person or by phone. Two of his attorneys strenuously denied the accusations made by Tasha and Dakota Adams, and said any notion that they are in danger from Rhodes is entirely unfounded.

“There was never any allegation of threats to his wife or his children that came before the divorce court,” said Ed Tarpley, one of Rhodes’ defense attorneys. “The divorce proceedings have lasted for six years, and in that whole six year period of time, there's never been a reference or a mention of a kill list.”

The Oath Keepers: Delusion, megalomania and ‘magic money’

Adams met Rhodes at a Las Vegas dance class in 1991. At first she was charmed by the gruff-voiced, fiercely intelligent Army veteran, and photographs she shared with USA TODAY show a happy, hopeful young couple on their wedding day, grinning over their first child, Dakota, and hugging in front of a Christmas tree.

But as the years passed, Adams said she began to understand that Rhodes wasn’t just your average smart young man frustrated by a lack of opportunities and money. Rhodes’ ideas weren’t just original and interesting, she said, they also often veered into the conspiratorial, paranoid and unhinged.

While Rhodes pursued his ideas and toyed with a career in the law, alternating between taking VA-subsidized classes and lying somnolent on the couch, Adams worked multiple jobs, including as an exotic dancer, to support the growing family.

Looking back three decades later with the wisdom of countless hours of therapy and counseling, Adams said she missed all the obvious signs that Rhodes is a classic egomaniac, bent on abusing and manipulating everyone around him for his own gain.

“I would say Stewart fit the profile of a pretty typical abusive husband and father, hitting pretty much every red flag, every notch in the narcissist-slash-sociopathic handbook,” Adams said.

Rhodes’ megalomania hit overdrive with the founding and almost overnight success of the Oath Keepers, Adams said. The far-right group, aimed at current and former law enforcement officers and military, had as its central premise a list of orders that such personnel would never obey. The list included refusing to “disarm the American people,” impose martial law or imprison American citizens as “enemy combatants.”

“He was just adamant that this was going to be world changing, that this was going to take off,” Adams said.

And it did.

Membership of the Oath Keepers soared. Money flooded in. Rhodes began appearing on far-right talk shows and fostered a relationship with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who helped further promote Rhodes’ organization and ambitions. The former Yale law student was finally fulfilling his potential.

But for Adams, stuck now in a remote, 800-square-foot Montana cabin and caring for six children, the comforts and riches brought by fame remained a distant concept.

Adams described constantly scratching for money to stay afloat, even as Rhodes traveled the country, splurging on new weapons, clothes and hotel rooms for himself.

“We were constantly on the verge of being evicted,” she said. “Everything was broken at one point — the toilet, the sink, the oven, everything — we were washing clothes by hand, and if you turned on the sink, it ran into the electrical box. We were going to the bathroom in the woods, just living in this cabin 20 miles from cell service.”

Also living on the property was a revolving cast of “Oath Keeper dudes,” Adams said. Men would come and go, staying in trailers surrounding the cabin. Meanwhile Rhodes would appear from time to time, renting a car to drive out to the cabin, where he would splash out on steak dinners and bizarre gifts for the children, Adams said.

“The kids had a term — they called it ‘Magic Money,’ which is when he would return home from a trip with a wallet full of cash,” she said. “He would get very spendy, and I would feel guilty accepting money or gifts from him, because the bills aren't getting paid and the kids need shoes. He’s buying a kid a fancy $150 lamp, but they don't even have a bedroom. They're sleeping on a pad on the floor.”

The odd habits, near-constant absence and growing suspicion that Rhodes was cheating on her with multiple women were all hard to bear, Adams said. But as the Oath Keepers thrived off the growing national discord and the swelling of the far-right so-called militia movement under the aegis of Trump, Rhodes’ paranoia and irrationality reached fever pitch.

And life inside the tiny, freezing cabin, with its broken appliances, became almost unbearable.

‘We’re going to die if we stay’

Dakota Adams grew up in a sort of fog of imagined war and conflict, most of it dreamed up by his father.

What’s so galling for Adams, who took his mother’s last name a couple of years ago in defiance of Rhodes, is that the prepping, training and maneuvers he learned as child soldier in Rhodes’ wannabe militia haven’t even served him well as a young adult.

“I would not say that any of my militia training skills have been applicable to anything,” Adams said. “I cannot overstate how dysfunctional and ineffective our apocalypse prepping at home was.”

Adams is a typical man of Montana, albeit one who wears eye makeup and a torn denim vest adorned with patches of his favorite local bands. Tall and muscular, he works on building sites, putting up drywall, and volunteers for the local fire department, often spending days at a time fighting wildfires in his home state.

Now 27, Adams says he has “no venom left” for his father. He said he spent years trying his hardest to provide for and protect his siblings from a man who was equal parts abusive and ridiculous.

As such, Adams’ stories of life in the cabin swing from the terrifying to the absurd. Like the time in 2018 Rhodes bought a T-shirt printing press to make shirts with Hilary Clinton memes on them, only to abandon the project as soon as he realized how impractical it was to manage a mail merchandise business from a cabin 30 minutes from the nearest town.

While Adams said he wasn’t handed skills or fatherly affection that would stick with him through his life, he certainly still carries other emotions and triggers that Rhodes’ behavior instilled in him.

“I get an immediate adrenaline spike from heavy footsteps on a floor above me, because that was the key that Stewart had woken up from a 12 hour prescription painkiller nap and was coming downstairs to scream at everybody,” he told USA TODAY.

Tasha and Dakota Adams describe the peak Oath Keeper years of 2016 to 2018 as a chaotic, terrifying regime under the Rhodes dictatorship.

When Rhodes was home, he would swing into violent rages at the slightest provocation, Tasha Adams said. That anger would often morph into episodes of regret, self-pity and paranoid delusions about Rhodes’ role in the world and the future of the bizarre brand he was still building with the Oath Keepers.

Adams described meticulously planning every move in the cabin. She planned escape routes past Rhodes from every possible position in the home. And she began doing ballistics analysis — calculating where she should stand when confronting her husband or being berated by him, in order that a bullet passing through her from one of his many guns wouldn’t go on to hit any of her children.

“Drawing his handgun was something that had happened every couple years, but now it was happening every week,” Adams said. “Lawyer that he is, he would always claim he was drawing it because he was suicidal, but he's pointing it at himself, and he's screaming at me while he's doing it — he's pointing it here, there and everywhere, and then eventually saying, ‘Well, I'm suicidal,’ and pointing it at his head. But that was the legal cover. The point was to terrify me.”

And it wasn’t just threats. Adams said Rhodes also choked one of her teenage daughters. And it was at that point that Dakota stepped in front of his mother with a message.

“Dakota said someone is going to die,” Adams said. “There's no way, if you stay, that we all get out of this alive. And we might die trying to get out, but we're going to die anyway. We're going to die if we stay.”

Escaping Stewart Rhodes

One doesn’t just leave Stewart Rhodes.

Escaping the Montana cabin, with six children, several dogs and a coterie of other household pets in tow was a mission Adams knew she had to meticulously plan. So, over several months, she and Dakota contacted attorneys, planned logistics and saved every penny they could get their hands on.

Nothing was simple. A phone call to an attorney meant a 40-minute round-trip drive to cell phone coverage. Rhodes kept a tight rein on all the household money, so eking out a reserve took skill and perseverance. Adams and the family struggled through one more Thanksgiving and one more Christmas, but as 2018 dawned, she realized she couldn’t face another Valentine’s Day with her abuser.

On February 12, 2018, Adams and her children loaded into the one working truck on the property. Carrying bags of essentials, spare clothes and the money they had saved, they drove away. Dakota even managed to sneak away with one of his father’s favorite rifles. An insurance policy in case of a family shootout.

They fled to Libby, Montana, “on the other side of the mountains” from Rhodes, as Adams puts it. From there, she called her husband, told him she had filed for divorce and said she was filing for a protective order against him. This last piece of news terrified Rhodes, Adams said, because such an order would prevent him from carrying a firearm. He pleaded with her not to take such action, and promised to leave the cabin and allow the family to move back in.

After a few nervous nights, in which Adams said Dakota’s friends in the volunteer fire department helped out enormously, she and the kids moved cautiously back into the cabin. In the weeks that came, as the divorce proceedings heated up, Adams constantly worried that Rhodes would seek revenge against her and the family.

Adams detailed the abuse in a 2018 court filing. In a separate, later filing provided to USA TODAY, she also laid out numerous other instances of abuse and alleged inappropriate conduct by Rhodes against her children.

Every night, she said, Adams would block the one dirt road into the property with the truck. But she still fretted he would come back.

“My thinking was he would pull up down the road and crawl in, which I do believe, in retrospect, there's some evidence that he did do that a couple of times,” Adams said.

In time, however, Rhodes’ grip on the family lessened. As the Oath Keepers began to get more and more attention, he moved back to Texas, sharing a house with one of his top lieutenants. Adams still checked his personal Twitter account every morning, trying to get a handle on where Rhodes was that day, but as the tumultuous events of the 2020 election approached, it was clear Rhodes had another mission — another target — the U.S. Capitol and American democracy itself.

An insurrection, a trial, and a big sigh of relief

In their case against Elmer Stewart Rhodes, federal prosecutors argued he was one of the principal architects of the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Beginning in December 2020, Rhodes and other conspirators plotted to stop Congress from certifying the results of the presidential election, the prosecutors alleged. As part of the plot, members of the Oath Keepers stashed weapons in a cache across the Potomac, assembled a Quick Reaction Force, or “QRF,” and marched on the Capitol at least twice in military “stack” formations, all under Rhodes’ direction.

As Jan. 6 unfolded, Tasha Adams was at home in Montana, glued to her laptop and continually hitting refresh. When she saw footage of Oath Keepers in military gear and “stack” formation, one hand on the shoulder of the person in front, she knew Rhodes had to be heavily involved.

But she also knew something else. If Rhodes was at the Capitol, cooperating with a mission he believed to be an actual coup attempt, then he must have assurances — that ever-present legal cover — that he would be protected in the long-run.

“It's like the War of the Roses,” she said. “If you're someone like Stewart, you choose your king who will come out on top. And I think he thought, ‘Well, if we really make this happen, I'll come out on top.’”

But, of course, Rhodes’ coup never succeeded. After a few chaotic hours at the Capitol, hundreds of assaults, a handful of deaths and a mountain of mayhem, the attack on democracy was over, and the FBI was soon hunting for its ringleaders.

More than a year after the Capitol insurrection, Rhodes was arrested in Texas. In a jury trial in late 2022 marked by Rhodes’ occasional outbursts, he was eventually convicted of seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings. Last May, he was sentenced to more than 18 years in prison, the second-longest term handed down for the insurrection.

For Adams and her family, the conviction meant more than simply justice. It meant respite from more than two decades of fear and trepidation.

Two days before Rhodes’ sentencing, Adams divorce had also finally come through.

“That was huge,” she said. “I was like ‘Now what?’”

Adams’ response was to walk away from the life she had been leading in the shadows of her relationship with Rhodes. She stopped doing media appearances and put aside the book she had been writing. She took some classes and just spent her time “getting rid of Stewart’s horrid crap,” as she puts it.

“I had been running scared for so long, since February 2018,” she said. “And most of it stops there, but then came some of the after-effects.”

Then came Trump.

Then came a third presidential run for the GOP nomination.

Then came a promise to pardon the insurrectionists.

The ‘kill list’

Tasha and Dakota Adams have watched with amazement and agony as the 2024 presidential campaign has unfolded.

Dakota has responded to the trauma and drama of his youth by funneling his energies into an unlikely political campaign. He’s running for a Montana state legislature seat in the crimson-red district where he still lives — as a Democrat.

Mother and son both ardently support Vice President Kamala Harris to win the election. But they admit they also both have a vested interest in Harris beating Trump. And that interest is about more than pride. It’s about self-preservation.

"If Stewart ever gets out of prison, the first three people he's going to try to kill are my mom, Nancy Pelosi, and one of my sisters for testifying against him in custody hearings.” Dakota said. “That's going to be his immediate priority kill list, after a couple of weeks of binge partying."

Through his attorneys, Rhodes said the claim that he poses a danger to his family is absurd.

“There's simply no basis in fact for this allegation,” said Tarpley. “A statement like this is libelous and defamatory because it's so false and there's no basis in fact.”

Those assurances don’t assuage Dakota and Tasha Adams’ fears. They’ve heard hundreds of unkept promises from Stewart Rhodes. They’ve had to clear up the messes he’s left behind, whether from a leaking sink, a broken toilet or an abandoned T-shirt press.

And they’re not taking any chances. In the wake of a contentious election, there are always some disgruntled voters on the losing side who say they’re leaving the country for once and for all. For the Adams family, most of whom barely know life outside the rural county where they have lived for a decade, a decision to flee, perhaps across the Canadian border just 20 minutes away, won’t be made out of ideology, but out of necessity.

Passport applications have been filled out. Tasha Adams is working as much as she can and saving every penny. Dakota is installing drywall by day and attending political events by evening, hoping to make contacts and raise awareness.

The whole family is waiting to learn their future once the votes are counted and a new president is installed to decide their fate.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Stewart Rhodes sits in prison for Jan. 6. His family fears a pardon.