[[link removed]]

THE MILITIA AND THE MOLE  
[[link removed]]


 

Joshua Kaplan
January 4, 2025
ProPublica
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A mole spent years undercover infiltrating the highest ranks of
right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t
tell his family or friends. This is what he uncovered. _

,

 

Reporting Highlights

* A Freelance Vigilante: A wilderness survival trainer spent years
undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t
tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends.
* The Future of Militias: He penetrated a new generation of militia
leaders, which included doctors and government attorneys. Experts say
that militias could have a renaissance under Donald Trump.
* A Secret Trove: He sent ProPublica a massive trove of documents.
The conversations that he secretly recorded give a unique, startling
window into the militia movement.

These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked
on this story.

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go
on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash;
makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins
and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more
than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly
distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and
rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had
accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out
looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return.
He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake
City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the
20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.

He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice
had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking
start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years
undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared
someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired.
Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now,
he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets
back to the rest.”

In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address
in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive
and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.

It was addressed to me.

The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological
compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most
prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home
of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling
through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate
ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law
enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the
surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage
the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful
that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.

Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from
the city, where he could disappear.

 

1. Prelude

I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me
an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been
attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over
a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into
the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one
to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about
emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call.
Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to
know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.

We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled.
He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol,
Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to
violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed
democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major
domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on
spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI.
A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.

Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a
self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law
enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me
he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what
he’d learned.

The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported
extensively on Jan. 6
[[link removed]].
I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved
ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and
violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted
me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone
dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?

Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package
arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew
Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,”
he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they
won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed
precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed
to proceed with extreme skepticism.

So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included
dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of
private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those
through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to
dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his
militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online
he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.

The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into
one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our
time
[[link removed]].
Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which
included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they
were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a
world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to
spark a debate about logistics.

Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their
role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade
or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a
broad swath of Americans.

Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters
[[link removed]]
when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move
could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an
unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all
the more urgent to understand them.

(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this
story responded to requests for comment.)

Williams is part of a larger cold war
[[link removed]],
radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A
left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people
who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They
did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the
surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American
politics into their own hands.

Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country
through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and
lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as
successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he
once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they
recognized something in me.”

 

2. The Struggle

If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia
underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent
to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger
and filled with an inner turbulence.

Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court
records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in
rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he
said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching,
camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John
Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)

Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the
grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs
he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me
his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of
“petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to
a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.

What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those
arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the
case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to
him and put him away for three years.

Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history
books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing
school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years.
Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and
corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own
benefit without the other person noticing.

When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness
survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in
Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like
a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports
a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his
hiking sandals.

Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal
crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments
harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for
putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing
to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,”
one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay
thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the
desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by
choice, to celebrate a birthday).

Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out
business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but
in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer
money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend
recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.

Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received
an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He
wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.

_Finally_, Williams thought. _I’m starting to get some traction._

 

3. The Decision

They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told
me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven
into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places
in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and
escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that.
So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival,
but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.”
He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry
and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so
no one could tell it was ever there.

As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man
said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At
the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The
ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.

He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and
tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me.
But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he
found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group
again.

This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first
became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own
account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the
time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened
that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias
was considered taboo.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant
backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then
soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I
called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’
timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently
involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group
who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture,
Williams had warned me the man would say something like that —
Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left,
he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work.
(Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I
asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very
well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his
intentions.”)

Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to
them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many
loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early
2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online
forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this
period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for
moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these
skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not
enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival.
In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The
posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the
Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.

One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or
“the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun
control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke
out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for
local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed
with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to
bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent
overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”

Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams
thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It
looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his
training.

_Did I teach that guy?_ he wondered. _Why was I so cordial to them
all?__If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I
actually helped them_. _Because I was too selfish to think of anything
but my career_.

Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for
revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal
peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless
Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted
to be among them.

 

4. A New World

Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice.
Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear
exactly the same.

Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams
was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in,
joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy
took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as
a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he
decided that was a waste of time.

The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful.
Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He
kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His
syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and
cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most
— he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how
they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.

Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out
condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning
their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for
left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the
militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him
for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote.
“It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The
AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an
entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)

Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had
chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of
thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6,
membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist
ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in
the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on
saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks
to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was
eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence
[[link removed]].)

On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was
still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the
state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group
from outside scrutiny.

“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to”
take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him
the promotion.

“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he
saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there
was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the
mole hunt.

Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But
how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about
AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by
being the best militia member he could be.

He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force
reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records)
who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended
paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with
improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades
free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the
backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing
rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear.
Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to
blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions
erupted.

Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours
a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was
to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce
vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic
Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he
saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this
a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet
leftist who might dox him or inform the police?

He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the
movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated
by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day.
In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should
commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding
up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that
yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names,
logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty
crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.

Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it.
Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired
detective named Bobby Kinch.

 

5. The Detective and the Sheriff

Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up
after one ring: ​​“What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you
doing, man?”

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d
met years before.

“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second.
He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm
reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?

“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath
Keepers now.”

The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid
his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch
said he was serving on the group’s national board when his
predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do
not worry about me. This is God’s way.”

“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”

Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath
Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared
ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members
often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine
your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but
I’d love to sit down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should
definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint
reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on
intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he
said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”

By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams
to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The
head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an
old friend.

To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the
same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording
that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most
important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I
independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape,
a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had
proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was
just as deep as he claimed.

I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he
sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the
affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been
fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started
examining his backstory.

Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran
who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later
recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran
from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of
the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the
metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23
years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like
the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the
“Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with
investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American.
(A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing
squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to
self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would
welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as
fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!”
An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret
Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according
to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and
determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet
reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being
targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned
in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.

Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a
Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on
a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the
Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve
anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his
followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because
violence did solve quite a bit.’”

Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah
Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30,
2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of
Kinch’s top deputies.

Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a
73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been
a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the
group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think
this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more
about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to
“my inquiries today or tomorrow.”

That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up
note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement
officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your
inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”

“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI
interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates
had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if
that had piqued the FBI’s interest.

To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties
between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to
enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the
sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.

 

6. The Hunting of Man

A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a
half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the
mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on
a mid-December Saturday morning.

Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device
off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and
microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men
chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice
when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.

The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was
cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three
plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line.
“There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those
who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care
for anything else.”

They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a
charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a
tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip
his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned
enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around,
Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.

_If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun,_ he thought.
_Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods._

Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to
Williams and started to apologize.

Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!

On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in
the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest
city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting.
Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack.
On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The
radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”

Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was
wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures
he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the
Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing
animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as
he recounted the night he decided to retire.

He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d
gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun.
“I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make
sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when
I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”

Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he
paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”

By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to
charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath
Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost
weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars.
“It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go
down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.

Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if
he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”

Williams laughed, a little too loud.

 

7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy

Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath
Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he
said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work,
exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to
build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years,
conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’
endorsement.

Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all
these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able
to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one
of the men had remarked.

The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious
conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I
opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting
down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after
this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?

The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection
startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno,
California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this
defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an
armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a
friend.

But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors
— he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now
led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board
meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and,
Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s
department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He
has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a
spokesperson for the company said.)

Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with
surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias.
They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen
elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead,
they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert
in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d
help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this
organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,”
another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting
than an insurrectionist cell.

Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how
many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a
recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change.
They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado.
Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around
the county.

Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their
recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.

“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.

“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates
added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff”
on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give
a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is
my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.”
Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney
general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep
a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national
footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two
more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked
Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training
exercises.

“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was
resolved to find his way onto the national board.

 

8. The Stakeout

On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a
tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he
was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’
real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had
demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed
eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions
to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting
suspicion on himself.

“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams
opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I
think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a
scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a
Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists
think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title
down.

Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’
boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people
they knew.

In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was
on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that
year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving
her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times
in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was
going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police
department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.

Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited.
(“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within
a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m
going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the
diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into
militia leaders’ accounts.

The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The
week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in
the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed
toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a
real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of
“anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local
political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.

Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some
kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he
asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing
political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”

“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan
responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with
malicious intent.

He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a
brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been
terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by
these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone
number, along with two pictures of his house.

Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic —
he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and
about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college
student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan
explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the
Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that
did a stakeout.”

“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a
stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s
parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid
around? Did they surveil his family home?

His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself
reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and
start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The
police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The
incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.

Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of
objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent
threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if
his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of
effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got
hurt?

 

9. The Plan

By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his
anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers
and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to
infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the
local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white
supremacist group too.

His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the
four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and
was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump;
they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members,
which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the
fold.

Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to
send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He
attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously.
And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if
the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.

But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was
done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two
parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could,
he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully
documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law
enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the
very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each
other.

In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He
began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile
situation the militiamen put themselves in.

On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre
Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is
gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities
across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often
responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed
patrols.

Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the
streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending
messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped
would persuade them to stay home.

In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias.
He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If
any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my
cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to
avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member
responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let
out.”)

After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a
long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating.
He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d
gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home,
he’d vomited blood.

Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check
if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught
someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help
“relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak
candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his
electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell
him what’s going on.”

He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A
training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a
way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic
motherfuckers.”

“It’s getting to be too much for me.”

 

10. The Deep State

On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he
was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I
could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I
listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By
day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet.
He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of
AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.

Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders
could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire
state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that
night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.

The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the
Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He
might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.

With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia
ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting
evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said
in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”

He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the
sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks.
He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the
movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent
interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the
Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and
thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically
contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes
are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the
attorney general’s office.”)

Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to
law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging
about their police connections. They told him about their ties with
high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in
Tennessee.

The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m
probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have
too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him
down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United
States.”

Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3
leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45
minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown,
population 23,000.

The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a
homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the
controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the
reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said,
he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.

“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded.
“They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to
be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording
device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.

He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could
talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant
by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him.
So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown.
He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d
feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous
warning.

“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is
heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the
reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe
her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”

He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500
words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a
screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined
that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it
afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.

He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while
on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the
upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the
light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half
years.”

 

Coda: Project 2025

It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had
insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were
being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city
that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room
wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip
T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked.
He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office
chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer
with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the
phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own
future and of the country’s — was severe.

After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few
weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents
down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to
civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an
attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after
dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d
needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally
abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.

Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping
them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer,
those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his
gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily
like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.

To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him.
He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in
recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own
saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same
introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first
calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was
myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the
few dangers he could control.

Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story
is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the
United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent
abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years
before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he
himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I
wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”

I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our
two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me.
But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations
against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.”
He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start
his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the
far right.

In August, I published my investigation into AP3
[[link removed]].
(I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an
anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d
learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of
militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the
dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.

Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed
that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and
had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to
news of a mole.

The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia
inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,”
Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking
trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon
declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up
email: “MAGA.”)

Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit
without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of
files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and
police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records
he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his
former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks
his story could be his most effective weapon.

Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go
to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back
of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”

_Joshua Kaplan has been a reporter at ProPublica since 2020._

_In 2023, he and his colleagues revealed how a set of billionaires
secretly provided decades of lavish gifts and luxury travel
[[link removed]] to Supreme
Court justices. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize for public
service and helped prompt the Supreme Court to adopt its first-ever
code of conduct._

_He has also reported on the U.S. military’s withdrawal from
Afghanistan
[[link removed]],
the Jan. 6 riot
[[link removed]] at
the U.S. Capitol
[[link removed]],
and misconduct by undercover police officers
[[link removed]],
among other subjects._

_In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Kaplan’s work has received
national honors including two George Polk Awards, the Selden Ring
Award, an Investigative Reporters and Editors medal and an Edward R.
Murrow Award. He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of
Chicago._

_You can reach Josh via email at [email protected]
[[link removed]] or
by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383._

* _ [email protected]
[[link removed]] @js_kaplan
[[link removed]]  734-834-9383
[tel:734-834-9383?utm_source=xxxxxx-general&utm_medium=email]  Signal:
734-834-9383 [[link removed]]_

_ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces
investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important
issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public
trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold
power to account._

_With a team of more than 150 editorial staffers, ProPublica covers a
range of topics including government and politics, business, criminal
justice, the environment, education, health care, immigration, and
technology. We focus on stories with the potential to spur real-world
impact [[link removed]]. Among other positive
changes, our reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws;
reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for
leaders at local, state and national levels._

_Investigative journalism requires a great deal of time and resources,
and many newsrooms can no longer afford to take on this kind of
deep-dive reporting. As a nonprofit, ProPublica’s work is powered
primarily through donations. The vast bulk of the money we spend goes
directly into world-class, award-winning journalism
[[link removed]]. We are committed to uncovering
the truth, no matter how long it takes or how much it costs, and we
practice transparent financial reporting
[[link removed]] so donors know how their dollars
are spent._

_ProPublica was founded in 2007–2008 with the belief that
investigative journalism is critical to our democracy. Our staff
[[link removed]] remains dedicated to carrying
forward the important work of exposing corruption, informing the
public about complex issues, and using the power of investigative
journalism to spur reform. DONATE.
[[link removed]]_

__

* militias
[[link removed]]
* Right-wing militias
[[link removed]]
* investigative journalism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]