Documents from a Utah offshoot of the rightwing Oath Keepers militia show that two 2023 leadership meetings of the extremist group were attended by former law enforcement officers, a serving prosecutor and a former elected official.
The meetings – whose minutes record discussions on “Helicopter Landing Zone (HLZ) Bird Training”, “Hand to Hand Training” and the “role of an armed responder” – show how deeply intertwined the organization had become with conservative politics, law enforcement and the legal establishment in the cities of Utah’s metropolitan Wasatch front region and beyond.
The revelations also show that the November 2022 conviction of Stewart Rhodes over the Oath Keepers participation in the January 6 insurrection provided little deterrent to the participants, who instead made concerted efforts to rebuild local and national Oath Keepers organizations.
Now that Rhodes’ sentence has been commuted by Donald Trump – one of 1,500 pardons and commutations for convicted January 6 rioters – experts say the capacity of the organization to regenerate is an open question.
The Guardian contacted all of the Oath Keepers members named in this story for comment and none responded.
Sam Jackson is an assistant professor in the emergency management and homeland security department at the University at Albany, SUNY, and the author of Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Antigovernment Group.
In a telephone conversation, he said: “I’m not really surprised that Stewart Rhodes’ arrest and conviction didn’t act as a deterrent.” He added that antigovernment activists “have spent decades decrying governmental injustice, so it’s pretty easy if you’re so inclined to situate Rhodes’ conviction and sentence into that broader narrative”.
On the other hand, Jackson said that former members of the group had related that “for basically as long as the organization has existed, a lot of members hated Rhodes and thought he was a terrible leader, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some people in the group were happy that he got convicted”.
The meeting records are part a trove of documents first brought to public light by a long-term infiltrator in the anti-government “patriot movement” and shared with journalists by the transparency non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets).
According to the documents, the Utah leadership meetings were held on 16 February 2023 and 18 March 2023. The minutes of the February meeting describe it as a “leadership meeting” and the March meeting is dubbed an “annual leadership meeting II”.
The attendee lists at the meeting significantly overlapped; however, while the February meeting document recorded 13 attendees, the March document recorded 18.
The earlier meeting indicated that the Utah group, which was previously reported on in the Guardian, is organizationally intertwined with an LLC that has registered its intellectual property and had at that time “four members on our National 10 Member Board of Directors”, naming “Bobby Kinch, Steve Van Der Heyden, Dave McDonald and Dave Coates” as Utah’s serving national board members.
Jackson, the Oath Keepers researcher, said that along with some “churn” in leadership after Rhodes’ imprisonment, “there were a couple of different state Oath Keepers chapters that tried to take over the mantle of the name”, and even now “I’m sure there are others trying to claim that mantle. For all of its flaws, the national organization really did have success in building a brand over 12 years or so.”
The Guardian previously reported that Kinch, a former Las Vegas metropolitan police department (LVMPD) officer, left that agency after a prolonged controversy over his airing of political views on social media, including his apparent advocacy of a “race war”.
One of the national board members who was present at both meetings, according to the documents, is Van Der Heyden. Other documents in the cache show emails and letters from Van Der Heyden to the Utah Oath Keepers membership. In those communications, dated between July 2022 and February 2023, Van Der Heyden signs off as “Executive Officer, Oath Keepers Utah”.
Earlier, according to reports in St George’s Spectrum newspaper and Associated Press news wires, Van Der Heyden was a city council member of Washington City, a community on the outskirts of St George in southern Utah.
In 2004, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Van Der Heyden had been the only council member to consistently oppose the construction of a statue of John D Lee, who as a member of a Mormon militia had participated in the so-called “Mountain Meadows Massacre”.
Van Der Heyden lost his bid for re-election in November 2009. During the campaign, his challenger, Bill Hudson, claimed that Van Der Heyden had tried to eliminate him from the race by offering instead to appoint him to the city’s planning commission; an ethics complaint to state authorities was reportedly backed by the city’s mayor and four councilors.
The Guardian emailed Van Der Heyden for comment at the Gmail address he used for internal communications within the Oath Keepers.
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Another attendee at the 2023 leadership meeting, Len Gleim, was a highly decorated police officer in Fresno, California, who apparently received training and resources from a federally funded fusion center.
According to California state records, Gleim retired from the Fresno police in 2014 at the rank of sergeant, and collects an annual pension of more than $126,000 after 25 years service.
On 29 March 2008, the Fresno Bee awarded Gleim a “thumbs up” for being “winner of the International Organization of Asian Crime Investigators and Specialists Lifetime Achievement Award”, adding that he had been “working with Southeast Asian gangs since 1987”.
Other media reports stretching back to 1995 indicate that Gleim established himself as a specialist on Asian gangs while serving in Fresno. A Fresno Bee report from that year indicates that Gleim had established a youth gangs taskforce in Fresno as early as 1988, and subsequent reports indicate that he pursued Hmong gangs in sex trafficking and homicide cases, and served as an expert witness in a California appeals court case that upheld attempted murder convictions against Hmong gang members.
Documents from the BlueLeaks trove, also provided to reporters by DDoSecrets after it was released by hackers in 2020, show that in 2012 Gleim applied to the Central California Intelligence Center, a federally funded fusion center, for access to the information broker service TLO, and that he may have received training in the use of that service.
Screenshots from internal chats indicate that Gleim was an enthusiastic participant in day-to-day discussions inside the Utah Oath Keepers, often sharing stories from his time as a police officer.
In December 2022, in an internal discussion about gangs, Gleim said that “we had several underage [Fresno Norteño] male gang members engage in relationships with teachers, juvenile hall employees, correctional deputies, etc.”
Another member who was present at both leadership meetings was lawyer Mark Arrington, currently an assistant deputy city attorney in Layton, Utah, who also maintains his own private practice in the city.
According to his LinkedIn page, before becoming acquiring a JD degree in 1998, Arrington, 53, worked as a police officer in several cities in Utah and in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He also claims there to have been a air force reservist “specializing in Base Security”.
Local media reports indicate that as a public defender, Arrington in 2020 represented a man who pleaded guilty to murdering a woman he met on Tinder, another man convicted of murdering his wife in 2006, and a man who pretended to be a lawyer in a fraud scheme.
The future of the Utah group and the Oath Keepers nationally remains uncertain even after Rhodes was freed. The judge who sentenced Rhodes previously described that prospect as “frightening”.
Speaking before news of the commutation broke, Jackson said that in the event Rhodes was freed, “I’m optimistic, or hopeful at least that [Rhodes’] attention’s going to be elsewhere. And I think that that means that the Oath Keepers – a group under that name – is going to struggle to reemerge in the way that it did previously.”
He added, however, that “we need to be aware of the trap of focusing too much on groups: even if the Oath Keepers organization doesn’t reemerge, that’s not to say that other threats won’t”.
