Court filings and public statements leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, show how important the idea of the Insurrection Act became to Rhodes and other extremists, including followers of the ever-changing QAnon extremist ideology, and to Trump and people close to him.

“It is hard to put into words how mind-boggling this idea was, to use a statute designed to protect the country from insurrection to support an actual insurrection,” said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino…

Indictments filed in the Jan. 6 investigation show Rhodes’s followers were drawn to Washington partly in the hope that Trump would invoke the law once more, transforming the Oath Keepers into a kind of shock troop militia to smite imagined rioters, government officials and anyone who tried to make Biden’s election victory a reality.

“If Trump activates the Insurrection Act, I’d hate to miss it,” Oath Keeper Jessica Watkins of Ohio wrote a week before the Capitol attack, according to court papers. Around the same time, Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida chapter of Oath Keepers, allegedly predicted in a separate conversation that Trump would stay in power and “claim the Insurrection Act.”