Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes is spending his time in federal prison planning legal action against the Justice Department.

Rhodes, one of the most prominent Jan. 6 defendants, is serving an 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and destruction of evidence.

President-elect Donald Trump, however, has changed the outlook for Rhodes and others in similar circumstances, having promised pardons for Jan. 6 defendants.

Rhodes told The Washington Times he is approaching his legal options “one step at a time.”

“If President Trump pardons me, I would love to sue [the Justice Department] for a 1983 claim. That’s a potential violation of civil rights. That’s a false imprisonment,” said Rhodes, a Yale Law School graduate. “They did the same kind of lawfare against President Trump and at us.”

He said his militia group, which was formed by former police and military members with an oath to protect the Constitution, was singled out by federal prosecutors for the most severe charges. Critics of Oath Keepers characterize the group as anti-government and far-right.

“I was a paratrooper in the Army until I was disabled in a parachuting accident. I was sent a letter by the VA letting me know that from now on, all my veterans benefits have been stripped, so I’m no longer eligible to be buried in a veterans graveyard,” Rhodes said in an interview from prison.

“That’s a horrific insult to me as a veteran. So just you know that the harm done to us is next-level. By getting us, this conspiracy was all because of who we were, not because of what we did.”

He said the federal prosecution against him was cooked up by Democratic Party players, who mapped out the seditious conspiracy charges in civil lawsuits, pointing specifically to Rep. Bennie Thompson, who led the Democrats’ probe into the Jan. 6 riot.

Mr. Thompson, Mississippi Democrat, filed the first civil lawsuit against Mr. Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys militia group, alleging Mr. Trump was a leader of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“That’s when the narrative got started. It’s been their manufactured narrative from Day One,” Rhodes said.

Mr. Thompson filed the lawsuit in Feb. 2021 under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which was passed in the wake of the Civil War and prohibits any conspiracy to prevent lawmakers from discharging the duties of their office.

“The carefully orchestrated series of events that unfolded at the Save America rally and the storming of the Capitol was no accident or coincidence,” the lawsuit stated. “It was the intended and foreseeable culmination of a carefully coordinated campaign to interfere with the legal process required to confirm the tally of votes cast in the Electoral College.”

Mr. Thompson’s lawsuit, which the NAACP filed on behalf of the lawmaker, said Mr. Trump was personally responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, because he “acted beyond the outer perimeter of his official duties and therefore is susceptible to suit in his personal capacity.”

Rhodes has kept up with House Republicans’ investigation into the Jan. 6 committee, which Mr. Thompson led with Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican.

That investigation by the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight refuted many of the claims made by the Jan. 6 committee and accused Ms. Cheney of witness tampering for the committee’s televised hearings.

Rhodes said Ms. Cheney and Mr. Thompson “should be in jail.”

“I’ll volunteer to be a special prosecutor — whatever they want me to do. I’ll do it,” he said.

• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.