I covered January sixth as an investigative reporter. A lot of people remember the images of violence against police officers outside the Capitol and people, you know, rummaging through desks, but it's easy to forget how much worse it could have been. You know, this mob got within one hundred feet of Vice President Mike Pence, who they'd been saying
they want to hang for treason. It was always struck by like this kind of feeling that there was a lot of things I didn't think the public got much of a chance to see, and just kind of ever since wondered where does the militia movement go from here after this kind of huge calamitous event. You know, are we going to look back at January sixth as the peak of militia violence in America? Or is just the prelude to something even more consequential.
Josh Caplin is an investigative reporter at Pro Publica. After January sixth, he didn't just wonder what would happen next for the militia movement. He decided to find out. He gained access to hundreds of thousands of internal messages sent by the Shadowy Militia Group AP three or American Patriot three Percenters. These messages tell the story of AP three from the ashes of January six for their transformation into one of the biggest armed right wing militias in the
United States. Now AP three is gearing up for the November election, and Josh has uncovered a picture of what could happen next. From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM today Josh Caplan on the three Percenters, their politics and their plans. It's Monday, September sixteen. So Josh, I thought we could go right back to the very
beginning of your interest in this. Can you take me into your reporting and tell me about the kind of picture that you started to form of AP three and the ideology.
Yeah, I mean the three Percenters take their name from the claim that only three percent of Americans fought in the American Revolution. So it's organized around this idea that a very small vanguard can, with concerted action, stand up against what they see as tyranny. And one of the chief activities this group has is very serious paramilitary training, getting together with guns and practicing storming buildings with semi armatic rifles, attacking dummies with knives, but there's all these
strange things about the groups that I found surprising. They do charity drives for the homeless, they celebrate Valentine's Day together, they have a monthly magazine with kids games in the back. And the leader of the group, Scot said, is kind of a surprising figure to lead a major paramilitary group.
Good morning, guys. Just want to wish everybody a very safe, happy, healthy Thanksgiving holiday.
He's a former Army reservist, but also spent most of his adult life bouncing between jobs. He worked as the manager for a small time rapper. He worked as a model and appeared on the cover of erotic books.
We're a conservative American law abiding group. We believe in constitutional law enforcement.
It started on basically just an idea on Facebook, and you know, before long it was several thousand people that span active duty law enforcement, active duty military, alongside convicted criminals, small business owners, healthcare professionals. But broadly they see themselves as the last line of defense against the excesses of the government and the left.
Well, they're going to find out who has not gotten their vaccine, who has an American flag outs out in front of their hole, who's the conservative, who's the conservative gun owner?
They are going to feel you out.
Trust me, If you take a lot of what Donald Trump is saying literally, then we're in a situation where America has been taken over in a vast conspiracy. The authorities are either sleep at the wheels or in on it, and they are coming for you. It's the exact sort of thing that they feel like they need to step into. No one else is going to do anything. So these brave men and their guns are going to make a difference.
Right And Josh, the militia movement, it didn't with Donald Trump. So where does something like AP three come from? And how has it evolved?
So the modern militia movement in the US started in the early nineties really around issues of gun control, and it was expanding rapidly. And then in nineteen ninety five, a military veteran with militia tized blew up a government building in Oklahoma City and killed almost two hundred people, which was at the time the largest of terrorist attack ever on American soil.
And Nathay McVeigh guilty guilty of murder, guilty of conspiracy, guilty on all eleven federal charges that he faced in the Oklahoma City bombing trial.
And that kind of killed the movement in the US for a long time. But then in two thousand and eight you have Obama's election, who is portrayed by much of conservative media as this undercover Marxist as a secret Muslim. Obama and his wife, I'm concerned that they could be anti white, that he might hide that a Christian. This is a crustation. What is our counter going end up?
What?
And you also have a financial crisis. Those two factors kind of rekindled this new generation of groups. So AP three and other three percenters groups started at that time. The Oaskeepers, who became very famous for their role in the Capital Riot, became very big national militias in the US.
The events in Washington have taken a violent and tumultuous turn in the past few hours, as thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the US Capital Building, venting their anger at the victory of Joe Biden in the presidential election. They forced the evacuation.
The people involved in the January sixth riot are associated with the January sixth riot. In the weeks after, there were pariahs groups like AP three and other groups like it were just hemorrhaging members and they know their leaders were talking internally that we may not survive this. This may be the end of our movement. It was a time of real strife and depression for this wing of
the far right. So what changed One there was a shift in the political climate that none of them expected, where Trump and other prominent figures in the Republican Party embracing the January sixth writers as patriots.
They were there with love in their heart.
That was it unbelievable, and it was a beautiful day.
And you started having people actually joined saying I was inspired by January six And they were able to have really pretty massive success recruiting through Facebook again, with as many as fifty people applying every day to join. It doesn't take very long for that to become a really
large number. They've already tried to shape American life through armed vigilanti operations, and they've been royaled by this pass intensifying schism over the question if and when they should commit mass political.
Violence after the break the actions AP three are already taking and what will happen should Trump lose. So josh AP three started to grow again after January sixth. They went from being shunned in the immediate aftermath of that day to having people line up to join them. So can you tell me what you've learned about what they've been doing with this reinvigorated membership. Yeah.
I mean, these are people that regularly put themselves into very volatile situations while heavily art and so they have a lot of tactics, you know, from staging a counter protest of a defund the police rally with the explicit purpose of building ties with police. They talk about getting intelligence from them and actually being asked by the police
to assist them in operations. They were assaulting Black Lives Matter protesters and rounding up migrants at the US Mexico border, doing these armed vigilanti patrols where they would catch migrants and at gunpoint stop them and pass them along to law enforcement. Okay, guys, American pageor Super.
Sam, we are here. We are on the border as we said we would be.
We rived earlier today and then in the twenty twenty two mid term elections, Scott said kind of put out a call to arms that they were going to stake out ballot boxes where people can drop off absentee ballots and try to intimidate people that they believed might be trying to commit fraud. Very quickly went wrong because one of their members was standing outside a ballot box in Arizona with a handgun on his chest, in full tactical gear,
and he got a confrontation with a woman. Law enforcement arrived the scene, and this quickly blew up became a huge national story.
Officials in Arizona are now stepping up security after describing instances in which vigilantes their word were seen loitering around ballot boxes. NBC's gave Gutierra's reports from Miracle.
Ba count As soon as the guy was in the news, he quit the group in order to protect them. And so is anyone reading about this at the time and for many months later would just think, oh, this is a lone wolf rather than fairly carefully organized vigilanti operation from a militia, Okay.
And so as that's happened, and as we've moved closer and closer to election day, what are we hearing from the group's founder from Settin.
He's been going through some difficulties with the groups. As I said, he was an army reservist, but he presented himself as as much more than that kind of you know, he said on a public resume that he was a veteran of the Gulf War. You know, this is something he leaned on to get authority within the group, to
get people to follow him. And eventually one of his own members got their hands on his discharge papers, and according to his military discharge papers, he was active duty for five months, and that consisted of initial training that caused an explosion internally of people who felt they'd been lied to, And then a rumor started to spread that he was under investigation for fraud, and that led to a bunch of people leaving the group and joining other militias.
So broadly, the movement has gotten more fractured and more to centralize, and that means that it could be much harder for law enforcement to track these groups and to intervene before one can commit violence.
So can we talk about the upcoming election. We're seeing signs already that Trump, should he lose, might not concede defeat.
I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election.
If I win.
He's alluded to a blood bath.
Now, if I don't get elected.
It's going to be a bloodbath for the whole that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the content.
How do comments like that get interpreted by AP three members and what are they actually saying about their intentions for the upcoming election.
I think that's the really crucial question behind all of this, just to give a taste of this, how they're thinking about this. In AB three, they're sure it's going to be stolen again. One leader wrote that this election is not going to be decided at the ballot, is going to be decided at the amal box. And if you look at the polling numbers, even of how Americans are viewing political violence, support for political violence seems to only
be growing. And these groups haven't gone away. They've gotten smarter, and you know, if AP three is any example, they've gotten angrier. I think the things that experts are most fearful of is if trump fulfills the promise he's made repeatedly that if he wins, he will pardon January sixth defendants. They fear that whatever his intention is, people on the most extreme side of the Republican Party could take it as a get out of jail free card for committing violence for the cause.
Well, Josh, thank you so much for your time today. It's been really interesting.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Also in the news today, former top public servant Katherine Campbell says she's escapegoat after an independent review found her to have breached the Public Service Code of Conduct in relation to her handling of the illegal Robodet scheme. Miss Campbell is among twelve current and former public servants who've been found to have breached their obligations ninety seven times
according to the Australian Public Service Commissioner Review. And voters in New South Wales will wait several weeks to find out the official results of the council elections held over the weekend. It's been an unusual election marched by the New South Wales Liberal Party accidentally failing to nominate more than one hundred and thirty six councilors across sixteen different council areas. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.
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