They said that Mr. Minuta, a New York tattoo artist, followed shortly behind with a separate group that clashed aggressively with Capitol Police officers inside. Earlier that day, Mr. Minuta and his group had provided security for Roger J. Stone Jr., a former adviser to Mr. Trump, and rushed to the Capitol on a golf cart to join the mob and confront police officers.
“To Minuta and these people storming into the Capitol, they were patriots,” Troy Edwards, a prosecutor, told the jury at the beginning of the trial. “And he was headed to join what he called patriots.”
Federal prosecutors described how Mr. Vallejo, an Army veteran from Arizona, kept watch over an arsenal of guns stashed in a hotel in Virginia as part of a “quick reaction force” that could deliver weapons to those members in Washington in the event of a breakdown in the rule of law.
They also returned to some of the evidence presented in the case against Mr. Rhodes last year, poring over reams of text messages in which members of the group fretted over Mr. Trump’s fate after the election and swapped outlandish conspiracies about Joseph R. Biden Jr. and what they described as shadowy international forces influencing him.
Over the course of both trials, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the Oath Keepers had for months expressed a desire to help Mr. Trump remain in power even after his election loss, and that they had positioned themselves in Washington on Jan. 6, ready to back the former president as an armed militia if Mr. Trump authorized them to.
“These defendants, they perverted the constitutional order,” Mr. Edwards, the prosecutor, said in December. “They were willing to use force and violence to impose their view of the Constitution and their view of America on the rest of the country.”
Lawyers for the defendants echoed arguments made in the previous trial — that while members of the group often darkly discussed the possibility of “revolution” and “civil war,” they never put together clear or practical plans to enter the Capitol or stop lawmakers from certifying the 2020 election.
