Whose Side Are the Oath Keepers in Ferguson On? Andy Cush
Filed to: Oath Keepers 8/18/15 10:00am
Sam Andrews received three phone calls during an hour-long lunch at a Pizza Hut in St. Louis County, Missouri, last week. Andrews is a member of the group called the Oath Keepers, and the callers were fellow Oath Keepers, congratulating and questioning him about his latest “operation”: Over the previous two nights, in nearby Ferguson, he’d led a group of five white men with assault rifles and body armor to the scene of the protests marking the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. It had been a grabby image for the media convened there, and he relished the attention.
“My guys are eminently qualified,” Andrews said to one caller. “We know way more about weapons than the St. Louis County Police Department.” Later in the same conversation, he practically spat into his cellphone while discussing St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar. “Do you believe the shit coming out of your mouth?” he said, addressing a mock Belmar. “‘Cause we don’t believe it.”
After the first night, Belmar had decried the Oath Keepers’ presence, calling it “both unnecessary and inflammatory.” That had not kept Andrews and his heavily armed men from spending a second night walking Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue, the street at the center of the protests since Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in August 2014.
They had come to town at the behest of Joe Biggs, a writer for the conspiracist website InfoWars, who requested protection from the Oath Keepers after a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist was attacked and robbed while reporting on looters from West Florissant Sunday night. This was the Oath Keepers’ second high-profile mission to West Florissant. Months after Brown’s death, in an operation also led by Andrews, members of the group could be seen standing on rooftops along the avenue, carrying heavy weaponry and dressed in military fatigues, intending to protect business owners and residents from looters.
Belmar, the police chief, was not the only one unhappy to see them again. Demonstrators greeted the group with a mix of bafflement and anger, and even within the Oath Keepers organization, Andrews’ actions were met with suspicion. Even by the standards of a libertarian-minded vigilante organization, Sam Andrews is a bit of a freelancer: He resides in St. Louis County, but he has never attended a meeting of the greater St. Louis chapter of the Oath Keepers, and he seems to disdain those who do attend. Biggs, whom Andrews counts as a personal friend, asked him directly about an Oath Keepers bodyguard detail, and Andrews called the informal group of men with whom he usually works into action, without so much as notifying the local Oath Keepers about it, much less obtaining their permission.
...more at linkhttp://gawker.com/whose-side-are-the-oa ... MediaREDEF
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