Frank Eathorne’s aggressive efforts to keep the pressure on Liz Cheney are going to be complicated by his association with an extremist group facing grave charges.
When the Department of Justice indicted members of the Oath Keepers last week for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, there was one Republican official who might have taken more notice of the arrests than others.to be one of 191 Wyoming-based members of the far-right militia group, was in Washington for protests on Jan. 6. But Eathorne is no rank-and-file fringe crank. He is the sitting chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party.
But the Oath Keepers indictments mean that Eathorne’s aggressive efforts to keep the pressure on Cheney—in hopes of replacing her with a MAGA acolyte—are going to be complicated by his association with an extremist group facing grave, and rare, federal crimes charges. Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the Western States Center—a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks far-right extremism, particularly in the West—called the militia membership of party figures like Eathorne a “dangerous signal about the state of our democracy.”
In a statement a day after the insurrection, Eathorne confirmed he was in Washington for the events, including “a brief stop in the vicinity of the Capitol building property.”