Key Oath Keepers leader revealed as former Las Vegas police detective

The man in control of the Utah-based rightwing militia Oath Keepers USA, a recent spinoff of the national organization first established by Stewart Rhodes in 2009, is a former Las Vegas metropolitan police department (LVMPD) homicide detective who left the force in acrimony after advocating “race war”.

The revelations about Robert “Bobby” Kinch, now of Duck Creek, Utah, come from public records, online materials and the work of a longtime infiltrator of the patriot movement in the Pacific north-west, who provided vital evidence to the Guardian captured inside Kinch’s home.

The findings show that four years on from January 6, the Oath Keepers, who played a central role in fomenting that day’s insurrection in Washington, have not disappeared but have continued quietly adding law-enforcement officers to their ranks.

The return of Donald Trump to the presidency may encourage the likes of Kinch to bring their movement back into the spotlight, as the incoming administration promises to carry out unprecedented mass deportation of immigrants and to take on Trump’s perceived opponents, whom he has described as “the enemy within”.

Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), said: “These disclosures show once again how police departments aren’t taking the threat of extremists in the ranks seriously.”

Inside Oath Keepers USA

The infiltrator – whose name the Guardian is withholding over fears of retaliation – spent several years from 2021 in contact with multiple, interconnected and overlapping anti-government “patriot movement” groups in the Pacific north-west and intermountain west.

Their trove of archived materials includes chat logs, documents and media files, and has been made available to the Guardian and other news organizations by the whistleblower and pro-transparency non-profit, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets).

The materials also include first-hand photographs and recordings of direct interactions with anti-government leaders who believed that the infiltrator was a like-minded activist, and who accepted them into their inner circles.

Among those is a series of photographs taken inside Kinch’s home in Duck Creek, an unincorporated village in the remote Cedar Mountains of southern Utah, during a visit in early 2023.

Kane county property records indicate Kinch and his wife own a one-acre property located at the GPS reference recorded by the infiltrator at the time of his visit. The same records indicate Kinch acquired the property from John Ducas, another former Las Vegas police detective, in 2018.

And Kinch’s links to the Oath Keepers, a key group that fomented the January 6 insurrection, are not to be taken lightly.

Images captured during the visit include firearms and airsoft guns, a large stockpile of shelf-stable food and survival equipment, and tactical gear.

Also captured in the photographs are a series of plaques commemorating Kinch’s service in the Las Vegas police: one from the LVMPD Sheriff’s Protective Association, indicating his membership between 2002 and 2016; one from the department, celebrating his “22 years, 11 months of service, August 31 1993 to July 31 2016”; and a third memorializing his seven years in the “career criminal section”.

The last plaque is emblazoned with a quote from Ernest Hemingway’s 1936 Esquire article, On the Blue Water: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”

Another series of photos capture a blank Oath Keepers Utah membership certificate with a space for a signature at the bottom right with “Bobby Kinch, state leader” printed underneath.

Utah company records indicate that Northbridge Patriots LLC was incorporated in that state in September 2022, with Kinch as president, a position he still holds.

That company, in turn, has held the trademarks for Oath Keepers USA since May 2023, according to US Patent and Trademark Office records.

Text on the membership certificate reminds the recipient, that “as an Oath Keeper, the member has pledged NOT to obey the 10 specific unlawful actions listed in our ‘Declaration of Order We Will NOT Obey’”.

The orders not to obeyed, first laid out by the now-imprisoned founder, reflect the organization’s paranoid view of the federal government, and include “We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people”; “We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps”; and “We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.”

The Guardian repeatedly reached out to Kinch by phone and text but got no response.

‘Race war, civil, revolution? Bring it!’

Kinch’s last brush with notoriety happened a decade ago when his career as a veteran LVMPD detective went off the rails.

According to reporting from the Las Vegas Sun, KNPR and Raw Story, Kinch had been serving in the department’s elite repeat offenders program (ROP) since 2009. In December 2013, however, fellow officers discovered inflammatory Facebook posts, including one that read: “Let’s just get this over! Race war, Civil, Revolution? Bring it! I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!”

According to later findings of fact in a Nevada discrimination suit brought against the LVMPD by John Ducas, who had also been a senior ROP detective, the post was made on his Facebook wall.

The same court document said: “Ducas and Kinch considered themselves to be politically conservative, while they viewed the junior members of the ROP to be politically liberal.”

A few months into 2014, Lt Clint Nichols, a Black officer who supervised Kinch, learned of the Facebook post and suspended him. A subsequent internal investigation unearthed a photo showing Kinch pointing a handgun at a commemorative plate bearing Barack Obama’s image.

The photo was taken at a party where several police officers were present. The plate had been given to Kinch as a gag gift by a junior ROP officer, and the photo was brought to investigators’ attention by a union official.

The then deputy chief, Gary Schofield, alerted the United States Secret Service when he learned of the photo. This nearly triggered a federal raid that was only halted by an intervention by Sheriff Doug Gillespie, which slowed down federal investigators enough to forestall departmental embarrassment.

Despite a five-page memo from Nichols outlining why Kinch should no longer serve as an officer, the police department allowed him back to work with no more than a written reprimand.

Beirich called this outcome “completely unacceptable. It left an officer on the force who could be a danger to the constituents he was supposed to serve.”

Kinch was subsequently administratively reassigned to desk duty outside the ROP. However, this in turn became the basis of a discrimination lawsuit, in which he claimed that his reassignment was a form of retaliation that had cost him overtime income.

That action was entangled with a 2015 discrimination complaint filed by Kinch’s close colleague Detective John Ducas, for whom Kinch provided supporting testimony in October 2014.

Following this testimony, Kinch claimed he was transferred away from investigating cases involving Black suspects and had his overtime opportunities curtailed.

The department attempted to contain the fallout by quietly adopting a new social media policy in July 2015 that explicitly prohibits discriminatory speech and threatens termination for violations.

The evidence uncovered by the infiltrator indicates that a year later, Kinch had quit the department.

In an email, LVMPD’s public information officer wrote: “Robert Kinch voluntarily retired from LVMPD in July of 2016”

Beirich said of Kinch’s long tenure at the force after his invocation of race war: “Far too many Oath Keeper cops have been found in the ranks of police departments in recent years.”

She added: “No one who is associated with a group whose leader is now imprisoned for seditious conspiracy, and whose basic purpose is to disregard government orders they disagree with, should be employed by any police force.”