Two out of five defendants linked to the far-right Oath Keepers group were found guilty on seditious conspiracy charges Tuesday in what was the governments highest-stakes Capitol riot trial held so far.

The Oath Keepers founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes, and a member who ran the Florida chapter, Kelly Meggs, were both found guilty in a verdict that came after three days of deliberations. On other charges, however, the jury was mixed, finding Rhodes guilty of obstructing an official proceeding but not guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. Meggs was guilty of both of those.

The three other defendants were found guilty on lesser charges.

Proceedings in the trial stretched on for nearly two months, as the process of selecting a panel of 12 jurors and a handful of alternates began the last week of September.

Prosecutors stood to prove that the deadly mob that stormed the seat of U.S. legislative power posed a real threat to American democracy. The guilty verdict even a mixed one underlines the importance of efforts to hold participants accountable efforts including those of the House Jan. 6 select committee, which is currently preparing to release a hotly anticipated report of its findings.

Defendants Rhodes, Meggs, Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins and Kenneth Harrelson were each accused of scheming to disrupt the transfer of presidential power by force on Jan. 6, 2021. While Caldwell, Watkins and Harrelson managed to dodge convictions on seditious conspiracy, all five were found guilty of obstructing an official proceeding, a charge frequently seen in trials for Jan. 6 defendants.

Judge Amit Mehta is expected to hand down sentences in the coming weeks.

The rarely used seditious conspiracy charge carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, the same maximum as obstructing an official proceeding. To date, the longest sentence anyone has gotten for participating in the attack on the Capitol was 10 years behind bars, doled out to a former New York City police officer who attacked Washington law enforcement.

Three of the defendants took the stand: Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers as an anti-government militia after the election of former President Barack Obama ; Caldwell, whose lawyers suggested his poor health prevented him from seriously acting on any threats he made to overthrow the government; and Watkins, who angrily voiced her support for election fraud theories in court.

All three struggled to varying degrees when confronted with evidence of their own past statements during cross-examination.

For more than a decade, the Oath Keepers have recruited active and former law enforcement and military servicemembers who pledge to oppose any orders they consider unconstitutional.

Written messages, including Signal messages and blog posts, displayed in the courtroom revealed how Rhodes often used grandiose language to suggest the groups mission had an almost biblical purpose. In one open letter to then-President Donald Trump , which was posted on the Oath Keepers website in late December, Rhodes outlined what was at stake if Trump failed to block Joe Biden s electoral victory.

If you fail to do your duty, he told Trump, you will leave We the People no choice but to walk in the Founders footsteps, by declaring the regime illegitimate, incapable of representing us, destructive of the just ends of government to secure our liberty and to be a mere puppet of a deadly foreign enemy.

At trial, evidence showed how members of the group stashed a large quantity of powerful rifles and ammunition, along with other survival gear, just outside the Washington, D.C., border at a hotel where they were staying. While Washington has strict gun control regulations, Virginias laws are laxer.

Prosecutors showed stills from security cameras in which defendants could be seen wheeling in large cases of the supplies, which a QRF, or quick reaction force, could transport to the Capitol if needed. Text messages showed Caldwell debating whether he should have a boat on hand to ferry the weapons across the Potomac River, although Caldwell denied that was ever his plan. (In one of the trials more absurd moments, Caldwell testified that a text-message reference to moving heavy weapons was just something out of a screenplay he was writing.)

Rhodes also denied that the weapons were part of a QRF, telling the court that Oath Keepers were simply accustomed to traveling heavily armed but wanted to respect D.C.s gun laws which he termed bullshit in one audio recording of an Oath Keepers leadership phone call.