This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI means for the agency's ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots. Read Part 1 here.

In August 2019, a 21-year-old white man named Patrick Crusius drove 650 miles to El Paso, Texas, walked into a Walmart with a rifle and opened fire, killing 23 people in an attack that deliberately targeted Hispanics.

The El Paso massacre made 2019 the deadliest year for domestic violent extremism since 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Crusius clearly stated in a manifesto that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using language that directly echoed President Donald Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections describing a migrant caravan as “an invasion.”

ALSO READ: Going to come after you': Inside Kash Patel's 'lawfare' suit against ex-Pence official

So devastating was the attack that Trump, not typically one to acknowledge right-wing extremism, was compelled to tell the nation during an address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House: “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”

The president added: “We must shine a light on the dark recesses of the internet and stop mass murders before they start.”

Beyond the president’s words, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — the two federal agencies most responsible for addressing domestic terrorism — seemed to get serious about white supremacist violence.

Mixed record on handling white supremacist terror

The Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, released in September 2019, observed that “white supremacist violent extremism… is one of the most potent forces driving domestic terrorism,” while noting that deaths caused by domestic terrorists had eclipsed those caused by foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and al-Qaeda.

Five days before a Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va. in January 2020 that received President Trump’s endorsement, the FBI arrested three men in Maryland who were members of the Base, an accelerationist group that promoted insurrectionary violence as a first step towards creating a whites-only homeland. According to court documents, the three men, who included a Canadian national, acquired 150 rounds of ammunition and trained at a Maryland gun range.

While planning to attend the Richmond rally, two of the men allegedly discussed conducting ambushes against police officers and unsuspecting civilians. One of them mused that “Virginia can spiral out to f---ing full-blown civil war,” while another fantasized that “if there’s like a po-po cruiser parked on the street and he doesn’t have a backup, I can execute him at a whim and just take his stuff.”

The three men eventually pled guilty to federal firearms charges and received sentences ranging from five to nine years in prison.

But the decisive manner in which the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security moved to combat violent extremism during the final years of his Trump’s first administration gives some reason for cautious optimism that they’ll be able to continue to do that work during the next administration — even as the president-elect pours rhetorical fuel on the fire.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told Raw Story that the federal government’s pivot towards addressing the threat of white supremacist terrorism under the first Trump administration suggests that it is still viewed as a “bipartisan national security issue.”

“No matter what party they’re in, no president wants to see a massive terrorist attack on their watch,” she said.

Others are not so sure the field agents devoted to disrupting accelerationist terror plots will remain unscathed by politicization of the bureau.

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story that it’s a safe bet that agents involved in the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election will face the most intense scrutiny.

“But we’re fooling ourselves if we think that’s where it stops,” he added.

While the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security ramped up their efforts to disrupt violent white supremacists in 2019 and 2020, the final two years of the first Trump administration also showed how domestic terrorism could be politicized.

Elizabeth Neuman, who served as assistant secretary for threat prevention and security policy at the Department of Homeland Security, has said that officials in the Trump administration didn’t want to use the term “domestic terrorism” after the 2019 El Paso massacre. But when left-wing protests, some of which turned violent, erupted in response to the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr said: “The violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.”

Assuming Trump carries through on his promise to initiate widescale deportations when he takes office in January, Lewis said the response from federal law enforcement will bear scrutiny.

“At a strategic level, the concern would be around resourcing if there’s a massive shift away from the domestic [terrorism] desks and a reprioritization to anarchists or environmental activists, where every left-wing threat against an ICE facility was viewed as terrorism,” Lewis said.

Despite clear evidence of the persistent threat of white supremacist violence and the FBI’s track record of aggressively disrupting terror plots over the past five years, it remains to be seen whether Trump will continue to support the agency’s counterterrorism focus when he returns to the White House.

Trump said little or nothing during the 2024 campaign about whether he views white supremacist domestic terrorism as a problem. Meanwhile, he and his allies have obsessively focused on their grievances against FBI investigations targeting Trump and supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Trump transition team and Kash Patel, whom the president-elect announced will lead the FBI, did not return messages for this story.

The emergence of Terrorgram

The white supremacist domestic terror threat didn’t end when the FBI dismantled the Base in 2020, or, for that matter, when Trump left the White House in January 2021. The El Paso massacre and an earlier, even deadlier attack — when a 28-year-old Australian national named Brenton Tarrant gunned down 51 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019 — exemplified the kind of terror plots the FBI would scramble to disrupt during the Biden era.

The new threat would come not from groups, but from lone actors loosely networked through the internet and goaded into action by online propaganda.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security officially acknowledged accelerationism as a driver of domestic terrorism for the first time in May 2021.

“Themes like ‘gamification’ and ‘accelerationism’ partly inspired some of the attacks in 2019 and will likely continue to inspire future plots,” the two agencies said in their jointly issued Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism document. “Widely disseminated propaganda on online forums and encrypted chat applications that espouse similar themes regarding kill counts could inspire future attackers to mobilize faster or attempt increasingly lethal and more sophisticated attacks.”

The assessment included a definition of accelerationism: “a belief among some neo-Nazi and/or fascist RMVEs that the current system is irreparable, without apparent political solutions, and hence violent action is needed to precipitate societal collapse and start a race war.”

Fears among counterterrorism officials about recurring white supremacist violence driven by online propaganda and obsession with “kill counts” turned out to be warranted.

In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron drove three and a half hours from his home in Conklin, N.Y. and walked into a grocery store on the east of Buffalo, where he opened fire and killed 10 people, almost all of them African Americans. Gendron issued a manifesto that cited Tarrant as an inspiration.

The pattern would repeat more than a year later, in August 2023, when a 21-year-old man named Ryan Palmeter fatally shot three Black people at a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, Fla. Palmeter, like Gendron, praised Tarrant as an exemplar.

Following the Buffalo massacre, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security would observe “a significant shift in some of the [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists’] coordinated efforts to spread overtly violent and racist propaganda within encrypted chat applications, specifically to encourage others to engage in violence.”

The online propaganda referenced in the agencies’ most recent joint assessment appears to be the Terrorgram Collective, a loose network that produces and distributes digital publications that provide detailed instructions for carrying out mass shootings and energy grid attacks, while extolling racist mass murderers as “saints.”

Dallas Erin Humber and Matthew Robert Allison, the two alleged leaders of Terrorgram, were arrested in September 2024 and charged with multiple felonies, including conspiracy and soliciting hate crimes, which could garner each of them up to 220 years in prison.

For every Payton Gendron who successfully carries out a lethal mass shooting, there are likely a dozen more plots targeting African Americans, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that the FBI disrupts — almost always by using informants.

The FBI has demonstrated an increasingly “nuanced understanding of the threat” posed by neo-Nazi accelerationists, Lewis, the research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story.

“These agents have their finger on the pulse, no question,” he said.

The FBI arrested Kyle Christopher Benton, a 26-year-old resident of Snohomish, Wash. on Sept. 6 for illegal possession of a machine gun. According to the government, Benton had been arrested for domestic violence while serving in the U.S. Army in 2019. Witnesses interviewed for that case revealed that Benton expressed admiration for Tarrant and talked about a fantasy of getting in a shootout with federal law enforcement agents. He had also allegedly “communicated with another person about the idea of killing a homeless person to see how it would feel.”

For years, the government said, Benton had expressed support for accelerationism, and in 2021 he told an informant that he supported an initiative to create a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest. When Gendron opened fire in the Tops supermarket in Buffalo, Benton allegedly told an acquaintance in a private Instagram message: “Today has been another glorious entry into the annals of Aryan Terror. The harder the jew system presses back, the more the Aryan Will shall be unleashed to wreak havoc and death upon the hordes of our racial and spiritual adversaries.”

In August 2024, according to the government, Benton posted on the encrypted app Telegram that he was “going into random chats and hyping up saints," adding that he "might get some weirdo to become a saint because he knows people will love him.” Around the same time, the government said, Benton posted a video of himself firing a fully automatic firearm.

The Benton case illustrates the dilemma faced by FBI agents who are answering the charge given by then-President Trump in 2019 to “stop mass murders before they start.”

“There’s no charge for a neo-Nazi who’s talking about committing a mass shooting or taking overt steps to carry out a mass shooting,” Lewis told Raw Story. “Until he’s at the synagogue door, there are precious few options for the FBI other than the low-level charges like possessing an illegal machine gun.

“That’s just to take them off the playing field,” Lewis continued. “When you look at how these cases evolve, you’ve certainly seen the FBI responding to the conditions as they are — the legal conditions and the conditions on the ground.”

No matter how stark the evidence, if law enforcement makes an arrest before and not after the attack, the question of whether the violence is an actual plot or just someone’s fevered imagination often comes down to the discretion of a federal judge.

Noah Edwin Anthony, a 23-year-old soldier, was stopped during a random vehicle inspection while entering Fort Liberty in North Carolina in March 2022. Military police found a ghost gun, ammunition and a patch with an American flag altered to display a Nazi swastika in place of the stars.

Later, when police searched Anthony’s barracks, they discovered a military-style operational document entitled “Top Secret Goebbels” that described a “premeditated plan to physically remove as many of the” Black, Hispanic and mixed-race people from the four counties surrounding Fort Liberty “by whatever means need be.”

The document outlined a litany of methods, including ricin poisoning, arson and shooting, while naming “minority businesses, meeting places and neighborhoods” as targets.

“There are members of the government that believe that but for the actions of that gate guard at Fort Liberty, we could have very well seen a mass casualty event in the Eastern District of North Carolina,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gabriel Diaz told the court during Anthony’s sentencing in March 2024.

Diaz argued that a prison sentence of three years and four months was necessary to deter violence and protect the public.

But when Anthony stood before the judge, he received only 18 months — the lowest sentence in the guideline range.

“My job is to protect the public from further crime by the defendant,” Judge Richard E. Myers II, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Trump, told Anthony. “If Mr. Diaz is right that there is a genuine risk going forward, then shame be on this judge. Right? If you go out and hurt somebody, I have failed. And believe me, I think about that.”

This is the second in a two-part series about what Trump's return to the White House and Kash Patel's appointment as the next director of the FBI mean for the agencies ongoing efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.. Read Part 1 here.

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist named by President-elect Donald Trump to lead the FBI, has financially backed a lawsuit against former Trump administration official derided as a “RINO” that raises questions about how he would wield power as head of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency.

Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, has confirmed in a court filing that the Kash Patel Legal Offense Trust (now known as the Kash Foundation) contributed $7,500 to support his defamation lawsuit against Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism advisor to Vice President Mike Pence.

Grenell’s lawsuit, which is currently pending in federal court, alleges that Troye defamed him posting a reply on Twitter (now X). Troye’s tweet, a reply to Rep. Ted Lieu (R-CA) stated that prior to serving as acting director of national intelligence, Grenell, as ambassador to Germany, “tried to get Mike Pence to attend a white supremacist gathering.”

The German news outlet Der Spiegel has reported that members of the far-right party Alternative for Germany posed with Grenell at the U.S. Embassy’s Fourth of July party. The German courts have upheld a designation by the country’s domestic intelligence agency to place the party under surveillance for suspected extremism.

ALSO READ: Trump allies promise revenge as Dems ram through Biden judges

Troye testified in a deposition for the case that Stephanie Dobitsch, who served in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, told her that Grenell “tried to get Pence to meet with Nazis.” Troye also testified that Dobitsch told her that Pence did not attend the gathering. Dobitsch appears to have given the same account to Brian Murphy, who also worked in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, based on a statement by Murphy that was submitted to the court by Troye.

Murphy wrote that during a 2020 conversation with Dobitsch, she told him that Grenell had advised her during a meeting in advance of Pence’s visit to Berlin that “the vice president should meet with a German civil society group.” Murphy said Dobitsch told him that she went to the group’s office to vet them and concluded that the “group Grenell suggested was a far-right extremist group… similar to a neo-Nazi organization,” and that she advised “that meeting with the group Grenell suggested would be a political disaster for the vice president.”

Patel announced the lawsuit against Troye on his Fight With Kash website in August 2022 in an article headlined, “Fight With Kash & Ric Grenell file defamation suit against fired deep state employee.”

He also posted on Truth Social at the time: “Today, “FightWithKash.com and @grenell took decisive action against the deep state and fake news mafia.”

Jesse Binnall, who represents Grenell in the lawsuit, is listed as a member of the board of directors for the Kash Foundation on its 2023 990 report.

Patel announced the filing of Grenell's defamation lawsuit against Troye on Truth Social in August 2022.Federal courts

In a motion to dismiss filed in federal court in May, Troye argued that the lawsuit, with Patel’s financial backing, is part of a “lawfare MAGA campaign to silence critics.” The lawsuit, she said, is intended by Grenell and his lawyers “to silence and punish those who criticize them and other MAGA luminaries.”

In another filing, Troye described the suit as “a political stunt at its heart to stifle criticism and cause perceived opponents to incur legal fees so that they would shy away from further comments.”

Reached by phone, Binnall acknowledged questions from Raw Story and said he would confer with Grenell, but the two men did not respond in time for publication.

Grenell, who was reportedly a final candidate for the secretary of state position before being passed over in favor of Sen. Marco Rubio, hailed Patel’s nomination on Instagram on Sunday. Grenell referred to Patel, who worked under him at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as “my brother from another mother.”

Former acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell congratulated Kash Patel on his appointment to lead the FBI in an Instagram post on Sunday.Instagram screengrab

Patel has made no secret of his desire to enact retribution against Trump’s perceived political opponents.

“We will go and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media,” he told Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, in 2023. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”

In an interview with Raw Story, Troye warned that Patel could use his position as FBI director to carry out vendettas against anyone who runs afoul of Trump, including Republicans.

“There’s nothing to stop him from making up bogus charges and doing frivolous investigations,” she said. “And then the question is — it’s going to fall on the workforce to stand against things that they know are not legal or viable. But how long will that workforce be able to hold the line? Do I have faith in law enforcement and the integrity of many of these people who serve in these roles? Yes. However, depending on how many people they go in and fire, lawfully or unlawfully, just how many people fall in line remains to be seen.”

Patel could not be immediately reached for comment for this story.

Troye added that the combination of Patel and Pam Bondi, whom Trump has named to serve as attorney general, “is very dangerous because she could provide top cover for Patel to carry out some of these things.”

NOW READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy-monger and MAGA propagandist, announced on his Election Day show that it was “doomsday for the globalists.” But he warned his listeners to be on the lookout for false flag attacks calculated to try to spoil candidate Donald Trump’s victory.

“And now, we’re beginning to see the signs,” Jones said. “But this, too, will fail. No one’s gonna buy it.”

His voice dripping with mockery, Jones said: “And then we’ve got the white supremacist — handled and run by the FBI, they built him the bomb, controlled him, were his leaders, they admit in the arrest documents and the press release.

“They’ve been telling you, ‘Oh, the white supremacist Trump supporters are going to blow up the power stations.’ Boom,” Jones continued. “Or do they just say it enough and loons go, ‘Oh yeah that’s a good idea!’ I mean, either way, they’re putting it out there.”

Law enforcement agents arrested 24-year-old Skyler Philippi on Nov. 2 as he powered up a drone and prepared to attach explosives to it while sitting in the back of an SUV. He had been planning to fly the drone into a nearby electrical substation in Nashville, Tenn., according to a federal complaint.

A drifter who had bounced from his hometown in Minnesota to the New Hampshire woods, and then to a Nazi “hate house” in Louisville, Ky., Philippi was living in Middle Tennessee by the summer of 2024. By then, according to the charging document, Philippi was talking to an FBI informant to whom he had confided that he wanted to commit a mass shooting at a YMCA.

This person put Philippi in contact with a second informant who lived close enough so that the two could meet in person. According to the charging document, Philippi mentioned his interest in carrying out an attack on an electrical substation that would “shock the system” and talked about accelerationism, a strain of white supremacist ideology that advocates hastening the collapse of society to lay the groundwork for a whites-only homeland.

“If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis,” Philippi allegedly texted the second informant.

Philippi’s arrest, which Jones dismissed as a “false flag alert” on his X account on Election Day, is only the most recent of at least half a dozen arrests by the FBI of accelerationists motivated by hatred of Black people, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ+ people that Raw Story has tracked over the past year. The defendants are accused of planning infrastructure attacks, mass shootings and ambushes against law enforcement.

The arrests, including the two alleged leaders of the Terrorgram Collective, described by the FBI as “a transnational terrorist group,” reflect the agency’s aggressive and increasingly sophisticated effort — often using informants — to disrupt accelerationist terror plots.

“Protecting the American people from terrorism — both international and domestic — is the FBI’s top priority,” the FBI said in a statement to Raw Story. “In 2019, we elevated racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism to be the one of our top threat priorities and it has remained at that level.”

Alex Jones’ dismissal of the foiled Nashville substation attack as an FBI “false flag” represents a larger tendency within the MAGA movement to reflexively downplay domestic terrorism motivated by white supremacy, just as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House and is reportedly preparing to replace current FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Neither Trump nor his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris raised domestic terrorism as a significant issue during the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies relentlessly attacked the FBI and Department of Justice as the “Deep State” while promising to carry out retribution against officials involved in the multiple investigations against him and supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Kash Patel, the MAGA loyalist Trump has announced as his pick for FBI director, previously served as chief of staff for the Department of Defense during the incoming president's first term and led a probe of the FBI's investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Trump and Patel have given little indication of whether he will support the FBI’s campaign to combat domestic terrorism, which has assessed violent extremism driven by a belief in white supremacy as being among the agency’s “highest priority threats.”

The Trump transition team and Patel did not respond to emails for this story.

Patel’s book Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy, published last year, devotes the first eight chapters to the FBI and the Department of Justice, but says little to nothing about domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. The book only addresses domestic terrorism as a whole to argue that the FBI has exaggerated the problem for the purpose of unfairly maligning conservatives.

Patel, who prosecuted members of ISIS and al-Qaeda as a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s counterterrorism division from 2013 to 2017, writes in a chapter entitled “Made-Up Domestic Terrorism” that “to pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data about domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

As a source for his claim, the footnote in Patel’s book cites a news article about a letter written by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, to Wray. Jordan wrote that a “whistleblower explained that because agents are not finding enough DVE cases, they are encouraged and incentivized to reclassify cases as DVE cases even though there is minimal, circumstantial evidence to support the reclassification.

White supremacist violence in first Trump administration

The FBI told Raw Story that “between 2015 and 2019, the most lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremism in the United States was from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists driven by a belief in the superiority of the white race.”

Those years bookend the June 2015 massacre carried out by 21-year-old Dylann Roof at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. that resulted in the deaths of nine African-American parishioners and the August 2019 mass shooting that targeted Latinos at an El Paso, Texas Walmart, taking the lives of 23 people.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security recognized 2019 as “the most lethal year for DVE attacks since 2015,” when Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb that at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.

Shortly before 21-year-old Patrick Crusius opened fire at the Walmart in El Paso, gunman Patrick Crusius published a manifesto stating that his attack was “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” using a word that directly echoed Trump’s claim during the 2018 mid-term elections that a Central American migrant caravan approach the southern border was “an invasion.”

The following day, Trump issued a formal statement from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House that addressed the manifesto, while omitting any mention of his rhetoric.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump said.

“We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts,” he added. “We must shine light on the dark recesses of the internet, and stop mass murders before they start.”

His condemnation of the El Paso massacre notwithstanding, Trump has only escalated his rhetoric against immigrants since 2019.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump likened migrants crossing the southern border to “a military invasion,” while claiming that the United States was being “conquered” and “occupied by a foreign element.”

In other respects, Crusius’ manifesto didn’t just echo Trump’s own rhetoric, but forecasted positions that would be adopted by Trump and the GOP at large years later.

Crusius wrote: “The Democrat party will own America and they know it. They have already begun the transition by pandering heavily to the Hispanic voting bloc in the 1^st Democratic Debate.”

Five years later, during his debate with Harris, Trump gestured towards his Democratic opponent, saying, “Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”

Tom Homan, whom Trump has named as his “border czar” during the next administration, made a similar false claim during a speech at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival in Pennsylvania in October.

“Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the first administration in the history of this nation who unsecured a border on purpose,” Homan said. “This isn’t an accident, this isn’t incompetence, this is by design, folks…. They obviously perceive a political advantage, thinking maybe they are future Democratic voters.”

A key reason for the enduring appeal of accelerationism — the white supremacist ideology repeatedly cited by the FBI in charging documents for disrupted terror plots — is dehumanizing narratives in the political and media discourse, said Matt Kriner, the managing director of the Accelerationist Research Consortium.

“What we’re seeing now is there’s a lot of discussion in the mainstream media around the ‘great replacement’ theory,” Kriner told Raw Story. “That’s a central component of their radicalization gateway. You get this swirling mix of terrorist propaganda and manifestos and mainstreamed narratives like the anti-Haitian conspiracy in Springfield, which creates a highly toxic and compelling radicalization environment.”

This is the first in a two-part series on the FBI's efforts to disrupt accelerationist terror plots as Donald Trump returns to power.

NOW READ: Merrick Garland and his 'Justice' Department should never be forgiven

With the nomination of former congressman Matt Gaetz, a MAGA loyalist known for hyperbolic rhetorical attacks against Donald Trump’s enemies, to serve as attorney general, the president-elect appears to be eying the U.S. Justice Department as a cudgel against his political enemies.

At the top of the target list is Special Counsel Jack Smith, who obtained indictments against Trump for subverting the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents, followed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Mike Davis, a pro-Trump lawyer who previously served as chief counsel for nominations to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, broached a plan to pursue retribution against Trump’s enemies during an appearance on former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast on Tuesday.

“There must be severe legal, political and financial consequences,” Davis said, after citing the FBI raid on Trump’s personnel residence at Mar-a-Lago during Smith’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents. The case was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge appointed by Trump.

READ: The one belief that predicted Trump voters with scary accuracy

“And it needs to happen at the Department of Justice through the Office of Professional Responsibility, through a probe, a criminal probe,” Davis continued. “Maybe President Trump should file civil lawsuits for this obvious violation of his civil rights and other torts against him.”

Davis also referenced the successful prosecution by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and pending charges brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis related to the effort to overturn the 2020 election in his remarks.

Bannon, for his part, said during the segment that there was an “active discussion” about “a special prosecutor to be named by the Trump administration” that would “look into all of this.”

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, has also called for Smith “to be indicted for blatant election interference.” (Flynn pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, but the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration dismissed charges, and Trump pardoned him.)

Trump routinely attacked Smith on the campaign trail by calling him “deranged,” and last month vowed to “fire him within two seconds” and said “he should be thrown out of the country.”

Trump has called for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who obtained a $450 million civil judgment against his businesses for falsely inflating the value of their assets, to “be prosecuted.” And after a jury in Manhattan convicted Trump of 34 felonies in the hush money case involving porn actress Stormy Daniels, Trump reportedly said District Attorney Alvin Bragg “should be prosecuted or at a minimum he should resign.”

Trump’s announcement that he’s choosing Gaetz, who must clear confirmation from the incoming Republican-controlled Senate, for the job of attorney general, highlighted his preoccupation with using the nation’s top law enforcement agency to exact retribution on his political opponents.

“Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System,” Trump said in his announcement, while promising that Gaetz “will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ.”

Walter C. Holton Jr., a former U.S. attorney appointed by President Bill Clinton, told Raw Story there is “no legitimate basis” to launch a criminal investigation against Smith.

Holton contrasted the idea of prosecuting Smith that Trump’s allies are floating to the case of Mike Nifong, a district attorney in Durham, N.C. who was disbarred and went to jail for contempt of court after falsely accusing three Duke University lacrosse players of rape in 2006.

Holton noted that in that case, the prosecutor ignored facts or chose not to investigate facts that undermined his case.

“But this situation is entirely different because what the special counsel is doing is operating through grand juries, and he allowed grand juries to make the decisions using facts and witnesses,” Holton said. “It’s not just a warrant for arrest, which is what Nifong did through a magistrate…. There is typically a degree of immunity accorded to prosecutors who are operating in good faith.”

Holton said he feels confident the American justice system would withstand any effort to harass Trump’s political enemies by bringing bogus criminal charges.

“I tend to think the founders of the country are stronger than a bunch of clowns in a car yelling out the window — which is what these guys are,” Holton said.

Davis and Gaetz could not be reached for comment for this story.

Holton noted former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who pressed Trump’s case to overturn the 2020 election, wound up losing his law license in New York and Washington, D.C.

“If you try to create and fabricate a situation that is not true, you can lose your law license,” Holton said.

If Gaetz opts to investigate a Special counsel criminally, it would not be the first time a Trump Justice Department has sought to turn the tables on an investigation that cast the incoming president in an unfavorable light.

In 2019, at Trump’s urging, Attorney General William Barr appointed Special Counsel John Durham to probe the origins of the FBI investigation into possible collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russians. That investigation, known as “Crossfire Hurricane,” resulted in “convictions of a half-dozen Trump associates, and determined that Russia intervened on the Trump campaign’s behalf and that the campaign welcomed the help,” according to an Associated Press report.

Durham’s counter-investigation resulted in one conviction: An FBI lawyer pleaded guilty to altering an email related to secret surveillance of an ex-Trump aide.

Durham also brought another case against a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, which ended in acquittal.

Durham’s final report concluded that the FBI minimized critical evidence, such as a witness denying to a federal informant that he had any knowledge of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication of Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political and other purposes,” the Durham report concluded. “Unfortunately, it did not.”

Call to fire DOJ career lawyers who refuse Trump’s orders

Trump’s choice to select Gaetz as attorney general aligns with a push among his allies to consolidate the incoming president’s control over the Justice Department while setting aside a post-Watergate norm of insulating the department from political influence.

Trump’s interest in exerting greater control over the Justice Department surfaced most dramatically when he expressed indignation about his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recusing himself from the investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russians, telling the New York Times that it was “very unfair to the president.”

Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for the Office of Management & Budget in the first Trump administration, issued a warning on Wednesday to “career DOJ lawyers” who might resist implementing Trump’s agenda.

“Any civil servant who claims their actions to resist policy initiative will be doing so to uphold the rule of law is being dishonest,” he wrote on X. “They are undermining the rule of law and subverting democracy and should be fired.”

In an interview with One America News Network host Chanel Rion on the far-right on Tuesday, Paoletta emphasized that, in his view, Trump “has every right and responsibility and duty to exercise control over the Department of Justice, right down to, if necessary, specific cases, as to what they bring and what they don’t bring.”

Trump appears to share Paoletta’s view.

In an interview with Time earlier this year, he indicated he would be open to firing federal prosecutors who refuse orders to prosecute someone, saying, “It would depend on the situation.”

Holton, the former U.S. attorney, cautioned that the Department of Justice is a “big apparatus.” Even if the incoming administration were able to magically replace roughly 110,000 career employees overnight, they would still need to move their cases through the courts.

“Every employee of the U.S. Department of Justice took an oath to the Constitution,” Holton said. “They have lived through administration after administration. They’re career people. They’re some of the best and brightest of the legal profession. To think they can be whipsawed by a Bible salesman is naïve.”

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Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has vowed to strip security clearances from dozens of former intelligence officials who signed a letter less than a month before the 2020 election warning that the Hunter Biden laptop bore the “earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

The targeted individuals include some of the top intelligence officials from the administrations of at least two former presidents. Among them are James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, and three former CIA directors—John Brennan, Leon Panetta and Mike Hayden—who served in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.

Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents seven of the signatories, told Raw Story that the move to revoke the security clearances could be only the first salvo in a wider offensive to punish political enemies and stifle voices critical of the incoming administration.

“There’s nothing to be done to prevent them from doing anything untoward or against the norm — until they do it,” Zaid said.

ALSO READ: What Trump's win really means for America

Vance pledged during a podcast interview two months ago that the incoming administration would “strip” 51 former intelligence officials “who said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation” of their security clearances.

Kash Patel, a former Department of Defense official under the first Trump administration who is widely believed to be under consideration for the job of CIA director or another top position, told a podcaster that he “recommended” to Trump that the former officials lose their security clearances, according to an ABC News report.

“They have had the opportunity to recant, and all 51 of them have doubled down and tripled down,” he said. “So, pull them. I think we will.”

Zaid said he believes that most signatories no longer hold active security clearances. But, he said, talk about targeting them could indicate a wider range of efforts to mete out punishment.

Before releasing the October 2020 letter, Zaid said the CIA had pre-cleared the document, stating that it contained no classified information. However, he said nothing would prevent Patel or another CIA director appointed by Trump from reassessing and reaching a new determination about whether or not classified information was released. Or, he said, the next CIA director could reclassify the information and find the former officials to be in breach after the fact. He said they could face prosecution under the Espionage Act in either case.

As a candidate, Trump has promised “retribution” for a wide array of grievances. His allies, including Vance, have claimed that the former officials lied in the October 2020 letter so that they could damage Trump’s reelection prospects.

“You cannot lie, take your position of public trust, and lie to the American people for political purposes,” Vance said. “It’s disgraceful. And people have to suffer consequences for it.”

A joint report issued by House Republicans in May 2023 took a swipe at the former intelligence officials by concluding that allegations that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails “were the product of Russian disinformation were false.”

Clapper, Brennan and other signatories have insisted that they did not lie in the letter.

Nowhere in the letter did the former intelligence officials state conclusively that the laptop or its contents were the work of a Russian influence operation, only that the emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” In the fifth paragraph, the authors wrote explicitly that they “do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”

In contrast to the cautious language in the letter, the headline in a story published by Politico presented the intelligence officials’ assessment as conclusive.

“Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” the headline read.

During his final debate with Trump in October 2020, Biden pushed the claim even further than the Politico story, saying, “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what [Trump is] accusing me of is a Russian plan.”

Clapper told the Washington Post the Politico story amounted to “message distortion.”

“All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation,” he said. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said.” (Politico stood behind the reporting in a statement to the Post.)

House Republicans also charged in a report released last month that efforts by government officials in 2020 to cast doubt on the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop amounted to “election interference.”

Zaid told Raw Story that the incoming Trump administration could retaliate against the former intelligence officials through various means.

“Could they concoct some crazy criminal case to say that they conspired to violate some election law?” he said. “Maybe. Do I think so? No. But I’m not going to put anything past possibility.”

To financially punish the former intelligence officials, Zaid said President-elect Trump could cut their pensions, although such a move would be unprecedented. He said some senior-level former officials likely earn money by serving on corporate boards. The incoming administration might pressure the companies to sever ties with the former officials as a condition of continuing to do business with the federal government.

Emails from Raw Story to the Trump campaign seeking comment on whether the incoming administration intends to follow through on Vance and Patel’s pledge went unreturned.

A retribution campaign against the former intelligence officials could easily dampen criticism of the incoming administration, Zaid said. Some of the signatories hold contributor contracts with media organizations. For example, Brennan, the former CIA chief, serves as an analyst for NBC and MSNBC.

Zaid noted that all of the signatories held an SCI, or sensitive compartmentalized information clearance, a high-level clearance that allows access to classified information about intelligence sources. Federal law requires people with SCI clearance to obtain pre-clearance from their respective agencies before making public remarks or statements.

In policy and practice, Zaid said it’s not uncommon for former intelligence officials to go on television and comment on emerging global crises. Technically, the former officials could face criminal penalties or find themselves on the receiving end of a civil lawsuit from the government, Zaid said.

“Rarely does the government do that,” Zaid said. “I could count on both hands the number of times the CIA and DOD has done that in 60 years. That’s normal times. This is not normal times.”

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Donald Trump’s reelection is electrifying the Jan. 6 offender community, prompting a wave of elated X posts anticipating presidential pardons and, in some cases, calling for retribution against the Department of Justice and congressional investigators.

“We are on the cusp of a prisoner exchange,” Derrick Evans, a former West Virginia state legislator who served three months in prison for storming the U.S. Capitol, wrote before the polls had closed on Tuesday. “Swapping patriots for traitors.”

At 1:39 a.m., when it was evident Trump would win, Evans wrote: “I can’t imagine the excitement from my fellow Jan 6 prisoners who are still in prison tonight. Hold on, guys… you are coming home!”

Adam Christian Johnson, who served a 75-day sentence for stealing then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s lectern on Jan. 6, posted a video of himself on X at 1:46 a.m. popping the cork on a bottle of champagne. He captioned the video: “I. Want. My. Lectern.”

Another convicted Jan. 6 offender, Eric Clark, replied to Johnson: “When we go to DC to get our pardons, we’re all going to ask Trump to let you take the lectern home with you. You’ve earned it.”

ALSO READ: The 50-year war on democracy that built Trump's oligarchy and killed the American dream

The X account of Edward “Jake” Lang, who is currently awaiting trial in a Brooklyn, N.Y. jail on a charge of assaulting police at the Capitol, posted a message at 1:32 a.m. in all caps: “IM COMING HOME!!!!! THE JANUARY 6 POLITICAL PRISONERS ARE FINALLY COMING HOME!!!!”

Even before Trump’s reelection, prosecution had hardly dampened Lang’s militancy. In June, he had announced from jail that he was forming a “militia” alongside prominent conspiracy theorists to address potential “civil unrest” surrounding the election.

The expectation that more than 500 people convicted of violent crimes at the Capitol could receive presidential pardons and a smaller number currently incarcerated could be freed is not unreasonable, considering Trump’s statements on the campaign trail.

Trump dangled the promise of pardons for Jan. 6 offenders during campaign rallies while falsely referring to them as “hostages.” And Trump kicked off his campaign in March 2023 with a rally in Waco, Tex. that featured a recording of the so-called “J6 Prison Choir” singing the Star-Spangled Banner, overlaid with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Members of the Proud Boys, the fascist street gang that provided the engine for the attack on the Capitol, also took note.

The group’s primary Telegram channel posted a message calling the election for Trump at 1:24 p.m., adding, “We are so f---ing back!”

Leaders of the group are currently serving prison sentences for seditious conspiracy ranging from 15 to 22 years. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys' former national chairman, told the Washington Post that prosecutors tried to get him to implicate Trump in the attack on the Capitol but that he refused to cooperate. Even as he faced sentencing, Tarrio publicly supported the former president who will be returning to the White House in January.

The Proud Boys Telegram channel celebrated Trump’s reelection on Wednesday morning with a series of graphics showing members in tactical gear thronging an oversized bust of Trump.

The channel also posted an obscene meme depicting Trump using a Sharpie to draw genitalia on the forehead of Attorney General Merrick Garland, accompanied by the words, “YOU’RE FIRED.”

The post was quickly followed with the message: “RELEASE ALL THE J6 POLITICAL PRISONERS NOW.”

Following news of Trump’s reelection, some Jan. 6 offenders simply expressed relief.

“DADDY TRUMP IS COMING HOME!” Rachel Powell, who is currently serving a 57-month sentence at a medium-security prison in West Virginia, posted on Wednesday morning. “When I get out, I will be working with the Patriot Freedom Project.”

Powell, who was nicknamed “Pink Hat Lady,” was seen in videos directing other rioters on how to take control of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Jenny Cudd, who was sentenced to two months of probation after pleading guilty to trespassing at the Capitol, posted a video on X at 3:09 a.m. central time saying, “We’re all real excited that we’re about to get presidential pardons.”

But others are calling for retribution.

Addressing a post to the FBI Washington Field Office and the Department of Justice, Treniss Evans, who spent 20 days in jail for obstruction of an official proceeding on Jan. 6, wrote on X: “Remember what you did to patriots? What legal justice do you think will be coming for you?”

He also singled out the now-defunct House Select January 6^th Committee chaired by Rep. Benny Thompson (D-MS).

“You sorry bastards in the so-called Select Committee, your time is coming too!” he wrote.

Some supporters of Jan. 6 offenders have also suggested that anonymous online sleuths who have provided hundreds of tips to the FBI to help identify wrongdoers should themselves face criminal charges.

Derrick Evans, the former West Virginia state lawmakers, rejected an appeal for unity made by Trump during his victory speech.

“Piss on ‘uniting the country,’” Evans wrote. “I want to see these treasonous scumbags in shackles facing a military tribunal.”

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A group of anti-government extremists who showed up in western North Carolina promising to provide disaster relief after Hurricane Helene is now threatening to destroy cell-phone towers and sabotage military vehicles.

The group, Veterans on Patrol, attracted attention by setting up a disaster relief staging area in the parking lot of the Ingles grocery store in Lake Lure, about 50 miles from Asheville.

But locals, including some who initially cooperated with the group, began to complain about threats and harassment.

Over the past three weeks, members of the group, which falsely claims that Helene was caused by a “weather weapon,” have been making conspiracy-driven claims that the U.S. military is attempting to kill U.S. citizens with “directed energy weapons.”

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Veterans on Patrol’s channel on the encrypted social-media platform Telegram posted a message on Thursday displaying photos of what appears to be a cell tower on a mountaintop. The message asserted that locals “are in Live Exercises where the United States Military is permitted to destroy your homes, bodies and minds,” while suggesting that equipment on the tower “is solely for providing the U.S. military the means to murder Americans.”

“Focus on tearing down their weapons,” the message reads. It continues, “All it takes is one weapon tower being toppled with the stated reason spoken boldly.”

Another message posted in the group’s Telegram channel appears to advocate for sabotaging military vehicles and assets.

“Simple acts of pouring sugar into fuel tanks of military equipment, backup power systems, and personal vehicles of military personnel can wreak havoc on those who murdered all these people out here,” reads the message, which was posted on Wednesday.

Soldiers from Fort Liberty and Fort Campbell have deployed to western North Carolina to assist in the disaster response, along with National Guard members from nine states.

Veterans on Patrol is led by Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, who has a long history of anti-government extremism, dating back at least 10 years. Meyer, according to the extremism watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center, is not a veteran.

Reached by phone on Friday, Meyer doubled down on the threats.

“Jesus used bullwhips and flipped tables,” he told Raw Story. “We’re going to use our bullwhips and topple towers.”

At first during the interview, Meyer argued that the Telegram messages weren’t advocating for targeting cell towers, saying instead that the group would “surgically” remove the supposed “directed energy weapons." He went on to say that they would provide Appalachian residents with generators and Starlink boxes so they could maintain power and communication links.

Asked about the message referencing “pouring sugar into fuel tanks,” Meyer told Raw Story: “We’re going to destroy your tanks…. You want to get dirty? That’s what we should be doing.”

Veterans on Patrol has promoted multiple conspiracy theories based on false claims since arriving in western North Carolina.

One message posted on Telegram on Oct. 22 claimed that “Helene was a Weather Weapon steered to destroy the area, while also claiming that the investment fund BlackRock is attempting a “land grab” and describing the storm and its aftermath as “an act of war perpetrated against the People.”

As the final day of voting in the presidential election approaches, posts on the group’s Telegram channel have taken on an increasingly urgent tone.

The Oct. 22 post claimed that “stolen elections” are a real phenomenon, along with “weather weapons,” “Satanic pedophiles” and “adrenochrome," which refers to a QAnon conspiracy theory that a cabal of elites tortures children to extract a chemical from their bodies which is then used as a recreational drug.

In another post last week, a Veterans on Patrol member nicknamed “Shepherd” claimed that the U.S. Air Force command is instructing pilots “to deploy additional weather weapons.” The post goes on to say, “These people don’t have 2 weeks to wait for vote and 3 months to hopefully wait for a Regime change.”

Another message on the group channel that was published on Wednesday suggests without basis that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff is the beneficiary of BlackRock’s supposed landgrab.

Speaking to Raw Story, Meyer seemed to all but dare law enforcement to intervene.

“For people to go and do something to prevent weapons from being deployed — that’s not a crime,” he said. “If they want to bring this to court and charge us with conspiracy, then let’s go.”

The FBI did not respond to an inquiry about Veterans on Patrol's activities, but Meyer told Raw Story in an email that he "would imagine the FBI knows full well what we are attempting through Operation Leaning Tower."

Meyer told Raw Story that he notified the office of Gov. Roy Cooper about his "operation." Cooper's office did not immediately respond to a voicemail message from Raw Story.

Phone calls from Raw Story for this story to officials in Lake Lure and Rutherford County, which surrounds the town, went unreturned.

Meyer’s history of extremism dates back to the Bundy Ranch standoff, when armed militants faced down the FBI and other federal agencies in 2014 during a dispute over rancher Cliven Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees. Meyer’s involvement in the Bundy Ranch standoff came to light later, when the Oregonian reported that he and a group of friends got into a brawl with other anti-government extremists during the standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, which Bundy and a group of armed supporters had occupied.

Meyer founded Veterans on Patrol in Arizona in 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Prior to presenting itself as a disaster response group in the aftermath of Helene, Veterans on Patrol has claimed its efforts were directed towards rescuing children from sex trafficking, addressing veteran suicide and dubious claims that the military is maliciously harming civilians. Meyer’s activities have frequently landed him in trouble with law enforcement.

Meyer was arrested twice in 2015 after emergency responders talked him down from a light pole in Surprise, Ariz. in 2015.

In 2018, was arrested by the police in Tucson, Ariz. for trespassing and an outstanding warrant for an assault charge, after occupying a tower on an industrial property. A press release from the Tucson Police Department claimed that Meyer “found an abandoned homeless encampment” on the property, “and fictitiously declared, without evidence or corroboration, that the area was the site of a sex-trafficking ring.”

The Tucson police said they received complaints from Tucson residents that Meyer and his followers had threatened and intimidated them, and Meyer made “multiple threatening and hostile remarks directed towards various elected and appointed officials” through social media.

In the summer of 2024, before Hurricane Helene, Veterans on Patrol was active in Spokane, Wash. In Telegram message from July 2, 2024, Veterans on Patrol announced to the police that it “would no longer be safe” for one of its officers “to work his beat.” The channel also posted the home addresses of city council members.

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GREENSBORO, N.C. — They came seeking Donald Trump, the keeper of their American dreams.

They came hoping Trump could do something to help their children. Or that he would hear them and respond in some way. Or maybe they would just come away with a T-shirt to remember him by.

Shannon Ward pulled out her cell phone and began filming as she and her friend entered a labyrinthine maze of bike-racks arranged to funnel attendees to the entrance of the Greensboro Coliseum where Trump would be speaking just a few hours later on Tuesday evening.

“I can’t wait to see him,” said Ward, who lives in nearby Pleasant Garden. “It’s wild seeing the president or someone who might become the president. I’m almost 43 years old, and I’ve never done that.”

She was temporarily taken aback by one of the vendors making a sales pitch with the words Trump mouthed after surviving an assassination attempt three months ago in Butler, Pa.: “Fight, fight, fight.”

“What — no,” Ward protested as she filmed. “Peace, love and equality.”

Ward didn’t vote in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Now, she’s registered, she said, and her vote will be going to Trump.

What she’s seeking in a second Trump presidency is more than just vibes, though.

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She has two special-needs children, and the Medicaid benefits they receive aren’t sufficient to provide for their care.

“It would be great to get them the help they need, and not have to go through the red tape,” Ward said.

She said she hopes Trump will do something to help.

Asked if she’s heard Trump say anything that gives any indication he’s inclined to take action, Ward paused for a moment to think about it.

Then she said recalled Trump say that the government “needs to do a better job on mental health.” It was something along the lines of, “Why wait for a tragedy when you can do something to prevent it?”

Darien Williams, a 23-year-old Black man from Graham, is also a recent convert. Williams came to the rally with his neighbor, 19-year-old Michael Strothman, who is white.

Williams sat out the 2020 election, but his mother voted for Democrat Joe Biden. Williams’ interest in cryptocurrency provided him with an entry point into the Trump movement. (In 2019, Trump said crypto’s “value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” but he reversed himself this year by pledging to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet” and launching his own digital currency project.

“He relates to my values,” Williams said of Trump. “I’m big into the digital banking industry He’s about innovation. That makes a difference to our generation, which is Generation Z.

“Usually, I don’t come out in person to vote, but with Trump I can take that chance,” Williams added.

There is an aspect of attending Trump rallies that is akin to a pilgrimage, Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Dartmouth College, told Raw Story.

“They think he’s going to look out for their interests, although everything I know about Trump suggests otherwise,” Balmer said. “He’s going to look out for himself first. He’s a salesman.”

‘Trump chosen by God’

The warren of metal barricades in the parking lot at the Greensboro Coliseum deposited rallygoers in front of a pen fashioned out of bike racks, where members of the pro-Trump religious group Rod of Iron Ministries hyped the crowd. A banner flanking one side of the pen depicted Trump raising his fist at Butler, accompanied by the text, “Trump strong. Trump chosen by God.”

Two men danced inside the pen to a hip-hop track and occasionally fist-bumped Trump supporters filing past, while a woman wearing a red MAGA hat paced the perimeter, repeating, “Everybody needs to vote. If we don’t vote, we don’t win.”

- YouTube A contingent of Trump supporters with Rod of Iron Ministries hypes Trump supporters at a rally in Greensboro, N.C. on Oct. 22, 2024.

Rod of Iron Ministries is a sect led by the Rev. Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon that splintered from the Unification Church, led by Sean’s late father Sun Myung Moon. Adherents, known as Moonies, believe that Sun Myung Moon is the messiah.

Under Sean Moon’s leadership, Rod of Iron Ministries incorporated AR-15 assault rifles into their worship and explicitly aligns with Trump. The group recently held a festival in rural northeastern Pennsylvania that featured several former Trump officials, including retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Tom Homan and Sebastian Gorka.

The crass commercialism of the vendors hawking Trump merch blended seamlessly with Rod of Iron Ministries’ religious pageantry. The Rod of Iron Ministries contingent waved a giant flag depicting Trump as Rambo, a staple of the vendor tents. They held a sign reading, “Fight, fight, fight,” echoing the pitch of the vendor working the line.

Another vendor, among a trio of men marketing anti-Kamala misogyny, serenaded the rallygoers to pitch his product.

“You gotta say no to the ho,” he sang in a smooth baritone while displaying his T-shirts. “Because that ho is just as bad as Joe. You gotta say no to the ho. I take cash, card and Venmo.”

Later, one of the foreign visitors in the Rod of Iron Ministries contingent caught the spirit and proclaimed as he strolled through the parking lot: “I say no to the ho!”

Ted O’Grady, a Rod of Iron Ministries member from Boston, had driven the Japanese visitors to Greensboro, and would be transporting them to Georgia for another Trump rally on Wednesday. Sean Moon would join them there.

Wearing a hat displaying the iconic image of Trump in Butler with the word “Fight” and a T-shirt reading, “Jesus is king,” O’Grady shook hands with a rallygoer in the line, saying, “We need revival.”

O’Grady said he does not worship Trump. But when asked why he believes Trump is chosen by God, O’Grady replied, “I think he has a certain providence for America to shift.”

He added that he doesn’t believe that Democrats are evil, notwithstanding some of the rhetoric by both Rod of Iron Ministries and the Trump campaign.

Then, O’Grady turned the tables, arguing that it’s Trump supporters who have been demonized by the left.

He complained that comparisons between Trump’s upcoming rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City and a 1939 Nazi rally are “incendiary,” despite the fact that Trump has used overtly fascist language such as calling his political opponents “vermin” and claiming that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“There are good people here,” O’Grady said. “They feel demonized. They feel that Christianity is under attack. By the way, transgender surgery is banned in Russia.

“White people are inherently racist — what do you even do with that?” he continued. “That’s a nullification argument. We should be able to have a discussion.”

Balmer told Raw Story that in addition to appealing to a sense of grievance among evangelical voters, Trump invokes what he called “the false God of American civil religion” that “invests the nation with supernatural characteristics.” These appeals pose a danger, Balmer said, not only to the “integrity of the faith” but also in promoting a kind of blind patriotism that is uncritical.

But even O’Grady said his support for Trump is not unconditional.

“A lot of the patriot side believes Trump — I don’t like to say ‘far-right’ — but they believe Trump has thrown them under the bus,” he said. “I don’t want to say he’s betrayed us; I just hope and pray he’s being guided by God.”

O’Grady expressed support for Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier. Fuentes dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, but shortly after the Republican National Convention picked a fight with the Trump campaign in an as-yet unsuccessful bid to impose ideological purity.

O’Grady mentioned Fuentes in the context of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unrelenting military assault on Gaza. But rather than focus his criticism on the Israeli government, O’Grady endorsed Fuentes’ anti-Jewish hate.

“I think he’s bringing up a good point about overwhelming Jewish power,” O’Grady said of Fuentes. “It has to be mitigated.” (Sean Moon also has a history of antisemitic statements.)

‘Keep Trump with you’

By 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the Greensboro Coliseum had reached capacity. About 25 supporters lingered around the venue’s southeast corner, eying a restricted area of the parking lot where they hoped to spot Trump emerging from his motorcade.

“Get your keychain, y’all,” one of the vendors announced. “Keep Trump with you.”

By then, Shannon Ward and her friend had already left.

Ward said they hadn’t been able to see anything inside except the Jumbotron, and if she was going to watch the event on screen she could just as easily do that at home. But she wasn’t disappointed.

“We got souvenirs,” she said, nodding towards a folded T-shirt tucked under her arm.

Vanesa Conde and her husband, Jesus, had arrived too late to get inside, but they waited on the sidewalk, hoping for the opportunity to speak with Trump when he came out.

Vanesa, an immigrant from Colombia, will take the oath of citizenship next week.

“My first vote will be for Trump,” she said.

She said she’s supporting Trump because he “saves America for the future.”

The future that needs saving, she said, includes “the kids, the pets and the economy.” While alluding to Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs with her mention of “pets,” Conde said the economy is the top issue for her.

“Four years ago, I pay 99 cents for the eggs; now, I have to pay five dollars,” she said. “It’s no fair. The economy right now is trash.”

Despite widespread complaints among voters about high prices, the United States leads developed countries in economic growth, unemployment remains relatively low, inflation has stabilized, and a long-predicted recession has been averted.

Jesus, a former truck driver wearing a white plastic cowboy hat with the words “Make America Great Again,” lamented that if he had been able to get off work an hour earlier, he would have parked his rig at the coliseum. He had wanted Trump to see a sign he painted that reads: “What would you do for the trucking community?”

Jesus said he never considered voting for Harris, having concluded that Trump was the better candidate from a financial standpoint.

Jesus grew up in the Mexican state of Sonora, just across the border from Yuma, Ariz. He came to the United States with his family at the age of 10 and became a naturalized citizen at the age of 15. He’s lived in Greensboro since 2000.

He said he doesn’t agree with Trump on all of his policies on immigration and the border.

The topic that Jesus kept coming back to was trucking. He repeatedly said during an interview that he wants to ask Trump what he can do to help. He wants any reporter with access to Trump to ask the question.

“If he helps the trucking community, he’s got this election in the bag,” Jesus said.

Jesus drove a truck for six years, including hauling shipments of Mt. Olive Pickles, based in eastern North Carolina, across the country. But then the cost of diesel went up. Freight rates went down. Regulations limiting driving hours made it impossible for him to complete his trips on time. He complained about the county taxing his rig as an asset. Eventually, he had to give up truck-driving because he wasn’t making enough money.

“I miss truck -driving,” he said. “Truck-driving is freedom. For me, it’s my American dream.”

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Far-right allies of former President Donald Trump are calling on the state legislature in North Carolina and other closely contested presidential battleground states where Republicans hold control to short-circuit the popular vote and directly award the state’s 16 electoral votes to Trump.

Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army lieutenant colonel known for pushing a similar plan four years ago to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw the 2020 election, made the pitch during an appearance at the final stop of the ReAwaken America Tour, a roadshow that mixes evangelical Christianity, conspiracy theories and slavish devotion to Trump, on Oct. 18.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security director and the event’s star attraction, introduced Raiklin as an “amazing guy” and a “friend” who “has a plan,” during the far-right gathering in Selma, a Republican-leaning suburb outside of Raleigh that is part of an area where Democrats made slight gains in the last presidential election.

“The title of my speech: How do we guarantee that North Carolina’s electors for president and vice president are, number one, not stolen by the radical commies, and guaranteed to go to the Republican nominee,” Raiklin said.

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The anti-democratic proposal rests on a novel legal framework known as the independent state legislature theory. The idea that state legislatures hold the authority to override the popular vote and directly appoint electoral votes was a component of the larger effort to overturn the last election. As Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the former president's allies in Congress attempted to prevent the certification of the election and send the electoral slates narrowly won by President Joe Biden back to friendly Republican legislatures for reconsideration.

If Republican-controlled legislatures override the popular vote and directly appoint electors during this election, it will be the first time that has happened in this country since 1876.

Raiklin said in Selma that Trump supporters should spend the next “several weeks” trying to “motivate” House Speaker Tim Moore and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who serves as president of the Senate, to convene a special session “to allocate its electors.” Considering the supermajority Republicans hold in both chambers of the North Carolina legislature, Raiklin predicted that the electors would be awarded to Trump.

Moore and Robinson could not be reached for comment for this story.

Patrick Gannon, a spokesperson for the N.C. State Board of Elections, said the scheme that Raiklin and others are promoting is illegal.

“What is being advocated is a violation of the law,” Gannon said in an email to Raw Story. “North Carolina law requires the boards of elections to certify the vote tallies in an election. North Carolina law and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 require the boards of elections to count and report the votes of its voters. The certified results of the presidential election get reported by the State Board of Elections to the secretary of state and governor, and the state’s presidential electors are assigned by the governor according to the certified results of the election."

Michael Luttig, a former U.S. circuit court judge appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush, has warned that the independent legislature theory is “the Republican blueprint to the 2024 election.”

“Unlike the Democrats’ theft claimed by Republicans, the Republicans’ theft would be in open defiance of the popular vote and thus the will of the American people,” Luttig wrote for CNN. “Poetic, though tragic, irony for America’s democracy.”

Coupled with Raiklin’s call to upend almost 150 years of custom in election administration is a history of provocative rhetoric.

Raiklin’s speech in the past has tiptoed up to the line of advocating political violence by calling for “livestreamed swatting raids” against Trump’s political enemies, and calling for Trump supporters to respond in kind to the death of Ashli Babbitt at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and to the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa. on July 13.

To be clear, there is absolutely no evidence that either the Biden administration or the campaign of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was involved in the assassination attempt against Trump in any way whatsoever.

Raiklin has continuously maintained his statements are justified, and on Monday he wrote on X: “Everyone knows that my rhetoric and intent is always tethered to legal, moral and ethical activities.”

The Helene effect

Raiklin and a North Carolina political consultant named Noel Fritsch have cited the disruption caused by Hurricane Helene as a rationale for disenfranchising voters.

“What just happened a couple weeks ago in North Carolina?” Raiklin asked during his speech at the ReAwaken America Tour stop in Selma. “Hurricane Helene, right? So, how do we guarantee that we have a free, fair, safe and secure, fully transparent election come yesterday through November 5^th?”

Raiklin’s call to set aside the popular vote in North Carolina provides an indicator of how close the contest in what is considered a must-win state in any electoral path to victory for the Republican nominee. And at least so far, devastation wrought by Helene does appear to have made an impact.

Residents of the 13 counties most affected by Helene cast 74,837 votes during the first four days of early voting, down 44 percent from the total for the same time period during early voting in the 2020 election. In contrast, residents in the remaining 87 counties cast a total of 956,375 votes in the first four days of early voting, down from 1.4 million over the same period in 2020. (The state set a record for turnout on Oct. 17, the first day of early voting, topping the previous high-water mark in 2020, but since then participation has dropped below the performance for the same time period four years ago.)

Chris Cooper, a political scientist at Western North Carolina University, told Raw Story that “even small shifts in turnout” can make the difference between which candidate carries the state. The 13 counties identified by the State Board of Elections as having the most significant disruption to infrastructure, accessibility to voting sites and postal service lean towards Trump by about 10 points, Cooper said, even when the liberal outposts of Asheville and Boone are included.

“After four days of early voting, it appears that turnout in the affected counties is lagging a bit,” Cooper wrote in an email to Raw Story. “We will see whether turnout picks up as we get close to the election, but at this very early stage, it is certainly possible that the election may, at least partially, hinge on whether voters in western North Carolina return to normal levels of engagement before Election Day.”

Fritsch, a political consultant who publishes the far-right conspiracy news site National File, has also cited the devastation caused by Helene as a reason the popular vote should be disregarded in North Carolina. Fritsch outlined his reasoning during an Oct. 13 appearance on a talk-radio show hosted by Mark McCloskey, a former personal injury lawyer in St. Louis who came to national attention when he and his wife brandished firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020.

Noting that North Carolina began sending out absentee ballots on Sept. 20, Fritsch told McCloskey: “I don’t even think it’s possible to have a fair election in the state of North Carolina given that so many of the ballots have already been mailed out. How many of them had been filled out and mailed back in? Are they secure? Are the ones that are mailed out secure? Well, the world may never know, Mark.”

Karen Brinson Bell, the state election director, has signaled that election officials across North Carolina are prepared to handle any challenges presented by the storm recovery.

Brinson Bell told reporters during a press call on Oct. 15 that her staff is “very confident in what we are going to be able to provide to the voters of western North Carolina.” She added that the resolution approved by the State Board of Elections and an emergency law passed by the state legislature are “very sound in giving the flexibility to the counties to administer this election in a way that can serve the voters and be accessible to the voters and give them the flexibility that they need to have adequate workers and adequate sites, and make adjustments to those sites in an emergency situation.”

Brinson Bell also offered assurances that absentee ballots sent out before the storm will remain secure.

“Some of the measures we’ve taken with absentee ballots we will still have strong and accurate and documented chain of custody throughout the state to ensure that those ballots that might have been [cast] by voters in affected counties that arrived elsewhere are returned safely and securely to the home county or the issuing county,” she said.

Counter-signaling from Trump

The battered turnout numbers in western North Carolina do not appear to have registered with Trump, who made a campaign stop in Asheville on Monday. And Trump and his campaign lieutenants are striking a completely different tone than peripheral allies such as Raiklin and Fritsch. In contrast to the declarations by the two men that the election may be irredeemably damaged by the storm impact, Trump on Monday expressed confidence that his supporters are getting to the polls.

Emails to the Trump campaign for thie story seeking comment on Raiklin and Fritsch's call to bypass the popular vote went unreturned.

Asked by a reporter on Monday if he had any reason to believe the election results in North Carolina would not be credible, Trump waved off concern.

“No, I think it’s the opposite,” he said. “I was so impressed. I think they have a pretty good [election] system here…. I have not heard any complaints about that. I think that the amazing thing is that they’ve come from… it was like they have no home. They stayed in the woods. I heard cases where they’re staying in the woods because they wanted to vote. And they voted.

“Not to get too political, but they tend to be very Trump areas,” the former president added. “And that the people would come out like that — I think it’s a great sign.”

As he did before the 2020 election, Trump has incessantly made false claims that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election. But he said Monday that he has not seen any evidence of cheating so far.

Standing at his side, Michael Whatley, Trump’s hand-picked co-chair of the Republican National Committee, echoed his boss’ sentiment.

“Yeah, we’re very early in the process,” Whatley said. “And we’re tracking across all 50 states right now to make sure that the systems we want to have in place are in place. And we’re very happy with the initial results.”

But Trump suggested his support for Whatley could be retracted if he winds up losing the election in North Carolina.

“And now I can blame him if something happens,” Trump said. “And I’ll say, ‘Well, I made a mistake.’ I’ll send him back. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, based on what we’re hearing from early returns. Which are really phenomenal.”

Similar calls in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona

If what happened during the 2020 election is any guide, Trump is likely to turn to outside advisors if he comes up short during the vote count in critical swing states. In December 2020, the former president met with Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell and conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne at the White House, where he entertained their proposal to use the National Guard to seize election machinery and re-run the election. That makes the maneuver to pressure Republican lawmakers to directly appoint electors a potentially appealing move, no matter the constitutional chaos that would ensue.

Raiklin and Fritsch have been seeding the idea of Republican legislatures directly awarding electoral votes to Trump, not just in North Carolina but in other states.

Raiklin spoke at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, hosted by a religious group led by Sean Moon that worships the AR-15, in Greeley, Pa. on Oct. 12.

Raiklin urged his audience to go to the state capitol in Harrisburg after the election and “confront” state lawmakers with supposed “evidence of the illegitimate steal” while demanding that “those electors are not transmitted to Congress” and using their “powers to allocate those electors by voting in a joint session.”

Fritsch made the same proposal on McCloskey's radio show.

“This is how election went for like a hundred years,” Fritsch told McCloskey. “The state capitol would just directly apportion the electors. We can go back to that. We just have to demand that our state legislatures — that are red, by the way, in North Carolina, in Georgia, in Arizona — do that.”

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The man arrested with guns outside Donald Trump’s rally in Coachella, Calif. on Oct. 12 had spoken about assassination attempts against the former president less than two weeks earlier with a retired Army lieutenant colonel who calls himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution.”

Vem Miller, a 49-year-old former music video director who now produces conspiracy-driven documentary films, interviewed retired Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin, known for circulating a “Deep State target list” against Trump’s political enemies. The interview was produced for the America Happens Network, a company co-founded by Miller that describes itself as “the anti-thesis of what the mockingbird media has to offer.”

“You know, you inspire me,” Miller told Raiklin during the interview, which was posted on the video platform Rumble on Oct. 1. “This episode’s actually going to be called, ‘What are we going to do once they steal the election,’ because that’s certain, 100 percent certainty that they’re going to steal this. And we need to be prepared.”

“I already have a plan,” Raiklin responded. “I have the counter-strategy. I’ve already war-gamed basically their next 15 moves. I got 30 moves ahead of it. I’m doing worse-case [sic] scenario. And if worse-case [sic] scenario doesn’t happen, we win, right? But I’m always planning for the worse case [sic] scenario that they can do, both within their law, legal authority, and beyond of what they’re capable of.

“So, the categories of what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna continue to try to assassinate Trump,” Raiklin continued. “I already got a plan in response to that and what should take place.”

“Tell me that,” Miller interrupted. “Say it.”

“No, no, no,” Raiklin responded. “I don’t need to put it out. Because if I put it out, people are going to think I’m trying to advocate for that to take place. I’m not. But you always have to have someone planning out worst case already in advance that has already thought through it, so that immediate action takes place. I’ve already thought through that deliberately. I got a response for that. It’s going to be worse for them if that takes place.”

Vem Miller (right) speaks with Ivan Raiklin during a taping of his show "Blood Money," which was posted to Rumble on Oct. 1.(Screengrab / America Happens Network)

Raiklin added that he had already explained his thinking during an appearance on InfoWars with conspiracy trafficker Alex Jones in February 2024.

During that exchange, Raiklin told Jones: “This is a message directly to every single person on the Deep State target list. My assessment — Ivan Raiklin’s assessment that if you assassinate any political presidential candidate, whether it’s RFK, whether it’s Trump, guess what? America will do the following: Immediately, they will respond in kind.

“If they do that, option 2 behind Trump is going to be so much better for us, and so much worse for them,” Raiklin continued.

“I was about to say, if they kill him that’s best-case scenario,” Jones agreed. “From a sick level, from a sick level medium, oh, please kill him. It’s so good after that.”

Raiklin added: “It’s going to be the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime. I assess with almost certainty, with the highest level of confidence, that if they assassinate Trump, it is so game over for them.”

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, himself a fervent Trump supporter, told reporters during a press conference that a deputy arrested Miller when he stopped his vehicle at the inner perimeter of the rally. Miller had been allowed to drive through the outer perimeter, Bianco said, because it appeared that he was either a VIP or press.

But at a checkpoint for the inner perimeter, the sheriff said the deputy noticed that the “interior of the vehicle was in quite disarray.” The deputy also noticed a homemade license plate that led him to conclude that the driver was a sovereign citizen. Bianco said the deputy found multiple driver’s licenses and passports with different names. Eventually, the deputy also found a loaded handgun and a shotgun, the sheriff said.

The arrest took place before Trump arrived at the rally. Bianco said Miller was arrested for illegal firearms.

"If you're asking me right now, I probably did have deputies that prevented the third assassination attempt," Bianco said.

Miller denied that he had any intent to assassinate Trump, calling himself “100 percent a Trump supporter” in an interview with Fox News. He also denied that he is a sovereign citizen or that he was carrying fake documents.

Mindy Robinson, one of Miller’s partners at the America Happens Network, angrily posted on X that Miller’s arrest was retribution from the “Deep State.” Miller and Robinson released a six-hour documentary, which opens with an apocalyptic assessment of current events centered on the first assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa. before moving to its main subject: the armed standoff in 2014 that pitted the Bundy family and their supporters against the FBI.

“Vem just exposed a huge Deep State coverup involving the feds and the Bundy ranch scandal,” Robinson wrote on X on Sunday. “So, I firmly believe this is 100% some kind of setup in retribution for exposing it. That, or Trump’s security team is a bunch of dips---s trying to make up for how badly they failed in Pennsylvania with any kind of ‘win’ they can get, fake or not.

“There isn’t a universe his intention was to kill Trump,” Robinson continued. “He’s worked too hard in this movement to expose the Deep State and all the people against him. If he had guns in his car that were illegal, whooptie-f---ing do As a pro-2A advocate, ask me if I give a s--- about a good guy with a gun in an unsafe s---hole like California. It doesn’t even make sense why his passes would be fake either when we’re both usually invited as media to these things.”

Raiklin’s response to the news of his associate’s arrest was uncharacteristically muted.

“My hunch is there will be lots of retractions,” he posted on X on Sunday. “And the sheriff will have egg on his face as his stunt will be the end of his gubernatorial run before it even started.”

Vem Miller (right) speaks with Ivan Raiklin about assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump. roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms

Christina Bobb, a top lawyer for the Republican National Committee’s election integrity unit, has maintained a low profile since she was indicted in Arizona in April for her role in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But comments during a podcast interview last month suggest she’s still closely involved in the flurry of lawsuits filed by the GOP and its massive 18-state volunteer poll observer program.

Those lawsuits, which are unlikely to be resolved before Election Day, potentially set the stage for Trump and his Republican allies to claim the election was stolen through fraud should he lose. The strategy appears to foreshadow a replay of the last presidential election, once again potentially plunging the country into chaos of the kind that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol when Congress met to certify the election.

Bobb, who, like Trump, continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen, recently described her thinking about what constitutes fraud while recounting her experience helping with the effort to overturn that election. Bobb took a leave of absence from her job as an anchor on the far-right network One America News to assist former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, in the effort to overturn the election.

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Bobb told podcaster Matt Kim during an interview recorded last month at the RNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. that she visited 12 states in 2020 and found “evidence of fraud everywhere.” The most compelling evidence, she said, “was the manner in which the election was conducted,” specifically referring to emergency orders issued by governors during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure that voters could safely participate in the election through mail-in balloting. Those measures were subject to extensive litigation, in some cases between the states’ legislative and executive branches, in the run-up to the 2020 election.

“That all should have been deemed illegal, and mailing out ballots in contradiction to different state laws,” Bobb told Kim. “That was an illegal way of conducting an election.”

Bobb’s leadership role in the RNC’s election integrity unit suggests to some observers that should Trump lose a second time, legal efforts to overturn the election will fail, but bogus claims of election fraud could again create strife and uncertainty.

Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former voting rights litigator at the U.S. Department of Justice who now heads the nonprofit Institute for Responsive Government, told Raw Story that the election deniers loyal to Trump hold a striking record of failure.

“Election deniers executed a deeply flawed strategy in 2020,” he said. “They failed to win the presidential election. They failed to win their court cases. Election deniers who ran in 2022 failed to win their elections. What hiring Christina Bobb means is they’re trying to execute the same strategy they did in 2020, without any tweaks. Honestly, it’s somewhat baffling.”

‘Defenders of election integrity for Donald Trump’

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist who is currently serving a federal prison sentence for defying a subpoena from the House Select January 6^th Committee, suggested in an interview with Bobb shortly after her indictment that loyalty to Trump was the primary qualification for the job, calling her one of “the fiercest defenders of election integrity for Donald Trump.”

Two others named by Bannon as Trump “defenders” were Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn, another attorney, who were both charged alongside Bobb with conspiracy, fraud and forgery related to the fake electors scheme in Arizona. Epshteyn currently serves as a senior advisor to the Trump campaign, according to his X bio, while Giuliani is currently appealing a $148 million defamation judgment awarded to two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.

Among the galaxy of Trump allies involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Bobb stands out for her commitment to the cause far beyond the former president’s departure from the White House in January 2021.

Bobb was present with Giuliani and John Eastman — architect of the legal strategy to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into setting aside the electoral vote, and also a co-defendant in the Arizona case — at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. The Willard has been described as the “command center” for the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

After the election, Bobb and Chanel Rion, the White House correspondent at One America News, set up a nonprofit that funneled funding and volunteers to the so-called “Arizona Audit,” an effort by pro-Trump partisans to reexamine the 2020 election.

By 2022, Bobb was working as a lawyer for Trump. She signed a declaration stating that all classified documents had been returned from the former president’s residence at Mar-a-Lago to the government, which turned out to be untrue. Bobb reportedly told the FBI that she signed the declaration at the request of another Trump lawyer, Evan Corcoran, even though she did not have firsthand knowledge of the matter.

Trump was indicted on 40 felony counts of mishandling classified documents in July 2023. Bobb was not charged in the case, and in July 2024, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Trump.

Bobb told Kim she received a phone call from Chris LaCivita, co-manager of the Trump campaign, asking her to come to work at the RNC. She started the job in March. The following month, she was charged in Arizona with conspiracy, fraud and forgery for her role in the fake electors scheme.

The RNC did not respond to requests for comment from Raw Story, but Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung previously waved off the charges against Bobb as “another example of Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system.”

For her part, Bobb told Kim during the podcast interview last month: “It’s going to be fine. I’m not worried about it. You know, I don’t think the Arizona attorney general really has a case against me or any of the other defendants; I don’t think any crime occurred. But we’ll see how it goes.”

She added that she believes the indictment separated the stalwarts from the weak-hearted in the Trump movement.

“It really is the great exposure on the conservative side of, like, who’s willing to say the hard things, and I think we can see who those people are,” Bobb said.

Bobb's name doesn't appear on a recent RNC memo providing an update on the election integrity effort and RNC co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump have provided the public face for the effort, but Bobb's remarks during the podcast interview with Kim last month indicate she's still closely involved.

‘This is a bulls--- claim’

Bobb told Kim that she believes “the litigation team is doing as well as we can.” She cited a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in August addressing whether Arizona voters should be required to produce proof of citizenship.

The court turned down the RNC’s request to block Arizona’s 42,201 “federal only” voters from participating in the upcoming election. “Federal only” voters in Arizona may only cast ballots in presidential and congressional elections. Unlike Arizonans who complete a state voter registration form, federal only” voters are not required to submit proof of citizenship, but they are required to swear under penalty of law that they are U.S. citizens, as explained by NPR. The number of “federal only” voters currently eligible to vote in the upcoming election is almost four times the margin of victory for Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

“It’s very difficult to clean up this issue, especially two months before the election,” Bobb told Kim. “The laws, particularly around voting and citizens being the only legal voters, yeah, that all needs to get cleaned up.”

During the interview with Kim, Bobb claimed without evidence that Democrats “are trying to get as many illegal aliens registered to vote as possible,” highlighting the evolution of Trump’s false claims of election fraud from attacking mail-in balloting procedures put in place to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to the campaign’s current strategy of demonizing immigrants.

Trump has been pushing the baseless claim that Democrats are trying to import immigrants to illegally vote in the election at least since January, and regularly recycles it on the campaign trail, including falsely accusing his opponent Kamala Harris during the debate in Philadelphia of “trying to get [illegal immigrants] to vote.”

The lie has filtered down from the top of the ticket, and has been widely embraced by Republican officials such as Alabama state House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen and conservative voters.

Under the elaborate conspiracy theory posited by Bobb during her podcast interview last month, she claimed that “NGOs” that support immigrants are participating in an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.

“The concern is not that the illegal aliens are actually going to cast a ballot; they just need to get the registrations,” Bobb told Kim. “Because they want the mail ballots. A lot of the illegal aliens, as they’re registering to vote — the intel that we’re receiving is that they’re registering — you have to have a residence, right?... You have to have a house to register at. And a lot of them are registering with the NGOs that brought them across the border in all 50 states. Those ballots don’t even necessarily go to the illegal alien.

“They had to go harvest all the ballots, collect them and cast them,” she continued. “A good chunk of them this time are just getting mailed straight to [the NGOs].”

Paul Gronke, a political science professor and director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College, told Raw Story that if Bobb is going to make such a bold claim, she should present the evidence to back it up. Anomalies such as batches of new registrations using the same address, which happen to correspond to a nonprofit that supports immigrants, can easily be detected, he said, and partisan researchers routinely comb through voter data looking for such evidence.

“You’ve got an NGO and an address,” Gronke said. “This is just hand-waving. This claim is easily demonstrated. If Christina Bobb had this information, they would have showed it. I’m calling bulls---. This is a bulls--- claim.”

Bobb could not be reached for comment for this story.

Bobb’s unsubstantiated allegation about a Democratic ballot harvesting scheme using immigrant NGOs echoes her role in promoting the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems electronically deleted millions of Trump votes in the 2020 election. The election software company is suing Bobb and her colleagues at One America News, claiming they spread misinformation.

The federal judge presiding over the case granted a request from Bobb to delay her deposition and production of documents in the Dominion lawsuit until December, after the election. Bobb’s lawyers argued that she might need to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights during her Dominion deposition to avoid self-incrimination in the Arizona case.

‘Holding my breath’ for Nov. 5

The RNC’s election integrity program, while more ambitious this time around, replicates efforts made four years ago. During the 2020 election, affidavits from Republican poll observers in critical swing states such as Michigan, Georgia and Arizona, fueled conspiracy theories and propped up lawsuits challenging the results of the lawsuit, which were uniformly rejected by the courts.

Officials at the RNC’s election integrity unit claim to have signed up 219,712 volunteer poll observers, as of Sept. 30 across 18 states. They include the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; along with Minnesota, New Hampshire and Virginia, which the Trump campaign considers to be within reach. Other states targeted by the GOP election integrity program include Florida, Montana, Ohio and Texas, which have key Senate races; California and New York, which have key congressional races; and Maine and Nebraska, where electoral votes are allocated by congressional district.

Bobb told Kim she is heartened to see so many Republican volunteers sign up to monitoring polling places. She added: “But I want to see those people show up. I want to make sure every dot is connected.”

Bobb said the Republican volunteers will serve as the party's eyes and ears at polling places and counting centers.

“It’s overused, but if you see something, say something," she said. "Or if you hear something weird, report it. Because that’s the only way things are going to get corrected. That happened in 2020, but people were reporting them on Election Day. It just didn’t have enough time to catch.”

Bobb told Kim she expects more or less the same after the Nov. 5, 2024 election as what unfolded four years ago.

“The litigation, I think the RNC — and other groups as well — have probably litigated as much as reasonably can be done,” she said. “So, that’s great. But, if you remember from 2020, things didn’t get bad until November 3^rd, 2020, when, you know, everything, it hit the fan, and you can see how people reacted. So, I’m kind of holding my breath for that.”

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Only 30 minutes after billionaire Elon Musk began publicly accusing the federal government of blocking his company from delivering the satellite internet components to the disaster zone in western North Carolina, another extraordinary claim popped up on X.

“NC State Police issue statement that they will start arresting any federal employees trying to hinder rescue operations,” an Arizona man named Joseph O’Shaughnessy wrote on X Oct. 4.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, quickly disputed the claim from Musk, who owns both SpaceX and the social media platform X and would speak at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa. the following day. But O’Shaughnessy’s claim piggy-backing off Musk's post added a new layer to manufactured intrigue: a potential clash between state and federal authorities in a region traumatized by the staggering loss.

The statement is completely false, and it comes from someone with a history of armed confrontation with the FBI and other federal agencies. O’Shaughnessy served prison time for his role in the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and was also charged in the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014.

Prior to his involvement in the Bundy ranch standoff, O’Shaughnessy had been arrested for disorderly conduct, domestic violence and drugs, according to federal prosecutors.

“If you tie back to this guy, you’ll see that nothing reliable comes from that guy,” First Sgt. Christopher Knox, a public information officer for the N.C. State Highway Patrol, told Raw Story. “That’s not a trusted source of information. That information is not true in any way, shape or form.”

Knox pointed out that North Carolina doesn’t even have an agency called “NC State Police.” The claim is even more dubious if one considers that State Highway Patrol in North Carolina is under the command of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, an ally of Vice President Kamala Harris. From a purely partisan standpoint, it is unlikely the two agencies would end up in an adversarial position with one another.

O'Shaughnessy responded to an inquiry from Raw Story by sending an AI-generated GIF of Trump dancing through a direct message on X.

While O’Shaughnessy’s post was quickly shot down by X users who pointed out that no such agency exists in North Carolina, it landed within a matrix of false claims by Trump allies that has created a mutually reinforced narrative, belied by the facts on the ground, that the federal government is abandoning the people of western North Carolina.

O’Shaughnessy’s post was reshared 18,000 times, including Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories despite a professional background that requires an ability to separate fact from fantasy astutely.

Before joining the Trump administration, Flynn held the highest military intelligence position as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, re-shared O’Shaughnessy’s post, writing: “Finally, some good news!”

Flynn, who has persistently used his X account to push apocalyptic messages about the impending breakup of the United States, has also pushed misinformation related to the disaster. During an Oct. 4 interview with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Flynn said there were “reports” about “illegals” raping children, while describing the flood-ravaged region as a “warzone.”

Flynn also could not be reached for comment for this story.

Johnson, who interviewed Flynn on his show, was recently employed by a media company alleged by federal prosecutors to be a front for a Russian influence operation. Johnson and other conservative influencers linked to the company have said they were victims of the scheme. During his interview with Flynn on Oct. 4, Johnson echoed many of the same themes as his guest during his opening monologue for the segment, claiming that the federal government has “chosen” immigrants over Trump supporters.

“Our federal government has left you to die in whatever small, inconsequential town that you come from because you are a Trump voter, because you support MAGA, because you are America first,” he said.

Flynn wasn’t the only one who greeted O’Shaughnessy’s bogus claim about a state law enforcement agency challenging the federal government.

Gianna Miceli, who co-hosts a podcast that promotes sovereign citizen ideology, enthused: “Now we have a jurisdiction war happening! What a great time for people to learn some lessons about who is the government and who is not.”

“Exactly,” O’Shaughnessy responded.

In another reply to O’Shaughnessy’s thread, Miceli falsely claimed: “FEMA is a private for-profit corporation. It is not government.”

O’Shaughnessy’s false claim that a state agency in North Carolina is threatening to arrest federal agents in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election fits a pattern with not only his involvement in the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff and 2016 Malheur occupation, but also the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Bundy ranch, Malheur occupation and Stop the Steal 2020

O’Shaughnessy was described in a federal indictment in response to the Bundy ranch standoff as a “mid-level leader and organizer of the conspiracy who, among other things: organized gunmen and other followers; led gunmen and other followers in the assault and extortion of federal law enforcement at the impound site; organized protection for members of the criminal enterprise; and organized armed patrols and security checkpoints.”

Similarly, federal prosecutors would later describe O’Shaughnessy as a “mid-level organizer” of the Malheur occupation. In a video interview during the occupation, according to the criminal complaint, O’Shaughnessy said: “I’m right now in the process of trying to set up a constitutional security protection force to make sure these federal agents and these law enforcement don’t just come in here like cowboys.”

O’Shaughnessy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to impede federal officers for his conduct during the Malheur occupation, but the government dismissed charges in the Bundy ranch case. O’Shaughnessy was sentenced to time served, and reportedly spent one year and nine months in custody for the two cases.

O’Shaughnessy has described Roger Stone, a political consultant and longtime confidant of Trump, as a “hero and a mentor.” Like Flynn, Stone was pivotal in mobilizing a pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Immediately following the 2020 election, Stone privately strategized with Flynn, the Washington Post reported.

O’Shaughnessy’s Instagram account shows that he was with Stone during a dinner in Florida with Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander in November 2020. Another post shows dated Dec. 11, 2020, the eve of the pro-Trump Jericho March rally in Washington, D.C. includes a photo that shows Stone drinking with InfoWars conspiracy trafficker Alex Jones.

It is unclear what, if anything, O’Shaughnessy discussed with Stone, Jones and Alexander when they met on those two occasions.

A false claim that evolved out of Elon Musk’s dustup with FEMA

In his false post about state law enforcement threatening to arrest their counterparts last week, O’Shaughnessy appears to have taken a cue from Nick Sortor, a right-wing videographer who spent the past week in the Asheville area delivering Starlink terminals while producing media assailing the federal government response to the disaster.

In an Oct. 3 X post, Sortor thanked Musk and SpaceX “for bringing us another truckload of Starlinks. A photo in the post shows an officer wearing a North Carolina State Highway Patrol uniform holding a box labeled “Starlink,” while a video shows police vehicles that appear to be providing an escort for Sortor down a winding mountain road.

The following day, Sortor replied to Musk’s post accusing FEMA of preventing his engineers from allowing him to deliver supplies. In his reply, Sortor appears to reference the State Highway Patrol, while using the same misnomer that O’Shaughnessy would later use.

“Let me know where the blockades are and we’ll have the NC State Police move them out of the way,” Sortor wrote. “Already did it once, which is one reason why we have an escort now. FEMA has zero jurisdiction.

“Trust me,” he added. “They’re not going to win this one.”

Twenty-four minutes later, O’Shaughnessy made his post claiming that the “NC State Police” were prepared to start arresting federal agents.

Challenged to substantiate his claim, O’Shaughnessy responded to one detractor by writing, “Calm down stranger danger, my boys were one of the 1^st on-scene to bring aid…. I am the source.”

O’Shaughnessy didn’t identify his “boys” on the ground in North Carolina, but on Sunday he praised Sortor for delivering the Starlink terminals, writing, “And everyone, please follow @nicksortor. He’s the one who made it happen.”

Manufacturing a fake turf war between FEMA and state law enforcement doesn’t help the residents of western North Carolina, Christopher Knox, the State Highway Patrol spokesperson, told Raw Story. Instead of relying on dubious accounts on X, Knox recommended that people seek information about the recovery effort from trusted sources such as the NC Department of Public Safety.

“There’s a lot of people hurting and a lot of people looking for resources,” Knox said. “We hate that there’s stuff out there slowing the response. Getting people to the right sources is a big goal of the state of North Carolina.”

NOW READ: The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Denver Riggleman, who served as senior technical advisor to the January 6^th Committee, said he believes there is a significant risk of violence during the vote count of the Nov. 5, 2024 election because supporters of Republican nominee Donald Trump are so deeply immersed in conspiracy theories.

“They still have a plan to probably use lawfare to go after some of these certain states, but violence is certainly possible,” Riggleman told Raw Story. “I would say it’s actually probable. And I think it’s because you have people that are so riled up with these conspiracy theories and this good-against-evil vendetta that Donald Trump and I think a lot of the far right and the Christian nationalist type of individuals have been pushing into sort of the MAGA communications ecosystem.

"It scares the hell out of me, as someone who's dealt in counterterrorism for so long, to know that some of the same people who are around him — or a lot of the same people around him — for January 6th, 2021," Riggleman added, "are the same people in his campaign today and the same people who were authors of Project 2025."

A former Republican congressman and former military intelligence officer, Riggleman spoke to Raw Story after taping a message to North Carolina Republicans and independent voters on behalf of the Harris campaign at a recreation center in Greensboro on Thursday.

“Violence is bubbling right beneath the surface,” Riggleman said, citing the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the two assassination attempts on Trump this past summer. Riggleman identified variations on the QAnon conspiracy theory as a driving force of political violence.

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“QAnon and that whole conspiracy theory mindset of ‘the Deep State’ or ‘globalists,’ or ‘false flags,’ that has bubbled into almost a mainstream belief, I would say within 30 to 35 percent of the Republican Party,” he said. “So, now it’s a battle of good against evil, as far as they’re concerned. The Democrats, independents and the RINOs — whoever they are — represent what’s evil. And I think that should scare the hell out of people. Because once you start dehumanizing people, that’s when violence is possible.”

In contrast to the last cycle, when the Jan. 6, 2021 certification at the U.S. Capitol became the focal point of political violence, Riggleman predicted that threats this time will converge around major counting centers and state legislatures immediately following the election in the event that Trump loses.

“And you’re going to see that disinformation bloom happening starting, I would think, in the middle of October. It’s really going to ramp up, like it did before November 3rd of 2020,” Riggleman said.

Riggleman suggested that citizens should monitor far-right media outlets and personalities to understand the kind of conspiracy theories that are most likely to motivate Trump’s supporters to take action.

“Don’t be afraid to go look at crazy because crazy is how they’re going to try to affect the election,” he said. “It’s just like January 6^th and QAnon. You think about January 6^th — that was all fantasy. Every single person who went into the Capitol that day probably thinks Lord of the Rings is a documentary. That’s the issue that you have. They’ve completely gone off their rocker in this good-against-evil sort of disinformation landscape.”

ALSO READ: Is this the October Surprise?

Watch the interview at this link.

During a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., earlier this month — his first since debating Vice President Kamala Harris — former President Donald Trump doubled down on his false claims that Haitians are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Then, he tossed another small Rust Belt community into the national spotlight.

“Likewise, a small 4,000-person town, Charleroi, Pennsylvania,” Trump said. “Have you ever heard of it? Charleroi. What a beautiful name. But it’s not beautiful now. It’s experienced a 2,000 percent increase in the population of Haitian migrants under Kamala Harris.

“So, Pennsylvania: Remember this when you have to go to vote,” Trump added.

The sudden burst of attention by Trump and his allies on the borough of Charleroi in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley is yet more evidence that the campaign is leaning into racial scapegoating as an electoral strategy to win critical swing states, even as critics warn the rhetoric could spill into vigilante violence.

ALSO READ: Let's call Springfield what it is: Republican-made terrorism

Trump and his MAGA allies' focus on Charleroi appears to have begun on Sept. 11, when a shadowy nonprofit linked to a former speechwriter for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign posted an interview with a pro-Trump member of the Charleroi borough council.

The language in the X post by the nonprofit America 2100 is markedly similar to what Trump would say at his campaign rally the following day.

“It isn’t just Springfield; it’s happening everywhere,” the post reads. “In Charleroi, Pennsylvania — a low-income town of just 4,000 — the immigrant population has increased by 2,000% over the past two years. It’s almost all Haitians.”

The America 2100 post was boosted when Donald Trump Jr. re-posted it only 10 minutes later.

Nate Hochman, a senior adviser to America 2100 and the only person publicly identified with the nonprofit, was fired from the DeSantis campaign in June 2023 after reportedly making a video featuring the Sonnenrad — a symbol also known as the Black Sun that is associated with Nazis — and tweeting it from a pro-DeSantis account.

Previously, Hochman had praised Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who has denied the Holocaust and made numerous antisemitic statements. Hochman said on a December 2021 Twitter Space chat that Fuentes had “gotten a lot of kids based, and we respect that for sure.” He added: “But the fact that you’ve said super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can accomplish in politics.”

Hochman, a former intern at the Claremont Institute’s American Mind magazine and now a contributor at the American Spectator, announced on X on Monday that he was making a road trip to Charleroi “to report on the Haitian immigration crisis.”

Over the course of the week, Hochman posted video after video on the America 2100 X account, featuring interviews with local white residents who were unhappy about their new Haitian neighbors.

In one interview, a white man identified as “Tom” complains that the Haitians “have no interest in our culture” and that they open their own groceries “at the main drag of town.” The X post identifies Tom as “a lifelong native,” although the video shows Tom saying he moved to Charleroi in 2017.

In a video posted on Thursday, a man identified as “Ernie” laments that Charleroi “used to be a nice, middle-of-nowhere blue-collar town.”

“I think they’ve just destroyed the town, and they’ve bought all these properties,” Ernie says. “Okay, you might be able to buy a house cheap, but what kind of people are you gonna get in?”

“Yeah, what kind of neighbors you have?” Hochman says.

“Well, that’s it,” Ernie says. “And right now I’m surrounded by the immigrants.”

Some of the America 2100 X posts echo Great Replacement, a white supremacist conspiracy theory that, taken to an extreme, falsely claims that white people face genocide because of demographic changes.

“One thing that can’t be overstated is the degree to which mass migration wreaks havoc on the social cohesion of the already-existing community,” reads one post from a Sept. 7 thread about Springfield. “Local landlords, for example, have been making a killing. But they’re replacing their fellow citizens — and locals hate them for it.”

The post includes screengrabs from the “Haitian Community in Springfield, Ohio” Facebook page. One commenter replies to a post by a local realtor offering her services to the immigrant community by writing, “Wouldn’t plan on staying too long.”

Another X post by the America 2100 account refers to immigrants as “invaders,” using verbiage that turned up in the manifesto of 21-year-old white supremacists who massacred 23 people in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart in August 2019.

Hochman could not be reached for comment for this story.

NOW READ: Notorious conspiracy theorist rolled out by RNC to train election overseers in Michigan

Trump himself has repeatedly used the term, including during his recent campaign rally in Tucson.

“Under Kamala Harris, our country is under a thing called invasion,” he said. “Did you ever hear the word invasion? Just like a military. It’s like a military invasion. We’re being conquered and we’re being occupied by a foreign element.”

Swing state strategy of attacking immigrants

While the racist rhetoric against Haitian immigrants in Springfield focused on false claims that they are stealing and eating people’s pet, the attacks in Charleroi have zeroed in on another object of fear in white grievance politics: jobs.

An X post by the Libs of TikTok account run by Chaya Raichik, one of more than a dozen social-media influencers enlisted by the Trump campaign for a “war room” that amplified his attacks on Harris during the recent debate, shared a video on Tuesday that featured a man ruefully describing an arrangement to transport Haitian immigrants by bus to and from a processed food packaging plant in Charleroi.

“Incredible footage revealing an operation in Charleroi, PA where Haitians are being bussed to and from food factories operated by Fourth Street Foods,” the post reads. “Kamala imported 2,000 Haitians into this town of 4,000 people, and now they’re taking American jobs.”

State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, a Republican who represents Charleroi, said in a reply that she had re-posted from the Libs of TikTok account in the past, but the post about her constituents was not true.

“There was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed them,” Bartolotta told Raichik. “He advertised and looked for workers for a long time. Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and legal to work in his facility.”

David Barbe, the CEO of Fourth Street Foods, confirmed to KDKA News of Pittsburgh on Wednesday that his immigrant employees haven’t displaced any native-born workers.

“If I had 300 Americans come in today and they wanted to work, we would make room for them,” Barbe told investigative journalist Andy Sheehan.

Contrasting with the claims by the locals interviewed by Hochman suggesting that the Haitian immigrants are bankrupting Charleroi, Borough Manager Joe Manning told Sheehan that the new arrivals have made a net positive contribution to the area economy.

“They come here, they buy property,” Manning said. “They open businesses. They work here. They pay taxes. So, for us, at the end of the day, it has been a benefit.”

Some of Trump’s supporters believe that his false claims about Haitian immigrants, far from alienating voters, will instead give him the edge in critical swing states.

Jeremy Carl, a former deputy assistant secretary of the interior and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, praised Trump for bringing up “the cats” during the debate.

“You know, that’s just going to be a winning issue for us because it really is the linchpin of kind of every other crazy thing the left has done particularly on immigration,” Carl said during a podcast appearance on Monday.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who previously served as mayor of Braddock — a borough only 30 miles away from Charleroi — predicted to Raw Story that Pennsylvania voters will ultimately reject Trump’s electoral strategy of demonizing immigrants.

“Blame the immigrants, whether it’s that my dog’s gone — blame the immigrant,” Fetterman said. “That’s very anti-immigration. And now they’re proud of that. They’re not even trying to veil that. And western Pennsylvania has a really long history of immigration, and sometimes people blaming all of the ills on immigrants too. And I strongly reject that. And western Pennsylvania I think will as well, too.”

‘A total explosion of media’: Enter CSPOA

The Trump campaign did not respond to a question from Raw Story about how the candidate became aware of the Haitian immigrant community in Charleroi.

However, during an interview with the Liberty RoundTable podcast, Borough Councilman Larry Celaschi alluded to the America 100 X post published on the eve of Trump’s rally in Tucson.

“I know I did an interview with another news source out there that happened to go viral, and the next thing you know we’re hearing the same language that they had as their headlines was released from President Trump’s own mouth at his rally,” Celaschi said. “Since that time, it’s just been a total explosion of media here in the borough of Charleroi. It’s just overwhelming. I didn’t know that there were that many media sources out there.”

The two men who interviewed Celaschi, along with Borough Mayor Gregg Doerfler, are themselves representative of the far-right media personalities who have gravitated to the drama that Trump generated surrounding Charleroi.

Sam Bushman, the podcast host, is the CEO of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA, an organization that promotes the controversial idea that sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are not legally bound to uphold state and federal laws that they unilaterally deem to be unconstitutional.

As documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Bushman has a long history of promoting racist ideas and providing a forum for hardcore white nationalists. In July 2023, he interviewed a member of the white supremacist group Identity Dixie. In a Facebook post, the pseudonymous guest known as “Padraig Martin” advised those who attended the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. and the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that the next time they should be “prepared to kill them all.” He urged: “Do not leave a single police officer, congressman, judge or any other functionary.”

The other host who interviewed the Charleroi borough mayor and councilman on Tuesday was Richard Mack, the founder of CSPOA and current president of its advisory board.

Ignoring the fact that the Haitians living and working in Charleroi are there under temporary protected status, Mack suggested that an unspecified group of “supposed leaders” should be investigated for “aiding and abetting illegal immigration.” He added, “It might rise to the level of treason.”

Bushman and Mack prodded Doerfler and Celaschi to tell them about crime committed by Haitians.

Pressed for specific examples, Doerfler said, “The people, they’re just afraid to walk the streets, or whatever. I’ve heard a lot of that.”

Doerfler did not return a phone message left by Raw Story.

Celaschi told Bushman and Mack about a business owner who ran into her establishment and dialed 911 after a Haitian immigrant allegedly pursued her, demanding money he believed she owed him.

“To me, your police chief, if there’s illegals in your community, need to take action on the illegal activity, doesn’t he?” Bushman said. “I mean, I’m not here to try to divide your community, but I’m saying, look, if you got illegal people committing illegal acts, are they in jail, or they just allowed to run around free? Where’s your law enforcement locally?”

Doerfler and Celaschi confirmed that the police do arrest people in Charleroi, including Haitians, who break the law.

“The racist intervention of far-right groups like CSPOA in places like Charleroi makes the entire community significantly less safe and makes it more challenging to deal with real issues facing rural America,” Devin Burgart, who monitors the far right as director of the Seattle-based Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights, told Raw Story. “This type of rhetoric puts the Haitian community and Black residents of Charleroi in grave danger, as the bomb threats and violent racist rhetoric leveled at Springfield proved.”

Echoing Trump’s false charge in Tucson last week that “not only is Comrade Kamala allowing illegal immigrants to stampede across our border, but she’s flying them here from other countries,” Bushman asked the two borough leaders if they believe the federal government is complicit in a crime.

“Did the federal government and your state government in some way literally aid and abet illegal activity in America?” Bushman asked.

“Yes, they did aid and abet,” Celaschi responded. “Absolutely. I will stand by your statement 1,000 percent.”

Bushman was exultant.

“And they’re literally saying the federal government has partnered in promoting illegal activity, all the way down to their city,” he said, “to the point of literal virtual mayhem where citizens are in fear in their community.”

ALSO READ: Something broke Trump’s brain

While former President Donald Trump debated Vice President Kamala Harris at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, more than a dozen hand-selected right-wing influencers hunched over laptops in a conference room to churn out social media posts designed to amplify Trump’s messaging.

Heading up the effort was Trump campaign adviser Alex Bruesewitz, a political consultant with 448,200 followers on X. Bruesewitz played a key role in the “Stop the Steal” movement that mobilized Trump supporters to converge on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, following the 2020 election.

The right-wing influencers assembled for the “war room” have collectively promoted a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that high-level Democrats are involved in a child sex trafficking network, demonized transgender people and, like Bruesewitz, mobilized Trump supporters to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021.

But in a campaign in which Trump and his running-mate, JD Vance, are brazenly stoking fear about immigration by pushing a debunked claim that Haitians are eating pets or suggesting government collusion in the attempt on Trump’s life, the flurry of X posts produced by the influencers on Tuesday might not have made a huge impression.

In the hours before the debate, Chaya Raichik, creator of the Libs of TikTok account, made a handful of posts on X with memes that showed variations of Trump holding cats and ducks, and in one case showed the former president pointing a pistol while a militia of house cats wielding assault rifles massed behind him. She also posted a link to a story by the Federalist that purported to substantiate the claims by citing a single phone call to a police dispatcher reporting that he saw “a group of Haitian people” with “geese in their hands.” Local officials have since said that there's no evidence of Haitians harming geese.

Whether desperate or unimaginative, the posts about Haitians eating pets have come in for criticism from some surprising sources. The hits are not coming just from progressives and moderate Republicans, but also from at least two figures further to the right than MAGA who are no strangers to online provocation.

Ali Alexander, who organized the 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign alongside Bruesewitz, leveled criticism at “right-wing influencers” during an extended commentary for a livestream on his Telegram channel on Wednesday. He didn’t mention any of the pro-Trump influencers by name, but he took aim at one of their central preoccupations.

“If you watch the Republicans on Twitter, you’re dumb,” Alexander said. “You’re just uninformed and dumb. You think that Haitians are eating all kinds of people’s cats. Okay. So, you’re just kind of dumb, and you know, I can’t control that.”

Following the political and legal fallout over Jan. 6, Alexander has struggled to rebuild his stature in MAGA, and was largely exiled in 2023 following a revelation that he asked teenage boys to send him nude pictures.

Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who helped organize the 2017 Unite the Right neo-Nazi gathering in Charlottesville, Va., in which an antiracist activist was murdered in a car attack by a rally attendee, also ridiculed the memes.

“The ‘Haitians eating cats’ thing is utterly stupid,” he wrote on X three hours before the debate. “It’s crude and easily debunked and thus easily turned around and used to make the Right look bad.”

ALSO READ: 'I want Vance to apologize': We went to Springfield and found community hurt — and divided

In November 2016, Spencer and his nonprofit National Policy Institute attempted to ride the coattails of Trump’s electoral victory in an effort to inject white nationalism into the political mainstream. But following Unite the Right, which eventually led to a $25 million judgement against the organizers, Spencer’s influence rapidly waned.

On the day of the presidential debate, Spencer reflected that outlandish and overtly racist claims about Haitians eating cats would have been confined to the fringe in 2016, when he led the so-called “alt-right” movement, but are now being embraced by mainstream GOP figures including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).

“The alt-right methodology and ‘vibe’ has been fully integrated into the GOP,” he wrote on X. “At this point, online racism is just another chapter of the ‘Southern strategy.’”

‘We’re doing the influencer war room thing — whatever’

About an hour before the start of the debate, Trump spoke to the influencers through a cell phone call with Bruesewitz, his campaign advisor, according to a video posted by one of the influencers, CJ Pearson.

Bruesewitz boasted to his boss that the 16 influencers seated around a long row of tables in the conference room would be reaching a combined 50 million followers on X.

“They’re big deals,” he said.

Trump seemed unimpressed.

“Have a good time,” he said. “They’re going to have 200 million watching this.” (Later estimates by the media analytics company Nielsen would peg the number of viewers at 67.1 million.)

Another video posted by Jack Posobiec, who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory holding that Democratic Party elites were running a child sex ring from a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, shows him in the conference room saying, “All right. We’re doing the influencer war room thing — whatever.”

Then, Posobiec turns the camera towards Bruesewitz and asks, “What is this called?”

“No clue,” Bruesewitz responds. “But there’s a lot of influence here.”

Shannon McGregor, an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, told Raw Story that the near complete alignment between Trump and the social-media influencers to push extremist messaging means that influencers are likely not “drawing in heaps of new people.”

But that doesn’t mean their influence should be discounted.

The false claim about Haitians eating cats, which appears to have originated on Facebook, is a case study in how right-wing influencers with large social-media followings find and amplify individual stories, she said, that resonate “across mainstream Republican politics, which is this deep white nationalist story.”

Whether the influencers or Republican politicians are driving extremist radicalization, McGregor said the people shouldn’t underestimate the ability of influencers to mobilize followers to commit political violence on Trump’s behalf.

“To me, what’s most unsettling is that people who have not just media power, but real political power that they share this sort of deep story that ‘our’ way of life is under attack,” McGregor said. “By our, I mean a white nationalist identity. That’s scary from the point of view of the health of our democracy.

“I do think where the danger, in particular with some of these right-wing accounts that are huge, is being able to whip up thousands of people into political action and political violence,” she added. “We saw that already on January 6^th and we saw it in Charlottesville.”

NOW READ: Trump is permanently wounded

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee in the North Carolina governor’s race, spoke from the pulpit at the Lake Church in the state’s southeast on the last Sunday in June, just before the Fourth of July holiday.

A large Black man with a shaved head and trim salt-and-pepper goatee, Robinson paced the floor and scowled while preaching a hellfire sermon of conservative paranoia. An all-white group of parishioners sat behind him. They shifted uncomfortably in their seats, smiling thinly and clapping occasionally.

Seen in a video posted on the church’s Facebook page, the parishioners seem strangely unmoved by Robinson’s speech, as if they’re either completely in accord with him and find his conclusions unremarkable — or they think he’s completely lost his mind.

Robinson warned that there was “a certain class of people” that wanted them to forget the U.S. Constitution “was crafted for you” and that “Jesus Christ died to give you your freedom.” This unnamed “class of people,” analogous to King George during the Revolutionary War “want control, and the trappings that come with it,” Robinson said. “That’s why they despise America.”

America has set aside God and forgotten its founding principles, Robinson lamented, and for that reason he said, “We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intents.

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“You know, there was a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield,” he continued. “And guess what we did to it? We killed it! We didn’t quibble about it. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t fight about it. We killed it!”

Then, he made a rhetorical swerve from the ambiguous enemy of the “class of people… who hate America” to the Japanese and German Nazis whom the U.S. armed forces fought during World War II.

“Kill them!” he said. Then he preempted the anticipated criticism by adding, “Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful.

“Too bad!” he continued. “Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it… We have wicked people doing wicked things — torturing, murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green, and go have ’em handled. Or those boys in blue, and have ’em go handle it.”

Then, the speech swerved yet again. And while Robinson didn’t specify who exactly the enemy was, his remarks suggested he had shifted to one that was not a historical foreign adversary, but rather forces at work in American society today.

“We need to start handling our business again,” Robinson said. “Because guys, what I said at the beginning about you getting in your cars and listening to your radios, putting on what you want to put on, and saying what you want to put on — keep thinking about it.

“Don’t you feel it slipping away?” he said, taking a long pause. “Don’t you feel it slipping away?” Then he warned that 1776 is becoming “a distant memory,” and “the tenets of socialism” were gaining ground.

“They’re watching us,” Robinson said. “They’re listening to us. They’re tracking us. They get mad at you. They cancel you. They dox you. They kick you off social media. They come and close down your business.”

An extremist political brand that might not work in a general election

Robinson’s “some folks need killing” remarks are only one of a continuous string of controversies and scandals that have unspooled since his meteoric rise after giving an angry speech before the city council in his hometown of Greensboro in 2018.

READ: Cruelty is all the Republicans have left

It’s not even the most recent controversy. Since his appearance at the Lake Church in late June, Robinson has made waves by holding a fundraiser at another church in the western part of the state that has been labeled a cult and whose leaders have been accused of physically abusing children.

Bombast, provocation, name-calling and anger have been Robinson’s political hallmarks going back to his 2018 viral speech in which he lambasted local leaders for exploring options for ending a gun show held at a city-owned facility.

During the speech, he denigrated “people talking in here about this group and that group, domestic violence, Blacks, these minorities and that minority” as “loonies from the left.” Local residents who had never heard of Robinson before that night in April 2018 looked at his Facebook page and quickly discovered him mocking former President Barack Obama and other Democratic elected officials. They found blatant homophobia and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

With each round of liberal outrage at Robinson’s succession of outrages, his popularity with conservative voters in North Carolina only grew. In that way, Robinson’s strategy of building a political base by leaning into polarization aligns with that of former President Donald Trump, whose endorsement he has received.

In 2020, Robinson used his notoriety to easily dominate a crowded field of more experienced Republican candidates for lieutenant governor. By the time he announced his candidacy for governor in 2023, Robinson was already heavily favored to win the Republican primary, and he vanquished his opponents with almost 65 percent of the vote.

While the 56-year-old candidate has taken the Republican Party in North Carolina by storm with his brand of scorched-earth culture-war politics, whether he can win the statewide race for the top post in state government is a completely different question.

Robinson has been trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, by double digits in the polls.

Stein, who currently serves as the state’s attorney general and would be the first Jew to serve as governor, is heavily outspending Robinson on political advertising that largely consists of throwing Robinson’s inflammatory statements back at him.

READ: Trump is losing his audience

History also doesn’t favor Robinson. Despite Republicans holding a super-majority in the state legislature, only one Republican has held the governor’s office since 1994. The last Republican governor, Pat McCrory, lost his reelection bid in 2016 amidst a backlash over the unpopular HB2 law that policed transgender people’s access to bathrooms and caused entertainers and sporting events to yank their business.

Gay jokes and Facebook shock-posting

So, how did Robinson become the Republican nominee for the highest office in North Carolina?

Between working in furniture factories and running pizza takeout stores, Robinson was honing his rhetorical skills by telling homophobic jokes to patrons at a porn shop, Louis Money (his legal name) recalls.

Money told Raw Story, that in the early 1990s, Robinson gained favor with the staff at Gents Video & News in Greensboro by bringing in pizza from Papa John’s. In the pre-internet era, porn stores provided a haven for gay men — one of the few places in small Southern cities, aside from gay bars, where they could meet discreetly. Although Robinson did not directly interact with the gay patrons, Money told Raw Story that they were in the audience when he held court in the back of the store.

“He was hilarious,” Money recalled. “It would be 4 o’clock in the morning, and we’re trying to stay awake, and he would have us dying of laughter.”

Robinson’s alleged porn consumption was first reported by the Assembly, an online outlet that covers North Carolina. But Money, who fronts a band called Trailer Park Orchestra, has been publicly talking onstage about the matter since at least March 2024. Part of the story is memorialized in a humorous song by his band — a comedic troupe that he describes as a “redneck rock and roll band,” called “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money.” The song addresses Money’s assertion that Robinson failed to pay him for a bootleg porn video in the mid-2000s.

A spokesperson for Robinson told the Assembly that the allegations about his porn consumption, which are backed up by other patrons of the porn shop, were “a false and personal attack” and “complete fiction.” But Robinson himself refused to respond to questions from a reporter who met him at a campaign stop on Tuesday.

With the advent of Facebook just before the election of President Obama, Robinson found his true calling as a social media troll, staking out controversial positions and, like the professional wrestlers he revered, projecting a “come at me, bro” persona.

In his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson acknowledged that the crucial training for his 2018 speech to Greensboro City Council was Facebook. As compared to a previous public speaking attempt nine years earlier, Robinson reflected: “I was a much sharper weapon. I had been whetted and honed through the rough and tumble environment of social media. I had put in years of Facebook argumentation and meme making.”

By that time, Robinson was also deep into conspiracy theories.

READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

In an interview given only one month before he burst onto the national scene with his viral city council speech, Robinson embraced the host’s perspective of looking at history “from the conspiratorial viewpoint.”

“All you have to do is read the Communist Manifesto and know who Karl Marx was and know what he was about, and you understand that communism is pure evil and has evil intent,” Robinson said. “Everywhere it goes, it brings death, murder, it brings suffering…. I actually think communism is going to be a segue into one-world government.”

There was the “evil intent” that Robinson would invoke six years later as a candidate for governor to the parishioners at the Lake Church, when he said it must be met “on the battlefield.”

Robinson’s paranoia about communism seeping into nearly every facet of American life contextualizes one of his more controversial statements about Black people — surfaced by CNN in 2023 — in which he said that during the “so-called” 1960s civil rights movement “so many freedoms were lost.”

Robinson’s comments during the 2018 interview echoed the arguments made by white segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.

“I think since the early 1950s, matter of fact, directly after World War II, since directly after World War II, Black people have been pawns for communists up ’til today,” he said.

Robinson’s obsession with communism and apparent belief that shadowy forces are conspiring to take away Americans’ rights dovetails with statements that, intentionally or not, convey antisemitic tropes and downplay the Holocaust.

“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson wrote in a 2017 Facebook post. “There is a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million people they murdered throughout the 20^th century.”

In another social media post, made in 2018, Robinson wrote: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

After his viral city council speech launched Robinson as a conservative media star, he gave an interview to Sean Moon, a cult leader whose sect worships with AR-15 rifles. During the interview, Moon described the modern incarnation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation as China, the CIA, Islam and the Rothschild family of “international bankers that rule every single national and Federal Reserve-type style of bank in every country.”

Robinson responded: “That’s exactly right. It’s amazing to me, that we live in this age of information where you can go online and you can find all this information, and it’s not hidden from anybody.”

Recalibrating as election nears

Robinson apologized for a string of antisemitic comments in October 2023 by declaring “Solidarity with Israel Week” in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack, resulting in more than 1,200 deaths and the kidnapping of more than 100 civilians.

“There was never any antisemitism intended in those words,” he reportedly said during a press conference in Raleigh. “It was never within me. I’ve never had anything against the Jewish people.

“I apologize for the wording,” he added. “We’ve dealt with the Facebook posts and moved past them.”

Since winning the Republican primary in March, Robinson has toned down his rhetoric on social issues while backing away from a previous position supporting a ban on all abortions once a heartbeat is detected. He has admitted that he paid for his wife to get an abortion before they were married — a jarring admission in light of a history of comments describing the practice as “murder.”

Robinson also backpedaled on calls for political violence following the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump. He told a reporter during the Republican National Convention that he made his comments about killing people “in a historical context” that was not intended to extend “to the political discourse.” But he hasn’t explained who he was referring to when he said a “class of people… want control” and “despise America.” And he hasn’t explained who the people are who “have evil intents.”

Robinson has never apologized for repeatedly calling LGBTQ+ and transgender people “filth.” And while rhetoric about LGBTQ+ and transgender people isn't a feature of his recent campaign stops, he staked a clear position during a talk at a church outside of Charlotte one month before announcing his candidacy for governor in April 2023.

“God formed me because he knew there was going to be a time when God’s learning was going to be intolerable to the wicked,” Robinson said at the time. “When children were going to be dragged down to see the drag show. When pornography was going to be presented to our children in schools.

“Makes me sick every time I see it — a church that flies that rainbow flag, which is a direct spit in the face of God almighty.”

Robinson could not be reached for comment on this story.

One person who won’t be voting for Mark Robinson is Louis Money, the former porn video store worker.

The main reason is Robinson’s homophobia.

“That’s still the same guy that was telling all those jokes and talking all that trash in the back of the porn shop,” Money told Raw Story.

Money was 19 at the time — about four years younger than Robinson. He no longer laughs at gay jokes, he said, adding that he would like to think most people evolve.

“That guy that’s onstage now talking about gay people is the same guy that used to come to the porn shop at 2 o’clock in the morning to talk trash about gay people,” Money said. “To me, there was no evolution.”

NOW READ: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

CHICAGO — Donald Trump’s recent presidential campaign staff shakeup includes hiring a political consultant deeply involved in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that sought to overturn the 2020 election — and culminated with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Alex Bruesewitz, the CEO of the political consulting firm X Strategies, was named an adviser to the Trump campaign — part of a hiring spree last week as Trump struggled to maintain momentum with new Democratic opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris entering the race.

Bruesewitz’s new role in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign underscores how Trump is embracing people instrumental in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Raw Story’s review of U.S. House Select January 6 Committee investigation records indicate Bruesewitz helped organize an effort to mobilize Trump supporters to rally at state capitols — and eventually at the U.S. Capitol following the 2020 election.

Bruesewitz also coordinated with members of Congress to encourage them to object when Congress convened to certify the election on Jan. 6, 2021, according to texts and other source materials obtained by the now-defunct January 6 committee.

Bruesewitz appeared before the January 6 committee for a deposition in 2022, but repeatedly declined to answer questions while invoking the Fifth Amendment, which protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Included among the questions Bruesewitz refused to answer: “Did you have any role or knowledge beforehand about violence that would occur on January 6th?”

Prior to testifying before the January 6 committee, Bruesewitz spoke to “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” where he complained that the committee was harassing “conservative activists, innocent people for doing nothing but standing with President Trump until the finish line.”

He added that he planned to “go on the offense… because at the end of the day the American people deserve to know the truth about what happened on January 6th.”

To date, 1,488 defendants have been charged with offenses related to the events at the Capitol on Jan. 6, including 547 charged with assaulting law enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

At least seven people died on or shortly after Jan. 6, either from injuries or suicide and 140 officers were injured. The siege of the Capitol resulted in damages totaling $2.8 million.

Since refusing to answer questions from the January 6 committee, Bruesewitz has not spoken publicly about his involvement in the Stop the Steal campaign or his activities on Jan. 6, 2021.

Reached by phone by Raw Story on Aug. 17, Bruesewitz, who now lists himself as a "Trump Campaign Advisor" on his X social media account, said he was at an event and was unavailable to talk, and then suggested reaching out to him by email.

Since then, Bruesewitz has not responded to Raw Story’s emails and messages left through the contact form on his company website. Voicemail message have also gone unanswered.

The Trump campaign could not be reached for comment for this story.

Others recent Trump campaign hires include Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager who will serve as senior adviser; Tim Murtaugh, who served as communications director for Trump’s campaign in 2020; former Trump aide Taylor Budowich; and former Fox News producer Alex Pfeiffer.

Evading questions about Jan. 6

Bruesewitz, who has this week used his X social media account to amplify Trump campaign messages to his more than 439,000 followers during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, has not been charged with a crime.

Bruesewitz has also publicly denied going to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

But private texts obtained by the January 6 committee indicate otherwise.

A congressional investigator cited an interview Bruesewitz gave to “Super Talk Mississippi” after learning that he had been subpoenaed by the January 6 committee.

In that interview, according to the investigator, Bruesewitz claimed he didn’t go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and did not organize any of the events that day. The investigator noted that Bruesewitz was not under oath when he gave the interview.

Later, the investigator confronted Bruesewitz with the fact that, on Jan. 6, 2021, he had tweeted: “See you at the Capitol in a few minutes.”

Text messages obtained by the committee from another Stop the Steal leader, Ali Alexander, also strongly suggest Bruesewitz was at the Capitol.

In one text on Jan. 6, Alexander wrote to Mike Coudrey, another Stop the Steal organizer who was attempting to start a rally at a permitted space on the Capitol grounds: “We are about to send over 50,000 people over there. We are on the front side of the Capitol trying to D escalate.”

Coudrey wrote in response: “They broke the barriers they’re going inside.”

Alexander replied: “I know we are now two minutes away.

“Alex and I are talking to the police,” he added, apparently referring to Bruesewitz.

Bruesewitz appears to have also personally directed Trump supporters to come to the Capitol to attend the rally organized by Alexander.

“I urge EVERY patriot in Washington DC to march to the Capitol building and join @StopTheStealUS on the southside!” he wrote in a tweet that was archived by independent Jan. 6 attack researchers before Bruesewitz deleted it.

The post is part of a series of tweets reviewed by Raw Story that have not been previously reported.

The time stamp for the tweet is 2:10 p.m. By 1 p.m., Trump supporters had broken through the barriers and moved on the Capitol grounds. At 2:13 p.m., they would break out windows and stream into the building.

At 2:32 p.m., Bruesewitz tweeted: “What the hell did people expect? The Democrats took everything from these people! Now they’re stealing the election from the ONLY politician (@realDonaldTrump) that cares about them! I don’t support ANY violence. But this isn’t surprising!”

In another tweet at 2:50 p.m. that appears to reference the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt, Bruesewitz wrote: “First they rig and steal an election? Now they’re tear gassing and possibly even shooting @realDonaldTrump supporters? What the hell is happening to our country! Be peaceful! Stay safe!”

Then, at 3:36 p.m., Bruesewitz signaled that the mob should stand down.

“My friends @StopTheStealUS have left the Capitol grounds,” he wrote. “We don’t support ANY violence. Never have. Never will. A group of bad apples have hijacked such an important fight! Shameful!”

While Alexander, for his part, played a prominent role in marshaling right-wing social media influencers to help overturn the 2020 election, he has largely faded from the public eye following a revelation in 2023 that he had asked teenage boys to send him nude pictures.

A White House visit and coordination with members of Congress

Among the questions congressional investigators were keen to answer: why Bruesewitz visited the White House on Jan. 5, the day before the Capitol siege.

White House logs show that Bruesewitz visited Camryn Kinsey, an external relations director for the Presidential Personnel Office between August 2020 and January 2021, according to her LinkedIn page.

Bruesewitz wouldn’t say why — he pleaded the Fifth when asked about the visit.

Bruesewitz also declined to talk about members of Congress with whom he spoke immediately before Jan. 6.

The congressional investigators then showed Bruesewitz a Twitter direct message chat named “Stop the Steal leadership,” which included Bruesewitz and Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ).

Bruesewitz asked Gosar if he coordinated with other House members committed to objecting to the certification, according to a transcript of Bruesewitz’s deposition.

“As best as possible,” Gosar replied.

Later, at 5:15 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Gosar reported in the “Stop the Steal leadership” chat: “We’re still on lockdown in the congressional office.”

Bruesewitz’s deposition also indicates that he talked about his efforts to secure support for the objection from Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) and then-Rep. Ted Budd (R-NC), who is now the junior U.S. senator from North Carolina.

Bruesewitz’s own remarks during a speech outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 5 suggest he was on a phone call with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and other lawmakers to discuss the plan to object to certification the election.

Bruesewitz said he had “been working with a few brave patriots” that work in the Capitol, adding that “dozens” of House members and “a couple of the senators that I work with are objecting tomorrow.”

But he singled out Graham as a holdout.

“I was sitting on a phone call with one of the senators — I’m not gonna say names — I’ll spare Lindsey and this person the embarrassment,” Bruesewitz said. “But I hear Lindsey Graham’s voice — his stupid voice. He goes, ‘You guys are going to cause a civil war if you object.’

Then, Bruesewitz exhorted the crowd.

“You’re not starting a civil war,” he said. “We’re going to end it.”

In the same speech, Bruesewitz recounted how Alexander had enlisted his help to mobilize Trump supporters across the country to protest supposed election fraud one day after the election — when votes were still being counted in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.

“On November 4th, I got a text from my good friend Ali Alexander, and he said, ‘Something terrible’s happening. They’re gonna steal this thing. We must stop it,’” Bruesewitz recalled. “And so what we did is we put together a coalition of patriots and we started flying them across the country. Within hours, we had thousands and thousands of people in Arizona, hundreds of people across different state capitals across the country. And we said, ‘We are not going to let the Democrats steal our country.’”

Since 2018, Bruesewitz’s political consulting firm has performed work for several other pro-MAGA political candidates and committees, according to Federal Election Commission records.

The firm received $54,120 from a pro-Trump super PAC then known as the Committee to Defend the President. Other clients, per federal records, include Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX), Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH).

CHICAGO — Despite some protesters’ vows to “make it great like ’68,” history did not repeat itself, and the streets of Chicago did not descend into chaos during this year’s Democratic National Convention.

And inside the United Center, delegates cheering the presidential nomination of Vice President Kamala Harris experienced none of the turmoil that upended the 1968 convention, when security forces roughed up journalists and attacked campaign volunteers.

Despite the parallels between opposition to the Vietnam war in 1968 and protests against U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza in 2024, there are some key differences that explain why the dynamic is different this time.

Most importantly, the nominees: Harris is not Hubert Humphrey.

Sure, Harris is currently the sitting vice president, as Humphrey was in 1968. But as the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, and as a woman poised to become leader of the free world, she can credibly claim to be a change candidate. Humphrey, in contrast, was the embodiment of the 1960s-era Democratic Party establishment.

Harris’ campaign promises “a new way forward” — primarily from the era of Donald Trump, but also from the political style — if not entirely the policy prescriptions — of a Silent Generation politician in Joe Biden, who entered the U.S. Senate in 1973, when Harris was in grade school.

Humphrey, in contrast, represented a continuation of then-President Lyndon Johnson’s policies, including an unpopular, war and efforts to address racism and poverty that, taken together with rioting in American cities in response to the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, prompted a backlash from white voters.

Another key difference between 2024 and 1968 is the Republican nominee. Simply stated,Trump is not Richard Nixon.

Voters and, more importantly, the Democratic Party rank-and-file, know Trump because he’s already served one term as president and has never stopped running for president since, shattering democratic legal standards and norms all the while.

Nixon, the Republican nominee, ran on the sufficiently vague promise of “peace with victory” in Vietnam that allowed him to evade scrutiny before going on to win the election and dramatically expand the war.

While Nixon would of course resign in 1974 amid nation-shaking abuses of power, neither Democrats nor Republicans in 1968 could not have predicted the events that would precede his political demise.

In contrast, Democratic Party delegates who gathered in Chicago this week are well aware that Trump intends, for one, to gut the civil service to install loyalists in the federal government. Trump’s risible efforts to distance himself notwithstanding, Project 2025, with its prescriptions for restructuring the government with authoritarian efficiency, is practically a household name among Democratic voters.

Thanks to the threat of Trump, Democratic Party activists are giving their nominee extraordinary leeway on policy issues. Aside from the politically perilous issue of Gaza, there was little evidence inside the United Center of factions jockeying for influence over particulars concerning environmental policy, healthcare or immigration. Many Democrats are happy to unify behind Harris with the imperative to beat Trump in November.

Another key difference between then and now is the Chicago police, who arguably bear the largest share of responsibility for the violence in 1968.

In 1968, violent skirmishes broke out between police and protesters roughly six miles from the convention center in what an independent commission later described as a “indiscriminate and unrestrained police violence.”

Protesters at the 2024 Democratic convention leaned into the legacy of 1968 in a bid to elevate the suffering in Gaza into the national discourse.

“Just like 1968, there’s nothing here to celebrate,” the protesters chanted on Wednesday, as their march idled in a residential neighborhood four blocks from the United Center. “The whole world’s watching — the bombs are dropping.”

Chicago police in riot gear — aided throughout Chicago by local and federal law enforcement officials from across the nation — held the line despite attempts by protesters throughout the week to break through security fences and access the United Center.

There were some minor skirmishes, as on Tuesday evening, when officers grabbed protest leaders out of a crowd outside the Israeli consulate, about two miles away from the United Center. The police sometimes used aggressive tactics, including trying to grab media credentials from journalists and arresting two on Tuesday. They also detained protesters in train stations near the march route, although they later released them, and in the end, the clashes didn’t amount to much.

Contrast this week’s events with the 1968 protests, as described by Peter Hayward, then a college student, to CBS News: “Cops on motorcycles — on those three-wheeled motorcycles — just driving us north. I saw some kids fall down — in a panic to see this kind of thing happening — and the National Guard just walking over them, and the motorcycle cops showing absolutely no respect for the fact that these people were lying there.”

The violence in 1968 was so horrifying and grotesque that Humphrey was forced to acknowledge it before giving his acceptance speech.

In 2024, it’s safe to say that for the vast majority of the Democrats, the joyful chaos of celebratory balloons and throngs of elated delegates chanting long after Harris left the stage left a more lasting impression than anything transpiring outside the United Center.

With the Democratic National Convention slated to start days from now in Chicago, many in the party are thrilled to channel a sudden burst of energy surrounding Vice President Kamala Harris — who is already certified as the presidential nominee — and emerge unified in taking a “joyful” fight to Donald Trump in the general election.

But it won’t be that easy.

The ongoing carnage of Israel’s war in Gaza and the threat of a widening war throughout the Middle East raises a profound note of discord amid what party leaders want to be a harmonious gathering.

Protest against the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel is expected inside and outside Chicago’s United Center, where the Democratic National Convention will take place.

In interviews with Raw Story this month, pro-Palestine convention delegates, who together represent hundreds of thousands of voters who withheld their votes from Joe Biden during the primaries, indicate they’ll press the case on the convention floor for a ceasefire and arms embargo against Israel.

Meanwhile, in the surrounding streets, potentially thousands of protesters — some radicalized by the experience of police crackdowns against pro-Palestine college campus encampments earlier this year — are angling to the Biden-Harris administration for propping up what they consider the worst human rights atrocity of the 21st century.

An insistent demand to account for the Gaza dead will be heard, they say, a Democratic Party unity-fest be damned.

“I do think it’s important to see that this movement is not fringe,” Asma Mohammed, an uncommitted delegate, told Raw Story. “It’s full of people across the country who are considering whether they’re going to show up at the polls at all.”

And while Mohammed said the uncommitted delegates are not coordinating with the protesters outside the convention hall, she said she hopes their voices will be heard by presumptive nominee Kamala Harris.

“We are trying to get these demands met so that our people do not have to be in the street demanding change at the risk of being arrested, at the risk of being maced, at the risk of being chased by police,” Mohammed said. “It’s terrifying to have to do that. We want Kamala Harris to see that we are willing to do that to save the lives of people in Palestine.”

The specter of violence has loomed over the convention, with the 1968 Democratic convention as a cautionary tale of police overreaction turning protests into bedlam and the party emerging fractured and weakened. The city repaired some of its reputation with a Democratic convention that went off without a hitch in 1996, but Chicago experienced significant unrest during protests in the summer of 2020 over the murder of George Floyd.

The two camps of pro-Palestine advocacy at this year’s Democratic convention are raising almost identical demands, but the stakes for each are wildly different.

Many of the pro-Palestine activists in the “uncommitted” movement work in organizations that advocate for goals that benefit working people, such as school funding. They can’t necessarily afford to alienate Democratic Party officials, including Harris’ recently announced running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

But protesters with no ties to the party may feel they have nothing to lose. By the very nature of a national convention — and with images of the Democrats’ violent 1968 convention in Chicago firmly in mind — thousands of people with varying agendas are converging in one place at the same time, with the potential for confusion and unpredictable results.

Here’s what you should prepare for.

Inside the convention hall: ‘uncommitted’ to Harris

Thirty uncommitted delegates across Michigan, Minnesota and Hawaii — those who are not supporting Harris — are going into the convention with two demands that appear highly unlikely to be met: an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and an arms embargo against Israel.

They are also requesting a meeting with Harris and calling for the Democratic National Committee to provide a five-minute speaking role to Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who has witnessed the war up close by working in a hospital in Gaza.

They are further asking for space at the convention for a daily vigil, and for programming such as a panel discussion or debate about the different views within the party on the war between Israel and Hamas, which governs Gaza. Israel has been fighting Hamas for more than 10 months after Hamas militants attacked and killed more than 1,100 people in Israel — mostly civilians — and kidnapped more than 200 others.

“Folks are asking if we’re going to endorse Harris,” Mohammed told Raw Story. “Until we have that meeting, there’s no chance of us feeling there’s any alignment in our values.”

So far, the Harris-Walz campaign has not responded to the request for a meeting. The Democratic National Committee likewise has given no indication as to whether an advocate for Palestine will receive a speaker slot.

The Harris-Walz campaign and Democratic National Committee did not respond to messages from Raw Story seeking comment.

A Democratic Party platform draft released last month gives pro-Palestinian protestors little purchase, as it states that the Democratic Party’s commitment to Israel’s security is “ironclad,” as is its commitment to Israel’s “its qualitative military edge” over enemies.

Colin Kahl, a former under secretary at the U.S. Department of Defense, who co-wrote the section of the platform that addresses the Middle East, emphasized during a meeting of the platform committee last month that the document reflects Biden and Harris’ belief in “the worth of every innocent life, whether Israeli or Palestinian.”

Elianne Farhat, co-chair of the National Uncommitted Movement, had previously addressed the committee while raising the demand for a ceasefire and arms embargo.

“I don’t believe that language would be in there without the organizing of the uncommitted movement,” she said. “If that’s their attempt to placate us, it is wholly insufficient.”

Mohammed downplayed the possibility of disruption inside the convention hall.

ALSO READ: We asked 10 Republican senators: ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’ Things got weird fast.

“We’re people with roles within the party,” she said. “We want to ensure that we’re following the rules in the party.”

She added that simply being elected as delegates on behalf of the 10,000 people who voted uncommitted in the Michigan primary “is an act of protest.”

Others in the uncommitted movement have suggested that even if the Democratic Party doesn’t meet their demands, that doesn’t mean pro-Palestine voices won’t be heard within the United Center.

Layla Elabad, a community organizer in Michigan, told Mother Jones that even if Dr. Haj-Hassan doesn’t receive a formal speaker slot, “we’ll find a way for her to speak, one way or another, in the tradition of Fannie Lou Hamer, who made a moral witness to human suffering at the 1964 DNC.”

Hamer was the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to be recognized in place of the all-white official delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. Hamer’s speech to the credentials committee was televised for a national audience and vividly described the horrors of racial segregation in the South.

Outside the convention hall: a militant left

For their part, protest leaders who won’t be credentialed inside the convention hall have made it clear that they hold the Biden-Harris administration responsible for the death toll in Gaza — more than 39,000 people by late July, according to Palestinian health authorities.

And on this specific issue, they make no distinction between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

“Our aim is to bring together tens of thousands of people to call for ending genocide and ending U.S. aid to Israel,” Faayani Aboma Mijana, a spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the DNC, told Raw Story.

But Mijana said these protesters are not looking for strategic allies inside the convention hall. They acknowledged there are elected officials in the Democratic Party “who are friendly to what we’re trying to do,” but the one person they cited as an example — Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) — was knocked out in her primary on Tuesday by an opponent who received heavy financial backing from pro-Israel lobbying groups.

“We know the source of change is not going to come from within the party,” Mijana said. “Our focus is on building a mass movement outside of Washington. The change is not going to come from within the parties; it’s going to be brought about by the movement outside of it.”

The protesters have pledged to do their part to minimize the risk of violence, while the Chicago police have signaled they will draw a hard line against unrest.

Mijana said protest leaders are planning a “peaceful, family friendly” event that will be inclusive of everyone, regardless of immigration and disability status. Similar to the protest against the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, the Chicago protest leaders are securing permits and plan to utilize marshals to guide protesters and de-escalate and potentially confrontations with counter-protesters.

Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling warned during a press conference last month: “Physical responses to violence and civil unrest on the part of those who come here with plans to damage the city or reputation of the city or to hurt people — the response is never going to be pretty. But it will be constitutional.”

Palestine is front and center in the March Against the DNC, planned for the first and final days of the convention, although protesters are also highlighting mass incarceration, the crackdown on undocumented immigrants, and women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

While Mijana said organizers are committed to keeping protesters safe, the potential for convention-related chaos to usher in a second Trump administration is simply not a factor in their considerations.

“Our view is, how much worse can it get?” they told Raw Story. “There’s already a genocide that’s killed 40,000 people. An entire city of 2 million people has been displaced. People are starving. People are being raped and tortured. It’s already the worst human rights atrocity of this century.”

James Zogby, pollster and founder of Arab American Institute, likewise expressed deep concern about “40,000 people dead — at least,” noting that “people are upset and have a right to be.”

But Zogby cautioned that “people also have the need to be responsible in that we are winning the public relations war.

“There’s far greater sympathy among Democrats towards the Palestinians and what they’ve endure. There’s far greater support for change in policy,” he told Raw Story in a phone interview. “We have to be careful in how the demonstrations unfold so that they make a point to move forward support instead of alienating potential allies. I’m not sure everyone has that goal. They’re using slogans like ‘Genocide Joe’ and ‘Killer Kamala. That’s not helpful.”

The 1968 analogy

Both protesters and pro-Trump forces watching the convention from the sidelines have leaned into the 1968 analogy, while the pro-Palestine forces planning to attend the convention have vowed they will not be bullied into silence in the name of preserving party unity.

“It’s something that we are hyper-aware of, is ’68, and it’s something we’ve been constantly thinking about and talking about,” said Danaka Katovich, co-director of activist group Code Pink, during a group webinar on Aug. 1 while discussing planning for the protests. “We’ve identified this DNC as a leverage point, something to take advantage of, especially with the internal political strife in the Democratic Party.”

As early as this spring, Christopher Rufo, a conservative intellectual credited with weaponizing “critical race theory” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” as culture-war smears against the left, has identified the protests against the war in Gaza as a new point of attack against Democrats. Ignoring the antipathy between the party and the protesters, Rufo and other conservative strategists hope to create a linkage in the minds of swing voters between radical left-wing protesters and the Democratic Party.

In an essay titled “The Left’s Hamas Problem that he published in April, Rufo wrote: “The encampment escalation divides the left, alienates influential supporters, and creates a sense of chaos that will move people against it. The correct response from the right is to create the conditions for these protests to thrive in blue cities and campuses…. If these protests become more volatile and go all the way to the Democratic convention in Chicago, we could see a 1968 scenario. That didn’t work out too well for the Democrats.”

It also didn’t work out well for the antiwar movement.

Bill Ayers, a former Students for a Democratic Society leader who protested the 1968 Democratic National Convention, cited one success in his remarks during the Code Pink webinar. The police response stripped away any illusions the protesters might have that American power could be bent towards good, he said.

“What we succeeded in was showing the system for what it was,” Ayers said. “It was a militarized, militaristic response to protesters who simply wanted their voices to be heard to stop a genocide. And what did they do? They had a police riot. So, we showed the world: This is what American power rests on. I think it was a huge success.”

But Ayers readily acknowledged that the 1968 protests completely failed in a material sense.

“We did not end the war in 1968,” he said. “A million people were dead, but the war ground on, and [National Security Adviser] Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon expanded the war…. It went on for another… seven years. So, we can’t claim a huge victory…. What we set out to do was end a genocidal war, and we did not do that…. We didn’t stop the war, and that was our minimum program.”

While the parallels between 1968 and 2024 are striking, there are also notable differences.

The Democratic Party was far more divided in 1968, with hopes for a “peace” candidate dashed first by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy coupled with party leaders sidelining Eugene McCarthy at the convention.

In contrast, when Joe Biden dropped out of the race last month, Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris. And unlike in 1968, when eventual Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey came from the pro-war faction of the party, Harris is acknowledged among protesters as being more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people than Biden.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, remarked during the Aug. 1 webinar that beyond the antiwar movement, voters who would ordinarily be supportive of the Palestinian cause are likely to rally around Harris “because of their fear of Trump.”

Farhat, the co-chair of the National Uncommitted Movement, declined to speculate on what strategies uncommitted delegates might employ to press their case inside the convention hall. But she said they’ll be recruiting so-called “ceasefire” delegates among those committed to the nominee “to be part of a visible presence for Palestinian lives.”

And, she said, their efforts won’t end with the convention.

“Uncommitted delegates are very clear on who they are representing,” she said. “That’s the more than 700,000 voters who voted in the primaries. That’s who we are representing, and we will stay true and focused on being accountable to them, as well as the Palestinian leadership — to not give up ground on this critical issue.”

Editor's note: Following publication of this story, the Uncommitted National Movement confirmed in a press release that two leaders met with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz before their rally in Detroit on Wednesday.

According to the leaders, Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh, Harris "shared her sympathies and expressed an openness to a meeting with Uncommitted leaders to discuss an arms embargo."

Phil Gordon, Harris' national security advisor, said in an apparent response to the Uncommitted leaders in a post on X on Thursday that Harris "does not support an arms embargo on Israel" and "will continue to work to protect civilians in Gaza and to uphold international humanitarian law."

The self-styled “secretary of retribution” for Donald Trump, who created a “Deep State target list” a prominent congressman describes as a “vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans,” received an audience earlier this month with the very people he’s sought to attract: law enforcement officers.

Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army lieutenant colonel with designs on conducting “live-streamed swatting raids” against the more than 350 politicians, federal employees, journalists and others on the list, detailed his plans to about two dozen police officials gathered earlier this month for a sheriffs’ association conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

Raiklin’s 20-minute presentation to the Texas law enforcement officials took place in a private meeting room on July 22 in a restaurant in Fort Worth, according to a video reviewed by Raw Story.

During his presentation, Raiklin laid out a legally dubious plan in which he suggested the law enforcement officials could investigate various high-ranking Democrats by reviewing their private communications on the social media platform X, and then correlating the geo-located data to their local counties.

In previous interviews on right-wing podcasts, Raiklin has suggested that the communications, were they to be disclosed, would provide digital evidence of crimes that would then justify law enforcement investigations and “swatting raids” — the latter term apparently referring to arrests.

Raw Story has confirmed that at least two county sheriffs were among the law enforcement personnel attending the event, which one sheriff said was hosted by an organization called Texans for Constitutional Sheriffs.

“We are pleading with you at the county level,” Raiklin told the group, adding that he plans to “use capabilities like some people have in this room to sift through all of their digital assets.”

With Trump now facing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, Raiklin predicted that the next six weeks in American politics would get “spicy,” and he presented a conspiratorial narrative about supposed ruthless “Deep State” agents willing to go to any lengths to maintain their hold on power.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump ‘secretary of retribution’ won't discuss his ‘target list’ at RNC

“They may have already assassinated Joe Biden, for all we know,” Raiklin said during his talk, which took place one day after President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the presidential race. (Contrary to speculation by right-wing conspiracy theorists, Biden is alive.)

“They are willing to go to any length to retain their power, and we have to go to the mat to make sure that we get our constitutional order back in place,” Raiklin continued. “And it requires everybody in this room and your colleagues at the county level — local action, national impact — to reset and body-check this lawlessness.”

The law enforcement personnel in the audience participated in Raiklin’s classroom-style presentation by engaging in a call-and-response session.

For example, Raiklin asked the sheriff officials to name a business mogul who had recently moved his company headquarters from California to Texas.

“Elon Musk,” one man responded.

Raiklin also called on them to name the local Texas counties where they worked.

“We want to see all forms of communication between Twitter employees and their emails, and their internal Slack channels, and their Twitter direct messages inside the Twitter platform with the geo-tagged, geo-located metadata applied to everyone on the Deep State target list,” Raiklin said. “And then decide where a criminal interaction took place by jurisdiction. Anything that has Texas on it in county….”

Raiklin paused, and then called on one of the audience members.

“What county?” he asked a stocky man with piercing blue eyes.

That man, Sheriff Edward A. Miller, volunteered to Raiklin that he leads the sheriff’s office in Shackelford, a county with a population of 3,105 that is roughly 125 miles west of Fort Worth and not near any interstate highways.

With this tangible piece of information, Raiklin continued his hypothetical, asking the law enforcement officials to imagine that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a prominent, liberal congressman who previously expressed concern about Raiklin to Raw Story — was “driving through Shackelford County.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Texas news station removes press release praising Trump's ‘secretary of retribution’

Then, perhaps recognizing the remote likelihood of the hypothetical, Raiklin abruptly asked for another volunteer.

An unidentified man volunteered the name of McLennan County, located on Interstate 35 between Austin and the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Its county seat is the city of Waco.

Then, Raiklin moved on to a more plausible place where Raskin might travel.

“Who is near a major airport?” he asked. “Anyone?”

A woman attending Raiklin’s presentation volunteered the names of Tarrant and Dallas, the two counties across which Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport stretches.

Miller, the sheriff of Shackelford County, Texas, told Raw Story by phone that Raiklin’s presentation was put on by Texans for Constitutional Sheriffs. Sheriff Parnell McNamara of McLennan County told Raw Story that someone he didn't know invited him to the restaurant for a steak dinner while he was eating lunch at the Fort Worth Convention Center, where the Sheriff's Association of Texas Annual Training Conference and Expo was held from July 20 to July 23.

McNamara said he ate the steak, but didn't stay for the presentation. He told Raw Story he doesn't know Raiklin and hasn't communicated with him before or since.

After reviewing social media posts showing Raiklin mingling in the exhibition hall at the conference, Skylor Hearn, executive director of the Sheriffs' Association of Texas, confirmed that they show Raiklin wearing an "exhibitor" badge issued by the association.

Some of the posts depicting Raiklin at the sheriffs' conference show him seated in front of large placards for two different organizations — one that provides legal support to defendants charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the other promoting the hand-counting of election ballots.

One post includes a photograph showing Raiklin speaking with Morris County, Texas, Sheriff Jack Martin. The caption indicates that Martin had been “informed to be prepared” to receive a tranche of private messages from X “and let his district attorney know it’s coming for Deep State Target List development.”

Martin did not return multiple messages from Raw Story seeking comment on Raiklin’s pitch. Nor did the sheriffs’ offices in Tarrant and Dallas counties, which were both referenced by one of the audience members during Raiklin’s presentation.

“We get a wide variety of vendors,” Hearn told Raw Story. “If someone is willing to stop and listen to them, they can talk about their widgets or their worldview.”

McNamara, the sheriff in McLennan County, said he was similarly enticed when he received the invitation to Raiklin's presentation at the restaurant.

"Different vendors are wanting you to come and wanting to buy you dinner, and I thought that's what this was about," he said.

The sheriffs' conference included official trainings that allow participants to earn credits through the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, but Hearn said Raiklin’s presentation to the sheriffs at the restaurant “was definitely not part of our programming.”

Raiklin, who attended the sheriffs conference only three days after appearing at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee as a credentialed guest, did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

When Raw Story approached Raiklin last month at the Republican National Convention, Raiklin refused to answer various questions, including those about his "target list" and plan to work with largely rural, conservative county sheriffs to deputize some 75,000 military veterans to arrest people on his list.

The video of Raiklin's presentation shows a man who appears to be Kirk Launius, founder and director of Texans for Constitutional Sheriffs, assisting Raiklin by selecting a slide for his audio-visual presentation.

Launius' LinkedIn profile describes him as a Dallas-based "global internet entrepreneur, mobile business coach, social media strategist and philanthropist" who was previously employed as a Dallas police officer. Launius ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Dallas County in 2012 and 2016.

Launius could not be reached for comment for this story.

‘America will respond in kind’

Since the beginning of the year, Raiklin has zealously promoted his plan to enlist sheriffs to detain federal employees and others who have run afoul of Trump and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

On podcasts and social media, Raiklin often presents a bill of particulars against individuals on his “target list” based on a dubious legal framework and dubious claims, such as suggesting without evidence that the unidentified person responsible for setting pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a subordinate-surrogate of the Capitol Police Board,” which oversees the Capitol Police.

Raiklin’s claims carry an undercurrent of violence: He accuses perceived Trump enemies of treason, and his social media followers sometimes make the logical leap that people on Raiklin’s “target list” should face the punishment of death.

Raiklin has forged a close relationship with Flynn, who was his former boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a federal entity where Raiklin worked during the past decade. Following an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate from Virginia in 2018, Raiklin became an avid Trump supporter, and worked in tandem with Flynn to overturn the 2020 election.

Over the course of this year, Raiklin has appeared at events to promote a laudatory documentary film about Flynn.

Prior to each screening, Raiklin typically presents a museum-style “evidence wall” arguing that many of the individuals on his “Deep State target list” conspired in a plot to persecute Flynn.

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the U.S. Department of Justice dropped its case against Flynn in May 2020, and later that year, then-President Trump issued Flynn a pardon.

Raiklin’s rhetoric over the past two months has escalated to the point where he has directly called for violence.

In one X post, Raiklin mocked former national security adviser Alexander Vindman, suggesting that he would “speak to him in person” and asking for his “preferred punishment for committing treason.” Raiklin supporters on X responded by suggesting variations on hanging or execution by firing squad.

Since the attempt on Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, Raiklin has claimed without evidence that members of the so-called “Deep State” are involved in a plot to assassinate the former president and current 2024 Republican nominee for president.

In an X post on July 22, Raiklin decreed that “all leading contenders” to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee — Vice President Kamala Harris ostensibly included — “are to be treated as the ones behind ordering the assassination of President Trump.” He further warned that “America will respond in kind unless they turn themselves in.”

Lira Gallagher, a spokesperson for the FBI Washington Field Office, declined to comment on whether Raiklin is on the agency’s radar.

During his presentation to the Texas sheriffs, Raiklin singled out Raskin, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, for scrutiny.

Raskin has previously described Raiklin’s list as a “vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans, and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” Raskin called on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to repudiate threats of political violence.

Since then, Raiklin has appeared to taunt Raskin by posting a photo of himself clasping hands with Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) at the Republican National Convention. Higgins has falsely claimed that a “ghost bus… filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters” descended on the Capitol on Jan. 6."

“What do you think we discussed, @RepRaskin?” Raiklin wrote. “Maybe @SpeakerJohnson can tell you.”

Then, on the same day he spoke to the Texas sheriffs, Raiklin accused Raskin of being “involved in the assassination attempt” against Trump, while acknowledging that he has no evidence to back his claim.

Miller, the sheriff of Shackelford County, said he came away confused about what Raiklin was asking him to do.

“I don’t know where you would come up with a crime if they’re 30,000 feet in the air,” Miller told Raw Story. “It seems like that would be more likely to be investigated as a federal conspiracy.”

Miller said he expected Raiklin’s talk to provide sheriffs with insight on how they can follow the Constitution, but that wasn’t what they heard.

“My opinion is that the presentation that should have been given is, ‘This is the United States Constitution. We believe that the sheriff and the county should follow the Constitution as it relates to the inalienable rights of the citizens,’” Miller said. “That wasn’t the presentation that was given. It was a presentation on politics.”

When Raiklin asked whom in the audience might be “near a major airport,” he zeroed in on the biggest political target of all — Harris — the candidate who is all but certain to go up against Donald Trump in the presidential election.

An unidentified woman in the audience volunteered that Tarrant and Dallas counties in Texas encompass Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

“Imagine they flew through there as they’re waiting,” Raiklin said. “They communicate.”

He went on to specifically name Harris, while suggesting that the law enforcement officers could investigate her “comms team” based on private emails that they might have exchanged while waiting for a connecting flight.

Raiklin’s motivations — and a pitch to law enforcement

During his presentation in Fort Worth, Raiklin suggested his motivation for attempting to exact retribution on federal government employees was being placed under surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security following Jan. 6, 2021, when he was spotted on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

In the runup to Jan. 6, Raiklin had promoted a plan called “Operation Pence Card,” which called for then-Vice President Mike Pence to set aside electoral votes in states narrowly won by Biden, which would have effectively flipped the election in Trump’s favor.

“And in the case of my situation — top Secret clearance, reserve lieutenant colonel — cleared TSA pre-check,” Raiklin said, apparently referring to a pat down. “But when I go to travel — not anymore — for 21 months, they subjected me to that Fourth Amendment gang rape, as I reported that procedure, okay? Is that cool?”

To establish his qualifications, Raiklin told the group assembled for his presentation that he finished his military career teaching “intelligence analysis at the nation’s premier intelligence analytic program in the U.S. intel community at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“I’m not the smartest guy in the room, but I may know what I’m talking about when it comes to conducting structured analytic techniques, link analysis, timeline, chronology — all taking that capability and applying it to something isn’t right in America,” he added.

Raiklin’s plan depends on cooperation from a series of powerful actors, as he explained to the law enforcement officers present for his presentation.

He told them he wants to see three Republican congressmen who chair House committees — Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky, and Barry Loudermilk of Georgia — or Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton subpoena X owner Elon Musk for the private direct messages of the 350-some individuals on his “Deep State target list.”

A spokesperson for Loudermilk did not respond to a request for comment on the record, and emails to Jordan, Comer and Paxton similarly went unreturned.

Prior to speaking with sheriffs in Fort Worth last week, Raiklin had attempted to cultivate relationships with sheriffs through the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which espouses the controversial belief that sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are not legally required to uphold state and federal laws they deem to be unconstitutional.

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Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.

“I am your warrior,” Trump proclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”

Raiklin is seeking to enlist so-called “constitutional” sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to detain Trump’s political enemies. Or, as he says, carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against individuals on his “Deep State target list.”

“This is a deadly serious report,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story. “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom."

READ: Trump's far-right army is threatening bloodshed — believe them

Raskin called on House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to “denounce this dangerous plot and to repudiate threats of, and planning for, political violence from any quarter. Bipartisan opposition to vigilante violence and assassination plots is essential for American government to continue.”

The list Raiklin has been circulating since January is extensive.

It includes numerous Democratic and Republican elected officials; FBI and intelligence officials; members of the House Select January 6 Committee; U.S. Capitol Police officers and civilian employees; witnesses in Trump’s two impeachment trials and the Jan. 6 committee hearings; and journalists from publications ranging from CNN and the Washington Post to Reuters and Raw Story — all considered political enemies of Trump.

Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police employee named on the list who as assistant director of intelligence and interagency coordination warned about the potential for violence in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, said she would not be intimidated by the list.

“Any hit list is designed to impart the silence and fear of those named on it,” Farnam told Raw Story. “But silence is victory for those who write such lists. Conversely, speaking the truth without fear will always be the undoing of those who seek to intimidate and spread hate in our world. I can never be silenced.”

In addition to Farnam, the list includes nine current or former U.S. Capitol Police employees. The agency declined to comment for this story.

Raw Story is not publishing the full list given the potential risk posed to people unaware that they’re on it.

One individual named on the list who spoke on condition of anonymity noted that Raiklin is associated with retired Lt. General Michael Flynn.

“And Trump himself has repeated on dozens of occasions calls for revenge, retribution and retaliation,” the person told Raw Story. “This is another example of that broader phenomenon of revenge against political enemies that animates the former president and his entire movement, and for that reason should concern us all.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to emails requesting comment for this story.

‘Attack on our democracy’

The accusations of “treason” and other imagined offenses leveled by Raiklin against these individuals are typically based on fanciful legal theories and outlandish factual claims, if anything at all.

For example: Raiklin, in a podcast, suggested without evidence that the unidentified person responsible for setting pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on Jan. 6, 2021, was “a subordinate-surrogate of the Capitol Police Board,” which oversees the Capitol Police.

But Raiklin is nothing if not self-assured that the “evidence” he’s gathering on anti-Trump “deep state” plotters is real. So real, it seems, that Raiklin claims the material — fully revealed — would establish probable cause for county sheriffs across the nation to issue arrest warrants for various high-ranking officials who have, in one way or another, run afoul of Trump.

Under Raiklin’s objectively bizarre plan, the sympathetic sheriffs would deputize some 75,000 military veterans — veterans he claims have been pushed out of service because they refused to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates — to carry out the arrests.

Raiklin has gone so far as to pitch his plan to a group of far-right sheriffs who met in Las Vegas in April.

Public records requests filed by Raw Story with dozens of county sheriff offices reveal that word of Raiklin’s efforts has reached the email inboxes of sheriffs from Wisconsin to Oklahoma.

But Raiklin’s effort to enlist these sheriffs appears to be foundering: Not one has openly signed on, and even some who are sympathetic to his cause publicly warn that his plan violates due process.

Undaunted, Raiklin has attempted to build relationships with conservative members of Congress, and aides to two Republican lawmakers who chair influential House committees confirmed to Raw Story that they are familiar with him.

An overriding reason for why Raiklin hasn’t been entirely marginalized or relegated by fellow conservatives to the realm of kooks and gadflies?

Raiklin uses the kind of hyperbolic language that Trump himself uses — and that Trump’s base eats up.

He gives federal agencies and media outlets Trump-like nicknames such as “FB-Lie,” “Faux-litico” and “National Poison Radio.”

“My nickname is the Deep State marauder, aka the mauler,” Raiklin told a group of election deniers in New Jersey earlier this year. “And I like using ice picks instead of poking the bear.”

In a video posted in May to X, which now accrued more than 10 million views, Raiklin said, “Expect to see live-streamed swatting raids of every single individual on that Deep State target list, because the precedence has already been set.”

Notwithstanding Raiklin’s claim that his plan would be “legal, moral and ethical,” swatting — the false reporting of an emergency to garner a response from law enforcement for the purpose of harassing a target — is illegal.

Raiklin has nevertheless promoted the idea in podcast interviews, multiple posts on X, a press conference and conversations with prominent far-right extremists.

In recent days, Raiklin’s rhetoric has escalated beyond setting out future hypothetical scenarios for retribution.

He mocked one former federal employee blocking him on X while suggesting that the targeted individual “wants me to speak to him in person” and asking him for his “preferred punishment for committing treason.”

And during a podcast, he claimed to be surveilling a U.S. Capitol Police employee, whom he mentioned by name, “both physically and digitally.”

Experts worry that provocative rhetoric from figures such as Raiklin could impose a climate of fear on civil servants simply trying to do their jobs. Even worse, Raiklin’s rhetoric could inspire violence against them.

“The idea that you would target anyone that was there on the basis of allegiance to the rule of law and the Constitution is really scary,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told Raw Story.

Stier’s organization promotes professional, merit-based civil service as a pillar of good governance — a notion that he said is being increasingly challenged.

“This represents, in my view, an attack on our democracy,” Stier said. “We have a rule of law. If any civil servants are violating the law, there are mechanisms in place to hold them accountable. Vigilantism is not the way to have a society function.”

Raiklin responded to a phone call requesting comment by posting a recording of the voicemail on his X account on Tuesday, while commenting: “Looks like Elements of the Deep State Target List have asked @jordangreennc of Raw Sewage to try to find out more about my list….”

Later, he acknowledged a set of written questions submitted by Raw Story but didn't answer them, while accusing Raw Story and "domestic terrorist leftists" of hounding him.

"Look at my entire Deep State target list," Raiklin said. "That is the beginning. This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?"

One prominent media organization named on Raiklin’s “target” list expressed concern for its journalists, five of whom also appear on the list by name.

“The conspiracy theories underpinning this list are baseless, and the calls for targeted harassment are dangerous,” Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesperson for the New York Times, told Raw Story. “The Times reporters on the list are simply professional journalists doing their jobs. Swatting is a criminal offense, and in the event of any instances directed at our employees, the Times will work with law enforcement to prosecute those responsible.”

Said Raw Story Publisher Roxanne Cooper: “Purposefully threatening and endangering the safety of working journalists is both reprehensible and illegal, and the American public should reject and denounce anyone who engages in such behavior.”

CNN, Reuters, the Atlantic and American Oversight declined to comment on Raiklin. Emails to the Washington Post, Politico, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC, whose journalists are also named on the list, went unreturned.

Who is Ivan Raiklin?

As the 2020 election approached, conspiracy minded Trump supporters with active Twitter accounts were in abundance. Most never broke through the incessant MAGA noise, or merely added another note to its election denialism dissonance.

Raiklin was different.

He was a seasoned veteran with a background in military intelligence who wound up playing a small but significant role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s name.

Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Armed Forces in which he served as a military attaché to the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and foreign affairs specialist assigned to the Ukraine Crisis Team, Raiklin left the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2017 to run for U.S. Senate in Virginia, according to the Washington Post.

At the time, Raiklin’s candidacy in 2018 provided little indication of the MAGA loyalist relishing the destruction of Trump’s enemies that he would become.

If anything, Raiklin fashioned himself as a force of apolitical positivity.

“The reason I’m running is that we’ve had such a negative political atmosphere the past couple years,” Raiklin told the Courier in Iowa. “I want to inject a ‘positive disruption’ in the political conversation. Being a veteran of 20 years, I’m pretty much a political agnostic.”

But Raiklin didn’t get far: He failed to garner a sufficient number of signatures to make it onto the Republican primary ballot. And when he sued the Virginia GOP and the state Department of Elections, claiming that he was unfairly excluded, a federal judge tossed out the suit.

Following his disappointing foray into electoral politics, Raiklin began his turn toward Trump’s MAGA movement.

In 2019, he appeared at a QAnon-themed fundraiser for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, whom Raiklin met in 2010. (Flynn and Raiklin have become close in recent years, with Raiklin urging Trump to select Flynn as his vice presidential running mate and Flynn featuring Raiklin in his current speaking tour.)

Roughly a week after the 2020 election, when major media outlets had called the election for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, Raiklin went on Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory show InfoWars and confidently predicted that Trump would ultimately obtain the necessary number of electoral votes to secure reelection.

“I absolutely guarantee it,” he said. “One hundred percent. Unequivocally. Full stop. There is no possibility that he does not reach 270.”

It's a classic example of how Trump’s followers often act on Trump’s wishes or anticipate his desires without receiving specific directives.

For months, Trump had been saying that the only way he’d lose the election is if Democrats stole it through fraud. Now, Trump had lost, and Raiklin was arguing that Trump was winning, against all evidence.

Raiklin, in essence, operates as an agent of Trumpism independent of Trump.

And as the 2024 election nears, the same dynamic is apparent: Trump articulates the broad themes, and his supporters scramble to put them into practice.

“Stand back and stand by” set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection in 2021, and now, “I am your retribution” serves as a solicitation to supporters such as Raiklin to put together specific plans for retribution against Trump’s political enemies.

‘Operation Pence Card’

Raiklin’s primary contribution to the effort to overturn the 2020 election is a memo he drafted for the benefit of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Entitled “Operation Pence Card,” it proffered a novel legal argument that Vice President Mike Pence held the authority to set aside electoral votes from states narrowly carried by Biden.

The plan is widely associated with attorney John Eastman, who now faces charges of racketeering and conspiracy in Georgia, and with conspiracy, fraud and forgery in Arizona.

But Raiklin actually tweeted out his plan one day before Eastman drafted his now-infamous stop-the-steal memo. And Raiklin wielded enough influence that Trump himself, on Dec. 23, 2020, retweeted Raiklin’s “Operation Pence Card” tweet to his tens of millions of followers.

Around the same time, Raiklin dined with then-Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who attended a meeting at the White House along with other House Republicans to discuss plans to object on Jan. 6 to the congressional certification of the presidential election — the final, generally ceremonial step before a presidential inauguration.

On Jan. 4, 2021, Raiklin had told Jerome Corsi, a longtime conspiracy theorist, that with regard to Trump supporters descending on Washington, D.C. en masse: “I am not calling for any violence, but at the same time, I can’t stop people from committing it.”

Raiklin was present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 when a pro-Trump mob breached Congress’ defenses and temporarily stopped lawmakers’ electoral vote certification. Raiklin has not been charged with any crime related to the attack.

Following the Jan. 6 attack, the Army Reserve opened an investigation into whether Raiklin violated its rules against partisan political activity, but by early 2022, the service had cleared him of wrongdoing.

Raiklin has said the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have also investigated him, but those investigations likewise concluded without formal accusations of wrongdoing against Raiklin.

“So what does that trigger me to do?” Raiklin said during a presentation to a group of election deniers in New Jersey in February. “It weaponizes me against them. And so, since they haven’t found anything, and you’re investigating me, sir, I have the capability and capacity to start digging into you, your family, your friends, your associates — every single thing that you do in your life.”

Whitewashing the crimes of violent J6 rioters

While avoiding prosecution himself, Raiklin has eagerly taken up the cause of defendants who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted for their role in the Jan. 6 attack.

In June, Raiklin held a press conference in Detroit to promote his “live-streamed swatting raids” scheme. He did so alongside Treniss Jewell Evans III, who served a 20-day prison sentence for illegally entering the Capitol. Also speaking at the press conference: Sarah McAbee, the wife of a former sheriff’s deputy who is currently serving a 70-month sentence for assaulting a Washington, D.C., metropolitan police officer.

Ronald Colton McAbee, Sarah McAbee’s husband, wore patches with the word “SHERIFF” and the emblem of the anti-government Three Percenter movement on his clothing while taking part in an hours-long battle at the mouth of the Lower West Terrace Tunnel on Jan. 6.

A GiveSendGo campaign to support his wife applauds McAbee for answering “the call to stand up for our nation,” but following his conviction the Department of Justice described him as witnessing rioters knock an officer defending the U.S. Capitol to the ground. McAbee’s response was the opposite of rendering aid, according to the government.

After the officer was kicked and stripped of his baton by rioters, the government contends that “McAbee stepped into the archway, grabbed the officer’s leg, and pulled him further toward the crowd. When a second MPD officer stepped off the police line to assist the downed officer, McAbee stood up, yelled at the officer who had stepped out to assist, and then swung his arms and hands towards the officer’s head and torso. McAbee made contact with the officer and was wearing the reinforced gloves at the time of the assault.”

In the run-up to Jan. 6, Raiklin had baselessly ascribed the legitimate election of Joe Biden to “domestic fraud” committed by people “potentially under foreign actors’ payroll.” Now, at the press conference in Detroit in June 2024, Raiklin was inverting the violent crimes committed by Trump supporters to portray them, not the officers defending the Capitol, as the victims.

“You need to know who is coming after us,” Raiklin said, naming two people who are part of the U.S. Capitol security apparatus. Without presenting any evidence, Raiklin accused one of the men of “weaponizing and working with the DOJ… to criminalize against Sarah’s husband.”

Cultivating relationships with House Republicans

All the while, Raiklin is forging ties with Republican lawmakers who are sympathetic to the Jan. 6 rioters.

While leveling outlandish charges of criminal misconduct at federal civil servants, Raiklin has become a familiar presence at congressional committee hearings controlled by Republican lawmakers eager to downplay the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, or, alternately, shift blame to Democrats for the violence.

Raiklin has sat in the gallery behind the witnesses in at least five House committee hearings over the past year.

Among them: the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), the House Oversight and Accountability Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).

“I don’t just sit back behind the witnesses when I’m in the House,” Raiklin said on a podcast in May. “For 15 months, I’ve been grinding day in and day out talking to dozens of members of Congress giving ideas on what needs to be done.”

On another podcast, Raiklin said: “The only person that understands this is a guy by the name of Barry Loudermilk…. Why? Well, because he’s doing the right thing. And I get an opportunity to explain this to him and his staff regularly.”

Nick Petromelis, an aide to Loudermilk, told Raw Story he, Petromelis, is “familiar” with Raiklin.

Loudermilk ignored a request from the now-defunct House Select January 6 Committee to explain a tour he gave to constituents on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. His committee deposed Farnam, the former U.S. Capitol Police intelligence leader who is on Raiklin’s target list, last month.

Austin Hacker, an aide to Comer, likewise said he, Hacker, was aware that Raiklin had attended House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearings.

Despite promising in late May that he would find out whether Comer had personally spoken to Raiklin, Hacker stopped responding to follow-up messages from Raw Story.

Raiklin said on a podcast in May that he has sent his “Deep State target list” to Comer, Jordan and the Administration Oversight Subcommittee chaired by Loudermilk.

Hacker told Raw Story that Comer, his boss, does not have the “target list” document. Aides to Jordan and the House Administration Oversight Committee did not respond to emails from Raw Story seeking confirmation that they received copies of the list.

None of the three House members responded to requests for comment about whether they support Raiklin’s antics.

Raiklin has singled out other members of Congress for praise. Of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), who filed legislation to hold U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland in “inherent contempt,” Raiklin said she “has exhibited the maximum courage that her position allows.”

Luna’s legislation would hold the attorney general in “inherent contempt” for refusing demands to turn over audio of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden, related to Biden’s retention of classified documents in the garage of his Delaware home. “Inherent contempt” is a tool that would allow the House sergeant-at-arms to take Garland into custody and compel him to sit for a congressional proceeding. Raiklin told one podcaster that he “saw” Luna at a congressional hearing in May.

Luna’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

‘Go to the maximum level’

While cultivating ties with members of Congress, Raiklin has been lobbying sheriffs — with mixed results — to join his effort.

To reach potentially sympathetic sheriffs, Raiklin has focused on an organization called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.

Under the leadership of Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Arizona, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association has promoted the controversial view that county sheriffs are the highest law in the land and are within their rights to ignore any federal and state laws that they deem to be unconstitutional.

But Mack told Raw Story he has severed ties with Raiklin since talking with him in early June, and that he disapproves of Raiklin’s rhetoric.

During the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association’s annual convention during April in Las Vegas, Raiklin asked a panel of sheriffs if they would “be willing to go to the maximum level to create consequences for these federal actors” whom he claimed had committed “seditious conspiracy.”

The response was less than promising.

Still, the potential for violence should not be discounted, according to Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights and someone who has been monitoring the far right for more than three decades.

“It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility to see them using the office of the sheriff and posses they wish to create to start rounding up political opponents,” Burgart told Raw Story. “Right now, in the far right, the promotion of post-election violence and bloody political retribution has become disturbingly commonplace. In that context, the results of the election are almost an afterthought — only important in determining whether their murderous rage will have state sanction.”

While the far-right’s willingness to escalate may increase as the election approaches, at the time of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention in April, the two elected sheriffs on the panel were taking a cautious approach.

Sheriff Bob Songer from Klickitat County in Washington state told Raiklin that much as he might want to help, he doubted many prosecutors would be willing to press charges.

Sheriff Dar Leaf from Barry County in Michigan, put it more forcefully.

“We’re not going to be able to just go out and arrest,” he said. “We’ve got to do a grand jury indictment, just like the Constitution says.”

Leaf’s far-right credentials would seem to make him a prime candidate for Raiklin’s project. He gained national notoriety in 2020 when he suggested that members of an anti-government militia accused of attempting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer might have been trying to carry out a citizen’s arrest.

Leaf has falsely claimed that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and a lawyer representing Leaf reportedly sought evidence from an ad hoc group organized by lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn in December 2020 that could be used to justify “issuing probable cause warrants to sequester Dominion voting machines.”

But if Raiklin and his allies were discouraged by Leaf’s response at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, they haven’t given any indication of it.

During a podcast appearance with Mark Finchem, a former Arizona state representative who took part in the effort to overturn the 2020 election, Raiklin said he was certain that the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association could help “identify which county sheriffs would be clamoring, clamoring to prosecute these scum.”

“I know one,” Finchem replied. “Dar Leaf in Barry County, Michigan.”

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Leaf said that despite fielding a question from him at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention, he doesn’t know who Raiklin is.

Leaf reiterated his rejection of Raiklin’s plan by expressing an aversion to politically motivated prosecutions.

Furthermore, Leaf warned that if indictments were obtained through grand juries “stacked” with Trump supporters, any criminal activity uncovered through depositions would be thrown out “because we started out breaking the law.”

Among dozens of other sheriff’s offices across the country contacted for this story, two in Wisconsin — Burnett County and Polk County — confirmed receiving an email with the subject heading: “Ivan Raiklin Requests Deputization of 80K Veterans” that linked to Raiklin’s video and encouraged them to get in contact.

“Please Watch this viral video that has garnered 9.8M views in 5 days,” it reads. “Important you understand. Remember your Oath.”

Raiklin’s name landed in one other sheriff’s inbox through a subscription to the “General Flynn Newsletter,” which is promoting the documentary about the former national security adviser.

The email, received by Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado in Oklahoma, describes Raiklin as a member of a team “hand-selected” by Flynn to provide event attendees “with an informative and unforgettable experience.”

The email describes the “General Flynn was Framed Evidence Wall,” a visual prop that Raiklin uses prior to each film screening that presents “an exhaustive timeline and link analysis of all the major political and government officials at the most senior levels that weaponized against General Flynn to prevent him from exposing their corruption.”

During his months-long campaign, Raiklin has continuously referenced Mack and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association in an effort to build credibility for his plan.

During his press conference with Treniss Evans in Detroit, Raiklin mentioned that the previous evening he’d “had a very long conversation with a guy by the name of Sheriff Mack” on the topic of “vetting and communicating with sheriffs.”

On a livestream of the press conference, Raiklin displayed a photo of the two men huddling over a laptop, suggesting a collaborative effort.

In a recent interview, Mack told Raw Story at the time that he had been “getting all sorts of calls” about Raiklin.

But since that meeting, Mack said he has soured on Raiklin’s plan.

“I’m afraid I don’t approve of some of his language, the hyperbole, the rhetoric,” Mack said.

For the same reason, Mack said, he resigned from the Oath Keepers. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right group that recruited from the ranks of retired law enforcement and military veterans, is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy at a federal prison in Cumberland, Md.

“It’s not where CSPOA can go,” Mack said, adding that he and Raiklin “are not working together at all.”

Since early June, Mack said that the two men have not spoken or exchanged any emails.

“Quite frankly, he talks about that list of 350 people — I’m sure they can afford lawyers,” Mack said. “It reeks of lawsuits, and it doesn’t follow due process.”

During his press conference with Evans, Raiklin said the two men are planning to attend the Sheriffs Association of Texas’ annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas, this month and pitch their plan.

“I would say that my inbox has been interesting lately with the amount of sheriffs that have an interest in seeing Texas uphold the United States Constitution, and preserve the way of life that we’ve come to expect as constitutionally guaranteed,” Evans said during the press conference.

But Mack said Raiklin’s score is currently 0.

“I know a lot of sheriffs, especially in Texas,” Mack told Raw Story. “I do not believe he has a single sheriff aligned with him. He’s never been able to give me a name.”

‘It’s so easy to learn where they live’

While cultivating relationships with members of Congress, lobbying sheriffs and recruiting volunteers to join posses tasked with detaining political enemies, Raiklin has also forged relationships with other extremists, seeming to cast about for a legal rationale in support of his scheme.

Over the past six months, Raiklin has appeared on at least three podcasts with Dr. Pete Chambers, who helped organize a “Take Our Border Back” convoy earlier this year to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s defiance of the federal government.

Like Raiklin, Chambers is a retired lieutenant colonel who formerly served in the Army Special Forces. Following his retirement from the military and later, in 2022, from the National Guard, Chambers joined the “sovereign citizen” group Republic of Texas, whose members shot a man and took him hostage in 1997.

Chambers said when he watched Raiklin’s viral video outlining his plan to carry out “live-streamed swatting raids” against his “Deep State target list,” he recalled that he said to himself: “Ivan, you’ve just kicked open the door, and we’re going to have to back your play. And we can. And we’ve got the receipts to do it.”

During the conversation between the two men, Chambers referenced something called “the doctrine of lesser magistrates.” Although the term is rooted in the 16th century Protestant Reformation in Europe, it was more recently popularized by Matthew Trewhella, a Wisconsin pastor who has advocated killing abortion doctors.

Michael Flynn has recommended Trewhella’s 2013 book, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates: A Proper Resistance to Tyranny and a Repudiation of Unlimited Obedience to Civil Government, as “a masterful blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.”

Trewhella’s book also received a plug at the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association convention where Raiklin attempted to sell the sheriffs on his “live-streamed swatting raids” plan.

Chambers seemed to acknowledge the improvisational nature of applying a 16th century religious doctrine to an ideological battle with Trump’s political adversaries in the United States of America in 2024.

“We’re building a plane and flying it here, I would say,” he said. “However, it is legal, moral and ethical…. If we can get together and develop the alliances of these sheriffs, then we decrease the space that these people can then maneuver.”

‘Gonna face those guns’

Next week, barring something cataclysmic, Trump will officially become the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.

Trump will become the nominee despite being convicted of 34 felonies in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case in Manhattan, and he still faces dozens of additional federal and state charges despite a recent Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump — and any future president — immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts” they took as president.

Trump is as defiant as ever.

“I did nothing wrong. We’d have a system that was rigged and disgusting. I did nothing wrong,” Trump said June 27 in his debate against Biden.

On a parallel track, Raiklin’s embrace of lawlessness appears to be growing stronger.

In June, Raiklin published a 76-minute video of himself speaking with Cliven Bundy, a 78-year-old Nevada rancher who is perhaps the ultimate icon of the far-right anti-government movement. In 2014, Bundy’s refusal to pay grazing fees to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management led to an armed standoff between the FBI and militia members, along with other supporters, including Richard Mack from the CSPOA.

Raiklin flattered Bundy during the exchange as “quite the legend,” while describing the federal government as “the most corrupt institution on the planet.” The two men agreed that “the militia” — a term used to describe armed citizens — “puts a check on the federal government.”

The rhetoric used by the two men became increasingly confrontational, with Bundy accusing the federal government of plotting to kill Americans. Cliven Bundy noted that his son, Ryan Bundy, was wounded, and a friend, LaVoy Finicum, was killed during a traffic stop during the Malheur National Forest occupation in Oregon in 2016.

“They don’t have those bullets to fight our enemy across the border,” Bundy charged. “They’ve got those bullets to kill us in America.”

Raiklin then quoted the Bible to suggest the proper response was “an eye for an eye.”

Bundy lamented that sheriffs across the country did not heed his call in 2014 for them to disarm federal agents in their jurisdictions.

“I said, ‘If you don’t disarm them, one of these days you’re going to face those guns,’” Bundy recounted.

“Now, we’re getting closer,” he quickly added. “Gonna face those guns.”

Raiklin, in response, appeared to advocate for doxing federal agents.

“Oh yeah, we’re not only going to do that,” he said. “Again, they’re going to experience the most peaceful, legal and moral, ethical and patriotic endeavor they’ve ever experienced in their life. Every one of them. Because we have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people that will facilitate them experiencing that.

“Because it’s so easy to learn where they live,” Raiklin continued. “Each one. Where their homes are. Who they’re related to. Where they frequent. What kinds of vehicles they own. What kinds of devices they own and that they emit GPS geo-tracking data. Which social media apps they use. We monitor all their communications.”

Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, who briefly served as national security adviser under former President Donald Trump, signaled he’s not in contention to be Trump’s running-mate in the 2024 presidential election.

“Hope not, I’m spending time with my grandchildren,” Flynn posted Thursday morning on X, in a reply to a Raw Story post.

Flynn’s response was prompted by a Raw Story article about a filing with the Federal Election Commission — confirmed to be fictitious — that indicated Donald Trump has selected Flynn as his vice presidential running mate. Trump campaign treasurer Bradley Crate told Raw Story the filing was a “fraud.”

Flynn is not generally believed to be among the people under serious consideration to serve as Trump’s running mate and vice president.

RELATED ARTICLE: 'Fraud': Trump campaign denies federal filing naming Michael Flynn as VP running mate

That list includes Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

But among some of the more extreme elements of Trump’s MAGA base, Flynn’s loyalty to Trump and military background — coupled with his experience as a target of federal prosecution — make him an appealing potential running mate for Trump, who is himself mired in multiple criminal and civil legal proceedings.

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who has been working alongside Flynn since the 2020 election, wrote on X earlier this month: “The only way Trump wins is if he makes Flynn his VP candidate. Flynn knows how to spring Trump from prison.”

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Byrne said he respected half of those thought to be under serious consideration for the role, but added, “Trump’s going to be sitting in jail. The world is at war and we need a General.”

Trump and Flynn have remained in touch since Trump left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, particularly when Trump has faced some of his most serious legal peril.

Flynn was on a “Pastors for Trump National Prayer Call” in March 2023, shortly before Trump was indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records related to the Stormy Daniels hush-money affair.

Earlier this year, a jury found Trump guilty of all 34 charges in the case, and he is scheduled for sentencing on July 11 — four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Also in March 2023, Trump called into a ReAwaken America Tour stop at the Trump National Doral resort in Miami and told Flynn: “You have to stay healthy because we’re bringing you back.”

The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.

A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.

Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.

She did not want to go.

But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.

Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.

What was possibly happening here?

As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of which Raw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.

The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.

More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.

“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”

The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.

These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.

These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.

And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.

‘A plane full of ballots’

Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”

Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.

The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.

The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.

With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.

The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”

Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.

Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.

“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.

Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”

Enter Staci Burk.

Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.

But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.

Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.

“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”

“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”

Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)

“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”

What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.

Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.

Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.

Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’

On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”

Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.

“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.

“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.

“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.

As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.

Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.

Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.

Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.

“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”

At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.

At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.

Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.

Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.

The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.

“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”

As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.

In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.

And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.

‘He fabricated everything’

Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.

Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.

“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.

“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”

The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.

Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?

Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.

The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.

Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.

More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”

Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.

“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.

“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.

A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp

Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.

In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.

One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.

Except for the fact that it is real.

It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.

The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.

The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.

The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”

‘There was no goldmine’

Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.

She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”

Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.

“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.

But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.

“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”

This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”

No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.

“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.

“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”

The band breaks up

These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”

Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.

In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”

Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.

Some of the key players involved have also split up.

Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”

Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.

“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.

Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.

In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”

But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.

Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.

Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.

Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.

Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.

Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.

“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”

Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.

“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”

“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”

* * * * *

Key players

Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.

Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.

Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.

Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.

Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.

Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.

Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.

Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.

The former assistant director of intelligence for the U.S. Capitol Police, who issued a stark warning about the threat of extremist violence days before the Jan. 6 attack, expects to be called to testify before a House subcommittee led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) that is focused on shifting blame away from former President Donald Trump.

Julie Farnam told Raw Story she expects “to get a subpoena any day now,” and anticipates that she will be called to testify behind closed doors before Republican members of the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee on June 21.

Farnam said she received an email from subcommittee staff today telling her to expect a subpoena following discussions with her lawyer about scheduling her deposition.

Farnam said she believes the subcommittee is compelling her to testify as a ploy to distract attention from Loudermilk’s actions in the lead-up to the attack.

Loudermilk led a group of would-be J6ers on a tour of the U.S. House buildings complex — including security checkpoints and the entrance to the tunnels leading to the Capitol — on Jan. 5, 2021. Loudermilk ignored requests from the now-decommissioned House Select January 6 Committee to explain why he gave the tour.

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“I think he does have some involvement in January 6th,” Farnam told Raw Story, “and these hearings are designed to distract from the truth.”

Farnam told Raw Story she expects to be deposed behind closed doors, but that she would prefer to testify publicly. She said she is working with her attorney to try to get her own court transcriber so she can keep a transcript of her testimony. She wants to publicly release the transcript.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re not having me testify publicly,” Farnam said. “They can take what I say and construe it however they want.”

Following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Farnam was promoted to acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police, but resigned in June 2023. Farnam is currently running as a Democrat for a seat on the Arlington County Board in Virginia.

Mary Beth Burns, a spokesperson for the House Administration Oversight Subcommittee, which is chaired by Loudermilk, declined to comment when reached by Raw Story earlier today.

‘Members of Congress very rarely give tours’

Loudermilk’s committee is relitigating Jan. 6 at a time when Trump faces multiple criminal charges, including indictments brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis that accuse the former president of conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election.

And it comes at a time when Trump, who is presently on trial in Manhattan for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a sexual affair that could have damaged his 2016 presidential campaign, is again expected to be the Republican nominee for president.

Farnam has been an implicit target of the Loudermilk committee’s investigation for months.

An interim report released in March by the committee includes a three-page section rejecting any notion that Loudermilk’s tour was connected to the events of Jan. 6.

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Meanwhile, the report alleged that the Capitol Police’s intelligence division, under Farnam’s leadership, “failed to fully process and disseminate actionable intelligence which directly contributed to the overall security failures at the Capitol.”

The House Select January 6 Committee released video of the Loudermilk tour during the second year of its work. At the time, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), who chaired the January 6 committee, said in a public letter that some of the individuals in the tour group sponsored by Loudermilk were seen at the rally held by Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.

Thompson cited video showing one of the individuals on the tour. On Jan. 6, 2021, the man carried a sharpened flagpole and made threats against Democratic members of Congress, including then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

“They got it surrounded,” the man can be heard saying in the video. “It’s all the way up there on the hill, and it’s all the way around, and they’re coming in, coming in like white on rice for Pelosi, Nadler, even you, AOC. We’re coming to take you out and pull you out by your hairs.”

A report issued by the Capitol Police intelligence division roughly two weeks before the attack, warned about a thread on a pro-Trump message board discussing “tunnels on US Capitol grounds used by members of Congress.” Among the user comments cited in the report, one wrote, “Maybe millions of protesters could simply block all the Dems from showing up to Congress. Block all the tunnel entrance [sic].”

The Capitol Police subsequently reviewed footage of Loudermilk’s tour, and Chief J. Thomas Manger appeared to clear the congressman of wrongdoing in a letter to former Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), then the ranking member of the House Administration Committee.

“We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance, and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious,” Manger wrote.

Farnam, who was serving as acting director of intelligence for the Capitol Police at the time, signaled she doesn’t share the chief’s assessment.

“I don’t buy his excuse for why,” Farnam told Raw Story. “Members of Congress very rarely give tours themselves. That was odd that he was giving a tour, and it’s less likely that a member would give a tour to people that they don’t know. The day that he gave the tour, there weren’t any tours being given. What was he doing and why was he doing it?"

Loudermilk’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

“He needs to be questioned,” Farnam told Raw Story. “He needs to be on record about what he was doing.”

Farnam pitted against former Capitol Police chief

The interim report issued by Loudermilk’s committee on March 11 took critical aim at an intelligence assessment written by Farnam on Jan. 3, 2021, three days before the attack on the Capitol.

Loudermilk’s report contends that “significant questions remain about the emphasis of actual intelligence” in Farnam’s assessment “and its distribution to [Capitol Police] prior to January 6.”

The committee has assigned a star role to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who testified in an open hearing last September that “no intel agencies or units sounded the alarm” despite having significant intelligence about threats against Congress.

“We were blindsided,” he said. “Intelligence failed operations.”

Farnam has vigorously disputed that claim.

Much of Sund’s testimony focused on his requests for National Guard assistance. The interim report dedicates 10 pages to resistance from the two sergeants at arms for Congress. Former House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving, who at the time reported to Pelosi, told Sund he was concerned about “optics,” according to the former chief.

Since at least July 2021, Republican lawmakers have been attempting to shift blame for the attack on the Capitol from Trump to Pelosi. The former House speaker has said through a spokesperson that she and her staff had no discussions with Irving about National Guard deployment prior to Jan. 6.

The interim report issued by Loudermilk’s committee deflects responsibility from Trump by painting the House Select January 6 Committee as “a political weapon with a singular focus on promoting the narrative that Trump was responsible for the violence on January 6.”

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Trump summoned his supporters to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, with a tweet that read, “Be there, will be wild.” During his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he told them to march down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” because if they didn’t, they “were not going to have a country anymore.” Once Trump learned the Capitol was under attack, it took him two hours and 56 minutes to tweet out a video telling the rioters to go home.

Loudermilk told the Christian nationalist podcaster Lance Wallnau that Trump has privately praised him as a “hero.” Loudermilk said Trump specifically praised him for “exposing all these lies” when the congressman joined him backstage at a rally in Georgia before the state’s primary in March.

‘Congress itself is the target’

Farnam said she expects Loudermilk’s committee to ask her about the intelligence she received concerning threats against the Capitol in the run-up to Jan. 6 and how it was distributed.

“I think it’s going to be related to the intel,” she said. “What did we have? They’re going to accuse me of not doing more.”

While the subcommittee is not commenting publicly on Farnam, her 2021 interview with the House Select January 6 Committee and recent comments to Raw Story provide a preview of what she is likely to tell the Republican lawmakers when she testifies next month.

As the lead author of an intelligence assessment issued on Jan. 3, Farnam noted that the finality of the Congress’ decision to certify the election during the joint session on Jan. 6 would likely raise the stakes for the protestors coming to Washington, D.C. that day.

“This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent,” the assessment warned. “Unlike previous post-election protests, the targets of the pro-Trump supporters are not necessarily the counter-protestors, as they were previously, but, rather, Congress itself is the target on the 6th.”

Sean P. Gallagher, deputy chief of the protective services bureau, emailed a copy of the intelligence assessment to the chiefs at U.S. Capitol Police on Jan. 3 at 10:40 p.m., while noting that Farnam and her colleague John Donahue at the intelligence division would update commanders during a conference call the following day.

An email provided to Raw Story by Farnam shows that Sund replied at 11:18 p.m. on Jan. 3: “Copy thank you Sean.”

Despite evidence to the contrary, Sund testified before Loudermilk’s committee last September: “We now know that significant intelligence existed that individuals were plotting to storm the Capitol building, target lawmakers and discussing shooting officers. And yet no intel agencies or units sounded the alarm. We were blindsided. Intelligence failed operations.”

Farnam told the House Select January 6th Committee that during the Jan. 4, 2021 conference call, she conveyed the substance of the written assessment, and then added: “Stop the Steal has a propensity for attracting white supremacists, militia groups, groups like the Proud Boys. There are multiple social media posts saying that people are going to be coming armed, and it’s potentially a very dangerous situation.”

Farnam said that at the end of her presentation she received no questions.

Gallagher told the House Select January 6th Committee in January 2022 that he didn’t recall the “specifics” of Farnam’s presentation, but told the committee it was fair to say that her warning didn’t prompt the Capitol Police to make any operational changes.

Farnam told Raw Story she believes Yogananda Pittman, then assistant chief of protective and intelligence operations, briefed Sund on the conference call, but said there’s no paper trail to prove it.

Pittman could not be reached for comment for this story.

“Chief Sund did NOTHING with the intel — no ops plan, no distro to officers, no canceling leave, no staging equipment — that’s on him, not me,” Farnam wrote in an X post on May 23. “Also EVERYONE knew something was going to happen on #J6. It was planned in plain sight.”

Sund could not be reached for comment for this story.

Farnam said when she testifies before Loudermilk’s committee, she expects to be questioned about a romantic relationship she had with Lt. Shane Lamond, her intelligence counterpart at the DC Metropolitan Police Department around the time of Jan. 6.

Lamond was suspended by the police department in early 2022 and subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury for obstruction of justice for allegedly leaking sensitive information to Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

Tarrio, in turn, is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The relationship between Farnam and Lamond is detailed in Farnam’s book, Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism, which was recently released by IG Publishing. Farnam resigned from her position at the U.S. Capitol Police in June 2023, after the agency threatened legal action to prevent her from publishing and threatened to refer the matter to law enforcement.

Farnam told Raw Story she met Lamond at a holiday party in December 2020. They had planned to get together on Jan. 7, but wound up going on their first date after President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. The Capitol Police knew about the relationship, she said, adding that Lamond “never said anything that would make me think there was anything unlawful going on.”

The day Lamond was suspended from the Metropolitan Police Department, Farnam said she went to the FBI and turned over all of her emails with him.

Farnam said she expects that Loudermilk’s committee will use the relationship to try to undermine her credibility.

She said she doesn’t know if the Democratic members of the committee will be present for her interview.

Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA), the ranking member, and Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), the only other Democrat on the panel, could not be reached for comment.

Although she plans to cooperate with the committee, Farnam said she intends to “answer them as narrowly as possible.”

“I don’t want to speak to them,” she said. “I’m being forced to speak to them. I’m not going to offer any more information than the specific answer to the question.”

Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that his multiple prosecutions are a conspiracy led by President Joe Biden to sabotage his reelection efforts.

No matter that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim, least of all in Thursday’s guilty verdict in a New York state court that is not even under federal jurisdiction.

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But the once and would-be president’s supporters are predictably scouring every minute detail of the legal process — and embellishing the conspiracy theory.

Case in point: Dustin Stockton, a Republican political operative and MAGA provocateur who helped organize the national bus tour culminating in Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

In response to the verdict, Stockton argued during an X Spaces session Thursday that people should boycott the state of New York, similar to the boycott against North Carolina when the state enacted a law in 2016 preventing transgender people from using the bathroom that accords with their gender identity. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of the former president is tantamount to an existential attack against all of Trump’s supporters, Stockton argued.

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“So, if you’re a Republican, find some freaking nuts for once in your f------ life, and stand up against this s---,” he raged. “What they’re trying to do is kill us. They’re trying to starve us. They’re trying to deny us our freedoms.”

Then, riffing on a claim by Trump that Bragg is backed by the liberal financier George Soros, Stockton again made the outlandish claim that there is a conspiracy to kill Trump supporters. (A CNN factcheck found that Soros and a political action committee that Soros supports contributed to another PAC that in turn donated to Bragg’s campaign.)

“You don’t hate this government,” Stockton complained. “You don’t hate the Soros people nearly as much as you should. Because they want you dead. They hate you. So, are you gonna step up and do something?”

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Stockton decried Trump’s July 11 sentencing date set by Judge Juan Merchan falling only four days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wis.

“So, they made sure to set this up right before the RNC convention, right,” he said, “which is usually a huge momentum boost. This is 100 percent, like the whole point of this is not about justice, right, we’ve talked for days about all the different ways that they stretched the law, the novel legal theories, that they came up with to get this result out of a very small group of rogue lawyers out of New York.”

The campaign committee of far-right Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is engaging a North Carolina firm whose owner proudly promotes white nationalism and antisemitic tropes, while pushing false narratives surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The Gosar campaign has paid Southern Pines Strategies a total of $136,342 for “fundraising services” since 2020. The campaign’s most recent filing shows that a consulting firm owned by political consultant Noel Fritsch received $594 in the first quarter of 2024, spread out across nine payments ranging from $3.50 to $138.25, most recently on March 10.

In one recent X post, Fritsch sarcastically wrote, “Not shifty at all,” while resharing a post by an anonymous account calling attention to the fact that the Jewish owner of the World Trade Center broke with custom by not eating breakfast in the North Tower on the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

Commentary suggesting nefarious intentions and possible profit motives by Jews surrounding the Sept. 11 attack have been a staple of antisemitic discourse over the past decades, recycling millennia-old conspiracy theories about supposed malevolent control that engender hostility towards Jews.

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In another recent post, Fritsch wrote that “October 7” — the date on which Hamas launched a brutal attack against Israel and took hundreds of hostages ­— “was just a time to crank the emotional manipulation all the way to eleven.” While Fritsch’s post does not specify who he believes is manipulating people’s emotions, it suggests a nefarious actor behind the scenes that is more powerful than Hamas.

Alon Milwicki, a senior research analyst at the extremism watchdog group Southern Poverty Law Center, told Raw Story that antisemitic content is increasingly prevalent on social media, including X.

“There is a compelling argument to be made that this rise has facilitated the normalization of detrimental stereotypes about Jewish individuals, including enduring tropes about their alleged control, manipulation, deceitfulness and greed,” he said. “These narratives are increasingly echoed by figures in positions of influence and authority, thereby ingraining themselves further into societal discourse and regrettably blurring the lines between fact and bigotry.”

Gosar has cultivated ties with election deniers and white nationalists, but he breaks with many in the far-right movement through his professed supporting Israel. The far-right congressman from Arizona voted in favor of a resolution supporting Israel in July 2023, while condemning “the vile, antisemitic hatred expressed by certain members.” He was referring to a statement by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) calling Israel “a racist state.”

The Gosar campaign could not be reached for comment for this story.

Gosar was among one of the most strident members of Congress to promote the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. He rallied supporters at a protest attended by armed militants outside a ballot-counting center in Phoenix following the November 2020 election. Later, Gosar was among a group of lawmakers who met with Trump at the White House on Dec. 21, 2020 to discuss a plan to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the election.

Following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Gosar reportedly explored the possibility of launching an America First Caucus promoting “a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” although the plan was soon scrapped after it was leaked to the media.

Payments from the Gosar campaign to Fritsch’s firm — representing a cut from small-dollar donations — peaked at $84,798 in 2021, following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Fritsch told Raw Story he no longer does “business” with the Gosar campaign. But when informed that the Gosar campaign reported nine payments to his firm in the first three months of 2024, Fritsch declined to elaborate on what “fundraising services” he provided, suggesting the phrase is self-explanatory.

A parade of far-right candidates

In many ways, Fritsch has proven to be a close match with Gosar. Fritsch has worked for a roster of far-right candidates — all unsuccessful so far, with the exception of Gosar. They include Paul Nehlen, a congressional candidate embraced by white supremacists who sought to fill the seat formerly held by House Speaker Paul Ryan; Corey Stewart, a U.S. Senate candidate from Virginia who was linked to the white supremacist group League of the South; Roy Moore, whose 2017 campaign for U.S. Senate was derailed by sexual misconduct allegations; and Lauren Witzke, who openly courted white nationalists during her run for U.S. Senate from Delaware in 2020.

Overlapping with his political consulting work, in 2019 Fritsch launched National File, a news site that sometimes garners legitimate scoops such as a revelation about sexually explicit texts that sunk North Carolina Democrat Cal Cunningham’s 2020 bid for U.S. Senate. More often, the site features hit pieces against his clients’ political opponents and other Republican candidates deemed insufficiently conservative. Patrick Howley, the National File writer who landed the Cunningham story, has cycled through a host of conservative and conspiracy clickbait sites, and has come under scrutiny for serial antisemitic rants and tweets.

In February 2022, Fritsch’s National File published an adulatory profile written by Howley to celebrate the rise of the NSC-131, a neo-Nazi group that has terrorized Jews, LGBTQ+ people and migrants in New England. By December 2023, the group and its members would find itself on the receiving end of lawsuits filed by the attorneys general in Massachusetts and New Hampshire for alleged civil rights violations.

Howley’s article lauded NSC-131 for “distinguishing itself as part of a new vanguard of pro-White organizations determined to protect White people and stop the White genocide pushed by both the progressive left and the globalist corporatist Republican establishment.”

In a complaint filed in Suffolk County Superior Court in December 2023, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell alleged that NSC-131 members “have recently carried out a series of violent and otherwise unlawful club actions targeting those they have designated ‘enemies of our people’” by repeatedly attempting to “disrupt public events organized by LGBTQ+ groups, and interfere with the provision of emergency shelter to recent immigrants at local hotels.”

Reached by Raw Story, Fritsch doubled down on the white nationalist talking points in the NSC-131 profile, complaining in a phone text that “Amerikkka is so anti-white” and falsely claiming that Raw Story is joining forces with the Anti-Defamation League, an anti-hate group with a pro-Israel stance, to advocate “for the extermination of white identitarian interest groups.”

Gosar’s links to white nationalism

Gosar is no stranger to white nationalist groups. Less than two months after the failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he spoke at the America First Political Action Conference organized by Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. At the end of Gosar’s speech, the young white nationalists attending the conference reportedly chanted his name.

Fuentes and Fritsch have crossed paths in the white nationalist milieu, although, according to Fritsch, they are more rivals than allies.

Fritsch’s National File sponsored an event in Washington, D.C. in February 2020 that coincided with the more mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference and featured Infowars conspiracy-trafficker Alex Jones. At the same time, Fuentes hosted the first America First Political Action Conference. Fritsch told Raw Story that Fuentes’ event was held at an undisclosed location, and he wound up waiting at a bar for some of the attendees who were acting secretive about where they had been. Fuentes also spoke at the event sponsored by National File, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The ties between Gosar and Fuentes go beyond his appearances at Fuentes’ events. Wade Searle, who previously served as digital director for Gosar, was an enthusiastic supporter of Fuentes, according to a 2023 report by Talking Points Memo.

Gosar has alternately courted and distanced himself from Fuentes. In 2022, after appearing in a pre-recorded video at the America First Political Action Conference, Gosar reportedly said, “I’ve given up… on dealing with Nick. Nick’s got a problem with his mouth.”

Fritsch told Raw Story the rift between Gosar and Fuentes stems from Fuentes’ lack of deference toward Gosar and others such as Michelle Malkin, a far-right commentator who has forged ties to both Fuentes’ Groyper movement and politicos such as Gosar and former congress member Steve King of Iowa.

“I think Fuentes didn’t want to take leadership from anyone,” Fritsch said. “That includes Malkin and Gosar. The consensus among most people is that he was a mule-headed diva who plays with his cats,” Fritsch told Raw Story.

Alignment on Jan. 6

Gosar and Fritsch also align in promoting false narratives surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Before police had cleared rioters from the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, Gosar tweeted, “This has all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Later in 2021, Gosar pivoted from scapegoating “antifa” to the so-called “fed-surrection” narrative. The congressman reportedly wrote in a fundraising email that “facts are coming to light that the FBI might have had a hand in planning and carrying out that event.”

More recently, Gosar introduced a bill demanding that the FBI turn over documents on Ray Epps, a fellow Arizonan who became the focal point for conspiracy theories claiming that the attack was orchestrated by agents provocateurs working for the federal government.

Fritsch has similarly promoted false narratives that deflect responsibility for the attack from violent Trump supporters. One of Fritsch’s newest clients is Derrick Evans, who pleaded guilty to obstructing law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and is running for Congress from West Virginia’s 1^st District. The Evans campaign has paid Fritsch’s firm a total of $33,391 for “strategic management consulting” and “online fundraising fees” from January through March 2024, according to Evans’ most recent campaign finance report filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Evans faces incumbent Carol Miller in West Virginia’s May 14 Republican primary.

Evans published video in February of a man — previously identified by NBC News as John Banuelos — firing a pistol on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Following the attack on the Capitol, Banuelos was arrested in Salt Lake City and charged with fatally stabbing another man. He reportedly told police in Salt Lake City that he had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Evans and Fritsch capitalized on the news break to boost Evans’ campaign while simultaneously promoting National File within the right-wing media ecosystem. The two men appeared on the “War Room with Steve Bannon” podcast hosted by Donald Trump’s former White House strategist.

“We all know that the people who are engaged in violence — the greatest amount of violence — were feds who were looking to try to meet and engender other people to do violence,” Fritsch told Bannon. “Therefore, the people who are rotting in prison right now ­— they are hostages that need to be freed.

“This is a war,” Fritsch continued. “The government, largely, is at war with the American people, Steve.”

Bannon, who on the eve of the attack on the U.S. Capitol accurately predicted that “all hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” suggested to Fritsch that he was troubled about what he was hearing.

“There’s something just not right about this,” he said. “There’s so much about this J6 thing that’s not right.”

Neither Bannon nor Fritsch disclosed during the interview that Fritsch was working as a political consultant for the Evans campaign.

While calling for the release of Jan. 6 offenders as “political prisoners,” Fritsch also told Bannon that “there needs to be prosecutions of those federal provocateurs.” (Since the time of Fritsch and Evans’ appearance on Bannon’s show in February, Banuelos has been arrested and charged with discharging a firearm on Capitol grounds. No evidence has come to light indicating that he is a federal informant.)

Asked to explain why he believes that people convicted of violent crimes or being held in pre-trial detention under a judicial order should be freed, Fritsch told Raw Story: “Feds who engaged in false imprisonment should be charged.”

A report by NBC News found that among the hundreds of people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack, only 15 are being held in pretrial detention. Among them is Banuelos. Others include a man separately charged with plotting to murder FBI agents after Jan. 6, and defendants variously accused of hurling an explosive device, swinging a lead pipe and deploying chemical spray on officers.

“Are you aware that Ryan Samsel is rotting in a prison cell?” Fritsch asked Raw Story.

Samsel is awaiting sentencing in jail following his conviction on eight felony counts, including three for assaulting officers. The government presented evidence showing that during the initial breach of the Capitol grounds, Samsel pushed barricades into Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, causing her to fall and hit her head on the stairs behind her and sustain a concussion. Later, he threw a two-by-four at Metropolitan police officers and grabbed an officer’s shield.

Prior to Samsel’s trial last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Jia M. Cobb turned down a request by the defendant for pretrial release.

“Mr. Samsel is charged with committing several serious felony offenses and has a history of convictions for violent conduct (and an outstanding warrant for assault), which supports the detention order’s conclusion that he poses a danger to the community and counsels against his release,” she wrote in the order.

READ: Bill Barr: The GOP's master 'fixer' for decades exposed

Federal law enforcement is running out of time to arrest all those who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to members of the loosely organized “sedition hunters” community who have helped the FBI identify hundreds of people involved in the insurrection.

“There’s a 50-50 chance that if you went to J6 and committed a crime, you’re not going to get arrested,” one sedition hunter, who worked directly with the FBI, told Raw Story.

Raw Story is identifying her by her handle on X — @MsTerryMete — because of her concern about retaliation and violence from Jan. 6 offenders. She also worries that she could face retaliation from the federal government if Donald Trump becomes president again.

MsTerryMete’s warning is echoed by other members of the sedition hunters community, who have compiled a list of profiles of those suspected of committing crimes at the Capitol — some identified, others not — who have yet to be arrested. The sedition hunters, whose work is profiled in NBC reporter Ryan J. Reilly’s book of the same name, created hundreds of individual dossiers for suspected J6ers using extensive photographic and video documentation.

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A representative of the sedition hunters community sent a letter to top federal law enforcement officials on Tuesday evening that warns: “It appears that the department and the FBI are not on pace to arrest an alarmingly large percentage” of those “who committed crimes at the Capitol on January 6 but have not been charged yet.”

The letter, which Raw Story has read in draft form, is addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

The author of the letter, one of the founders of the Sedition Hunters group, said the presidential election this year factored, at least in part, in the timing of the letter. This sedition hunter, like MsTerryMete, also spoke to Raw Story on condition of anonymity when confirming the letter.

“These people have already committed political violence once, and for the more violent offenders to remain un-arrested and face no accountability is a concern to me because it’s an election year — and what’s to stop them from committing political violence again this year?” the author of the letter said. “You combine that with the dramatic increase in threats against elected officials, election workers, judges and the FBI itself, what that means is these people feel empowered and emboldened to act beyond the law because there’s been no consequences for them.”

Patricia Hartman, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, told Raw Story that she would not comment on a letter that her office had not received.

The office of Attorney General Merrick Garland could not be reached for comment.

Since Donald Trump ceremonially launched his 2024 presidential election campaign in Waco, Texas — near the site of a violent FBI standoff with the Branch Davidian cult that is a touchstone for the far-right movement — the former president has put the Jan. 6 defendants at the center of his bid for a second term.

He regularly opens rallies with a recording of jailed Jan. 6 rioters singing the National Anthem and has called them “hostages.” And Trump, who himself faces 88 charges spanning four criminal indictments, regularly demonizes the Department of Justice, including lambasting the “thugs and criminals who are corrupting our justice system” at his Waco campaign kickoff.

Members of the sedition hunters community say they’ve observed about 3,900 people committing crimes at the Capitol on Jan. 6 — a figure that includes people who breached the Capitol and those who engaged in violence on the grounds.

The figure does not include people who were on the Capitol grounds — itself a federal crime — but otherwise didn’t violate any laws. To date, the FBI has arrested upward of 1,375 people, leaving roughly 2,500 yet to be held accountable, by sedition hunters’ tally.

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Along with people who illegally entered the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, violent insurrectionists — those who injured police officers, brandished weapons, destroyed property and the like — are the primary focus of federal prosecutors, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said in a press conference in January.

The number of overtly violent offenders who have yet to be arrested is about 540, according to the sedition hunters letter.

According to numbers publicly reported by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, about 626 people have been charged with assaulting law enforcement and media, or entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.

Based on those numbers, the arrest rate for violent offenders would need to pick up the pace from about 16 per month to 26 per month in order to meet the deadline before the statute of limitations runs out on Jan. 6, 2026.

The author of the letter to Garland and Graves told Raw Story that after taking a break from Jan. 6 research during the warm months last year, they were concerned to find that the arrest rate had slackened rather than quickened.

“This winter, when I came back, I noticed a significant difference in the DOJ and FBI’s arrest rate — a significant decline,” they said, “and it’s obvious they’re not going to get all the people who committed crimes at the Capitol at the current arrest rate."

Identified as participating in the Capitol riot — but not charged

Individuals who took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol — and have yet to be charged — have gone on to threaten a federal prosecutor, commit assault and armed robbery and even commit a fatal stabbing and hack a man to death with a machete.

A Pennsylvania man nicknamed “#LeadPipeGuy” by sedition hunters has been classified as an “AFO” — an FBI acronym for someone suspected of assaulting a federal officer — and appears on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

A entry on the Capitol Terrorist Attack website — a repository for Jan. 6 offender profiles compiled by a group of volunteers — describes #LeadPipeGuy as throwing a lead pipe at police on Jan. 6. He’s also seen stealing an officer’s shield.

As early as May 2021, one researcher speculated that #LeadPipeGuy had been identified to the FBI by sedition hunters. Another complained two years later that #LeadPipeGuy was among “violent people” who assaulted officers on Jan. 6, and had yet to be arrested.

Nine days later, the man was taken into custody, but not for anything he did on Jan. 6. On May 25, 2023, police arrested #LeadPipeGuy — real name: Joshua Atwood of Burgettstown, Pa. — for armed robbery and malicious assault following a weeks-long manhunt after he allegedly robbed and stabbed a restaurant owner whom he believed owed him money.

But to this day, Atwood has not been charged for his actions at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Atwood could not be reached for comment for this story.

Gabrielle Millenbruck is accused by sedition hunters of body-slamming a police line at the West Plaza of the Capitol where police faced off against rioters. Sedition Hunters’ leader publicly identified Millenbruck in February 2022 as the rioter they dubbed #CapitolCousinIt.

To date, Millenbruck, who works as a realtor in Kirkwood, Mo. — an affluent suburb of St. Louis — has not been arrested.

Reached by phone at a publicly listed number for her real estate service, a woman who answered acknowledged that she was Millenbruck, then abruptly hung up after being asked about her alleged participation in the Capitol riot.

In another example, a woman who was one of the first suspects added to the FBI’s Most Wanted List has yet to be arrested — despite admitting to the FBI that she led rioters into the Capitol with a megaphone and took a baseball from then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.

A photo of the woman with long, wavy brown hair tucked under a red “Keep America Great” hat is featured as “Photograph #9” on the FBI’ Most Wanted List and comes with a request to call the agency to help “identify individuals involved in the riots at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

It didn’t take long for the FBI to track down the suspect.

Megan Dawn Paradise met with the FBI at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 18, 2021 — 12 days after the attack. An official FBI record of the interview indicates that Paradise was accompanied by “several attorneys.”

Among them: Danny C. Onorato, a litigator based in Washington, D.C., who specializes in white collar criminal defense and government investigations, and Setara Qassim, a criminal defense lawyer based in Los Angeles who is employed by the law firm of renowned litigator Mark Geragos.

Paradise told FBI agents that she urged Jan. 6 rioters to advance on a police line by shouting into her megaphone: “Let’s go!”

Later, when rioters massed at one of the doors to the Capitol, Paradise told the FBI that people began to back away when a flash-bang went off. She said she “used her megaphone to shout to the crowd to keep going forward and hold the line,” according to the report.

When Paradise reached Pelosi’s Office, she told agents that she sat at a desk and put her feet up on it. She admitted to taking a baseball from a display cube and a Papermate pen from the office.

Later, when she discovered the baseball was signed, Paradise said she became worried that she shouldn’t have taken it. She gave the baseball to a friend that night. The day after the riot, Paradise said, she informed her lawyer that she had taken the baseball, and she asked the friend to turn the baseball over to her lawyer.

Paradise could not be reached for comment. Onorato indicated to Raw Story that he no longer represents her.

Paradise’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, are nearly identical to those of Richard Barnett, a self-avowed “white nationalist” from Arkansas, who was seen in news reports with his feet propped up on Pelosi’s desk while smoking a cigar.

Barnett and Paradise both sat at desks in Pelosi’s office. Similar to Barnett, Paradise admitted to writing in a notebook on the desk: “You’re fired.”

But Barnett became the media poster child of the insurrection thanks in part to a widely circulated photo of him in Pelosi’s office. Paradise remains virtually unknown to the general public.

Barnett — who also stole correspondence from Pelosi’s office and left a note for Pelosi reading, “Hey Nancy, Bigo was here bi-otch” — is currently serving a 54-month sentence at FCI Seagoville in Texas, following his conviction for disorderly conduct, theft of government property and other violations.

Paradise has not been arrested and remains free.

Questions about agents’ commitment to the investigation

The draft version of the sedition hunters letter reviewed by Raw Story also expresses concern “that the identifications of alleged January 6th crimes provided by our community have not been either entered into federal information systems and/or distributed in a timely manner for FBI Field Offices or the Department of Justice.”

The FBI has revoked the security clearance of at least three agents, including, one, Brett Gloss, who reportedly entered the restricted area of the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 in violation of federal law.

Another agent, Marcus Allen, reportedly lost his security clearance after he “expressed sympathy for persons or organizations that advocate, threaten or use force or violence.”

A third, Stephen Friend, refused to take part in a SWAT arrest carried out against a Jan. 6 suspect in Florida. The letter raises concern about whether agents sympathetic to the rioters might be undermining the investigations.

“What efforts have been taken to ensure that all FBI field offices are diligently providing the DOJ with the evidence it needs to prosecute January 6 suspects?” the letter asks.

The author of the letter told Raw Story: “There doesn’t seem to be a prioritization system to arrest the most dangerous J6ers who came armed with weapons and assaulted officers. It’s concerning to me that there are going to be AFOs that have not been arrested.”

FBI headquarters declined to comment for this story.

‘You guys are going to need this information’

MsTerryMete and other sedition hunters have become increasingly alarmed over the past 12 months or so about what the letter describes as “unacceptably slow pace of arrests.”

“I am not the only one in my role experiencing frustrations and backlog,” MsTerryMete wrote in an email to David Sundberg, the assistant director for the FBI Washington Field Office, in May 2023. “The current process between my community and yours is statistically proving to not be efficient or effective. There is room and need for improvement if we are to meet both the goal and the deadline.”

MsTerryMete said she was one of at least three sedition hunters who the FBI paid to provide information by scouring public video for matches with social media accounts to identify people who allegedly committed crimes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

A single mother, MsTerryMete quit her job as a substitute teacher to help the FBI track down Jan. 6 offenders, she told Raw Story.

She said she was promised $500 for each person she identified as assaulting an officer and $250 for each misdemeanor, but she said she only found out later that she wouldn’t get paid until an arrest was made.

From August 2021 through May 2023, she said, she made only $7,000 or $8,000, part of which she shared with other Jan. 6 researchers and part of which went to expenses such as a subscription to PimEyes, a facial recognition program.

By May 2023, MsTerryMete was fed up, and she dumped her designated FBI handler. She asked Sundberg for a new handler. Short of that, she offered to just hand off information about the hundreds of Jan. 6 attack suspects she had backlogged.

“Since I no longer have a handler (and I hope the old ones will be crediting me for my past work), I will need someone to work with to process the additional 220 IDs my community has been sitting on, waiting for your community to catch up,” MsTerryMete wrote to Sundberg.

“Hopefully, someone will be reaching out to be me soon, otherwise I’ll just start sending you all the evidence files,” she added.

MsTerryMete’s three emails to Sundberg in May 2023 went unreturned, she said.

The FBI Washington Field Office did not directly address a question from Raw Story about MsTerryMete’s efforts to speak with Sundberg.

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But in a statement to Raw Story, the FBI Washington Field Office said the agency “remains committed to working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and law enforcement partners across the nation to identify, investigate, and prosecute those responsible for the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“While it may appear no overt law enforcement action is being taken on some tips that have been submitted, tipsters should rest assured that the FBI is working diligently behind the scenes to follow all investigative leads to verify tips from the public and bring these criminals to justice,” the statement continues.

By July 2023, MsTerryMete and the leader of the Sedition Hunters team estimated that they had a combined 500 to 600 Jan. 6 suspect identifications backlogged between them.

But no one, from the FBI up to members of Congress, could be bothered, she said.

“Not a single person called me back,” she said. “No one. I couldn’t get the Democrat who represents my district to call me back. I literally bought a burner phone to call them safely and securely. I even called the FBI’s Boston Field Office. I said, ‘I broke with my handler. I still have this information. You guys are going to need this information. I need to transfer this information to you.’ No one called back.”

After receiving an email response from a scheduler for Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) on Sept. 11, 2023. reporting that the congressman wouldn’t be available “to schedule a meeting in the next couple months,” MsTerryMete fired off a follow-up email that brimmed with desperation and sarcasm.

“If January is the only time he has available to discuss the fact that the FBI has no central process to prioritize the remaining arrests of J6ers with 2 years left on the statute and there are currently uncharged violent J6ers roaming his congressional offices, while active naval intelligence officers are doxxing and harassing FBI agents, DOJ attorneys, and sedition hunters… then great… I’ll take it,” she wrote.

Michael Suchecki, Moulton’s press secretary, told Raw Story the congressman does not comment on scheduling matters.

Running out of time?

On Jan. 4 — two days before the third anniversary of the attack on the Capitol — Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, gave an hour-long press conference that was billed as a “progress report” on the investigation.

In many ways, Graves’ presentation showcased the government’s theory of the case writ large. It provided a narrative arc for how the attack was carried out, highlighting the most egregious acts of violence, and inventorying the weapons used by the rioters. The press conference also provided Graves with an occasion to take a victory lap for the crowning achievement of the Jan. 6 investigations — seditious conspiracy convictions obtained against leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, the two militant groups that provided the engine for the attack.

Graves’ press conference opened with a request for “the public’s continued assistance.” The government was particularly interested, Graves said, in “the roughly 80 still unidentified individuals who are believed to have committed acts of violence against law enforcement officers.”

Graves promised: “Today, we will post a list of individuals most wanted by the FBI for violence at the Capitol, calling for any help the public can provide in identifying them.”

“Where is that list?” the draft letter from the sedition hunters asks. “If it was provided on January 4, 2024 it must not have been circulated very publicly because we still have not seen one.”

Asked about the list referenced in Graves’ remarks, Patricia Hartman, the spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, referred Raw Story to the FBI’s Most Wanted List, a working document that the agency has been building since shortly after the Jan. 6 attack.

The FBI Most Wanted list includes 216 profiles suspected of assaults on law enforcement and media who have not been arrested. Sedition hunters claim to have sent the names of at least 19 of those suspects to the FBI, based on a review by Raw Story.

When the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued its annual report on progress made in the Jan. 6 investigation requesting public assistance to identify four of the subjects, sedition hunters reacted with ridicule, noting that they had already provided the names of three of the men to the FBI.

“One of the problems right now is some of the information that we’re providing to the FBI doesn’t appear to be getting acted on in a timely manner,” the sedition hunter responsible for authoring the letter told Raw Story. “That spans from adding profiles to their Most Wanted list to making arrests.”

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Michele Morrow, the newly minted Republican nominee for superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina, wishes “death” on Bill and Melinda Gates.

She’s advocated killing people she considers “traitors.”

Despite seeking to oversee public education in a state of 10.5 million people, she is herself a homeschooler.

She has no prior political experience.

She attended the Jan. 6 rally to support Donald Trump’s quest to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

She received candidate training alongside a Proud Boys member.

And yet, Morrow upset incumbent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary on Tuesday.

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Morrow, who rallied for Trump in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, has repeatedly made false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, while calling for death to Trump’s political enemies — and to former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his former wife Melinda Gates for promoting vaccines.

Morrow could not be reached for comment for this story.

In a post on Twitter (now X) on Dec. 29, 2020, Morrow wrote: “I do support death to vaccine mongers like Bill and Melinda Gates.” (Raw Story reviewed the post on Wednesday, but it has since been removed for violating X’s rules. The post has been archived.)

In another post the same day, she wrote: “We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!!!”

Morrow livestreamed herself with other Trump supporters walking to the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

“We are here to take back America,” she said. “We are here to stop the steal. We are here to ensure that President Trump gets four more years.”

Morrow, who has worked as a Christian missionary, exhorted her livestream followers: “We need to fight back with prayer… May the people of God arise. May the Holy Spirit descend on D.C., and may souls be saved. And may the United States once again return to one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.”

In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Morrow rebuked a call by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to prosecute those involved. Four people died during the attack — all Trump supporters — and dozens of police officers were injured.

“We do not condone violence and destruction,” Morrow wrote. Nor will we stand for treason and cowardice. Did anyone offer to talk with those entered? Or only force them out and threaten them? Thousands of us were here in Nov & Dec. We never heard from ANY Congressmen. Now you want to talk?”

Following President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, Morrow took part in the far-right shift towards focusing on public schools as sites for cultural and political struggle.

A post in the private Facebook group Education First Warriors shows Morrow attending a candidate training with a member of the Proud Boys in January 2022. The photo was posted by Sloan Rachmuth, the president of the Education First Alliance.

Proud Boy member John Fischer, who like Morrow would go on to lose a local school board race that year, later attended a rally with other Proud Boys wearing masks and paramilitary gear who harassed patrons at a drag show in Sanford, N.C.

Public schools are 'greatest threat to humanity'

Truitt, who Morrow defeated Tuesday to win the Republican nomination for superintendent of public instruction, has held the post for the past four years.

The person in this position is responsible for developing curriculum and administering state and federal funds in North Carolina K-12 schools.

Morrow’s primary win sets up what’s likely to be a spirited general election fight with Maurice “Mo” Green, formerly the superintendent of Guilford County Schools — the third largest district in the state — who won the Democratic primary.

Green received the endorsement of the NC Association of Educators, whose president declared the election to “be critical to the future of public education in North Carolina” while warning that “anti-public school politicians want to tear down our schools.”

Some of Morrow’s views on public education are outlined in a 2023 Newsmax opinion article that promotes a Christian nationalist vision for education, while claiming that preserving traditional gender roles is a matter of national security.

Morrow wrote that “government-run (read public) schools and medical systems” are “the greatest threat to humanity,” while arguing that removing God “from the classroom, the courtroom, and the public square” is opening “ourselves up to chaos and confusion.”

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In the same article, Morrow claimed that the American soldiers who liberated France during World War II are being demonized as “toxic.” She also complained that society is “filling our children’s minds with the lie that gender roles are an oppressive, social construct to be rejected” and “telling them that it is ‘heroic’ to block the natural processes of development.”

Green, the Democratic nominee for superintendent of public instruction, is largely refraining from commenting on his opponent.

In a statement to Raw Story, Green said he will work to make the North Carolina public school system the best in the country by advocating for full funding, ensuring staff receives adequate pay and “celebrating the good in public education.”

Morrow, in contrast, has a history of negatively framing public education.

Speaking at a candidate forum during her unsuccessful bid for a seat on the Wake County Board of Education in 2022, Morrow said her children have been educated in public, private and home schools.

“And what worked best for my kids in preparing them to be critically thinking, hardworking and intelligent adults and prepared for entering into the adult world and following and pursuing a career that they are passionate about was homeschooling,” she said.

Morrow added: “I would be more than happy to put my last child, who is in fifth grade now — 10 years old — to put him in the public school system if I believed that the public education system was focused on academic excellence and preparing our children for the career of their choice.”

It’s the call that no parent wants to receive.

Aaron Houran, a local water quality technician, was summoned to his son’s high school on the North Carolina coastline in November 2022.

A school resource officer had pulled his 16-year-old son, Noah, aside. The FBI was involved, too.

They were concerned, Aaron Houran recounted to Raw Story, about a video that his son posted online purporting to show him burning an LGBTQ+ pride flag. Noah Houran talked of attending an unspecified “rally.”

The online content that caught the FBI’s attention appears to have also involved firearms, based on a reference Noah made in a subsequent Instagram post.

“There was an agent who came to school, who was talking to him, just to try to figure out, is this a fantasy, or could it become real?” Aaron Houran recalled by phone to Raw Story.

Noah Houran is one among a handful of white male teenagers who emerged as the national leadership cadre of 2119, a violent neo-Nazi youth group that uses encrypted social messaging platform Telegram to promote hate and recruit new members.

As detailed in a Raw Story report, authorities are investigating attacks targeting Jews and a Martin Luther King Jr. monument that were committed in 2119’s name in New Hampshire and North Carolina, respectively. Four members face felony hate crime charges for a vandalism spree that includes attacks on two separate synagogues, a mosque and a Masonic lodge in Florida.

The national leadership promoted 2119’s hate-fueled attacks through propaganda videos highlighting criminal acts while recruiting new members and expanding across the United States. While encouraging 2119’s active campaign of vandalism, national leaders cultivated a paramilitary aesthetic. They shared how-to manuals promoting mass shootings, industrial sabotage and race war. They aspire to violence.

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For Aaron Houran, it’s a living nightmare.

He told Raw Story that his son makes up stories to fit in with other teenagers on the internet. Whether true or not, Noah claimed in a Telegram chat that he has been a national socialist since he was 13 years old.

“A lot of it was for attention,” he added. “These people find you and pull you into their world, and you’re not lonely. Next thing you know, he’s a leader and he’s important.”

As a result of Noah’s online posts, he was kicked out of school, his father said.

In December, Noah made an announcement on Telegram that his father offered as evidence of his willingness to reform. He said that in January he would be “heading out west for a military academy.”

The announcement wasn’t entirely true: The Tar Heel ChalleNGe Academy in Salemburg, N.C., where Houran is currently enrolled in a six-month program, is only 90 miles from his home on the North Carolina coast.

Aaron Houran said his son’s decision to enroll in the academy, which is described as “a preventive rather than remedial at-risk youth program,” was motivated by a genuine desire to leave the white power movement.

The program, which is sponsored by the National Guard, “targets voluntary participants, 16- to 18 years of age, who have dropped out of school or are not satisfactorily progressing, are unemployed or under-employed, drug-free, and crime free.”

As a condition of his enrollment, Aaron Houran said his son is not allowed to have electronic devices.

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It appears that the last post Noah Houran made in his Telegram channel was on Jan. 5 — the day before he left for Salemburg — but the channel remained active after his departure.

Seven hours after Aaron Houran spoke to Raw Story, his son’s Telegram channel switched from public to private. Aaron Houran told Raw Story that he found his son’s password and deleted his Telegram account.

In contrast to Noah Houran, 2119 member Aiden Cuevas, who is 18, has given no public indication that he has any intentions of leaving the neo-Nazi group and he did not respond to requests for comment.

But in a voicemail to Raw Story, Kevin Cuevas, Aiden’s father, gave a taciturn response to questions about his son’s extremist involvement.

He initially attempted to cast doubt by pointing out his Puerto Rican heritage.

But when Raw Story responded with a voicemail presenting evidence of Cuevas’ involvement with 2119, the elder Cuevas responded with an air of resignation.

Kevin Cuevas acknowledged that he had asked his son “if he belongs” to 2119, and said Aiden’s response was that “he does not.”

He said his son no longer lives with him since he graduated from high school.

“I have relayed all your messages, and it is up to him now,” Kevin Cuevas said. “I have nothing further to add.”

Cuevas’ mother is an immigrant from Russia, and his Russian heritage is a point of pride that Aiden often emphasizes in chats with fellow neo-Nazis on Telegram.

Discussing his legal troubles with peers, Cuevas appeared to be especially bitter about the FBI seizing his Russian empire flag and a video game console.

“Took my f—ing Xbox lad,” Cuevas told Houran on Telegram. “They will strip you of everything they can possibly get away with.”

For one 2119 member, family was a prime reason he says he’s quitting the group.

Aaron Alligood cited the risk to his parents and siblings as a reason for leaving 2119,, along with legal peril. Raw Story could not confirm Alligood’s age, but a page on a athletics website indicates that he is now a sophomore in high school.

“It got too hot,” Alligood told Raw Story last month. “I realized that it was leading me to a pathway of destruction. You’ve seen how some of the legal stuff shapes up to this. I don’t want to be a part of it anymore.”

It’s clear that Alligood’s parents disapproved of his extremist activity.

A year ago, in January 2023, he reported to his neo-Nazi associates on Telegram that his parents forced him to burn some white supremacist stickers that he received in the mail. Alligood said he lied to his parents by telling them that he was “tricked” into ordering the stickers, and that in fact he loved Black people.

He said he had wanted to earnestly explain his racist beliefs to his parents, but feared they would disown him.

“Try living with a father that is cuckservative,” Alligood complained last year. The insult he threw at his father — who coached African-American football players for Berrien High School until his retirement in May 2023 — denotes a weak-willed conservative who treats minorities, women and liberals as equals.

Alligood’s parents could not be reached for comment for this story.

Agonizing realization for parents

Teenage 2119 members have quickly radicalized online to commit in-real-life criminal acts targeting minority groups, said Emily Kaufman, the associate director for investigative research at the ADL Center on Extremism, an anti-hate organization.

“Anytime we see the move from online to on-the-ground, it’s concerning,” Kaufman said, adding that the rhetoric they’re using is different from that of a white supremacist groups such as Patriot Front, which might use “some innocuous propaganda with a QR code.

“This is a different strategy of ‘look how far we’re willing to go with the extreme rhetoric,’” she said.

White supremacy and other toxic content is so ubiquitous on the Internet that it’s almost impossible to avoid, said Dana Coester, a professor at Reed College of Media at West Virginia University who is researching youth online radicalization.

Parents often ask her how they will know that their child is being exposed to white supremacy or other dangerous ideologies, and Coester tells them that if the children are online they’re encountering it through memes, game chats and other content.

“My heart goes out to parents,” Coester said. “This is a completely different landscape than the one they grew up under.”

She added that parents need to come with a large dose of humility when they grapple with the online content their children are consuming.

“There are two kinds of parents I interact with,” she said. “The parents in the room with hollow eyes that are saying, ‘Omigod, yes. I’m terrified. I’m dismayed.’ The other kind of parent will be, ‘Not my kid. No, my kid would never do something like this.’ I always feel more concerned about the parents who are so sure rather than the parents who are agonized.”

Raising children to hate

Then there are is a completely different subset of parents — those who are raising their children to hate.

Mathew David Bair is a 34-year-old Marine Corps veteran from Pennsylvania.

Bair is also a father who joined 2119 relatively late in the group’s development, and he’s one of the few members older than 18.

At the end of last year, Bair posted a photo of his 4-year-old son posing in front of a swastika and the numbers “2-1-1-9,” written in graffiti.

Asked by Raw Story about the dynamic of a thirtysomething adult organizing with teenagers, Bair volunteered that he wouldn’t be opposed to his eldest daughter, who is 14, dating one of the young 2119 members.

“If she would bring home one of you, what is it that I would want as a father?” Bair told Raw Story. “I think this dude saying ‘n—’ online is a lot more of a man than this person pushing sex surgeries. It’s a weird line to draw.”

In the same way that people normalize transgenderism through drag queen story hours, Bair said he wants to see the swastika normalized to “strike fear into people’s hearts.”

Aaron Houran lamented that there are older extremists cultivating children on the Internet. It’s not just Bair, but also older members of neo-Nazi active clubs and racist skinhead crews who have mentored 2119 members.

He might have added that it’s also 16- and 17-year-olds who have been marinating in extreme Internet culture since they were adolescents, and now have the clout and seniority to influence younger children.

“It’s a crazy world with so much going on,” Houran said. “It’s easy to fall into these traps. It’s sad that there are people trying to take advantage of these kids and change them into the same hateful pieces of s--- that they are.”

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About this investigation: This is the second in a two-part Raw Story series about youth neo-Nazi organization 2119. The first part revealed 2119’s violent aspirations and the group’s inner workings. A first-person account about the threats and harassment reporter Jordan Green has received as a result of his coverage of 2119 may be found here.