dustin stockton bus
==
outed ginni jan 6 role
grift pending
paoletta ltr ~ jan 6 comm sez eyewitness recanted
ginni j6 depo:
ould you look at exhibit 18? This looks like a text message from Jake
18 Hoffman to Kylie Kremer.
Right.
And he mentions in the first line, "Hi, ladies. Ginni Thomas and Stephanie
Coleman gave me your number and suggested I reach out." And he goes on to mention
that:{ he's one of the official Trump Presidential electors in Arizona. And it looks like he's
}:
asking to speak at the events on January 6th.
:{
}:
24 :{Do you recall having a conversation with Jake Hoffman?
25 A Not about this. I mean, I don't remember}: -- until I got this from th...
124
1 committee, I didn't know that this happened. I didn't remember that I was connecting
him to Kylie Kremerabout his desire to be a speaker.
3 Q Okay.
:{4 And can you tell us a little bit about what role, if any, you had in relation to the
5 rally on the 6th at the ElIipse?
6 A I'm glad you asked.I had no role in organizing, coordinating, speaking.
just went as an ordinary citizen that day.}:
Q Okay.
A And so the media has gotten that one wrong too.[mark earlier tried to get her to not say?]
Q And did you have any role in organizing any events or rallies on January 5th,
11 the day before...
1 Stephanie Coleman. I'm just wondering about your prior connection to Kylie Kremer.
2 A I:{ knewAmy Kremer from back in 2011 or 2012, but -- and Kylie, no, I
3 didn't -- I don't know how I had her number. I do have a lot of numbers of people.}:
I understand.
But she's not a close friend. I don't remember how I would've even
connected them. But I clearly did.
7 Q Yeah. Okay. And no specific communication with either Kremer about
the events on the 5th or 6th?
A Right.
Q Okay. Thanks.
BYMR.-:
Q And it sounds like -- did you know Jake Hoffman before this event?
A Yes. He's a friend.
Q:{ Okay. And did you, during the November/December of 2020 timeframe
have discussions with him about his role as an elector at all in the State of Arizona?
16 A No. I forgot that he was an elector. He's a State delegate. He's
17 oftentimes a speaker for us at Groundswell. And, no, he's just a great guy.}:
18 Q Okay.
just sec
red team rally planners stop steal:
january 6 rally organizers participated in “dozens” of meetings with White House staff, including Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as well as some Republican members of Congress and their staff. » Rally organizers were reportedly concerned about the possibility that an unpermitted march planned by Stop the Steal activists could turn chaotic and lead to violence, and shared those concerns with Meadows, whose text messages reveal the extent of his involvement in the effort to overturn the election. » Rally organizers, Stop the Steal activists and militia groups participated in a group chat that included Roger Stone, who coordinated the effort to overturn the election with former national security advisor Michael Flynn, Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, among others. »
Two key organizers of the rally at the Ellipse, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, turned over a trove of documents and messages and testified to the Committee. » A trove of material obtained by ProPublica includes documents, digital communications and audio recordings of a variety of individuals involved in the broader effort to sow doubt about the outcome of the election. » Trump affiliated lawyers have been sanctioned by courts, including Rudy Giuiliani. In an (oftoverlooked) decision to suspend Giuiliani’s New York State bar license, the state court said that Giuliani “communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign;” “[o]ne only has to look at the ongoing present public discord over the 2020 election, which erupted into violence, insurrection and death on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, to understand the extent of the damage that can be done when the public is misled by false information about the elections.”
purple: dom terror: key figures that advanced baseless election fraud claims and courted the QAnon conspiracy movement included former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn and Trump affiliated lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood. All three were banned from Twitter for sharing QAnon conspiracies. Figures including Mike Lindell, Phil Waldron, and Ron Watkins (identified by some experts as Q) coordinated to advance false election claims
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/19/dustin-stockton-jen-lawrence-trump-profile-522823
SUBSTACK?
https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-had
NO LNX MANY VID?
Team Trump Had a Second Pre-Insurrection War Room
An investigation of who was in this second Insurrection Eve war room has now begun.
Seth Abramson
Jun 6
Introduction
As this publication has exclusively and exhaustively detailed, on the eve of the January 6 insurrection Team Trump convened a 23-person war council at Trump International Hotel in D.C. to plot out—as attendees have since confessed—what would happen the following day. It is now clear that a second, contemporaneous pre-insurrection war council was held at a nearby Washington hotel and that it may well have been linked, through either phone or video conferencing, to the first.
This previously unreported news could significantly swell the size of Donald Trump’s pre-insurrection planning team, even as it remains possible (indeed, a possibility that has been extensively investigated here at Proof) that any remote conferencing that occurred the night before the January 6 insurrection also included the White House.
The Two War Rooms
The group that convened at Trump International on January 5 included, per eyewitness accounts previously compiled by Proof, the following members of Trump’s family, legal team, campaign staff, advisory corps, donor class, circle of friends, allies in Congress, and presidential administration:
Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Adam Piper, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck, Layne Bangerter, and two additional unnamed U.S. senators, one of whom prior Proof reportssuggest was Ted Cruz (R-TX). Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander“attended” by phone.
Other possible attendees—whose status is still being investigated in light of evidence they were present—include Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Guiliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. As Proof has previously noted, and as will become vital to the account below, four individuals from the two lists above now claim (or have had it claimed by legal counsel) that they weren’t, in fact, part of any meeting involving Trump International Hotel on January 5, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Those individuals are Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and David Bossie.
Based on the evidence now available, the largest possible size of the group that met at Trump International Hotel on January 5—all members of Trump’s inner circle—is 23.
But emerging evidence—see below—now suggests a sizable team of Trump insiders concurrently gathered, on January 5, at the Willard InterContinental Washington D.C. Hotel (“the Willard”) at 1401 Pennsylvania Ave., 0.3 miles from the White House.
The group that gathered at the Willard Hotel on January 5 appears to have been nearly as large, if not larger, than the group at Trump International Hotel. Possible attendees include, of those not also reported to have been involved in the January 5 meeting at Trump International, the following: Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Robert Hyde, Russell Ramsland Jr., Jim Penrose, Sal Greco, Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, and Dustin Stockton. Moreover, among the Willard war room attendees concurrently said to have been involved in a meeting at Trump International Hotel we find Rudy Giuliani, Ali Alexander, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Phil Waldron, and Peter Navarro.In all, the suspected roster of Willard war room attendees numbers 16, though that number may swell after additional investigations at Proof and elsewhere.
Indeed, just two photos of the Willard war room taken by Robert Hyde on Insurrection Day alone (the one below and this one) show ten people, only three of whom—Giuliani, Eastman and Hyde—can be identified,and are thus included in the attendee list above.
{Note: The man in the white shirt in the first picture belowmay be Owen Shroyer, who works with and for Alex Jones at InfoWars. The second picture below is Shroyer on January 5, 2021. Shroyer introduced Jones at the Freedom Plaza event that day.The two were followed on stage by Ali Alexander, who oddly said that Trump “calls me ‘Sammy Davis Jr.’ every time he sees me” (emphasis supplied). Alexander introduced Roger Stone by noting that Stone, who was then staying at the Willard, had offered “counsel” to Trump’s legal team—headquartered at the Willard—and that, as of January 5, Stone’s Stop the Steal “movement” was at “war.” After Stone speaks, someone is heard repeatedly calling “Victoria! Victoria! Victoria!”, which may refer to Trump lawyer Victoria Toensing. It is unclear if Toensing stayed at the Willard also.}:
Those who have followed the January 6 investigation closely will note that the Willard Hotel war room attendee list includes a substantially larger number of dubious figures (for instance Hyde, who aided in Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Ukraine, as detailed in a chapter in my 2020 Macmillan book Proof of Corruption) as compared to the Trump International list, which may underscores why it has taken so long for this second war room to be disclosed to the public.
Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the Willard
While Roger Stone spoke briefly to the crowd at Freedom Plaza on January 5—and in his remarks incited insurrection through militant, bizarrely pseudo-religious rhetoric—and while he also spoke in front the Supreme Court building earlier on January 5, in both instances traveling via golf cart and flanked by Oath Keepers, everyone seems to agree that Stone wasn’t at Trump International on January 5; that he never showed up to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech, as his Stop the Steal co-organizers Alexander and Jones and had expected him to do; and that he never showed up for his “Wild Protest” speech at the Capitol, despite having publicly raised money for the latter appearance.
So where was Roger Stone the rest of the time on January 5 and January 6? According to Stone himself, he was at the Willard Hotel. A video from ABC News confirms that this is where Stone was staying during the insurrection, with Stone further telling the network that he “never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport” on the afternoon of January 6. Stone’s statement makes clear that it was not that he stayed in his room at the Willard, but that he remained on hotel grounds—a distinction that is critical now. Stone’s NYPD bodyguard Sal Greco stayed with him at the Willard Hotel.
As for Alex Jones—who has said the White House asked him to lead the march on the Capitol; who has said he (with Alexander) was in text communication with the Trump campaign from the Capitol as it was being attacked; and whose top lieutenant Owen Shroyer appears to be pictured above, with Rudy Giuliani, in the Willard war room—per Yahoo! News he stayed at the Willard for a Stop the Steal event in November 2020 and, per Politico, also stayed at the Willard for a December 2020 Stop the Steal event.
But now an amazing five-part exposé by a French independent journalist publishing via Montréal-based website Centpapiers further reveals—using simple and easily confirmed photographic analysis—that the January 5 interview Michael Flynn conducted with Alex Jones, reported on at length at Proof, was held at the Willard, meaning both men were at the site of Trump’s second war room on Insurrection Eve.
{Note: This same exposé offers pictures that seem to indicate top Trump adviserPeter Navarro was with Dustin Stockton at the Willard at some point during the lead-up to the insurrection, as well as providing pictures of Stockton and his wife Jennifer Lynn Lawrence in the VIP area of Trump’s Ellipse speech alongside top Trump congressional ally Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of Ali Alexander’s self-confessed co-conspirators in plotting the dire events of January 6.}
The aforementioned couple, Lawrence and Stockton, have at various points been Steve Bannon acolytes, employees, and business associates, and were known to have been at the Willard Hotel pre-insurrection. According to this report by the New York Times,
Two organizers helping the [post-election Stop the Steal] effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Trump’s border wall. In August [2020], federal prosecutors accused Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Lawrence and Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated,and Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president. A one-time organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group.
…
[Jennifer Lynn] Lawrence had personal ties to Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions”, she said in an interview. She also knew [Michael] Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank.
…
By [approximately 2PM ET on January 6], with “all hell breaking loose”, as Stockton put it, he and Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”
While Lawrence and Stockton’s presence at the Willard Hotel doesn’t ensure Bannon’s, the two Bannon associates’ unusual use of golf carts in downtown Washington during the insurrection—mirroring the use of such vehicles by Stop the Steal, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers—as well as the notion that they went to the Willard to “await instructions” from an unnamed superior, group of superiors, or group of compatriots, suggests the possibility that Bannon and/or the Three Percenter leadership were at the Willard at some point during the run-up to the insurrection or on Insurrection Day.
How Proof Learned About the War Room at the Willard
On May 5, 2021, in a little-heard interview with self-described “birther” Peter Boyles, former Chapman University and University of Colorado-Boulder law professor John Eastman—known for falsely saying prior to the 2020 election that Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for Vice President due to not being a U.S. citizen—told Boyles that that in January 2021 he “was representing the President of the United States in the Supreme Court on one of the most significant legal issues to have come down the pike in half a century.” Eastman, who notes that he “spoke right before the president” at the Ellipse on January 6, further tells Boyles he can reveal private conversations he had with his “client” Donald Trump pre-insurrection because he has received “express” permission from Trump to do so.
Eastman confesses to Boyles that in the days prior to and including the attack on the Capitol, he, Giuliani, and unnamed others “had a war room at the Willard Hotel [in Washington] kind of coordinating all of the communications.…[it was in] a suite of offices.” Significant in this, of course, is not only Eastman’s description of the space as a “war room,” but his contention that Giuliani used the room in the days prior to the insurrection. Why does this matter? Because it raises new questions about another pre-insurrection war room: the one at Trump International. Was Giuliani at the Trump International war room on January 5, the Willard war room, or both? This question has larger implications than may at first appear, so we begin by unpacking what we know:
(1) Charles W. Herbster vacillated on the presence of only one person at the January 5 pre-insurrection war council at the Trump International Hotel: Rudy Giuliani.
After first writing on Facebook that he (Herbster) was “standing in the White House”, Herbster edited his post to write that he was in fact in Trump’s “private residence” in Trump International. But he also edited out Giuliani’s name, as if he’d either (a) been mistaken about Giuliani being at Trump International, or (b) suddenly felt it critical to not say that Giuliani was with him. Note that Herbster took this view of no one else at Trump International;as Proof has detailed, David Bossie and Michael Flynn both now maintain they weren’t at Trump International, and yet Herbster still hasn’t changed his contradictory statement on the matter.For a time even Tuberville contradicted Herbster and said he wasn’t at Trump International, and yet, despite Tuberville being a senator, Herbster still didn’t amend his statement on Facebook. Yet as to Giuliani Herbster did correct himself, suggesting a possibility Giuliani really was at a different location than the other individuals Herbster mentioned—but nevertheless attended the meeting Herbster described. Proof previously noted that this would be possible if the January 5 meeting at Trump International was “conferenced” with other locations.
(2) When the Associated Press asked Rudy Giuliani if he was at Trump International Hotel on January 6, Giuliani told the AP that he would have to check, via his “diary.”
Giuliani never got back to the AP, despite there being no known illegality—as yet—with respect to the event at Trump International. So why not tell the AP where he was on January 5? Doyle Beck told the AP Giuliani was at Trump International; it’s unclear why the conversation regarding his whereabouts isn’t one Giuliani is willing to have.
(3) On January 5, Flynn gave a long interview with Alex Jones at the Willard Hotel.
Both Stone and Giuliani were staying at the Willard Hotel, and Alex Jones and his team would have had to reserve a room at the Willard for any live recording there, so this creates numerous opportunities for overlap between Jones, Stone, Flynn, and Giuliani—the last of whom was then running an on-site Trump war room. Note that, as previously reported at Proof, Michael Lindell has said he was consistently with Flynn and Giuliani in the days prior to the insurrection. If Herbster is unclear and Giuliani cagey about whether Giuliani was ever at Trump International on January 5; and Flynn maintains he wasn’t at any meeting at Trump International (despite an Instagram photo placing him in the hotel lobby that day), one possibility is that any war room meeting(s) Flynn attended on January 5 were attended from the Willard, where we now know he was with Jones on January 5. Flynn is so adamant he wasn’t at Trump International on January 5 that he had his attorney send this author a letter threatening legal action for citing news reports placing him at that location on that day; this suggests a degree of confidence that no one can place him inside the Trump Townhouse at Trump International, his presence in the hotel lobby notwithstanding.
(4)As Proof has reported, Corey Lewandowski was also cagey about his location on January 5, telling a reporter for The Atlantic that he “met” with Donald Trump on that day—but also implying that he didn’t go to the White House in order to do so.
How could Lewandowski meet with Trump without being in the same space? Again, the specter of a very simple explanation—the use of phone or video conferencing—manifests. This might also explain the confidence thatDavid Bossie, Lewandowski’s business associate, has had in maintaining he never entered Trump International on January 5, even as Herbster places him at an event Herbster attended from the hotel.
What Happened at the Willard Hotel
Eastman describes the “suite” of offices at the Willard—a term that suggests multiple rooms and work stations—as designed for “coordinating all of the [pre-insurrection] communication[s]” between members of Team Trump. Certainly, the suite could have coordinated communications via phone conferencing rather than video conferencing, but in either case it would seem that to “coordinate” communications between a large team of people at least some conferencing would have to have occurred at some point.
So if Giuliani had a “war room” at the Willard on January 5 that was specifically set up to “coordinate communications” pre-insurrection, why on earth would he need to walk over to Trump International to attend a second war room? Why not just conference the rooms? This question begs another: if Giuliani did decide to needlessly travel from one war room to another on January 5—during a period of hours that time was precious to Team Trump—why didn’t he bring Eastman with him? Indeed, an unresolved paradox is that Eastman appears to place himself with Giuliani fairly consistently during the days before the insurrection, yet no one places Eastman at Trump International Hotel.
A similar paradox involves Giuliani, Flynn, Lindell, and Powell. As Proof has reported, Lindell says he was with Giuliani, Flynn, and Powell on January 5, yet Flynn says he wasn’t at Trump International, Herbster at first wrote that Giuliani was there and then corrected himself, and no one places Powell at Trump International. Given that Powell was, like Eastman and Giuliani, a Trump legal adviser on January 5, one explanation for this would be that Flynn, Giuliani, and Powell were with Eastman at the Willard on January 5, whether or not they—or Lindell—also visited the Trump International war room.
More Bombshells From the Eastman-Boyles Interview
(1) Trump cybersecurity advisers Russell Ramsland Jr., Doug Frank, and Jim Penrose were with Eastman in the Willard Hotel war room at some point on January 5, 2021.
Specifically, Eastman told Boyles that “the [election] experts that I had met with [in November and December 2020, a group into which Eastman puts Ramsland, Frank, and Penrose] were with me on January 5.” Given this statement, it’s worthwhile to say a little more about two of these men.
Jim Penrose
According to The Hill, Penrose is “a former head of the National Security Agency’s Operational Discovery Center.”
Besides having run an operational center for the NSA—which sounds oddly similar to Eastman’s depiction of the Willard Hotel war room as having been a “communications coordination” center during the insurrection—one of Jim Penrose’s specializations, reportedly, is “how misinformation campaigns [can]…influence elections.” Does this mean that Trump had a misinformation operations expert running a secret war room during the January 6 insurrection? That’s a question the FBI will now need to answer.
Russell (“Russ”) Ramsland Jr.
Russ Ramsland co-founded Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), a Dallas-area cybersecurity firm, with a number of men, among whom was Adam Kraft, a former DIA employee of Michael Flynn. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump after the 2020 election, has referred to ASOG as “our [Trump’s] team” on Fox News Channel.
The Washington Post writes that in 2018 ASOG began pitching GOP candidates on schemes to challenge their election losses by claiming election fraud. Per the Post,
By late 2019, ASOG’s examination [of elections in which Republicans had lost] had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela, and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show. ASOG’s examination [of elections] by last summer [the summer of 2020] had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by the Post. Ramsland had sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries.
There’s more of interest here than can be unpacked in one article. For instance, Stop the Steal’s Ali Alexander is believed to have contacted a DHS number to join a 90-minute conference call on December 21, 2020, the same day Trump met in the Oval Office with a delegation from the House Freedom Caucus led by Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).Of the call to DHS, Alexander wrote on Twitter that he hoped it would “change the world”, raising the question of who at DHS could have been in contact with Alexander, and whether they were also in touch with Ramsland as he worked with Trump’s legal team. {Note: While I’ve confirmed that Alexander called a “DHS” number, it remains unclear whether it’s a “Department of Homeland Security” call-in number or a D.C. “Department of Human Services” number; in the latter case, the call may have been about January 6 permitting, though it’s unclear why this would “change the world.”}
Trump’s 2019 and 2020 efforts to steal the election—detailed in Proof of Corruption—were linked to, among others, Texas Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas, and fracking industries, an echo of the phrase used to describe Ramsland’s donors and investors. Were any of the individuals who met in Texas in 2019 with Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and Florida-based Trump donor Harry Sargeant III to discuss the 2020 election, energy issues, and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs who allegedly had dirt on Joe Biden involved in funding Ramsland’s dubious pre- and post-election “election integrity” efforts? Republican donors who made their fortunes in the oil, gas, and fracking industries were also, as Proof of Corruption details, involved in Trump’s clandestine outreach to Venezuela in 2019 and 2020—Venezuela being the nation in which the Post saysRamsland’s donors were hoping he’d look for and find political dissidents to reveal a supposed election-theft scheme originating in Caracas.[ghost of hugo chavez?]
:{
}:
The Post notes that Ramsland’s lies “were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert(R-TX), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the ‘kraken’ lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell—who the Post has learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG—and aired publicly by Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.” Rep. Gohmert attended the December 21 pre-insurrection meeting at the White House, intended as a follow-up to the raucous December 18 Oval Office meeting attended by Giuliani and Powell. This underscores that, at a minimum, three individuals who Ramsland had worked with to spread false claims of election fraud were in the Oval Office with Trump during the 120 hours—December 17 to December 21—it appears the initial planning for the insurrection occurred. Indeed, the Post writes the following of November and December of 2020:
During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.
The Post alleges that at least three such “anyones”—Gohmert, Powell, and Giuliani—were part of Ramsland’s “network” of collaborators. Per the Post, “ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but…[Ramsland] never spoke[ ] to Trump himself.”
Whether or not Ramsland spoke with Trump pre-insurrection, the fact that he is, per the Post, a Cruz donor as well as a Trump donor; someone whose first client was an “associate of Steve Bannon”; co-founder of ASOG with a Flynn associate; and a man who successfully lobbied top Trump congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to use his services underscores that if he was in the Willard war room on January 5 the number of Trump associates who may have been there, nearby, or in contact with the war room is considerable.
Beyond the obvious figures, others written about at Proof but with less frequency may also be in the picture with respect to the Willard war room. The Post reports that one apparent investor in Ramsland’s efforts to spread election conspiracy theories prior to the 2020 election was Charles Richard Saulsbury, the fabulously wealthy Texan whose son Bubba Saulsbury was with Mike Pence at the vice presidential mansion on the night of January 5,as exclusively reported by Proof. If a Ramsland investor was with Pence while Ramsland was at the Willard, is it possible that any phone- or video-conferenced strategy session that evening involved not just the Trump International and Willard Hotel war rooms but both the White House and vice president’s mansion? We can’t, at present, know this. But we do know that Bubba Saulsbury—who’d come to D.C. thrilled about marching to the Capitol—saw or heard something on the evening of January 5, while with Pence, that caused him to flee Washington the next morning to avoid all of the events of January 6. What had Bubba Saulsbury heard, and from whom?
{Note: Saulsbury’s Facebook photos indicate he was staying at Trump International Hotel.}
The Post reports that, during the time Ramsland may have been receiving investments from the Saulsburys—in 2019 and beyond—everything he did “became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his plan to challenge elections Republicans had lost] had to get to Trump.” This doesn’t sound like a man who would have sat at the Willard on January 5 without making any attempt to get in touch with the president.
Indeed, the Post reports that “In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus”—possibly the same seven Freedom Caucus members who five months later would be in the Oval Office discussing an allegedly stolen election with Trump: Gosar, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Gaetz, Greene, and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). Certainly, Trump was well aware of Ramsland by mid-November of 2020, with the Post reporting that “late on November 15, Trump retweeted to his millions of followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from twenty-nine states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish election systems company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’”
But Ramsland’s connections to key insurrectionists go well beyond these, to include ex-Trump legal adviser Lin Wood and Giuliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. The Post writes that “Ramsland contributed material to [Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory”, and also that “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm…said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”
Even former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a participant in the unprecedentedly wild December 18 meeting at the White House, is tied to Ramsland.Per the Post, “By December [2020], Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former CEO of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani.”
So if Eastman was with Ramsland in the second Trump war room on Insurrection Eve, did Ramsland’s associates Ellis, Gohmert, Byrne, Bannon, Wood, Powell, Saulsbury, Sessions, Waldron, Giuliani, or Flynn join them there at any point on January 5 or 6?
(2) Eastman was in the Oval Office on January 4 in a previously unreported meeting.
According to the ex-law professor, on January 4 three people met in the Oval Office with him and Donald Trump: Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob. Per Eastman, prior to the meeting someone had advised Trump that “law review articles” written about the 2000 election indicated that “maybe the Vice President had unilateral authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.” Presumably it was not Eastman who provided such erroneous counsel to Trump, as Eastman says that during his meeting with Trump and Pence, Pence asked Eastman if he believed vice presidents had the authority that Trump had been advised they had, and Eastman purportedly told Pence it was an “open question.” But per Eastman, he nevertheless told Pence it would be “foolish” to accept the alternate slates of electors the Trump campaign had had sent to D.C., as none had been certified by any state legislature. Eastman says he advised Pence to “delay the proceedings [in Congress]” in “response to the [GOP] state legislatures” that wanted time to “audit” their votes.
This meeting corroborates prior Proof reporting on Trump’s plan for January 6, which was not to win re-election—an impossibility—but simply to allow for so much chaos on Capitol Hill that Congress’ joint session would have to be postponed, giving GOP-led batlleground-state legislatures time to decertify their electors. As Eastman advised Pence and Trump on January 4, under such a scenario GOP-led state legislatures could try to certify new slates of Trump electors, arguably putting Pence in a novel situation the second time Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Many of the voter suppression bills the GOP is now pushing across America are “insurrectionist” in just this way; they aim to realize the vision of our democracy that Eastman shared with Trump and Pence on January 4—one in which state legislatures decide elections, not U.S. voters.
Conclusion
The Willard war room seems to have been focused on “coordinating communications” to ensure sufficient delay in the joint session of Congress that a coup of the incoming Biden administration would be possible through the creation of new slates of certified electors. While we know that the Willard war room hosted an advisory corps focused on the administrative components of this plot, the evidence also suggests that present in this second war room may have been individuals like Stone, Jones, Alexander, Flynn, Stockton, Lawrence, and Shroyer, who lacked the qualifications to have any role in any such administrative component—but would have been of great utility in orchestrating a paramilitary component to Trump’s plan to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.
At the nexus of these two parts of Trump’s apparent coup plan was Giuliani, whose ties to both of the two teams that appear to have used the Willard were considerable.Notably, it was Giuliani who said at the Ellipse, “Let’s have trial by combat!”—a line equally relevant to the administrative components of such a plot or paramilitary ones.
A robust investigation of the Willard Hotel “war room” has only just begun. Its size, technological capacities, traffic, purpose, and full roster of attendees remain an open question. This article therefore serves as only the first of a series of articles about this critical development in the story of the January 6 insurrection. More is forthcoming.
some lnx
Those who have followed the January 6 investigation closely will note that the Willard Hotel war room attendee list includes a substantially larger number of dubious figures (for instance Hyde, who aided in Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Ukraine, as detailed in a chapter in my 2020 Macmillan book Proof of Corruption) as compared to the Trump International list, which may underscores why it has taken so long for this second war room to be disclosed to the public.
Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the Willard
While Roger Stone spoke briefly to the crowd atFreedom Plaza on January 5—and in his remarks incited insurrection through militant, bizarrely pseudo-religious rhetoric—and while he also spoke in front the Supreme Courtbuilding earlier on January 5, in both instances traveling via golf cart and flanked by Oath Keepers, everyone seems to agree that Stone wasn’tat Trump International on January 5; that he never showed up to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech, as his Stop the Stealco-organizers Alexander and Jones and had expected him to do; and that he never showed up for his “Wild Protest” speech at the Capitol, despite having publicly raised money for the latter appearance.
So where was Roger Stone the rest of the time on January 5 and January 6? According to Stone himself, he was at the Willard Hotel. A video from ABC News confirms that this is where Stone was staying during the insurrection, with Stone further telling the network that he“never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport”on the afternoon of January 6. Stone’s statement makes clear that it was not that he stayed in his room at the Willard, but that he remained on hotel grounds—a distinction that is critical now. Stone’s NYPD bodyguard Sal Greco stayed with him at the Willard Hotel.
As for Alex Jones—who has said the White House asked him to lead the march on the Capitol; who has said he (with Alexander) was in text communication with the Trump campaign from the Capitol as it was being attacked; and whose top lieutenant Owen Shroyer appears to be pictured above, with Rudy Giuliani, in the Willard war room—per Yahoo! News he stayed at the Willard for a Stop the Steal event in November 2020 and, per Politico, also stayed at the Willard for a December 2020 Stop the Steal event.
But now an amazing five-part exposé by a French independent journalist publishing via Montréal-based website Centpapiers further reveals—using simple and easily confirmed photographic analysis—that the January 5 interview Michael Flynn conducted with Alex Jones, reported on at length at Proof, was held at the Willard, meaning both men were at the site of Trump’s second war room on Insurrection Eve.
{Note: This same exposé offers pictures that seem to indicate top Trump adviser Peter Navarro was with Dustin Stockton at the Willard at some point during the lead-up to the insurrection, as well as providing pictures of Stockton and his wife Jennifer Lynn Lawrence in the VIP area of Trump’s Ellipse speech alongside top Trump congressional ally Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of Ali Alexander’s self-confessed co-conspirators in plotting the dire events of January 6.}:
The aforementioned couple, Lawrence and Stockton, have at various points been Steve Bannon acolytes, employees, and business associates, and were known to have been at the Willard Hotel pre-insurrection. According to this report by the New York Times,
Two organizers helping the [post-election Stop the Steal] effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Trump’s border wall. In August [2020], federal prosecutors accused Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Lawrence and Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president. A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group.
…
[Jennifer Lynn] Lawrence had personal ties to Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions”, she said in an interview. She also knew [Michael] Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank.
…
By [approximately 2PM ET on January 6], with “all hell breaking loose”, as Stockton put it, he and Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”
While Lawrence and Stockton’s presence at the Willard Hotel doesn’t ensure Bannon’s, the two Bannon associates’ unusual use of golf carts in downtown Washington during the insurrection—mirroring the use of such vehicles by Stop the Steal, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers—as well as the notion that they went to the Willard to “await instructions” from an unnamed superior, group of superiors, or group of compatriots, suggests the possibility that Bannon and/or the Three Percenter leadership were at the Willard at some point during the run-up to the insurrection or on Insurrection Day....
rolling stone on bus tour: nothing on peace]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/how-a-feud-between-2-tea-party-leaders-helped-lay-the-groundwork-for-the-capitol-insurrection/
...Martin had urged her members to “melt those phone lines” and call Georgia election officials to question their procedures. On November 17, she had posted a “bombshell” video in which she recorded herself harassing a county election official. It soon had hundreds of thousands of views on Twitter and was picked up by Trump-faithful outlets such as American Family Radio. That performance further elevated her status: In early December, Martin announced she’d joined Trump’s last-ditch “legal team” in Georgia, even though she’s not a lawyer.
Meanwhile, Kremer’s Women for America First was one of the permit-holders for the Million MAGA March, on November 15, that brought hundreds of Trump supporters to DC to protest Biden’s election, including large groups of Proud Boys and other white nationalists. After the rally, police arrested 21 people and seized eight unregistered firearms. One person was stabbed.
Kremer then launched the March for Trump bus tour.She was joined by her husband, James Lyle, and daughter, Kylie, both of whom now work for Women for America First.Also along for the ride were former Tea Party Express activist and former Breitbart News reporter Dustin Stockton, and Stockton’s fiancee and former Breitbart News reporter Jennifer Lawrence.
The tour kicked off in Doral, Florida, near Trump’s golf club, and covered 18 states before culminating in the second Million MAGA March in Washington, DC, on December 12, an event heavily promoted by the Oath Keepers and the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. Proud Boys, some wearing bulletproof vests, marched through the city, and some participants vandalized two historically Black churches. Four people were stabbed and 33 arrested.
After a holiday break, the tour resumed on December 28, spreading disinformation about the election and casual talk of violence along the way to DC. A North Carolina county commissioner and local tea party organizer said at a rally in Morehead City on December 2, “I jokingly told some folks in the tea party, ‘See, we’d solve every problem in this country if on the Fourth of July every conservative went and shot one liberal.’”
In mid-December, Kremer and her daughter took a break from the bus and went to a shooting center in Nashville for “tactical training.” The center is owned by James Yeager, whose gun license was suspended in 2013 after he posted a video of himself threatening to “start killing people” if Obama signed an assault rifle ban. Kylie Kremer andJennifer Lawrence also appeared on Yeager’s YouTube show and openly appealed to his tens of thousands of subscribers to “get out into the streets.” Jennifer Lawrence later posted a campy video of Kylie, Stockton, and herself posing with assault weapons as if they were in an action film.
Trump himself reinforced Kremer’s efforts to rally the faithful. Some of his former campaign staffers helped Kremer secure the permit for the January 6 event from the National Park Service. A few days beforehand, Kylie Kremer tweeted a link for the planned rally with the tag “The calvary [sic] is coming, Mr. President!” Trump retweeted it, responding: “A great honor!”
...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/19/dustin-stockton-jen-lawrence-trump-profile-522823
many pix some lnx
the Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World
For a decade, Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence had surfed the wave of populist-right politics like few other people in America. Then came Jan. 6.
Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence pose with a 1929 Ford Model A at the Classic Auto Restoration Specialist in North Fort Myers, re-enacting some of the poses Bonnie and Clyde did in their classic photos, in Florida in June 2021.
By DAVID FREEDLANDER
11/19/2021
David Freedlander writes about politics and culture. He lives in New York.
Dustin Stockton stood in a throng of thousands of people near the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., nursing an American Spirit cigarette and a Red Bull. He was talking on the phone (“Don’t worry, I’ll send you bodies”) greeting well-wishers (“A great day for patriots and a terrible day for the fake news”) and fretting about a speech to the crowd he hadn’t yet written.
It was November 2020, and even as the Washington Post’s front page had just announced a second surge of the coronavirus, tens of thousands of people were gathered, mostly maskless, swarming downtown D.C. for a “Stop the Steal” rally. Inside the hotel, two blocks from the White House, Alex Jones was riding the elevator with a female companion and a bodyguard. When the elevators stopped on an upper floor, he prohibited anyone else from getting on. “Sorry, really being Covid-cautious!” he said — clearly a joke, since none of them were wearing masks either, and because in fact to do so would make anyone in this crowd seem ludicrous.
Outside, a man in a preppy popped collar and sunglasses walked around holding out a tampon, asking anyone (for yuks) if they needed a spare mask. The Proud Boys were lined up in formation by the entrance. “Thank you for your service!” a middle-aged woman with a Jersey accent yelled at the group as she walked by with a plastic cocktail cup in her hand.
The mood that day was celebratory — Trump’s motorcade drove by, and he waved to the adoring throng — but still an air of menace hung over the proceedings. A marker was being put down, there on the streets of the nation’s capital: Joe Biden had lost, and Donald Trump had won, and his victory was being unfairly taken away, and something needed to be done about it. The notion that day that a similar crowd would gather again eight weeks later and lay siege to the Capitol would have seemed fanciful, but not ludicrous.
Stockton and his girlfriend, Jennifer Lawrence, left the hotel and pushed their way through the crowd to the stage, where upon arrival, Stockton stepped up to the microphone, gave a massive Ric Flair-style “Whoooooo!” stepped away from the microphone, then stepped back up, and gave another. “Whoooooooooo!”
Stockton was dressed in a blue and white camouflage button-down shirt. Lawrence, who stood beside him clapping and cheering, was wearing red tights, an American flag belly shirt, a red MAGA hat and a Trump flag draped over her like a cape. “If we let them steal the election from President Trump, we will never get it back!” Stockton told the crowd. “Our freedom is not coming back! We must rise up!”
photo from Jennifer of Dustin at the frist stop the steal rally in Washington DC November 2020...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
photo from jennifer of her at the stop the steal rally in november 2020 in washington dc...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence at the first “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington in November 2020. | Courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence
He talked about the liars and the fake news, and the Big Tech oligarchs who wanted to keep everyone at home on the Internet instead of out here, in the streets. He explained how Trump and the whole MAGA movement was an outgrowth of the tea party revolution from a decade ago. He talked about how they needed to gather offline, just like the original American revolutionaries did. He called on the group to march on the Supreme Court. “Our institutions have been corrupted and weaponized against We the People. And that is what Joe Biden’s agenda is! There is no way that senile old fool beat the hardest working and greatest president ever!”
That gathering, a week after Joe Biden had been declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, was put on in part by Stockton and Lawrence. It was the highest-profile of a whole series that the duo threw together in the days after the election, when they got on a bus and went barnstorming around the country for their favorite defeated president. Organized alongside Women for America First, a Trump-aligned political action committee, and featuring a pair of Trump-aligned pastors, their rented bus rolled across America, firing up crowds with claims of fraud in the vote-counting, rolling from South Florida up to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, back to Washington again for a December “Stop the Steal” rally, then back out, making it all the way to the West Coast before turning east again.
Their trip, as they planned it, would culminate in one final rally, to be held at the ellipse in front of the White House. That one would be on Jan. 6.
The stories of many of the people who descended on the Capitol that day in January are by now well-known: the millionaires flown in on private planes, the militia members spoiling for a fight, the QAnon cosplayers searching for conspiratorial clues, the celebrities of MAGA America who served as self-appointed spokespeople for the movement. Hundreds more were surprises — middle-class Americans quietly radicalized over the years, pulled as if by gravity toward this one explosive moment.
Then there are Dustin Stockton and Jen Lawrence.
The Jan. 6 rally was, for them, the culmination of work they had been doing for the past decade — work that long predated the election conspiracy, or QAnon, or Donald Trump’s political career. They surfed the waves of a populist tide that grew larger than anyone imagined, one dedicated to tearing down the establishment of both parties and the government itself, replacing it with a government they saw as closer to the people, closer to God, closer to the Constitution.
For years, Stockton and Lawrence had built a career around that movement — as fundraisers, campaign consultants, rally organizers, schemers; engineering ever-more-outlandish media stunts to serve up to an online audience ever more primed to click on them, raising millions in small-dollar donations that relied on Ethernet connections and outrage, taking advantage of loose electioneering laws to give any kind of advantage to favored candidates. They existed on what seemed like the margins of conservative politics until, suddenly, it wasn’t the margins anymore at all.
Trump was the latest, and most powerful, vehicle for their politics and ambition, and he was what brought them to Washington on Jan. 6 — although you could almost as accurately say they are what brought him there, since they were the ones who helped organize much of the rally. Their story is the story of American politics since the Great Recession, when anger against existing institutions became the great motivator, when the bar to entry for candidates hit the floor, when social media fame became the coin of the realm, and money, gobs and gobs of it, went washing through the political system. Their story, as I’ve been able to pull it together here, is based on dozens of hours of interviews in person and on the phone, news reports in which they’ve appeared as central or marginal characters, and, where possible, the corroborating accounts of others who were there. They had a knack for being in the room with some of the biggest boldface names of the populist right — but also for never quite getting vaulted into the limelight.
“If we let them steal the election from President Trump, we will never get it back!”
Dustin Stockton last November
The Jan. 6 rally, Stockton told me later that November, was supposed to be big, huge, between four and five million showing up. Congress would be meeting to certify the election; the rally would be the final chance for Trump to lay out the evidence of why the vote was a fraud. We were talking by phone, Stockton sitting in the “March for Trump” tour bus, parked in front of one of the Trump hotels in Las Vegas, waiting for Lawrence to pick up a prescription from CVS. He seemed his usual low-key self, even as the chaos swirled around him. His life, as he described it, was lived on the fly; they’d scarcely pack up from one rally before figuring out how to make the next stop on the tour happen. He told me Eric Trump had just called to make sure everything was going okay; that he’d just gotten off the phone with Kanye Westto arrange for the 2020 candidate and hip-hop star to appear at the rally the first week of January; that they also expected Kid Rock, the country music duo Big & Rich, the talk radio host Leo Terrell. (None of them appeared.)
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In late December, though, as Trump began searching more and more desperately for some election officials who would do his bidding, Stockton and Lawrence’s project began to shift and metastasize. Rivals in the MAGA movement, they said, derided what they had been up to as mere “tea party-type rallies” and said it was now time for something a little sharper, a little more on point. By late December, the pair had lost control of the rally on the 6th, and had instead been left in charge of organizing a smaller rally the day before, featuring mostly B-team players from the MAGA universe, while Trumpworld figures like Kimberly Guilfoyle and Rudy Giuliani took center stage on the 6th.
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: A Stop The Steal is posted inside of the Capitol Building after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital today to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 6: Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. - Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. (photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
I talked to Stockton again on Jan. 5, and he sounded both exuberant and exhausted, never mind that some of the stars had never in fact signed on, and that the crowd was looking to top out at 30,000, max. Trump had been hyping up the rally on Twitter, writing, “Be there, will be wild!” and retweeting Lawrence’s announcement of it, a tweet that would later be shown on the Senate floor and entered into as evidence for Trump’s second impeachment trial. (Lawrence sued the House impeachment managers for defamation.) They were told that the word from the White House was to be prepared to be around all day and all night if need be. “We are going to keep it going until there is some kind of resolution,” Stockton told me.
By the next day, though, Stockton and Lawrence, going on one hour of sleep, and after squabbling with conservative influencers who thought they deserved better seating, and sitting in the freezing cold for hours during the various warm-up acts, decided to leave and go back to the hotel just as Trump was speaking, to rest up for the long night ahead. “I had Fox News on, I woke up, and it was breaking news,” Stockton told me later.
“‘They have taken over the Capitol.’ And my first thought was, ‘’Oh my God, what kind of idiots are these?’ It was my worst nightmare. Instead of it being Patriots Day, where we prove the election fraud, my thought was: We are about to get roasted.”
“Instead of it being Patriots Day, where we prove the election fraud, my thought was: We are about to get roasted.”
Dustin Stockton after January 6
Their version of Jan. 6 seems an unlikely story — going back to their hotel, annoyed at MAGA world’s self-dealing celebrities, instead of joining the out-of-control march they helped set into motion. But so far there’s been no proof otherwise: As the Capitol that day became the most scrutinized crime scene in America, no charges were ever filed against them; Stockton says he was interviewed by federal authorities once, in the spring, but never heard anything more about it.
And the sense of frustration, betrayal, disgust they’ve developed since Jan. 6 — that is incontestably real.
They were already let down by what they saw as a lack of gratitude from the Trump administration: Their hoped-for administration jobs, possibly an overseas posting, never arrived. They had ties to Steve Bannon, and hoped to use his connections to become high-dollar fundraisers, but he never really made those introductions. They wanted Fox News appearances, and social media clout, but had trouble locking down both. Their highest-profile effort, the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign, ended in charges and recrimination. And in the months after the Jan. 6 rally, they came to feel betrayed by a movement they helped build.
“If you go work for Trump,” Stockton said to me last week, over a year after we had met up in D.C., “you eventually become the focus of the attack, and when you do, they just dump you.”
They are, they know, now political actors without a country, reviled on the left for being associated with insurrectionists, and on the right for now willing to talk about what actually went down that day in Washington. They can make for difficult, even unsympathetic, subjects, figures who perpetrated a decade’s worth of hijinks and dirty tricks who at last pulled off a stunt so big and outrageous they lost control of it.
Jan. 6 was supposed to be the culmination of their careers. Instead, it felt like the end.
I first met Stockton and Lawrence nearly a decade ago. I needed a quote for a story, and searched around for someone affiliated with the tea party who could comment. Stockton was listed as the head of something called “Western Representation PAC,” one of the many such groups that had begun up during Barack Obama’s first term.
A few months later, I went to meet them at a divey Irish bar near my New York City office on a Friday afternoon. They looked like they had just blown in from Hazzard County; she in cut-offs and a T-shirt, he in torn jeans and sunglasses. If they were really political operatives, they were nothing like the pleated-khaki version I had previously known. After a couple of beers, Stockton leaned across the table with a proposal for me. Neither of us, he said, had anything like the social media following we deserved. We should get into some kind of epic Twitter battle, one that would get a lot of attention and boost both of our visibility. I demurred, in part because I was almost certain that James O’Keefe or some similar figure was secretly recording this conversation.
Dustin smoking a cig on the front porch...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
smoking and taking selfies on the front porch of home in florida...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
If they were really political operatives, Stockton and Lawrence were nothing like the pleated-khaki version.
We kept in touch over the years, as the conservative populist movement evolved and they became players in it. Not stars, mind you, in a world that minted them all the time. They were not “thought leaders” like Ben Shapiro, nor impresarios like Steve Bannon, militia flashpoints like the Bundys, flamboyant provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos, organization builders like Charlie Kirk.
But they were, in a constant and grassroots way, there — at rallies, on campaigns; their names were behind websites and Facebook pages. Stockton and Lawrence made a living almost as mercenary soldiers in the decade-long war against the Republican establishment. For the past 10 years, Stockton and Lawrence have lived a life one part Zelig, two parts Bonnie and Clyde. The two of them have, for all intents and purposes, no fixed address — living out of an RV, out of fancy hotels, out of roadside motels, forever strivers in the attention economy. At one point, over the course of our conversations over the past year, Stockton asked if I wanted semi-nude photos of Lawrence by the wall along the Texas-Mexican border that they helped construct for art for this story. I demurred.
“A lot of honest people are shunned and not allowed to be in the spotlights because the uppity-ups … say that you are not good enough for us.”
Jennifer Lawrence
“I’m never going to fit into your social norms,” Lawrence told me recently in her thick New Yorkese. “I might dress a little more slutty than I should to certain events, or say over-the-top things, or look at someone point blank in the face and say, ‘Wow, you’re kind of a dick,’ if they are being kind of a dick. A lot of honest people are shunned and not allowed to be in the spotlights because the uppity-ups, the Harvard-educated, Ivy Leagues assholes say that you are not good enough for us.”
As much as this excludes them from the Beltway cocktail circuit, it gives them an easy connection to the people crowding the disenchanted edges of populist America. “They are fearless,” said one associate of Bannon’s. “They have this f--k-you spirit which I think people in the MAGA world appreciate.”
Jennifers jacket from the bus tour her nickname JLAW
“We need to start having a political impact”
LAWRENCE'S CUSTOM-EMBROIDERED JACKET FROM THE BUS TOUR.
Stockton and Lawrence met through a presidential campaign — not Trump’s, but the 2012 campaign of the late Herman Cain, the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.Though Cain didn’t make it to Iowa, his presidential run, with its scarcity of policy, sexual harassment scandals and ability to excite the don’t-give-a-damn portion of the Republican base, now reads as a transparently clear preview of Trump.
Stockton was 30 years old at the time, going through a bad divorce, moving out of the “dream home” he shared with four small children in Austin, Texas. Lawrence had grown up around Republican politics in New York; her father runs in conservative donor circles in the city and served on the board of the Center for Security Policy, a far-right think tank that has been accused of anti-Muslim bias. (The CSP has warned of creeping Sharia in the United States, and accused the Obama administration of having secret ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.) Lawrence went to the New York Military Academy for high school — Trump’s alma mater — and then followed a boyfriend out to the University of Colorado Boulder. In a fit of teenage rebellion, she majored in gender studies, where, she says, students were taught how to accuse someone of sexual harassment without cause. Her father, she said, introduced her to Cain at a fundraiser, and — presumably unlike most of her gender studies classmates — she became a Republican field organizer.
Stockton had been discharged from the Army and dropped out of community college, and while trying to make money playing online poker was working a string of nowhere jobs— the graveyard shift at a plumbing supply warehouse, a water-skiing store, in the back office of a payday loan place. Like many Americans, he had developed some big questions about the economy: why he kept getting laid off; why his home in Reno, which his parents and in-laws helped buy, was suddenly worth less than he paid for it. Stockton had grown up listening to Rush Limbaugh, but he came to see that the problem was bigger than either the Republican or Democratic Party. “They were bailing out the very people who robbed me,” he said.
Jennifer getting ready in the bathroom of their home in florida...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
Lawrence is a true believer, someone raised in right-wing circles, and can stay relentlessly on message.
He saw Obama as trying to take the country into full socialism, and so Stockton and his father started a PAC. They were against liberals, but also against Republicans rigging the economy for their corporate benefactors; their PAC promised to fight for reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, reimposing the Depression-era regulations on banks that a bipartisan majority had repealed in the late 1990s. Stockton began a long investigation of their senator, the Nevada power broker Harry Reid, who also happened to be the Senate majority leader, painstakingly posting online what he saw as shady ties between the Democrat and his donors. No one paid much attention.
Out of frustration with all of his work seeming irrelevant, he told me, he wrote simply on Facebook, “HARRY REID IS AN ASSHOLE.” Tens of thousands of engagements poured in.
(To be clear, this is a slightly inflated version of what Stockton wrote in his self-published memoir, Community Organizer: A Tea Party Story: “I spent weeks pouring over Harry Reid’s FEC filing and did a long analysis about how little of his money was being raised in Nevada, earning me a few hard-won likes. Then I posted ‘Harry Reid is a Disgrace’ and I got hundreds of likes.”)
Bluster,he came to realize, brought attention, and attention was the coin of the new digital political realm. They traveled to Massachusetts, hosting a press conference targeting Congressman Barney Frank andpledging $10 million to defeat him. The money didn’t exist, but who cared? They got play out of the story anyway.
His work helped attract the attention of the Tea Party Express, a new group that was hoping to capitalize on right-wing populist anger roiling the nation in the wake of the election of Obama. The group hired Stockton as its in-house blogger, and he and the group’s leaders traveled by bus with the movement’s newest stars like Sarah Palin, Andrew Breitbart and ex-Saturday Night Live star Victoria Jackson. He started running events at their stops, figuring out how to corral the stars and limit their speaking time, and handling the ever-increasing demands of the C-list musical acts that joined along the tour.
There is a video on C-SPAN of Stockton from just at the end of the Tea Party tour, speaking to a crowd at the National Press Club. He is unrecognizable as the Stockton of today, clean-shaven and wearing a button-down shirt, with a buzz cut and the wide-eyed look of some kid from Nevada addressing the National Press Club for the first time.
Top: photo from jennifer of her and Dustin with Flynn at the Metropolitan Club in NYC just before the election in 2016...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
Bottom right: photo from jennifer of her and Dustin in TX ....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
Bottom left: photo from jennifer of her and Dustin at the Trump ignaguration in 2017 ....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
A year and a half after they first met, Stockton called Lawrence and invited her to Las Vegas. The two have scarcely been separated since. Clockwise: Them with Michael Flynn in New York in 2016; in Texas the same year; and at the inauguration in 2017. | Courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence
“I’m so honored to be a part of this,” Stockton said, telling the audience earnestly about the pregnant wife and two young daughters he had left home in Nevada. There were no “Whoooooos,” no camouflage or Proud Boys in the crowd. “Each and every one of us has a responsibility to make sure that we do something to fight for our great nation. … It is not just enough to stand against something and protest and rally. We need to start having a political impact.”
When Stockton met Lawrence during the Cain campaign, they hit it off, smoking a joint together backstage at a rally. A year and a half later, he was divorced, and Stockton called Lawrence and invited her to Las Vegas. Lawrence was living on Staten Island at the time, waitressing and working as an intern at the London Center, a far-right think tank in New York that Michael Flynn and Sebastian Gorka were associated with.
Stockton was already in Vegas. He took her out to dinner at the restaurant at the Paris casino, they went to go see a show, and afterwards, Stockton says, he went on a run like he had never had in his life, winning thousands of dollars at a clip. When the weekend was over, and Lawrence was back in New York, Stockton called her up and told her she needed to come right back out. She did, and the two have scarcely been separated since.
Game on glass table in the living room
“We love lost causes”
STOCKTON AND LAWRENCE'S COFFEE TABLE, FEATURING A MURDER MYSTERY GAME AND WHAT LOOKS LIKE A PHOTO ALBUM.
In their first two years together, they drove tens of thousands of miles around the country, developing a tool bag of tricks to boost a rising conservative populist movement. They became, in their words, political gypsies, traveling around the country, working on races for a couple of weeks at a time, helping them sharpen their messages and boost their fundraising before moving on to the next.
They liked stunts that crossed the line between what was aboveboard and what was not. When the Obamacare exchanges launched in 2013, Stockton recruited some of his online followers to swarm the online exchanges, gumming up the works on the first day of the rollout.
A lot of what they did, however, was connect campaigns with the vast array of grassroots tea party groups, tea party-inflected media and tea party donors that had arisen after 2010.They lost a lot of races, but didn’t care. “We love lost causes. We love grassroots-style people,” Stockton told me in December, pausing for a moment to take a rip off his bong to cure his hiccups. (“Legal in Nevada!” Lawrence yelled into the phone.)
“I never got along well with most political consultants or really wanted to. We take the jobs no one else will,” he said. “What, Mitch McConnell is going to threaten us? We really don’t care.”
“What, Mitch McConnell is going to threaten us? We really don’t care.”
Dustin Stockton
They started working for Gun Owners of America, a group formed on the belief that the National Rifle Association was filled with a bunch of compromising squishes when it came to firearms. Stockton had become one of the right’s many prolific Facebook content generators, with hundreds of thousands of engagements for every one of his increasingly incendiary posts, and a leading digital fundraiser, with his solicitations garnering hundreds of thousands of dollars for whatever cause or candidate he was shilling for. But his time with Cain in 2012, and before that with theNewt Gingrich campaign,gave him a glimpse into a bigger, richer world — one they both wanted a way into.
“It goes to the anti-establishment thing,” he said. “I could never lock down, like, a quarter-of-a-million-dollar contribution. The only time I was on Fox was on Huckabee’s show at 2 o’clock in the morning. There were people who were doing a fraction of the work who were getting all of the attention.”
Dustin and Jennifer posing and taking instagram photos and working on the water side of the house...spending time making calls and planning....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
They became, in their words, political gypsies, travelling around the country, working on races for a couple of weeks at a time, helping them sharpen their messages and boost their fundraising before moving on to the next.
Stockton says he met Steve Bannon at CPAC in 2012.Stockton hosted a party in his suite, a party that became infamous when a bunch of protesters from Occupy Wall Street showed up to heckle Andrew Breitbart, who responded by yelling back, “Behave yourself! You are filthy filthy freaks! Stop raping people!” It was all caught on video. Later Bannon invited Stockton to the Breitbart Embassy, the Capitol Hill townhouse he used as his headquarters, as he convened various figures in the tea party movement in the run-up during the 2012 election to tell them they needed to get behind Mitt Romney or the tea party would die. (“A bunch of kumbaya bullshit,” Stockton recalls.) At Bannon’s behest, Stockton organized a “Unity Rally” before the GOP convention — a piece of political theater in which assorted tea party groups agreed to put aside their differences.
Bannon later hired them both as community liaisons for Breitbart. (Bannon did not return several requests for comment on this story.) They spent six weeks staying at the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South and “infiltrating” a bunch of left-wing activist groups that wanted to disrupt a GOP gala in Manhattan before they were found out. Afterwards, Bannon sent the two to cover Bernie Sanders, who was challenging Hillary Clinton, with the idea that they could find and write about the fissures in the Democratic coalition. They convinced Bruce Carter, a Black supporter of Bernie Sanders, to channel his anti-Clinton energy into a new group called Trump for Urban Communities, which had a Twitter account that Carter didn’t control and was funded by people he never met or solicited. After getting blackout drunk and having a messy fight at the Trump inauguration — “We are kind of famous for our fights,” Lawrence said — they were sent by Bannon to babysit Milo Yiannopoulos, the far-right provocateur, on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour, where they tried to keep the peace between Yiannopoulos and his hangers-on and the security detail assigned to guard them.
[hat on counter...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
They grew tired of the life, the constant travel, the never really having a home.
For all that work, they expected some kind of ticket into the big time. Stockton and Lawrence had hoped if Trump lost, Bannon would be able to hook them up with their own show on whatever television station Trump was going to start in defeat. When that didn’t happen, they thought they might get a job with the administration, or at least the campaign. When that didn’t happen, they went back to working on political campaigns.They worked for Kelli Ward, a far-right conspiracy theorist running for the Senate in Arizona,but left after a dispute with some of her consultants. They went to Alabama, where they found a 12-year-old girl to interview Roy Moore, the judge and Senate candidate who had multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with underaged girls against him. The interview ricocheted around the internet, even landing on late-night talk shows.
“It is easier to influence events than it is to understand them,” said Stockton, a philosophy he says he borrowed from George Soros. “And so if you find yourself in a controversy, it is better to just create your own controversy so that you know what the next moves are.”
“Is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?”
Dustin Stockton
But they grew tired of the life, the constant travel, the never really having a home. They scarcely saw Stockton’s three kids. They said they went to Jamaica and tried to start a cannabis festival, but it fell through. They hoped to start an international cannabis business as more countries embraced legalization. They were done, they thought, with politics.
“Everybody’s always trying to screw everybody else,” Stockton told me. “Politicians let you down 100 percent of the time. It gets hard, and after 10 years of it I was like, you know, is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?”
[Picture of a MAGA hat on Lawrence
“It was defiantly sympathetic”
LAWRENCE WEARS A CAMOUFLAGE MAGA HAT.
Politics, however, kept reeling them back. The barriers to entry kept getting lower; the prospect of viral renown, if you could hit the right marks, only increased.
They were living in upstate New York, on an estate belonging to Lawrence’s family, when an associate connected them to Brian Kolfage, a triple-amputee Iraq War vet who had started a coffee company called Military Grade Coffee. The coffee company had a very familiar playbook: Kolfage found his customers in part by spreading inflammatory news stories online, then harvesting the email addresses of people who engaged. By the time they met Kolfage, his company had just been kicked off of Facebook for misinformation. Stockton tapped his own email list on Kolfage’s behalf, telling them about the triple amputee who was being censored by Big Tech. The coffee business quickly did more business than ever before. Stockton, who was at the time just trying to make some quick Christmas cash, set up a GoFundMe to help Kolfage sue Facebook for kicking him off, and the campaign raised nearly $40,000 in a matter of a few weeks. (Kolfage told me he was talked out of it after meeting with lawyers.)
Kolfage was thrilled, and he called Stockton up about setting up another GoFundMe, this time to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico. At the time, the federal government had been shut down for 35 days because Trump insisted on a wall and couldn’t convince the Democratic-controlled Congress to pay for it; this was a direct appeal to ordinary citizens who might be willing to pay for it themselves. Stockton was skeptical: Immigration posts could generate big numbers on his Facebook pages but he didn’t believe the issue was a way to get grassroots donors to give money. Plus, the actual logistics of their project — raising money and giving it to the federal government — seemed like it would be a nightmare.
[Dustin working on his computer at the home in st james city fl....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence in Florida June 17 2021
Jennifer lawrence working on her computer in St James City FL June 16th....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
Politics kept reeling them back. The barriers to entry kept getting lower; the prospect of viral renown, if you could hit the right marks, only increased.
Kolfage wrote a GoFundMe appeal that played on his status as a war vet and as a free-speech fighter against Facebook. He anticipated that the mainstream media would call it a scam, and leaned into that in advance — the triple-amputee veteran versus the critics. “It was defiantly sympathetic,” Stockton said. “People figured, ‘Look if the one-armed dude is going to take my 50 bucks, so be it.’”
At the end of four days, leveraging Stockton’s email list and affiliated social media networks, they had raised $20 million.
Stockton says they really did try to deliver the money to the Treasury, though their idea also had an underlying problem: There’s no legal vehicle for citizens to earmark funds for their own government projects. They reached out to everyone they knew in the administration, and allies in Congress like Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). They went to Washington and met with Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mark Meadows. Though Steve Bannon was by that point on the outs with the administration, with Trump making fun of his penchant for wearing multiple shirts at a time, Stockton and Lawrence started gathering people in Bannon’s basement and, using Bannon’s Rolodex, got a bunch of right-wing figures, like former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince and former Milwaukee sheriff Dave Clarke, to sign on as board members of the nonprofit they would soon register: We Build the Wall.
“People figured, ‘Look if the one-armed dude is going to take my 50 bucks, so be it.’”
Dustin Stockton
Getting land to actually build the thing proved more difficult. They ran into regulations about building near waterways and borders. They didn’t want to build in the middle of nowhere, where no migrants crossed. Many landowners they contacted had heard about the $20 million in their bank account and wanted big chunks of it for themselves. With the media and protesters tracking their every move, over Memorial Day weekend in 2019 the group found a half-mile stretch of land along the Rio Grande and built a portion of the wall essentially in the dark of night, before anyone knew what they were doing, only to be forced to stop when the local government issued a stop-work order.
Their campaign started to get attention in corners of the MAGA world, but Bannon thought they needed bigger names, so he invited Kris Kobach, the former hardline anti-immigrant Kansas secretary of state, to join the group, figuring that if he became Trump’s Homeland Security secretary — a job he was in the running for — it would mean their wall project would get the government’s blessing.
photo from jennifer of dustin and jennifer looking down on the wall section their group built in TX ....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
The portion of a border wall the We Build the Wall campaign helped build. | Courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence
Kobach was supposed to be the project’s liaison to Trump, but according to Stockton and Lawrence, he seemed to want to use it mainly to boost his own profile.The pair spent months negotiating an exclusive interview with Kolfage and CBS News, and Kobach stepped on their plans by scheduling his own interview with Fox. Kobach and Bannon also wanted to push out some of the longtime board members in favor of more “respectable” conservatives. Stockton and Lawrence decided they had had enough. They left on a road trip with Stockton’s kids, and while they were gone, Bannon and others remaining behind arranged to host a three-day symposium at the wall with political celebrities like Donald Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle.
Stockton and Lawrence returned to the symposium in a rage, in part because of what they say were the funds lavished on the influencers on the program. Stockton, who had been bounced from a speaking slot at the event in favor of the influencers, grabbed the mic anyway and started speaking his piece, praising the work of Kolfage and early founders like themselves. Everyone was mad at everyone, and as they decamped to the desert for dinner that night, Lawrence made hamburgers for everyone. One of the boyfriends of one of the influencers, an angel mom who had been brought on board for the event, complained that it was cold, and so Lawrence told him — in her words — that he was a f---ing asshole and could shove that hamburger up his ass. Stockton tried to get her to calm down, which led to a big fight between the two of them, and the two of them saying they were breaking up.
Dustin talking politics...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence in Florida June 17 2021
Stockton has always struck me as someone in on the joke, willing to give the necessary quote, well aware that he was playing a role in the national narrative.
Soon afterward, they decided to leave the organization for good. They were sleeping in their RV, outside of a cheap motel in Mesquite, Nevada, one night when they heard a loud knock on their door. Stockton, who said he had been twice arrested by the Las Vegas police in recent years (once because he had failed to heed police warnings to disperse when he was filming a George Floyd protest, and once when he was falsely accused of failing to return a rental car), figured that is who it was, or else, “some kind of crackhead.” He grabbed his gun, and ran to the front of the RV, where out the window he saw a half-dozen federal agents with guns.
They turned out to be armed agents with the U.S. Postal Service, and they handed Stockton and Lawrence a subpoena and seized their computers and phones. Later, they found out that Bannon had been arrested on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut that belonged to a Chinese billionaire. (The charges against Bannon were later dropped after Trump pardoned him.) Kolfage had been arrested as well. Federal prosecutors in New York alleged that We Build the Wall was a fake nonprofit, a scam meant to funnel money to its founders. The agents ended up keeping Lawrence’s and Stockton’s phones, but not their computers, and the two were never formally charged. The case is ongoing.
Dustin and Jennifer in their car waiting in a parking lot for take out.
“We are not afraid to tell people what happened”
STOCKTON IN HIS CAR IN A PARKING LOT IN FLORIDA.
The 2020 campaign was the first in a decade that Stockton and Lawrence hadn’t played a role in. That changed on election night. They were in their home in the town of Pahrump, Nevada, and Stockton didn’t like what he was seeing as the returns came in. It was just as Trump had said: The Democrats were trying to steal the election in the middle of the night, “dumping” thousands of ballots from Democratic precincts in swing states. Never mind that this was a normal pattern that election experts had expected; urban areas frequently report late and come in with huge margins for Democrats. Stockton had followed elections before, but there just couldn’t be margins and numbers that big, he thought. “It was just as Trump said it would go,” he said.
He says they didn’t want to get involved, but Amy Kremer, the head of Women for America First, and the original head of the Tea Party Express, called, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. (Kremer did not return multiple requests for her account of the events; since Jan. 6 they had a falling out, a not uncommon occurrence among figures of the MAGA right.) They were, she told them, the only ones who could pull off what needed to be pulled off. A big rally in D.C. next week, and who knows what would come next. There was a measure of self-interest, as well: With their legal position still ambiguous — they had not been formally charged in the We Build the Wall case, but thought they might be soon — running around the country saying the election had been stolen seemed like a good way to attract the president’s favor should he start handing out pardons.
[Dustin and Jennifer in Lovegrove Gallery in Matlacha Island Fl....Leoma Lovegrove is a famous local artist and Trump supporter who Dustin and Jennifer know...Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence in Florida June 17 2021
jennifer working on her computer as her dog lou interrupts at the house in st james city fl....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence in Florida June 17 2021
Dustin hugs his daughter at the house in st james city fl.... Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence in Florida June 17 2021]
The 2020 campaign was the first in a decade that Stockton and Lawrence hadn’t played a role in. That changed on election night.
Stockton set up a “Stop the Steal” Facebook page, and within 24 hours it had 350,000 members, with several million more in the queue waiting for approval. After some digging by NBC investigative reporter Brandy Zadrozny, however, the page got taken down by Facebook for spreading misinformation. Stockton accused her of playing with a powder keg. “You really should try writing things that aren’t designed to marginalize people by having them silenced. You are creating extremely dangerous situations where these people feel like they have no real outlet,” he says he wrote to Zadrozny when she asked for comment.
With Facebook shutting them down, Stockton and Lawrence figured the only thing they could do was to go all-in.The first rally they put together, the one on Nov. 14,was bigger than they had imagined. Stockton left the main stage to go speak before the Supreme Court, and so many protesters had surrounded the front of the building that he could barely make it to the microphone there. The group decided to go on a bus tour of swing states — North Carolina, Florida, Michigan — before heading back to D.C. for another December rally. Everywhere they went the crowds were energized, enthusiastic. They were back.
“If we allow them to blatantly lie to take control of our government, there is no future.”
Dustin Stockton before January 6
The bus tour was, by many accounts, ugly. Stop after stop was filled with speakers talking about what was happening with the vote count in the most apocalyptic terms, warning, or some would say threatening, violence. Stockton himself told the crowd that “if we allow them to blatantly lie to take control of our government, there is no future” and that “we have to remember the people who betrayed us.”
After the riots of the 6th, outlets like BuzzFeed and the New York Times unearthed footage of these events, blaming the rhetoric used on the tour for fanning the flames that engulfed the Capitol later. Stockton didn’t mind the stories. “I thought we came out pretty well in them, actually,” he said. “That kind of language — some of it is political hyperbole. And a big chunk of it is more generic than it seems to probably a lot of people. Nothing that we asked for or preach for is anything different than what you find in our founding documents.”
Nothing that Stockton or Lawrence said, they noted, went beyond anything the president of the United States was saying.
[picture from jennifer of her and Dustin on the stop the steal bus tour after the election....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have
a picture courtesy of Jennifer of the buses from the bus tour after the election....Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence who staged the 3 stop the steal rallies at their home in St. James City Florida June 16 2021....]
Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, who are listed on the group's website as part of the We Build the Wall team, were both served with warrants for their cellphones and subpoenas to appear before a grand jury, Stockton told CNN. He and Lawrence have not been charged with any crime.
not been charged with any crime.
They went on a bus tour of swing states before heading back to Washington for another December rally. The crowds were energized, enthusiastic. They were back. | Courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence
As much as they operate as a team, Stockton and Lawrence are different people and they play different roles. Lawrence is a true believer, someone raised in right-wing circles, and can stay relentlessly on message. Her official title for We Build the Wall was communications director. When I first spoke to her days after the riots of Jan. 6, she said it may have been antifa and brought up Black Lives Matter. Stockton is different: He has always struck me as someone in on the joke, willing to give the necessary quote, well aware that he was playing a role in the national narrative.
I’ve spoken with Lawrence and Stockton for hours and hours, both before the election and after. As far as I can tell, they both really believed at the time that Trump had won, and that the election was fraudulent. In part, because Trump said it was, and in part, I suspect, out of a belief that when you have spent a decade monkeying with politics, you assume more powerful forces are monkeying with the system even more effectively. But also because of the way the world seemed rigged against them — the way they were constantly getting kicked off of Facebook, the way the “Russia hoaxers” and anti-Trumpers in the national media all seemed to know each other.
When the 6th arrived, they say they thought this would be the moment — Trump would lay out the evidence and the courts or Congress or someone would see the light. Instead, Trump spewed the same stuff he always had. “It was just the same f---ing speech. It was really disheartening,” Stockton said.
Was he really that surprised? In the days after the election, Stockton spoke about the fraud as a true believer, no winking or arched eyebrows. Trump had won, and it was only a matter of time before the courts and various secretaries of state sorted it all out. He maintained that pulling off a scam to deliver hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes would actually be relatively easy. When I asked him why he was so confident, he’d unspool obscure bits of information about recently discovered boxes of fake ballots as if it were widely accepted fact. Like a lot of people in MAGA world, he had a sense of the news that seemed to come from a hermetically sealed bubble.
But their frustration was also out of personal spite. They had put together “March for Trump” rallies all over the country and on the fly, while other MAGA-world figures like Ali Alexander and Alex Jones had co-opted their original “Stop the Steal” name but, in Stockton’s estimation, “couldn’t organize shit.” Stockton and Lawrence had been trying to keep them and their cohort away from their efforts, and say a deal was ultimately brokered to allow Alexander and Jones to speak at the rally on the 5th so long as there was no rally at the Capitol on the 6th. But Alexander and Jones planned one anyway — and when Trump mentioned walking over to the Capitol in his speech, it meant to Stockton and Lawrence that someone from the other side had gotten to him.
Even so, the notion that Stockton and Lawrence, after having spent the months leading up to Jan. 6 on a “Stop the Steal” bus tour, came to Washington and then, just as the steal could be stopped, shrugged and went back to their hotel, and looked on shocked — shocked! — at what had transpired, seems frankly, like horseshit. I have told them as much. And they get it, and agree that their story doesn’t sound very believable. But as investigators have pored through the evidence of the day, nothing has yet pointed to Stockton and Lawrence being at the Capitol.
Stockton and Lawrence left D.C. a few days later and went down to “hide out” in North Carolina. (They have, they said, hideaways run by “patriots” all over the country where they can stay undetected if need be.) When we spoke a few days after the 6th, Stockton sounded done, depressed even. He was expecting something to happen, and it didn’t.
To bounce back, at first they tried to rally their energy and run the old playbook. They started a “MAGA Sellout” tour to take down Republicans who had certified Biden’s election or supported Trump’s impeachment; Stockton talked ambitiously about a series of massive cookouts and a “Tea Party 8.0.” But something was also changing for them. Stockton says he now believes that in fact Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States. It can seem odd, trying to punish politicians who believe the exact same thing they believe, until you remember that this is actually safer ground for them: politics as a prank, eyebrows arched. And besides, what did it matter who was right? If your goal is to remake the Republican Party, tossing out politicians with last names like Cheney and Murkowski and Romney, you take any opportunity you can.
In any event, even that version didn’t work out. They failed to recruit candidates and no one came to the big barbecue. Stockton and Lawrence talk darkly about why they’ve been laying low since then: They say that they are being targeted again, and see a shadowy conspiracy keeping them on the sidelines. They say that they’ve faced face extra scrutiny at the airport when they try to travel, that they have been unable to bank. Worse, Stockton says, somebody — maybe their newsletter platform, maybe their internet service provider — labeled the email list that he spent millions of dollars building and years cultivating a kind of spam, and so his open rate went from 20 or 30 percent to 2 percent. Without being able to reach people, he has no way to raise money. “We tried soft-ask emails, no-ask emails … and nothing is getting through,” he says. “We finally just gave up.”
Broke, unable to afford lawyers, and forced to turn off the hot water in their RV in Nevada to save on money, Lawrence and Stockton are, in a word, furious. They say the money they were owed for the “Stop the Steal” bus tour never came through. Investigative reports from outlets like ProPublica and others have lumped them in with the crowds who stormed the Capitol. Never having been introduced to the top money people, never having been pardoned, never even paid properly and, now, left holding the bag as others led the assault on the Capitol, they are ready to tell what they know. POLITICO has already reported that Stockton talked to the Jan. 6 committee. They no doubt spoke to me for this story, in large part, because they thought they could vindicate themselves.
“There are a lot of grifters in our space … and we know a lot about that, and we are ready to share.”
Dustin Stockton
They still stand by their beliefs about America, and still stand by what they have done: They say there was never any violence at any of their rallies; Stockton says everyone who asked for a refund from We Build the Wall got one, and no one donor has said they were defrauded, even as Bannon was arrested and the media labeled them grifters and con artists. A portion of the wall was built, and it still stands.
But they now feel a growing sense of alienation from their own side, as well as from the elites they’ve been fighting for years. Who gets the pardons, who gets the Fox News hits, and who gets to hobnob with the donor class? Not them. “We are just tired of watching people take advantage of other people and then us being forced to bear the consequences of it. There are a lot of grifters in our space, a lot of people who are not acting in good faith, and we know a lot about that, and we are ready to share,” he said.
Stockton and Lawrence see a shadowy conspiracy keeping them on the sidelines. They now feel a growing sense of alienation from their own side, as well as from the elites they’ve been fighting for years.
Without money to pay attorneys, they say they reached out to the House Jan. 6 committee, and would like to voluntarily testify. “This is our chance to tell our side of the story. We are going to be labeled with the crazies unless we do. We are in no-man’s land right now. The right thinks we are collaborators and the left wants our heads on pikes because we organized rallies in D.C. I don’t know what we do,” Stockton continued. “And so f--- everyone. We are not afraid to tell people what happened. We don’t want to be known as an insurrectionist or any other dumb-f--- influencer on the right who just echoes the same talking points everybody else says.”
Stockton and Lawrence are not, to be clear, brave dissidents coming in from the cold of the right-wing fever swamps. Their own version of their story and their epiphany can seem a little too cute; they’re people who grabbed a tiger’s tail and eventually the tiger bit them. They have political ideas that many readers will find abhorrent. Stockton believes, for example, not only that a well-armed militia is constitutionally enshrined but that it is also necessary for safety, and that trained civilians carrying semi-automatic rifles keep people safer. They filmed a Facebook video of themselves at a gun range with a far-right YouTuber in the days before the riot on the 6th. Stockton uses the word “globalist,” often seen as an antisemitic dog whistle, insisting that it is about open borders and trade and foreign military intervention, and in his defense points to Lawrence’s father’s friendship with Bibi Netanyahu. There is video of Lawrence heckling migrants as they cross the southern border, but they also forcibly remove people who carry Confederate flags to their rallies. Stockton says he wants people to participate in politics, in the legitimate political sphere, and he sees the charge on the Capitol as a violation of that.
When Stockton spoke at that first rally, back in November of 2020, he called Donald Trump and all the patriots gathered there the natural outgrowth of the tea party — the next step in the movement that they gave much of the last 10 years to. Now that movement seems dead, and Trump lives on.
“The Trump world is clearly the worst of it,” Stockton said. “He has raised $200 million-plus since the election. What is that being used for? Is it being used for what they are telling people it is being used for? I know it is not, because I am out here starving.”