Traitors better watch their backs

Two key organizers of the main Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C. are coming in from the cold.

Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence are set to testify next week before the House select committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

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Among the documents the couple is providing are conversations they had with staffers and members of Congress as they planned the main rally that took place on the White House Ellipse that day. Stockton described these discussions as largely logistical and focused on planning the members’ participation in objections to the electoral certification on the House floor and various events that were staged to protest against the election. They include Instagram messages Lawrence exchanged with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.).

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It’s the latest revelation from the couple, veteran activists who have spent the better part of a decade specializing in staging political stunts while working for conservative activist groups, Republican campaigns, and Trump’s on-again-off-again strategist Steve Bannon. Stockton and Lawrence were members of the team that led the nationwide “March for Trump” bus tour, which ended with the Jan. 6 rally at the White House Ellipse.

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The pair were the sources for a story that was published in late October, when they said members of Congress were involved in planning Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the Jan. 6 Ellipse rally. They claimed one of these lawmakers, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), suggested the possibility Trump could get them a “blanket pardon” in an unrelated ongoing investigation if they helped protest the election. (Gosar later suggested that story was “categorically false and defamatory.”)

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[Gosar] insisted the allegations came from “people I have never met.” He had, in fact, met Stockton and Lawrence. The trio were photographed beaming together at the Ellipse rally on Jan. 6.

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Nothing in the documents viewed by Rolling Stone or the couple’s statements revealed any planning for, or coordination with, the violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Stockton and Lawrence spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity for that story due to the ongoing investigation. Now, after receiving a subpoena from the committee, they decided to come forward and testify publicly — in Congress and in the press.

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Stockton is scheduled to testify on Tuesday, and Lawrence is due up the following day.

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Stockton and Lawrence have spent the past few weeks on the move, switching between their R.V. and various hotels and hideouts. Apart from Louis, a greyhound-beagle mix who has accompanied them back and forth across the country, the couple have few of their old friends left. The legal drama and infighting have left them cut off from political work; Stockton is keeping them afloat with what he describes as “a variety of side hustles.”

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They’ve spent most of the past few months on the run.

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For a lot of people who end up in such a tight spot, it’s tough to look back and pinpoint the moment things started to go wrong. For these two, that question has a fairly straightforward answer.

In Lawrence’s mind, it all began when she had “a gun put to my head.”

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Stockton says he was handcuffed as [USPS] officers searched the R.V. [in the early morning hours of August 20, 2020], while Lawrence, by her own admission, went “apeshit” and began shouting at the officers about corrupt courts and accusing them of being part of a plot to boost Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden.

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[T]he raid was part of a fraud investigation into a group that Stockton and Lawrence worked on alongside Bannon.

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During the 2016 election, they tried to chip away at Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, with a series of rogue operations that included recruiting Black activists to discourage the community from voting and embedding with Bernie Sanders supporters to help spur their protests at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. A recent profile in Politico that chronicled their work dubbed the pair “The Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World.”

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Stockton and Lawrence took the armed raid on their R.V. as confirmation of their worst worries about “deep state” forces waging “lawfare” on Trump supporters.

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Despite the raid, Stockton and Lawrence have never been charged.

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When social media and tech companies deleted content that spread election misinformation, Stockton and Lawrence saw it as dissent being silenced. The pair were convinced the election was stolen.

According to the couple, Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who Stockton knew from his days in the Tea Party world, reached out to them on election night to see if they were interested in staging protests questioning Trump’s loss. They went all in for the cause.

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THE JAN. 6 ELLIPSE RALLY was set to be the culmination of the bus tour, featuring a speech from multiple members of Congress and Trump himself. According to Stockton and Lawrence, it was planned to support the objections to electoral certification that were taking place that day on the House floor. They expected Trump and other leaders to present definitive detailed proof of election fraud as the crowd remained on the Ellipse, where security procedures were in place.

Instead, for well over an hour, Trump aired a series of vague, misleading, and demonstrably false claims about the vote being “rigged” along with his familiar campaign grievances about the media supposedly ignoring his crowd sizes, the “radical left,” and “cancel culture.”

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Stockton claims he was so upset by the speech that he turned to Lawrence and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” He was incensed by both Trump’s call to march and the lack of concrete evidence that was presented onstage.

“We assumed that him sitting with all the access to all the agencies of government and classified information he … had access to vastly more information than we did,” Stockton says. “We trusted when he told us that it was black-and-white and that there was clear evidence over, and over, and over again. We trusted that it would be there, and it ended up being a bluff, and he finally got caught in it.”

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At their hotel on Jan. 6, Lawrence says she watched the violence break out on TV as Stockton slept in the other room. She was incensed that Trump — who didn’t send out a tweet urging the crowd to “stay peaceful” until about an hour after the barricades were breached — hadn’t done more to call for an end to the violence.

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It’s a situation that Stockton and Lawrence find deeply troubling. And it is Trump himself that the pair believe was, as Stockton says, responsible “as much as anybody who actually was doing the violence.”

  Rolling Stone

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.