Teasing the truth out of January 6

Scott Johnston — who worked on the team that helped plan the Ellipse rally — says that’s just not so. He claims that leading figures in the Trump administration and campaign deliberately planned to have crowds converge on the Capitol, where the 2020 election was being certified — and “make it look like they went down there on their own.”

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Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokeswoman, talking with Kylie Kremer, the executive director of Women for America First, about plans for a march to the Capitol. Johnston said the conversation was clearly audible to him since it took place on a speakerphone as he drove Kremer between the group’s rallies in the final three days of 2020.

“They were very open about how there was going to be a march,” Johnston says.

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He says the trio decided against officially permitting the march, citing concerns about security costs and about the optics of a sitting president organizing a push towards Congress as lawmakers certified his loss in the 2020 election. Ultimately, Johnston tells Rolling Stone, they planned to “direct the people down there and make it look like they went down there on their own.”

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The president’s camp insists this wasn’t part of any pre-planned push. In the book where he recounted his time in the White House, Meadows called the Jan. 6 violence “the actions of a handful of fanatics across town.”

  Rolling Stone

The lack of a permit would also lead capitol police to underestimate the crowd situation.

According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, prepaid cells that can be harder to trace because they’re not personally identified with a user or a user’s account — “to talk about” potential permits and plans for a march with Trump aides.

Johnston says that, in the key phone conversation he overheard, the group settled on ordering a march without an official permit. “Nobody wanted to do it because they didn’t want to pay for it,” Johnston says of obtaining a permit. “They didn’t want to have to provide security and all the other expenses.”

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Johnston also says he told investigators that he knew the call took place on a “burner phone” in the final days of 2020 because the discussion came right after Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase three phones for her group.

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Johnston [...] says Kylie Kremer directed him to purchase the phones on Dec. 28, 2020, so she could “communicate with high-level people.”

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“I’m the one that bought the burner phones,” Johnston says.

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Organizers of the Ellipse rally told Rolling Stone last year that they participated in “dozens” of meetings with White House staff and pro-Trump Republicans in Congress as they planned protests against Trump’s election loss. And Rolling Stone reviewed text messages among the rally organizers — including Johnston — in which the organizers said they were “following [Trump’s] lead” in planning the Ellipse rally.

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The committee is also seeking Meadows’ phone records via a subpoena sent to Verizon, but the former White House chief of staff sued to block that subpoena in December. The case is ongoing.

All accused are denying Johnston's allegations.

Rolling Stone cannot independently verify Johnston’s claim about the December phone conversation. He says he’s unaware of any recording of the call. The only other person Johnston believes may have overheard it is another Ellipse rally planner, Matt McCleskey. Johnston says McCleskey was also in the car when Kylie Kremer spoke about the march with Meadows and Pierson. However, Johnston says it’s unclear if McCleskey would have heard the call, as the staffer often wore headphones as he worked during the long drives.

McCleskey tells Rolling Stone Johnston’s story is “not true” and says he was “never in the presence of a phone call involving Meadows and Pierson.”

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The Ellipse rally was not the only major pro-Trump event that was set to take place in Washington on Jan. 6. There were also plans for a rally called the “Wild Protest” that was to be held alongside the Capitol grounds. One of the organizers of that demonstration, far-right activist Ali Alexander, claimed in a television special produced by Fox News host Tucker Carlson last November that a Trump campaign staffer approached him at the Ellipse Rally and directed him — as well as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — to lead a march to the Wild Protest site. “A Trump campaign staffer walks up to me and says, ‘You know, Ali, there are people leaving the overflow and there are already tens of thousands of people at the U.S. Capitol. With your presence and the presence of Alex Jones, why don’t you guys walk down Pennsylvania, gather people together, and then position them for your rally.'”

Jones made a similar claim in a video that he posted on Jan. 7, 2021. “The White House told me — three days before — we’re going to have you lead the march,” Jones said. “Trump will tell people, ‘Go and I’m going to meet you at the Capitol.”

And we know how that turned out. 

How stupid were they to believe he'd do that anyway? Perhaps if they'd been successful, he might have.

Alexander and Jones — who both have a long history of promoting false conspiracy theories — have not produced any evidence of their claims or named the White House and campaign staffers who they say directed them.

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“No one instructed anyone to have a structured march (formation, banners, fencing, etc.) that I’m aware of. The walk over was colloquially described as ‘a march’ by some, as ‘a walk over’ by others,” Alexander wrote. “And that was an evolving issue that developed and changed the advertising or characterization of the event as it was quickly planned.”

Nobody did anything.

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