Florida leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys extremist groups coordinated their activities in advance of storming the US Capitol and were in contact with prominent allies of former President Donald Trump, including Florida residents Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, according to evidence presented Tuesday by the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol focused Tuesday on the activities leading up to Jan. 6including an extraordinary Dec. 18 meeting at the White House attended by Flynn and fellow Sarasota County resident Patrick Byrneand the coordinated planning by pro-Trump extremists, many based in Florida.
Florida leads the nation in the number of individuals facing charges stemming from Jan. 6, with 94. Among the Floridians charged with Jan. 6 crimes are 16 Proud Boys and 13 Oath Keepers. The state has 43% of the Oath Keepers arrested in connection with Jan. 6 and 34% of the Proud Boys.
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The committee emphasized Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet calling his supporters to Washington, DC, on Jan. 6 for a rally, telling them to “Be there. Will be wild!”
“Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet motivated these two extremist groups, which have historically not worked together, to coordinate their activities,” US Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Jan. 6 committee member, said of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
The committee showed a message written by Kelly Meggs, a 52-year-old car dealership manager from Dunnellon, north of Tampa, who served as the leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers.
Meggs wrote just hours after Trump’s tweet that the Oath Keepers were forming an alliance with another militia group and the Proud Boys.
“We have decided to work together,” Meggs wrote.
That same day Meggs called Enrique Tarrio, the Miami leader of the Proud Boys, according to phone records obtained by the committee.
The next day the Proud Boys launched an encrypted chat to plan for their activities on Jan. 6, Raskin said. They shared “maps of Washington, DC, that pinpoint the location of police,” Raskin said.
Leaders of these extremist groups have ties to Trump allies such as Flynn, Byrne and Stone. Flynn was Trump’s first national security adviser, Stone is a longtime Trump adviser and Byrne is the former CEO of Overstock.
The committee showed pictures of Flynn and Byrne with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and another member of the group, Roberto Minuta.
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Rhodes, Minuta, Tarrio and Meggs have been charged with seditious conspiracy, the most serious crime stemming from Jan. 6. They face up to 20 years in prison.
Between the election and Jan. 6, Stone “communicated with both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers regularly,” Raskin said.
There was an encrypted group chat called “Friends of Stone” that included Stone, Rhodes, Tarrio and Stop the Steal coordinator Ali Alexander, Raskin said. They discussed “various pro-Trump events in November and December of 2020, as well as Jan. 6,” Raskin said.
Flynn and Stone later spoke at a rally in Washington, DC, on the evening of Jan. 5.
“This is soil that we have fought over, fought for and we will fight for in the future,” Flynn declared.
The committee also provided more evidence of Flynn’s status as a central figure in the efforts to overturn the election, delving into the Dec. 18 meeting at the White House where extraordinary measures were proposed.
Many of the details of that meeting have long been known, but the breadth of testimony presented by the committee emphasized how dramatic it was, and how consequential it could have been.
Flynn and Byrne, who both moved to Sarasota County after the 2020 election, met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 18. Joined by attorney Sidney Powell, they pushed Trump to take extraordinary measures to overturn the election.
The committee highlighted an executive order drafted by Trump’s allies that would have instructed the Department of Defense to seize voting machines and appointed a special counsel to investigate election fraud claims, with Powell proposed as the special counsel.
White House counsel Pat Cipollone recently testified privately before the committee, and on Tuesday video excerpts were played in which the attorney talked about how strongly he clashed with Flynn, Byrne and Powell on Dec. 18, and his alarm over the proposed executive order.
“To have the federal government seize voting machines, it’s a terrible idea,” Cipollone said. “That’s not how we do things in the United States. There’s no legal authority to do that.”
Cipollone also said he was “vehemently opposed” to appointing Powell as special counsel.
“I didn’t think she should be appointed to anything,” Cipollone said.
The meeting was loud and profane.
Former White House attorney Eric Herschmann said there was screaming involved, according to a video of his testimony to the committee. He said Flynn called him a “quitter.”
Flynn showed a diagram — which Herschmann deemed “nuts” — purportedly showing unfounded if not fantastical allegations of vote machine tampering by Hugo Chavez connections in Venezuela.
“What they were proposing I thought was nuts,” Herschmann said.
US Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Orlando, directed much of Tuesday’s committee hearing.
In her opening statement, Murphy said Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud were at the center of the violence.
“This was the Big Lie, and millions of Americans were disappointed by it,” she said. “Too many of our fellow citizens still believe it to this day. It’s corrosive to our country and damaging to our democracy.”
She added of the rioters that day: “In their warped view, this ceremonial procedure was the next and perhaps the last inflection point that could be used to reverse the outcome of the election before Mr. Biden’s inauguration.”
Another Floridian featured during the hearing was Brad Parscale, the Fort Lauderdale man who led Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign until he was elected the summer before the election.
In text messages on Jan. 6, Parscale criticized Trump, saying he was “pushing for uncertainty in our country” and dismayed by “a sitting president asking for civil war.”
In another text, Parscale expressed remorse for having been part of the campaign, writing: “I feel guilty for helping him win.”
When told it wasn’t Trump’s rhetoric that provoked the violence, Parscale disagreed, saying: “Yes it was.”
USA TODAY reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver contributed to this report. Follow Herald-Tribune Political Editor Zac Anderson on Twitter at @zacjanderson. He can be reached at [email protected]
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism