Are angry town-hall protesters being paid?

“Unfortunately, at this time there are groups from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology, some even being paid, who are preying on public town halls.” — U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas in a statement

A large crowd of demonstrators gathered outside the Tennessee State Senate Chambers Feb. 6 and chanted, “We’re not being paid.”

Several Republican lawmakers have accused protesters at recent town hall-style meetings of being the tools of deep-pocketed benefactors pushing a liberal agenda.

U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas was one Republican who leveled the charge in a Feb. 21 statement. Gohmert was refusing to hold any constituent meetings because of protests elsewhere.

“Unfortunately, at this time there are groups from the more violent strains of the leftist ideology, some even being paid, who are preying on public town halls to wreak havoc and threaten public safety,” the statement read.

Nothing has yet turned up to support those claims. The burden of proof still lies with the accusers, however, and Republicans haven’t been offering any evidence.

First thing about these town hall protests: Crowds have been

pretty raucous and confrontational, but not violent.

Gohmert spokeswoman Kimberly Willingham did not provide evidence that protesters had been paid.

Also silent when we asked for proof was Jim DeMint, a former U.S. senator from South Carolina who now is president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. He told Greta Van Susteren on MSNBC on Feb. 22 that’s he’d been reading the Indivisible Guide, a handbook for grassroots protest compiled by several Democratic former congressional staffers.

DeMint said Indivisible’s activists were “very well-financed, very well-organized” and were “being bused around to go to these different town halls to disrupt them.”

That was news to the leaders of Indivisible, who have said they only tried to provide resources — how to found an activist group, how to reach members of Congress, how to hold meetings and form talking points, etc. — to groups unhappy with leaders in their districts.

“It’s easier to say all these protests are paid than to admit there are wide swaths of people in your district who disagree with how they are represented in Congress,” Sarah Dohl, a spokeswoman for Indivisible, told PolitiFact.

Press secretary Sean Spicer said on Feb. 22 that he thought “some people are clearly upset, but there is a bit of professional protester manufactured base in there.”

This after Spicer earlier this month on Fox News accused protesters opposing Trump’s executive order on immigration of being “a very paid, ‘AstroTurf ’ type movement.” If that term sounds familiar, it’s because liberal pundits and politicians used it to describe the tea party in 2009.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said in April 2009 that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grassroots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects.”

Trump addressed the protests last week, tweeting, “The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists.”

That echoes a common fall-back position for politicians who can’t prove that protesters are paid, University of California-Irvine sociology and political science professor David Meyer told us.

“Of course they are (organized) Meyer said. “Someone distributed information about the time and place of each town meeting and encouraged people to show up and ask tough questions. That’s how politics works.”

Our ruling

Gohmert said political activists are “being paid” to protest members of Congress.

His office didn’t provide any evidence of this, and neither did several other Republican officials we asked. There’s zero evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy to bring in paid activists to disrupt meetings.

We rate this statement False.

Rep. Louie Gohmert