Scrutiny on ties to extremist groups
GOP Congress members make alarming threats, back QAnon, militias, write Luke Broadwater and Matthew Rosenberg
The video’s title was posed as a question, but it left little doubt about where the men who filmed it stood. They called it The Coming Civil War? and in its opening seconds, Jim Arroyo, who leads an Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia, declared that the conflict had already begun.
To back up his claim, Arroyo cited Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of the most far-right members of Congress. Gosar had paid a visit to the local Oath Keepers chapter a few years earlier, Arroyo recounted, and when asked if the United States was headed for a civil war, the congressman’s response to the group was just flat out: “We’re in it. We just haven’t started shooting at each other yet.”
Less than two months after the video was posted, members of the Oath Keepers were among those with links to extremist groups from around the country who took part in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, prompting new scrutiny of the links between members of Congress and an array of organisations and movements that espouse far-right beliefs.
Nearly 150 House Republicans supported President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him. But Gosar and a handful of other Republican members of the House had deeper ties to extremist groups who pushed violent ideas and conspiracy theories and whose members were prominent among those who stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to stop certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Their ranks include Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, who like Gosar was linked to the “Stop the Steal” campaign backing Trump’s effort to overturn the election’s outcome. Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has close connections to militia groups, including the socalled Three Percenters, an extremist offshoot of the gun-rights movement that had at least one member who entered the Capitol on January 6. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents were among the most visible of those who stormed the building, and she appeared at a rally with militia groups. Before being elected to Congress last year, she used social media in 2019 to endorse executing top Democrats and has suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, was a staged “false flag” attack.
Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida appeared last year at an event also attended by members of the Proud Boys, another extremist organisation whose role in the January 6 assault, like those of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, is being investigated by the FBI.
It is not clear whether any elected officials played a role in directly facilitating the attack on the Capitol, other than helping to incite violence through false statements about the election being stolen from Trump.
Officials have said they are investigating reports from Democrats that a number of House Republicans provided tours of the Capitol and other information to people who might have gone on to be part of the mob January 6. So far, no evidence has surfaced publicly to back up those claims.
Boebert said in a statement that she had “never given a tour of the US Capitol to anyone besides family members in town for my swearingin”, and she called accusations from Democrats that she gave a “reconnaissance tour” to insurgents an “irresponsible lie”. After the riot at the Capitol, she said she did not support “unlawful acts of violence”.
Biggs has denied associating with Stop the Steal organisers and condemned violence “of any kind”.
“Were you aware of any planned demonstration or riot at the US Capitol to take place after the rally on January 6, 2021? No,” Biggs said in a statement.
A spokesman for Greene said she now rejects QAnon, and he tried to distance her from militia members.
Gaetz, on his podcast, said the Proud Boys were at the event he attended to provide security and that “just because you take a picture with someone”, it does not mean “you’re tied to every viewpoint they’ve ever had or that they will ever have in the future”.
Publicity for extremists
But in signalling either overt or tacit support, a small but vocal band of Republicans now serving in the House provided legitimacy and publicity to extremist groups and movements as they built toward their
role in supporting Trump’s efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election and the attack on Congress.
Aitan Goelman, a former federal prosecutor who helped convict Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, said that when elected officials — or even candidates for office — took actions such as appearing with militia groups or other right-wing groups, it “provides them with an added imprimatur of legitimacy”.
To some degree, the members of Congress have been reflecting signals sent by Trump.
During a presidential debate in October, he made a nod toward the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand back and stand by”.
Two months earlier, Trump described followers of QAnon — several of whom have been charged with murder, domestic terrorism, planned kidnapping and, most recently, storming the Capitol — as “people that love our country”, adding that “they do supposedly like me”.
Few Republicans have been more linked to extremist groups than Gosar.
“He’s been involved with antiMuslim groups and hate groups,” said Gosar’s brother, Dave Gosar, a lawyer in Wyoming. “He’s made anti-Semitic diatribes. He’s twisted up so tight with the Oath Keepers it’s not even funny.”
Dave Gosar and other Gosar siblings ran ads denouncing their brother as a dangerous extremist when he ran for Congress in 2018. Now they are calling on Congress to expel him.
“We warned everybody how dangerous he was,” Dave Gosar said.
In the days after the 2020 election, Paul Gosar and Biggs helped turn Arizona into a crucible for the Stop the Steal movement, finding common cause with hard-liners who until then had toiled in obscurity, such as Ali Alexander. The two congressmen recorded a video, This Election Is A Joke, which was viewed more than one million times and spread disinformation about widespread voter fraud.
Alexander has said he “schemed up” the January 6 rally with Gosar, Biggs and another vocal proponent of Stop the Steal, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama. Alexander’s characterisation of the role of the members of Congress was exaggerated, Biggs said, but the lawmakers were part of a larger network of people who helped plan and promote the rally as part of Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters.
Although Biggs has played down his involvement with the Stop the Steal campaign, on December 19, Alexander played a video message from Biggs to an angry crowd at an event at which attendees shouted violent slogans against lawmakers. At the event, Biggs’ wife, Cindy Biggs, was seen hugging Alexander twice and whispering in his ear.
In 2019, Biggs spoke at an event supported by the Patriot Movement AZ, AZ Patriots and the American Guard — all identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, according to The Arizona Republic .In
2015, he sat silent at an event as a founder of the Oath Keepers called for the hanging of Senator John McCain, calling him a traitor to the Constitution. Biggs told The Republic at the time that he did not feel it was his place to speak up and denounce the comments.
Just like Gosar’s family, Biggs’ two brothers have publicly denounced him, saying he was at least partly responsible for the violence on January
6. In addition, a Democratic state representative in Arizona, Athena Salman, has called on the Justice Department to investigate the actions of Gosar and Biggs before the riot, saying they “encouraged, facilitated, participated and possibly helped plan this anti-democratic insurrection”.
‘I am the militia’
In December 2019, hundreds of protesters descended on the Colorado Statehouse to oppose a new state law meant to take firearms out of the hands of emotionally disturbed people.
Among those at the rally were members of the Three Percenters, which federal prosecutors describe as a “radical militia group”, and a congressional hopeful with a history of arrests named Lauren Boebert, who was courting their votes. Armed with her own handgun, she posed for photographs with militia members and pledged to oppose the law. In the months that followed, militia groups would emerge as one of Boebert’s crucial political allies. As her campaign got under way last year, she wrote on Twitter, “I am the militia”.
Militia members provided security for her campaign events and frequented the bar she owns, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado. In a recently posted video, a member of the Three Percenters was filmed giving Boebert a Glock 22 handgun.
Another member of the group, Robert Gieswein, who posed for a photograph in front of Boebert’s restaurant last year, is facing federal charges in the storming of the Capitol and attacking police.
Boebert’s communications director, Benjamin Stout, said in an email that she “has always condemned all forms of political violence and has repeatedly made clear that those who stormed the US Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law”.
The QAnon caucus
One of the animating forces behind the attack on the Capitol was the movement known as QAnon, and QAnon has few more high-profile supporters than Greene.
QAnon is a movement centred on the fantastical claim that Trump, secretly aided by the military, was elected to smash a cabal of Democrats, international financiers and “Deep State” bureaucrats who worship Satan and abuse children. It prophesied an apocalyptic showdown, known as “the Storm”, between Trump and his enemies. During the Storm, their enemies, including Biden and many Democratic and Republican members of Congress, would be arrested and executed.
The mob that attacked the Capitol included many visible QAnon supporters wearing “Q” shirts and waving “Q” banners.
Greene was an early adherent, calling QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles out”. Many of her Facebook posts in recent years reflected language used by the movement, talking about hanging prominent Democrats or executing FBI agents.
Greene has also displayed a fondness for some of the militia groups whose members were caught on video attacking the Capitol, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
Speaking in 2018 at the Mother of All Rallies, a pro-Trump gathering in Washington, she praised militias as groups that could protect people against “a tyrannical government”.