Grassroots efforts funded Capitol riot
Calls for cash, talk of revolution online enabled, motivated Trump supporters
Keith Lee, an Air Force veteran and former police detective, spent the morning of Jan. 6 casing the entrances to the U.S. Capitol.
In online videos, the 41-yearold Texan pointed out the flimsiness of the fencing. He cheered the arrival, long before President Donald Trump’s rally at the other end of the mall, of far-right militiamen encircling the building. Then, armed with a bullhorn, Lee called out for the mob to rush in, until his voice echoed from the dome of the Rotunda.
Yet even in the heat of the event, Lee paused for some impromptu fundraising.
“If you couldn’t make the trip, give five to 10 bucks,” he told his viewers, seeking donations for the legal costs of two jailed “patriots,” a leader of the farright Proud Boys and an ally who had clashed with police during an armed incursion at Oregon’s statehouse.
Much is still unknown about the planning and financing of the storming of the Capitol, aiming to challenge Trump’s electoral defeat. What is clear is that it was driven, in part, by a largely ad hoc network of low-budget agitators, including far-right militants, Christian conservatives and ardent adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Lee is all three. And the sheer breadth of the movement he joined suggests it may be far more difficult to confront than a single organization.
In the months leading up to the riot, Lee had helped organize a series of pro-Trump car caravans around the country, including one that temporarily blockaded a Biden campaign bus in Texas and another that briefly shut down a Hudson River bridge in the New York City suburbs. To help pay for dozens of caravans to meet at the Jan. 6 rally, he had teamed with an online fundraiser in Tampa, Fla., who secured money from small donors and claimed to pass out tens of thousands of dollars.
Theirs was one of many grassroots efforts to bring Trump supporters to the
Capitol, often amid calls for revolution, if not outright violence. On an online ride-sharing forum, Patriot Caravans for 45, more than 4,000 members coordinated travel from as far away as California and South Dakota. Some 2,000 people donated at least $181,700 to another site, Wild Protest, leaving messages urging ralliers to halt the certification of the vote.
Oath Keepers, a self-identified militia whose members breached the Capitol, had solicited donations online to cover “gas, airfare, hotels, food and equipment.” Many others raised money through crowdfunding site GoFundMe or, more often, its explicitly Christian counterpart, GiveSendGo. (On Monday, money transfer service PayPal stopped working with GiveSendGo because of its links to the violence at the Capitol.)
A few prominent firebrands, an opaque pro-Trump nonprofit and at least one wealthy donor had campaigned for weeks to amplify the president’s false claims about his defeat, stoking the anger of his supporters.
A chief sponsor of many rallies leading up to the riot, including the one featuring the president Jan. 6, was Women for America First, a conservative nonprofit. Its leaders include Amy Kremer, who rose to prominence in the tea party movement, and her daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, 30. She started a “Stop the Steal” Facebook page on Nov. 4. More than 320,000 people signed up in less than a day, but the platform promptly shut it down for fears of inciting violence. The group has denied any violent intent.
By far the most visible financial backer of Women for America First’s efforts was Mike Lindell, a founder of the MyPillow bedding company, identified on a now-defunct website as one of the “generous sponsors” of a bus tour promoting Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. In addition, he was an important supporter of Right Side Broadcasting, an obscure pro-Trump television network that provided blanket coverage of Trump rallies after the vote, and a podcast run by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon that also sponsored the bus tour.
“I put everything I had into the last three weeks, financial and everything,” Lindell said in a mid-December television interview.
In a tweet the same month, he urged Trump to “impose martial law” to seize ballots and voting machines. Through a representative, Lindell said he only supported the bus tour “prior to Dec. 14” and was not a financial sponsor of any events after that, including the rally Jan. 6. He continues to stand by the president’s claims and met with Trump at the White House on Friday.
By late December, the president himself was injecting volatility into the organizing efforts, tweeting an invitation to a Washington rally that would take place as Congress gathered to certify the election results.
“Be there, will be wild!” Trump wrote.
The next day, a new website, Wild Protest, was registered and quickly emerged as an organizing hub for the president’s most zealous supporters. It appeared to be connected to Ali Alexander, a conspiracy theorist who vowed to stop the certification by “marching hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of patriots to sit their butts in D.C. and close that city down.”
Alexander could not be reached for comment, but in a video posted to Twitter last week, he denied any responsibility for the violence.
While other groups like Women for America First were promoting the rally where Trump would speak — at the Ellipse, about 1 mile west of the Capitol — the Wild Protest website directed Trump supporters to a different location: the doorsteps of Congress.