Rolling Stone Magazine has an exclusive from a witness who overheard Mark Meadows and the organizers of the Jan 6th “rally” planning to sic the people who attended the event to march on the Capitol. The witness is a man by the name of Scott Johnston who helped the organizers of the Jan 6th White House Ellipse rally. Johnston claims that Meadows and some of the rally organizers planned for the crowd to march on Congress, but none wanted to take responsibility for either 1) obtaining a permit and 2) planning for police security. According to Johnston, Meadows and the others designed the march to “make it look like they went down there on their own.”
In other words, it was supposed to be a “hands free” insurrection.
Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff and a national campaign spokesperson were involved in efforts to encourage the president’s supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That’s according to a person who says he overheard a key planning conversation between top Trump officials and the organizers of the Jan. 6 rally on the White House Ellipse — and has since testified to House investigators about the phone call...
Trump and his cronies wanted deniability for the insurrection, and all have mantained that the “rally’ was peaceful.
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.”
Johnston, who says he described the phone call to House select committee investigators, detailed his allegations in a series of conversations with Rolling Stone. Johnston says he overheard Mark Meadows, then-former President Trump’s chief of staff, and Katrina Pierson, Trump’s national campaign spokesperson, 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.
(I’m trying to stay within Fair Use guidelines, but this article is packed with information).
By the way, the rally organizers planned for the crowd to march on Congress, and they knew there would be blowback if it was found out that Trump and the rest planned for a mob to descend on Congress. Therefore, the planners all used burner phones.
Johnston’s account suggests there was a deliberate strategy by Trump’s allies to have supporters descend on the Capitol. Such a connection would implicate top White House and campaign officials in drawing crowds to the Congress without a permit — a step that could have required added security and may have allowed law enforcement to better prepare for the day’s events. Those crowds overwhelmed the Capitol Police and engaged in an hours-long battle with law enforcement. Four people died during the attack.
According to Johnston, rally organizers were “constantly” using “burner phones” — cheap, pre-paid 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.”
Emphasis is mine.
The rest of the article deals with Meadows lies to the public that it was a just a few bad apples who went down and rioted at the Capitol Building. And they provide some details on Johnston’s work with conservative causes. It appears that Johnston was appalled at the Kremer’s actions because he got to see their grift literally thrown in his face. He was ordered to go “bra shopping” with Kylie Kremer who had just put her hand in the donations till for the bra shopping excursion and other personal items.
Anyway, it’s worth a read. And it definitely moves the focus up the food chain to Mark Meadows. Be nice if the DOJ finally moved on that contempt referral from Congress.