A few weeks after the election, the lawsuit says, a key organizer of the Stop the Steal movement that promoted false claims of election fraud, Ali Alexander, appeared at a rally outside the State Capitol in Georgia with the leader of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio. “We’re going to stop the steal,” the suit quotes Mr. Alexander as saying. “But first we’re going to stop the certification.”
Mr. Alexander’s lawyer, Baron Coleman, has repeatedly said his client is not under investigation in connection with the riot. Mr. Tarrio was not in Washington on Jan. 6 but was sentenced this week to five months in prison for possessing illegal weapons and burning a Black Lives Matter flag stolen from a historic Black church in Washington after a separate pro-Trump rally in December that also descended into violence.
The suit mentions other steps along the path to Jan. 6: In late November, it says, a California-based political organizer named Alan Hostetter, who believed the election was stolen, posted a video on the internet claiming that people “at the highest levels” needed to be “made an example of with an execution or two or three.”
Mr. Hostetter, who was charged in June with conspiring to storm the Capitol with members of the Three Percenter militia movement, also said in the video that he was going to return to Washington “with a million patriots, and we’ll surround that city.”
As for Jan. 6, the suit paints a picture of Stop the Steal activists riling up the mob of Trump supporters gathered in Washington with lies about the election, which the president then echoed in a speech near the White House. Members of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenter movement, it claims, led the mob on the ground in the Capitol assault.
Mr. Trump, the lawsuit says, knew that “the situation at the Capitol was dire” but did not condemn the rioters. Instead, it says, he released a video two hours after the initial breach repeating his lie that the election and been stolen and telling the attackers that he loved them.
Source: NYT
