Jan. 6 Organizers Say GOP Rep. Paul Gosar Promised Them Blanket Pardons, Very Legal, Very Cool

They also say they met with legislators in advance to plan the Ellipse rally.

Nine months after the events of January 6, we are now officially starting to hit the Trouble In Paradise stage, in which those responsible for what went down start to roll on each other. Last week, we found out that one of the Capitol rioters was maybe planning to defend his innocence by saying he thought he was authorized to invade the Capitol and tase a cop by Donald Trump, just like how a couple of the Watergate burglars thought they were authorized to break into Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office.

Now, Rolling Stone   has published an article in which two of the people involved with organizing the protest at the Ellipse tell all about the involvement of several Republican legislators in the planning of that and other "Stop the Steal" rallies.

These two sources [...] helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.

Along with [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas)."We would talk to Boebert's team, Cawthorn's team, Gosar's team like back to back to back to back," says the organizer.

It's not terrifically surprising that these members of Congress and/or their staffs met with these organizers. Hell, most of them spoke at the Ellipse rally or at the "Wild Protest" hosted by Ali Alexander (who it seems these people have something of a beef with), and none of them hid the fact that they either believed or were going to insist on pretending they believed the election was stolen from poor Donald Trump.

What is kind of pathetic, however, is that the organizers say they were promised that the long-heralded QAnon "storm" was coming and that the legislators were going to drop a big evidence bomb that, surely, would lead to the certification being stopped and perhaps even Trump being reinstated as president. They were never going to get that, of course, largely because it's tough to have solid evidence of something that never happened, especially on a time crunch.

"We had also been coordinating with some of our congressional contacts on, like, what would be presented after the individual objections, and our expectation was that that was the day the storm was going to arrive," the organizer says, adding, "It was supposed to be the best evidence that they had been secretly gathering. … Everyone was going to stay at the Ellipse throughout the congressional thing."

The biggest bombshell in the report is that GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, who has been Team Insurrectionists since the beginning, reportedly worked to entice them to organize a rally that day by promising to get them "blanket pardons" in an unrelated investigation. Obviously said blanket pardons never materialized.

The organizer claims the pair received "several assurances" about the "blanket pardon" from Gosar.

"I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you've been doing," Gosar said, according to the organizer.

The rally planner describes the pardon as being offered while "encouraging" the staging of protests against the election. While the organizer says they did not get involved in planning the rallies solely due to the pardon, they were upset that it ultimately did not materialize.

"I would have done it either way with or without the pardon," the organizer says. "I do truly believe in this country, but to use something like that and put that out on the table when someone is so desperate, it's really not good business."

Oh boy, it sure is just shocking that Republican Congressman Paul Gosar is allegedly not an honorable man. Who would have thought, except for his closest relatives? 

It would be nice to have January 6 wrapped up in a neat little bow, where we could prove that invading the Capitol was the plan all along, and that Trump and the Trumpettes in Congress were behind it all from the beginning, crafting it all meticulously, from toes totop hatsviking hats.

Alas, the most likely truth is that it was the spontaneous but predictable end result of telling people who had been told their whole lives that the Second Amendment gives them the right to overthrow the government that an election had been stolen from them, and that all their hopes and dreams for four more years of having an internet troll for a president were going to be destroyed.

See also: "Sometimes people are assholes."

[ Rolling Stone ]

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