Brazil's Murky Connection to Trump's Secretive January 5 War Council Is Getting Clearer—and It Raises New Questions

Previously unknown details of the January 5 Lindell-Bolsonaro meeting may establish links between Trump's inner circle and the January 6 insurrection and Capitol assault.

Introduction

Proof has already written at length about Donald Trump adviser and MyPillow CEO Michael Lindell’s presence at a secretive January 5 pre-insurrection “war council” at Trump’s “private residence” at Trump International Hotel—as well as Lindell’s claim that he met with one of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s sons that day, indeed possibly at Trump International as part of the aforementioned council. Proof has also noted the substantial connections fellow meeting attendee Daniel Beck has with the nation of Brazil; Beck owns Combat Armor Defense, a company that makes armored vehicles for governments—used, for instance, in crowd control during large civilian demonstrations—and the chief Combat Armor Defense factory is in Brazil.

What we’re learning now takes these early signs of a potential Trump-Brazil scandal to an entirely different level. Here are ten significant new revelations:

(1) The Bolsonaro Son Trump Adviser Michael Lindell Met With on January 5 and January 6 Was Eduardo Bolsonaro

On January 4, 2021—48 hours before the insurrection—Eduardo Bolsonaro entered the United States as part of a “surprise visit to the White House at the invitation of Ivanka Trump.” On January 5, Eduardo published on social media (see below) “a photo of Ivanka holding his newborn daughter in her arms.”

Bolsonaro’s statement on Instagram regarding the above photo, translated into English, reads as follows:

“I was received [at the White House] by President Trump’s Special Adviser, Ivanka Trump, in her White House office, along with my wife Heloísa and my daughter, Georgia. It was an occasion to strengthen the ties between our countries and to have a pleasant conversation. A businesswoman, Ivanka has done strong work [in the areas of] women, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and she has always been a safe haven for her father Donald Trump—thus [the reason for her] becoming his primary adviser.”

{Note: Technically Eduardo wrote “his office,” not “her office,” but this may be a typo, as he appears to be standing in Ivanka Trump’s White House office.}

Bolsonaro’s Instagram—usually gregariously active—falls mysteriously quiet for the rest of his pre-insurrection visit.

As for Bolsonaro’s Twitter account, on January 4, 2021, the day he arrives in the United States, he retweets a tweet from Brazil’s ambassador to the United States stating that “Brazil is committed to building an ever stronger partnership with the United States, based on common values, for the benefit of our peoples.” He also lauds Mike Pompeo, who is in Brazil, for signing an agreement that “designate[s] Brazil [as] a major non-NATO ally and launches the U.S.-Brazil Environmental Framework Dialogue”, two developments that in theory could put the Bolsonaros in Trump’s debt as Eduardo heads to the White House to speak to Ivanka Trump and (possibly) her dad. Notable also is that the tweet from Brazil’s ambassador allegedly signaled the end of the said ambassador’s term in America, meaning that Bolsonaro may well have held himself out as Brazil’s de facto ambassador (see below for much more) during his stay in Washington.

On January 5, 2021—the day of Trump’s war council—Eduardo Bolsonaro issues a cryptic tweet about Brazilian history that focuses (in its English translation) on how Princess Isabel became famous in Brazil by “chang[ing] the succession of the throne.”

As if the fact that Eduardo Bolsonaro was the only son of Jair Bolsonaro in the United States during the period Michael Lindell said he met with a Bolsonaro son wasn’t enough confirmation that it was Eduardo Bolsonaro with whom Lindell met, a January 6 photo of Lindell and Eduardo posted on social media has now surfaced:

While Bolsonaro reportedly made his surprise January 4 visit to the White House during a “vacation” from his work as an elected representative in Brazil’s government, it’s clear it was a working vacation, as on January 5—the first day Lindell said he met with Bolsonaro—Eduardo’s wife Heloísa Bolsonaro wrote on social media that her husband was “in a meeting” in “Washington.” No additional details of the meeting were released, though Heloísa called her husband’s January 4 trip to the White House a chance for her child to see “Aunt Ivanka [Trump]”, and revealed that the White House visit, and indeed Eduardo’s entire trip to D.C., was a “last minute” event that only “recently” got “confirmed”, a statement suggesting that Eduardo may have been coordinating with the White House about flying to D.C. immediately before January 6. {Note: the son of a prominent and powerful foreign leader visiting the U.S. would, indeed, normally be enough for the U.S. State Department to want to know about it in advance.}

Eduardo would eventually post a picture of himself with Lindell on social media on the evening of January 6 (see above) meaning that Eduardo had met with the top Trump donor, booster, and adviser two days running at a minimum. As for Lindell, in his own January 6 social media post about his meeting with Bolsonaro, a video livestream, he also noted that he had spent the last two days with Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell—a recitation of his pre-insurrection dance card that suggests Eduardo Bolsonaro may have been a member of this disreputable cadre throughout the 48-hour lead-up to the insurrection.

On January 7, the day after the insurrection, Bolsonaro wrote on social media that, as to the assault on the Capitol, he had decided to “make my own the words of [Brazilian] Chancellor Ernesto Araújo.” The words in question included these, along with Araújo’s “regret” over the destruction caused on Capitol Hill (emphasis in original):

“One must recognize that a large part of the American people feel assaulted and betrayed by their political class and distrust the electoral process. One has to distinguish between ‘electoral process’ and ‘democracy.’ Doubting the suitability of an electoral process does not mean rejecting democracy….One must stop calling decent citizens ‘fascists’ when they demonstrate against elements of the political system or members of institutions….Nothing justifies an invasion like the one that occurred yesterday. But at the same time nothing justifies, in a democracy, the disrespect of the people by institutions or those who control them. The right of the people to demand the proper functioning of their institutions is sacred. May yesterday’s events in Washington not serve as a pretext, in the United States of America or in any country, to place any institution above popular scrutiny.”

January 7 also sees Bolsonaro tweet out a picture of him meeting with CPAC CEO Matt Schlapp—whose wife, Mercedes Schlapp, was the Trump 2020 campaign’s Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications—and Dan Schneider, the Executive Director of the American Conservative Union (which was then planning a CPAC conference in Brazil, just as the ACU sponsors one annually in the United States.)

(2) Eduardo Bolsonaro Is a Close Trump Family Friend

Eduardo Bolsonaro’s visit with the Trumps at the White House on January 4, 2021 was not a one-off. As reported by WSWS,

“In the first year of his administration, [Jair] Bolsonaro appointed his son Eduardo as Brazil’s ambassador to the United States, allegedly because he is ‘a friend of Donald Trump’s children’ and has ‘a very great global experience.’ This plan [to make Eduardo Bolsonaro Brazil’s ambassador to the U.S.] ultimately failed. The ‘global experience’ mentioned by [Jair] Bolsonaro includes having been nominated by [Trump adviser] Steve Bannon as the South American leader of his [Bannon’s] fascistic front, ‘The Movement.’”

The one other example of Eduardo’s “global experience” cited by the Bolsonaro family in attempting to justify Eduardo becoming his dad’s chief emissary to Donald Trump was an even more suspicious one than the one above. Per a report from The Intercept,

“[T]he only international experience listed on [Eduardo Bolsonaro’s] resume is the year he spent on a work-exchange program in the United States, which included a brief stint behind the counter at a Popeyes chicken restaurant in Maine. Bolsonaro told reporters he “friend [sic] hamburgers” there—but the [restaurant] chain only serves fried chicken and shrimp.”

So what was Bolsonaro actually doing in the U.S. from 2004 to 2005? No one knows.

Here’s what we do know: according to The Intercept, Bolsonaro—along with his father and brothers—has long had “extensive, direct, multilayered, deeply personal ties to the paramilitary gangs and militias responsible for Brazil’s most horrific violence.”

(3) Trump Himself Is An Admirer of Eduardo Bolsonaro

According to The Intercept, not only is Eduardo “a huge fan of Donald Trump”, but this warm feeling is returned—with Trump saying, in a public statement in support of Eduardo’s prospective ambassadorship in America, that he “know[s]” Eduardo and that he considers him to be “outstanding.” Moreover, Trump “promised [Yair Bolsonaro] in writing that [his administration] would welcome Eduardo’s appointment” as Brazil’s ambassador to the United States.

While Eduardo’s nomination was eventually scuttled in Brazil because, as noted above, the inexperienced Bolsonaro was unqualified for it, Trump has an extremely long and detailed history—meticulously sourced and itemized in the “Proof” trilogy (Proof of Collusion, 2018; Proof of Conspiracy, 2019; and Proof of Corruption, 2020)—of treating as a nation’s “real” ambassador whomsoever he chooses. It is reasonable, in the view of this and (I’m sure) every other Trump political biographer, to suspect that on January 5, 2021, Trump and his family regarded Eduardo Bolsonaro as the de facto ambassador to the United States from Brazil, if not the de jure one. It’s important to note, too, that Trump’s kind words for Eduardo came in the middle of his clandestine attempts to get foreign nations (most notably Ukraine) to help him steal the 2020 presidential election:

Eduardo Bolsonaro🇧🇷 @BolsonaroSP

Thanks for the kind words, Mr. President @realDonaldTrump . If I am entrusted with the mission of being the Ambassador of Brazil in the USA, I will certainly work very hard to promote agreements in all areas and to build a prosperous and longstanding Brazil-US relationship.

Jair Bolsonaro has said of Eduardo that “He’s friends with Donald Trump’s children.” Meanwhile, The Intercept notes that Eduardo has “carefully cultivated at least the image of being close to the Trump family: proudly displaying photographs of himself with Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner during recent visits to the United States.”

That Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were the two sons of Donald Trump most frequently used by the former president for inappropriate meetings with foreigners—for instance, the now-infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Don Jr., Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a gaggle of Kremlin agents, or Don Jr.’s still too-little-discussed meeting at Trump Tower with Saudi and Israeli representatives offering to secretly aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign—mustn’t go unremarked upon here.

{Note: Links to tweets with photos of Eduardo alongside Trump Jr. and Kushner can be found here and here, respectively, as well as below.}

(4) Bolsonaro’s Trip to the White House to Meet with the Trumps, His Meeting with Lindell, and His Possible Presence at Trump International Hotel on January 5 Remain a Mystery

If, as The Intercept writes, Eduardo has “a shaky command of English”; is not Brazil’s ambassador to the United States; but is close friends with the Trumps and indeed (per the digital media outlet) has exhibited “fealty to the Trump family” in public; the question remains: what was it Lindell and possibly Giuliani, Powell, and Flynn needed to talk to Eduardo Bolsonaro about mere hours before the most fraught day in Trump’s political career? And why did Bolsonaro spend Insurrection Day itself with Lindell? And in addition to meeting with Lindell and a now-infamous crew of insurrectionists, did Eduardo Bolsonaro also get an invite to Trump’s January 5 “war council”? And if not—considering his close relationship with Donald Trump Jr.—why not? {Note: I ask this last question as a way of underscoring that, given the relationship Eduardo has with the Trumps, federal investigators working on the January 6 case would consider it unlikely that Lindell, Giuliani, Powell, and Flynn would ditch Eduardo to meet with a friend of his, Don Jr.}

We don’t have answers to these questions. But we do know that Jair Bolsonaro’s former chief of staff has called Eduardo “a completely inexperienced boy” who “doesn’t even know the role of an ambassador.” Meanwhile, Jair Bolsonaro himself has been so set on his son staying close to the Trumps that he threatened to make Eduardo Brazil’s foreign minister if the government wouldn’t accept him as an ambassador; moreover, as The Intercept writes, when Brazil’s leader “visited the White House in March [2019], it was Eduardo Bolsonaro, not [Brazilian foreign minister Ernesto] Araújo, who was seated to the Brazilian president’s right during an Oval Office meeting with Trump.”

This at a minimum suggests that Eduardo was Jair Bolsonaro’s handpicked emissary to Trump and his family—though to what end, in January 2021, remains unclear. It does substantially increase the odds that Eduardo stayed with Lindell when Lindell went to Trump International to meet with Trump’s inner circle, however, and it underscores that Jair Bolsonaro wouldn’t have sent his emissary to Trump to D.C. 48 hours before planned pro-Trump rallies across Washington without significant prior deliberation.

{Note: As established by the 2020 book Proof of Corruption, March 2019 was the very month Trump’s plot to steal the 2020 general election via illicit collusion with foreign powers began. As astute Proof reader from New Hampshire named Dave—see the comment section below—notes that, per public records, Daniel Beck’s Combat Armor Defense opened its first factory in Brazil in 2019.}

(5) Eduardo Bolsonaro Is a Steve Bannon Ally

According to a report by ABC News, Steve Bannon participated in “efforts to promote the January 6 Stop the Steal event that ultimately devolved into a riotous and deadly melee at the United States Capitol, leaving five dead and causing Trump to become the only president to be impeached for a second time.”

Forbes notes that Bannon was “reportedly in talks with the President in [the] weeks [prior to January 6]”, with Trump “seeking advice about his various attempts to overturn his electoral loss to Joe Biden.”

So it is telling that, according to The Intercept, Eduardo Bolsonaro is “a close ally” of the insurrectionist Trump adviser Bannon, and has “boasted about meeting Bannon” and publicly “promised that they [he and Bannon] would join forces to fight so-called ‘cultural Marxism.’” Eduardo thereafter took his relationship with Bannon to the next level, assuming “a formal role in the former Breitbart chair’s organization, announcing in a press release that he was ‘very proud to join Steve Bannon as the leader of The Movement in Brazil, representing Latin American nations. We will work with him to reclaim sovereignty from progressive globalist elitist forces.’”

(6) The Bolsonaro Family, and Eduardo in Particular, Would Have Had Something to Contribute to Trump’s War Council

Keeping in mind that ten days after the war council Michael Lindell would go to the Oval Office bearing a plan for the institution of martial law; and keeping in mind that on January 5, the same day as the Trump International Hotel war council, the leading Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate, Amanda Chase, met with the heads of the Oath Keepers (the under-investigation Stewart Rhodes) and Vets for Trump (the recently arrested Joshua Macias) to discuss, among other things, how Trump could use paramilitaries composed of former military veterans and police officers to institute martial law in America; it’s important to understand that when Lindell attended the January 5 Trump International Hotel meeting—possibly alongside Eduardo Bolsonaro—he had been meeting with a scion of a Brazilian family that The Intercept reports is internationally known for its “close ties to notorious paramilitary gangs”, with the digital media outlet adding that the Bolsonaros are, in general terms, “closely linked to mafiosos, death squads, and murder.”

The concern here goes well beyond the fact that the Bolsonaros are experts at using “paramilitaries” to execute their political designs. The “assassin team” The Intercept reports the Bolsonaros using—known as The Crime Office—is composed of “highly trained police officers who use their specialized knowledge of investigations and assassin skills to carry out murders with very little possibility of detection.” {Note: As established in the 2019 book Proof of Conspiracy, both Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner have a fondness for working with foreign autocrats who use assassin teams to execute their political designs, with Saudi Arabia’s MBS and the United Arab Emirates’ MBZ being two such examples—in the latter instance aided by Trump adviser and donor Erik Prince.}

The Bolsonaros’ paramilitary army bears similarities to the army proposed to Amanda Chase (who calls herself “Trump in heels”) on January 5 by Stewart Rhodes, the head of an organization closely linked to Trump adviser Roger Stone, as well as to the sort of outfit that might have been needed to execute Lindell’s January 15, Oval Office-presented plan for the imposition of martial law in the United States. That Eduardo’s brother Flávio Bolsonaro, like Eduardo a Brazilian official, has long (per The Intercept) “had on his official government payroll the mother and wife of one of the country’s most notorious and psychopathic paramilitary leaders, the fugitive chief of the militia responsible for the assassination of [the Bolsonaros’ political opponent] Marielle Franco”, underlines the sort of intel Eduardo could have provided Trump’s inner circle about how to coordinate one’s political ambitions with paramilitaries.

{Note: Flávio Bolsonaro is so detestable that when one of the paramilitaries unit he’d long supported killed “Brazilian Judge Patricia Acioli, who, along with Brazil’s left-wing PSOL party, was overseeing a sweeping criminal investigation into militias and heroically sent numerous high-ranking police officers to prison”, Flávio “posted a tweet that basically blamed Acioli for her own murder, criticizing her for provoking the militias.” The Intercept writes that Acioli’s murder confirmed that, in Brazil, militias can “just murder whoever they want[ ], even judges sending their leaders to prison”—worryingly, the sort of power Rhodes and Macias seemed to believe Trumpist paramilitaries should be given in the United States.}

According to The Intercept, irregular militias actively encouraged and supported and lauded by Eduardo Bolsonaro’s father “have taken over huge swaths of Brazil’s most critical cities, including Rio. A January investigation from The Intercept Brasil found that militias have virtually taken over the entire city.”

(7) It Seems Likely That Daniel Beck’s Brazil Connections Are Linked to Eduardo Bolsonaro’s Presence Inside Trump’s Inner Circle on January 5

It’s in view of all the foregoing that we must remember that Daniel Beck—present at the January 5 war council for no reason anyone has yet articulated, including Beck—not only has supported QAnon conspiracy theories on his Facebook page that would require martial law and paramilitaries to execute but, as noted, owns an armored-vehicle operation in Brazil that makes just the sort of heavy assets that paramilitaries can use to engage in extrajudicial suppression of local populations.

While there is no evidence as yet regarding what Daniel Beck (and possibly his father Doyle Beck) discussed at Trump International Hotel on January 5 besides what has already been reported by the Omaha World-Herald—“They discussed how to pressure more members of Congress to object to the Electoral College results that made Joe Biden the winner”—and therefore it cannot yet be known be known what connection, if any, exists between Lindell and Bolsonaro, Beck and Combat Armor Defense, and Rhodes and Macias, the possibility of a connection surely must now be investigated by the FBI. Just so, the recent report that the U.S. Capitol Police has suspended 6 officers and is investigating 35 others for helping to facilitate in the January 6 insurrection in some fashion leaves open at least the possibility that Trump and his allies hoped, like the Bolsonaros, to create clandestine ties to federal police officers as part of their illicit plans to illegally extend their political influence. Just so, the death-by-suicide of two Capitol police officers immediately following the insurrection is still unexplained; while there’s presently no reason to suspect that either man had a connection to the insurrection, the father of one was a longtime associate of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager whose firm Event Strategies helped stage Trump’s January 6 “incitement-to-insurrection” speech.

(8) The Trump-Venezuela Connection to a Possible Trump-Brazil Scandal

On January 5, 2021, four members of the Trump International war council—Michael Lindell and the three people he now says he spent all of January 4 and January 5 with, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell—were focused on establishing, in federal court if possible and in the court of public opinion if not possible, the idea that the November 2020 election had been stolen by Democratic operatives working in cahoots with the government of Venezuela. Powell and Giuliani had even hinted that they had sources from South America who would confirm the nefarious actions of certain murky Venezuelan interests in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

{Note: As I discuss in my 2020 book Proof of Corruption, Giuliani represents one of the richest and most well-connected men in Venezuela, Alejandro Betancourt, who is currently under criminal indictment in the United States for corruption. Just so, as Proof of Corruption details, Trump allies Erik Prince and Pete Sessions have, like Giuliani, had clandestine contact with the government of socialist Venezuelan strongman and top Putin ally Nicolas Maduro as part of a plot to keep Maduro in power contrary to official U.S. policy. One thing Maduro could have offered Trump’s most corrupt agents in return in late December 2020 and early January 2021 was false intelligence about the actions of U.S. Democrats. This would simultaneously divert attention from a potential Trump-Venezuela scandal and bolster Trump’s false claims of the 2020 general election having been “stolen” from him.}

So how do we know that Eduardo Bolsonaro would have been interested in working with the Trump administration to unveil a supposed illicit plot involving Venezuela? Well, because the man and his family had already confirmed it, with The Intercept reporting in March 2019 that Yair Bolsonaro and Trump met that month explicitly to “focus[ ] on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela”—an effort we now know, per the major media-sourced revelations in Proof of Corruption, was corrupted by clandestine Trumpist motivations and negotiations.

(9) Others at the War Council May Have Had Ties to Brazil besides Eduardo Bolsonaro, Michael Lindell, and Dan Beck

As previously noted at Proof, there is ample reason to believe that Trump elector, Idaho GOP official, and Beck family friend Layne Bangerter was at the January 5 meeting at Trump International Hotel along with Daniel Beck and his father Doyle. Photographic evidence places Bangerter with the elder Beck during the same period a hotel guest took photographs of known or suspected meeting members, including Trump Jr., Flynn, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Giuliani associate Phil Waldron.

Bangerter was born in São Paulo, Brazil, sometime between 1961 and 1965. His parents—Granger (Utah) residents and LDS missionaries Grant and Geraldine Bangerter, who had moved to Brazil in 1958—moved back to Granger in 1965. Bangerter’s older sister, Julie Bangerter, had been born in Granger in 1954. In 1973, she married Ramon Paul Beck, becoming “Julie Bangerter Beck” or “Julie B. Beck.” It is unclear whether Layne’s brother-in-law is related in any way to Daniel and Doyle Beck.

In view of the foregoing, and the fact that the Bangerter family’s Brazilian connections—going back decades, particularly through Bangerter’s late famous father—are to São Paulo in particular, it is worth noting that the most powerful elected representative from São Paulo from 2015 to the present day is none other than… Eduardo Bolsonaro.

And did I mention that Daniel Beck’s plant in Brazil is located in São Paulo? Just as it seems impossible that Daniel Beck would attend a January 5 meeting at Trump International Hotel—a meeting whose list of attendees is stunning—without his father (a far more powerful GOP figure, who was in the hotel at the time) or Bangerter (an even more powerful GOP figure than Doyle Beck), it is hard to imagine Daniel Beck getting to attend such a meeting if the foreign dignitary and Trump family friend who represents the city where his lucrative Brazilian plant is located were not also invited.

(10) Bangerter and the Becks Deserve a Closer Look Not Just Because of Their Ties to Brazil and Possibly Bolsonaro

In January 2017, Bangerter became the Deputy Associate Administrator at Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. As of January 5, 2021, he appears to have been an employee in Trump’s Department of Agriculture. As Proof has previously noted,

“Bangerter previously worked in DC—indeed, for fourteen years, from 2003 to 2017—for current senator Mike Crapo (R-ID). More relevant to the account here, in 2016 Bangerter was Trump’s ‘Campaign Director for the State of Idaho’ and thereafter a ‘Delegate to the Republican National Convention’ and even a member of the ‘Trump/Pence Transition Team from November 2016 to January 2017.’ He claims to have often traveled around the country with Vice President Mike Pence.”

It is unclear if Bangerter was at Trump International Hotel on January 5 as an agent of Vice President Pence, but it is worth remembering that—as Proof previously discussed—Trump donor Bubba Saulsbury, who excitedly flew to D.C. from Texas to participate in the events of January 6, suddenly decided to flee from D.C. after meeting with Pence at Pence’s home on the evening of January 5. The possibility that Pence had access to information his associate Layne Bangerter gleaned at Trump International that night cannot be overlooked.

Of Doyle Beck, Idaho Public Television reports,

“Beck not only gave $20,000 to the Idaho Freedom Action Fund; He gave [GOP] House candidate Chick Heileson $1,000 through his company, BRP Gem Lake Harbor Inc. And $1,000 through his other company, Bingham Development Company LLC, listed under the same address as BRP Gem Lake Harbor, Inc. And $1,000 through his other company, Lincoln Land Co, LLC., also under the same address. And another $1,000 through his other company, BECO Construction. And another $1,000 through his other company, Phenix of Idaho, which has the same address as BECO Construction. And $1,000 through another company, JBC Construction, INC. The report lists JB Construction, though the address given on the document lines up with JBC Construction, which Doyle Beck lists as one of the companies he’s founded on his LinkedIn page. And another $1,000 from his wife, Elizabeth Beck. (The address given for Elizabeth Beck is the same one given for Doyle Beck on the Idaho Freedom Action electioneering communication declaration from May 5.) Why not just give that $7,000 in one donation? It’s illegal. An individual’s donations to an Idaho legislative candidate can’t exceed $1,000 per election cycle. Both Beck and Heileson are scheduled to appear in court for misdemeanor charges of campaign finance violations. Those accusations stem from a May 2014 contribution to the Integrity in Government PAC in which Heileson borrowed about half of a $12,000 contribution from Beck, according to the Post Register.”

{Note: Internal citations in the block quote above have been omitted. See the link preceding the block quote for a full listing of citations confirming this account of Beck’s political donations.}

While of course Doyle Beck remains innocent until proven guilty of any campaign finance crimes, the fact that the January 6 insurrection was expensive—with Stop the Steal coordinator Alex Jones citing the cost of the Ellipse speech and intended follow-up event at the Capitol as being approximately half a million dollars—underscores that too little attention, as yet, has been paid to the financing of the insurrection. We know Roger Stone raised funds for the insurrection via a late December/early January video already discussed at length at Proof, and that some of the others who did so, like Proud Boy leader Ethan Nordean, have been arrested for doing so (and Proof has identified at least one other major donor who worked with the Stop the Steal group, Julie Jenkins Fancelli) but the possibility that the Becks or Bolsonaros helped fund Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election must be considered by federal investigators.