Insurrectionist Nebraska Gubernatorial Candidate and Future Federal Witness Charles W. Herbster, Flanked By Former Trump Campaign Managers, Publicly Swears Fealty to Trump

Trump dispatched his chief propagandists to Nebraska—with the result that the ex-POTUS has extracted a public loyalty oath from a man who could testify against him in a federal criminal prosecution.

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Has the most infamous witness tamperer in U.S. political history—Donald Trump—just struck again? It certainly looks that way.

Put bluntly, why else would both Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign manager and his 2020 presidential campaign manager now be barnstorming Nebraska with an obscure Republican gubernatorial candidate more than a year before the GOP primary there?

What makes that race so important that Corey Lewandowski and Kellyanne Conway should both be advising rancher Charles W. Herbster as he runs for a minor position the GOP is sure to ultimately secure no matter who wins the 2022 Republican primary?

There are, of course, many possible theoretical reasons for New Yorker-cum-Floridian Donald Trump suddenly deciding to take an interest in Nebraska politics. Herbster has been friends with him for sixteen years. As discussed previously at Proof, Herbster was “chairman of President Donald Trump’s agriculture and rural advisory committee.” Like Trump, Herbster is a supposedly fabulously wealthy man who would rather his working and middle-class supporters pay for his political ambitions than open his dusty wallet to contribute even a cent toward his would-be career as an elected official. And as Trump requires of all his “friends” and stooges, Herbster has never said a bad word about this nation’s most infamous and unrepentant white-collar and campaign-finance criminal. He even attended Trump’s now-infamous “incitement-to-rebellion” speech at the White House Ellipse on January 6. Herbster is also, of course, a Trump mega-donor; in 2016 he met with then-candidate Trump in New York City to discuss campaign strategy, and even met with disgraced Trumpist political consultant Sam Clovis.

{Note: According to a report in the Omaha World Herald, Herbster’s hometown newspaper, Herbster doesn’t just have “close ties to Donald Trump” but—like Trump—“could fund his own campaign but doesn’t want to.”}

So perhaps it’s no surprise that two unscrupulous Trump sycophants would gravitate toward a man so connected to and so superficially resemblant of the man to whom both Conway and Lewandowski long ago sold every ounce of their remaining integrity. Herbster may not have Trump’s inexplicably effective “charisma” in dealing with low-information voters, but on the other hand, the Nebraskan can “those people” with the best bigots on Earth (a group of which Trump is the grand poobah), as he recently told Nebraska media—speaking of men, women, and children fleeing violence in Central America as desperate refugees—“If we think those people are just gonna stay in Texas, in Arizona, we live in a glass house. Those people are coming to Nebraska.” (Emphasis supplied.) Never let it be said that Herbster isn’t ambitious; even Trump himself would likely have only said “those people” once.

But what if it’s a little more complicated than this? What if a man who was President of the United States a hundred days ago doesn’t send his two top presidential campaign staffers to Nebraska a year before a gubernatorial primary—and the primary, mind you, not the general—just because he’s pulling for a pal to do well in politics? Does Trump have any history of this sort of magnanimity with his chief corporeal assets? Not really.

But what if the obscure neophyte politician in Nebraska happens to also be one of the chief potential witnesses against Trump in a likely future federal prosecution for either incitement of armed rebellion or—worse—conspiracy to commit election fraud and sedition? Now that might be enough to summon one’s most reliable wights from their Washington crypts.

As readers of Proof are well aware, Herbster was responsible for the initial revelation of the January 5 “war council” at Trump International Hotel—an event that could be key to the January 6 investigation now being conducted by the FBI. As readers of this site know, there is some reason, as has been detailed at Proof, to believe Trump may have attended this secretive conclave via video conferencing equipment positioned in the White House and (as Herbster has termed it) the ex-president’s “private residence” in Washington. While Herbster tried, after spilling the beans about the January 5 event, to edit his Facebook post on the meeting, it was too late—Proof broke the story nationally on January 26 and followed up on it over a dozen times in the next 45 days.

So we could say that Charles Herbster has been a problem for Trump, and whether or not Herbster is fully loyal to Trump during any future FBI interrogation is a matter of grave interest to Trump—one that will (needless to say) determine whether Trump’s pal continues to enjoy the former president’s support as he pursues the governership of a state that contributed an Electoral College vote to Joe Biden in November 2020.

In this view, Trump’s dispatching of two capos to Nebraska doesn’t seem so surprising.

With all that said, now comes a report, in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald, revealing that—as Kellyanne Conway was traversing Nebraska with a man who would naturally be considered one of the most dangerous potential federal witnesses in America as far as her boss’s future freedom is concerned—Herbster said this while with Conway: “I would never, in any way, back away from my support and loyalty for the president.”

Then, in another media event—this one reported on by KETV—Herbster felt a sudden need to oddly and unnecessarily repeat himself: “If it’s the difference between being disloyal to President Donald J. Trump or becoming Governor of Nebraska, I will not be disloyal to the 45th President of the United States.”

And of course Herbster has already lied for Trump over the insurrection, falsely telling Nebraska media he flew home to Nebraska after the insurrection—when he actually flew to Mar-a-Lago with the Trump family, according to an Omaha World-Herald report.

{Note: Even the language of Herbster’s swearing-of-fealty was telling. He didn’t promise to be loyal to Trump’s agenda; he didn’t promise to be loyal to—such as they are, and such as they even exist—Trump’s “values”; he didn't promise to honor Trump’s legacy as president. Rather, he swore undying and unadulterated loyalty to the man himself—which, lest we forget, was a virtually unknown public ritual prior to Trump entering U.S. politics, and remains a genuinely creepy one.}

The aforementioned Donald J. Trump must have been mighty pleased to hear all of this.

Indeed, one wonders what sort of political capital Trump—who, recall, has a basically bottomless history of tampering with federal witnesses—will gift to Herbster now that Herbster has said the words Trump needed to hear while standing beside a Trumpist handler. We know that former FBI director James Comey refusing to take a “loyalty oath” of the sort Herbster has now taken publicly led to the former’s firing and the years-long Robert Mueller investigation; what goodies will Trump have for Herbster now that Herbster has passed the test that everyone Trump needs to cover up a crime must eventually pass—or else face his wrath?

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