BREAKING NEWS: New Evidence Emerges About Where Congresswoman Lauren Boebert Was in the Hours Before the January 6 Attack

While we don't yet know all the details of this newly discovered, secretive Insurrection Eve meeting, what we do know points to it being critical—and suggests it may have been held at the White House.

Introduction

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) may have one of the most peculiar backgrounds of any person ever to serve in the United States Congress.

The New York Post notes that despite being fairly young—Boebert entered Congress at the age of 34—the Colorado politician has, along with her husband Jayson, “racked up arrests” in her home state, and is widely known for “dust-ups” with uniformed police.

Across several dates of offense, Boebert has been arrested for Disorderly Conduct (an incident which involved her encouraging suspects in a police investigation to flee from law enforcement); Failure to Appear/Bail-jumping; Careless Driving; Operating An Unsafe Vehicle; allowing her pit bills to attack a neighbor’s pet (which ultimately resulted in her catching a Dog at Large charge); Underage Drinking; Third-Degree Assault; and Criminal Mischief. Meanwhile, among her husband’s arrests we find (for starters) Domestic Assault, Public Indecency, and Lewd Exposure.

The Denver Post calls Boebert’s criminal record “unusually long” for anyone in public office, let alone someone who loudly and repeatedly professes her love for the police. The Post also adds to the criminal incidents mentioned above another fact-pattern that involved allegations of Criminal Harassment and several instances of the now-Congresswoman skipping out on court dates without explanation. During one of her several arrests she loudly declared that the careers of the arresting officers would be ruined once she exposed them through her “friends at Fox News.” So it’s fair to say that a “friend of the police” Boebert was not in the years leading up to her implicit encouragement of violence against federal officers at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

ABOVE: One of Lauren Boebert’s mug shots. Boebert was briefly imprisoned in Colorado after this photograph was taken by local law enforcement officers.

Other media reports show that in running for office Boebert made up her volunteer service record, made up stories about her childhood and political evolution, lauded the domestic-terrorist QAnon cult, and reopened her Colorado restaurant in violation of state coronavirus regulations designed to protect the lives of her would-be patrons.

Lest anyone be inclined to respect Boebert for being a small business owner, keep in mind that her restaurant is one in which the wait-staff are armed with loaded guns and customers are “encouraged” to dine while carrying weapons. No fewer than eight tax liens have been filed against the restaurant (aptly named Shooters) which first made national news after a man was murdered right outside it. Boebert quickly made up lies about the murder to gain publicity for her business. Indeed, it’s not clear how often Boebert has told the truth about anything involving either herself or her business, or whether she has with regularity exhibited any of the values—including respect for law enforcement—she now insists are near and dear to her heart.

More recently, Boebert has been accused of illegally using campaign funds to pay off personal expenses—including the rent for Shooters.

{Note: Boebert, who dropped out of high school and says she has a GED but has provided no proof of it, also claims her Republican awakening came in her late teens, when she decided “I don’t trust the government.” In fact, what Boebert did in her late teens was register to vote—as a Democrat. There’s no reliable reporting on how Boebert ended up a Republican, leaving this author and others to suspect that the conversion was opportunistic rather than principled.}

So it didn’t surprise many people in Boebert’s home state of Colorado when, within the first 72 hours of her being in Congress, she “tussled” with law enforcement over her plan to be armed inside the Capitol every day, staged a campaign ad that raised major questions about whether it violated D.C. gun laws (an incident that resulted in even more police contact), and declared that the citizens of a majority-minority city—D.C., which has been the capital of the U.S. since 1790—don’t understand anything about “real America.” CNN reported Boebert’s run-in with Capitol Police over firearms in the Capitol as a full-blown “stand-off”.

{Note: With respect to the comment about “real America”, readers should understand that Boebert was born and raised in Altamonte Springs, Florida, an Orlando suburb which Niche describes as “one of the best places to live in Florida...offering residents an urban-suburban mix feel…Many young professionals live in Altamonte Springs, and residents tend to have moderate political views.” The suburb is around 80% white—just a bit whiter than Florida.}

As someone who grew up in a nice Florida suburb just miles from Disney World and Epcot Center—a far cry from her bizarre claim that as a child she “stood in line for government cheese” and that her family was “stuck in a cycle of poverty”—Boebert was well-prepared for the circus-cum-riot-cum-insurrection that engulfed the Capitol on January 6.

The congresswoman, who regularly deletes tweets just after posting them, infamously tweeted “Today is 1776” on Insurrection Day, and then not once but twice tweeted out the location of members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), as the attack unfolded.

Boebert was later accused by her peers of giving a “large” Capitol tour to a group of unidentified persons on Insurrection Eve. While Boebert claims the tour was only given to a small group of family members, almost half of whom were children, her description of the group in no way matches—either in number, age range, or any other particular—what her House peers say they saw. Still more bizarre is the fact that Boebert had already given her family a tour of the Capitol at midnight on December 12—a truly strange episode reported by Salon—so it’s not clear why another tour would have been required on January 3 (and note too that while Boebert insists that the latter tour happened on January 3, her peers say it was “after the 3rd [of January] and before the 6th [of January]”).

Boebert’s history of deceit, violence, lawlessness, and contempt for rule of law raises understandable concerns about what role she may have played in encouraging and facilitating the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Because Boebert wasn’t sworn into office until January 3—just 72 hours before the attack—there was little opportunity for her to be actively engaged in a Capitol plot as a congresswoman (that is, at the level potentially available to a newly minted insurrectionist member of the House) until January 4 at the earliest. This makes the question of how Lauren Boebert spent her first 48 hours in Congress—post-January 3, pre-January 6—of great interest to federal investigators.

Due to some fantastic sleuthing by a Proof reader, Proof has new information on this.

Lauren Boebert on Insurrection Eve

To understand what Boebert was up to on January 5, you must first understand that following her election to Congress she didn’t sit idly by as Trump spread the “Big Lie.” Rather, she was at the forefront of the action, even as a mere congresswoman-elect.

On December 12, Boebert attended the Stop the Steal-coordinated Million MAGA March at the invitation of Amy Kremer of Women for America First, the very woman who arranged the events of January 6 in conjunction two agents of the White House generally and Donald Trump specifically, Trump advisers Katrina Pierson and Kimberly Guilfoyle (the latter also the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr.). The December 12 event, which featured many of the same insurrectionists as January 6—including domestic terrorist Ali Alexander, infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and self-described “dirty trickster”-cum-Trump-confidant Roger Stone, the three primary organizers of Stop the Steal—is now considered a dress rehearsal for the January 6 insurrection. Indeed, the idea for January 6 was devised in a series of conversations between and amongst Stop the Steal and Women for America First officials in D.C. in mid-December, suggesting that Boebert may have been near the center of these plans as a congresswoman-elect in touch with at least some of the parties at the forefront of the discussions. Certainly, we know from Boebert’s statements during December of 2020 that her general attitude toward the 2020 presidential election and the incoming Biden administration could best be described as sedition-curious.

For instance, in late December, at a Turning Point USA summit in Florida—the same event at which Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) gave a lengthy and truly stunning insurrectionist rant—Boebert said that one of the purposes of the Second Amendment is “hunting tyrants”. Boebert has often used the word “tyrant” to describe President Joe Biden, and moreover has specifically done so in discussing Biden’s gun policies—making it clear that her rhetoric in late December 2020 in Trump’s home state, just a couple weeks before an attack on the Capitol that she called “1776” and featured her supporters hunting for Democratic politicians to kill, was indeed about assassinating political opponents.

{Note: Boebert has also called Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was targeted in a kidnapping and assassination plot, a “tyrant”, as well as Colorado Governor Jared Polis—whose COVID-19 orders Boebert was melodramatically ignoring even as those executing his lawful orders became the target of threats of “civil war” in Colorado.}

During this period Boebert was evidently in conversations, behind the scenes, about appearing at insurrectionist events in January—as per a federal permit application filed on January 3, she had by that date agreed to speak at the Insurrection Eve Rally for Revival jointly being put on by Stop the Steal and the domestic-extremist Eighty Percent Coalition (avid supporters of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as discussed here at Proof in the past; the founder of the Eighty Percent Coalition, Cindy Chafian, is the very person who both put Boebert on her permit application and gave a speech supporting the Proud Boys on Insurrection Eve at the event she had invited Boebert to speak at). The planned location for Boebert’s speech was Freedom Plaza, not far from both the White House and the Capitol. The Congresswoman was due to speak alongside all of the following (a non-exhaustive list):

• Ali Alexander, Stop the Steal

• Roger Stone, Stop the Steal (and a longtime Trump adviser)

• Alex Jones, Stop the Steal and InfoWars

• Owen Shroyer, InfoWars

• Rogan O’Handley, internet provocateur (and now a Trump adviser)

• Jack Posobiec, internet provocateur

• Tracy Diaz, internet provocateur

• George Papadopolous, former Trump adviser (and now an internet provocateur)

• Robert Patrick Lewis, 1st Amendment Praetorians (domestic extremist group)

Note that Boebert was the only member of Congress scheduled to speak at the event.

We also know that, in addition to speaking at the Rally to Revival sometime between 5PM and 8:30PM, Boebert was scheduled to speak to longtime Donald Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka on his podcast America First at some point between 4:30PM and 5PM on Insurrection Eve (in the video of the podcast, Gorka begins discussing Boebert’s upcoming, indeed apparently imminent interview at around 4:30PM ET):

ABOVE: The schedule for Gorka’s January 5 podcast (see also the link above).

In the event, Boebert—just 48 hours into her tenure in Congress—unceremoniously cancelled on one trusted Trump adviser (Gorka) and the bevy of top Trump allies and advisers then gathering at Freedom Plaza (including onetime, current, and/or future Trump confidants Stone, Papadopoulous, Jones, and O’Handley). It begs the question: what sort of conflicting event could make a brand-new congresswoman seeking to gain favor with Trump’s inner circle cancel on prior commitments to attend events featuring five top Trump advisers? What sort of intervening event(s) took up so many hours of Boebert’s Insurrection Eve schedule that it kept her busy from 4PM through at least 9PM (notably, the period all Trump’s Insurrection Eve war rooms were active)?

Was Boebert at the White House on Insurrection Eve?

In August 2021, a “fed up” Boebert “demanded” that President Biden (who she termed the “so-called commander-in-chief”) and Vice President Kamala Harris (whose name she repeatedly mispronounced) be removed from office. She said that America must “get rid” of Biden, and that Harris and Speaker Pelosi should “follow him out the freakin’ door.” In the bargain, she repeated the lie that the Taliban had hung a man from a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter; in fact, Reuters confirms that the very-much-alive man was a Taliban soldier in a harness trying unsuccessfully to affix a Taliban flag to a tall building. Boebert called the Taliban “savages” who plan to “rape and slaughter” any “Christian” they can get their hands on. She spun the old conspiracy theory that behind the scenes “someone is telling Joe Biden what to do”—a claim usually linked to far-right anti-Semitic allegations that Holocaust survivor George Soros and a cabal of international Jewish allies are secretly running the United States.

In the speech linked to above, Boebert said that the GOP—a political party just a few months removed from a failed coup attempt—“should not stand idly by until the next election” and let a “weak and incapable regime” remain in office. She added that the “so-called administration”—Proof isn’t really sure what that means—puts America’s enemies ahead of America’s citizens, a not-so-veiled accusation of treason. She noted that Harris was Joe Biden’s “handpicked” vice president, which appeared to be some sort of reference to a far-right conspiracy theory about the non-white Harris, but Proof doesn’t know which one. Boebert went on to call for the removal or impeachment of “Biden” (she wouldn’t call him president) and “Kamala Harris” ( mispronouncing her name again, possibly deliberately) for executing the same strategy in Afghanistan that she supported when it was being pushed by Donald Trump. She then called for the removal or impeachment of the Speaker of the House (“[we need to] get her the heck out of here [the Capitol]”, she said, gesturing to the building her supporters had lately stalked while looking for Pelosi to kill her) as well as Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

Boebert had thus called for the removal from office of four of the five Democrats atop the presidential line of succession—a proposed course of action that, if she can make good on it a year from now (when the Republicans expect to take over both houses of Congress) would make Republican Chuck Grassley the President of the United States in January 2023. She ended by lauding the coming “uprising of the American people” that would sweep all Democrats and even moderate to center-right Republicans out of office. She closed by calling the President of the United States of America “asleep or senile or sucking on applesauce.”

So why do I mention this August 2021 speech as a preface to discussing what Lauren Boebert did on January 5? Because I want Proof readers to think of where Boebert’s mindset was pre-insurrection—when none of us knew exactly how bloody and tragic January 6 would be—given where her mindset appears to be today, nine months later.

As Proof previously reported, the White House held a secret meeting somewhere on the White House grounds on Insurrection Eve. The only three confirmed attendees thus far are Rogan O’Handley, who was due to speak alongside Boebert at Stop the Steal’s Rally to Revival; Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), the Ali Alexander co-conspirator who was slated to speak at the Stop the Steal rally scheduled for the Capitol grounds on January 6 (an event that is newly the subject of a Congressional subpoena sent to Ali Alexander); and Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX), the only other Congressman scheduled to speak with Gosar as part of the Insurrection Day Stop the Steal event at the Capitol.

In short, two of the three members of Congress willing to speak at a Stop the Steal event on January 5 or January 6 were at a secret meeting at the White House with at least one other Stop the Steal speaker from the evening of January 5. That third man, O’Handley, made clear in his speech at Freedom Plaza on Insurrection Eve—at the very event Boebert was supposed to have spoken at—that the White House meeting he attended took place during the Rally to Revival. As noted above, Boebert, the third and final member of Congress willing to speak at a Stop the Steal event on January 5 or January 6, didn’t show up at the Rally to Revival despite being scheduled to do so…

…and we now find out that, according to the producer of the Sebastian Gorka podcast, Boebert or her team told the former Trump adviser she couldn’t come on his show because she was “in a meeting about—a strategy meeting for—tomorrow [January 6].”

Gorka’s response to this revelation was to ask his producer to “kill the [microphones].”

He thereafter looked up nervously at the video camera recording his words, as though he was worried that what he said next could be read by a lip-reader. We don’t hear his next words. So what did Gorka—who seconds earlier had billed himself as “a member of [President Trump’s] national security board”—want to ask his producer about the meeting Boebert said she was at?

Over the next three minutes, Gorka glances up at the camera every time he speaks—his microphone still off—and when he returns to air, one of the first things he notes is that the coming days will be “crazy”. He then starts pitching his next guest, Trump adviser Peter Navarro, another Rally to Revival speaker—indeed the most nervous one of the whole event, as Navarro begins his address seemingly most concerned about telling the audience he isn’t present as an agent of the Trump administration. As Proof has previously detailed, Navarro spent part of Insurrection Eve in the Trump “war house” at Trump International Hotel, a fact that he subsequently lied about to the AP.

{Note: By 1:33 in the video above, Gorka—who for some reason no longer feels he must cut his mike during breaks—is telling a second producer that Boebert just cancelled her appearance.}

So Gorka, a self-described member of Trump’s national security apparatus, seemed to have his finger on who was advising the president on January 4 and January 5, and on how “crazy” January 6 would be, and the person he wanted to speak to was a freshman congresswoman named Lauren Boebert who had been sworn in just 48 hours earlier.

Yet Gorka’s confidence in the significance of Boebert turned out to be (unsurprisingly, perhaps, given his access to Trump) prescient. Guess who was in the front row at Trump’s incitement-to-insurrection speech on the morning of January 6? Indeed, not just the front row—it was a rather long front row—but the very center of the front row?

Boebert also got a front-row-center seat at Trump’s “farewell speech” two weeks later:

So how did a woman who’d only just come to Washington in early January get so close to a sitting president in under 20 days? What had she done during this time—what meetings did she attend—via which she proved to Trump her commitment to his coup?

The Other Shoe Drops (Conclusion)

It’s almost impossible to imagine Lauren Boebert needing to attend a several-hour “strategy session” on Insurrection Eve. Indeed, it’s not at all clear what needed to be strategized; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) had already coordinated with several GOP reps to organize challenges to at least two slates of Biden electors, and all those challenges would entail were 90 minutes of debate—during which Boebert would give a speech either she’d written herself or (more likely) an aide had written for her. What was there to strategize about, let alone in secret, for hours, at an undisclosed location, with undisclosed parties, on January 5?

What we do know is that whoever Boebert met with on Insurrection Eve—whether it was Donald Trump, other members of the Trump family, leading seditionists like her House GOP peers Gosar and Gooden, grassroots insurrections like Rogan O’Handley, or the man who preceded O’Handley on stage at the Rally to Revival, Ali Alexander—this is what she was tweeting to nearly 400,000 followers on the afternoon on January 5:

And one of the first things she did on Insurrection Day was tweet this message out:

And this (below) is what she was doing while the Capitol was under attack: describing the movements of the intended victims of the attack, including “tyrants” she’d later rail about and demand that far-right Americans “get rid” of.

So the question of whether Boebert was with Trump, any member of Trump’s family, or any member of his administration, at a “strategy” meeting the night before she had a front-row-center seat to the most important and incendiary speech of Trump’s life is a consequential one indeed. Did the “strategy” involve tours of the Capitol? Did it call for her to incite her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers with the call-to-arms slogan, “Today is 1776”? Did it involve giving out the location of members of Congress as the building they were in was under armed attack? Whatever the “strategy” was, it was worth Boebert cancelling multiple appearances with high-level Trump insiders in order to help develop it.

While Proof long ago reported exclusively on a major GOP conference call involving Trump on January 2—on the weekend before the attack on the Capitol—the Boebert tweet below suggests a more intimate, direct exchange with the president on that day:

If Boebert spoke in person or by cell with Trump on January 2, it certainly increases the odds that the two spoke again 72 hours later. Moreover, the way in which Boebert addresses the mob she anticipates is about to descend on Washington is noteworthy; she tells them to “Get ready!” Precisely what they all should be “getting ready” for is unclear. At the time, the only plan for those Trumpists coming to D.C.—at least the only public plan—was to have them attend a rally at the White House Ellipse and one at the Capitol, and perhaps (if they wished) a Freedom Plaza rally on January 5. What about any of this required a public exhortation for passive rally-goers to “Get ready”?

The House GOP reportedly held a two-hour caucus meeting on January 5. However, that event broke up so early in the day that the one outlet that reported on it was able to provide an “updated” version of its report by 4:48PM ET—and the report makes clear that it was originally filed well after the conclusion of the GOP caucus meeting. And this video shows Boebert inside the Capitol rotunda just before the GOP caucus meeting would have begun. So whatever Lauren Boebert was doing between 4PM ET and 9PM ET on Insurrection Eve, it does not appear to have involved meeting with her Republican House colleagues en masse (though, as noted above, a smaller working group—including one that included the President of the United States as well as representatives Gosar and Gooden—is a distinct possibility). Based on the available evidence, this possibility is one that investigators must investigate urgently and fully.

With the Guardian reporting that Trump is “preparing to direct” some of his top aides—including former chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Trump political adviser Dan Scavino (who now appears to be missing), and former post-election Trump whisperer Steve Bannon—to defy Congressional subpoenas, the discovery that a non-executive branch employee like Boebert, who can’t claim executive privilege, may have been at one of the most important and secretive insurrection planning meetings, could change the scope of the House January 6 Committee investigation considerably. Let’s hope so.

{Note: Proof Politics previously published a lengthy analysis of Lauren Boebert’s first 100 days in Congress. That analysis supplements this news in critical ways, so I hope you’ll check it out.}

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