BREAKING NEWS: On Insurrection Eve, Trump Adviser Michael Lindell Both Proposed Civil War in a 15-Page Manifesto and Met in Virginia with a Corrupt Foreign National

In this second entry of the Proof series on lightly reported or non-reported pre-insurrection meetings involving insurrectionist kingpins, we discuss a secretive January 5 dinner in Virginia.

Introduction

Proof long ago reported on Michael Lindell’s claims that he met with the corrupt son of corrupt Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro on January 5. That reporting in turn led to two additional significant Proof reports on the possible value of the Bolsonaros to Trump’s coup attempt; the connection between other Trump war room participants (such as the Becks of Idaho) and the Bolsonaros; and other visits Eduardo Bolsonaro made during his consistently-thereafter-lied-about trip to D.C.—including not just one but two visits to see the Trump family at the White House, one before Insurrection Day and one shortly afterward. The reports linked to above contain photographs of these key meetings.

Ultimately, reports at Proof about Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Michael Lindell, Team Kraken, Daniel Beck, Doyle Beck, Eduardo and Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump led to an ongoing Congressional inquiry in Brazil, as detailed (with links) in the history of this publication. Brazilian media has now covered the possible involvement of the Brazilian government in Team Trump’s fraudulent “election fraud” accusations against Brazil’s foremost enemy—Venezuela—in a way that U.S. media has not. And some members of Team Trump and its offshoot Team Kraken, such as Sidney Powell, have maintained their lies about Venezuela in a way that must be extremely pleasing to the increasingly unstable, perpetually embattled neo-fascist Bolsonaro government.

Proof can now report much more on what Lindell was doing on Insurrection Eve than it already has—though this is a developing story, and there is doubtless much more to learn. But the urgency of uncovering what Lindell has been up to has only grown since his insurrectionist August “symposium” in South Dakota (an event Eduardo Bolsonaro spoke at); his past claims that Trump would be reinstated as president (which would have seen Trump back in power on August 13, per Lindell); and the upcoming Justice for J6 rally in D.C. on September 18, during which insurrectionists like Lindell will return to a scene of past offenses at a rally law enforcement fears could spark violence.

Photographs Emerge of a Bizarre Insurrection Eve Dinner Meeting

As Proof has previously reported, videos and still images from early January confirm that Michael Lindell was staying at Trump International Hotel during Insurrection Week. He even gave an interview with a far-right religious organization—video of which Proof has published—from his room there, in which the hallmark blue curtains of Trump’s D.C. hotel, with their distinctive “seal” pattern, can be clearly seen. And Lindell gave a second interview from his room with former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka. During these interviews Lindell alludes to the fact that his “nieces” were at the Capitol as it was being attacked; it remains unclear whether any member of Lindell’s family illegally entered the Capitol. {Note: It is evident that Lindell himself was very much a part of the events on Insurrection Day. He was repeatedly filmed and photographed using the same Willard Hotel-stored golf carts to get around the Capitol area that Stop the Steal and the Oath Keepers were using on January 5 and January 6 to facilitate their D.C. coup attempt.}

Given that Lindell would say on the morning of January 6 that he had spent “the last three days” with three people in particular—Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn—and in the aforementioned interview with a far-right religious group he noted that Flynn had just been in his room until a few minutes earlier, the odds that either Flynn or Powell or both were likewise staying at Trump International (Giuliani is known to have been staying in a suite of rooms at the Willard Hotel) are high. {Note: In this undated interview with Powell, which is clearly from late December or early January, she is staying at Trump International, as again evidenced by that hotel’s telltale curtains. Just so, in this January 5 photo Flynn is at Trump International, as he was in this January 5 photograph previously reported on by Proof.}

In light of his claim that he spent Insurrection Week with Giuliani, Powell, and former Trump National Security Advisor Flynn, why was Lindell—notably, the only one of this group of four who could credibly claim not to be a former/current formal member of Team Trump—alone in Virginia meeting with a foreign national on January 5?

This January 5 photo from northern Virginia’s Ritz Carlton–Pentagon City (website) raises far more questions than it answers:

ABOVE: Bolsonaro (far left), Lindell (far right), and two as-yet unidentified men.

Note that the man facing away in the center of the photograph has his computer out, confirming that this is a working dinner along with whatever else it was intended to be.

This photograph was posted to Facebook by Trump supporter Marianne St. Amour Champiny, who appended the following note to it: “Having Dinner with George Papadopulous [sic] and Mike Lindell!” Champiny is of course wrong here—this is not George Papadopoulos, but Eduardo Bolsonaro, something she would’ve known had she literally been “having dinner with” the men above rather than only figuratively, by virtue of being in the same room in the same restaurant—but this photograph is most notable for (a) the two unidentified men sitting with Lindell and Bolsonaro, (b) the fact that there doesn’t appear to be anyone else at the table, meaning Lindell inexplicably parted company with Giuliani and Flynn and Powell to take this meeting (and indeed, one imagines Champiny would’ve identified anyone else at the table who had attained the level of national fame among Trump supporters as those three individuals), and (c) it’s unclear why Lindell and Bolsonaro decided to leave D.C. for this dinner meeting.

While we don’t know where Bolsonaro was staying during Insurrection Week, so he may have opted to stay in the Commonwealth of Virginia rather than America’s capital to keep a low profile, the fact that he took all his known meetings in D.C., and made two trips to the White House within 96 hours (January 4 and January 8), undercuts the notion that he felt it was necessary for him to stay out of D.C. as much as possible.

In this second picture, taken in the same room at the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City, Lindell is posing for a photo with Benji Gershon, who, from Champiny’s Facebook comments, appears to be associated with her rather than Lindell’s party. And here’s Champiny with Lindell:

In case you’re wondering about the general tenor of Champiny’s politics, here’s a Twitter post of hers from May 10, 2021 (advance warning, it’s profoundly deranged):

Why are the second two photos above relevant? Because we don’t know if Lindell was eating in a semi-private room at the Ritz Carlton, and therefore holding his meeting semi-secretly, or if it was a dinner in public. That the person sitting next to Lindell in the room he and Bolsonaro were in turns out to be a violent insurrectionist seems too coincidental to be without meaning, and may indicate that the room in which the meal took place was in some way rarefied company—that is, pre-determined as a room for ardent, radical, and wealthy Trump supporters. At this point, Proof simply cannot say.

This Meeting Matters a Great Deal—and Here’s Why

On January 5, Lindell was just days from meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office to propose the declaration of martial law and the establishment of an American autocracy led by Trump. This alone makes all Lindell’s movements in early January significant. But January 5 in particular was a significant day for Lindell.

On that day, at 2:40 AM—so approximately 16 hours before he met in Virginia with the corrupt son of a corrupt foreign leader—Lindell had published a fifteen-page, stunningly titled manifesto: “Reclaiming a Superpower: Americans Prepare for War.”

That’s right: just a matter of hours after publishing seditious propaganda advocating violent revolution in the U.S., Lindell met with a corrupt foreign national who was secretly in America (as Proof has previously reported, Bolsonaro did not inform the appropriate ministries in Brazil that he was going to America); was under multiple corruption investigations at home (investigations that could involve U.S. companies, which Trump would have opposed had he remained president, even as the incoming president, Joe Biden, was certain to support them); and who would, on his return to Brazil, falsely say he’d gone to D.C. for a vacation—and to introduce his new daughter to Ivanka Trump.

So yes, identifying the other two men who Lindell and Bolsonaro were meeting with at the Ritz Carlton in Virginia on Insurrection Eve matters a great deal.

Reclaiming a Superpower: The Full Text

Here’s the document Lindell published on January 6 (minus its six-page “Appendix”):

Conclusion

In retrospect, it is appalling that celebrities like Jimmy Kimmel have even humored Lindell. It’s not just that Lindell is an insurrectionist, it’s that he’s a potentially violent one who has met secretly with foreign nationals to plot what he intended—and still intends—to be a Trumpist coup. While we don’t yet have all the answers as to what Lindell and Bolsonaro were doing in Pentagon City, or what they were talking about there on Insurrection Eve, Proof hopes the pictures above can at least help launch an investigation into this critical topic.

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