MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Far-Right Militants Were in Trump's Insurrection Week Command Center

Proof reveals three new participants in Trump's Insurrection Week war room: one a militant, two who helped a Capitol-breaching Stop the Steal insurrectionist broadcast Trump propaganda from January 6.

{Note: This is Part 2 of a three-part Proof exposé on events that occurred at the Willard Hotel during Insurrection Week in January. Part 3 is coming shortly; Part 1 can be found at this link.}

Introduction

For months, Proof has focused with as much intensity on January 5 as January 6. Why? Because the evidence suggests there was an equal chance that Trump’s armed rebellion against the U.S. government would kick off on what turned out to be Insurrection Eve (January 5) as Insurrection Day (January 6). This sentiment arises on the political right as well as the political left; in a Patriot Transition Voice (PTV) interview with Robert Patrick Lewis, founder of far-right militia 1st Amendment Praetorians (1AP), Lewis observes that “everyone knew that something was going to happen” in the first week of January, but simply didn’t know if “it” would happen on “January 5 or January 6.”

Per Lewis, 1AP provided security to former Donald Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell in DC in early January; was (as photos from the event now confirm) at Stop the Steal’s profoundly inciting Rally for Revival/Rally to Save America on January 5 (in the “VIP tent” at the event); was in the “VIP area” of Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse speech; acted as security for Ali Alexander of Stop the Steal during at least one Stop the Steal event in late 2020; and in all these deployments utilized not only paramilitary and “overwatch” forces but intelligence and surveillance operations. Lewis discusses sharing the results of his operations with powerful Trumpworld figures he won’t name, though he notes that 1AP’s main ambition was to get the fruits of its labors directly to Donald Trump.

Lewis’s claims of high-level access to Trump advisers, members of Trump’s legal team, and leading insurrectionists are repeatedly confirmed by photographs of Lewis on January 5 and January 6, in which he can be seen at the January 5 Stop the Steal rally and January 6 Trump Ellipse speech, respectively. The question, however—given the extremely dangerous, even seditious views held by Lewis (see below) and endemic to both his paramilitary and his intelligence-gathering operations—is just how close 1AP got to the command center for insurrectionist plotting on January 5, January 6, January 7, and January 8: the Willard Hotel in DC. And the answer seems to be that 1AP was anywhere and everywhere it wanted to be during Insurrection Week, including inside the Willard Hotel suite that Trump lawyer John Eastman has described as a “war room” and Trump legal team adjunct Joe Oltmann has described as a “command center.”

Proof can also report on two additional individuals who were in Trump’s war room—and the circumstances of their sojourns there tell the stunning tale of Team Trump’s “Plan B” for the insurrection, as well as deepening the centrality of the Willard Hotel to the horrible events of January 6.

The Patriot Transition Voice Interview

In speaking to PTV on January 7, 1AP’s commander, Robert Lewis, presents himself to his interviewers as being—at the time of the interview—just one room away from a high-level hotel-based war room. Specifically, Lewis explains that (emphasis supplied),

[w]e’ve been talking about this for the last three hours in a room right over there {gestures to his right}: what does President Trump have to gain by not fighting back? Nothing, right? So even if the Democrats were to come to him and say, “Hey, you know, just make it a clean, smooth transition when you leave, we’ll give you an island in the Bahamas and we’ll leave you alone forever,” he knows they wouldn’t honor it. He knows that they’re going to be out for blood. They would go after him and every member of his family. So if he doesn’t fight, there is nothing left. And is that the type of person that he is? He’s getting bad advice from all the people around him, he’s got gatekeepers who won’t let anyone give him good advice, but is that like him—just from what you’ve watched for the last four years—is it like him to just throw in the cards and go, “There’s no hope”? And so in our [war] room today, in this room over there {gestures to his right}, we listened to his [Ellipse] speech today five times. And we had some of the smartest people, most experienced people, and most well-connected politically people I’ve ever met in my life listen to it five times {NB: this would take over five hours to do if one took no breaks} and we all came to the same conclusion: he didn’t concede, he’s being specifically vague [sic], there’s more there than meets the eye. So there’s a theory amongst our group that he said that [what he said at the Ellipse] to get some people to back off a little bit to give him more room to do what he’s got to do. Because he’s not to sort of person to just go, “Eh, I’m done. I’ll just go out peacefully and let them destroy the country that I worked so hard to try to fix and save.”

…

I’ve talked to a lot of very well known constitutional scholars over the last week, and I’ve been fortunate to hear their insights and hear them going over the finer points with this group that I’m with, and January 20 is the only hard [and] fast date in the Constitution. That means we have thirteen days left, right? Thirteen days left to put pressure on whoever your elected representative is, thirteen days to put pressure on [Vice President Mike] Pence, thirteen days to put pressure on [Trump chief of Staff Mark] Meadows, and everyone else that has a hand in this process.

In the block quote above, Proof frames “room” as a “war room” because Lewis admits that this what the mysterious room next door to his present location is. At one point he says to his two interviewers, “We’re in the next room war-gaming right now, trying to do some things.” The interviewers—both of whom are far-right Trump supporters—take the same meaning from Lewis’s statement that Proof has, with one of the two declaring that Lewis can only take a limited number of questions from those listening to the PTV interview because “he [Lewis] has to get back to the war room.”

So Which War Room Was the 1AP War Room?

If the war room Lewis was in on January 7 wasn’t in the Willard Hotel, it means rather less to insurrection researchers—as there’s nothing particularly remarkable about 1AP setting up a war room in Maryland, Virginia, or DC, much like the Oath Keepers are known to have done by reserving a large block of rooms at a hotel in Virginia. Such an accommodation will most certainly be looked at closely by the FBI, but it may not have any significance to bringing insurrectionist kingpins to justice. By comparison, if 1AP had set up camp inside Donald Trump’s Willard Hotel war room, it would be very hard to imagine a bigger development in the insurrection investigation—as it places radical, dangerous, militant insurrectionists inside Team Trump’s Insurrection Week command center. So what evidence do we have that Lewis gave his January 7 PTV interview from the Willard, and was referring to the suite of rooms then being used by John Eastman, Joe Oltmann, Rudy Giuliani, Christina Bobb, Russell Ramsland Jr., Robert Hyde, Maria Ryan and up to twenty-five other Trump attorneys, associates, agents, advisers, aides, and allies during the week of the insurrection? Quite a lot. {Note: Also see the prior Proof reporting on the Willard Hotel war room here, here, here, here, here and here.}

What Lewis Describes Is Identical to What Oltmann Described

It’s not just that both Oltmann and Lewis describe a hotel-based war room that was open on January 7 and featured a large number of “constitutional scholars” and politically well-connected individuals focused on helping Trump remain in power—while it’s unlikely that there was more than one of these on January 7, it’s certainly not impossible—the similarities between Oltmann’s description of Trump’s Willard Hotel war room and Lewis’s description of the hotel room in which he was “war-gaming” go beyond this. Consider the two quotes below, the first from the January 7 PTV-Lewis interview and the second from an April interview with Oltmann reported on by Proof (see links above), in which Oltmann is discussing what he learned in the Willard Hotel war room during Insurrection Week:

LEWIS: I just found out {he points toward the hotel room adjacent to the one he is in} that it’s DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] that’s blocking President Trump getting access to the Georgia ballots….it’s DHS that’s blocking them from getting the Georgia ballots. Really think about that. We were with Patrick Byrne—we have teams that are with him all the time—and he’s got pictures of a warehouse full of fraudulent ballots. They got pictures of them shredding these ballots that legally they have to maintain.

OLTMANN: You have Chad Wolf [then the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security]…[who] found out about, down in Georgia, that there was a shredder truck full of ballots, [and] they [DHS] took control of that shredder truck with those shredded ballots. They—I—the information we have on that is that that’s credible and they [Chris Krebs and CISA of DHS] said, “It’s not.” We have pictures of it. But yet the woman that actually came forward and said “I have the pictures” had somebody knock at [her] front door literally within hours of having a conversation with me about how she’s scared for her family. And Chad Wolf writes a text message to someone saying, “There’s nothing [DHS] can do about it [because] it’s out of our jurisdiction.”

We’re talking about the election for the United States president. And yet they [DHS] are having jurisdictional fights over, “Well, it’s not in our [jurisdiction]—I [Wolf] have to hand it over.” And then they [DHS] hand those ballots in Georgia back over to the Secretary of State [Mike Pompeo], [who] does what…? Destroys them. Even though the law states—in most states—that you have to keep ballots for twenty-four months.

So in Oltmann’s April interview with David Clement, and Lewis’s January interview with PTV, both men described a war room focused on DHS, alleged election fraud in Georgia, the alleged existence of a warehouse full of purportedly fraudulent ballots in that state, unidentified criminals’ alleged use of shredders to destroy such ballots, and urgent efforts by Trump’s legal team to try to access them (efforts, both men said, that DHS was blocking). Lewis even went on to cite the same number of months that the State of Georgia is supposed to hold onto ballots—as though he was working from the very same war room talking points as Oltmann.

Significant too, however, are some of the protectees Lewis discusses in his PTV chat. He says 1AP was protecting Patrick Byrne during Insurrection Week—Byrne, who was at the Willard on January 5 at a minimum, conducting an interview with Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer of InfoWars and Stop the Steal—and mentions also Michael Flynn (who was at the Willard on the same day and for the same reason) and Sidney Powell, who was not only Rudy Giuliani’s closest associate on the Trump legal team during the post-election period but was said by Mike Lindell to have been consistently with him, Flynn, and Giuliani in days leading up to January 6. In other words, it’s impossible to imagine Lewis and his team protecting Byrne, Flynn, and Powell without it putting Lewis and his team a) in the Willard at some point during Insurrection Week (at a bare minimum) and b) in proximity to Giuliani, who headed up Trump’s Willard war room.

But Lewis goes still further than this in his PTV interview, at one point saying that “Joe Oltmann diagrammed the ‘big con’ for us [at the Stop the Steal rally on January 5]”, but also implying that he’d had contact with Oltmann since then—a significant fact given that Oltmann conceded to this author, on Facebook, that he’d indeed been in the Willard Hotel “command center” on January 7 (the day Lewis said the war room he was in was ongoing).

Lewis’s 1AP Associate Phillip (Philip) Luelsdorff Was Definitely Inside Trump’s Willard Hotel War Room on January 6 and January 7

If any doubt remained that 1st Amendment Praetorians were inside the nerve center of Trump’s Insurrection Day operation, the picture atop this article dispels it completely.

The previously unidentified man in the white tee shirt is Phillip Luelsdorff (on some documents, Philip Luelsdorff), who is the Director of Business Development for the 1st Amendment Praetorians. The Maryland-dwelling Luelsdorff is also a professional poker player (seen in this article discussing the November 2016 Borgata Fall Poker Open at the Borgata Hotel, Casino, & Spa in Atlantic City, New Jersey; the longtime owner of a renovation company (seen in this YouTube video discussing his business); and the former owner of transportation company Baron Transportation, during which period of ownership Luelsdorff was arrested in Maryland for “allegedly stealing motor fuel” (Luelsdorff was alleged to have knowingly received the stolen fuel). Here’s a clear picture of Luelsdorff playing poker in 2016:

Various photos in this excellent Twitter thread place Luelsdorff in the VIP section of the January 5 Stop the Steal rally, the VIP section of the January 6 Ellipse speech by then-president Trump, and walking with fellow 1st Amendment Praetorian executive Lewis during Insurrection Week in Washington.

Given that Luelsdorff works under Lewis at 1AP, it’s almost impossible to imagine him gaining access to Trump’s Willard Hotel war room without Lewis having similar access, especially as—again—the war room Lewis describes being in on January 7 sounds identical to the one that Luelsdorff was in (per Robert Hyde’s January 6-dated photo) on January 6. Moreover, the fact that Oltmann claimed to this author that the picture atop this article was actually taken on January 7 would—if true—further substantiate the notion that the war room Lewis discussed with PTV on January 7 was the Willard war room (as the only alternative would be two 1AP executives attending two entirely disconnected war rooms at two separate hotels on the same day—despite the reported composition, discourse, and purpose of the two war rooms being indistinguishable).

Why 1AP Matters

Close contact between Team Trump and a 1AP militant like Robert Patrick Lewis is significant because the former has positioned itself as supporting only administrative insurrection—the overturning of a democratic election via dodgy backroom political maneuvers—while the latter has routinely flirted with the idea of a paramilitary revolt. Placing these agendas in the same room underscores the ways they were synchronized.

In his PTV interview, Lewis not only drops known QAnon slogans suggesting violent rebellion—like “the Great Awakening”—but he speaks animatedly about “how deeply our government has been infiltrated by Marxists, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party], and people who have been blackmailed and bribed”—this last allusion a likely reference, given Lewis’s citation of narratives people call “conspiracy theories” that are (in his view) actually accurate, to the QAnon-fostered notion that Democratic and Republican members of Congress are being blackmailed by individuals with video footage of them sleeping with, killing, and/or drinking the blood of children. Indeed, Lewis says at one point in his PTV interview that “I will tell you, a lot of conspiracy theories that people have heard about very nasty disgusting types of sexual blackmail [are] absolutely accurate.” Lewis’s reference to the CCP appears to be a citation of a Trumpist conspiracy theory—later cited, on January 11, by Owen Shroyer in speaking to Joe Oltmann on InfoWars—that holds that Joe Biden is secretly receiving “billions” of dollars from the Chinese government (a foreign entity whose only known financial relationship with the head of a major American political party is with Donald Trump, a topic exhaustively discussed here).

Lewis also opines to his two PTV interviewers that “this is what they [the Democrats] are going to do [if Biden assumes the presidency]: they’re going to ensure they never lose power again unless we have a full-on revolution. And that’s socialism: you [U.S. voters] vote your way in[to it] and you have to shoot your way out [of it]. Right? And that’s what it’ll come to [in America].” One of his interviewers responds, “I am ready to do anything I need to for the country. I still have hope we’re going to get it done [get Trump installed for a second term] passively.” Lewis replies, “The thing that has kept conservatives from really doing anything [violent] is this thought that we don’t want to watch the country burn. Right? And there are a lot of very well known, very high-profile people on the conservative side that I’ve been with for the last week and that I get to talk to them and know their insights, and a lot of them are saying, ‘Well, we want to let the constitutional process play out, we don’t want to do any damage to the country,’ and that ended yesterday [Insurrection Day]. That all ended yesterday. That’s done…there’s not ‘other ways to do it’ [besides violent revolution].” Thereafter, Lewis says that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and then institute martial law, saying, “He has got to find a way to use the military [before January 20].”

These was the sort of individual working with Team Trump during Insurrection Week.

As Lewis says, “We have people we’ve been working with who’ve been trying to get in to see [Trump]”, mentioning Powell and Flynn in particular. “We’ve been trying to send messages and get people in to see him [Trump]”, Lewis repeats, adding that his requests are being blocked by Mark Meadows—precisely who Joe Oltmann blamed for his inability to get in to see Trump. Lewis notes too that “constitutional scholars have been here in our little suite….I’ve talked to so many constitutional scholars in the past week, and been part of these conversations”, words that are unclear with respect to who they reference, but that do echo Oltmann’s description of attorneys on Trump’s legal team working out of the Willard (including, in addition to Giuliani and Eastman, Matthew DePerno and John Baker).

{Note: Lewis also goes on a tirade about the recent arrest of “Enrique”—a first-name reference to Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio, whose federal criminal case Lewis said he knows “all the little ins and outs” about. Lewis also says he knows how the Proud Boys are “organized” with sufficient clarity to say that Tarrio’s arrest in and banishment from D.C. on January 4 would not affect the Proud Boys’ operational effectiveness on January 6. Lewis also says that 1AP has “a couple hundred” members.}

The Willard Hotel, the Willard Hotel Fire, and the Near-Riot at Black Lives Matter Plaza on Insurrection Eve

The congregation of radical militant extremists like 1AP not just at the Willard Hotel generally but with members of Team Trump, Stop the Steal, and InfoWars specifically matters because these entities—with the Proud Boys—were the four most responsible for the planning and coordination of the events of January 6, with the Oath Keepers (many of whom apparently congregated at the Willard Hotel also, acting as bodyguards for members of the Stop the Steal and InfoWars camp) serving as important adjuncts to the effort. More broadly, the fact that the Willard Hotel was a launching ground for a near-riot on January 5, and that the said launch was coordinated by Roger Stone’s InfoWars co-host Owen Shroyer; filmed by Proud Boy Tim Gionet; aided by InfoWars guest analyst Tayler Hansen; attended by leading (white supremacist) Groyper Army member Matt Colligan; and preceded by Stone inexplicably vacating the Willard at a time he now says he considered the streets of DC to be “chaotic” and “disorganized” and too dangerous to go out in even more fully sets the scene of the Willard as Ground Zero for the January 6 insurrection. With this in mind, it’s worth reviewing the major gathering spots inside the Willard on both Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day:

January 5: The Willard Hotel Lobby

The number of insurrectionists who gathered in the Willard lobby is almost certainly too many to count, but photographs on Instagram posted by Trump fans—and the narratives of the individuals who were present—establish that at least the following individuals were in the hotel’s lobby on Insurrection Eve:

• Roger Stone

• Sal Greco, NYPD

• George Papadopoulos of the 2016 Trump Campaign and a Stop the Steal speaker

• Don Thompson of March for Trump*

• “50” insurrectionists, including Oath Keepers**

*Thompson’s Facebook page reveals a staggering array of photographs from the lobby of the Willard with well-known figures, including Stone, Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, and David J. Harris Jr. In photos from the VIP section of the Trump speech at the Ellipse, Thompson has captured candid shots of Christie Hutchinson and Melissa Carone, and tags himself as being “with” Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence (associates of Steve Bannon), Amy Kremer of Women for America First, Sky Jones, Judson Phillips, Brian Gibson, Ben Cunningham, Lisa Hays, and Drew Hays.

**Stone suite-mate Kristin Davis says that Stone and Greco hung out with “literally fifty” people in the Willard Hotel lobby, among them Oath Keepers and—it is more vaguely implied—Proud Boys (a group Stone has regularly socialized with in the past).

January 5: The InfoWars Suite

In a brief span of time on Insurrection Eve—the three hours between noon and 3PM—InfoWars’ Willard suite played host to the following insurrectionists (at a minimum):

• Alex Jones

• Roger Stone

• Owen Shroyer

• Michael Flynn*

• Michael Flynn Jr.**

• Patrick Byrne***

• Pastor Randy Coggins II

• 1st Amendment Praetorians****

*Of Team Kraken and the Jericho March as well as Team Trump.
**Per social media photos he has since posted.
***Of Team Kraken, as well as the former CEO of Overstock.
****Names and numbers unknown, but there “protecting” both Byrne and Flynn.

January 5: Outside the Front Door of the Willard Hotel

As noted above, those congregating in this space (for whatever duration) included:

• Roger Stone

• Sal Greco

• Owen Shroyer

• Tim Gionet

• Matt Colligan

• Tayler Hansen

• Tara Szczepanski*

• Assorted white supremacists and far-right live-streamers**

*Of the far-right Polish American Brotherhood.
**These include a white supremacist live-streamer pseudonymously known as “Loulz.”

January 5, January 6, January 7, January 8: Trump’s War Suite

• Rudy Giuliani

• John Eastman

• Maria Ryan

• Robert Hyde

• Joe Oltmann*

• Phillip Luelsdorff

• Russell Ramsland Jr.**

*Of FEC United and a vigilante militia, the United American Defense Force.
**Of Allied Security Operations Group.

Two additional participants in Trump’s Willard Hotel war room are discussed below.

January 6: Roger Stone’s Suite

We know little about Stone’s room at the Willard except a) a few of its occupants, and b) the fact that Stone considered it important (see links above) to repeatedly lie to the media about his use of his room—with the longtime Donald Trump friend and adviser insisting he never left it when we know he did so regularly on both Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day. The known occupants of the room include:

• Roger Stone

• Sal Greco

• Pastor Randy Coggins II

• Pastor Mark Burns*

• Kristin Davis (the Manhattan Madam)**

• Oath Keepers***

*A top Trump surrogate.
**Why these two pastors were hanging out on Insurrection Day with a convicted felon (Stone) and an acknowledged pimp (Davis) is probably a question the members of their respective religious congregations should be asking.
***Stone has acknowledged that the Oath Keepers were his constant companions on both January 5 and January 6, so unless he forbade them from entering his hotel room even as they were protecting his person for free, they were also inside his hotel room.

January 6: Outside the Front Door of the Willard Hotel

All of these figures were observed out the Willard Hotel on the morning of January 6, all at approximately the same time, though they were not seen interacting:

• Roger Stone

• Rudy Giuliani

• Boris Epsteyn*

• Alex Jones

• David J. Harris Jr.

• 6 Oathkeeper “bodyguards” for Stone

*A former Trump campaign and Trump administration official, and rated by Proof, on photographic and video evidence, as having a greater than 90% chance of having been in the Willard Hotel war room at some point.

Additional Insurrection Week Meetings

Many additional meetings involving Willard Hotel guests occurred in and around the Willard during the week of the insurrection, including some of obvious importance but whose exact location and date we can’t yet pinpoint. These include the following:

Owen Shroyer (InfoWars) and Joe Oltmann (Team Trump): In this InfoWars interview of Oltmann, Shroyer welcomes Oltmann to the program by calling him “a great American” and adding that “I had the pleasure of meeting Joe last week [the week of the insurrection] and I’m so glad I did. He was giving a great speech [at the Rally for Revival/Rally to Save America]. In fact, I think he went right before me or right after me, I can’t remember…[but] he gave a great speech and I learned about Joe and the battle that he’s in right now and I said, ‘That is an American patriot.’”

David J. Harris (Stop the Steal speaker) and Brandon Straka (Stop the Steal organizer) and Harris and Michael Lindell (Team Kraken): Like most of those associated with either Stop the Steal or Team Trump, Harris avoided being at the Capitol for reasons that are suspect and too convenient by half. Per Harris in this January 22 video, “I am being targeted at a very deep level. I’ve had friends of mine that have had the FBI knock on their door because they were in attendance [at Trump’s Ellipse speech] on January 6. I was supposed to be speaking that day, as well as my good friend Mike Lindell, [but] we were not [speakers]. We were told that all the speaking lineup had been changed, that no speakers were speaking except for those that the Trump administration—at that time—wanted to speak, and it was going to be very few.”

Harris admits that he headed back to the Willard after Trump’s speech, but claims he was intending to go from the Willard to the Capitol before he accidentally heard, while returning to the hotel, that the Capitol had been breached; allegedly, a stranger using a bullhorn was shouting this randomly at passerby on a bullhorn. While the purpose of the story seems to be to explain how Harris knew not to go to the Capitol, he obscures his design by using the story to instead establish a January 6 timeline of events, noting that his personal timeline means that the breach of the Capitol happened even as VIP attendees of Trump’s speech were leaving the Ellipse. “Several of my friends that did speak on [January] 5, like I spoke [at the January 5 Stop the Steal rally]...we’re hearing about all these people that are being arrested. Several of my friends have had feds show up at their door [and] ask them questions.”

In a second, January 25 video, Harris says his “very good friend” Brandon Straka of Stop the Steal has now been arrested by the FBI, and he repeats his explanation for not being at the Capitol, but this time with a twist: he blames his wife, and implies that he did want to go to the Capitol but “I didn’t go. Again, I listened to the president speak [and] went right back to the [Willard] hotel, went up to the room and turned on Fox [News] and saw what was happening. And my wife said, ‘We’re not leaving [this room]. We’re not going there [to the Capitol], period.’ [So] I didn’t go [to the Capitol].”

Jason Funes (Stop the Steal, the 2016 Trump campaign and the Trump administration), Maryam Henein (the eighth confirmed Trump war room attendee), Ann Vandersteel (the nineth confirmed Trump war room attendee): Funes—who is infamous for being used by Giuliani in a January 8 video of his (Funes’s) comments on January 6 as “proof” that it was antifa and Black Lives Matter behind the attack on the Capitol—says in this January 27 interview with Ann Vandersteel, who Maryam Henein says was coming out of Trump’s war room on January 8 as she (Henein) was going in, that “I have a unique perspective [on January 6], because I was at the Willard Hotel. And I left the Willard Hotel in a golf cart. People were offering me hundreds of dollars to get rides on a golf cart.” Because the number of golf carts reserved by Stop the Steal and parked at the Willard was extremely limited—and these carts are only known to have been used by Roger Stone, Oath Keepers (including two since-arrested bodyguards of Roger Stone, Joshua James and Roberto Minuta), and Mark Finchem of Stop the Steal—that Funes had access to one on Insurrection Day is astounding, and positions him as a major new figure in the insurrection timeline.

{Note: Funes is especially noteworthy because he not only featured in a Trump war room video and was the “videographer” for the Rally for Revival/Rally to Save America’s Master of Ceremonies, Matt Couch, but also, per Henein, breached the Capitol after going there from the Willard. Henein writes here that on Insurrection Day, as she was immediately outside the Capitol, “[Jason Funes] asked me if I wanted to go back inside [the building]. I nodded enthusiastically. His phone had run out of memory, and so I agreed to cover for him. In retrospect, I wish my camera work was better, but I was cold and concerned that if more tear gas was fired, I would be caught in a panicked melee. It was loud with all kinds of chants like ‘We love Trump’ as people moved through the crowd like sardines. Finally, we positioned ourselves on the left side outside of the Rotunda.” It is unclear why Funes and Henein have not yet been arrested by the FBI, as both are activists who on January 6 were posing as journalists—exactly what Team Trump has accused John Earle Sullivan of doing.}

Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lynn Lawrence (Steve Bannon associates) and unknown parties: As Proof has reported, these two top Bannon aides have said that they were at the Willard Hotel to get “instructions” on January 6, after having gone to see Trump’s Ellipse speech earlier. But we don’t yet know who they were getting instructions from. Right Wing Watch identifies both Stockton and Lawrence as part of Don Thompson’s March for Trump group.

{Note: Part 3 of this three-part Proof exposé on events at the Willard Hotel during Insurrection Week is coming shortly.}

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