Major New Revelations About Donald Trump's January 5 Pre-Insurrection War Council (Part I)

The mystery of the strange conclave at Trump's private residence at Trump International Hotel is unraveling—revealing new evidence about the Oath Keepers, U.S. senators likely in attendance, and more.

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{Note: This is Part I of a three-part exposé on the pre-insurrection war council held on January 5, 2021, at Donald Trump’s private residence in Trump International Hotel in Washington. Part II of the series can be found at this link, and Part III can be read here.}

Introduction

The mystery of which three United States senators attended Donald Trump’s secret pre-insurrection war council has remained only one-third resolved for months, with only Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville admitting—after being forced to do so by reporting at Proof—that he attended, though his confession included a passel of new lies about the event, anyway. The other two U.S. senators present at the war council alongside Trump family members, aides, and advisers at Trump’s “private residence” in Trump International Hotel have remained a mystery, and (inexplicably) one that U.S. media thus far has made no effort to unravel.

Proof has long focused on the Becks of Idaho—a gaggle of mega-wealthy, far-right, devoutly religious scions with outsized influence in Idaho’s intense GOP scene—as far and away the most inexplicable attendees at Trump’s “intimate” (as one of the Becks themselves called it) pre-insurrection strategy session. Who invited them? What did they have to offer? While new data published below confirms the Becks as significant donors to Trump’s cause, there are infinitely more generous Trump donors around the nation—making the Becks’ wealth an unlikely explanation for their presence at Trump International. Nor does anyone in the family fit, at first glance, into the other major classes of meeting attendees: Trump family, Trump advisers, Trump administration officials, Trump campaign staffers, Trump lawyers and their agents, and individuals involved with the Stop the Steal “movement.” Other individuals on-scene on January 5 who fit into the category of “donor”—such as Charles W. Herbster and Michael Lindell—also conspicuously hold other classifications, with Herbster being a Trump administration official with sights on the governorship of Nebraska (his top campaign advisers, per local media, are former Trump campaign managers Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski) and Lindell being a member of Team Kraken and therefore an agent of Trump’s unscrupulous and often publicly incomprehensible legal corps.

The Becks? They all fail—spectacularly—the old Sesame Street game, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.” For a former criminal investigator in the federal criminal justice system in D.C. like me, this marks them as important objects of study and inquiry.

Prior Proof investigations of Daniel Beck and Doyle Beck, the two known non-minor Beck family attendees at the January 5 war council, revealed the following information:

(1) The January 5, 2021 meeting at Trump International Hotel was an hours-long pre-insurrection strategy session, not a “fundraiser” as falsely claimed by Sen. Tuberville.

(2) At least one of the Becks was in the now-infamous “VIP” area of Trump’s speech at the White House Ellipse on January 6, while there taking photos featuring numerous insurrectionists, including Team Kraken associate and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Stop the Steal co-organizer Alex Jones, both of whom have acknowledged being in touch with the Trump White House in the two weeks immediately prior to the insurrection. Others in the VIP area included insurrectionist leader, Oath Keeper, and current federal defendant Jessica Watkins, as well as Alex Jones’ Stop the Steal associate Ali Alexander, a convicted felon who is hiding from federal officials after revealing that he conspired with top Trump congressional allies Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Mo Brooks (R-AL) in coordinating the events of January 6.

(3) The Becks fled the scene—like all those who attended Trump’s January 5 meeting—rather than do as the president had explicitly demanded at the Ellipse and march on the Capitol. None of the meeting attendees have explained how they knew in advance that they (unlike the mob Trump incited) should ignore the president’s commands.

(4) The Becks, like all others at the January 5 meeting, thereafter spread several false conspiracy theories also pushed by Trump: (a) that the events at the Capitol had in fact been caused by antifa activists; (b) that Trump still had a plan to remain president or to somehow return to the White House as president at some point in the future; and (c) that a conspiracy between Big Tech, U.S. media, and the two major political parties was intended to destroy Trump’s political “movement,” requiring a mass exodus of Trump loyalists to a third political party (the once-proposed The Patriot Party) and/or new social media platforms like that hotbed of violent far-right extremism, Parler.

(5) The Becks had been ardent Trump supporters since his nomination as the GOP presidential candidate in mid-2016.

(6) There may be a connection between Txtwire, a mass text-messaging company run by Daniel Beck, and the mass text-messaging platform Ali Alexander announced he was going to build for the Stop the Steal movement beginning in September 2020—with the aim of Stop the Steal’s new digital network being to help orchestrate Trump’s insurrection. Alexander lated stated in an interview with Jones that he was in touch with the Trump campaign—via text—from the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. Alexander “attended” (via phone) the January 5 war council that Daniel Beck attended, speaking (at a minimum) to Donald Trump Jr. girlfriend, top Trump presidential adviser, and Stop the Steal liaison Kimberly Guilfoyle as she attended the meeting.

(7) The Becks appear to hold some legitimately scary views, judging from their social media profiles (see below for more). Daniel Beck writes approvingly on Facebook of QAnon conspiracy theories; the unhinged “sovereign citizens movement” conspiracy theory that says Joe Biden is disallowed from being POTUS and that there is currently no authorized federal government in D.C.; and terrifying plots to retake Washington and overthrow the Biden administration by force—plots (as will become significant to this article shortly) that dovetails with the Oath Keeper conspiracy now being pursued by the FBI. Under that criminal conspiracy, 30 to 40 Oath Keepers, including Watkins (who, again, was in Trump’s VIP area at the Ellipse on January 6, as was Beck) would corral Congress into the tunnels beneath the Capitol and then “gas” them all. While there’s no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in this criminal scheme by Daniel Beck, Beck shared approvingly on social media a chilling video by British conspiracy theorist Simon Parkes indicating that an attempt of this sort might again be made by Trump loyalists at some point. Statements made by Parkes, who claims to have sources inside our federal government apparatus, dovetail with those made by Team Kraken lawyer Lin Wood, who was either at the January 5 meeting with the Becks or (failing that) worked on Team Kraken alongside—and as an agent of—those from the Team who did apparently attend the meeting, including Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Michael Flynn, and Sidney Powell. Wood’s claim, like that of Parkes, is that the U.S. military is still loyal to Trump; considers Trump the only authorized President of the United States; and will, at some unspecified time in the future, suddenly arise to take the necessary actions to depose Biden and re-install Donald Trump as U.S. president.

(8) The Becks’ significant financial interests in São Paulo, Brazil, and significant ties to Brazil’s government—in the persons of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, the latter of whom was present at the January 5 meeting at Trump International Hotel—may help explain how Bolsonaro came to be at Trump’s hotel on Insurrection Eve participating in a discussion of manufactured election-interference “evidence” allegedly emanating from the Bolsonaro family’s sworn enemy, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. {Note: For more on this, see the Proof reporting here and here.}

All of this, and much more, has already been reported about the Becks here at Proof.

What this new three-part exposé does is take the above information and expand upon it considerably, to include:

1. Ties between the Becks and paramilitary organizations, including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters—both of which entities participated in the January 6 insurrection. As recently reported by NPR, “People allegedly affiliated with organizations such as The Three Percenters, The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, Texas Freedom Force, and other self-described Nazis and white supremacists were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol building, according to federal investigators.” These ties offer at least one possible explanation for the presence of the Becks at Trump International on January 5.

2. The Becks appear to be involved in the takeover of Idaho by paramilitaries, in a shocking power grab that appears tied to the American Redoubt Movement—a seditious plot to have three GOP-controlled states and two portions of blue states in the Great Northwest of the United States secede from the Union in order to create a far-right theocratic government (see the image below, from the Spokane Spokesman-Review). This insurrectionist movement is so far advanced that, as reported by the New York Times just this week, five eastern Oregon counties have already voted to secede from Oregon and become part of Idaho, with two more counties—and thus, a total area of land constituting more than half the current boundaries of the State of Oregon—planning to do the same shortly.

3. The Becks may well have been present at Trump International Hotel because of their ties to a key insurrectionist U.S. senator with 2024 presidential ambitions. This discovery may also reveal the identity of that senator, a critical component of the ongoing investigation of the insurrection because (at present) only the names of two meeting attendees remain unknown, and both of them are senators. {Note: There may well have been other attendees beyond the twenty now identified—for instance, Lin Wood and Alex Jones—but as yet the public evidence does not support it.}

These discoveries are conjoined, in this three-article series, with a number of others that underscore public and private outreach by Trump and his inner circle, in the days leading up to the insurrection, to the very entities—in some cases, the very people—who were critical to the storming of the Capitol on January 6. More broadly, this article looks at the harrowingly dangerous and violent extremist views embraced by Trump and his team in the days before the insurrection; in many instances, these views are still being openly embraced by Trumpists both in the former president’s inner circle and in Congress. As previously noted on the Twitter feed connected to Proof, revolutionary rhetoric has become so common among Trump and his allies, agents, attorneys, aides, advisers, and associates that Americans have become inured to how dangerous it is. This was again called to mind for many Americans when insurrectionist former lieutenant general Michael Flynn again “trended” on Twitter for seditious words, this time claiming during an interview that the Democratic Party, in cahoots with unnamed foreign nationals from nations with Communist associations—namely, Russia, Venezuela, China, and Cuba—deliberately caused the harrowing human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. (even though Flynn’s Republican Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for the first year of the outbreak) in order to create a “distraction” from their theft of the 2020 presidential election and a means to “control” American society through government-mandated vaccines (not a thing) and other nefarious subplots aimed at enslaving “we the people” (a key meme in the new Trumpist, Revolutionary War-inspired insurrectionist lexicon).

In short, most Americans don’t understand how dangerous things are getting, and how little work has thus far been done to expose not just the foot-soldiers of Trump’s armed rebellion but those who plotted it and continue to feed it. While it’s great news that 494 insurrectionists have been arrested by the FBI so far, virtually none of these new federal defendants hail from the classes of insurrectionist most dangerous to America.

Proposed New Country Now Being Sought by the “American Redoubt Movement”

How Radical Is Doyle Beck?

When Proof began writing about the Beck family, its focus was on Daniel Beck—see the many links to Proof articles about him above—because it was this Beck son who had first revealed, along with Charles Herbster, that a secret conclave had happened at Trump’s D.C. hotel on January 5, 2021.

Since then, things have changed.

The focus of this publication is now on Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck’s father, who from the start Proof noted was substantially more connected within the Republican Party than this son is, though still not at a level that would explain his presence in Trump’s private residence on Insurrection Eve.

Above (l-r): Layne Bangerter (2016 Trump delegate); Donald Trump Jr.; Doyle Beck (2016 Cruz delegate). Taken at Trump International Hotel on January 5.

We already know that the elder Beck (see Part II of this exposé, and the links above) has been charged with state crimes on multiple occasions, despite his very public and very strident claims of godliness within the context of the Mormon faith in which he was raised and still practices. We also know, and this series will discuss in more detail, the positively bizarre and deranged election plots Doyle Beck had been associated with in the past. Less sufficiently covered is the extent to which Beck’s views are extremist, dangerous, and pose a clear and present danger to our Union. Fortunately, as a radical, Beck does not hide his worldview—at least not all of it—publishing a sufficient volume of scary material on Facebook that he has been called a white supremacist in the op-ed pages of his hometown newspaper and was even featured in an Associated Press article from February 26, 2021 entitled, “Some Local GOP Leaders Fire Up Base with Conspiracies [and] Lies.” In that article, AP says the following about Doyle Beck and a close associate of his in far-right Idaho GOP circles, Brent Regan (capitals in original, bolded emphasis supplied):

Last week, Idaho’s Kootenai County Republican Central Committee Chairman Brent Regan posted on Facebook: “People who DON’T own a gun should register and pay a fee. Per the Idaho Constitution Article 14 Section 1, all able bodied males between the ages of 18 and 45 are part of the militia and should arm themselves ... That is the LAW.”

That posting followed Regan’s online messaging in early December, when he boosted a Parler post on his feed: “SIDNEY POWELL’S ‘KRAKEN’ IS DOD CYBER WARFARE PROGRAM! WE ARE AT WAR!—THE MARSHALL REPORT.” Powell, a lawyer who had supported Trump, referred to her legal strategy as “the kraken”, [a gambit] powerful enough to destroy Biden’s presidency. However, the Supreme Court on Monday rejected a handful of cases related to the 2020 election filed by Trump and his allies in five states.

Another recent Regan Facebook post: “The thing I object most about democrats [sic] is that they incite my base instincts to retaliate in kind.”

When the Associated Press asked about his posts, Regan said: “My message on social media, print media, and in person is consistent: ‘Pray for serenity. Be the eye of the storm. Stay calm. Think clearly. Don’t panic. Stay peaceful while demanding integrity and honesty.’”

On January 5, 2021, Idaho Republican National Convention delegate Doyle Beck, who sits with Brent Regan on the board of a libertarian policy group called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, arrived in Washington where he posted a photo of himself on Facebook with Donald Trump Jr., commenting “TRUMP 2020, Stop the Steal.”

Beck told the Associated Press that he went to a meeting at Trump International Hotel that night [January 5] with [Donald] Trump Jr., Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, Trump adviser Peter Navarro and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and attended the Trump rally the next day but stayed far from the Capitol building. AP confirmed that Trump Jr. and Tuberville attended the gathering. Navarro denied attending, and Giuliani said he couldn’t remember and would need to check his diary.

On February 2, 2021, Doyle Beck reposted on Facebook a statement reading: “Why Would You Have to Impeach A President That Lost? Unless Of Course He Didn’t. Then You’d Have To Silence Him. Oh, Wait….”

More than a month after the insurrection, Beck told AP he believes the election was stolen, and that he might switch to Parler because he thinks his posts are being censored on Facebook. “Parler is honest”, he said. “They don’t try to do this fact check bullcrap.”

Needless to say there’s a lot to unpack here—and Part II of this exposé will take a deeper dive into Beck’s incredibly revealing social media posts pre-insurrection, on Insurrection Day, and post-insurrection—but most notable for the present purposes is that Trump’s inner circle, when it convened on January 5, included a man who calls fact-checking “bullcrap”; who accuses the Democratic Party of a coordinated criminal conspiracy to “silence” a former president through a fraudulent impeachment process (one aimed at covering up, as likewise implied by fellow January 5 meeting attendee Flynn) a stolen election; who supports the insurrectionist Stop the Steal “movement”; who consorts with Idaho extremists who publicly support violent acts of sedition; who for reasons that remain unclear left out of an interview with the nation’s premier wire service at least fifteen of the attendees at Team Trump’s pre-insurrection strategy meeting, including his son; and who (again for reasons that remain unclear) had enough useful intel following that meeting about what was likely to happen at the U.S. Capitol after Trump’s January 6 speech at the Ellipse that he knew to “stay[ ] far from the Capitol” despite his political hero having commanded the opposite conduct. Add to this Doyle Beck’s bizarre claim that he has been personally targeted by Big Tech—a false claim echoed by his party’s insurrectionist leader—and his ambition to reside on a far-right platform so removed from anything godly or decent that it makes ritualistic Satanic sacrifice look like a first Communion, and one has to ask the question: what was said, agreed upon, and planned at Trump International Hotel on January 5, 2021?

Doyle Beck on Social Media

Proof has now conducted a thorough review of Doyle Beck’s social media presence to try to determine whether, like his son Daniel’s, it holds significant clues to what the Becks were doing at Trump International Hotel on January 5.

It does. And indeed, it’s a rabbit-hole of evidence that produces critical information not just relating to the Becks but their political allies and even Donald Trump himself. Part II of this three-part series of articles explores Beck’s social media feed in great detail, but it is worth noting here, first, that Doyle Beck’s treacherous writings on his Facebook feed began immediately after the election. Indeed, a timeline of that feed includes the following (this timeline will continue into Part II of this article series).

Beck’s Facebook Feed: a Pre-Insurrection, January 6, and Post-Insurrection Timeline

November 15, 2020: Beck posts a photo of himself with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and a newly elected Republican representative from Utah, Burgess Owens. To this author’s knowledge, neither Owens nor (far more importantly) Kevin McCarthy has been asked about their association with Doyle Beck, and/or whether they were in contact with him following his arrival in Washington on either January 4 or January 5. Did Doyle Beck discuss the January 5 meeting with either of these men? We don’t know. The Associated Press inexplicably never followed up on the buried lede of its February 26, 2021 article detailing Beck and Regan’s public lies: the fact that at least the former had attended a high-level planning meeting at Trump’s D.C. hotel on the eve of an armed insurrection against the United States government. As a journalism professor at University of New Hampshire and a working journalist for going on 25 years now, I might have followed up on that. AP apparently had other ideas about the significance of top-level strategy meetings 16 hours prior to the gravest political crime in the U.S. since the Civil War.

November 28, 2020: Beck links on Facebook to an American Thinker essay that makes false allegations against Venezuela and the particular foreign nemesis of U.S. senators Rick Scott of Florida (for whom melodramatic opposition to outreach to the Cubans is a prerequisite of holding statewide office as a Republican in Florida) and Ted Cruz of Texas (who has carefully fostered support in the key presidential-election battleground state of Florida as part of erasing his father Rafael Cruz’s politically highly problematic participation in the Communist Cuban Revolution). In the essay in American Thinker, Andrea Widburg makes the sort of false claims about electronic voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems that are now the subject of multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuits against Fox News and members of Team Kraken. Doyle Beck amplifies these lies uncritically. An excerpt from the essay, highlighting references to Venezuela and Cuba:

Apart from the apparent abject falsehood of every word above, it is noteworthy that Beck and his political inspiration, Trump, not only have pivoted to calling all U.S. Democrats not just “socialists” (which they are not, indeed not even a notable fraction) but “Communists”, but to regularly accusing the Democratic Party, without evidence, of colluding with four Communist-associated countries: Russia, China, Venezuela, and Cuba. This rhetoric creates an excellent palette for Trumpism’s faux Revolutionary War rhetoric; the premise is that today’s “patriots” must “fight” (and if necessary, with weapons) against a totalitarian political principle more devilish than any monarchy: Communism. As we will see, Doyle Beck’s social media feed is replete with paint-by-numbers associations of any political progressivism with hardcore militant Communism, as well as association of his far-right anti-Communist (thus anti-Democratic) cause with evangelical Christianity. {Note: God apparently also wants Doyle Beck to hunt deer with helicopters, though the association here to the New Testament is less clear to this author.}

The notion that the Cubans have the intelligence infrastructure to interfere in U.S. elections is of course tired Red Scare McCarthyism. Equally base is the adoption of Russian propaganda denying that the Russians have been—since the beginning of Trump’s political career—interested in aiding that career, rather than its opponents. As established in national bestsellers Proof of Collusion (2019), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), and Proof of Corruption (2020), not only has Donald Trump had exponentially more dealings with the Russians and Chinese than Biden, Hunter Biden, and Eric Swalwell combined—what’s more, clandestine and conspicuously corrupt dealings—he has also played both sides of the domestic tilt in Venezuela between the socialist Maduro and the West-supported Juan Guaidó, making Doyle Beck’s conspiracy theories not just laughable but infuriating.

The reason for Trump and those in his inner circle to establish a War on Communism inside the United States—based on nothing but hyper-sensitive over-reactions to the sometime excesses of fringe actors on the political left (none of whom have ever tried to directly topple U.S. democracy, as have fringe actors on the political right)—is clear enough: such a “hot” war would justify anything, including theft, violence, sedition, treason, even war crimes. As you read this exposé, it is essential this be understood.

{Note: This article is continued in Part II, which will be published here at Proof very shortly.}

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