On Ali Alexander

More information about one of the chief suspects in Trump's insurrection.

Ali Alexander is a self-acknowledged Roger Stone and Proud Boy associate who has turned the Stone-coined “Stop the Steal” hash-tag into what Alexander (formerly “Ali Akbar”) frames as a movement. Alexander has been photographed with Donald Trump and is routinely described by major media as a “far-right radical.”

And he’s currently on the run.

Alexander has been on the lam from federal authorities ever since he posted a YouTube video a few days ago confessing that he was the original conceiver and organizer of Trump’s January 6 rally, and that he’d been assisted in this “scheme” (as he calls it) by three of Trump’s top allies in Congress: Arizona representative Paul Gosar (R), Arizona representative Andy Biggs (R), and Alabama representative Mo Brooks (R). The last of these appeared with Trump at his January 6 rally, giving a speech considered the most incendiary—and the most directly associated with the cause of insurrection—of the whole day, the president’s speech included. Meanwhile, Alexander’s other two apparent co-conspirators were up at the Capitol objecting to Arizona’s slate of Biden electors using lies the president himself had been spreading for two months.

According to one of Alexander’s two video about the January 6, its purpose was to sway certain Republicans (the ones called “weak Republicans” by Trump in his January 6 speech) to agree to formally challenge Biden’s electors. Alexander submitted, in one of his videos, that he wanted legislators to “look out the window” of the Capitol and see a “mob” they didn’t want to be “on the other side of”—an implicit, unmissable threat.

More video and audio of Alexander is being released by the hour, including video of him screaming “Victory or death!” at a D.C. rally in Freedom Plaza on the evening of January 5, and video of an interview he conducted with a far-right Christian church on January 10 in which he claims to have “private” information about communications between Donald Trump and Arizona elections officials as Trump desperately sought to overturn the 2020 election there in the days leading up to his January 6 insurrection.

Alexander is now being supported—while he’s evading federal law enforcement—by online donations from Trumpist insurrectionists, with donations at last count amounting to approximately $200,000 in just a matter of days. Meanwhile, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for D.C. have announced that “public corruption” officials are working on the ongoing federal investigation into Trump’s insurrection, which means that FBI interviews of federal officials like Trump allies Gosar, Biggs, Brooks, and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (Brooks’ Alabama colleague in Congress) may be forthcoming.

Most Americans don’t seem to realize that a man who’s been photographed with Trump, and who has confessed to plotting an insurrection with Trump’s Congressional allies, and who was photographed (on January 5) wearing the “blaze orange” hat the Arizona Proud Boys used as their distinctive signifier as they led the charged to breach the Capitol on January 6, is currently on the run. If more people understood that this federal manhunt is ongoing, and if more people were familiar with the “consciousness of guilt” our criminal justice system routinely associates with a flight from either investigative inquiry or prosecutorial justice, it would be clearer to all Americans just how close we are to confirmation that the January 6 insurrection was not only planned at the highest levels of our government but that the planning included Trump himself.