'Brothers on the path': Notorious extremist sheds light on ties to Mike Johnson

House Speaker Mike Johnson's legal work for conservative Christian causes has become well known since he emerged from the back bench to claim the gavel, but new reporting shows that his work as a lawyer sometimes linked him up to some unsavory clients.

The Louisiana Republican represented clients, often for free, affiliated with some of the most extreme anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ groups in the country, including one who was present for the Jan. 6 insurrection and now leads a militant organization tied to the murder of a Kansas abortion provider, reported The Daily Beast.

"The Daily Beast’s review turned up one former Johnson client who said the government 'should be a terror' to abortion providers and the LGBTQ community, another who opposed the condemnation of domestic terrorist attacks on abortion clinics, and another client who went on to record himself endorsing the hanging of government officials while in the thick of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol," the website reported.

"That former client now leads a militant organization tied to one of the darkest chapters in the anti-abortion movement: the 2009 murder of a Kansas abortion doctor," the report added. "And that plaintiff’s father also turned to Johnson when he wanted to secure a permit in 2003 for an anti-LGBTQ protest — a protest that ended in the attempted stabbing of a gay man."

That client, anti-gay activist and former preacher Grant Storms, organized that event 20 years ago in New Orleans to protest the city's Labor Day Bacchanal, which is known as the "gay Mardi Gras," and that drew a man armed with a steak knife who specifically "wanted to kill a gay man," and the former radical preacher expressed some measure of regret in a new interview.

“When everything was at the height — everything always on the news and everyone always talking about it — well in the midst of our protest, a gay person got stabbed,” Storms said. “Every person who’s a public figure has to be careful with their rhetoric, and as you get older you have to be more and more careful."

Storms made national news again later that year by appearing to endorse the mass murder of gay people at a religious fundamentalist conference in Wisconsin, but Johnson continued to represent him in a case where he sued Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.

“As a practicing attorney for over 20 years, Johnson defended the First Amendment rights of countless clients," said a spokesperson for Johnson. "As the Daily Beast surely knows, an attorney representing a client in a first amendment dispute does not equate to an endorsement of everything that client has ever said or done prior to or after a case."

But Storms, who confessed in 2012 to masturbating in his van by a playground in Metairie, Louisiana, said he felt a kinship with Johnson, who did most of his legal work for free, although he said they lost touch around the time of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“We were brothers on the path,” Storms said. “He always had our back.”