‘Stop the Steal’ organizers feared Trump’s paramilitary groups: Bannon associate
On MSNBC Monday, anchor Ari Melber interviewed Dustin Stockton, an associate of Trump ally Steve Bannon, who claimed that many organizers of the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally for Trump were afraid of, and tried to distance themselves from, the extremist paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers gathering to storm the Capitol.
While many of the attendees of that rally did ultimately join the attack on the Capitol, Stockton, who worked on Bannon's fraudulent "We Build The Wall" project, insists the groups didn't coordinate — and took a swipe at Trump for encouraging the extremists.
"The Select Committee has information about contacts between far-right operatives and rally organizers," said Melber. "You were on the inside. You've talked to the committee about the split. Did you witness in any way other organizers working directly with those militia groups or having a plan to turn a rally into an invasion at the Capitol."
"We definitely saw — there was a definitive split between the group that put together the ellipse, the rally at the Ellipse in the morning, and the group who was planning a rally at the Capitol," said Stockton. "In fact, the group that was putting on the rally at the Ellipse made several efforts to stop any other rallies from happening, specifically in part because the people who were organizing it were using vastly different rhetoric than we were using, far more revolutionary and violent."
"Let me ask you ... when you talk about that rhetoric, did you hear it before the 6th as storming the Capitol, was it that precise, those folks?" Melber asked.
"It wasn't — it's hard to go back and look now and say what was rhetorical and what wasn't," Stockton replied. "What we remember, though, is that tensions were extremely high, and we had an obligation to tamp those down to be able to present ourselves as a reasonable political movement. And there were people who were not following that, and they were the ones pushing people to go to the Capitol, and we were pushing our people not to participate in that in any way, and of course when Trump sent people to the Capitol, it felt like an affront to us that he had kind taken that more radical side and made no sense to us."
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