“Here, this is a present from Maryland Proud Boys to you,” the young man told Cox, while presenting him with a small, black comb and shaking his hand, according to a report in the Washington Post. The Telegram channel for the Maryland Proud Boys has promoted accelerationist and white nationalist content.
Raw Story has confirmed the identity of the Proud Boy at Cox’s election watch party as Henry Vladimir Lehman, a Maryland man with an extensive history of involvement in far-right extremism. Lehman’s extremist activity dates back to June 2017, when he attended an alt-right rally headlined by white supremacist Richard Spencer and extended through his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.
Video of Cox’s election watch party shows Lehman standing next to Shekinah Hollingsworth, a biracial woman who is a self-described “Christian nationalist” and “Groyper” who supports white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The throng of supporters also included Ivan Raiklin, a former Army lieutenant colonel who promoted a strategy to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to set aside electoral votes from states narrowly won by Joe Biden in the runup to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Cox, who is trailing his Democratic opponent Wes Moore in a Post-UMD poll by 32 percentage points, has sought to distance himself from the insurrection and the extremist elements of his party, after winning his primary with the backing of Donald Trump. The Post reported that Cox deleted his account on Gab and removed more than 1,000 posts from the fringe social media platform, which has gathering place for white supremacists and other extremists.
Cox attended the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally at the Ellipse with seven of his children, but has said he left before the march to the Capitol, according to the Post. The newspaper reported that Cox tweeted, “Mike Pence is a traitor,” but later apologized for “my poor choice of words.” Also, according to the Post, Cox tweeted that he was co-hosting two buses from Frederick County to DC for the Jan. 6 rally, but later said he was just promoting someone else’s effort.
Raiklin has said he met Cox two days after the 2020 election in Philadelphia, where he was observing the Trump campaign’s legal strategy.
“That’s where I met Dan Cox; he was working it,” Raiklin said in an interview with the “RedPill78” podcast in August. “He’s now the candidate for governor in Maryland, America First guy.”
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Hollingsworth has said on Gab that “January 6 was the most epic day in modern history, anyone who denies this is a fed.” In another post, she wrote that she “was present on Jan. 6, and interrogated by the FBI.”
Hollingsworth, who ran unsuccessfully for Maryland House of Delegates, posted a photo of Cox attending her campaign fundraiser in November 2021.
Cox could not be reached for comment for this story, but in a comment to the Post he distanced himself from the Proud Boy at his election event whom Raw Story has identified as Henry Lehman.
“I had never seen him before, and I have not seen him since,” Cox told the Post. “I have no affiliation with anyone involved in violence on January 6th, period.”
In video reviewed by Raw Story, Lehman can be seen on Jan. 6 dressed in camouflage, a helmet and skull mask, while marching across the Capitol lawn with at least 10 other young men, some of whom are also wearing skull masks and military-style attire. A video posted on Parler shows him waving rioters up the Capitol steps underneath scaffolding set up for the inauguration. Later, as the mob massed against the barricades opposite a line of riot police, Lehman can be seen in video published by Getty Images cupping his hands and urging rioters: “Do not stand down.”
While participating in the attack on the Capitol, Lehman wore patches representing the Ukrainian ultranationalist paramilitary Right Sector, the Confederacy and the sonnenrad, an Indo-European symbol embraced by white supremacists. Similarly, while greeting Cox at his election watch party, Lehman wore a Ukrainian flag lapel pin and a Confederate flag belt buckle.
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Lehman’s mother is a native of Kazakhstan who grew up speaking Russian and Ukrainian, according to a 2007 story in the Frederick News-Post. According to the story, Lehman’s parents met while his mother was employed as a translator at a Bechtel construction site near the Caspian Sea, where his father was worked as a welding supervisor. The article gives Henry Vladimir Lehman’s age as 6 at the time, indicating that he is about 21 years old today. Henry has a brother who is four years younger.
About a month after the Frederick News-Post article about the family, a neighbor accused Henry Lehman Sr. of beating her dog with a stick or a bat, according to a federal lawsuit the couple filed against the city. The police arrested Henry Lehman Sr. while his wife was attending classes at Frederick Community College, leaving the two boys in the custody of the police. Henry Lehman Sr. was ultimately found not guilty by a district court judge, and the civil suit against the city was dismissed.
As a teenager, Henry Vladimir Lehman became an ardent supporter of Donald Trump.
Photos and video of a “Freedom of Speech” rally held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC in June 2017 show Lehman wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and T-shirt bearing Trump’s image. The rally served as a dress rehearsal of sorts for the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., featuring several of the same alt-right and white supremacist personalities, including Richard Spencer, Jason Kessler and Christopher Cantwell, along with members of Vanguard America and Traditionalist Worker Party.
In one video recorded during the rally, Lehman can be heard telling live-streamer Tim Gionet aka Baked Alaska: “Good job, man.”
“I am out here because I love my fellow Trump kids,” Lehman added.
Gionet is currently awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to a charges of knowingly entering or remaining in the Capitol building, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
Lehman can also be seen at the rally standing behind Gionet and applauding a speech by Spencer, and speaking directly with James Allsup, a member of the now-defunct white supremacist group Identity Evropa, as Spencer urged people to attend the upcoming Unite the Right rally.
A year after the Jan. 6 attack, in January 2022, Lehman showed up on the sidelines of a march by the white supremacist group Patriot Front that glommed onto the March for Life. Led by Thomas Rousseau, Patriot Front emerged from a schism in Vanguard America, after James Fields rallied with the group and then drove his car into a crowd of antiracist marchers at Unite the Right.
Wearing a helmet adorned with stickers promoting the Confederate flag and American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and a backpack with Ukrainian and Confederate patches, and heckled counter-protesters as the Patriot Front members marched past.
Two days later, Lehman joined a group of Proud Boys from the Maryland/DC chapter for a rally against vaccine mandates at the Lincoln Memorial. Shekinah Hollingsworth, the biracial Groyper who would later celebrate Dan Cox’s primary election victory with Lehman, also attended the rally.
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