This is the second part of a two-part Raw Story series exploring pro-Trump organizer Cindy Chafian’s actions before, during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Read Part 1 here.
Cindy Chafian, who handled permits for two pro-Trump warm-up rallies in Washington, D.C., and then hosted her own rally on the eve of President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” speech at the Ellipse, stood atop the U.S. Capitol’s inaugural grandstand the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.
Standing beside her, Mariposa Castro, a former yoga and tea shop owner from California, excitedly addressed viewers on her Facebook livestream as rioters busted out a window to a Senate conference room.
“We’re breaking in,” she said. “We are breaking in. We’re doing this. We’re breaking in, right?”
Castro swiveled her phone to Cindy Chafian, who nodded emphatically.
“Right, we’re… this is our Capitol,” Chafian replied, appearing to endorse the breach. “We the people. We’re not taking it anymore. We’re taking our house back.”
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Chafian has claimed that she doesn’t remember saying those words, doesn’t know who Castro is, and doesn’t know anything about the video.
But a Raw Story investigation indicates that Chafian is linked to at least three people who have faced charges related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including Castro. A fourth defendant, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer — who, like Chafian, used provocative rhetoric in the runup to Jan. 6 and went on restricted Capitol grounds — recently received a 60-day prison sentence.
Chafian, however, remains a free woman. No indictments, no charges, no imminent legal peril.
The obvious question: why?
The answer is one that’s equally uncomfortable and elusive.
‘I’m not complying’
Nine months after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the January 6th House select committee issued a subpoena to Chafian, ordering her to appear for deposition and produce documents related to the committee’s investigation.
The subpoena noted that Chafian submitted the original permit application for the Jan. 6 rally on behalf of an organization called Women for America First on the same day that President Trump tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.”
The subpoena also noted that Chafian organized and sponsored the Rally to Revival at Freedom Plaza on the eve of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse.
Chafian failed to appear for her deposition in October 2021. Subsequently, Chafian received a letter from the committee warning her that as a consequence of noncompliance with the subpoena, she could be held in contempt of Congress.
Chafian’s response? Open defiance.
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“I’m not complying,” she announced during a stop on the ReAwaken America Tour in Dallas in December 2021. “Pretty simply, there was no insurrection…. If there was, Trump would be in the White House. I’m just saying.”
Taking the stage during the event — a political rally crossed with a religious revival and conspiracy theory expo that provided a refuge for MAGA supporters during the lull between Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2024 campaign launch — Chafian seemed to relish the notoriety that the subpoena brought to her.
Chafian was one of at least five people who ignored subpoenas from the committee. Others include former White House strategist Steve Bannon, former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House adviser Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino, Trump’s former social media coordinator.
Only weeks before Chafian’s appearance in Dallas, Bannon — who predicted on his podcast on the eve of the insurrection that “all hell is going to break loose” on Jan. 6 — had been indicted for contempt of Congress.
Chafian told the audience in Dallas that congressional investigators had visited her home and warned her that she could face the same fate. She said her response was a shrug.
“Let the chips fall where they may because, look, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Chafian said. “I planned an event that let people come. We, as Americans, have the right to voice our opinions. We have the right to address our government with our grievances. And that is what happened on January 5th. And that is what happened on January 6th.”
Cindy Chafian drives a golf cart through a crowd in the Pennsylvania Avenue parking lot on the way to the Capitol. YouTube screengrab courtesy MrYogiEntertainment
The committee voted to refer Bannon, Meadows, Navarro and Scavino for contempt charges.
But not Chafian.
“I would imagine it’s because in the brief conversations I had with investigators, and the little information I gave them, they figured out that I had nothing to do with any of it,” she told Raw Story.
The Department of Justice ultimately declined to bring charges for contempt of Congress against Meadows and Scavino. But Bannon and Navarro have both been found guilty of contempt on two counts — failure to appear for testimony and failure to provide records — by D.C. juries. In October 2022, Bannon was sentenced to four months in jail and ordered to pay a $6,500 fine, but his sentence has been stayed while it’s under appeal. Navarro faces up to one year in jail and is scheduled to be sentenced in January, although he plans to appeal.
Few of the organizers — those who produced and hyped the D.C. rallies, worked out logistics and lined up speakers — have been prosecuted. One exception is Shroyer, the InfoWars host, who accompanied Alex Jones and pro-Trump provocateur Ali Alexander as they made their way around the Capitol and eventually wound up ascending the steps on the east side.
Like Chafian, Shroyer did not enter the building.Nevertheless, a judge sentenced Shroyer to 60 days in prison earlier this month. Shroyer has asked the court to release him pending appeal, in a motion filed with the court on Tuesday through his lawyer, he said he will argue “that reliance on protected speech as relevant offense conduct in the context of a political rally turned riot sets a dangerous and chilling constitutional precedent.”
Prosecutors noted in Shroyer’s sentencing memorandum that before leading the crowd to the Capitol, Shroyer exhorted them with a bullhorn: “The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: They’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on January 6, we declare death to tyrants. Death to tyrants!” While at the Capitol, Shroyer led a chant of “1776.”
In his motion for release pending appeal, Shroyer through his lawyer cited the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio ruling, in which the Supreme Court ruled that “the mere abstract teaching… of the moral propriety or even necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and telling it to take action.”
What is most unique about Shroyer among the Jan. 6 organizers, including Chafian, is that he had previously been arrested for disrupting a House Judiciary Committee meeting at the Longworth House Office Building in December 2019. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement in February 2020, Shroyer agreed to not engage in any disorderly conduct on the grounds of the Capitol.
Richard Painter, a former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told Raw Story that Chafian’s conduct at the Capitol, where she appears to have expressed support for the breach, likely falls in a gray zone that poses prosecutors with a tricky decision.
Painter likened the conduct of people like Chafian to left-wing protesters who chanted, “Burn, baby, burn,” while a police precinct burned in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020 — somewhere between the peaceful protesters and those who set fire to the building.
Prosecutors would likely ask whether someone like Chafian was “part of a plan to obstruct a proceeding to count the electoral votes” and whether she was “engaging in conduct intended to stop the proceeding,” Painter said.
“They don’t want to push their luck with a case that’s borderline,” he said. “If they get acquittals on these — and they’ve got a good track record now — if they start striking out, that gives Donald Trump a lot of ammunition.”
From Cindy Chafian's vantage point, the government said she "would have seen and heard some of the most extreme violence of the hours-long battle between the rioters and law enforcement officers who were defending the Capitol building." Facebook livestream by Mariposa Castro, courtesy U.S. Department of Justice
In Shroyer’s case, prosecutors homed in on a statement that he made at the Jan. 5 Freedom Plaza rally that Chafian organized.
“Americans are ready to fight,” he said. “We’re not exactly sure what that’s going to look like perhaps in a couple weeks if we can’t stop this certification of the fraudulent election… we are the new revolution! We are going to restore and we are going to save the republic!”
When Chafian took the stage at her rally, she told the crowd: “Those people on that [Capitol] hill up there are going to make a decision tomorrow, and we are going to hold every single one of them accountable. We are not going back to the way it was.
“Let me just tell you: The Deep State ruled by communists and people who want to destroy this country have taken advantage of us for far too long,” she continued. “And I don’t know about you, but I’m pissed. Are y’all pissed? Are you ready to fight back? They have smacked a lion on its ass, and that lion is not backing down, are we?”
Chafian told Raw Story that government officials “are willing to arbitrarily target anyone who doesn’t abide by their agenda,” adding that “it would be naive of me to not be concerned about being a target of unjust prosecution.”
Since Jan. 6, 2021, Chafian’s political outlook appears to have significantly darkened.
Later in 2021, she organized a U.S. tour for Artur Pawlowski, a Canadian pastor who was arrested for flouting COVID-19 restrictions. Beyond championing Pawlowski’s cause, Chafian told Raw Story, she is “no longer engaged nor interested in political organizing,” adding that she is focusing “more on helping people achieve their best lives through true health and wellness.”
Chafian told Raw Story that she is “not a sycophant for any political figure,” including Trump, but she echoed the ominous themes of his 2024 campaign — Deep State corruption, weaponized justice and dark forces arrayed to destroy the country.
“I no longer have faith in our system of elections nor the belief that government cares about any citizen,” she told Raw Story in an email. “The people are nothing more than pawns in a system rigged against them.”
‘They looked like they’d gone through hell’
Jason Funes, a former Trump campaign staffer and former Department of Interior employee who helped Chafian produce the Jan. 5 rally at Freedom Plaza, had gone back to his room at the Sofitel hotel and watched events at the Capitol on Jan. 6 unfold on TV.
“I couldn’t believe what I was watching on TV,” Funes would later tell the January 6th House select committee. “It just seemed so surreal. Like, another Twilight Zone moment.”
He went over to the tony Willard Hotel, near the White House, and picked up one of the golf carts under Cindy Chafian’s control. When he arrived at the Capitol, he encountered Cindy and Scott Chafian as they were leaving.
“They looked like they had gone through hell,” Funes told the committee. “They looked like s---. I don’t know what the f--- was going on in their heads, but, like, it was f---ing weird.”
Cindy Chafian told Raw Story she was shocked that police had deployed teargas on the crowd.
“It made me sad and frustrated that the situation had devolved into such a chaotic mess,” she told Raw Story. “It was so easily preventable.”
Chafian added: “It’s the right of every free person to protest peacefully. That is what I endorse. Peaceful protest when a government disregards its own laws.”
Funes said he told the Chafians he was going to the Capitol, and they told him: “Well, just be careful, be safe.”
Funes — who to this day pushes a discredited theory that “antifa” instigators combined with deliberate indifference by law enforcement was responsible for the insurrection — narrated a video that was tweeted out by Maryam Henein, a filmmaker/journalist known for pushing COVID-19 disinformation.
With the Capitol behind him, Funes declared on Jan. 6: “We are in the middle of a militant leftist Deep State globalist operation, trying to make Trump supporters look like idiots and that we’re violent agitators, when truth in fact there are people dressed up in MAGA hats and other gear that are pretending to be MAGA supporters, and they’re instigating.”
Not everyone on Team MAGA agreed.
“I’m completely confused,” Brandon Straka, a social media influencer who went inside the Capitol, tweeted. “For 6-8 weeks everybody on the right has been saying ‘1776!’ & that if congress moves forward it will mean revolution! So congress moves forward. Patriots storm the Capitol- now everybody is virtue signaling their embarrassment that this happened."
Straka, who launched the #WalkAway campaign in the summer of 2020, had been a speaker at the Jan. 5 Rally to Revival at Freedom Plaza that Chafian organized.
“Also- be embarrassed & hide if you need to- but I was there,” Straka continued. “It was not Antifa at the Capitol. It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not.”
More than two years after the insurrection, Trump was indicted in federal court, accused among other alleged offenses, of conspiring to “to corruptly obstruct and impede an official proceeding, that is, the certification of the electoral vote” on Jan. 6, 2021.
Although the former president is not specifically charged with inciting violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the federal indictment alleges that he “directed” his supporters “to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure” on Vice President Mike Pence to fraudulently reject the Biden electoral votes.
The indictment also accuses Trump and unnamed co-conspirators of exploiting the attack on the Capitol “by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.”
Around 7 p.m. on Jan. 6, after police had flushed rioters out of the Capitol building and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had declared a curfew, Cindy Chafian read a tweet reporting that the Senate would soon reconvene to complete the Electoral College count.
She, like Straka, appeared to be in no mood to distance herself from the day’s events.
“Guess it [is] time to go back,” she tweeted in reply.
Capitol rioters
Capitol rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Saul Loeb for AFP)