Select Committee Makes Major Strides Understanding Proud Boys and Oath Keepers Organized Efforts on January 6th

When Peter Navarro explained the January 6th plan that he and Steven Bannon called “the Green Bay Sweep,” a convoluted means to keep Mike Pence from counting the votes needed to put Joe Biden in the White House, to Ari Melber of MSNBC, Navarro said that it would have worked absent the hordes taking over the Capital. Navarro said that the plan required a peaceful demonstration to intimidate Mike Pence. Even as Navarro described it to Melber, it was laughably obvious that the plan could only benefit from a hold or interruption in the January 6th Congressional proceedings. Now, the House Select Committee is set to prove that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers coordinated their work to intentionally breach the Capitol as part of a plan to interrupt those proceedings and link that plan as a cog in a larger conspiracy.

According to the Guardian, the Select Committee’s “Purple Team” (Responsible for investigating the insurrectionists at the highest level) has a working theory:

The panel has amassed deep evidence about the connections between the connections between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys in recent weeks after it obtained hours of non-public footage of the leaders of the militia groups in Washington ahead of the Capitol attack, the sources said…

Most Americans who have paid attention to developments in the investigation know of the ties between Roger Stone and Steve Bannon with the two militant groups. Now, the Select Committee seems to have the evidence it believes it needs to prove that these groups were not at the top of the pyramid or leaders in the Capitol Attack but merely leading the troops on the ground.

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The information, which could play a large role in establishing for the select committee whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy as part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is being viewed internally as a significant breakthrough, the sources added.

Most crucially for the panel, it could form part of the evidence to connect the militia groups that stormed the Capitol on 6 January to the organizers of the Save America rally that immediately preceded the attack – who in turn are slowly being linked to the Trump White House.

If one just looks at it as a matter of common sense, the very fact that there was a “war room” in the Willard Hotel, from which Navarro, Flynn, Bannon, and  Stone (who left town as it got bad) were to watch things play out on January 6th, burner phones, and plenty of reports of Stone, Flynn, Alex Jones, and Bannon seen in and among top members of both groups on the night of January 5th, it would be difficult to envision a scenario where the “Willard Team” was not coordinating with the leaders of the insurrection. As of yet, there is no public evidence of such coordination.

The Guardian says that the Select Committee now seems to have the same degree of confidence as the Justice Department concerning evidence of a seditious conspiracy among the two groups. Unlike DOJ, however, the Select Committee has two other working groups (Gold, Red) that would tie the insurrectionists to the rally planners and the White House. In a very telling paragraph, the Guardian says that the Select Committee is organized into three teams; one to cover the insurrectionists, the rally planners, and the White House and the overlap among the three.

The organization alone seems indicative of the direction the investigation has taken.

Jason Miciak

@JasonMiciak believes a day without learning is a day not lived. He is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is a Canadian-born dual citizen who spent his teen and college years in the Pacific Northwest and has since lived in seven states. He now enjoys life as a single dad of a young girl, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast. He loves crafting his flower pots, cooking, and currently studies philosophy of science, religion, and non-math principles behind quantum mechanics and cosmology. Please feel free to contact with any concerns.