Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
With the White House in the background, people arrive for the rally of Trump supporters that preceded the riot at the Capitol, January 6, 2021, in Washington.
President Trump topped the list of those held accountable for the January 6th Capitol Riot. Within days, the House impeached him for a second time. But Trump wasn’t the only one calling for people to make a final effort to “stop the steal” on January 6, 2021.
Weeks after the election unrest, responsibility for the insurrection continues to spread, not only to lawmakers in Washington but also state-level politicians, influence groups, and their donors in corporate America.
In addition to Team Trump’s invitation to march on the Capitol, state-level politicians, the political arms of groups like Turning Point USA and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), and right-wing organizations like Women for America First and the Black Conservatives Fund actively encouraged people to come to Washington, and contributed to the flow of misinformation about a stolen election.
Several right-wing groups collaborated to apply for the permit to protest on January 6, and to promote the misinformation spread by sympathetic far-right elected officials across the country, according to a new report from watchdog group Accountable.US.
Corporate donors played a major role as well. The heir to the Publix supermarket chain, Julie Jenkins Fancelli, contributed $300,000 to the event, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump campaign fundraiser Caroline Wren organized the event at Fancelli’s request.
The head of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, previously boasted that they provided 80 buses to bring people to the demonstration, in a tweet that has since been deleted. And Documented first reported that RAGA’s nonprofit arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls ahead of the insurrection to “patriots,” asking them to “join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections.” The robocall also gave out the meeting point address and time.
According to a Trump administration appointee, the executive director of RAGA, Adam Piper, was among those who met with Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and top Trump officials the night before the “Stop the Steal” rally. Piper was forced to quit over the organization’s association with the riot.
“Unfortunately, it’s a very large list of factors that contributed to this,” says Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. “Trump is the linchpin and the spark on timber, but there is much blame to go around and there are many players that had a role.”
GOP members in Congress are enduring the first blows of responsibility after Trump, as corporations pledge to either “evaluate” their contributions to members who voted against the Electoral College certification, or outright end contributions to them. Comcast, Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, and many banks have made similar pledges.
Some lobbyists and other 501(c) organizations are also trying to perform a similar vanishing act, disappearing their associations with the Republican Party’s far-right flank. Republican members seen as too hot to handle include Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
These pledges join a long-running list of organizations aiming to distance themselves from Trump’s political brand, dating back to when Macy’s dropped his and his daughter’s clothing lines during his 2016 campaign, to earlier this month when Deutsche Bank said it would not be doing further business with the former president and his enterprises.
But these pledges are only a self-imposed and self-regulated response toward those who were involved in the Capitol Riot, and the impacts are limited in scope.
“This is a fairly narrowly tailored reaction,” Gilbert says. “It’s important because it shows some understanding of what it means to fund politicians who take inappropriate actions and act against America. So it’s a right move, but it’s a first move.”
Many of the pledges are also limited to a company’s PAC contributions, Gilbert explains. Those corporate PAC donations are capped at $5,000 per candidate. But most corporate support in elections comes from much larger dark-money spending, both from corporations and from individual corporate executives. Importantly, those contributions don’t have the same requirements for transparency to the public; they can be much more difficult to track.
For example, RAGA is an organization dedicated to electing Republican attorney general candidates to what is in most states the highest-ranking law enforcement office. Their “patriots” robocall was officially sent out by RAGA’s nonprofit organization arm, a 501(c)(4) group that does not have to reveal its donors.
Meanwhile, the main organization does report its contributors quarterly to the Federal Election Commission. In 2020, RAGA’s biggest donors were the Judicial Crisis Network, which helped with the Supreme Court nominations of Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh; the Institute for Legal Reform, an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Karen Wright and Thomas Rastin, both of gas compressor manufacturer Ariel Corporation; and Koch Industries, Inc.
Responsibility continues to spread, not only to lawmakers in Washington but also state-level politicians, influence groups, and their donors in corporate America.
Of that group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is now working to rebrand itself as a moderate pro-business lobbying operation in Washington, despite years of working almost exclusively with Republicans. The Chamber’s connection to the GOP was so cemented that Politico reported anger from its corporate donors last summer when it endorsed some Democratic House members.
“I think the Chamber of Commerce is absolutely in the midst of attempting a personality makeover and hoping people forget how narrowly aligned they’ve been with only Republicans for many years, and how they sort of misuse their front as small business to channel the biggest corporations’ money into causes they don’t want to be associated with,” Gilbert says. “They need to put their money where their mouth is and change their political spending practices and own up to how they’ve been influencing policy for years.”
The array of organizations involved with promoting and funding the Capitol Riot bears watching.
“We think that we need to bring attention to everyone involved in the rally—not just Trump at the top,” says Jeremy Funk of Accountable.US. “We think there should be a congressional investigation that brings all these facts to the public light. There’s no overstating how serious this assault was. People died because of lies that were amplified by these right-wing groups and the politicians that radicalized these Americans.”
