Thread by @SethAbramson

(🆚) UPDATE: I've now added a significant update (including new photographs) to the BREAKING NEWS from last night about Donald Trump secretly having contact with an insurrectionist leader—Alex Jones—on January 6. I hope you'll subscribe and RT this widely. sethabramson.substack.com/p/breaking-new…

1/ I want to clarify something here about Alex Jones, as a lot of his followers are coming to this feed to troll because (a) they've never read this feed before and (b) they've never read PROOF, so they don't understand how I am using the *accurate* term "insurrectionist leader".

2/ I first wrote on this feed *5 months ago* that the video evidence we have from January 6 shows Jones urging people *not* to go into the Capitol or commit acts of violence. Because it's Jones, he slips up once or twice and commends them improperly, but he's *not* urging crimes.

3/ In fact, I wrote long ago that Jones could be a good "flip" for the FBI because he *didn't* lead the attack on the Capitol—he arrived well after it had begun—and did *not* try to stoke violence *on January 6*. (I've watched so much Jones video from January 6, you'd be amazed.)

4/ PROOF, and my feed, uses the term "insurrectionist leader" in the accurate and legal sense—not the false one Jones supporters want, which would mean only applying that term to the foot soldiers (e.g., the Arizona Proud Boys) who *led the attack itself* on January 6.

Sorry—no.

5/ Jones is an "insurrectionist leader" because he plotted, with Alexander, Stone, Coudrey, Finchem, and many others—including paramilitary leaders/lieutenants and numerous agents from the Trump campaign and White House—a march on the Capitol which, *as conceived*, was illegal.

6/ The *stated* purpose of the march was to get a huge, federal permit-busting volume of angry people to criminally trespass on federal grounds and thereby illegally frustrate federal officials in the operation of their constitutional duties. That *illegal* purpose Jones incited.

7/ Jones incited it with his absolutely batshit insane, violence-glorifying speech at Freedom Plaza a mere 18 hours before the Capitol was breached, a speech he now hopes people forget because it was the absolute craziest, nearly-speaking-in-tongues thing anyone had ever seen.

8/ And he incited it with *weeks* of statements on his InfoWars show, his funding efforts, his interviews with fellow insurrectionists like Alexander and Stone, his encouragement of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, his statements in Georgia, his contact with the WH, and more.

9/ I've repeatedly said—in fact wrote a massive article about it at PROOF that went viral—that Team Trump's plan on January didn't *require* violence. The team was amorally indifferent to the prospect of violence. What they needed was for the Capitol to be *stormed and occupied*.

10/ Jones's biggest lie—which of course his followers never call him on, as so much of what he says is a lie—is that Trump "had the votes" for a ten-day delay in the certification on January 6, and therefore there was "no point" in doing anything that would delay the proceedings.

11/ And Jones *knows* he's lying, because he knows that Trump *never had anything close to the votes to stop the proceedings and was never going to have the votes to stop the proceedings*. So they had to be stopped via a storming and occupying of the Capitol. That *was* the plan.

12/ Jones and Alexander made clear in statements before *and* after January 6 that they believed it would be possible to instill fear and confusion and a need for delay in members of Congress if they could get a sufficient number of people *illegally* onto secure federal grounds.

13/ The *purpose* of the delay was to overturn what Trump's own administration called the "most secure election in U.S. history." So yes, Jones and his team incited federal crimes, did so deliberately, did so across a period of weeks, and did so to topple a democratic government.

14/ The one thing I agree with Jonesists on is this: there are many jerks on Twitter who don't check their facts and accuse people—including me—of things that never happened. It is wrong to accuse Jones of fomenting violence *on January 6* because he's on video trying to stop it.

15/ But any troll who thinks they're going to come on this feed and find a researcher who's *ill-prepared* to answer their attacks is confused. I've researched the January 6 insurrection to within an inch of its life, and when I call someone an "insurrectionist leader" I mean it.

END/ So if you're here because you think this is some "muh insurrection" feed, grow the hell up. I'm an attorney and have worked in the federal criminal justice system as an investigator. I'm an academic and Trump historian and PROOF is careful, fully sourced, *serious* research.

NOTE/ Amazing citizen journalists are doing great work on the fight at the Capitol. That isn't PROOF's focus. PROOF looks at what kingpins were doing offsite on 1/6 and before. So if I use a term like "insurrectionist leader," it's likely to not be referring to the attack itself.

NOTE2/ My pinned tweet *must* be considered pretty significant by the insurrectionists, as it's already become the most lied-about article ever published at PROOF. Hundreds of people who didn't read the article are claiming it says things—and is about things—it doesn't and isn't.