It has been speculated for months that the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection had the fingerprints of certain Congress members all over it. In a bombshell report just published in Rolling Stone magazine, sources revealed that the speculation was correct.

Investigative reporter Hunter Walker uncovered how lawmakers plotted and planned to protest the certification of then President-elect Joseph Biden. Three sources have come to the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee to present testimony regarding the weeks leading up to an angry mob of Donald Trump supporters laying siege to Capitol Hill.

The mob perpetuated three hours of what can only rightly be characterized as domestic terrorism, against those fearfully hiding within the Capitol, and those charged with the duty to protect them: the U.S. Capitol police.

On that fateful day in U.S. history, five deaths were reported, and 100 U.S. Capitol police officers were injured. In the aftermath of the insurrection, four Capitol police officers have committed suicide.

The sources named seven members of Congress who allegedly held “dozens” of meetings with the planners and “organizers” of the “Save America March” and the “Stop The Steal” movement.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Rep. Madison Cawthorn (RNC), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green (R-GA) were named as collaborators in the plan to stop the succession of the presidency from Trump to Biden.

TRUMP IN CROSSHAIRS White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was also named. At a meeting with Meadows, organizers made him aware that the protest could become “violent.” Sources disclosed that Meadows “played a significant role” regarding the planning of the rally. Meadows was “a regular figure in these really tiny groups of national organizers” and “was 100 percent made aware of what was going on,” one source told Rolling Stone.

This averment could directly place former president Donald Trump in the crosshairs of the Jan. 6 commission and a future subpoena.

The sources revealed that there were “dozens” of “briefings” that occurred between the organizers and planners of the Save America March and congressional members.

Reps. Biggs, Brooks, and Gosar are familiar names attached to the insurrection. Stop The Steal founder Ali Alexander claimed in a since deleted video on Periscope that “we four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting” with the intentions to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

Eight days after the insurrection when Biggs and Brooks were under scrutiny for their participation in the protest turned riot, a spokesman from Biggs’ office issued a statement saying, “Congressman Biggs is not aware of hearing of or meeting Mr. Alexander at any point – let alone working with him to organize some part of a planned protest.”

PARDON ME

Brooks also denied claims of playing a role in the protest turned riot by admitting that the White House “invited” him to speak at the rally, but at the time stated he had “no recollection of ever communicating in any way” with the organizers of Save America or the Stop The Steal.

One of the most interesting new details that the sources revealed to Rolling Stone is that among the many discussions, there was talk of then-President Trump issuing “blanket pardons” to the participants in the plot to overturn an election, and thereby democracy itself.

Gosar reportedly told organizers that “he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.” Organizers were told by Gosar that a “blanket pardon” was a “done deal.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), denied having meetings with the orchestrators of the insurrection by issuing a statement in response to Rolling Stone that while she “had nothing to do with the planning of any protest … no one cares about Jan. 6 when gas prices are skyrocketing, grocery store shelves are empty, unemployment is skyrocketing, businesses are going bankrupt, our border is being invaded, children are forced to wear masks, vaccine mandates are getting workers fired, and 13 members of our military are murdered by the Taliban and Americans are left stranded in Afghanistan.”

What Greene and others in the GOP would like Americans and Democrat lawmakers in Congress to do is to sweep the deadly insurrection and its investigation under the rug and forget about it.

The pattern resonates time and time again in American history.

WILMINGTON MASSACRE Another deadly American insurrection to overturn the government occurred in 1898 in Wilmington, N.C. The Wilmington Insurrection and Massacre was the first “coup d’etat” that managed to overthrow elected officials and install political proxies.

Ironically, two sons of North Carolina, Rep. Madison Cawthorn and former White House Chief Meadows, were a part of the failed insurrection in 2021. It would almost be fitting that a representative of North Carolina would be found beneath the pile of riot mongers plotting with politicians to overthrow an elected official and government 100-plus years later.

Cawthorn told a group of Macon County Republicans in late 2020, while autographing and holding a gun, that guns were not for hunting, but for fighting tyranny, remarking that “when tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes your duty.”

Luke Ball, spokesman for Cawthorn, said in a statement on Monday: “These anonymous accusations are complete garbage. Neither the congressman nor his staff had advance knowledge of what transpired at the Capitol on January 6th or participated in any alleged ‘planning process.’”

In 1898, White supremacists were angered by the progress of former African American slaves and their progeny, upset that Reconstruction had seated the first African Americans in Congress, Hiram Rhodes Revels in 1870, then George Henry White in 1897. The progression of African Americans in politics became a symbol of everything that the South had fought against during the Civil War.

Wilmington was a majority African American town with an enterprising and escalating African American middle class, who shared political stature with their White counterparts.

SAME PROPAGANDA

Angered by the results of the election which saw more African Americans elected to political office, nine White supremacists – Hugh MacRae, J. Allan Taylor, Hardy L. Fennell, W.A. Johnson, William Gilchrist, L.B. Sasser, P.B. Manning, E.S. Lathrop, Walter L. Parsley – alongside political activist Alfred Moore Waddell and Democratic State Party Chairman Furnifold Simmons, conspired to lead a “protest” of almost 1,000 White citizens and militia.

It became a massacre that slaughtered an estimated 600 African Americans, setting the African American community on fire and forcing the reminder into the woods and subsequently scattered many to railroads bound North.

Furnifold Simmons opined that “North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’S STATE and WHITE MEN will rule it, and they will crush the party of Negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever dare to attempt to establish Negro rule here.”

Immediately following the massacre, on Nov. 10, 1898, the mayor, police chief, city council, and aldermen resigned their positions at gunpoint. Laws were drafted that stripped African Americans of their legal right to vote and relegated them back to a subservient existence.

It should come as no surprise that many Americans, including many residents of North Carolina, do not know the bloody history of what happened in Wilmington. This is because the first successful American insurrection of 1898 was unceremoniously “forgotten” in the annals of history. Forgotten on purpose. Or forgotten with a purpose.

The very same propaganda or misinformation that fueled the murderous insurrection of 1898 ignited its unsuccessful successor.

The same attitude that Greene expressed Monday – when she nonchalantly shrugged off the attempt to disrupt democracy with the statement “no one cares about Jan. 6” – prevails throughout the GOP.

House Democrats, however, are hoping to change the course of history by holding political officials and citizens alike accountable for their actions.