Ocasio-Cortez Calls to Expel Members Who Aided Jan. 6 Plot After Fiery Report

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has called for members of Congress who aided far-right organizers behind the January 6 Capitol attack in their plot to be expelled.

Ocaiso-Cortez’s call was prompted by a report by Rolling Stone which found that officials such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) allegedly aided attackers in planning the attack.

According to two people who planned the attack, there were “dozens” of meetings between the eventual attackers and members of Congress before the attempted coup that led to the deaths of at least nine people. The organizers name Greene, Representatives Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), Madison Cawthorn (R-North Carolina), Andy Biggs (R-Arizona) and Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) as members who aided in the attack.

“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s capitol must be expelled,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez. “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) made a similar call, emphasizing that her resolution to investigate and potentially expel members of Congress who voted against the certification of the electoral results on January 6 was even more urgent now.

“My resolution to investigate and expel the Members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol is just waiting for a vote. It’s inexcusable to wait any longer,” Bush wrote. “Pass H.Res 25.” The resolution, introduced shortly after the attack, garnered 54 cosponsors.

Ocasio-Cortez had previously described the terror of feeling like she was going to die on January 6 after a close encounter in her office. “It is not an exaggeration to say that many, many members of the House were nearly assassinated,” she said at the time, adding that members’ families were also present that day.

Even before the attack, Ocasio-Cortez has said that she had to go into hiding because of her fear of fellow lawmakers and protesters around Washington, D.C. She called, then, on people like Senators Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who were key in supporting President Donald Trump’s completely false election narrative leading up to and after the election, to resign.

Previous evidence and allegations have also pointed to the involvement of Congress members in aiding the attackers, but this is the first time such an extensive list of specific officials has been provided by planners themselves.

“I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene specifically,” one of the planners told Rolling Stone. “I remember talking to probably close to a dozen other members at one point or another or their staffs.” They went on to name other lawmakers, saying, “we would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team like back to back to back to back.”

The planners offer some details over what the members of Congress offered the attackers, including Gosar offering a “blanket pardon” in unrelated investigations to help incentivize them to plan the attack. “I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the source.

“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” one of the organizers said, “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.”

In return, the members of Congress also asked the organizers of the attack for finding supposed proof for the bunk conspiracy theory that there was election fraud afflicting the 2020 election.