Our president wants us here,” a man live-streaming from inside the Capitol building said, according to a New York Times report. “We wait and take orders from our president.”
“The President asked for his supporters to be there to attend, and I felt like it was important, because of how much I love this country, to actually be there,” Larry Brock Jr., an Air Force veteran who was seen on the floor of the Senate in a helmet and fatigues while holding flex-cuffs, told The New Yorker. (Brock was later arrested.)
“He said, ‘Hey, I need my digital soldiers to show up on January 6.’ And we all did,” Doug Sweet, a 58-year old who stormed the Capitol and was later arrested, told The Wall Street Journal.
Jacob Chansley, the spear-carrying and fur hat-wearing insurrectionist known as the Q Shaman, reportedly came with a group of “patriots” from Arizona, according to prosecutors, “at the request of the President.”
“My client had heard the oft-repeated words of President Trump,” Al Watkins, Chansley’s lawyer, said in a press release that also asked Trump to pardon Chansley. “The words and invitation of a president are supposed to mean something.”
Robert Sanford, an ex-firefighter who threw a fire extinguisher at police officers at the Capitol, was reportedly “following the President’s instructions,” according to a friend who reported Sanford to the FBI.
“We were invited here!” one insurrectionist can be seen in a live video yelling into a bullhorn on the Capitol steps. “We were invited by the president of the United States!”