Several Republicans Who Attended Jan. 6 'Stop the Steal' Rally Just Won Elections — Here's More About Them

The majority of those elected have said they didn't participate in what came after the rally, including the violent march on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob

Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty

A number of Republicans who were in attendance at the infamous "Stop the Steal" rally held near the White House not long before a mob of Donald Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 have been elected to seats across the country, according to multiple news reports.

According to HuffPost, at least eight people who attended the "Stop the Steal" rally went on to win their recent campaigns: Three of them were elected to state legislatures, while five won local office.

According to a list published by BuzzFeed News, at least 13 candidates who were on the Nov. 2 ballots across the country were at the rally Jan. 6.

As HuffPost notes, the majority of those elected have said they didn't participate in what came after the rally — when a violent, pro-Trump mob overwhelmed law enforcement at the U.S. Capitol and breached the complex during a joint session of Congress, in chaos that soon turned deadly. Instead, they say they were only on hand at the rally, which was part of a months-long campaign by Trump alleging, without evidence, that the election had been stolen from him.

At that same rally, Trump spoke approvingly of his supporters who were planning to march to the Capitol. While he told them to be peaceful and patriotic, he also said they should "fight like hell. "

"And if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," he said.

Here's a look at some of the rally attendees who won their races.

John McGuire

Incumbent McGuire, 53, won his re-election to the Virginia House of Delegates after controversy regarding his attendance at the rally, which he first revealed to The Washington Post in an August interview.

At the time, McGuire insisted he was "shocked and horrified" to learn about the riot, saying he did not enter the Capitol building and was unaware of the violence until he came home later that day.

But those statements seemed to run counter to a photo unearthed by his Democratic opponent in which McGuire could be seen on Jan. 6 standing near a group of men wearing paramilitary gear and confronting police.

"While Delegate McGuire claims he never entered the Capitol, he stood proudly with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and proud boys in the heart of our nation," Blakely Lockhart, McGuire's opponent, said in a statement at the time.. "I irrevocably condemn his actions on January 6."

McGuire, a former U.S. Navy SEAL who was first elected in 2017, told the Post he did not enter the Capitol and has since told reporters he stands by his statement that he attended the rally and then left.

"When I arrived home and saw the news, I was just as shocked and horrified as everyone else to see that people had entered the Capitol. It was a tragic day, and one we won't soon forget," he said, according to The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Marie March

Another rally attendee, March won an open seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. The restaurant owner reportedly posted about her attendance at the rally on social media and in since-deleted Facebook posts also warned about a looming "Civil War."

In those posts, according to the Roanoke Times, March wrote of how divided the country had become and how Trump supporters would "fight and shoot and defend and die for their beliefs and life experiences." She, too, was willing to "fight and die" for her "family" and "small businesses,"she wrote. (She owns at least two barbecue restaurants, as well as a number of other businesses, according to her website.)

In her posts, per the Times, March wrote of possible commonalities between the different political groups in America but also wondered: "Will this coming war be us killing each other in order to reset this country? Will we kill off the old OR will we kill off the young? Can we live with our conscience when we actually take human life and end their potential?"

On her campaign website, March describes herself as a "small business owner, proven job creator, rock-solid conservative, and Trump Republican."

Dave LaRock

An incumbent, LaRock was re-elected to represent the 33rd district in the Virginia House of Delegates on Tuesday.

His victory came months after he faced calls to resign for attending the rally before the riot and for posting several false statements about the violence at the Capitol, such as claiming that it had been infiltrated by "paid provocateurs."

In a statement published after the riots turned deadly, LaRock condemn "those who forced entry into the Capitol, destroyed property, disrupted the meeting of Congress, and caused injuries and a death," though he also attempted to draw a parallel between the Capitol rioters and those who participated in protests following the death of George Floyd. "The actions taken by rioters during this summer's riots across the country were wrong, and so were the actions taken by those who stormed the U.S. Capitol today," LaRock said.

A week after the rally and ensuing insurrection, LaRock called the events "an outstanding exercise of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. There was no vandalism, trash was picked up, and many times the masses sang the National Anthem together."

Natalie Jangula

Jangula won her race for seat 3 of Canyon County's city council in Idaho, where she garnered 52.3 percent of the vote.

Jangula, 35, has said she was present at the Jan. 6 rally and has posted photos from outside the Capitol, though she has said she did not subsequently go inside the Capitol and does not condone the actions of those who entered the Capitol building that day, the Idaho Press reported earlier.

She previuosly called the "Stop the Steal" rally a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to just go and just show my support for our country and for the freedoms we have and for election integrity, and just to go and meet some like-minded people, and it was the most patriotic experience ... My intentions were 100% not insurrection by all means."

Christine Ead

Ead was elected to the Watchung Borough Council in New Jersey after the Echoes-Sentinel reported that she had made comments on a Facebook community page confirming her rally attendance and parroting Trump's claims that the election was "unfair."

Ead also claimed that "ANTIFA and other anarchist groups were at the rally," suggesting they may have been to blame for the violence.

As NPR reported earlier, the false claim that the rioters were actually anti-fascists was mentioned more than 400,000 times online in the first 24 hours following the attack. The FBI has refuted the claim and no one who has since been charged in the attack has been found to be connected to the loosely organized left-wing movement.

Charles Ausburger

Republican Councilman (and chair of the Connecticut Republican Party) Ausburger — who HuffPost reports again won a seat on the Mansfield, Connecticut, town council — was open about his attendance at the Capitol.

In a January town council meeting, he said he saw someone get in the head with a can of tear gas and saw a woman fall down five flights of stairs, Connecticut's Chronicle reported.

He said at the time the group he was with left at 3 p.m. The situation had, at that point, already turned violent — though Ausberger has not said he was ever inside the building (emails sent by PEOPLE were not returned)

"We decided at that point, it was getting out of control," Ausburger has said, the Chronicle reported. "We didn't want to be there amidst the nonsense."

Susan Soloway

A Hunterdon County, New Jersey, commissioner who won re-election, Soloway faced criticism for posting — and later deleting — photos of herself at the rally on social media.

She told reporters in January that she "quickly left" once the situation escalated: "I joined with several other members of the Hunterdon County Federated Republican Women in attending the rally in support of the President on January 6. Our group was shocked, outraged, and frankly scared, when it became apparent that a group of thugs were using the rally as a pretense to attack the U.S. Capitol. As those actions unfolded, concerned for our own safety, we quickly left the area."

Soloway initially faced calls to resign for her attendance.

Matthew Lynch

A former high school teacher, Lynch resigned from his decade-long career after activists sent a photo of him outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 to the FBI.

The 35-year-old Lynch subsequently won an open seat on a six-person school committee in Braintree, Massachusetts, garnering the second-most votes for one of the three open positions.

Lynch told the local news website Patch in October that the FBI has visited him twice since Jan. 6, and accused those who sent the agency his photo of "slandering me as a domestic terrorist."

He had separately been criticized for making what some teachers and students at his former workplace said were transphobic remarks on social media, Patch reported in a separate article, noting that there were more than two dozen complaints against him.

More than 500 people have been arrested for participating in the riot at the Capitol — which led to the deaths of at least five people — Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in June.

In September, the House of Representations' select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a round of subpoenas to those involved in the planning and organization of the Stop the Steal rally.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee investigating the riot, told CNN of the subpoenas: "it's important for us to figure out exactly what the relationships were between the official rally organizers and the White House and the violent insurrectionists who launched the violence on that day."