❤️❤️** Thread#2****Day 2 - TRUMP INSURRECTION ******🇺🇸

[crickets]

11. Dean mentions Mike Shirkey from MI as receiving call from trump

Shirkey confirms to AP Trump talked about Mich. election results with GOP delegation.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214614623 NOV2020

MI Sen. Shirkey falsely claims Jan. 6 insurrection was staged, not carried out by Trump supporters
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215079450 FEB 2021

‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/08/us/militias-republicans-michigan.html FEB 08 2021

LANSING, Mich. — Dozens of heavily armed militiamen crowded into the Michigan Statehouse last April to protest a stay-at-home order by the Democratic governor to slow the pandemic. Chanting and stomping their feet, they halted legislative business, tried to force their way onto the floor and brandished rifles from the gallery over lawmakers below.

Initially, Republican leaders had some misgivings about their new allies. “The optics weren’t good. Next time tell them not to bring guns,” complained Mike Shirkey, the State Senate majority leader, according to one of the protest organizers. But Michigan’s highest-ranking Republican came around after the planners threatened to return with weapons and “militia guys signing autographs and passing out blow-up AR-15s to the kiddies on the Capitol lawn.”

“To his credit,” Jason Howland, the organizer, wrote in a social media post, Mr. Shirkey agreed to help the cause and “spoke at our next event.” [snip]

Two weeks after the Statehouse protest, Mr. Shirkey, the Republican leader, appeared at a rally by the same organizers, onstage with a militia member who would later be accused of conspiring to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“Stand up and test that assertion of authority by the government,” Mr. Shirkey told the militiamen. “We need you now more than ever.”