The January 6 Select Committee has subpoenaed Nick Fuentes, the leader of the “Groyper” movement, and fellow streamer Patrick Casey, over their attendance at Stop the Steal rallies, and cryptocurrency donations received by both men from the same source.
On Wednesday, the House’s January 6 Select Committee announced that they had sent subpoenas to both Fuentes and Casey, who they identified as “leaders of the ‘America First’ or ‘Groyper’ movement,” demanding that they hand over records relating to the protests on Capitol Hill last year, and that they both produce testimony to Congress.
In the letters, the committee notes that both Fuentes and Casey attended numerous Stop the Steal rallies following the November 2020 election, and that they each received tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency from a “French computer programmer” in December 2020, something that the FBI is “reportedly scrutinizing to assess whether the money was linked to the Capitol attack or otherwise used to fund illegal acts.”
The Select Committee has issued subpoenas to Nicholas J. Fuentes and Patrick Casey.
The committee is demanding records and testimony from the two witnesses who promoted unsupported claims about the 2020 election and were present on the Capitol grounds on January 6th. pic.twitter.com/0mLN2C1a4k
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) January 19, 2022
The subpoenas follow the rejection of Fuentes and Casey from previously co-operating with the committee. Speaking on his nightly show America First on Wednesday, Fuentes described the committee as being a “witch hunt,” saying that they should instead be investigating “that the election was stolen on November 3.”
Fuentes slammed the committee as being designed to chill free speech and scare people like him “into submission,” along with draining time, resources, and energy, from the America First movement.
“I’m exercising my First Amendment right.”
Casey echoed his comments the same evening, saying the committee functioned “as nothing more than a fishing expedition… [and] a partisan attempt to do whatever is possible to damage Trump, to damage his supporters, and his allies. It is a new form of an agenda that has existed in one form or another since Donald Trump initially came down that escalator and announced his bid for the presidency.”
Fuentes, who leads the “Groyper” movement, and Casey publicly split last year over disagreements with how to continue their movement post-January 6. Both Fuentes and Casey therefore highlighted the fact that it was strange that the committee had lumped their subpoena announcements together.
The subpoenas of the streamers follows the arrest of Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, and his charges of seditious conspiracy, with the federal investigation shifting towards unsubstantiated claims that the Capitol protest was an organised, targeted insurrection.
“Nowhere in [the subpoena letter] is there any criminal activity,” Fuentes argued. “What they’re alleging is that there was an organized effort to overthrow the government,” he continued, adding that “what we see in this letter is indicative of the rest of this investigation, which is that there is no evidence that that occurred.”
“If there was some big conspiracy, I wasn’t privy to it, and I would bet money that there wasn’t,” Casey said on Wednesday, noting that “promoting unsubstantiated claims is not a crime.”
Rather than being beaten down, Fuentes seemed emboldened by the subpoena. “That I’m subpoenaed by the US Congress at the age of 23, I think it just gives me credibility. I don’t know about you… but I see a subpoena from the US Congress and I take great pride in this,” he argued.
“If it wasn’t for the overt, explicit, over the top political persecution, nobody would have any reason to say my name and bring attention to the message… Whenever they do these things, they’re just turning me into an international political figure… It just goes to show, we’re the only truly principled opposition to the system. We reject it completely.”