Trump Fundraiser Plunked In $3M To Fund Jan. 6 Insurrection

Caroline Wren, who had worked on the Trump campaign, told associates she distributed funds to a number of political organizations backing the rally, including Tea Party Express and Turning Point, Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan reported for Pro Publica.

Photo Insert: Trump supporters storming the Capitol during the DC insurrection

As much as $3 million may have been raised to support the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the attack on the Capitol, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica, with some money flowing to Republican dark-money groups that helped bring crowds to the event.

Dustin Stockton, a Republican operative who helped organize the rally, told ProPublica he met with Wren at the Willard Hotel in Washington on the evening of Jan. 5. At that meeting, Stockton said, Wren boasted of having raised $3 million to support the rally.

She also described how she had “parked” unspecified amounts of money for Jan. 6 at an arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), at the Tea Party Express and at Turning Point, a collection of affiliated nonprofits that serve young Republicans.

Routing funds to multiple groups “added a layer of confidentiality for the donor and offered institutional support for the 6th,” Stockton said. Mollie Simon, Kirsten Berg, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jake Pearson also contributed to the Pro Publica report.

A Wren associate told another rally organizer that $3 million had been raised to support the rally on Jan. 6. The organizer, who did not want to be named because of the ongoing House investigation into Jan. 6, did not provide further details.

Earlier news reports estimated that staging the rally cost only about half a million dollars, primarily funded by a roughly $300,000 donation Wren facilitated from the Publix supermarket heir Julie Jenkins Fancelli.

Wren provided a statement from her lawyer last week that did not address the Jan. 5 meeting, how much money was raised for the rally, or how it was spent. Ahead of the Jan. 6 rally, Wren directed roughly $150,000 from Fancelli to the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the dark-money arm of RAGA, according to a person familiar with the transaction.

The Rule of Law Defense Fund then paid for a robocall inviting people to the Capitol in order to satisfy the conditions of the donation Wren brought in, the source said.

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