Rape Allegation Against Moms for Liberty Is Starting to Cost Them

A local chapter of the far-right Moms for Liberty has taken a step back from its national entity amid a swirling rape allegation against the husband of one of the group’s co-founders.

The Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, chapter announced Monday that it will distance itself from its parent organization, citing a difference in values.

“The journey has always been the strength of our local community and we found all the support we need among us,” chapter chair Clarissa Paige told The News Item on Monday. “We are going to continue to champion parental rights with dignity and integrity.”

Last week, Florida GOP Chair Christian Ziegler, the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, was accused of sexually assaulting a woman involved in threesomes with him and his wife.

The rape accusation became public after the Florida Center for Government Accountability published an explosive report that included a heavily redacted police report and search warrant affidavits detailing the assault.

“It’s hard to advocate for parental rights when the co-founder is caught up in the scandal,” Paige told The News Item. “Our values are not aligning with the national organization.”

The Ziegler couple are rising stars in the Florida GOP who seem unlikely to keel to the allegations. Christian Ziegler has rejected calls for his resignation, refusing to give up his seat at the helm of the state’s conservative party.

Meanwhile, Bridget Ziegler has been personally endorsed and backed several times by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, including for a school board seat and an appointment to a state board that oversees the special district previously run by Disney World. That’s in large part due to her vocal opposition to progressive education policies, including critical race theory and LGBTQ+ friendly policies. Zeigler has said she aims to bring “religious values” to public schools that are “indoctrination centers for the radical left.”

Yet her stringent moral values appear set on restricting everyone’s sexualities except her own.

“As leaders in the Florida GOP and Moms for Liberty, the Zieglers have made a habit out of attacking anything they perceive as going against ‘family values’—be it reproductive rights or the existence of LGBTQ+ Floridians,” said Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried in a statement. “The level of hypocrisy in this situation is stunning.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson just accidentally obliterated the Republican Party’s favorite conspiracy theory: that the January 6 insurrection was carried out by undercover federal agents and members of antifa.

Johnson told a press conference Tuesday that the GOP is editing footage of the insurrection to prevent the Justice Department from potentially identifying rioters.

“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” he said.

And with just one sentence, Johnson has given away the entire game. Republicans have spent the past nearly three years insisting that the riot was caused by antifa, Black Lives Matter protesters, and even undercover FBI agents. But if that’s true, then why would the GOP want to shield those people from identification?

Republicans have thrown out conspiracy after conspiracy in an attempt to divert blame from their supporters—so much so that it’s hard to capture the full scale of it in this piece. In 2021, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert said that federal agents had embedded in extremist groups and then “egged on” rioters to incite the January 6 attack.

Just last month, Representative Clay Higgins said “ghost buses” packed with “FBI informants” descended on Washington, D.C., the night of January 5, so they could pretend to be supporters of Donald Trump.

One Trump supporter, Ray Epps, sued Fox News in July for defamation. Prominent right-wing figures on the network, including former Fox host Tucker Carlson, repeatedly claimed Epps was an FBI agent.

In reality, hundreds of people arrested for participating in the January 6 attack said they went to Washington because they felt Trump had personally told them to. And now, Johnson has revealed that Republicans don’t want any more people who tried to overthrow the government to face any repercussions.

Before joining Congress, Representative Mike Johnson was a lawyer for conservative Christian causes. And one of his regular clients was a violent radical Christian activist who described himself and Johnson as “brothers.”

Johnson worked for years alongside anti-gay activist and former radical Christian preacher Grant Storms, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday. Storms told the Beast that Johnson had done copious amounts of legal work for him in the early to mid-2000s, all for free.

“We were brothers on the path,” Storms told the Beast. “He always had our back.”

Storms met Johnson in the early 2000s when the latter was working at Alliance Defending Freedom, the far-right Christian group that has recently sought to ban the abortion medication mifepristone and public drag performances. Johnson worked at the ADF for nearly a decade.

Storms initially reached out for help removing what he called “lewd” imagery from a bus station ad. He claimed the ad included an image of men having sex.

Johnson continued working with Storms after that, and he helped convince New Orleans officials to grant Storms a permit for a protest against an annual Pride celebration. Storms’s protest ended up getting national attention when an anti-gay protester attempted to murder a man with a steak knife. Storms said the attacker was not part of his organization, but the assailant later told police he went to Storms’s event because he wanted to “kill a gay man.”

Johnson represented Storms a few more times until 2005, when Storms said they lost touch. But just four years later, Johnson represented Storms’s son Jason in a violent anti-abortion case.

Jason Storms is the head of Operation Save America, one of the largest—if not the largest—militant anti-abortion groups in the country. The group made national headlines in 2009 when it was linked to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider. The group, then called Operation Rescue, said the killer was not a member. But he had been in touch with an Operation Rescue official about Tiller’s whereabouts.

That same year, Johnson represented Jason Storms and several other anti-abortion extremists, arguing their free speech rights had been violated when a federal court barred them from protesting outside abortion clinics.

Jason Storms also participated in the January 6 insurrection—almost fitting given that Johnson led the amicus brief that more than 100 Republicans signed in an effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

It is, unfortunately, no longer a shock that Johnson supports far-right beliefs. He has described abortion as a “holocaust,” blamed the fall of Rome on LGBTQ people, and cited the “great replacement theory,” the far-right theory that white people are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants. Johnson flies a Christian nationalist flag outside his office and speaks regularly at far-right events.

But it is shocking—and terrifying—that Johnson is able to espouse these beliefs with no pushback on Capitol Hill. His ideological leanings suggest that the issues he supports and plans to prioritize in legislation will stray further and further into the fringes. And that could come at the cost of democracy.

Republicans are leaving nothing up to interpretation. On Tuesday, Speaker Mike Johnson unequivocally admitted that the conservative party is doctoring footage of the January 6 insurrection to prevent the identification of the rioters in an investigation by the Justice Department.

“We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ,” Johnson said.

“That’s a slow process to get it done, we’re working steadily on it. We’ve hired additional personnel to do that and all of those tapes ultimately will be out so everybody can see them and draw their own conclusions,” he added.

The blur could also be an attempt to stop armchair sleuths on the internet from identifying the rioters—a process that could help expedite the lengthy investigation required to process more than 40,000 hours of footage and put names and histories to the 2,000 rioters in attendance that day.

Johnson previously claimed he would release the footage so people could see for themselves what happened on January 6. But apparently, he didn’t mean without edits.

Liz Cheney is dishing everything Donald Trump–related in a new book—including details on a phone call that unraveled a “chilling” plan to stop Vice President Mike Pence from ratifying the election, mere days before January 6.

“I had heard, obviously, there had been talk about having these electors meet, but it wasn’t clear to me what the contours of this particular part of the plan were until I got onto that phone call,” Cheney said on The Rachel Maddow Show.

“Listening to them describe how these fake electors would be used, and the fact that they anticipated that Vice President Pence was going to use them to count legitimate electors, was certainly a moment of intense concern,” she added.

As Cheney tells it, she “ran” to the Office of the Parliamentarian of the House to inform them, but little could be done by then.

“If you’re in a joint session of Congress, you’re not in a position where there are a lot of legislative steps that you can take except to basically move to adjourn, so it was a very dangerous and chilling moment,” Cheney said. “I learned later through the investigation that Vice President Pence and his counsel were having discussions with the Senate parliamentarian and that the vice president ultimately, of course, did his duty bravely.”

Cheney’s latest book, Oath and Honor, comes paired with the news that the former Wyoming representative is weighing the possibility of running as a third-party candidate in the 2024 presidential election—a choice that could skim some moderate Republican votes away from Trump.

“Several years ago, I would not have contemplated a third-party run,” Cheney told The Washington Post. “I happen to think democracy is at risk at home, obviously, as a result of Donald Trump’s continued grip on the Republican Party, and I think democracy is at risk internationally as well.”

During an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning, Cheney warned that the U.S. would be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” if it chose to reelect Trump for a second term. She has also come down on Speaker Mike Johnson’s new role as the highest serving member of the House, noting that she would not want to see Johnson in a leadership position come 2025.

“What I learned was he was willing to do things he knew to be wrong in order to placate Donald Trump,” Cheney told Maddow on Monday. “And again, a situation where you have a speaker of the House, who … so clearly set aside what he knew to be the facts, what he knew to be the law, what he knew to be our obligations under the Constitution in order to try to help Donald Trump in his efforts in 2020.”