About
Longtime Trump ally and political trickster Roger Stone originally created Stop the Steal as a registered 527 organization in 2016—initially to fight GOP efforts to keep Trump off the Republican ticket that year and later to discredit an expected presidential win by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The organization hired “Vote Protectors” in November 2016, but in a number of states Democratic parties filed lawsuits charging these people with voter intimidation.
Stone resurrected the group in 2018, and in 2020, Ali Alexander became the face of the Stop the Steal movement. On Nov. 14, 2020—a week after the race was called for Biden—a Stop the Steal PAC was registered with the Federal Elections Commission.
Stop the Steal supporters organized a number of rallies after the 2020 election, including the Million MAGA March on Nov. 14 and Let the Church ROAR! on Dec. 12, both in Washington. The “Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol would likely have not occurred if not for Trump’s explicit and tacit encouragement of the Stop the Steal movement,” according to Just Security.
January 6, 2021
- Stop the Steal was listed as one of 11 major supporters behind the Stop the Steal rally and March to Save America, according to the event website that has since been taken down.
- Claiming that he did “nothing wrong,” Alexander cooperated with both the House Select Committee investigation of the insurrection and the Department of Justice’s own probe into the matter, providing testimony, documents, thousands of text messages, and other records.