June 09, 2022 12:16 PM UTC

The Republican Who Called Out Boebert After January 6th

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• by: Colorado Pols

Salon reporting on even more damning intra-Republican audio ahead of the publication of the new book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future–a recording from January 11th, 2021, in which Colorado freshman GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was slammed by a fellow Republican representative for Tweeting about the location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while the U.S. Capitol building was being overrun by pro-Trump rioters on January 6th:

The exchange reportedly played out during an internal conversation on January 11 between Boebert and Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Wash., who asked the freshman firebrand point blank, “Is it true that you were live-tweeting from the floor our location the people on the outside as we were being attacked, Lauren?”

“Umm, yes,” Boebert responded. “Those tweets did go out and that was something that was live and public information. It was broadcast live.”

“So don’t ask us about security if you’re telling the attackers where we’re at,” Beutler shot back. [Pols emphasis]

But Boebert didn’t mean to be a security risk, she swears!

“So, that was something being broadcast live from C-SPAN, and once we were on move, there was absolutely nothing else that was broadcast,” Boebert insisted.

Boebert’s Tweets about her and Speaker Pelosi’s location during the initial stages of the January 6th insurrection have dogged Boebert ever since then, with the best possible defense for Boebert being that she simply didn’t understand how providing location information to her hundreds of thousands of supporters on Twitter, who Boebert herself threateningly asserted just minutes before the rioters stormed the Capitol were “outside this building right now,” was an indefensible breach of operational security.

The other, less charitable interpretation, is that she did know.

Like other Republicans who were much too close to the violent side of the plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6th, Boebert has benefited tremendously from the en masse backslide led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy from outrage over January 6th to swearing renewed allegiance to Donald Trump within just a few weeks. If Republicans were interested in any kind of accountability for January 6th, Boebert would be high on the list of expendable figures to be thrown under the bus.

Instead, they’re stuck–at least for now–with the security risk.