At roughly 8:15 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, a few hours before President Donald Trump and his allies whipped up thousands of supporters with false claims of election fraud, law enforcement was summoned to the rally grounds to deal with a “possible disorderly.”
A simmering feud between rally organizers, including longtime Trump adviser Katrina Pierson and Republican fundraiser Caroline Wren, over who should speak that day was boiling over, culminating in a call to the U.S. Park Police, according to interviews with people familiar with the incident as well as text messages and police radio recordings reviewed by The Washington Post.
“Hey, can you break one or two bodies free to respond backstage? Possible disorderly,” says an unidentified speaker in a U.S. Park Police radio transmission that morning. The officers in radio communications described a “falling out,” with the person who called the police accusing another rally organizer of “interfering with the entire production.”
The call to police was made by Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director at Women for America First, a pro-Trump group that held the permit for the rally, who was aligned with Pierson in trying to keep some of Wren’s proposed speakers from addressing the crowd. Kremer confirmed in a statement to The Post that she called the Park Police.
Wren, who was listed on the permit for the rally as a “VIP ADVISOR,” had with others organized an initial spreadsheet of potential speakers that included far-right conspiracy...
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