A Republican county official from New Mexico who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol seems to have had a rude awakening.
Video footage from a QAnon conference held in Las Vegas over the weekend shows Couy Griffin implying that former President Donald Trump had failed him, as well as his other supporters, over the course of his four years in office.
Much of Griffin’s dissatisfaction stemmed from the fact that the former president had backed down on his 2016 campaign threat to imprison former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent in the presidential race.
“We supported President Trump for his fight for justice as well,” Griffin says in the clip, which first appeared Sunday on Raw Story. “And for four years, we cried, ‘Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up.’ We know she’s a criminal. What did the president tell us? ‘If I was in charge, you’d be in jail.’”
“OK, Mr. President, you’ve been in charge of the law for four years,” he continued. “At the end of your four-year time, the only ones locked up were men like me, and others like me, that have stood by the president the strongest.”
Catch a clip of Couy Griffin’s speech below.
A first-term commissioner in New Mexico’s Otero County, Griffin rose to national prominence in May 2020 when Trump tweeted a video of him proclaiming that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” In 2019, he founded the for-profit “Cowboys for Trump” organization and has described himself as a “peaceful patriot.”
He is facing misdemeanor criminal charges for his alleged role in January’s insurrection and, if convicted, could face up to one year in prison. The charges could also put a damper on his political aspirations.
Though widely circulated footage appears to show Griffin scaling a metal barricade, he has pleaded not guilty to the charges, maintaining he did not knowingly trespass into restricted areas outside of the Capitol on Jan. 6.