The Republican Party has a long, rich, and ignoble tradition of playing footsie with the extremist right. Barry Goldwater welcomed members of the ultra-conservative, commie-hunting, anti-civil-rights John Birch Society into his presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan pandered to racists with his attacks on “welfare queens.” John Boehner, when he was the GOP leader of the House, sponsored a rally at the US Capitol where hate-driven tea partiers called Democrats “Nazis” and shouted the n-word at the late Rep. John Lewis. And the January 6 seditious assault on Congress was a high—or low—point in this tawdry but never-ending relationship between the Grand Old Party and fascistic elements, with Donald Trump and his crew encouraging a crowd of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, QAnoners, militia wannabes, and others to rampage and overturn the results of a democratic election.

In following up on a recent story I did about one of those extremists, I came across an example of how a mainline Republican made common cause with a future 1/6 conspirator.

In January, I uncovered a video of a Stop the Steal organizer named Alan Hostetter, who at a pro-Trump rally in December in Huntington Beach, California, called for the “execution” of Trump’s foes. A few weeks after that event, Hostetter, a police chief turned yoga instructor, was a key figure at the attempted January 6 uprising. Through a nonprofit organization he runs, the American Phoenix Project, he had helped organize a pre-march rally on January 5 in front of the Supreme Court, where many of the sedition-pushing stars of the Stop the Steal movement spoke. The lineup included Ali Alexander, who has proclaimed himself the movement’s leader; Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theory monger; Joe Flynn, the brother of retired General Michael Flynn; and Roger Stone, the dirty trickster and long-time Trump adviser whom Trump later pardoned. Hostetter and the others fired up the assembled with hyperbolic and false rhetoric about the election being stolen. The next day, Hostetter was in the crowd that besieged the Capitol.

In an indictment filed earlier this month, the Justice Department charged Hostetter with conspiring to “corruptly obstruct, influence, and impede an official proceeding, to wit: the Certification of the Electoral College vote.” The indictment alleges that he plotted with several men associated with the Three Percenters militia and that this group planned to come to Washington to disrupt the certification. One of Hostetter’s confederates, according to the indictment, on January 5 posted a photo on an encrypted messaging service showing gear arranged on a bed, including two hatchets, a stun baton, and a knife, with the caption, “Now getting ready for tomorrow.”

The indictment depicts Hostetter as one of the more significant extremists at the January 6 rally. This makes it all the more notable that months earlier he had been funding the work of a prominent official of the Republican National Committee.

In May 2020, Hostetter’s American Phoenix Project joined the Center for American Liberty and the Dhillon Law Group to file a lawsuit against California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other Golden State officials that challenged COVID-19 lockdown restrictions implemented by the state. At that time, Hostetter was mounting protests against these public health measures. He was even arrested at a rally in San Clemente against stay-at-home orders and accused of inciting a riot, destruction of city property, trespassing, and resisting arrest. Postings on the website for his American Phoenix Project suggested he was a fan of QAnon.

The lawsuit claimed that Newsom and other officials “have used the Coronavirus pandemic to expand their authority by unprecedented lengths, depriving Plaintiffs and all other residents of California of fundamental rights protected by the U.S. and California Constitutions, especially but not limited to, the right to travel, the right to liberty, the right to the equal protection of the law.”

Hostetter’s ally in this endeavor was Harmeet Dhillon, a prominent San Francisco attorney who has been vice chair of the state Republican Party and chair of the party in San Francisco. She is now a national committeewoman for the GOP. The RNC website notes, “Harmeet was an RNC delegate for President Donald J. Trump at the [2016] RNC Convention, representing California as an at-large delegate, and she also served as California’s RNC Convention Rules Committeewoman in the 2016 convention, where she delivered a Sikh prayer as the invocation for the opening of the Tuesday evening nomination session of the convention.”

Dhillon is a frequent Fox News guest and the founder of the Center for American Liberty, which bills itself as a civil liberties outfit that battles “corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials.” She recently sent out a fundraising email asking people to send the Center for American Liberty $35 or more “to help us sue Twitter and a handful of liberal elected officials for their state-sponsored plot to eliminate our First Amendment liberties.”

According to the American Phoenix Project’s annual registration renewal submitted to California’s attorney general, Hostetter’s group spent $50,000 on this lawsuit. And there was a curious element in that filing. It stated that the American Phoenix Project, which was started in 2020, had raised only $10,317 that year. How could it then pay $50,000 to the Center for American Liberty for the lawsuit against Newsom? The answer: The group had received a loan of $75,000, according to its registration renewal. But the filing did not identify the source of this money.

Dhillon’s Hostetter-financed lawsuit did not fare well. US District Judge Josephine Staton denied her request for a temporary restraining order, citing a Supreme Court precedent declaring that genuine public safety concerns can justify reasonable regulations that restrain individual action. “Plaintiffs can do nothing to refute Defendants proffered evidence that ‘COVID-19 can spread quickly’ and is more likely to spread ‘when people are in close contact with one another,’” she wrote. Staton essentially tossed Dhillon out of court, saying the case raised “no serious questions.” Two weeks later, Dhillon filed to have the lawsuit dismissed.

How did Dhillon, a member of the GOP establishment, get involved with a future insurrectionist who would call for murdering political opponents? Through a spokesperson, Dhillon emailed me this statement: “The American Phoenix Project made a single donation to support one of the many civil rights lawsuits filed by Center-supported attorneys last year. The Dhillon Law Group has no connection to or representation of either Mr. Hostetter or the American Phoenix Project. Dhillon Law Group represented individual plaintiffs in several cases funded by the Center for American Liberty last year.” Still, the relationship between Hostetter’s group and Dhillon’s outfit is another sign of the overlap that occurs between the Republican Party and its adjacent extremists.

Hostetter and his lawyer did not respond to a list of questions I emailed them.

Hostetter is obviously in legal peril. According to the AP, he could face even more legal trouble because he used his tax-exempt nonprofit to advocate violence—which is something the IRS does not appreciate. As for Dhillon, so far, her link to Hostetter has not caused her any public inconvenience. She remains featured on the Republican Party’s website...in its section on party leaders.