Heavily Armed Suspect Arrested at Capitol on 1/6 Drove To Ted Cruz’s Home To Discuss ‘Election Fraud,’ Says Court Docs
Three weeks before the Capitol riot on January 6, Alabama man Lonnie Leroy Coffman went to the D.C.-area home of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to discuss “election fraud,” according to court filings entered on Monday. Coffman, 71, had his bond request denied in a 24-page ruling by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Coffman, a U.S. Army veteran, was arrested on January 6 after police happened to notice weapons in his pickup truck while they were investigating reports of pipe bombs in a sealed off area of Capitol Hill in a matter unrelated to Coffman. In the truck, police found five loaded firearms, 11 molotov cocktail-style incendiary devices, a stun gun, a crossbow, and machetes. Coffman has been indicted on 17 charges.
The judge noted in her ruling that prosectors allege that a tracking device in Coffman’s truck indicated that on December 11, he drove to Cruz’s D.C.-area home. A staffer for Cruz confirmed that Coffman called the senator’s office that day and that Coffman said he had gone to Cruz’s home, according to court documents.
The staffer reported that Coffman seemed “unbalanced” and “not 100 percent there.” Coffman wanted to “help with the election fraud he saw,” the aide said. While the staffer said he did not seem threatening, Coffman’s remarks “were odd enough to record.”:
Man says that he went to [Senator Cruz’s] DC home to visit him with no answer at the door, and then called to try to arrange a meeting with him over the phone. Directed him to the scheduler’s email address. He is also looking for contact info for [Sean] Hannity, [Mark] Levin, and [Rush] Limbaugh.”
These details in the charging documents cited by Kollar-Kotelly do not seem to have been previously disclosed.
The FBI says Coffman’s truck contained handwritten notes, on one of which was a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln which read, “We The People Are The Rightful Masters Of Both The Congress And The Courts, Not To Overthrow The Constitution But To Overthrow The Men Who Pervert The Constitution.”
The same piece of paper reads, “Rep [Andre] Carson D-Indiana (one of Two [sic] muslims in House of Reps)”. It also calls Judge David Hamilton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit a “Bad Guy,” while describing the conservative Washington Examiner as “Good guys.”
In 2014 Coffman was identified by the FBI as a participant in Camp Lonestar in Brownsville, Texas, where a group of armed citizens in fatigues assembled to “push back the illegals.”
