Steve Cortes, president of the League of American Workers, said on X that criminal prosecutions are necessary concerning the false 2016 Russia election interference narrative promoted by Democrats.
“The Real January 6,” said Cortes. “It was 2017, Trump Tower, NY. When Obama sent Comey on an ambush mission to trigger a grand hoax. Time for criminal prosecutions and accountability!”
Cortes said the “real” January 6 didn’t happen in 2021 at the Capitol, but rather on January 6, 2017, in a Trump Tower meeting, according to his commentary in Real Clear Politics. According to Cortes, this “real January 6” was the moment when the U.S. intelligence apparatus set a trap for then President-elect Donald Trump. FBI Director James Comey delivered the now-discredited Steele dossier as a routine intelligence briefing, but Cortes said this was not about national security—it was “a malicious setup, a trap.” The briefing, he said, served not to inform Trump, but to plant a seed for the Russian collusion narrative. “Once the FBI told Trump about the dossier… that fact became the news hook.”
Cortes said the Obama administration and intelligence officials are responsible for starting what he calls a “soft coup in slow motion,” according to his RCP commentary. He said their intent was to sabotage Trump’s presidency before it began—“before he signed a single order.” The press, he said, became participants. “These actions weren’t national security protections,” Cortes said, but rather “secret information warfare… waged not by foreign actors but by our very own intelligence community.”
The fallout from “the original sin,” according to Cortes, led to years of investigations. Agencies became vehicles of “narrative warfare.” He said that elites feared Trump not for his unpredictability, but because “he was serious… about cleaning house.” Cortes said that the true legacy of January 6, 2017, is the permanent class’s decision that “elections only matter when the ‘correct’ side wins.”
Cortes is also known for founding and presiding over the League of American Workers, an organization promoting pro-worker populism centered on national sovereignty and populist economics. He previously served as a senior advisor and spokesperson in Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns and has appeared as a commentator on networks such as CNBC, Fox News, and CNN. A former hedge fund trader, Cortes graduated from Georgetown University.
