Unfair Park from p3 raiser to help senior citizens. “I have black- mail pictures of several politicians up there. I won’t release them because I’m in them too,” he added. Laughter flashed through the audience. “Call the FBI. They have ‘em now.” When he spoke about their arrest, he took on a more somber tone. Around 8 a.m. on April 21, he recalled, he was pulling off his farm to head to work when two black Suburban SUVs rolled up. Armed federal agents spilled out and demanded he exit his vehicle. When he stepped out, he claimed, someone fired a stun grenade at his back. “Why’d they do that?” he asked the agents. “Because Washington told us to do it,” he claimed the agents replied. In his telling, they also refused to let him read their search warrant. “Wow,” an astounded audience member said over the din of the banquet room. (The FBI’s Dallas office declined to comment on the circumstances of the Middletons’ ar- rest.) After also arresting his wife, Middleton added, the feds carted the pair nearly an hour and a half away to Collin County Jail. Authorities booked and charged them. The next day, they had their first court appear- ance. By lunchtime, they were out on bond. “Praise God,” Middleton added, that he and his wife had spent the night in medical wards rather than in the jail’s general popu- lation. Around the country, more than 170 Capi- tol rioters had already pleaded guilty, and at least 64 had been sentenced. But Mark and Jalise Middleton were defiant. Even with felony charges against them, neither he nor his wife would be accepting any deals. They had both pleaded not guilty, he told the audi- ence that night in Lewisville, and they would have their day in court. He raised his voice. “They’re going to have to prove that we assaulted police officers,” he said. All at once, the banquet room broke out in applause. M ** ark Middleton describes himself as an American patriot and someone who firmly believes Texas should at least consider breaking away from the union. He backs the blue and yet allegedly brawled with cops while hundreds raided the Capitol. He harbors little love for the Texas GOP but hopes to join the Legislature under the party’s banner. If you’re Middleton, you likely don’t see any contradictions in him. You see someone who loves his country so much he put his body on the line to defend its electoral integ- rity. You see someone who similarly adores his home state so deeply he cannot stand to see it endure federal overreach. You see someone so committed to his president that he was willing to travel more than 1,300 miles to defend him. Sure, such a campaign may come as a 42 shock elsewhere, but this is post-Trump Texas, where a hardline conservative insur- rection is taking place within the state’s Re- publican Party. Just look at some of the Republican primary candidates around the state. There’s Don Huffines, the gubernato- Patrick Strickland Mark Middleton at a February campaign event. The GOP candidate for the Texas House is among scores of Jan. 6 rioters running for office. rial candidate who sees Marxism around ev- ery corner and has refused to cut ties with an alleged white nationalist staffer. There’s Daniel Miller, who’s running for lieutenant governor while also heading the pro-seces- sion Texas Nationalist Movement. There’s Suzanne Harp, a congressional candidate who has included ending the investigation into the Jan. 6 riot as a key point on her plat- form. In 1969, Middleton was born in Arling- ton. He grew up there, graduated from Ar- lington High School in 1988, and then married Jalise two years later. Over the de- cades, he volunteered as a cub master in the Boy Scouts of America and worked in prop- erty management in cities dotting North Texas. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business and a master’s in theology at Lib- erty University, the private Christian school founded by the late televangelist Jerry Fal- well. Around 2008, he and his wife moved to Cooke County to set up shop on family farm- land. There, he says, he pitched in as a vol- unteer firefighter and says he spent a stretch preaching. In his estimation, he has always been a devout Christian and a conservative. In late 2020, he scored a sales job with a company in Muenster, a tiny town near the Oklahoma border, and in December that year, he landed a position as the GOP chair in Cooke County’s 14th precinct. After his arrest, he lost both gigs. Now, he’s one of some 68 Texans facing charges related to the Capitol riot, according to the U.S. Depart- ment of Justice. When the news of alleged Capitol rioters gunning for office first broke, news outlets the country over jumped on the story. “Across the U.S., people who were at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot are running for office,” read a headline in The Week magazine last October. “These Trump fans were at the Capitol on 6 January. Now they’re running for office,” The Guardian chimed in. “Over 30 people who rallied in Washington on January 6, 2021, are running for state and federal of- fices,” CBS News announced in early Janu- ary this year. By the time Politico tallied the total number of Congressional, state and lo- cal candidates linked to the Jan. 6 events, it had grown to 57. The surge in Jan. 6-linked candidates strikes Heidi Beirich, the cofounder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, as “very worrisome.” After Jan. 6, politicians on both sides of the aisle condemned the riot. “These are people who worked to un- dermine our democratic systems,” Beirich said, “and who knows what extremism they will bring to office or what kinds of attacks on our democratic system we may see?” Because Middleton has refused a plea deal, he’s up against the clock. If he manages to win the GOP primary – a tall order, per- haps – he’ll need to not be convicted on any felony charges before November’s general election. That presents another issue: Be- cause no Democrat signed up to run for House in District 68 this year, whoever wins the GOP primary next month has a clear path to the state Legislature. “It’s really an unprecedented and incred- ible situation,” Beirich added, “and it does not bode well for Americans that people who tried to overturn an election are now looking to run for office.” To Middleton, though, the decision to run wasn’t a tough one. “It wasn’t on my ra- dar to run now,” he said. “I wanted to get the J6 stuff behind me, but on the same token, as a Christian, as a studier of God, and as a fol- lower of God, he sometimes works in ways we don’t expect.” ** To underscore that argument, he insists that neither he nor his wife entered the Capitol as the violence erupted. The prosecution, on the other hand, says body camera footage from outside the building shows the Mid- dletons battling with police officers. Middleton also points out that the gov- S ernment did not release the video itself – only still images are provided in court documents. Either way, the images appear to show Middleton pushing against a barri- cade erected by police and grappling with MPD officers. His wife reached out and struck a cop more than once in the head and the arm, according to the government’s statement of facts. The cops told Middleton and other rioters to get back, to which Mid- dleton, by his own admission, shouted, “Fuck you.” (He said he regrets that com- ment.) Meanwhile, other protesters used flags to stab at the officers’ faces, the govern- ment says. Eventually, one of the MPD offi- cers deployed “chemical spray” and forced the Middletons to “retreat back from the barricade line.” The next day, the Fort Worth Intelligence Exchange Fusion Center sent a report to the FBI identifying Mark and Jalise Middleton as participants in the violence against the police officers that day. The evidence? Their own social media posts. In one post accompanied by a video clip, Middleton wrote that he and his wife “helped push down the barriers.” “Jalise and I got pepper-sprayed, clubbed, and tear gassed,” he wrote. “We had >> p6 peaking to potential voters and con- servative audiences, Middleton, of course, insists he did nothing wrong. FEBRUARY 24-MARCH 2, 2022 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
