COLUMBUS, Ind. — An organizer of a Trump caravan from Indiana has said about 30 people from Bartholomew County traveled to Washington, D.C. last week and were on the U.S. Capitol grounds during the insurrection on Jan. 6 but they did not enter the building nor were they involved in any of the violence.
Mary Beth Clauss, president of the Bartholomew County Republican Ladies League, confirmed that she helped organize a caravan of Trump supporters who traveled from Indiana to Washington from Jan. 5 to 7 for the purposes of meeting with Indiana’s two Republican senators, Mike Braun and Todd Young, “to encourage them … to contest the electoral votes” from certain states.
Overall, 52 people from “all around southern, central Indiana” were part of the caravan, including residents of Columbus, Edinburgh, Taylorsville, Elizabethtown and “all the little towns and burgs in our county,” Clauss said.
The group allegedly met at Edinburgh Premium Outlets on Jan. 5 and traveled together to Washington, according to a Facebook event page that is no longer accessible to the public. Clauss declined to reveal the caravan’s meeting point, saying she didn’t “want anything to blow back on anybody.”
Neither the league nor the Bartholomew County Republican Party was involved with the caravan, Clauss said.
Clauss previously helped organize a “Trump Train Car Parade” in Columbus in September.
For more on this story, see Friday’s Republic.
