Exclusive: ‘Pelosi’s fixer’ at the Capitol on Jan. 6 an ‘unforgivable betrayal,’ friend says

When Kylie Jane Kremer heard the name Aaron Black for the first time, she was told “he was Nancy Pelosi's fixer.”

In her first media interview since Jan. 6, 2021, the executive director of Women for America First said she wasn’t familiar with Black’s name before President Donald J. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse — an event her group organized and ran.

– First in a series on the infiltration of Jan. 6 –

That all changed in the days after the violence at the U.S. Capitol. Kremer gathered with some of her event staff in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, having left Washington, D.C., due to the post-Jan. 6 political climate.

'I felt very unnerved by it.'

Kremer quizzed one of her organizers, Jennifer Lawrence, about a secretive Dec. 29 phone call made by Lawrence’s fiancé, Dustin Stockton. Kremer said she had wondered why Stockton, one of her key event organizers, insisted on getting off the “March for Trump” tour bus to make a private call.

“At one point we had to pull over the vehicles so that Dustin could make a private phone call that he did not want anyone else in the vehicle [to hear],” Kremer said. “And it was very odd. He was acting very weird; he was very secretive about it, would not tell us who the phone call was.”

The bus and support vehicles pulled over in a remote area of Arizona so that Stockton could make his phone call. Kremer asked Lawrence who was on the other end of the line. “Aaron Black,” was the reply.

Kremer said Lawrence told her that Black “was Nancy Pelosi's fixer, and they had known him for a very long time, going back to Tea Party days back on the West Coast.”

Kremer said she found that revelation disturbing.

Anti-Trump protesters unfurl a banner at the planned Trump campaign rally in Chicago on March 11, 2016. Democrat operative Aaron Black sent agitators to the event and the subsequent violence led to event cancellation. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“I felt very unnerved by it, because I can't think of a world that I would have anything to do with anybody in Nancy Pelosi’s office or orbit.”

The possible infiltration of Women for America First is but one example of the left’s involvement in the events that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. President Trump and hundreds of thousands of supporters were accused of carrying out an insurrection that day. A deep examination of the actions of the left — directly and by extension — is needed to yield a fuller understanding of Jan. 6, its players, and the violence that was used to justify a government war on conservatives. Central to the infiltration of the Jan. 6 rally is a longtime close associate of former House Speaker Pelosi (D-Calif.): Aaron Black.

Stockton, who has organized conservative events around the country for 15 years, freely admits to his long-standing relationship with the veteran Democrat political operative and campaign strategist.

Stockton adamantly disagrees with Kremer's story about the clandestine desert phone call to Black, saying, "It was no secret that I knew Aaron Black and that we had an open line of communication going back more than a decade," Stockton told Blaze Media. "The Kremers were well aware of my relationship with Aaron Black long before January 6."

Stockton knew Black from Black’s days with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and Stockton’s time at Breitbart News covering the 2016 presidential campaign. During one March 2016 event, Black arranged to put violent agitators at the Trump rally in Chicago that led to its cancellation, he later admitted in an undercover Project Veritas video.

'I don’t know the extent of his involvement in the setup of American patriots on January 6, but took it as an unforgivable betrayal.'

Stockton said he asked Black if he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and Black replied that he was “out of town.”

“Aaron had told me that he wasn’t in town for January 6,” Stockton said. “After seeing a picture of him and confronting him about it, he admitted he was on the Capitol steps to me and others,” Stockton said.

“I don’t know the extent of his involvement in the setup of American patriots on January 6,” Stockton said, “but took it as an unforgivable betrayal.”

In sworn testimony before the now-defunct Jan. 6 Select Committee, Stockton expressed his belief that outside individuals or groups came to the Ellipse and the Capitol that day intent on trouble.

“I honestly don't know if they’re foreign actors or — but it’s clear to me that there was a well-funded, well-paid group of probably 50-ish who were intent specifically on causing violence and chaos that day,” Stockton said, according to the official transcript of his interview.

Democrat operative and Nancy Pelosi adviser Aaron Black admitted to Dustin Stockton that he was on the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

Stockton said he believed a “paramilitary group that was well trained at moving a crowd” helped direct people from the Ellipse to the Capitol, where police lines were breached before 1 p.m. and violence later broke out on the West Plaza.

“But I believe they ran the worst and most aggressive elements within, like, the people who had came, and I think they ran them directly into a trap to cause these fights with the Capitol Police and sow this chaos,” Stockton testified.

The goals, he said, were to “create doubt in our American system [and] tarnish all the rest of us.”

Once the “toxic elements” in the massive crowds were steered to the Capitol, “professionals were prepared to, like, lead them into all the violence that occurred.”

Rapid-response man

Who exactly is Aaron Black, and did he play a role in what took place at the Capitol on Jan. 6?

Black describes himself on social media as a senior political adviser to @TeamPelosi, the former speaker’s personal account on X. That information was recently deleted from Black’s X account, but archived images of it are still available on the Wayback Machine.

Screenshot of Wayback Machine

As of March 12, the title is still visible on his account on BlueSky, the microblogging site that is a popular haven for Democrats who fled the Elon Musk-owned X.

“Senior Political Advisor #TeamPelosi,” Black’s BlueSky biography states. “Past: Biden, Harris, Clinton …”

Black’s profile photo shows him with his arm around the former speaker at an outdoor stadium. In the photo, Pelosi is wearing a Washington Nationals baseball jersey under her blazer.

'Nobody is really supposed to know about me.'

Black appears to have at least one important thing in common with Pelosi: narrative. Pelosi famously said the Jan. 6 Select Committee she appointed in 2022 was designed to preserve “the narrative” of Jan. 6.

In an interview with a group of high-school students in 2018, Black emphasized “narrative” as a key to success generally in campaigns and other political work.

“You can’t win elections and you can’t win issue campaigns unless you are controlling the narrative on the ground, on social media, on mainstream media,” Black said. “It should be authentic.”

Black has said he would prefer that people not know who he is or what he does for a living.

“Nobody is really supposed to know about me,” Black told an undercover journalist for Project Veritas in 2016.

Black has not sought public credit for his more than 15 years as a rapid-response director, event disruptor, agent provocateur, political “fixer,” protest leader, and professional rabble-rouser.

Success in this kind of work means not leaving behind a trail that can lead back to you or your operation, Black suggested in a series of undercover Project Veritas videos.

One of the core organizers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Black went on to become a key political operative for progressive consultant Democracy Partners and, by extension, the Democratic National Committee and the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Democrat rapid-response man Aaron Black took credit for getting President Donald J. Trump's Chicago rally canceled after agitators sparked violence on March 11, 2016. Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

He admitted engineering violence at a planned Trump rally at the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion on March 11, 2016. The unrest led to cancellation of the event.

Black bragged about the chaos to Project Veritas.

“So the Chicago protest, when they shut all that, that was us,” Black said on an undercover video. “... None of this is supposed to come back to us, because we want it coming from people. We don’t want it to come from the party.”

Republican primary opponents and Democrats alike blamed Trump and his blunt rhetoric for the Chicago violence.

“Trump’s slogan is ‘Make America Great Again,’ but his campaign for president continues to call out dark forces that divide a polarized America,” Washington Post pundit Dan Balz opined two days after cancellation of the Chicago rally.

Those dark forces, as it turned out, were at least in part made up of Democratic agitators organized and directed by Black.

Balz’s description could just as easily apply to Black, whom one business associate described as a “master of the political dark arts.”

Black and Pelosi did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze Media.

Bird-dogging GOP candidates

In one 2016 Project Veritas video, Black said female campaign operatives would be assigned to arrive at a Trump rally seven hours early in order to gain prime positions behind the rostrum.

Using a tactic Black described as “bird-dogging,” the operatives would smuggle in provocative signs in hopes of eliciting a reaction from pro-Trump men that would be captured on video and broadcast around the world.

“The latest hidden-camera video posted by Project Veritas shows Aaron Black, an associate at the Democratic consulting firm Democracy Partners, brainstorming about how to make sure pro-Trump men bully hired female agitators,” the Washington Times reported.

“So we get people behind Trump when he’s at a rally, but we make sure it’s women and they are positioned next to men,” Black said on a Veritas video. “We want images of the men bullying the women who are trying to hold their signs up. That’s what I’m going to do. That is what we’re going to do. That is the hit.”

Black referred to himself in the videos as “deputy rapid-response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground.”

After the Veritas broadcasts, Democracy Partners founder Robert Creamer quickly tried to distance his firm from Black, whom he discounted as a “temporary regional subcontractor” who is “no longer working with us.”

Everything Black said on the videos, Creamer contended, was hypothetical and never actually took place.

If Democracy Partners separated from Black after the expose, it was not reflected on the group’s website.

The Democracy Partners staff page continued to show Black as an “associate” until January 2018, when he was elevated to a partner, according to versions of the organization’s website saved by the Wayback Machine. He remained listed as a partner until late summer 2021, according to Wayback Machine screenshots.

President Donald J. Trump speaks to a massive crowd at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. The event was organized and run by Women for America First, an organization headed by Kylie and Amy Kremer. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Creamer and Democracy Partners sued Project Veritas in 2017, alleging that the videos were deceptively edited and claiming that a Veritas source working at the consultancy violated her fiduciary duty to the company. A federal jury in Washington, D.C., sided with Democracy Partners in a 2022 trial, awarding the plaintiffs $120,000.

Black, 53, whose real name is Aaron Matthew Minter, is drawing the attention of Kremer and other officials who organized Trump’s huge Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse, previous pro-Trump rallies in November and December 2020, and a “March for Trump” bus tour just prior to Jan. 6.

Amy Kremer and her daughter Kylie, who founded and operate Women for America First, said they are concerned after discovering that some of their organizers, including Dustin Stockton, have ties to Black.

'I fell off the skateboard and I spilled my glass of wine.'

Stockton has worked with the Kremers organizing conservative events as far back as the Tea Party days in 2009-10.

Stockton said he did undercover investigations on anarchist groups for Breitbart News.

“When at Breitbart, I infiltrated Antifa group planning to violently attack the NY GOP Gala in 2016,” he told Blaze Media. “Previously, lesser investigations doing protest coverage at G20 meetings. Studied in depth their tactics and maneuvers.”

Breitbart was accused in a 2016 Politico story of coordinating with Black on coverage of his activities during the Republican primaries and in the lead-up to the violence-marred Chicago Trump rally. The news site denied any coordination and said its role was limited to news gathering.

“At no time did Breitbart News reporters or editors, including myself, tell or suggest to Black what to do — he was going to do what he was going to do — we just covered the news,” said Breitbart Washington political editor Matthew Boyle.

Stockton wrote a story for Breitbart describing Black’s appearance on the Breitbart News Saturday radio program on April 16, 2016. During the call-in program, Black suggested the possible emergence of a new political party because the established parties were not listening to the people.

On Christmas Eve 2021, Black posted a video on X showing Kylie Kremer attempting to ride a skateboard down a hotel hallway just before Jan. 6. Kremer was wearing a bathrobe and carrying a glass of champagne in one hand. She tripped and spilled some of the champagne, the video showed.

"This is @kyliejanekremer co-founder of Women for America First. Here she is drinking champagne on a skateboard at the Trump hotel on Xmas eve 2020,” Black wrote. “She was also drunk on champagne at the Willard hotel watching the January riots that she helped plan. Do you see a pattern here?”

Kremer said the X post “was an attempt to humiliate me.”

The video clip posted by Black didn’t explain that Kremer was helping Lawrence carry Christmas gifts for Stockton’s children to a hotel suite where some of the bus tour crew members were hanging out for Christmas.

Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton were dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA World” by Politico. Dustin Stockton/Facebook

“The skateboard was one of the gifts that I was riding down the hallway,” Kremer told Blaze Media. “I was in a bathrobe, a hair roller. My hair, my makeup was half done, and I was still getting ready for the evening.

“So I tripped. I mean, you shouldn't be riding a skateboard on carpet in a hotel,” she said. “So I fell off the skateboard and I spilled my glass of wine on Jen and she caught it on video. It was hilarious. We were all laughing about it. We went into the suite to tell everybody else. It was hysterical, and we continued on with our night.”

Kremer said the only way Black could have gotten the video was from Stockton or Lawrence, who shot the footage with her phone. That realization “was very uncomfortable,” Kremer said.

MORE TO COME: This is the first installment in a Blaze News series on the infiltration of Jan. 6 protests by the left.

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