In a Facebook post from January, Jaqueline Anderson, First Vice Chair of the Mesa County Republican Party, encouraged her followers to identify as Three Percenters, a designation coined in 2008 for members of the far right sympathetic to militia ideology, and committed to opposing what they perceive as tyranny and suppression of individual, God-granted rights.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Three Percenters represent a range of loose ideological affiliations which can encompass everything from benign networks to radicalized criminal movements, including Second Amendment and Tea Party activism, anti-government extremism, militias, white supremacy, opposition to leftist and Antifa activism, and anti-immigrant vigilante enforcers.
The Colorado contingent of Threepers, as they’re sometimes called, has risen in visibility in the past decade, coinciding with the presidential terms of Barack Obama, whom they opposed, and Donald Trump, whom they enthusiastically endorsed.
Anderson’s husband, Cory, is an avowed 3%er supporter and former head of Bikers For Trump, which has provided security services at rallies for conservative causes, petition drives to recall Governor Jared Polis, and events for U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO). He is also the Security & Field Lead for U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP), whose mission is to expose election fraud that they believe was committed in the 2020 presidential election in Colorado, but which has never been substantiated.
Cory Anderson has led the voter verification canvassing effort in Mesa County on the Western Slope, where USEIP members knock on resident’s doors to “expose citizens to the fraud … and confirming phantom voters.” The group, which has given joint presentations with Colorado Republican party, has intimated at organizing armed members to provide security for canvassers. USEIP is now exporting their “voter verification” canvassing model to other states.
As a local party vice chair, Jaqueline Anderson joins the statewide chairwoman of the GOP, Kristi Burton Brown, as party leaders with connections to militia ideologies and groups. While serving as Colorado vice chair and before being elected as Chairwoman of the state GOP, Burton Brown served as president of FEC United. That group is affiliated with former Benghazi security contractor John Tiegan’s militia group, United American Defense Force. Both groups organized the “Patriot Muster” last year in Denver’s Civic Center Park which ended with the fatal shooting of one participant.
FEC United was founded by Joe Oltmann, the Colorado tech CEO, conservative podcaster, and purveyor of Big Lie conspiracies who pushed unfounded allegations of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and who is currently being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems and Eric Coomer, a former Dominion employee.
The Andersons are personal friends and political allies with Boebert and disgraced Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. They accompanied Peters on My Pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell’s private jet to his Cyber Symposium, a three-day election fraud conspiracy conference held in South Dakota last August.
Boebert has also posed with pictures with the Andersons, with Cory sporting Three Percenter insignia,
Other Three Percenters have made the news in Colorado, as well.
In January of this year, just a week before Anderson’s post on social media, Robert Gieswein, a III%er from Woodland Park was charged by federal law enforcement for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the nation’s Capitol in Washington D.C..
In photographs, Gieswein, armed with a bat and mace, can be seen pushing past barriers and confronting Capitol police in the building, along with other rioters wanted by the FBI. According to The Daily Beast, he is charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, depredation of U.S. property, obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering a restricted building with the intent to impede official functions.”
Following his arrest, an image surfaced of Gieswein posing with other Three Percenters outside Boebert’s Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado, flashing hand signs to represent the group.
