GOP Senate hopeful Laxalt backs House candidate who falsely claims FBI was behind Jan. 6

Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general, a pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theorist, and the current frontrunner in the GOP primary to challenge incumbent Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in November, has endorsed candidate Carolina Serrano in the Republican primary race for Nevada’s 1st Congressional District.

Serrano is notorious for pushing false conspiracy theories about the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and has called for the elimination of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice.

The right-wing Nevada Globe exclusively reported the endorsement on Tuesday. “I am honored to receive Adam Laxalt’s endorsement,” Serrano told the outlet. “Adam was committed to President Trump’s reelection in 2020, championed our Latinos for Trump efforts, and worded [sic] tirelessly after November 3rd to try and get to the bottom of what truly transpired in our elections.”

Laxalt retweeted her link to the report and message of appreciation later that day.

Serrano’s campaign website claims, “She worked on Capitol Hill briefly before leading the Hispanic outreach effort for President Donald J. Trump back in Las Vegas.” That position appears to have been a 2020 internship for Rep. John Katko (R-NY).

Serrano announced her candidacy for Congress in December by tweeting, “The Radical Left wants open borders, socialism, and to defund the police. I want the wall, freedom, and America First values in D.C.”

A review of her Twitter feed reveals a pattern of extremist positions and repeated attacks on federal law enforcement.

In October, she circulated information from Revolver, a website that traffics in conspiracy theories, and suggested that the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, during which thousands of Trump supporters illegally entered the Capitol and tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat, was really an inside job and that “the government used a fake anti-government front group to ‘attack’ itself and frame the sitting President and his supporters for the crime.”

Earlier this month, Serrano called the events a “Fedsurrection.”

Last Wednesday, she shared a tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) repeating the same false allegations that the federal government was behind the riot: “DOJ & FBI are creations of Congress. Congress has the power to dissolve them. The idea that they can choose which information to give Congress is an illusion perpetrated by them. AG Garland must answer my question: Did federal assets encourage protestors to enter the Capitol?”

“Time to dissolve them,” Serrano added.

In July, after white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes was suspended by Twitter and other platforms over bigoted and false posts, she responded by tweeting, “1964 civil rights act should be repealed.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans racial discrimination in, among other things, employment and public accommodations.

Serrano also oddly claimed on Tuesday, in yet another complaint about the federal government, “The Patriot Act was for terrorists but led to the creation of the NSA.” The National Security Agency has, in fact, been in operation since 1952, 49 years before the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act. 

A Laxalt spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

After losing the 2018 Nevada governor’s race, Laxalt joined a conservative D.C. law firm and became co-chair of Trump’s unsuccessful Nevada reelection campaign. Though President Joe Biden won decisively, Laxalt filed multiple unsuccessful lawsuits aimed at throwing out lawful votes and pushed baseless voter fraud claims.

Laxalt too has attacked the FBI and has had run-ins with the agency over a top donor’s alleged pay-to-play scheme and Laxalt’s ties to a corrupt political operative, though was not charged in either matter.

Laxalt has said little about the Jan. 6 riot, reminiscing only about “that fateful day in January when they pulled him [Trump] off of social media and pulled them off of Twitter and people felt that in their stomach, ‘Oh, my God, they can cancel a former president of the United States.'”

The Nevada Senate election in November is expected to be a competitive race.

Serrano is one of a handful of candidates running to take on Democratic Rep. Dina Titus. Under the state’s new redistricting, Nevada’s 1st Congressional District leans Democratic by 4 points more than the average U.S. House district.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.