A Jan. 6 attendee’s election speaks to Illinois GOP’s last stand in Will County
When the Will County Board decided to send four of its members to the National Association of Counties’ legislative conference in Washington this past February, the contingent included new Republican board member Daniel Butler of Frankfort.
The taxpayer-funded trip for the conference, which featured panels on federal policy headlined by a speech from President Joe Biden, wasn’t Butler’s first time to the nation’s capital.
Little more than two years earlier, prior to being elected to office, Butler was in Washington attending then-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally. Butler joined the march to the U.S. Capitol but he was not charged and he said he did not enter the building as insurgents staged a deadly insurrection in a failed attempt to stop the counting of Electoral College votes that made Biden the nation’s president.
Displaying a long history on social media of propagating elaborate and widely debunked conspiracy theories — ranging from pandemic vaccines linked with computer chip technology to a QAnon-backed tale contending Italian satellites were used in 2020 to switch votes from Trump to Biden — Butler won a seat on the Will County Board on Nov. 8.
Butler’s election was assisted by more than $3,300 worth of campaign mailings paid by the Illinois Republican Party. The Illinois GOP
