Jenna Ellis, former senior legal adviser to Donald Trump, has attracted furious backlash after her hateful commentary about the mass shooting Saturday at the Club Q gay nightclub in Colorado.
Five people died and at least 18 others were injured in the attack in Colorado Springs, which came amid a campaign by conservative media and politicians to demonize trans people and drag queens and pass hostile legislation targeting the LGBTQ community as a whole. The fear campaign has coincided with a spike in anti-LGBTQ harassment, threats and violence. The suspect in the killings faces murder and hate crime charges.
In an episode of her podcast this week, Ellis suggested that the victims of the shooting would suffer “eternal damnation” because they weren’t, in her eyes, Christian.
“Even more tragic than untimely death, is that the five people who were killed in the nightclub that night, there is no evidence at all that they were Christians,” the far-right attorney said. “And so assuming that they had not accepted the truth of the Gospel of Christ and affirmed Jesus Christ as the lord of their life, they are now reaping the consequences of having eternal damnation.”
Ellis, also a right-wing media pundit, played a top role in Trump’s failed legal push to overturn the 2020 presidential election and most recently worked as a legal adviser to extremist Republican gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who lost. Her history of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric dates back years.
In one 2017 Facebook post recorded by Media Matters, for example, she wrote: “Whether or not homosexuals are nice, wise people, or misunderstood, or mean is not the issue. … Sin is always sin, even if nice people commit it.”
And after the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were killed and 53 wounded, she voiced her disappointment that “conservatives are acquiescing to the LGBT agenda.”
“The Orlando shooting was absolutely terrible and tragic. But the response to this tragedy should not be embracing and advocating for gay rights,” she said after the deadly attack on the gay nightclub.
Earlier this week, she criticized the Colorado Springs Police Department because it included each of the Club Q victims’ pronouns when sharing their identities.
In the wake of the attack, right-wing figures have rebuffed accusations that their rhetoric helped create the environment for anti-LGBTQ violence, instead accusing critics of “politicizing” the tragedy and doubling down on their false narratives vilifying the community and its allies.
Ellis met fierce condemnation online Wednesday after clips of her Club Q commentary circulated.
The investigation, prompted by a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, began early last year. During that call, Trump suggested Raffensperger could “find” the votes to overturn his narrow election loss in the state. It has become clear since the special grand jury was seated in May that the focus of the investigation extends well beyond that call.
Willis last month filed petitions with the judge overseeing the special grand jury seeking to compel testimony from seven Trump associates and advisers, including Ellis, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Because they don’t live in Georgia, she had to use a process that involves getting a judge in the state where they’re located to order them to appear before the special grand jury in Atlanta.
Giuliani, who’s been notified he’s a target of the investigation, is set to testify before the special grand jury on Wednesday. Graham’s subpoena orders him to testify on Aug. 23, but he has said he’ll appeal a judge’s Monday order declining to quash his subpoena.
Ellis appeared with Giuliani at a Dec. 3, 2020, state Senate committee hearing at the Georgia Capitol during which false allegations of election fraud were made, Willis wrote. She also wrote at least two legal memos to Trump and his attorneys advising that then-Vice President Mike Pence should “disregard certified electoral college votes from Georgia and other purportedly ‘contested’ states” when Congress met to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, the petition says.
Evidence shows that Ellis’s actions were “part of a multi-state, coordinated plan by the Trump Campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere,” Willis wrote.
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