- Newly-elected GOP Rep. Mayra Flores once called for Trump to jail Hillary Clinton.
- She also said the Jan. 6 attack "surely was caused by infiltrators," suggesting antifa was behind it.
- Flores has also shared posts appearing to promote the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Republican Rep. Mayra Flores of Texas, who was sworn in as a member of Congress on Tuesday, once called for the jailing of Hillary Clinton and spread baseless claims about both the 2020 presidential election and the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.
In a series of tweets first revealed by CNN's KFILE on Thursday, Flores used her personal Twitter account @LARepublicana86 to promote conspiracy theories and defend former President Donald Trump on the day of the Capitol attack.
"If we allow the Democrats to steal THIS election, they will steal EVERY election moving forward!" she tweeted ahead of the riot, CNN reported.
In another tweet, Flores chided Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York for calling for Trump's impeachment following the attack.
"The President has fought to the bitter end and wanted peaceful protests," she wrote. "He has now publicly condoned [sic] these violent acts that surely was caused by infiltrators."
Flores did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment on Thursday.
"Problem is I don't see no [sic] getting arrested!" Flores wrote to another Twitter user under a since-deleted tweet from Trump. "President Trump should've locked Hillary Clinton in jail!"
Many of Flores' tweets echoed common conspiracy theories that far-right influencers and right wing media pushed following the 2020 presidential election and Capitol riot. False claims that anti-fascists were behind or heavily involved in the attack on January 6 rapidly spread in conservative circles, with figures such as Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Fox News host Laura Ingraham promoting the debunked allegations.
In another tweet on January 6, 2021, Flores shared the debunked claim that Jacob Chansley, who is known as the QAnon Shaman, had attended a Black Lives Matter rally in Arizona, according to CNN. Last November, Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his participation in the riot.
Flores, who previously worked as Hispanic Outreach chair for the Hidalgo County GOP, tweeted on January 4, 2021, that "Congressional Republicans MUST stand with" Trump on January 6, when members of Congress met to certify the results of the election.
The day after the riot, she retweeted a post that claimed that police in DC had allowed crowds to enter the Capitol, CNN reported.
"This was a set up! Antifa is definitely among this crowd!!!," the tweet, sent from the conservative activist David J. Harris, read.
In November 2020, Flores tweeted support for Sidney Powell, Trump's former attorney who filed lawsuits spreading baseless claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election, calling her an "American hero," CNN reported. Powell has since continued to push unfounded allegations of election fraud and spoke at a QAnon conference in May of last year, telling a crowd that Trump "can simply be reinstated" as president.
Flores also previously deleted posts on her social media accounts in which she used hashtags to reference QAnon, the the far-right conspiracy movement centered around the baseless belief that Trump is fighting a "deep state" cabal of human traffickers and Satan-worshiping pedophile elites who secretly run the world, the media watchdog Media Matters for America previously reported.
Those social-media posts featured hashtags related to QAnon, including #q, #qanon, and #wwg1wga, the shorthand for the movement's slogan "Where we go one, we go all." In an interview with the San Antonio Express-News, Flores said she had never supported the conspiracy theory.
In the same interview, Flores broadly claimed there was voter fraud in Texas.
Flores immigrated to the US from Tamaulipas, Mexico when she was six years old, making her the first member of Congress to be born in Mexico. She last week won a special election to serve out the rest of Rep. Filemon Vela's term, which ends in January. Vela resigned from Congress earlier this year to join a law and lobbying firm in Washington.