>Ezra A. Cohen@EzraACohen
“It’s clear that the QAnon conspiracy was a core of what was going on at the Capitol and I want to do everything I can to delegitimize this conspiracy,” Cohen, 34, told POLITICO in an interview. “The country deserved better on Jan. 6 — what transpired was appalling and completely at odds with our democratic principles.”
Asked about the violence at the Capitol, as well as the role that Trump played in stoking it through his speech that day and the conspiracy talk he fomented in the weeks after the election, Cohen said: “The administration should have crushed this QAnon stuff as soon as it materialized.”
In his first public comments on his ordeal, Cohen detailed a nightmarish, two-year-long fight to extricate himself from the QAnon saga. He said he’s speaking out now because he is again a private citizen, wrapping up his service as a Trump appointee at the Pentagon, and because he is outraged over the tragic events of Jan. 6.
Cohen described being caught in a kind of ideological tag team as early speculation by right-wing QAnon followers that that he was Q evolved into left-wing obsession with proving that he was the fraudster behind the postings, in order to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of a top Trump administration official.
The rumors eventually began to seep into his real-life world. He recalls being approached at a pre-Covid cocktail party in D.C. “Someone came up to me and said, whispering, ‘Are you QAnon?’” he said, calling the incident disturbing.
Online, Cohen faced a slew of social media accounts falsely purporting to be him, tweeting out cryptic messages to QAnon followers. He said Twitter was slow to address the problem.
“Twitter did a horrible job of responding to this,” Cohen said. “Twitter is getting very aggressive about the QAnon stuff now. But for a very long time they allowed this to fester. And it’s not like they didn’t know about it — we reported it to them.”
Cohen became so concerned about the proliferation of accounts suggesting links to him that he hired Washington-based lawyer Mark Zaid to investigate and push social media sites to shut them down.
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