Brooks Brothers riot

Based on Wikipedia: Brooks Brothers riot

On November 22, 2000, a mob of well-dressed men in suits and ties stormed a government building in Miami, pounding on doors, punching and kicking people, and ultimately succeeding in shutting down the democratic process inside. They weren't radicals or extremists in the traditional sense. They were Republican congressional staffers, political operatives, and lawyers—many of whom would soon be rewarded with jobs in the incoming Bush administration.

This was the Brooks Brothers riot.

The Closest Election in American History

To understand what happened that day, you need to understand just how razor-thin the 2000 presidential election was. When Americans went to bed on election night, they didn't know whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would be their next president. The outcome hinged entirely on Florida, where Bush held a lead of just 1,784 votes out of nearly six million cast.

That's a margin of about 0.03 percent.

The problems went beyond mere closeness. Florida's voting machines had produced thousands of questionable ballots—the infamous "hanging chads," those tiny pieces of paper that were supposed to be punched out completely but sometimes remained partially attached. Optical scanners couldn't read these ambiguous marks, so the machines simply didn't count those votes at all.

The Gore campaign pushed for hand recounts in several counties, arguing that human eyes could determine voter intent where machines could not. Miami-Dade County was one of those places, and local Democratic officials suspected that thousands of uncounted ballots there might swing in Gore's favor.

Setting the Stage

Miami-Dade's official canvassers—the local officials responsible for certifying election results—faced an impossible situation. A court had ordered them to complete their recount by a specific deadline, but examining each questionable ballot by hand was painstakingly slow work.

To speed things up, they made a fateful decision. Instead of recounting all the ballots, they would focus only on the 10,750 that the machines had been unable to read at all. And to work more efficiently, they moved the counting operation to a smaller room closer to the ballot-scanning equipment.

This meant moving away from where the media had been stationed. Reporters would now be restricted to observing from 25 feet away.

Republicans saw an opportunity.

The Riot

Hundreds of people descended on the Stephen P. Clark Government Center in downtown Miami. Many were local supporters, but a significant contingent consisted of Republican operatives who had been flown in specifically to oppose the recount. The Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, who witnessed the scene, described them as "50-year-old white lawyers with cell phones and Hermès ties"—a stark contrast to any grassroots uprising. Hence the name: the Brooks Brothers riot, after the upscale clothier favored by the Republican establishment.

New York Congressman John Sweeney was there, coordinating the effort. President Bush would later nickname him "Congressman Kick-Ass" for his work in Florida that day. According to multiple accounts, Sweeney gave the signal that transformed a loud protest into something more aggressive.

"Shut it down," he told an aide.

What followed was chaos. The New York Times reported that "several people were trampled, punched or kicked when protesters tried to rush the doors outside the office of the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections." Luis Rosero, an aide to the Democratic National Committee, reported being kicked and punched by rioters outside the building. Sheriff's deputies had to restore order.

Within two hours, the canvassing board voted unanimously to stop the count.

Mission Accomplished

The official justification for stopping was twofold: the process no longer appeared "open or fair," and the court deadline had become impossible to meet—in part because of the very disruption the protesters had caused. It was a neat bit of circular logic. Create chaos, then point to the chaos as a reason the process can't continue.

Sweeney later offered shifting explanations for his role. He insisted his aim wasn't to stop the recount entirely, just to restore public visibility to the process. But others were more candid about their goals.

"We were trying to stop the recount; Bush had already won," said Evilio Cepero, a reporter for WAQI, an influential Spanish-language talk radio station in Miami. "We were urging people to come downtown and support and protest this injustice."

One Republican lawyer put it bluntly: "People were pounding on the doors, but they had an absolute right to get in."

The right to get in, perhaps. But the pounding, the punching, the kicking, the trampling—these were something else entirely.

The Aftermath: A Study in Rewarding Loyalty

What happened to the rioters? Many of them received positions in the Bush administration or went on to prominent careers in Republican politics. The pattern is striking.

Joel Kaplan became a policy advisor in the Bush White House, eventually rising to become President of Global Public Policy for Meta Platforms—the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Matt Schlapp, a former congressional aide, became the White House political director and later took the helm of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the influential Conservative Political Action Conference, known as CPAC. Garry Malphrus became deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

Roger Stone was there too. Stone described himself as a "GOP Hitman" and had been a member of Richard Nixon's infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President (which earned the unfortunate acronym CREEP during the Watergate scandal). He would remain a fixture in Republican politics for the next two decades, eventually becoming a close advisor to Donald Trump before being convicted of federal crimes including witness tampering and lying to Congress. Trump pardoned him in 2020.

Both Stone and Brad Blakeman, another Republican strategist, have claimed credit for coordinating the riot from a command post. Their accounts contradict each other—a fitting coda for an event built on the strategic deployment of chaos.

Why It Matters

The Brooks Brothers riot occupies an uncomfortable place in American political memory. It wasn't quite forgotten, but it was never fully reckoned with either. Those who organized it faced no legal consequences. Those who participated were rewarded. The lesson was clear: disrupting the democratic process, if done in service of your party's interests, could be a career-enhancing move.

Compare it to what came before and after. In 1981, the Republican National Committee created something called the Ballot Security Task Force, which was accused of intimidating voters and suppressing turnout in Democratic-leaning areas of New Jersey. The tactics were different—targeted deterrence rather than outright disruption—but the goal was the same: shaping election outcomes through means that fell outside normal democratic participation.

And then there's what came after. On January 6, 2021, another mob stormed another government building to stop another count—this time the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The January 6th attack was far larger, far more violent, and resulted in deaths. But the fundamental logic was the same. If you don't like the outcome of a democratic process, use force to stop it.

The Echo in 2020

In the weeks following the 2020 election, as votes were still being counted in key states, something interesting emerged. According to conversations leaked to The Washington Post, a vice president at a political consulting firm claimed that Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar was planning a "Brooks Brothers Riot" in Arizona to disrupt vote counting there. The same consultant allegedly told a journalist working undercover to "get the Proud Boys out" for a similar action in Clark County, Nevada.

Gosar denied the allegations. But the very fact that "Brooks Brothers Riot" had become shorthand for this type of action—two decades after the original—tells you something about its place in the playbook.

The original riot lasted a few hours. Its effects lasted far longer. The Miami-Dade count never resumed. The Supreme Court eventually halted all Florida recounts in Bush v. Gore, handing the presidency to George W. Bush. We'll never know what a complete count would have shown.

Democracy and Its Discontents

There's a certain irony in the name. Brooks Brothers, founded in 1818, is one of America's oldest clothiers. It dressed Abraham Lincoln for his inauguration. It outfitted Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It was a symbol of American establishment respectability, of the kind of people who believe in institutions and norms.

And yet here were those same well-dressed establishment types, attacking the most fundamental institution of all—the counting of votes. They weren't outsiders trying to tear down a system that excluded them. They were insiders who had every advantage that system could offer, using violence to tilt the outcome further in their favor.

The suits made it more unsettling, not less. A mob in ordinary clothes is concerning. A mob in expensive ties suggests something worse: that the violence isn't impulsive or disorganized, but calculated and sanctioned from above.

Twenty years later, another mob would storm another building. Many of them wore tactical gear and carried zip ties. Some smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol. It was uglier, more chaotic, more obviously transgressive. But in a sense, the Brooks Brothers riot had already established the principle. The later violence was just a matter of degree.

The well-dressed men had shown the way.