After Vanity Fair reported that a group that included wealthy and prominent Memphians flew a private jet to Washington, D.C., to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, a deluge of tips and responses flooded this reporter’s inbox. Among them was the name of a previously unidentified passenger on the jet as well as an additional photograph that seems to place the group advancing toward the Capitol after the rally.
In the days following the riot, screenshots of a since-deleted photo posted to the Instagram account of George Zanone III were shared within the cloistered world of white Memphis society. Featured in that photograph were Zanone, John Hull Dobbs Jr., Carter Campbell, brothers Dan and Bob McEwan, Vince Smith and his wife, Kaki Valerius Smith, and, Vanity Fair can now identify, Timothy Curran. The photograph shows the eight posed by the nose of a private jet, with a location tag of Washington, D.C., and the caption “Go follow @memphispatriots.” (Zanone died unexpectedly on February 26.)
Within hours of Vanity Fair publishing an in-depth story about the group and their trip to the nation’s capital, a source shared a screenshot of another photograph posted to the deactivated @memphispatriots Instagram account. The screenshot shows the account avatar to be the original private-jet photograph. The new photo is of a sea of individuals, dotted with Trump flags and red “Make America Great Again” hats. The photo’s geotag is “Capitol Hill” and includes the caption “Walking towards Capitol Hill.” Vanity Fair has both photographs.
A number of individuals reached out to Vanity Fair to identify Curran. Google search results for “Timothy Curran” reveal a LinkedIn account that lists Raymond James—the investment firm where Bob McEwan also works—as his employer, though the account is no longer active. Photos posted to a public Facebook account that appears to belong to Curran feature him with Dobbs; one photo shows the two men and others behind a pile of dead mallards. (Raymond James did not respond to a request for comment. Dobbs, Campbell, Curran, the Smiths, and the McEwan brothers did not respond to a Vanity Fair request for comment.)
When Vanity Fair sought comment from the individuals in the photograph last week, none responded to confirm their attendance at the rally or to the question of whether they had approached or entered the Capitol on January 6. But according to flight data and plane-registration information, an eight-seat Bombardier Challenger 300 jet registered to Baron Partners—a limited liability company that shares the same address with Dobbs’s eponymous investment firm, Dobbs Equity Partners—took off from Memphis International Airport on the afternoon of January 5 and landed at Dulles, just outside of Washington, a little over an hour and a half later. On January 6, that same jet took off from Dulles roughly an hour after the sergeant at arms informed lawmakers that the Capitol was secure. It touched down in Memphis at 7:25 p.m., back in central time. When Vanity Fair reached Dobbs by phone, he denied knowledge of the “Stop the Steal” rally. “I don’t know anything about a rally like that,” he said. But after ending the conversation, Dobbs did not hang up his phone for several minutes, during which time he was heard discussing the call with Vanity Fair and seemed to indicate that he misled the outlet. Dobbs said, “Well, I told ’em, I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughs.] You must be talking about my dad or something.” Then, “God, the last thing I want to do is talk to them.”
According to a Capitol Police spokesperson, roughly 20,000 people were screened by the Secret Service at the Ellipse, where President Donald Trump held his “Stop the Steal” rally, and another approximately 10,000 to 15,000 people were estimated to be outside the metal detectors at the park, which is less than two miles from the Capitol building. Per the spokesperson, the latest official count of the number of people believed to have breached the barriers and entered the U.S. Capitol was approximately 800 people. (Vanity Fair does not have evidence to suggest that the group was involved in the Capitol attack. When asked whether the FBI could provide comment on whether Dobbs, Campbell, Curran, the Smiths, and the McEwans have been tied to or are under investigation for the Capitol breach on January 6, a spokesperson said, “We cannot comment on any of the names” that Vanity Fair provided.)
The attendance of this jet-setting group of Memphians pierces the inflated narrative that “economic anxiety” is a driving force behind Trump’s base of support. “It goes to show—and more so than anything about Memphis—how the Big Lie that Trump put out there didn’t just appeal to people who were middle income and lower or lesser education.… This Big Lie attracted people that were well educated and have high-income economic status. And I think that was true throughout the country,” Congressman Steve Cohen, who represents Memphis’s district, told Vanity Fair in an interview on Monday. “It was an insurrection, it was a seditious effort to take over the government and manipulate the process so that the people’s will wouldn’t be heard through the Electoral College.”