- Quinn Mitchell is an aspiring journalist known for facing off against Ron DeSantis.
- The governor gave an uncomfortable response and avoided answering Mitchell's question in June.
The 15-year-old aspiring journalist Quinn Mitchell, known for his pointed questioning of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, was thrown out of a Republican Party event by police on Friday, the Boston Globe first reported.
Mitchell, a political enthusiast, was escorted out of the First in the Nation Leadership Summit in Nashua, New Hampshire (NH).
He had gained notoriety after he asked DeSantis at a June town hall in Hollis, NH, if he believed "that Trump violated the peaceful transfer of power, a key principle of American democracy that we must uphold?"
The question provoked the governor's uncomfortable, evasive response, and the encounter garnered much attention online.
In a separate incident at a July 4 parade, Mitchell told CNN that he was subjected to "physical intimidation" by some members of DeSantis' security team.
He added that he thought it was a "restriction of free speech" and that it was "very concerning they're willing to go to that extent to just shut down a very simple question about January 6."
Despite becoming somewhat accustomed to such steely responses, Mitchell did not expect to be thrown out of Friday's event.
"I knew that DeSantis was gonna speak there," Mitchell said in a podcast episode where he went through the events of that day. "So I knew there might be some 'never back down' people who knew who I was."
At the event, a woman he didn't know approached him and said: "I know who you are. You're a tracker" — someone who closely follows and records political opponents.
He said she took him to a room where another man accused him of lying about who he was and said that he had "misrepresented" himself.
He was then removed from the Sheraton Nashua hotel by security and local police officers.
—Quinn Mitchell (@intothetussle) October 13, 2023
Jimmy Thompson, a spokesperson for the New Hampshire Republican Party, said that Mitchell's ejection from the event had been a mistake, The New York Times reported.
"During the course of the two-day event, an overzealous volunteer mistakenly made the decision to have Quinn removed from the event, thinking he was a Democrat tracker," Thompson wrote in a text message on Saturday, per The Times.
"Once the incident came to our staff's attention, NHGOP let him back into the event, where he was free to enjoy the rest of the summit," he added.
The Florida Governor's communications office has yet to reply to a request for comment from Insider, which was made outside regular working hours.