Jan. 6 and the Future of Democracy

- The Capitol attack, one year later.

- We're not gonna take it anymore!

- We're gonna walk down to the Capitol.

- [Yamiche] We remember the deadly insurrection.

- How the blank could something like this happen?

Is this America?

- President Trump was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office watching on television.

- [Yamiche] Look at the lies that fueled the assault.

- The big lie has driven states across the country to enact new laws to make it harder for people to vote.

- [Yamiche] And continue today.

- Those involved must be held accountable.

- [Yamiche] Plus.

- So at this moment, we must decide, what kind of nation are we going to be?

- [Yamiche] Can the great American experiment endure?

Next.

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Once again from Washington, Moderator Yamiche Alcindor.

- Good evening, and welcome to "Washington Week."

It's been one year and one day since the January 6th Capitol attack.

Washington remains deeply scarred by the attempted coup, and so many in the nation remained rocked by bitter enduring partisanship.

Over the past year, former President Trump has continued to spread lies about the 2020 election.

On Thursday, on the anniversary of the violence, President Biden addressed the nation from Statuary Hall in the Capitol, the scene of the crime.

- The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election.

You can't love your country only when you win.

You can't obey the law only when it's convenient.

You can't be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.

- In a statement, former President Trump responded that President Biden was engaged in, quote, "Political theater."

Trump also wrote, quote, "The Democrats want to own this day of January 6th so they can stoke fears and divide America."

Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the committee investigating January 6th, called out her Republican colleagues for downplaying the riot.

Trump loyalistS, though, Representatives Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly fired back.

- They ought to ashamed of themselves.

And history is watching and history will judge them.

- We're ashamed of nothing.

- Seize the day.

Seize the day.

- We're proud of the work that we did on January 6th- - That's right.

- To make legitimate arguments about election integrity.

- Tonight, joining me are four reporters who wrote the first draft of this chapter of American history.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is the White House correspondent for the "New York Times."

Carol Leonnig, a "Washington Post" investigative reporter, she's the co-author of the book "I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year."

Ryan J. Reilly, a senior justice reporter for "HuffPost," is also working on a book about the January 6th insurrection.

And Jake Sherman, founder of the political newsletter, "Punchbowl News," and co-author of the book "The Hill to Die On."

Thank you so much, all of you, for joining us remotely as we continue to deal with the pandemic.

Jake, I wanna start first with you.

You were there at the Capitol.

You saw the insurrectionists, the rioters break into the Capitol.

What sticks with you about that day?

And also talk about the lingering trauma that is impacting people who work in that building, lawmakers and staffers, and, of course, reporters.

- Well, Yamiche, I'll start with your second question, which I think is the most important one, which it's important to keep in mind that tens of thousands of people come into the Capitol every day.

Many of them are not political people.

Many of them are construction workers, electricians, plumbers, lawyers, clerks, all sorts of people who have nothing to do with politics.

And those people did not, not that anyone asked for this, but they have nothing to do with politics so they especially didn't ask for something like this.

And I think a lot of those folks, police officers included, I don't wanna disclude police officers here, they are particularly scarred, I would say.

And I think a lot of the press corps, a lot of my colleagues, a lot of our colleagues, Yamiche, people that all of us on this panel know quite well are very scarred by the incident.

The Capitol is the citadel of democracy, Yamiche.

You know that and you covered it.

We've all covered it at different times in our career, I've just never been able to escape it.

And I think that it's something that will linger with the institution for a long time.

I mean, I'll never forget just the sense of security that I had in the building, a building that I've worked in for almost 15 years, 12 years has been completely pierced.

I used to say to people that the Capitol is a safe place, don't worry about me.

And I no longer can really say that, because I don't have any evidence that that's the case anymore.

Now the building is safe, but still, that veil of security that we all had is gone.

And I think, listen, I think that we're in an unusual and an unusually dangerous time in our politics, and especially our legislative politics.

And I think a lot of that is a fallout from January 6th.

And I think the thing that stuck with me about this week is that the Republicans really seated the stage to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, two people, two relatively new members of Congress whose views are, I would say, not representative of everybody in the conference, but Kevin McCarthy didn't even issue a statement on January 6th, he wasn't in the building.

Mitch McConnell was at a funeral, his former colleague, Johnny Isakson.

So, listen, it's a very difficult day, but Republicans didn't really acquit themselves well on January 6th.

- Yeah, and as you said, it's an unusually dangerous time.

Carol.

I wanna come to you.

You began immediately reporting about how the rioters broke in, the security issues.

What have we learned about the possible role of lawmakers, the former President Trump, what role they could have played in all of this sort of this attack and its breach of security?

- That's right, I immediately began getting texts from of all my law enforcement sources that day.

I was actually on leave, book leave, ironically, and immediately, obviously, had to come off leave.

One of the texts that that sort of jolted me was, "Carol, call me right now.

Shots fired in the Capitol."

I really had no idea.

What we've learned in the year since, Yamiche, was just so important, so much, first through great reporting by all of the people on your panel, great book reporting, great investigative work that has uncovered things that the January 6th committee is now concretizing and corroborating.

They are making it admissible evidence, essentially.

And so is the FBI.

Here are some things we learned: Donald Trump was sitting on his hands for more than two and a half hours, watching, at first, gleefully, as his supporters broke through a police line, as they took bear spray and two-way radios and other weapons and began tromping through police and attacking them and moving on to the Capitol.

His only reaction of concern came when he realized things had gotten very, very violent and shots had been fired.

Those were the shots of a Capitol police uniform officer shooting a woman who was breaking through the glass into Speaker Pelosi's lobby when Speaker Pelosi was still right behind that glass.

That's when President Trump became concerned that this didn't look so good.

Now we know multiple lawmakers who say, "This was just a tourist holiday, this was just a calm group of people who wanted to support the president and wanted to defend democracy, it wasn't violent," now we know all of them were quietly, privately texting President Trump's chief of staff begging him to get the president to call off the dogs, telling him things had gone too far and that the violence was frightening the lawmakers who literally were running for their lives.

We've also learned that close allies of President Trump's were in contact with some of the people who are charged with the most grievous events on this day, conspiracy.

- And- - Go ahead.

- Well, I just wanna go quickly to Zolan, and we're gonna talk about, of course, about sort of the GOP and the shifting tone there.

But, Zolan, really quickly, President Biden came out, a forceful rebuke of President Trump.

He used words like defeat and loss and failure.

What are you hearing from the White House about the decision to do that, and also, the action moving forward?

- Well, what we saw yesterday was a shift, but the president, since he's come into office, he has condemned what happened on January 6th.

He has criticized the policies of his predecessor, but it was just last month that the White House press secretary, when pressed on why they didn't respond to each of the statements of misinformation coming from the former president, said that they didn't want to provide them a platform.

They want to focus on the president's agenda.

The president came in and was focused on unity and calculated in a way that, with a return to normalcy, that the divisions that Trump stoked and Trump would fade away.

Well, it didn't happen.

Those divisions are still throughout the United States of America, from the halls of Congress to school board meetings.

So there was a decision made yesterday by the White House and by the president who was involved in that speech yesterday.

And what he was basically saying to his team is he didn't just want to be about criticizing the mob that stormed the Capitol, but also specifically those that enabled the mob to storm the Capitol, and specifically former President Trump.

And that's what you saw yesterday.

Now, in terms of what we see going forward, you know, I've talked to folks that have said when it comes to this topic, you may hear that tone, but whether or not we're gonna hear it in other areas, whether or not you can expect them to continue to respond to each and every written statement that comes from the former president, I don't know about that at this point.

- Yeah, yeah.

And I wanna turn now to, of course, the Republican attempts to whitewash January 6th, some that we already touched on, in some ways.

There's been a significant shift in tone among the GOP as time has passed.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was personally targeted during the attack, has sought to downplay it.

Here's what he said on that day and what he said more recently.

- And as we reconvene in this chamber, the world will again witness the resilience and strength of our democracy, for even in the wake of unprecedented violence and vandalism.

I know the media wants to distract from the Biden Administration's failed agenda by focusing on one day in January.

- And, Ryan, I wanna come to you.

You love the Capitol, you shared some moving photos of the Capitol after this attack because you wanted to go visit, and you said, "See what these people had done to the headquarters of Congress."

Talk a bit about what you hear from your sources about this shift in messaging, though, of the GOP, and really, frankly, the fear that a lot of these lawmakers have of the former President Trump and wanting to stay in his good graces.

- Yeah, you know, I think that everyone's sort of going around what the facts of the case were.

That day, there was this more unison about what indeed happened on January 6th, but that has really shifted over time.

And I think as these cases go forward, as this FBI investigation moves forward, what you're gonna see for the next two years and three years, four years, even five years is this constant drum beat of cases that remind us of what happened that day and remind us of what it was inspired by.

Robert Scott Palmer, who has been sentenced to the longest sentence in connection with the January 6th attack thus far, he was a really big Trump supporter.

And we called him 12 days after, he was arrested 12 days after we contacted him back in March.

And, you know, you can look through his Facebook feed and it's everything you would expect, someone who stormed the US Capitol because they believe the lies about the stolen election to believe.

It was just like, it was textbook, right?

Everything in there was exactly what you would expect someone would be sharing.

And he's someone who went up and then he used a fire extinguisher on police as they were under attack.

He sprayed them with it, and then he chucked that at police.

And that's what he did because he thought the election was stolen.

And I think that that's gonna be, going forward, what the narrative is gonna be, this constant reminder, and a political inconvenience for Republicans to be reminded that this is what those lies did.

- This is what these lies did.

And while some 700 people have been charged, that's only a fraction of the people who were involved in the attack that day.

Jake, there of course is this January 6th investigation going on with lawmakers.

What's coming next on that front?

And I wonder where, in some ways, where this might be heading, past the report that's supposed to be out, I think before the November midterms, is there anything else that we expect to come out of this?

- Well, we expect public hearings in the next, let's call it two to three months.

And it'll be interesting to see how they structure those public hearings, who they get to testify, what kind of case they try to build publicly about that day in the Capitol.

There's a couple things to point out here, Yamiche, number one, a lot of hay and a lot of news is being made about the people who are subpoenaed, who have been subpoenaed and compelled to testify to the committee and speak to the committee.

But the larger point here is, the White House, the Trump White House has several people, many former aides to Donald Trump are participating in this investigation and helping the committee kind of chart out what was going on that day behind the scenes.

And a lot us have reported that Donald Trump was watching TV and kind of, I don't know about enjoying, but taking in the scenes, let's say.

They'll need a little bit more than that.

And I think that they have a lot more than that.

I think Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, the top two lawmakers on this committee, have a good deal of information about what Donald Trump was doing that day and what was going on in the Capitol, what Mark Meadows was up to.

They have text messages that Mark Meadows turned over to the committee before he stopped participating.

So I think you'll see two things.

I think you'll see some sort of interim report in the next five months.

And I think in the next seven to nine months you'll see a larger report about what they know about that day.

And, again, there's not a ton.

I mean, we overcomplicate this a little bit.

There's not a ton of ambiguity here on the basic facts of the case.

Donald Trump had a rally at the White House.

He spoke.

He told people to go to the Capitol.

He previously said, "Get wild."

People went to the Capitol and got wild.

It drives me absolutely crazy when people say it was tourists and they were behaving and it was calm.

I was there.

They weren't behaving.

they weren't tourists, and they weren't calm.

I mean, it's complete nonsense.

And getting into some of the funding streams, who knew about this?

Who in when the government was talking to these folks?

I mean, you look at these images, I've been working in the Capitol every day of my life for 12 years, I've never seen tourists break through windows on the west front where that is.

I mean, I know exactly where that is.

This is a main hallway on the first floor of the Senate side of the Capitol.

It's just astounding that people could be so stupid to say that it was calm and it was tourists.

It's almost laughable.

- Yeah, and Zolan, something that sticks out to people, of course, is how this group of people were treated versus Black Lives Matter protesters.

Talk a little bit about what we've learned about who these people are, the DOJ's plans to try to hold this majority white crowd of rioters responsible for this and how that is, in some ways, informing how they may interact with protesters in the future when we think about Black Lives Matter protestors who have been met with violence at times for protesting peacefully.

- No, absolutely.

I just wanna also say, the point Jake just made as well about some of the misinformation around that day, also a direct factor in the speech that you saw yesterday from the president as well, fueling some of the frustration in the White House just around some of the whitewashing that has been done about that day.

But in terms of the juxtaposition around the treatment as well, absolutely.

Look, I was there.

I covered most of the protests throughout last year in Washington.

I was there in June when, you know, the former president took a photo op and had rows of federal agents, whether it be Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Protection, HSI, I mean, there was a alphabet soup of federal agencies that were deployed for Black Lives Matter protesters last year.

I remember when a Black Hawk helicopter, when I looked up and saw it in downtown Washington.

Here, however, you had a different situation.

That day, January 6th now we're talking about, exposed, one, intelligence failures.

There was a glaring lack, the reporting has shown, lack of preparation, as well.

And you can notice that.

And now, with the committee investigation coming out, you're starting to see what, or you're starting to see some of the evidence around the disparate treatment of those two groups.

You can point to some of the emails that the committee did get from Mark Meadows messaging and organizer that was there on January 5th, I wanna make the distinction between the 5th and the 6th, but sending an email saying, "Look, the National Guard will be there, you know, to protect pro-Trump people as well."

You should also remember that, earlier, when it came to Black Lives Matter protesters, that aligned with the former president also trying to align his reelection campaign with being the law and order president, to crack down on any sort of disorder as well, even if he was conflating peaceful protesters with those that were actually committing any sort of crime.

So there's more and more evidence coming out of that disparate treatment.

- Yeah, and Ryan, you've been looking into the online sleuths that have been turning a lot of these rioters into the FBI.

Talk a little bit about their work and who the average rioter we've learned is.

- Yeah, I mean, they've really done an impressive work of sort of putting the pieces of this puzzle together.

Some of these affidavits that we see come out for the FBI were essentially ghostwritten by average Americans who put together all of these, information from the internet, essentially open-source dossiers to be able to make really rock-solid cases against a number of these defendants.

Some of them it's pretty easy because they, you know, put everything out on social media.

But a lot of this, there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes there.

And you were putting some images up earlier about the attack.

And when I look at those, I see a number of people who haven't been charged yet.

Some of them in that crowd have been identified, dozens, in fact, who are on the FBI's list have been solidly identified by sleuths, but haven't yet been arrested.

So there's a really long path ahead on these cases.

And then you talk about just the people who went inside the Capitol building that day, the total universe there is almost at 2,400 at this point.

So the total spectrum of cases we could see is around 3,000.

So that's really what the FBI is measuring against when they talk about these 700 arrests we've seen so far.

3,000 is the total number here.

So, again, a really long pathway ahead here.

- That is incredible how many people still have not been charged or have been held accountable.

I also wanna turn out to talk about sort of the future of democracy and voting, frankly.

A new poll found that, a year out of the attack, 64% of Americans across party lines believe that our democracy is at risk of failing.

In at least 19 states, Republicans have passed laws that will restrict voting.

In response, democrats in Congress, including Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, are trying to pass laws that they say will protect voting rights.

Here's what he had to say on Tuesday.

- Our democracy is imperiled, and time is running out.

This is a moral moment.

And if we fail to protect the voices and the votes of the American people, then we have fallen way short of our responsibility as members of this body.

- Carol, you of course have been doing so much work on the people who have been working on the sort of behind the scenes move and the GOP movement to restrict voting.

Talk about that, but also, you told our producers that you're genuinely worried about democracy in America.

- I think that Warnock has it exactly right, that democracy is imperiled.

You know, as journalists, what are we looking for?

We're looking to see where we should skate to, where the puck is going to be.

We're not following the puck and chasing it.

We want to get to where the puck is on the hockey field.

Well, the puck right now, in my view, is all of the elections that are gonna be held in 2022, where we're going to have midterms, in which I would guess an estimate based on the rhetoric, a lot of Republican officials at every level of the game, from dog catcher to, you know, senator, they're going to be saying, "Wait a minute, my election was rigged.

It wasn't properly handled.

The votes were stolen, and now I am refusing to accept this results."

Imagine that, Yamiche, happening in multiple states with multiple people.

As I said once before, there aren't enough sandbags to sort of stop and stanch that flood.

And it will begin to unravel what is the core of democracy, us believing that volunteers who man these locations, career officials in counties and states who are hired experts in elections, that these individuals are not to be trusted to manage an election and do it fairly.

Chris Krebs, who was, at DHS, responsible during Donald Trump's presidency for overseeing improper interference in the election made it clear that all of the conspiracy theories that were floating around after the November election were BS.

And he made it clear that that, not only did he just think that, they had drilled down to monitor the election and determined, palpably, demonstrably, that all those theories were false.

But here we are, Yamiche, per your great question, facing a fall when we could have a lot of, basically, miniature Trump moments, a lot of January 6th moments.

- Yeah, yeah.

And, Ryan, I have about a minute left.

I'm gonna try to split it between you and Jake so I'm gonna give you 30 seconds.

She said, Carol just talked about miniature Trumps.

At least 57 people, according to Politico, who played a role in January 6th are now running for office.

What's that say about where we are and the state of things?

- Yeah, I mean, Yamiche, it is incredible.

I think of Mellissa Carone, who actually was parodied on SNL and was beside Rudy Giuliani, she's running for office.

It doesn't seem to be a setback, you know?

Endorsing these lies and just spreading these lies across the country hasn't been a setback, unfortunately, in the Republican party because so many people believe them.

It's really frustrating, both about the lies about the stolen election and now the lies that we're seeing about January 6th itself.

- And Jake 10 seconds.

This is an easy question for you.

What is the likelihood that voting rights will be passed, that the filibuster will somehow be blown up or at least carved out for there to be some sort of voting rights issue passed?

- Minuscule, probably not gonna happen.

- Probably not gonna happen.

Well, you answered it in the two words which gave us a little bit of time, but thank you so much to all of you.

We'll have to leave it there tonight.

Thank you to Zolan and to Carol, to Ryan and Jake for sharing your reporting.

We will continue our conversation on the January 6th Capitol attack on the "Washington Week Extra."

Find it on our website, Facebook and YouTube.

And also, tune in to the "PBS NewsHour" on Monday for a look at a new effort to bridge the nation's political divide.

And finally, one year later, I wanna say my heart goes out to all of those people around the country who are still dealing with the trauma and pain of that day.

It's up to all of us, of course, to protect democracy going forward.

Thank you for joining us.

I'm Yamiche Alcindor.

Goodnight from Washington.

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