Consider This from NPR - The January 6th Committee Rests Its Case For Now, And Eyes Turn to Merrick Garland

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

This week the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol wrapped up its first set of public hearings. The final hearing focused on former President Trump's actions - or lack of action - as rioters breached the Capitol.As the hearings continue, the Department of Justice is conducting its own investigation. And Attorney General Merrick Garland is under pressure from the left to bring criminal charges against Trump.We spoke to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann about the evidence that the House Select Committee has presented and what the attorney general may be considering. Weissmann was a senior prosecutor on Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A hundred eighty-seven minutes. That time span was the focus of this week's primetime January 6th committee hearing. The clock started at 1.10 p.m. when then-President Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse, having urged protesters to march to the Capitol. A hundred eighty-seven minutes later, at 4.17 p.m., Trump finally put out a video telling his supporters to go home. For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved. Not by his aides, not by his allies, not by the violent chants of rioters or the desperate pleas of those facing down the riot. That's Select Committee Chairman Benny Thompson, a Democrat. And during the hearing, two timelines unfolded in parallel. One was the situation at the Capitol.

Witnesses and video captured the chaos as the crowd closed in on lawmakers and then Vice President Mike Pence. Secret Service radio traffic and video revealed just how close the mob came to Pence. They lose the ability to leave. So if we're going to leave, we need to go in-house. They've gained access to the second floor, and I've got public about five feet from me down here below. In recorded audio, a security official in the White House complex, whose identity was hidden, said the agents feared for their lives. There were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth. It was getting, for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP details thought that this was about to get very unclean. The other timeline laid out Trump's actions or lack of action, as in this montage of interviews with staffers, including lawyer Pat Cipollone and national security advisor to the vice president, Keith Kellogg.

Are you aware of any phone call by the president of the United States to the secretary of homeland security that day? I'm not aware of that, no. Did you ever hear the vice president, or excuse me, the president ask for the national security? No. No. No. What was Trump doing? Well, witnesses told the committee that he was sitting at a table in the West Wing's private dining room watching Fox News. In live and recorded testimony, many White House staffers testified that they and members of Trump's own family urged the former president to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol. It would take probably less than 60 seconds from the Oval Office dining room over to the press briefing room. That's Sarah Matthews, former deputy press secretary and special assistant to the president.

There's a camera that is on in there at all times. And so if the president had wanted to make a statement and address the American people, he could have been on camera almost instantly. Instead, Trump tweeted. At 2.24 p.m., after the Capitol had been breached, he tweeted that Pence did not have the, quote, courage to do what should have been done. Matthew said it was like pouring gasoline on a fire.

She resigned that very evening. It was essentially him giving the green light to these people, telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol was OK, that they were justified in their anger. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a Republican on the committee, said that the president did not fail to act. He chose not to act. Because President Trump's plan for January 6th was to halt or delay

Congress's official proceeding to count the votes. The proceedings grinded to a halt when the Senate and House had to evacuate. The mob, Kinzinger said, was accomplishing Trump's purpose. The question of whether all of this amounts to a crime, whether Trump should become the first former president in U.S. history to be indicted, that question can't be decided in a hearing room on Capitol Hill, no. It is a question to be answered by the Justice Department, which has been

investigating the attack on the Capitol since January 6th itself. The investigation has been led by Attorney General Merrick Garland. No person is above the law in this country. Nothing stops us. No, I don't know how to say that again. No person is above the law in this country. I can't say it. Consider this as the January 6th committee wraps up its first phase of public hearings. All eyes are now on Merrick Garland. And it is clear that however he proceeds with the Justice Department's investigation, the consequences will be enormous for American democracy. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, July 22nd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. This week's hearing focused on 187 minutes during the attack on the Capitol. But the seven previous hearings have also made the case that January 6th was actually the culmination of a months-long conspiracy. Witnesses detailed how weeks after the election, while Trump publicly alleged voter fraud, top lawyers inside his administration told him the claims were bogus. Lawyers like then-Attorney General Bill Barr. I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that.

And it was doing a great, grave disservice to the country. State officials testify that Trump and his associates pressured them to overturn the results in their states. I said, look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it. That was Republican Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House. Biden defeated Trump in that state in 2020. Bowers and other state officials held firm. But that wasn't the only lever of power that Trump tried to pull, according to witnesses in his Justice Department. Richard Donahue, who was then the

acting Deputy Attorney General, said that Trump repeatedly urged him to investigate baseless allegations. So I felt in that conversation that was incumbent on me to make it very clear to the president what our investigations had revealed, and that we had concluded based on actual investigations, actual witness interviews, actual reviews of documents, that these allegations simply had no merit. And when Trump was told that the Justice Department can't and won't snap its fingers and change the outcome of the election? He responded very quickly and said, essentially, that's not what I'm asking you to do. What I'm just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt

and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressman. In the end, the Justice Department stood firm as well. Perhaps no one faced more pressure than Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, as we mentioned earlier, because the mob was targeting him. You can hear it in video of the rioters that played in this week's hearing. It is spread like wildfire that Pence has betrayed us and everybody is marching on the Capitol, all million of us. It's insane.

The mob was focused on Pence because of an outlandish legal theory pulled together by a Trump lawyer named John Eastman. He argued, and Trump reiterated in public and in private, that Pence had the authority to stop the electoral count on his own. It's a theory that legal scholars have called nonsense, and one that Pence rejected from the very start, according to testimony from his attorney Greg Jacob. There's just no way that the framers of the Constitution,

who divided power and authority, who separated it out, who had broken away from George III and declared him to be a tyrant, there was no way that they would have put in the hands of one person the authority to determine who was going to be president of the United States. We heard testimony from other witnesses that Trump knew members of that mob that swarmed the Capitol were armed, that he wanted to walk with the protesters to the Capitol. White House security officials were shocked, according to the staffer who testified anonymously. This was no longer a rally, that this was going to move to something else if he physically walked to the Capitol. I don't know if you want to use the word insurrection, coup, whatever. We all knew that this would move from a normal, democratic, you know, public event into something else. The Select Committee has been making its case to the American public, but that is not its

only audience. I am watching and I will be watching all the hearings. Attorney General Merrick Garland is under a tremendous amount of pressure from the left to indict former President Trump. But investigating and potentially prosecuting a former president is a weighty decision. To get a sense of how Garland might be thinking about all of this, I spoke to former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman. He has firsthand experience on a case connected to Trump. He was a senior prosecutor on Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. And he says the very first question is, is there enough evidence to even open an investigation? I do think based on the evidence that's been laid out so far by the

committee that there is ample evidence to have that thorough investigation. There clearly would be the crime of obstructing Congress as something to be investigated. I do think that the harder charge would be seditious conspiracy because that requires proving that a person was going to obstruct Congress with force, with the use of physical violence, and that there was that agreement to use physical violence. And I think that's something that could be investigated, but I think that would be a harder charge at this point. Well, we know that the Justice Department is investigating what happened on January 6th before, during and after. But when it comes to whether there is enough evidence to the president knew that violence would be used with respect to Congress, with respect to attacking the building, that that's something that was part of the plan. Not that people would be demonstrating, not that people would be carrying guns, but there was an actual plan and agreement to attack the

Capitol with violence and that the president knew that in advance. Now, the Department of Justice may get there and may be able to show that, but that's the kind of thing that if I were a juror, and certainly if I was still in the Department of Justice, I would want to know, is there that direct evidence? Are there people who can talk about the president's scheme, what was said to him, what he said in response? That would be the ideal. Well, let's say the Justice Department does determine that there is enough evidence to prosecute Trump. And I totally understand. We are operating in the land of hypotheticals right now. Then, obviously, the Attorney General Merrickland, has a huge decision on his hands, right? Because no former president has

ever faced criminal charges. Can you just talk about like, what are the risks if the attorney general were to move forward and prosecute a former president? I think the risks are further I suppose our further division of America of creating this distraction in many ways, a forum for the former president to vent his grievances and for the wounds that have been inflicted and inflamed by the former president would continue. But I think that the greater risk, in my view, if you could make the criminal case would be in not going forward. We would not be the only so-called first world country to bring charges against former leaders. That's the case in is in not going forward. In other words, if you were attorney general, you would proceed with criminal charges against a former president if the evidence was there. And if the crime were sufficiently serious and here the idea that you were able to establish that the former president engaged in a wide ranging scheme to overthrow the election and the voters choice.

It's hard to imagine a greater crime. Well, former President Trump has repeatedly cast himself as a target of the so-called deep state, as he likes to say. And I mean, yeah, in a deeply divided country, do you think prosecuting Trump would reinforce that accusation in some people's eyes that the Justice Department is not independent, it is not an entity that can remain above the fray of politics. I do think that that is a risk. But I think, unfortunately, there are some people who will think that no matter what, but I think what I would say to them is, you have to remember that the Department of Justice could decide to go forward,

but at the end of the day, the department doesn't get to decide who is guilty and goes to jail. The people do. It's 12 citizens. And that verdict would have to be unanimous. And so that is a real check on the power of the Department of Justice. That is Andrew Weissman, a former federal prosecutor and a professor of practice at NYU School of Law. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.