The Dispatch Podcast - Investigating January 6th

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Tom Joscelyn joins Steve Hayes to talk about his time on the January 6th Select Committee and what all goes into a congressional investigation. Long-time Dispatch subscribers may know Joscelyn from his newsletter Vital Interests. Join the two as they break down the main characters behind the event and the GOP's attempt at a clean-up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by Tom Jocelyn, former professional senior staff member on the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Dispatch members know Tom as the longtime author of the Vital Interest Newsletter, which he left to take this position on the committee. We're happy to have him back to talk about the committee, to talk about political violence in America today, and to talk about what we should think about the continued conspiracies around the January 6th attack. Tom, welcome back to the dispatch podcast. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. Did you miss us?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I missed. I missed. No. I missed. I I miss being a marginal public figure who can speak in his own voice, have done different issues, sure. And I missed working with the team of the dispatch and to do that, you know, and talking to you guys, you know, about different issues. Sure, I absolutely missed that. Okay, I was hoping to get you to go real sentimental and mushy here right from the, right from the get-go.

Yeah, that's not me, you know. That was never going to happen. Let me start big picture. I've got a million questions that I want to ask you. I'm sure our listeners will too, and I'll try to sort of be a stand-in for them. So you spent better part of a year, more than a year, working on the January 6th committee. 11 months. 11 months, okay.

What was your job and what was your day-to-day like? Well, how did you spend all day every day as a professional staff or senior? your professional staff are on the committee. Yeah, I was one of the more senior professional staff members on the January 6th Select Committee. I spent most of my time, most of my days going through the evidence collected by the investigative teams, meaning depositions, you know, transcripts of the depositions, exhibits of the depositions, you know, all sorts of other evidence, including video, going through video, which there was a lot of people on the team who went through video.

We could talk about that because that's a hot topic. But, you know, basically just going through and doing my nerd thing, you know, which is there's more than 1,000 witnesses. There's all these documents and all this evidence and what does it add up to? What does it show? And just basically trying to figure that out on a day-to-day basis. In our experience, all the time I've known you now, which is more than two decades, the thing that you've been able to do is, if you think of the scenes from, from a movie where some sort of crazy person or investigator has, you know, a bulletin board with either pictures or maps or something and yarn going from place to place to place to keep track

of what's happening. You sort of have the ability to do all this in your head. As you went through the video, as you looked at the details, what sort of, how did you sort of, how did you start your inquiry? What did you, for presuppositions did you take into the inquiry? And then as you studied the facts and evidence, what did you learn? You know, one of the things that caught my attention early on was sort of the various components of the political conspiracy leading up to January 6th. You know, when you see a lot of the reporting on it, a lot of the way people approach it as if January 6 is this riot that was somehow completely separate from everything that preceded it. It was just something outgrowth of rage that day, but it wasn't really connected

to everything. And I think that that's absolutely wrong. I think that the report that the committee put out shows that it's wrong. I think that you can see that there were all these components of this political conspiracy headed by former President Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election. And that political conspiracy basically is what gave us January 6 in the first place. I mean, you know, think about the way I'd always say this to others is, you know, think about January 6. I mean, how many times, Steve, throughout your life as January 6 come and go on without incident, right? It's just the peaceful transfer of power. We don't think about January 6 at all. I don't think I've ever thought about it, you know, one win, you know. And it only becomes an issue.

It only becomes a day because, in the first place, because Trump makes it the day where his attempt to overturn the election is going to culminate, right? This is the culmination of his attempts to overturn the election. Everything comes to a head on January 6, 20, 21. And so understanding the political components, the political steps that lead up to that, I think, is a very important part of the process. Yeah. How did, how was the workload of the investigation divided up?

How did, I mean, it's a huge. job, as you say, you know, tens of thousands of hours of video, documentary evidence, what have you. How did the committee, how was the committee set up to tackle that, to make that doable? Well, the committee had lead investigator and Tim Hafe and then five investigative teams underneath them with five investigative leads who all come from sort of, I think they all come back from federal prosecutor backgrounds or sort of that sort of approach to things. things. And then underneath the five leads, there were, not all five of them are like that, but you know, a number of them are. And then underneath them were a number of other experienced lawyers

or junior lawyers who were doing investigative work. And then there were other staff members who kind of were assimilated in, like myself, I became like an adjunct, basically, to a lot of these groups. And I got to talk to a lot of these groups and work with them. And each one of the five teams was responsible for a different part of the story, investigating a different part of the story. So, for example, I just was talking about the political conspiracy that leads up to January 6th. There was a gold team that was responsible for looking into the political conspiracy, the different parts of it and what actually gives us that day. There was a red team that was responsible for investigating sort of what happened on the day of January 6 itself and January 5th and the immediate sort of hours leading up to the attack and those types of issues. There was a purple team that was looking into extremism and the different components of extreme.

that come together on January 6th, there was a green team that was interested in finances, and then there was a blue team that was into the law, who investigated the law enforcement and security failures and other parts of, you know, how DOD responded and those types of issues. Yeah. What, again, thinking about the amount of evidence that you spent almost an entire year going through, if I were to ask you the very simple question, January 6th, 2021. What happened and why? How would you answer that question? Well, I think the first part of my answer to that question would be when people look at what happened on January 6th, they tend to think of it as just this spontaneous riot, just this mob that got out of control. And I think

one of the things you can read in the report the committee put out, which I helped write, is that that's not really true. That it was basically, I think the way we put it was like an organization, organized riot or a planned riot. And it's a different model for understanding attacks, right? Because what happens is a very specific right-wing extremists, namely the Proud Boys, they do have, and they're on trial right now for a seditious conspiracy in Washington. It's one of the most important domestic extremism cases in our nation's history in my humble view. But the proud boys had a plan to stop the joint session of Congress. And there's still some details we don't know about the plan and exactly, you know, how it came together. But there's

are plenty of indications, for example, that, so start with, I guess one of the ways I'd answer is start with the night of January 6 itself. And I think I've sent you a couple times. I've sent you this video that was put out on parlor by Enrique Atario, the chairman of the proud boys, the head of proud boys. Yeah. And he, he, this is very important for understanding sort of how you investigate these things, because this issue, because he puts this video out, I think it's 11, 16 p.m. on the night of January 6th. And it's a, a brief, clip of a man dressed like a supervillain in like a mask and hat and cape, right, standing in front of a deserted U.S. Capitol. And for a lot of reasons, we know that this was recorded

prior to January 6. It could not have been recorded on January 6. It had to have been recorded prior to January 6 exactly when we're not sure. But Tario, the head of the proud boys, labels it premonition. And the idea was, yeah, he's rubbing it in everybody's face. We knew what was coming, right? He had a premonitioner was coming. Yeah, he did have a premonition, comes because then as law enforcement and people start investigating in this, it turns out that Tario was talking to his men about storming the capital in the days leading up to January 6th, that he had a coded reference to it as the Winter Palace, storming the Winter Palace, which is, oddly enough, comes from the Bolshevik revolution. So they were partly inspired by

the communist takeover of Russia in their plot to, you know, overthrow American democracy, which let that one sink in for a second. But you start accumulating all these facts. And you can see that the proud boys did come to town with some sort of plan to stop that joint session of Congress at the Capitol. And then lo and behold, when you piece that together, what we actually see on the day of January 6th, you see the proud boys consistently at the front lines leading the charge, leading breaches, you know, instigating others. So you see it all kind of come together on January 6th. That's my first part of the answer is that it wasn't just a spontaneous riot. It was actually a planned or organized riot. And it was done so to fulfill what President Trump was saying.

President Trump was saying the election was stolen, and these right-wing extremists wanted to basically stop that on his behalf. And again, given the fact that you've seen so much of this evidence, lived in it for a year, what's your view on sort of the much discussed question of whether the proud boys did this in coordination with people at the White House, or did this at the direct request of either Donald Trump or his associates? Or was it more the case that Trump through his rhetoric and his associates through theirs laid out a plausible path for people to take if they wanted to disrupt this? What's closer to the truth? How would you describe that?

I mean, I think the evidence is clear that at a minimum, Trump incited these groups and instigated this. I mean, I think that they debuted his rhetoric and what he was saying? saying is in sort of a call and response. I don't think you'll see anything in the report that says that Trump directly gave an order to the proud boys to do this, for example, or gave an order through a cutout. I would say that there were open questions about some of the people in Trump's orbit and their ties of these groups. You know, you can look at chapter six of the report. There's a section called Friends of Stone. And lo and behold, Roger Stone was one of the oldest,

if not the oldest political advisors to Trump is deeply in bed with the proud boys and the oathkeepers and other extremists who attack the Capitol. Now, that doesn't prove anything. And Stone has said that he had no role in this and didn't call for violence. And he's, you know, disclaimed any sort of role in the actual attack. But what I would say is that from my mind, It's disturbing that the right-wing extremists who attack the Capitol are just sort of one person away, one link away from the President of the United States. It doesn't take a bunch of dots to connect here. There's only really one person connecting them to the president. And at one point, in a nationally televised presidential debate, when the proud boys came up, Donald Trump said publicly, stand back and stand by.

Do it, sir. Say it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do you want to call them. What do you want to call him? Give me a name. Give me a name. White supremacists and white supremacists and right. Proud boys. Stand back and stand by. Is it overreading that rhetoric to think that he was putting them on notice for something

like this? I mean, you had Steve Bannon publicly predict that Donald Trump was not going to accept the results of the election. Bannon said that before the election. You know, there was some planning here. Is that part of it? Or was that a spontaneous remark from the president? How should we, if the proud boys are really important to what actually unfolded on the day of January 6th,

how should we read President Trump's comments in late September in that debate? So, well, there are a couple different things that are tied together there. So, I mean, let's take the stand back and standby comment. I got to say when that, when he first said that, you know, I probably even said this to you at the time, you know, it looked like another one of these Trumpian word salads, you know, where he speaks in sort of a confused sort of gibberish, you know. But the more I looked at it, the more actually those words weren't actually what resonated to me as much as what comes right immediately after the comma in his sentence. And he says, I'm paraphrasing. He says, but I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do

something about Antifa. But I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about Antifa and the left, because this is not a right wing problem. This is a left. This is a left What's interesting to me was that's the way the proud boys were portraying themselves. That's sort of the mission statement of the proud boys at the time. So now he's saying stand back and standby, he's basically endorsing the central mission of the proud boys and like mine and right-wing extremists who were positioning themselves throughout 2020 as this sort of counterweight to left-wing extremists and radicals like Antifa and groups like that. So, you know, I think that the evidence the committee got and collected, and you've seen this

in other evidence, is that that absolutely, that he makes that remark during the presidential debate, which I think was like September 29th, 2020, somewhere around there. And the proud boys themselves said it was a boon for their cause that basically enrollment tripled, that all of a sudden all these people were flocking to the proud boys. And then you can see from that point on after election day, what you see is that the proud boys, not just the proud boys, but also the oath keepers and these three percenters we can talk about and these white nationalist gripers and another sort of extremists, they become really a core part of the stop-to-steel movement and these events that occur from after election day

2020 through January 6th where their central political idea at the time over the course of those months is that the election was stolen from Trump and they need to mobilize to prevent Trump from leaving power and being removed from power. Let's tick through those other groups that you mentioned, just to give people perspective on who else participated and who may have had a rule in some of the pre-planning. Who are the oathkeepers and what did they do both before January 6th than actually on the day?

The oathkeepers are an anti-government extremist group that, like the three percenters, we'll talk about in a second, basically view of the U.S. government as illegitimate. And some of them view it as tyrannical. And they view it as they have these sort of delusions of grandeur that they're basically keeping their oath to the Constitution, even though the rest of the government is basically betraying it. And they had all sorts of cockamamie conspiracies through the years, to be blunt. And after Election Day 2020, Stuart Rhodes, ahead of the oathkeepers, comes up with this idea of that basically Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to stay in power. that essentially the election was stolen, and he should invoke the Interaction Act and use military forces to basically enforce, to keep himself in power.

And then as part of that process, he would call up the oathkeepers and like-minded militia movements as is like paramilitary force to keep in power. And so they have this long-running idea that this is going to happen. They start putting arms outside of Washington and Virginia. They start collecting firearms. And this whole idea is that they're going to be called up at any moment by Trump to basically keep him in power. And this, on January 6, you know, you have multiple groups of wealthkeepers do end up attacking the U.S. Capitol because they see it as the culmination or this key moment and everything. But their ideas about January 6 and the ideas of how that came about were a little different from the crowdboys. They thought there was going to be this sort of moment where Trump was going to basically pull the, play the autocratic card with militias and saying, you're now my guys and you're going to keep me in power.

And so it's a little bit different than the proud boy's story. That's basically who the oathkeepers are. We can talk about three percenters if you are. Yeah, what about the three percenters? They're basically, there are more decentralized movement around the country that of extremists, well, a lot of them are extremists who, again, believe that the current U.S. government is illegitimate and deserves to be overthrown. And there's a lot of chatter that they talk along those lines.

And they believe in this mythology that just 3% of the colonial population defeated the British Marnarchy during the Revolutionary War here in America. And so if they just get 3% of Americans today to buy under cause, they can do it again, which if you just think that all through, you realize the intent is to overthrow the current U.S. government. Now, as the descendant of a young man who actually fought in the Revolutionary War, I can say that that's all completely cockamamie and absolutely not, you know, basically they, in late 2020, 2021, they were on the side of the equivalent of King George, not the side of the 1776, you know, Liberty Fire, freedom fighters. And that's true for the proud boys and all these groups. They all portrayed

themselves as representing 1776. And I looked at it and thought, no, you're, you're on the side of the King George at this time. So the three percenters are also one of these groups that gets involved in the attack on the Capitol. There's a number of times the three percenters are on the front lines pushing the clause and attacking law enforcement and that sort of thing. When you look at what unfolded on that afternoon of January 6th, how much of the violence was committed, how much the tax were led by people in these three groups? And how much was it just people who had showed up because they had been misled by Donald Trump and his allies and Fox News into believing that the election had been stolen? and they just came for a protest. They didn't really come to attack the capital.

How, I mean, just in terms of rough numbers, I know there's nothing precise you can put on it, but were those groups 2% or 20% or how should we think of that? You know, it's a very interesting question. The way I would say it, and this is why we described it as an organized or a planned riot. So think about the numbers this way. Let's say there are about 300 proud boys and their associates

who marched from the Washington Monument around the Capitol in the morning of January 6th, and then they place themselves, they park themselves, this P.C.C. Or outside the Capitol by 12.46 p.m. And they and their associates instigate this attack on law enforcement, on the security barriers there, around 1253 to 1254 p.m., just before the joint session of Congress. When I look at that, look, I mean, that crowd that's there in the P. Circle at that time, which is when they're led by the proud boys, that, you know, a force of 300 guys is not enough to take over the U.S. capital, right?

If it was just these guys who were there at that time doing it, they wouldn't be successful in doing it. They would have been defeated. But what was somewhat clever about what they were doing was they knew they weren't going to take over the capital by themselves. What they were doing is they were clearing out the security so that when President Trump says to the crowd amassed the lips, which is just south of the White House,

He says to him, we're going to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and we're going to fight to take our country back. Well, Pennsylvania Avenue marches right down from, connects over to the ellipse, and then you go right down to the Capitol through the P-Circle. So these thousands of people who are going to be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue now have a clear shot onto the Capitol grounds that they would not have had if it not had not been for the Proud Boys clearing out the security saying, stop. And not just the Proud Boys, again, it's their associates or they're guys who are not necessarily members of proud boys who were there with them doing this. And I would say that that's basically one way of explaining this and understanding it

is that these right-wing extremists, I don't think they thought they could do this all by themselves. They wanted to basically muster the resources or rely on the resources of these thousands of people that had come to Washington for to hear President Trump speak and they were going to sort of basically ride this mob into the Capitol or clear the way for the mob to take over the Capitol. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind.

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dot com slash dispatch application times may vary rates may vary the report when it was issued and pretty consistently through the the depositions and the hearings the committee was criticized by Republicans saying look this is an illegitimate committee it's you know maybe not technically partisan because you had Adam Kinsiger and Liz Cheney were Republicans serving on the committee but it's a flawed committee because it didn't didn't have anyone there to defend Donald Trump to put comments that he made or others made into proper context. How do you respond to people, including people who have been Trump critics who have leveled that charge against the committee in its work? Yeah, I love this argument

because it assumes there's some other explanation for the things that President Trump was clearly responsible for, right? So let's walk through very carefully here for a second, okay? Who is ultimately responsible for turning the mob against Vice President Pence, his own Vice President? Who is more responsible than President Trump for that? Listen to Vice President Pence, to former Vice President Pence today, saying that he thinks that President Trump will be held accountable in the history books for his actions on January 6th. What's the alternative theory here, right? Is it space aliens? Really did this? Not Trump? You know? I mean, there is no plausible alternative theory of that. And I would say if you walk through the different cases here, so, you know,

who when Attorney General Barr, another Trump loyalist who fought the DOJ on the Russia stuff, who, you know, fought on Trump's behalf, you know, during his time as Attorney General, why does he resign from office, according to his own testimony, right? In part because he's uncomfortable with Trump's lies about the election and won't do what Trump wants them to do to help him overturn the election, right? What other party is responsible for that? Ultimately, other than Trump. Now, the report lays out Trump's accomplices, right? There are all sorts of people who are willing to help Trump do these things, right? But ultimately, who is the most powerful person in the room, who's the one who's actually motivating and driving this and the decision maker who's

pushing this? There's really no other alternative explanation other than Trump. And I mean, you know, when it comes down to the current sort of Republican attacks on this, their biggest argument in this regard is that, well, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell, by the way, because he was Senate leader, didn't have the capital prepared for an attack instigated by Trump. That's basically their best argument, right? Is that others, you know, including Pelosi, who's hunted by this mob, by the way, you know, they didn't play good enough defense against the offense launched by Trump and his supporters, you know? I mean, if that's what you've got, then that's a pretty weak hand altogether, and that's basically the best of what they've got. And I'll say one other

thing, and not to believe it by the point, but look at the committee witnesses, the key witnesses in the committee, and you'll notice something about them, right? And I, you know, go through chapter by chapter. Most of them are what? Most of them are Republicans. Not are they Republicans, but the Republicans who voted for Trump and supported Trump in 2020 and just drew the line at helping him overturn the election. So it's, to me, it's a silly argument. This was a partisan attack on our democracy. It was not a nonpartisan attack on our democracy.

So how can you deal with it other than just addressing that? And, you know, there's a lot we could say about, you know, Jim Jordan's, you know, basically closely saying Jim Jordan, Jim Banks can't join the committee. I mean, Jim Jordan is identified in the report as somebody who was a fervent supporter of Trump's efforts to overturn the election. I mean, is that somebody who should be investigating a crime? You know, I don't think so.

Speaking of congressional Republicans, much in the news over the past couple of weeks has been the fact that Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, as part of his, as part of the promises that the series of promises that he made to become Speaker of the House, I think in part to win support from fringe Republicans in the House made a promise to release some 40,000 plus hours of footage from the U.S. Capitol Police and other. From that day, what did you think of the decision to make that footage public? Well, he didn't actually make it public, first of all. What he did was he gave Tucker Carlson, his producer's preferential access to footage, right? So that's very different for

in public. I mean, you and I, it's funny, when this was going on, I was thinking back to you and I, we have these arguments for transparency for 20 years now. You and I have argued for government transparency, you know. And declassification of documents, whether it's from Iraq, whether it's Osama bin Laden's cash. Over and over. Yep. You won't find two more sort of strident supporters of transparency than you and I when it comes to all these issues, you know. And my opinion of the, what we're talking about here is really the 40,000 plus hours of footage recorded by the U.S. Capitol Police surveillance cameras, I have no problem with releasing that footage or at least, you know, some large chunk of it to the public either.

You know, in fact, large portions are already out there, much more than what Tucker Carlson showed his viewers. He only showed his viewers a few minutes. There are already hours and hours of clips you can find online of the footage, right? And most of that, you know, there's no objection coming from me to releasing. That's truly releasing that stuff to the public. I think the Capitol Police, and ironically enough, some of the current House Republicans have said that there are security issues if you do so. That was my concern, candidly. Jonah and I had a discussion about that on the podcast last week or the week before.

And Jonah was sort of for full transparency, put it all out there. And as you say, I mean, that's my position on virtually everything. I did have concerns, having spoken to some people who were close to the investigation, about revealing the locations of the cameras and more importantly, places that the cameras weren't capturing in the event of a subsequent attack. Yeah, I have mixed thoughts on all that. You know, my instinct is always for transparency. So, you know, I think there's a lot of footage, you know, I mean, I think a lot of the

footage is not really sensitive from a security perspective. I'd have to hear from the Capitol Police why I'd have to hear specific cases on each specific camera. I've not heard that case, you know. All I know is that, I mean, the whole premise of what happened here is phony, right? The premise is that this footage is going to show you what really happened on January 6. Well, January 6th is one of the most recorded days in our nation's history. It's really one of the most recorded days in the history of the world, right?

Not only do you have all this surveillance footage from the Capitol Police, you have the body warm camera footage from the much appalled the police department officers. You have all the media that was on the scene, including documentary filmmakers who were embedded with the proud boys and others. You have probably thousands of people who are there recording on their cell phones, you know, including some of the lead rioters themselves, including the Proud Boys themselves. I mean, one of the Proud Boys takes a selfie of himself just after he leads the breach into the Capitol, he takes a selfie himself, smoking, having a victory cigar smoke, you know, saying, I knew we could have taken this leap over if we just bleep and tried hard enough, you know?

And so there's just a ton of video footage out there. And the idea that this surveillance footage was going to sort of reveal, you know, the aliens that built the pyramids or something, you know, it just was never a plausible theory, you know, it just not case. In fact, what you saw Tucker Carlson rollout was just a highly edited selective few minutes on the QAnon Shaman and a few other clips, you know, here and there. And, you know, what I would say is you can, you can easily find the story he's betraying there is without even considering. insulting all these other video sources, just if you look at what is available from the Capitol police surveillance footage that he didn't show, it's already available online. You can show that it was all phony. There was a phony narrative. You know, I mean, there's a three-hour clip of the fighting on the tunnel on the west side of the capital, which is some of the most violent

fighting that day, you know, real nasty melee, you know, hand-to-hand brawl with police who are trapped in this tunnel. That's freely available on YouTube. I've linked to it, you know. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's not, it's not a short little clip. It's literally three hours and about 40-some-a-minute's into it. The fighting begins. It's, you know, bad stuff. And there's plenty of video footage like that. So I don't think that, you know, the argument that people should not believe their lying eyes,

which is essentially what they're trying to do here. I just don't think that really is going to go very far with the American public outside of this echo chamber that was watching this one particular show. But it could go pretty far with people in the echo chamber. You know, this isn't Tucker Carlson's first attempt at rewriting what happened at this revisionist history on January 60. Of course, produced this documentary called Patriot Purge that was released on Fox Nation, where subscribers are sort of the most loyal Fox viewers that literally made the case that the federal government was going after half of the country. They quoted somebody saying half of the country, meaning Trump supporters, and using the means that the U.S. government used to go after Al Qaeda, including suggestion at one point that they were putting people in Guantanamo Bay. What do you make of those arguments sort of broadly?

And then specifically, we've heard a lot about the supposed political prisoners, quote unquote. This is a favorite Marjorie Taylor Green argument, Lauren Bobert and others. Are there people being held without charges? And if there are, why are they being held without charges? Shouldn't they be charged by now? Shouldn't we know more? Well, take the last question first, which is no. There's nobody I'm aware of is being held without charges at all.

And nobody is being held as a political prisoner. I recently got the list of the 20 current January 6 inmates who were, as of March 13th of this year, being held in a Washington, D.C. jail. 17 of the 20 are accused of assaulting law enforcement on January 6 and 8 of the 17 if we're either either pleaded guilty or been convicted of that charge. So, and all 20 of them face serious charges based on real alleged crimes for that occurred on January 6. Not one of them is a political prisoner, not one of them. You know, the Washington, D.C. jail, you know, I'm not going to speak to the accommodations there. I think there's been running complaints long before the January 6th crowd was held there about the quality of those facilities.

But, you know, a federal judge recently ruled that they're not being discriminated against or receiving disparate treatment. And quite the contrary, they have access to, you know, sort of, you know, computers or iPad type devices, something like that, you know, to basically review the evidence in their case. And, you know, the 20 people, you know, I published a profile of all 20 over at just security. you can go read it and, you know, tell me which one of those people is a political prisoner, not one of them is. So, you know, one of the things, you know, by the way, when they talk about this, you notice a lot of times they don't actually name the people that are supposedly the political prisoners. That's a big tell, right?

Like, tell me who exactly you're talking about, and then we could talk about the specifics of that case, you know, because if it was true somebody was being held without charge, I would be against that too, right? I mean, for sure, you know, but they just haven't pointed to any concrete examples and the examples we're aware of showed quite the opposite. Now, when it comes to Patriot Purge, you know, you and Jonah obviously left Fox after Patriot Purge came out. I've watched that now twice or three times, very carefully line by line.

And maybe I'll have to publish my dissection for you guys because I have a draft of it. We would like it. And you're the first thing you said there, the first thing you said there, you'll see it at the top of my draft, I call it a failed prophecy. And what's the failed prophecy? Well, this comes out, page of purge comes out in November of 2021. And the premise of it is, just as you said, that the Biden administration is going to crack down on the rights of millions of Americans using the tools that were built and established during the so-called war on terror. And we're sitting here now on March 2023 and have millions of Americans been stripped of their rights?

has this huge purge of all of Magna World and the 74 million Americans who vote for Donald Trump, has that actually, in fact, occurred? And no, it has not, right? So it was really this paranoid fantasy, this hysterical paranoia that is the framing for the whole thing. And quite frankly, when you start diving down in the details after that, it doesn't get any better, right? I mean, it's just one thing that's wrong after another. One of the interesting things about, not interesting, but annoying things about what Tucker does here and all, is he accuses everybody else of lying, right?

And yet, he lies, right? He lies so clearly, you know? I mean, one of the things he says in Patriot Purge is that this January 6th defendant, Julian Cater, who sprayed Officer Brian Sicknick and Officer Caroline Edwards, was not mentioned, with a canister of pepper spray or something along those lines, that he didn't, you know, that this. this revolver news, you know, crazy site, you know, looked at the video footage and nothing comes out of the canister. He didn't actually spray Officer Siknik who died obviously the next day, right? Well, that's just false. Julian Kater actually admitted he pled guilty to spraying Officer Siknick and Officer

Carolina Edwards with the spray. There's no material dispute over this. And in fact, in the video clip that Tucker himself used recently from this incident, And you can see Officer Siknick and Caroline Edwards reacting to being sprayed. You can see them actually getting hit and wincing from it, you know. And so this is what's going on here is that there are millions of people who are probably three million or however many people watch this show, right? And it's really interesting for me to watch like the cognitive distance, right?

Because the thing that's actually being said by Tucker on air, in some cases it's just proven by what he's actually showing you in the video if you actually know what he's showing you. same thing with the proud boys you know when in patriarch purge he tries to insinuate that left-wing agitators tricked the crowd into attacking the capital there there were agitators that day right but they're right wing agitators the proud boys the three percenters of groups we just mentioned right and oftentimes when he's talking about left-wing agitators suppose the footage is actually of the prowboys who are actually physically removing security fences so it's this cognitive dissonance right between what's being said and what wants to what they want to believe versus what's actually

being shown on the show. Well, and even if you just, like, set aside reality. Oh, you have to set aside reality. That's definitely the starting point here, yeah. I mean, if you set aside what actually happened and what the video really shows in sort of a comprehensive way and just look at sort of the rotating explanations for the violence, they're self-canceling, and they're self-contradictory. I mean, at first they say, you know, you have.

had suggestions immediately as the rioting was happening, that this was Trump supporters who came to rally peacefully following the president's admonition, infiltrated by Antifa. And you had sort of credible people making the suggestion. I remember Britt Hume tweeted something to that effect. And it was kind of a prevailing assumption. Laura Ingraham talked about it, I believe, on her show that evening. Sort of the prevailing assumption among the. people who wanted to downplay what had happened or find somebody else to blame. But as it became clear and clear that that explanation just wasn't true. I mean, there were some, there were, there were individuals who were sympathetic or had been involved in Antifa protests on the

Antifa side, who were among the people at the Capitol that day. So it's important to note that there were some. But that's not what happened here. And if you look at, sort of the evolving explanation, you go from sort of this is awful. And Atifa must have been responsible for it to Tucker's latest preferred explanation, which is they were sightseers. There's really nothing going on. I mean, the Q&N shaman just walked around peacefully. These people were just there to, I forget the phrase he had,

but it was, you know, basically this was peaceful protest. Yeah, and there's an added contradiction or tension there, which is that they were sightseers who were tricked by alleged deep stay operatives, right? And we're more than two years past the attack now, you know, put the rubber to the road here. Let's name these FBI agents who trick these people. Let's go. You know, I want to know who the FBI agents were that were supposedly part of this deep state plot against the so-called patriots, you know. And, of course, that's inconsistent with exactly as you just laid out, right?

It's inconsistent with the sightseer explanation. It's inconsistent with the Antifa, left-wing agitation explanation. What you're seeing is it's psychology, right, in politics combined, right? It's this cognitive bias. They're looking for any kind of explanation they can come up with other than the simple facts in front of them, right? And that's why I joke and quip. It's like the aliens built the pyramids type stuff, right? You know, I mean, this is where you're at.

You know, now I guess there's actually a market for that on History Channel, so I probably shouldn't joke about that too much. But it's basically the same type of thing. only in this case the politics necessitate this sort of disconnecting of the dots here on what happened. But I just want to say one thing, too, about you mentioned the word that Trump used peacefully, where he tells people to march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol. You can read in the Select Committee's report in, I think it's Chapter 1 and in Chapter 1, that what's noteworthy about his use of the word peacefully in that one instance in that speech is how inconsistent it is with the rest of the speech.

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. We're going to walk down anyone you want, but I think right here we're going to walk down to the Capitol because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity.

So a lot of Trump's apologists will run to that line and say, you know, and Tucker's done this actually, he clips that one line in his video presentation, right? And he says, you know, this is what was said, right? Okay. First of all, that was written by Trump speech writers, right? It's the only time in the speech that peacefully is used. and he ad-lib the word fight or some sort of use of the word fight many, many more times.

I have to look at it. I think it's 20 times or so. I don't hold me to that. I have to go check my numbers, right? Including the line that I think is probably the most inflammatory line I've ever heard of president, sitting president views, in which when he says that tells the crowd they've got to fight, and if they don't fight, we're not going to have a country anymore. How do you square that with the word peacefully, right?

You know, and then you go see all these people go fight, you know, and you see him get involved in this, this mob takeover of the Capitol that's being sort of, you know, directed by right-wing extremists. I just think, you know, it's part of the dishonesty here is for people that are apologizing from Trump and all this to focus on that one word and ignore the rest of the speech, which, by the way, is also laced with lies about the election, laced with lies that he knew or should have known by that time were false. And yet he's using them to rile up the crowd. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Let me, let me, to this point, I've basically asked you questions that you can answer by simple recitation of the facts, your understanding of what happened your, you know, the year that you spent looking at this carefully. Let me ask you just a couple bigger picture questions that, that ask you to go beyond this. and I realized this might make you uncomfortable because you like to just stick to the facts. In the days after the attacks themselves, you didn't know that you were going to be working for the committee.

You didn't have any. You were sort of an American who was observing this like the rest of us, but maybe with a sort of a sharper eye because you'd spent more than a decade looking at extremism, most of it foreign-sourced. What did you think in those days? about sort of the roots of this, and where this was coming from,

first part of the question. The second part of the question is, did you ever get to the point where you thought that it would be plausible that people would try to rewrite it the way that we were just discussing has happened with Tucker, but also it has to be said,

many, many Republican elected officials? I mean, I would just say the politics of this. I mean, my first impression was, all right, well, you know, if you're, a reasonable Republican leader, you've got to want to get off this ship, right? I mean, this is madness. This is total madness. And you can't possibly keep going along with Trump and this craziness now. You know, I mean, if there were no breaking points before that, you know, and you politically rationalized everything up to that point, that's one thing. But now on this, on January

6th, I mean, this has to be the time where you say, okay, enough. You know, this is, this is craziness. I mean, you've got a mob incited by President Trump channing Hang Mike Pence, who is as servile as one could have been to President Trump throughout four years up until January 4th, basically, a couple of days beforehand, when Trump really starts ratching up the pressure on him to try and overturn the election. And if you're a Republican, you're sitting there, you're thinking, you've got to be thinking, you know, okay, this is it, right? Whatever accommodations I made in the past, I can't do that anymore.

And you heard that. You heard that from some of his biggest boosters, is Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy. They did momentarily waffle. They did momentarily, you know, speak the truth. You know, I mean, Kevin McCarthy said on the House floor that President bears responsibility for this. You know, Lindsay Graham gave that impassioned speech

where he said, I'm out, you know? And then he was very quickly back in, you know, and so was McCarthy and the rest of them, you know. And it just, to me, that just speaks to just the rot, right? I mean, just the total rot now that we're dealing with going for. And that's what concerns me the most is that, you know, If you can't draw a line after something like this and say, all right, you know, this is enough of this, then what are you doing? I mean, what do you actually stand for?

You know, you can only go so far with the what aboutism arguments and the, you know, objections to the left. At some point, you have to have some kind of principles that you stand for or something, some sort of positive agenda for America. And, you know, as somebody who, you know, used to run in conservative circles, I thought that the unifying thing for conservatism was the U.S. Constitution, right? and our fealty to it, our loyalty to it. I thought that was the thing that would bind, no matter what we disagreed with on other things, I thought that was the thing that would hold us together. And you here comes along a man in Donald Trump

who quite clearly tried to shred the Constitution in the months leading up to January 6 and on January 6 itself, and the whole process we have for deciding who our elected officials are, and yet so many of quote-unquote conservatives have gone along with it, right? I mean, that's just shocking to me, shocking. And he has lately called for suspending the Constitution to reinstall him as president of the United States.

These are not secretive calls. Yeah, these are not secretive calls. This is not some backroom plotting. It's no exaggeration to say that Kevin McCarthy's position, if you tie it together, is Donald Trump bears responsibility for the violence that we saw on January 6th in an effort to stop the peaceful transfer of power. and he must be elected president again. I mean, that's basically the logic of his argument to the extent that you can use the word logic to describe it. Yeah, no, I think that's right. I mean, and just, you know, just at some point, again, you know, I have always said, you know,

I don't claim to be some sort of moral paragon here, right? But, you know, there has to be some basic level of morality and ethics in your behavior. And if there isn't, then you can't just, you can't turn around and, you know, criticize the left incessantly for, crossing all these lines and believe me i agree that the left crosses lines sure you know there's things the left does i very uncomfortable with you know um and disagree with you know

but um the idea that you can you know turn around and and point all your venom and all your anger and and criticize and claim the more high ground for yourself against the left while justifying this or looking the other way or accommodating trump and trumpism after this whole uh attack on the U.S. capital, a totally unprecedented moment in our history, you know, that delayed the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in, you know, forever. I don't know how you can square that, right? And that's what you're saying, right? I don't know how you can square any of these arguments. I mean, you either stand for something or you don't. What we've learned is a lot of people don't stand for anything. Let me, let me make sure that I'm getting my facts, right? I don't

think Kevin McCarthy has officially endorsed Donald Trump for 2024. So I don't want to put words at his mouth, but I do think it's fair to say that nobody has done more to try to rehabilitate Donald Trump, including a trip to Mara Lago just three weeks after January 6th, then Kevin McCarthy has. Last question here. And again, I'm going to ask you to sort of move away from the fact set that we've been talking about and speculate a little bit here. We're recording this on Tuesday morning, and there is widespread expectation that Donald

Trump is going to be arrested. Donald Trump himself has predicted that he would be arrested today. This comes not as a part of the investigations into his conduct on January 6th. There is efforts in Georgia to subvert the election, to overturn the election, to steal Georgia's electoral votes. But I think a flimsy case brought by the Manhattan district attorney related to hush payments that Donald Trump paid to a porn store. during the 2016 campaign.

As we're having this conversation, you're seeing law enforcement fortify positions in New York City and Washington, D.C., in anticipation of possible violence. You had President Trump call repeatedly for people to speak out and protest and not let corrupt officials take their country away from them.

Do you worry about violence-related to these arrests and the subsequent investigations into Trump, some that were related to January 6th and his attempt to steal the election. And how much should we be worried about political violence in America more broadly? You know, it's a tricky question because the threat of political violence, I mean, you know, I hate both sides of arguments, right?

But we definitely are seeing an uptick in political violence across the political spectrum here. What's different about January 6th from my perspective is that we've never had a sitting president wielding the power of the presidency in sight violence the way he did, way Trump did, right? And that's my big concern is that, you know, this is a very, there's nothing like the power of the presidency. You know, we talked about the proud boys earlier saying that their ranks tripled, right? The Roman tripled after he said, stand back and stand by during presidential debate.

That's the power of the presidency. There's nothing that is as much of an accelerant for extremism as taking, you know, the commander in chief, you know, endorsing an extremist cause, you know. And I certainly think it's, obviously everybody knows it's possible that he could incite violence again. I think that the situation has evolved a little bit since January 6. You know, some of the parties are responsible for January 6 were actually disaffected with Trump afterwards because, you know, they felt like he didn't come to their aid and sufficiently afterwards, didn't pardon them, for example. didn't invoke the Insurrection Act, didn't do what they wanted them to do. So, you know, the situation is definitely involved. And I would also say this, you know, when we're talking about all this, you know, it's very

important, you know, you know, we've talked about this before, Steve, you and I, that also we shouldn't lump this, you know, these extremists who led this and then the rioters who followed them into the Capitol with all 74 million Americans who voted. I mean, that's, that's a nonsense argument, you know, I mean, that I wouldn't, I don't buy that for a heartbeat, you know, you got to be really carefully. here. I mean, I pointed to the numbers that Mitt Romney got, for example, 67 million Americans voted for Mitt Romney and then just over 69 million voted for Trump in 2016. A lot of people who voted for Trump are cultural and political Republicans who are going to vote for whoever

who has the R next to their name. That said, that said, what does disturb me is that there has absolutely been this cult of personality has grown around Trump that basically, means that all bets are off, right? I mean, basically the cult of personality believes that he's this mythic hero who is here to save them and America from the forces, these conspirator forces in the deep state and all these other

supposedly bad actors are conspiring against them. That's what Patriot Purge was about. It was what you're seeing, you know, I would argue you see sentiment like that on Fox pretty regularly these days, you know. And I think that's dangerous, right? I think that's dangerous, Even if the people who believe that, and most of them will never commit an act of political violence, the overwhelming majority of them will not, right?

But it's still dangerous for us in terms of how we go forward here because it means instead of competing in our political system to win elections and to convince other Americans of your cause and to try and build real institutions and build things up, you just have this nihilistic desire to burn it all down, you know? And that's, that to me is what's disheartening and scary, even if it doesn't lead to violence. Well, Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk to us about this. Thanks for the work you put in on the committee. I think the committee's report was, should be set off real alarms for people for all the reasons that you've suggested both about what we saw happen, what we know happened, and about what it means for the way that we conduct our politics going forward. I do think there's reason to be concerned. Tom, thanks for the time. Thanks for having me. Thank you.