The NPR Politics Podcast - A Good Guy: 279 Hours

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Today, the first of a two-part investigation from NPR's Embedded.Sgt. Joshua Abate's career in the Marine Corps seemed to be taking off. He was about to start a top-clearance internship at the NSA. But first, he had to take a standard polygraph test.And then a routine question came up: Have you ever tried to overthrow the U.S. government? Abate told the polygrapher something that he'd been keeping quiet for nearly two years: He followed the crowd that broke into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.This admission leads to a different kind of January 6 story. Abate says he's not an insurrectionist. So why did it take him so long to talk openly about that day? And what did he actually do inside the Capitol?Digging into FBI documents and CCTV footage, NPR's Tom Bowman and Lauren Hodges follow Abate's case in federal court. Reexamining their own firsthand accounts of what happened that day, their reporting offers a fresh look at January 6 and what it means for the military.LEARN MORE:- Explore NPR's database of January 6 criminal cases.- Read the findings about extremism in the military from researcher Michael Jensen and the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And over this Thanksgiving holiday, we want to bring you a two-part investigation from our friends at the NPR Podcast Embedded. The first part is today and you'll hear the second part tomorrow. There's a story we told ourselves about what happened on January 6th, 2021.

On that day, an angry mob attacked the Capitol to try to stop this thing that's so essential for our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. A lot of us, of course, saw it play out on live TV. Reporter Tom Bowman and producer Lauren Hodges were there on the ground. They saw people who looked like they had military training pushing forward, breaking down doors, getting violent with cops. And by the end of that day, the country had lived through one of the worst political riots in our history. But then the story started to change. It got all scrambled and mixed up. Some people started calling the rioters patriots. Trespassers became victims. And that shift has had consequences. Our new series is about one Marine who went inside the Capitol on January 6th.

And Tom and Lauren bring us the story he tells about that day, what happened to him afterwards, and the way all of this calls into question the military's ability to guarantee the oath its members take to support and defend the Constitution for all Americans. It's called A Good Guy. And before we get started, you should note, there is some violent language in this episode. Okay, here's Tom and Lauren. So it's early 2022. A young Marine hopes to get his dream gig.

I try to play it off nonchalantly. Like when I apply, it's like, if I get it, I get it. I don't, I don't. I'm not going to be bummed if I don't get it. Yeah. Um, so we, yeah, but we, we, I wanted it. His name is Josh Abate. He's 24, a third generation Marine.

From the time I was in middle school, I wanted to be a Marine. There's nothing else I wanted to do. There was no Plan B. It was Marine Corps. Josh looks like a Marine. He's tall and strong with short, brownish hair, and he has this tattoo covering his forearm. Full sleeve of my left arm, a rendition of the four horsemen from Revelations. But he's a quiet guy, a little bit shy, his dimples and sort of this baby face.

Josh made sergeant early, got a Navy commendation medal, and then he got what he wanted, that sweet internship he was applying for. It's kind of like a playground, like a crate drone experience with the NSA. That's the National Security Agency. It's kind of like a playground, like a cratron experience with the NSA. That's the National Security Agency. If you get the internship, you can basically ride that out to retirement if you wanted to because that's how coveted the internship is. There's just one final hurdle, a polygraph exam.

And it's kind of straightforward. The polygraph or ask you the usual questions when you're trying to get a top secret clearance like, are you in touch with any foreigners? Do you use illegal drugs? Do you have gambling problems? And also, have you ever tried to overthrow the United States government? And I was like, well, it depends on how you look at it. And he was like, well, what do you mean by that? I was like, well, I was in January 6th, and I went to the Capitol building, I went inside and I walked around.

So this would have been the first time you told anybody about it. Correct, yeah. Hey, what was this guy's reaction? I remember him kind of going wide-eyed, like, oh, what? What kind of nugget did I just uncover? Military polygraphs, you know, they're supposed to be pretty easy.

Pretty black and white, yes or no answers. For anybody in the military overthrowing the United States government, it should be hell no. Yeah, so what kind of an answer is it depends, especially with a topic like January 6th? I don't think I could have actually answered that question with a no, just because I knew what January 6th was and how it was associated to so many people. I'm Tom Bowman. I cover the military for NPR.

And about a year ago, I saw this little news item tucked inside the Washington Post. It was about three Marines who had been arrested for going into the Capitol. One of them was Josh Abate. And I'm Lauren Hodges. I work with Tom a lot on these military stories. We covered the storming of the Capitol together and were both really haunted by the fact that there were so many military people out there that day. January 6 of course was nearly four years ago, but it's still very much with us. Donald Trump tried to throw away your votes. Vice President Kamala Harris is campaigning on it.

When he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol where they assaulted law enforcement officers. And former President Trump, he's campaigning on a two. I think that the people of January 6th were treated very unfairly. He calls them patriots. Unbelievable patriots. And says he's open to pardoning them if he returns to the White House. Oh absolutely I would.

You would pardon those? If they're innocent, I would pardon them. — More than 200 of the people charged with crimes associated with the attack on the U.S. Capitol have military backgrounds, almost all veterans. — But Josh, he's an active-duty Marine who's in line to handle some of the country's most sensitive secrets. — Josh says he's not an extremist, that he was swept up in the moment. But what we would learn after we met Josh at his home is that the truth about what he did that day can be elusive.

Wow, nice country around here. Look at that old house. Josh lives in a small town in rural Virginia, about 30 miles west of Washington. Can we come inside? Nice place. That's my in-laws. It's where he grew up, near the Rappahannock River, where he was baptized by his wife's grandfather, an evangelical pastor.

Shoes off? Please. He's quiet, respectful. A lot of times he peppers his statements with sir this and sir that. Just so military. This is my wife Ashley. Hi, Lauren. Nice to meet military. This is my wife Ashley. Hi, Lauren.

Nice to meet you. Josh and his wife Ashley, they met in high school. Ashley's petite with long blonde hair slicked back into a headband, and she's holding their infant daughter. Can you cut a smile? That is one happy baby. A small dog is running around the dining room table

where we sit down, and it really felt like Josh wanted us to meet his family and get to know him as a person. You know, I think he wanted to convince us in so many ways that he wasn't an insurrectionist. Do you worry this is going to follow you forever? That an employer is going to put your name in Google and what are you going to tell them? The truth. The same thing I've done the entire time. Whatever question they want to know, I'll answer it. There's no point in hiding from it, you know. The information's out there. They can either find out themselves or they can find out through me. Get it from the source, you know.

Josh claims he was just a bystander in the Capitol attack, and he didn't even realize he wasn't supposed to be there. But however Josh tries to downplay what he did that day, what was an active-duty Marine doing there in the first place? Josh Abate swore an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. So did Josh violate that oath? It's a question that should have a clear answer, but what we found is that for the Marines

and for the military as a whole, trying to answer it kicked off its own battle, one that's been going on for years. From NPR's embedded, this is a good guy. More after the break. If your PR is embedded, this is a good guy. More after the break. This message comes from Wyse, 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 Wyse app today or visit Wyse.com, T's and C's apply. Here and Now Anytime is a podcast with fresh takes on the biggest stories of the day and also a little something you weren't expecting from a news show. One thing we're wondering lately is Black Friday a ripoff? Peel back the marketing blitz and what do you have left? That's coming up on Here and Now Anytime, wherever you listen to podcasts. When Josh tells the story of how he ended up inside the Capitol on January 6th, he brings up this text message.

Hey, we're going to DC to watch Trump speak. It was from two of his buddies at the Marine base Quantico. They were asking him if he wanted to tag along. Their names are Sergeant Dodge Hellinen and Micah Coomer, who's a corporal. Like Josh, they're all in their early 20s. And this was during the height of the pandemic. Yeah, this was the deadliest month up to that point for the United States. Tens of thousands of Americans had died, and vaccines weren't available yet for most people.

We've got the governor shutting the states down. We've got the Marine Corps telling us you can't go out and do stuff. And Josh, you know, he was really frustrated because of the shutdown, and I think his fellow Marines were as well. They were basically confined to their base, couldn't go on a planned trip to Norway. They couldn't even go to bars or restaurants. Just cooped up in our rooms and, you know, you didn't join the Marine Corps to stay in your bedroom and work for a couple hours a day and play the new games.

So he's in this kind of little, I don't know, cave of... An anger bubble. I pretty much pipelined Fox News and that was it. Welcome to Tucker Carlson tonight. One of these friends that Josh went to DC with, he later told a federal court that Fox News was often playing on TVs all around the base. If you want people to believe that our system is real, that our system is worth, say, joining the military

and dying to protect, then you've got to get to the bottom of what just happened, and you've got to do it quickly. And after the election that November, one of the main messages being broadcast was that fraud had led to Joe Biden's victory over Trump. You can't have fraud in an election because no one will believe in elections and then things fall apart.

And Josh says he was also scrolling through these social media accounts that were amplifying these claims. So he was starting to believe them. At the time, I thought there were certain spots that may have had some election fraud, but I don't think it was an overall national crisis. The fact is there was no widespread fraud. The election was secure. Both Josh and Ashley, they were huge Trump supporters. Very traditional values.

Ashley said he's a moral man. I come from a household where religion, manners, work ethic, that kind of thing is very important. You have to say what you do, Josh. You know, you can't really mess with Trump when he was in office. I knew that when he came to foreign policy and stuff like that, he wouldn't get us dragged into another war or stuff like that. He wouldn't get us driving to another war or something like that. So Josh says when his two friends invited him to Trump's rally to hear him speak, he said, sure. I knew that it was probably the last time that Trump had a rally that was this close. And I've always wanted to see him speak in person like the last time as his sitting president.

We were not able to get comment from Kummer or Hellenon. So we only have Josh's version of the events that day. He says they were just going to watch a presidential speech. But Trump had tweeted an open invitation for his supporters to attend this Stop the Steel rally. We'll be wild, he promised. And it blew up. On far-right social media groups, message boards, media platforms like Infowars, this became the rallying cry. January 6th, kick that fucking door open.

If you have enough people, you can push down any kind of a fence or a wall. Where were you when history called? Where were you when you and your children's destiny and future was on the line? So on January 6th, Josh says, Helenen and Kummer picked him up and they drove north to the White House. It's about an hour away. But he says they got there too late to see Trump speak. Traffic going into D.C. was mayhem.

So he ended up missing the speech. So he says they ended up driving over toward the Capitol and they see a huge crowd. They parked nearby and decided to follow the sea of people heading in that direction. And that's when they went inside. So you thought it was okay to be in the building? Well, yeah, because we walked right in. We didn't see any signs that said, do not enter, no trespassing. And as soon as we walked through the door of the Capitol building, there were two police officers standing right across from the door.

I figured if we weren't supposed to be there, they would have told us to get out. I covered Trump's speech that day. I got there with a producer early in the morning to find a good spot. Maybe head up to the monument, go get a nice view of the whole crowd. I remember walking around the corner and seeing this huge sea of people rising up to the Washington Monument. Must have been 20,000 people there. People had flags and banners.

I saw a lot of Marine Corps flags and there was no anger. It was just, it was almost like a celebration. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 45th president of the United States of America. And then Trump came out. You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. Really started whipping up the crowd. We're leading Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, by hundreds of thousands of votes.

Remember, Trump had no proof of any of this. And then late in the evening or early in the morning, boom, these explosions of bullshit. He mentioned fight many, many times. He said, I'm going to go up to the Capitol. Let's walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I want to thank you all. I couldn't hear him all that well. So I turned to my producer and I said, did he say he's going to the Capitol?

Thank you very much. that well. So I turned to my producer and I said, did he say he's going to the Capitol? Trump ended his speech a little after 1 p.m. I followed the crowd to the Capitol and the closer we got the mood it just felt darker like a thunderstorm was coming in. That's exactly when Lauren called me. She was already up there. Yeah, I was at the Capitol with our former extremism correspondent Hannah Lamb. The big crowd that Trump sent over was starting to arrive. Thousands of people.

The stream of people started to tighten around us. We kind of grabbed onto each other and ran sideways, kind of diagonally outside of the crowd, so that we didn't get crushed. We climbed up this hill and started looking down. Push past the barriers and now going up the steps to the Capitol. And there were just more and more people coming. It's absolute pandemonium. We asked someone in the crowd,

what are you going to do if you get into the building? The people in this house who stole this election from us, hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see, so it never happens again. That's what needs to happen. Four by four by four hanging from a rope out here for treason. We watched them rush past the police and start pushing against the doors,

trying to break the glass, screaming, we need fresh patriots to the front in order to get through. And then we saw the doors crack open and people started to flood through them. Hey! You're gonna die with this! Hey! You're gonna die with this!

They're in. Hey! You're gonna die with this! Hey! You're gonna die with this! Hey! You're gonna die with this! The FBI says the Senate doors were the first to be breached at around 212 in the afternoon. And what was it? Seven minutes. Seven minutes later, Josh went in through those same doors.

We straight up just walked in the building. There was no signs. We didn't see any barricades up to up just walked in the building. There was no signs. We didn't see any barricades up to friends from walking in the building. You didn't see the break-in? Mm-mm. Okay. No. And he told us he didn't hear any yelling or screaming or breaking glass or anything.

Nobody was trying to be rambunctious. Josh said he just stood back and took pictures and he wasn't chanting, didn't wave any flags or signs. But most importantly, he says he wasn't involved in any of the scuffles with Capitol Police. I'm pretty sure I could see the tear gas, but I, you know, I was far away. It's hard to imagine Josh simply walking into the Capitol building without noticing that the rally around him had turned into a full-blown riot. After about an hour of walking around,

Josh says he and his friends finally saw some cops. The police started coming in to force people out and we're like, okay, well, obviously they want us out. So we left. At this time in the Capitol, the cops are desperately trying to prevent these protesters from getting into the inner sanctum.

One of them, Ashley Babbitt, was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer as she lunged through a shattered window near the house floor. Babbitt was an Air Force veteran. And the lawmakers inside, they're scrambling for their safety, hiding behind chairs, under desks, barricading themselves in offices. These lawmakers, by the way, are supposed to be counting votes to certify the election,

but instead they're running for their lives. According to Josh, around the same time, he and his friends are calmly walking out of the Capitol and back to their car. After an hour-long drive, Josh and his buddies find themselves in a Virginia burger joint. When him and the guys got back, I met them at a restaurant. Josh's wife Ashley joins them for dinner at this place called Fatty's. They had a really good crab cake burger. And by this time, the Capitol attack is top news everywhere.

This is a special report of the CBS Evening News. We are witnessing history and what can only be described as a national disgrace. And they look up on the TV screens and they see the violence. Right now, Washington, D.C., is under a mandatory curfew, and police and the National Guard are trying to restore order. Ashley says she turned to her husband, Midberger, and was like, did you see any of the stuff they're talking about? And he told her, no, no, no, no. It was nothing like that when we were there. And at that point, Josh says,

he and Coomer and Hellenon all realized the same thing. Kind of like looking at each other, like we should probably not talk about this. He says this is when he took out his phone and started deleting all of the pictures and videos. He wanted no sign of him being there that day. He wanted to disassociate completely from January 6th. And how come?

Because you just saw it on TV, what had been found? I knew that if wind broke that Marines were in January 6th, that it would reflect poorly upon the Marine Corps. And I knew that even though I didn't do anything bad, I didn't cause any violence, I didn't perpetrate any sedition or treason, anything like that, I knew that I would just be grouped in to everything.

Josh says he never spoke about January 6th with Helen and Kumher again. But keeping it quiet would be a lot harder than they thought. One of them just couldn't help himself. And that's when they found the boogaloo. That's coming up at the Capitol. About 140 cops were wounded. Four people died that day.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, he was clearly troubled by it when he appeared before Congress later that summer. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. And as more information came out on just exactly who stormed the Capitol, it became clear that people with a military background were overrepresented. There were more than 200 of them, according to an NPR analysis. And get this, about a third of them were current or former Marines. That's a disproportionate

number considering the Corps is the smallest fighting force. It is so shocking when somebody that's taken an oath to protect the country is doing something to harm it. That's Michael Jensen. He researches domestic terrorism at the University of Maryland. Jensen says the Marines have one of the highest rates of extremist activity, going back more than three decades. The Army is the largest branch that you'd expect for it to have the highest numbers, but the second highest numbers come from the Marine Corps. And he says they don't do a very good job of investigating their own. They are having an outsized impact driving these numbers of cases, yet they're doing

the fewest investigations. Investigations into people like Josh. By the summer of 2022, 850 people had been arrested for their involvement on January 6. It was becoming the largest criminal investigation in FBI history. But at that point, only one active duty service member had been sentenced in federal court. SONIA DARA And speaking of Josh, he's thriving. Despite his polygraph admission, he gets that internship at the NSA that he really wanted, and the Marines send him to a special intelligence school in Florida.

Ashley, his wife, gets pregnant. For about two years, it's like January 6th never even happened in Josh's world. By the end of 2022, they moved to Fort Meade in Maryland for that internship. But a couple weeks before it's set to begin, Josh gets a text. His sergeant wants to meet up for a cup of coffee. The Starbucks on base didn't give me any other information, just said be there in civvies. Civilian clothes. So I'm thinking it's probably something related to the internship.

He wants to meet me or something like that. They get their coffee and then they're driving in the sergeant's truck and they pull into this other building on base, the headquarters of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The sergeant turns to him. Hey, um, so NCIS wants to ask you a few questions, nothing to worry about, just, you know, just be, be truthful. Hey, what did you think? Um, well, I thought I was, you know,

it's probably by January 6th. Gut feeling, intuition, call it whatever you want. All of a sudden, these agents come from either side of the building and get around him. So they had six people to frisk my pockets and put me in cuffs and tell me I'm under arrest for January 6. They put you in cuffs? Mm-hmm. And then what did you think? I was like, shit, this is happening.

They basically brought me into like a stereotypical movie type interrogation room with like a one-way mirror and a metal table. And basically they showed me pictures of me inside the Capitol building. They showed me pictures of Coomer and Dodge inside the Capitol building. Josh spent the night in the DC jail, sleeping on a metal bench, a bright light shining from the ceiling, a bologna sandwich for breakfast. So here's how he got caught.

Remember that polygrapher, the first person Josh actually told about being in the Capitol? Right, the guy who went wide-eyed. But you know, it's not just that. Yeah, he went and told somebody. The FBI. This triggered an investigation from NCIS and not just into Josh, his two friends from Quantico as well. Micah Kumher and Dodge Hellenon. The FBI had actually been on Kumher's case since at least August 2021. I know for a fact they looked into us from Kummer's Instagram post and that's when they found the Boogaloo. The Boogaloo.

Kummer had been posting photos of himself inside the Capitol, and that's what attracted the FBI to him in the first place. When they executed a search warrant to get into Kummer's Instagram account, they found something else. About three weeks after January 6th, Kummer sent a private message to a friend. In it, he was talking about one of the extremist movements represented at the Capitol that day. And these are the guys in Hawaiian shirts who often call themselves the Boogaloo Boys. Kummer said to his friend,

I'm waiting for a Boogaloo. His friend wrote back asking, what's that? Kummer simply replied, civil war two. Kumher's investigation eventually led back to Josh, who by the way says he does not agree with anything Kumher said about a civil war. I don't think there will be a civil war. You know, why do you want a war?

Josh seemed eager to distance himself from Kumher's message. And remember, Kumher and Hellenon declined our requests for comments, so Josh's account is all we had. But one thing's for sure, all three of them went through those Senate wing doors. And all three of them were charged with the same crimes. Federal prosecutors had them on four charges, from entering a restricted building to disorderly conduct. Over the next couple of months, Josh was placed on administrative duty at work. And as he and Ashley waited at home for the legal case to run its course, the reality of their situation began to sink in.

I asked Ashley what she was feeling at that time. Fear. I don't know, fear for the future. My baby? I don't know. Fear for the future? My baby? I don't know. You think all the typical like wife and mother things like, what are we going to do when he loses his job? So you were prepared for him to go to jail? It was a possibility that we were prepared for.

Josh and his lawyers eventually worked out a deal with prosecutors. They were willing to drop most charges in exchange for a guilty plea on just one misdemeanor. And they were recommending a reduced sentence of 21 days in jail. There's a certain level of ownership that we wanted to take because obviously being there was wrong and Sorry, it's um Wanted to take ownership for what we did So Josh decided to tell the court quote each of the lies circulated by President Trump were incredibly harmful to our democracy And our unity as a nation

harmful to our democracy and our unity as a nation. But whether Josh went to jail and for how long would come down to one person, federal Judge Anna Reyes, a recent Biden appointee, and she was assigned to Helenen and Kumher as well. We reached out to Judge Reyes, but she didn't want to go on the record. We do know Judge Reyes was stunned that anyone would go into the Capitol on January 6th. Here's what she told Josh during his sentencing hearing. It's scary to think that our active-duty military were part of the insurrection. She also told Josh that she was inclined to give him six months in jail. And then this shift happened. Judge Anna Rea started reading these letters of support.

There were more than 50 of them from people in Josh's life. Listen to this one. It's a letter from a Gold Star mom whose son was killed in action in April of 2011. She said, quote, I have met many Marines that are truly good Marines and good people. Josh is one of those Marines. The mother of a childhood friend wrote, even though I'm a strong liberal, I would never consider Josh to be a threat. I truly believe he is just fundamentally good. Not everyone was willing to write a letter. Josh told us one Marine refused. He said,

I like you, Josh, but not what you did. The others, though, they were basically asking the court to focus on Josh's character, not his actions on January 6th. Judge Reyes says she read all the letters, twice actually, and they changed her mind about Josh. Josh Reyes, Judge Reyes, That the crimes I was being accused of and pled guilty to were not the man that I am. And not only that, she said, you've made me a better judge.

My gut feeling was like, okay, it's not gonna be as bad as we thought. Judge Reyes gave Josh his sentence. 279 hours of community service. One hour, she says, for every marine casualty in the Civil War. That's the same sentence that Helena and Kummer got as well. So no jail time. Judge Reyes went from condemning Josh for being a part of this violent mob to going out of her way to craft this redemption story for him.

She mentioned something about how she's kind of envious of the story that I can tell my daughter and help her learn from my mistakes. And that kind of changed my mind on it is now it's a tool. It's not a blemish. You can use this to help others learn and prevent them from making similar mistakes. But were Josh's actions a mistake? We talked to him for four hours since his court case wrapped up and there were holes in his story. We asked him directly about some of his actions that day.

Were you chanting? No, no. There's, I didn't chant. They didn't actually show evidence to prove that I was chanting and picketing. Did at any point you say, this is chaotic, this is a little bit crazy, I gotta get the hell out of here? I think if I had actually seen some of the violence, I would have left sooner. The one thing he did tell us was that he helped put a MAGA hat on a statue.

I just knew I was definitely the tallest one in the group and could reach. He said there was this kind of small lady struggling to put it up there, so he came over, took the hat out of her hand, and helped her place it on the statue's head. A statue of what? Like, was it someone specific or like an eagle or what? No, I don't remember. Just a person? Yeah, it was a DeB a random statue in the rotunda. At one point, Josh called us back for a second interview. When we sat down, he handed me

this one sheet of paper. It was part of the FBI's official statement of facts. And he's like, look, this is all they've got on me. They appears in the crowd, and then he walks. And it just it talks about how we walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. And nothing in their summary of our actions is actually, you know, spooky or violent or scary. He kept using the word humorous. I thought it was humorous, but they, in their summary, like my time in the Capitol building,

that's all they could really sum it up to was walking. And then I looked at the bottom of the page and it says like one of 45. But there's more to this story than just some missing pages. There's also video evidence. The FBI investigation into Josh relied on these screenshots in the Capitol that mostly came from surveillance footage inside. We didn't have access to that.

But a few weeks after we talked to Josh, we got an unexpected assist. House Republicans started dropping some 5,000 hours of security camera footage from January 6th on a public video platform. The security footage is silent, so we're going to talk you through it. Seven minutes after the doors and windows to the hallway are breached, Josh walks in with Helen and Kumer. They slowly make their way to the front of this crowd, about 20 feet away from the door to the house chamber. And at one point, Josh cups his hands around his mouth,

and when you watch the video, it's pretty clear he's chanting, stop the steal, stop the steal. At another point, Josh is holding a Don't Tread on Me flag, just before tear gas starts to fill the space. At that point, Josh and his friends leave that hallway and end up in the Capitol Rotunda in a huge crowd. They help a guy try to put a MAGA hat on a statue. And Josh is the one who finally gets it up there by actually climbing the statue. When Josh admitted to putting a hat on a statue, he told us he didn't remember which statue

it was. But Lauren and I have seen this bust up close in shiny gold lettering it reads, Martin Luther King Jr. It's hard to miss. It's only when the police, in riot gear no less, form a line and start to push everyone out that Josh, along with Helenan and Coomer, are finally forced to leave the rotunda. It's clear that the video doesn't match up with Josh's story. Josh said he didn't see any violence, it was peaceful, he didn't do anything but walk around. That's just not true.

After we watched the surveillance videos, we shared them with Josh's lawyer and asked for a follow-up interview. Josh declined. He was done talking to us. All those months ago when we interviewed Josh, we kept asking him, how did he see himself that day? Was he a protester, an insurrectionist, an extremist? I would say the line that crosses you from just a peaceful protester, kind of just looking

around and walking around, and extremist is insinuating violence, being associated with one of the extremist groups. Once you compromise your integrity far enough to hurt someone or hurt the history behind the building, I think that's kind of what draws that line. Josh's narrow definition of extremism, property damage, bodily harm, conveniently leaves out anything he did that day. But I was there too, and I can say it's hard to compartmentalize like that. What I saw was a mass of bodies pressing their way into the Capitol building, people wielding flagpoles as weapons, hitting cops. It was chaos.

The power was in the numbers. The sheer size of the mob overwhelmed Capitol police, and they burst through the doors just minutes before Josh entered the Capitol. It was a riot, and it disrupted the congressional proceeding to certify the election. What happened that day couldn't have happened without everyone. When we talked to Michael Jensen about his work on extremism and the military, he said it's easy to recognize the worst offenders, the proud boys, the homegrown militias. But in his research, he says there's this

other, more elusive group. People that are sympathetic to these views, that are promoting these ideas. And that's where we really don't have a good sense of how large that population is. So is Joshua Bate one of them? This is an administrative separation proceeding. And what this essentially decides is, should Sergeant Abate remain in the United States Marine Corps? It's now up to the Marines to decide. As Marines, we take oaths to protect the Constitution

against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We violated that oath that day. That's on the second and final episode of A Good Guy. If you want to hear the second and final episode of this series right now, you should sign up for Embedded Plus. It's a great way to support our work, and you'll get to access every Embedded series early and sponsor-free. Head over to plus.npr.org slash embedded. A Good Guy from Embedded is a collaboration with NPR's National Security Team. This series was reported by me and Tom Bowman.

It was edited by Luis Treyes and Andrew Sussman. It was produced by Adelina Lansianese. Additional reporting and production from Hannah Allam, Graham Smith, Andrew Mambo, Barbara Van Werkum, and the NPR Investigations team, whose database of January 6th criminal cases you can find on npr.org. and the NPR Investigations team, whose database of January 6 criminal cases you can find on npr.org.

We'll provide the link in our show notes. Gilly Moon mastered the episode, fact-checking by Will Chase, episode art by Luke Medina. Liana Simstrom is our supervising senior producer, Katie Simon is our supervising editor, and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. The embedded team also includes Reyna Cohen, Dan Gurma, Ariana Lee, and Abby Wendell. Thanks to our managing editor of Standards and Practices, Tony Kavan, and to

Johannes Durgi and Micah Ratner for legal support. Music by Ramtin Arab-Louie. Special thanks to Odette Youssef, Tom Dreisbach, Oli Dierden, and the staff of All Things Considered for their support during the reporting and producing of this podcast. I'm Lauren Hodges. This is Embedded from NPR. Thanks for listening. Music