The NPR Politics Podcast - How Congress Is Investigating January 6th — And Preparing For Any Future Attacks

Episode Date: April 8, 2022

Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser to the former president, voluntarily testified before House investigators for more than eight hours this week about the insurrectionist riot in the Capitol. And Congress debated how the government would survive if half its members died or were incapacitated in an attack or natural disaster. Right now, the Constitution requires House members be to replaced by special election, a lengthy process.This episode: demographics and culture correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales, and congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Anna Inciardi, and it's a rainy, gray day, but good news is I have a really nice chocolate croissant to eat for breakfast. This podcast was recorded at 1.05 p.m. on April 8th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show! That sounds delicious. Living your best life. That was great. All right.

Hey there. It is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Carrie Johnson, national justice correspondent. And we have a couple of big things to cover today to wrap up the week. We're going to start with the

House committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riot. That committee is continuing its work. This week, former President Trump's daughter Ivanka spent several hours talking to committee members. And that committee also approved two criminal contempt referrals for two of Trump's top White House aides. So, Claudia, let's start with Ivanka Trump. What do we know about her appearance before the committee? Do we have any information right now? Right. Yes, she did voluntarily appear before the committee.

This was virtually on Tuesday to answer questions for about eight hours. So a very long day for the panel and her. Several members told us she did not invoke any privileges, that is, she did not decline to answer because of, say, executive privilege or other legal shields. And of course, Ivanka Trump was the former White House advisor, and she marks the highest profile member of the Trump family to be interviewed by the panel. We talked to Committee Chairman Benn Benny Thompson about this after her conversations, and he told reporters this is a big deal for the committee. I think it speaks volumes that the daughter of the president came in pretty much voluntarily

and spoke with the committee, and some of the other people close to him did not. That was part of a conversation with the chairman where we were trying to get little tidbits, if we could, of what she told the panel, and he kept it pretty general. But we imagine they covered a lot of ground. The committee said they wanted to know about conversations she overheard where her father was trying to convince the then-Vice President Mike Pence the morning of January 6th to reject the election's results. And also interest in her role as we learn White House staffers look to Ivanka Trump on January 6th to try and intervene and get her father to stop the rioters sooner.

Right. And as I said, up top, the committee was busy this week. They also voted to refer two top advisors, Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro, to the Justice Department for contempt of Congress after they defied subpoenas. Tell us more about that, Claudia. Why did they say they were defying those? And do we know what the committee is hoping to hear from those two? Right. So Scavino and Navarro have repeatedly said that executive privilege prevented their cooperation. And Scavino, of course, was the former deputy chief of staff, Navarro, the former trade advisor. But the committee said even despite that legal shield, if it applied, they wanted to talk to them about their unofficial duties in the days leading up to January 6. For example, Navarro wrote and publicly spoke about his own efforts to try and overturn the 2020 presidential election. And Scavino was part of several meetings where these efforts were discussed.

He also played a large role in the former president's social media accounts where misinformation was a major concern leading up to the attack on the Capitol. So the committee wanted to dive into details like that. And so now with these contempt referrals, it seems like this is headed more in a punitive direction, and they may never hear from these witnesses after all. Carrie, I want to talk to you about this because the House did this before with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. In December, they voted to hold him in contempt. I was looking back at coverage of that, and I saw the word thorny used a lot in headlines

describing it, just that this whole thing is complicated for the Justice Department. Remind us why it's so complicated. Well, it's complicated because for the last 40 years or so, the Justice Department and the executive branch have talked about executive privilege as a legal shield to protect very sensitive deliberations and communications between a president and his or her top advisors. And when you're talking about interactions between a president and a chief of staff, which Mark Meadows was at the time, I can't imagine something more sensitive than that. So it's complicated for that reason. These officials at the Justice Department who are looking at this question are also considering whether if they decide to prosecute Mark Meadows here, whether that would

set a precedent for future administrations. And, you know, it may be that Congress changes hands in several months. And where do we go from here? I would also point out that, you know, once you do prosecute somebody for contempt of Congress, which is happening right now with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, you basically foreclose any opportunity to get additional information out of those people. Mark Meadows did provide a lot of emails and text messages, including the ones involving the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, and they may want a lot more from him. That's why it's so thorny. Wow. Okay. So in other words, now that the House has voted to hold Scavino and Navarro in contempt, it's possible we just won't hear at all from them

or that the committee won't hear it all from them. Scavino and Navarro are a different category of fish, right? So Mark Meadows is a really big fish. He's about as close as it gets to Trump in those days. Scavino and Navarro are more complicated. Navarro, because as Claudia said, he's actually talked a lot about and written a book in which he discloses some of his baseless theories for trying to overturn the election. And Dan Scavino is really interesting because Scavino, as Claudia said, handled a lot of social media. He may also have some insight into what President Trump was doing and thinking as he was tweeting on January 6th. And remember that video that ultimately came out rather late in the day. We understand there are some outtakes there that are of great interest to the January 6th committee.

So Scavino and Navarro know a lot. They may not be quite as complicated legally to prosecute as somebody like Mark Meadows is. Right. I think they may be closer to the case of former strategist Steve Bannon, who, as you mentioned, Carrie, is battling these prosecution charges that were borne out of his contempt referral. Neither Navarro or Scavino turned over anything. So it was just an outright defiance of their subpoenas. All right. Well, before we go to break, I do want to ask you, Carrie, about some more of your reporting from this week, which is that the Department of Justice is investigating Donald Trump's handling of official documents after a bunch of records were discovered at Mar-a-Lago. What can you tell us about what those documents are and what this investigation means? it burst out into public view a few months ago that something like 15 boxes of sensitive

information, documents, other materials were found at former President Trump's resort at Mar-a-Lago. It turns out some of those materials were marked top secret, were highly classified. And so now the FBI is taking a look at whether there was any mishandling of that classified information, whether potentially any foreign government might have had access to it at Mar-a-Lago, and what exactly happened there. Now, this is complicated a little bit because a president has almost unilateral authority to declassify materials on his own, but you've still got to look at that if you're the FBI. And secondly, legal experts are telling me that people involved in the packing and shipping

of these materials to Mar-a-Lago may come under the purview of the FBI investigation, even if President Trump himself might not face legal jeopardy here. National security lawyers say this is a no-brainer. The DOJ and the FBI have to take a look at this, even though Merrick Garland and the DOJ leadership have been really leery of announcing they're investigating former President Trump. But anything, this is something they have to take a look at. All right. Well, Carrie, thank you. We're going to let you go to go start your weekend. Thank you.

And when we get back, Congress is deciding how it will proceed in the event of worst case scenarios. And we are back with Kelsey Snell. Hello, Kelsey. Hello. It's good to see you guys or hear you guys. I miss seeing you guys. Well, Kelsey, you reported this week on Congress tackling some, I think it's fair to call them existential questions. Namely, what would happen if a major disaster hit America, millions died, air traffic ground to a halt, electricity was down, and Congress needed to act? And what if half the members of Congress were among the dead or missing? The short answer is nobody knows, and that's chilling. Now, Kelsey, what prompted

all of those big questions this week? What prompted you to report on this? Well, so this was actually a hearing by the Congressional Committee. It's called the Select Committee on Modernization of Congress. It's this group in the House that have been spending the past several years looking at ways to kind of bring Congress into the current century. One of the things that's really interesting about that is that that task involves things that go from like making sure that paperwork processes are updated all the way through like dealing with making websites work better or making training better for new members. And in this case, it's also dealing with the eventuality of disasters.

One thing I should say is that Congress is kind of constantly having conversations about how to handle disasters. There are specialists within Congress who are, you know, federal employees whose job it is to have disaster preparedness strategies. But this is one of those things that, you know, is much broader in scope than I think people realize. A big part of what they talked about here was what do they do to replace members of Congress? And that's not something that any federally hired disaster planner can actually even address. It's really interesting about this committee, too, is that they have worked in such a bipartisan fashion. Some folks say it's one of the better committees when it comes to this kind of work. Totally. Yeah. It's like one of the only committees at work. Like they like that's the joke about them. They call themselves modcom and they're like the friendliest committee in Washington. That is fascinating. Both parties can agree that

disasters are bad. It is one of the few places that bipartisanship perhaps can come out these days. But hold on. I want to come back to this and really point out here that this is not just Congress spinning out post-apocalyptic scenarios. This is not a purely hypothetical risk, right? I mean, there have been these recent examples of political violence, January 6th, the congressional baseball shooting a few years ago. How did those come up in this hearing? Yeah. And I should say all of the scenarios that you mentioned at the top there are things that members of Congress themselves brought up as, you know, potential situations that Congress needs to be prepared to consider. I mean, they repeatedly said that this isn't a hypothetical thing. You mentioned the shooting at the baseball practice that happened in 2017 when a gunman shot at Republican

members who were practicing for a charity baseball game. One member of Congress, Steve Scalise, who's the Republican whip, was shot, as were two members of security detail and another person died. So this was a very serious event. And members also pointed to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And we should remind people that armed rioters were yards away from where members hid. And the thing that kept coming up over and over is that members really felt like they needed to have this conversation. Because, you know, all of these events, and other events that have happened, moments of threatened political violence, and even issues with elections that people have been worried could occur. These are all things that members of Congress think could have become disasters had fates changed a different way or if somebody hadn't been there to intervene.

So they're trying to think about things strategically, not catastrophically, not for the fun of thinking about disaster things, but because it's important to have continuity of government. Right. If we look at the pattern of threats against lawmakers, that's really skyrocketed just in the last couple years alone. So it's like, this job has become more dangerous, and this is a reality they need to consider more practically. Yeah. And this former congressman, Brian Baird, was testifying as one of the experts here. And he said something that actually even took some of the members on the committee by surprise. And that was that had the 20 members that were practicing for that charity baseball game, had they been killed, the majority would have flipped in Congress. And the same is

true if there is even one person who is, say, assassinated in the Senate. So these are serious questions that Congress needs to consider. Also, one issue to consider is when you look at the Senate side, when there's a vacancy there, a governor can appoint to fill. That's a much quicker action. We saw that with Senator Alex Padilla, who was appointed by the California governor in that case, when Vice President Harris was elected to take her position at the White House. But when we look at the House side, it's much more complicated. It requires this change to the Constitution, essentially, correct? Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Because the replacement process for a member of the House is constitutionally required to be a special election. And that has taken on average 150 days. There is no way to just name a replacement for a House member. And if you want to change that reality, you have to do a full amendment to the Constitution, which is really hard. Two-thirds of both the House and the Senate need to agree to pass a constitutional amendment, and then three-fourths of the states need to ratify it. Now, that is an extremely high bar. But without it, what do they do? Right. And to add one more layer to this, we haven't, we've barely even talked about here what that amendment would look like. I mean, what are some of the suggestions about what the plan even looks like? Or is it just, that's just too far to even speculate on? It would have to come up with some way to have, you know, criteria or, you know, rules for who should be the replacement. One idea that came up was that when a person runs for Congress,

they could basically run with an alternate. And so that the people would still be electing the person who would be appointed to fill their seat if something happened. But the problem that they run into is that they talk about how the framers didn't want the politically connected picking their own successors. So they're trying to kind of thread this needle between a potential necessity of the modern world where cyber threats and natural disasters and political violence are realities against the intent of the Constitution. All right, we're going to leave that there. Take a quick break.

And when we get back, it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back, and it's time to end the show like we do every week with Can't Let It Go, the part of the show where we talk about the things from the week that we just can't stop talking about, politics or otherwise. Kelsey, let's hear from you. What can't you let go of? All right. So earlier today, I was just kind of scrolling the internet, as you do, and I came across this story that is essentially just like a list of people recounting the stories of renaming their kids after they're born. Oh, yes. And I was super into it. I am too. Wait, why?

Well, some of them are like the standard thing where people are like, oh, we just thought we had a name that we wanted. And then before we left the hospital, we changed our minds. And so we just put the different thing on the paperwork than what we thought. But some of them, like there's this one person who they renamed the kid at like four years old. Wow. But why? Well, they said that the name just like four years old. Wow. But why? Well, they said that the name just didn't fit her. And so they inverted her middle name and her first name.

So it was like the name was already known to her, but like it just felt like it didn't fit her. You get buyer's remorse. You want something different. You want to change it up. It makes sense. I mean, this just made me think about how when I was pregnant, we couldn't come up with a name and like didn't have a name for my kid until they basically told me that I had to give the kid a name or leave the hospital with my kid being named baby. And I was like, wait a second.

I don't know if it would have actually gone that way. But I was like, we got to do something about this. So you just picked it impulsively? I didn't want to change my mind. Yeah, we had a hard time, too. We shopped ours at parties, which is not a good place to do that. And so it's a difficult journey, and it happens. I do not blame people.

You were poll testing. It's good. I am fascinated. I thought this was going to be way more dramatic. Like, we named you after Aunt Rita. Rita is dead to me. I had a fight with her. Listen, I'm sure that probably happens. Those people just didn't happen to write into the Washington Post. P.S. I want to point out, I have an Aunt Rita. Aunt Rita is lovely. That's just the name I pulled. Okay. All right. Here's what I can't let go of this week. What I can't let go of also is from the Washington Post. It is a story by Jessica Contrera at the Post about a man here in Washington, D.C., who than 24. He speaks 24 quite well.

But there's a whole list in this story of languages that he is fluent in, conversational in, intermediate, basic, that he knows a few words in. It's upwards of 40 that he is at least somewhat familiar with. That's amazing. And what's even wilder is that he doesn't work in a field that is tightly bound to four languages. He's a carpet cleaner. So while he might encounter people in his work that speak other languages, he's not an interpreter of any sort. fascinated with languages from a young age and got very into learning them whenever he ran into someone. And what's really lovely about this story, which I highly recommend people go read, is that beyond getting into the science of what his brain looks like and all of that, it also just gets into the human side of this. He talks about running into someone at a grocery store once, I believe it was, who spoke Russian. And he said to her something very simple like, good day, how are you?

And the phrase he uses is that there was like a splash of happiness that came across her face. It's a very lovely human story about really about not just, wow, isn't this fascinating that this man can speak all these languages but just the joy of connecting with people and how happy people are when you can meet them where they are and as I muddle my way through Duolingo that's what I can't let go of all right Claudia what can't you let go of. Okay, so mine is not a splash of happiness. I thought it was earlier this week. It was the capital fox. And so I had started my day on Monday.

I was taking my daughter to school, and I saw a fox as I was pulling out of my driveway chasing a squirrel. Very dramatic moment. And we know that foxes in our areas have had baby foxes. They have mouths to feed. So it's a busy time. So fine. So I come back home. Next thing I know, the fox is now jumping into my backyard. And I'm nervous because we have a little Chiweenie. So she's a mix of a Chihuahua and a Datsun. And so she could be a pretty nice meal for a fox. And so I was like, you know, alert, alert, we need to protect the Chiweenie from the fox and the fox babies. Fine. So I go to work Monday that night, I'm leaving. And I'm like, what is going on with the foxes?

I'm walking to my car and about 50 feet away from me, there's this fox booking it across Constitution. And I just thought, thought oh how funny and just kind of laughed about it like what a foxy day and so i get home the chawini's fine yes we've upped security for the chawini we like monitor her closely she's all good everything's great but come back tuesday to terrible stories about fox bites nine people in all perhaps, including a member of Congress. And so turns out they capture the Fox, US Capitol Police post the dramatic images of the suspect being taken into custody. And, you know, it's very funny at that point. But then we realize, oh, no, they have to euthanize the Fox. Because that's the only way you can test for rabies, right?

Exactly. I didn't know that. How terrible is that? So when they got the test results back, it turned out the fox was rabid. Yeah. This was such a roller coaster. Such a roller coaster of a story. It was such an emotional roller coaster.

Exactly. And it's just like so many DC stories, you know, that we'll hear. And they said they start out funny. And then it ends in the euthanization of the foxes. So tragic ending, and I'm never laughing at a fox again. I'm taking them all seriously. And I'm keeping security up on my 20olini. So hopefully no more Fox troubles. That was a roller coaster. I mean, hey, you two are safe. Neither of you got bitten.

That is the selfish NPR politics podcast happy ending here. You two are safe. And that's all I care about. Thank you. All right. That is a wrap for today. Our executive producer is Mathoni Maturi. Our editors are Eric McDaniel and Krishnadev Kalamar. Our producers are Lexi

Shapidl and Elena Moore. Thank you to Brandon Carter. I am Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover demographics and culture. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.