The NPR Politics Podcast - Jan. 6 Hearing: People Who Believed Trump Face Consequences. So Far, Trump Doesn't.

Episode Date: July 13, 2022

The committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack held its seventh public hearing Tuesday, focusing on the role right-wing extremist groups – such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers – played in planning the deadly siege. It also featured testimony from Stephen Ayres, a former Ohio factory worker, who said he stormed the Capitol after President Trump suggested it because he believed Trump's claims that the election had been stolen.And: President Trump attempted to call a witness in the Jan. 6 investigation following the last hearing on June 28 with Cassidy Hutchinson, the committee said.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Claudia Grisales, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 5.43 p.m. on Tuesday, the 12th of July. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. At today's January 6th committee hearing, testimony from a Capitol insurrectionist, Stephen Ayers. He came to see then-President Trump speak at the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse. He believed the president when he said the election was stolen. He marched on the Capitol after President Trump's call to do so. And he

was one of the hundreds like him who faced consequences for it. He pled guilty to disorderly conduct. I lost my job, sold my house. So, I mean, it definitely, it changed my life, you know, not for the good, definitely not for the, you know, for the better. Claudia and Ryan, a lot happened today, but I'd like to start with his testimony. It is a fresh reminder that so far for all of the actions that President Trump took, for all of the actions that those around him took, it's just people like Stephen Ayers, a former cabinet factory worker from Ohio who faced consequences, who faced legal consequences for what happened on and before January 6th. Right. This harks back to some opening remarks that Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney shared. She said that millions of Americans were persuaded to believe what Trump and his advisors did not. And Ayers is one of those examples. And it was emotional at times that you could see he approached the officers and former officers like Michael Fanone, who used to be with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, after the hearing. And he hugged some of them.

He shook hands. And Fanone was asked after, what did Ayers say to you? And he said he apologized. So it just was very striking in terms of the impact this has had on his life, you could hear it during his testimony, the remorse that he got caught up with social media, with Trump's message that the election was into the events of January 6th. A lot of time, that investigation, which is a huge, sprawling thing, kind of boils down to numbers. The number of people arrested, the number of people charged with seditious conspiracy, with disorderly conduct, what have you. Here today, we got to listen to one individual, Stephen Ayers, cabinet factory worker from Ohio, like you said, who has paid

a price for what he did on January 6th, for the things that he believed on January 6th. And I think that that provided the sort of human element that is often lacking in this big, sprawling investigation. And I think that if I had to guess why the committee had him testify, it was to draw a connection between his actions and the actions of all of these people who stormed the Capitol and the former president, President Trump. And you got this with Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy questioning Ayers about how closely he listened to Trump, how he followed his tweets and his Instagram posts. So why'd you decide to march to the Capitol?

Well, basically, you know, the president, you know, got everybody riled up, told everybody head on down. So we basically were just following what he said. And we've heard the committee over the course of these hearings really try to pin what happened on January 6th on the former president. He's the one who summoned the mob to D.C. He's the one who pointed it at the Capitol and set it off. And what the committee appeared to be trying to do with Ayers' testimony today was give you that one individual saying that that's exactly what happened in his case. And of course, the conclusion to draw, the conclusion that the committee wants you to draw is that's what happened. Extrapolate that. That's what happened with the full crowd. And I think that

we got a preview of the next hearing when he was asked, well, when did you decide to go home? And he said, well, it was after that four o'clock tweet from President Trump telling us to go home. We can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace. Claudia, you have followed this case. You have been following these hearings in and out. What else stood out to you from today's hearing? Right. It was really in vivid detail. We heard about this December 18 meeting.

Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, who was helping lead the presentation today, described it as a profane and heated clash. Witness Cassidy Hutchinson, who appeared at the prior hearing, called it unhinged in capital letters and a text appeared before the committee last Friday and was there for more than eight hours at the O'Neill House office building where they took in his testimony. And he also described how he walked into this room of this meeting, this chaotic meeting, and he was not happy at who he saw. For example, the Overstock CEO was there and he's like, who is this guy? Asked him, who are you? And so this included this face-off between Cipollone, White House lawyer Eric Hirschman against these individuals in this room. This included Trump ally and lawyer Sidney Powell. There was even discussion that she could be appointed special counsel to oversee investigations or claims such as seizing voting machines, these false claims to

look into false evidence that there was some sort of mishap with these voting machines. And then ultimately, just a couple of hours, if not less than that, after that meeting concluded, is when Trump sent out that fateful tweet about January 6th calling people to come to D.C. and for a rally that will be wild, he said. We should also note that Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor to the president who left early in the administration, he was also in that meeting with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. And it was this sort of epic battle about the strategy, about the path forward, whether to, you know, like use the levers of power of the federal government to chase every conspiracy theory or to give credence to every conspiracy theory or, you know, to proceed with

the legal constitutional process that is sort of spelled out and required. Right. And you had people like Cipollone and Eric Hirschman joining with the voices that we've heard from other former senior administration officials, pushing back against all of these claims, saying, where's the evidence? Where's the evidence? Cipollone, in his testimony at one point, said it's time to put up or shut up. There was no evidence that they had to back these claims of election fraud. And Cipollone tried to make that clear to the president, but it seems as though never really got through. So as part of this hearing, I think part of the promise of this hearing was that they were going to draw connections between these extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and connect them to President Trump and his allies.

And that stopped the Steele rally that he announced in the tweet that night. Did they make that connection? They did not really present any new evidence that would expand our knowledge of links between those two worlds. We know that there are connections between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys and people who have been sort of outside informal advisors of the president, people like Roger Stone, people like Michael Flynn, again. But we didn't really get any new information that would push our understanding of what happened, whether there was any coordination, let's say, between the upper echelons of the White House and the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. That's what I think a lot of people were perhaps hoping to see, see new evidence on that front. And the committee didn't really deliver there.

This hearing had several scenes, right? Like you had the knockdown drag out fight in the Oval Office that expanded to other parts of the White House. And then you had the night before January 6th, you had January 5th. And there was another rally in Freedom Plaza, which is really quite close to the White House, where essentially they were speakers that were deemed too extreme to put on stage with Trump the next day. And so they had this pre-rally. And you have a former deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, describing the doors open at the White House so that the sound...

In the Oval Office, right? Yeah, in the Oval Office, so that the sound of that angry crowd could wash in. It was so loud that you could feel it shaking in the Oval. He was in a very good mood. And Matthew said that in the sort of weeks leading up to this, Trump had been in a foul mood, just very angry. And that that was the big difference, was that here it is January 5th, and she said he was in a very good mood listening to this. Because he could hear the people that were there for him to help him stay in office. And

the message that was being delivered from the stage, the committee played sort of a supercut of that message. And it was basically about armed revolution. And it includes Alex Jones, founder of InfoWars, provocateur, conspiracy theorist. Very popular Internet man on the right. Very popular on the far right, railing, just railing. 1776! 1776! This also all ties into what we heard in the previous hearing from Witness Cassidy Hutchinson. Again, this is the former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. When she talked about how energized the president was the following day that he wanted to march to the Capitol and there was a confrontation in the presidential limousine over his efforts to try and march to the Capitol. And there was a confrontation in the presidential limousine over his efforts to try

and march to the Capitol. And that's another theme we heard today as well, that he was looking at perhaps another appearance later that day, that this was knowingly part of the plan, that he wanted to be part of this march and whatever happened after that. Right. Well, we are going to get to January 6th in a second, but first, a quick break. And we're back. And Ryan, as you said before, the committee did not draw a direct link. Like there were not text messages on the screen that showed a direct link between these extremist groups and the Oval Office or even the outer Oval. the audience is that President Trump was told by any number of people in his campaign, in his White House, up and down his administration, that there was not enough evidence of fraud or any evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. That he was told that the vice

president, Vice President Pence, could not legally overturn the election. And yet Trump summoned people to Washington on the day of the election certification that he was told that rally goers, some of them were armed, and he told them to go to the Capitol and fight. And in fact, there was sort of a lengthy discussion of the speech that he delivered and what was in and what was out of that speech and how it got more angry that Trump beforehand knew that he wanted to unleash his followers on the Capitol, that he planned to have them march, but they tried to keep that a tight hold. They tried to keep that a secret. This was premeditated, is what the committee was saying. This was not something that happened spontaneously. This is something that Trump was planning ahead of time, which points to some sort of premeditation, I think, is what the committee was getting at.

And there were organizers of the rally who, in various communications, said, we've got to keep this on a close hold, but I think he's going to go to the Capitol or I think he's going to say to go to the Capitol. Or Ali Alexander, who was an organizer of the rally the night before, the pre-rally, saying that he wasn't sure whether Trump was going to say it or not, but he thought Trump was going to say, let's go to the Capitol. So that there were people involved in organizing the rallies who thought Trump was going to say this. And so then when he did say it in that rally speech, it wasn't an ad lib necessarily. It wasn't an ad lib. And that is part of tying back into Cipollone. We heard from Hutchison in the last hearing saying that he said, do not let him get to the Capitol. We're going to break all these laws. Don't let it happen. So it connects those two dots in terms of even some of these folks involved with the organization of the rally had hints, like Ali Alexander, that that was potentially the plan, that Trump was going to leave that stage at the Ellipse and continue on with the mob, perhaps to another location, another second stage or to the Capitol.

At the very end of the hearing, and I feel like this keeps happening at these hearings, but at the very end of the hearing, Vice Chair Liz Cheney dropped a bomb. And one more item. After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation, a witness you have not yet seen in these hearings. That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump's call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice. Ryan, what is the significance of that allegation? Well, the suggestion, of course, is that this is witness tampering. Trump was trying to call this individual in order to influence whatever this individual would tell the committee, trying to influence testimony. That's not something that you're allowed to do.

I contacted the Justice Department. It has declined to comment on this. Whether this rises to the level of something criminal is, frankly, neither here nor there at this point in time, I don't think. I think the point from what Cheney wanted to do was put former President Trump on notice that the committee is aware of his doing this, that it's not OK, and that they're going to call him out for it and that there could be repercussions down the line. And this is part of a pattern that we're seeing built for the committee now at the end of Hutchinson's hearing last month. They also shared some potential cases of witness tampering. We don't know who was behind this or who was targeted. However, that is something else the panel said they were looking into. And with this hearing, they did not share the names of witnesses this

time. The committee did not ahead of the hearing and just signals the increasing security concerns that this committee has now surrounding these witnesses and perhaps going forward that they could be looking at threats of witness tampering as they get deeper and deeper into their investigation and sharing it with the public. All right. So what comes next there? We now know that there will be another hearing next week. Jamie Raskin, Congressman Raskin, certainly teased the idea that it's what she and other members of the panel have said. So that's the focus of this next hearing that's now slated for next week is looking at this more than three hours as officials, including Cipollone himself and others, try to get the president, then President Trump, to try and send a message, do whatever he had to do to try and stop this attack. And it didn't happen for a long time. So they're going to take a deeper dive into what was going on during those 187 minutes. And basically, this is the committee saying Trump did not take action, even though he knew this attack was unfolding. He was warned multiple times, and he let it happen for several hours. All right.

Well, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Claudia Grisales. I cover Congress. And I'm Brian Lukes. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.