The NPR Politics Podcast - Six Months Later, There Is A Lot We Don't Know About The Attack On The Capitol

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

More than five hundred people have been charged in what is on track to be one of the largest criminal investigations in the country's history. Now, a House committee is charged with an impossible task: establishing a widely-accepted set of facts about what happened on January 6th.This episode; White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and justice correspondent Ryan Lucas.Connect:Subscribe to the NPR Politics Podcast here.Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Listen to our playlist The NPR Politics Daily Workout.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, this is Sarah and Jared in Zurich, Switzerland. We're on our way to our 24-week prenatal doctor's visit, where I can join for the first time since COVID restrictions have eased. This podcast was recorded at 2.06 p.m. on Tuesday, July 6th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be preparing for welcoming our baby boy. Enjoy the show. That's exciting. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the

Justice Department. It has been exactly six months since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the January 6th insurrection. And since we're at this mark, we wanted to take this moment to look at the ongoing aftermath and where things stand. And Kelsey, let's start with you. There is a congressional probe that is getting ramped up to look at what happened. How's that taking shape? Yeah, the House voted almost exclusively along party lines to create a select committee to investigate the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Now, there were a few Republicans that voted along with Democrats, but this has become a very politicized affair. Democrats are moving ahead and they have named their members of the select committee, which includes Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming. She, you know, she took this job under some kind of veiled threats from

other Republicans that it would be a death knell for her political career. And I think, you know, one of the calculations that she has made over and over is that she has taken all of the political risks. This is not a new political risk. She is just firmly planting her feet in the space that she, you know, feels is right. And it would be odd for her at this point in time to not take this job, it would seem. She's gone kind of all in on this position. She has essentially said that other Republicans are, you know, are ignoring reality. She has staked her entire political identity on this moment.

So we know who the speaker has decided should be on this committee, but this is not intended to be a Democrats-only committee. So where do things stand with the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, naming who he would like to be on the committee. So far, he hasn't. We don't know exactly how he's going to approach this. A lot of Republicans just don't want to be on this committee. They see it as partisan. They see it as basically being stuck with a really bad job where they have to investigate what they expect will be Democrats wanting to go after former President Trump.

And they don't want to be a part of that. So far, really, the only people who want to be a part of that are people who are kind of jumping into the fray and, you know, wanting to fight on everything. I'm thinking about Marjorie Taylor Greene and, you know, Matt Gaetz of Florida, people who relish these moments of being the firebrands. And it would seem that that would not bode well for the bipartisan investigative spirit of a congressional committee. Well, yeah, because it changes the tone. Democrats say that they want this to be a serious tone, an opportunity to do a fulsome investigation, and that they want this to be bipartisan. They want Republicans to join them. You know, that whether or not Republicans view it that way, you know, may color the way the investigation goes down.

Or whether there are real answers. Or real answers that have broad agreement that, yes, that is in fact what happened. Yeah. Or if people trust it. And Democrats wanted this to be a bipartisan commission, not a select committee, because they wanted there to be agreement. They wanted there to be this, you know, this sign off this, this political agreement that whatever, whatever came of the investigation would be shared fact. But we don't live in a space where there are a lot of shared facts when it comes to a lot of things that have happened politically over the past several years. So the idea that this would be a place where suddenly that would happen seems like it was kind of a wish.

Okay, so Ryan, that is the political side of things. What about the justice side of it? There are how many cases more than 500 more than 500 people have been arrested in connection with the uh the attack on the capitol at this point yeah and there are people who are still being arrested almost every week uh and so it is still an active investigation the fbi is still looking to the public for help identifying people who have been caught on video at the capitol from january 6th so yes there are help identifying people who have been caught on video at the Capitol from January 6th. So, yes, more than 500 people have been charged so far,

and there's every expectation that we will see more people charged in the days and weeks to come. How is it shaping up? And what I mean by that is we're starting to see people negotiating plea agreements, for instance. Are we getting a sense of how this might resolve and whether this side of it could lead to answers? We already have a better understanding of what happened, what sort of planning went into it from the investigative work that the prosecutors have done so far. Now, granted, this is all at the pre-trial stage thus far. We've had a lot of pre-trial hearings. That continues to be the case. Prosecutors and defense attorneys in these cases have, in many of these cases, say that there are plea negotiations underway with a lot of these

defendants. We have had more than a half dozen plea agreements at this point in time. We've had one individual who's actually pleaded guilty and been sentenced thus far. But the important thing about these plea agreements is kind of what they signal is likely to happen in a lot of the rest of these cases. The one individual, for example, that I mentioned who's pleaded guilty and been sentenced is a woman by the name of Anna Morgan Lloyd. She's a 49-year-old from Indiana. She, on January 6th, entered the Capitol. She's not accused of engaging in any violence.

She spent 10, 20 minutes inside the building, hallways, rotunda, and then walked out. She managed to plead down to a single misdemeanor count of picketing, parading, or demonstrating in the Capitol. She was sentenced to three years of probation, 120 hours of community service, but no jail time. And talking to defense attorneys and looking at court papers, the expectation among defense attorneys who I spoke to who have capital right defendants is that this will likely be a model for how a lot of other defendants who engage in similar behavior, so who were not violent, who just entered the Capitol, don't have any ties to extremist groups, how they are likely the sort of plea agreements that they're likely to see. So no jail time is something that may end up being the case for a lot of these people. But let's talk about some of the more serious charges and cases, too. There were people charged with conspiracy related to the insurrection.

And I'm wondering, does that give any better sense of was this a spontaneous thing where people just walked over to the Capitol and what do you know? Or was this an organized attack on the United States Capitol? Do we have a better answer to that question? Well, we have a better sense of what the government alleges some individuals were doing. And you mentioned those conspiracy cases. There are conspiracy cases brought against members or associates of the Proud Boys. There are a couple of conspiracy cases involving them. And then there's one very big conspiracy case that involves alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers, the anti-government

kind of far-right extremist group. In that case, there are certainly allegations that the government has put forward that there was advanced planning done by the individuals involved to prepare for violence. And ultimately, the conspiracy charge is to disrupt Congress's certification of the of the Electoral College count on January 6th. The government alleges that there was talk about having weapons stashed on the Virginia side of the Potomac River that they could then ferry into Washington, D.C. if things got messy and they wanted to have weapons in the city. So there was definitely planning going on, but there is not a great deal of evidence that has been put forward by the government so far of some sort of – actually, there's no significant evidence that the government has put forward alleging some sort of vast conspiracy sense of what I would call kind of smaller scale conspiracies, small groups of people working together towards a common purpose. What specifically that purpose was, according to the government, tends to be to disrupt the electoral college

count. That's something that most of the defendants in those cases are fighting. That said, there's one individual who was charged in that big Oath Keepers conspiracy case who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Another individual who was alleged to kind of be part of that conspiracy but was charged separately, has also pleaded guilty and also agreed to cooperate. So that is a significant advance for prosecutors pursuing those cases, and it will be interesting to see what ultimately they come up with. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break, and when we get back, we will talk about where the country is six months after the attack

on the Capitol. In recent mass shootings, people have been targeted for who they are, who they worship. But on June 28, 2018, people were targeted for the job they do at a newspaper. Listen to the new series from NPR's Embedded about the survivors at the Capitol Gazette. And we're back. And Kelsey and Ryan, I wanted to just take a little bit of a step back. We've been talking about both congressional investigations and Justice Department investigations into what happened on January 6th. But there's also this theme emerging where there really are different realities or different views of what happened. And Kelsey, I think about some Republican members of Congress who have said things like, oh, it looked like a regular tourist day or things like that. Has the thread been lost? Absolutely not.

This is I mean, January 6th is still the backdrop of the interactions between members, particularly in the House on everything, everything from whether or not to set up that that select committee on the investigation to passing legislation and working together. You know, I've talked to Democrats who say that they just feel like they can't work with Republicans on things that they there were people that they used to partner with on, you know, completely unrelated legislation, and they just are unwilling to do that now, because they see the, you know, their Republican colleagues as threats. You know, there's a little bit of politics here, too. There are some Democrats who say that they feel like another attack is imminently possible and that other Republicans are fomenting the kind of disagreement that creates the environment where such a thing was possible and is possible. But, you know, as we've talked about a little bit, that is good political messaging, too. Yeah. And I'll just flag that the former president has sort of taken to downplaying it or talking about sort of conspiracy ideas about what really happened that day. And one

other thing about this day, six months out, there are actually just so many unanswered questions. And of course, the House Select Committee is going to work on that. The Justice Department is continuing to look at that and do those investigations we've been talking about. But Ryan, one thing that stands out is there were two pipe bombs placed that day. And other than sort of grainy security footage, it doesn't seem like there's any more of an answer about what that meant, whether it was related and who the heck that person was. No, you're absolutely right. That is one of the big outstanding questions from January 6th.

And it's something that people often forget about, I think, because those bombs didn't go off. But the fact that you had two bombs planted near the Capitol in front of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on the eve of January 6th, bombs that officials say were real. These were legitimate explosive devices. And we don't know what connection that has to the events that happened on January 6th, and we don't know who left them. And those, as you said, those are two huge questions that remain kind of hanging above everything else that we still need to learn about what happened on January 6th. Yeah. And I'll just say that there are so very many questions, and yet this has also become so politicized that it's not clear that answers will be forthcoming. I mean, certainly, the answer could be found about who left the pipe bombs, but more broadly, and how this happened. It's just not clear that there will

be an answer that the country will be able to agree on. It seemed more possible that there could have been an answer six months ago than it seems like today. Right. And I think we're going to leave it there for now. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.