The NPR Politics Podcast - The Evolution Of Election Integrity; Jan. 6 Rioter Sentenced To More Than 7 Years

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

"We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020, and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again, ever," said Cleta Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer, during a meeting concerning "election integrity" efforts. Groups on the right who buy into the "big lie" concerning the 2020 election are trying to refocus and reform efforts ahead of upcoming elections, according to audio of these meetings obtained by NPR.Guy Reffitt, a person who went to the Capitol on Jan. 6, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his actions during the insurrection. How will his trial and sentencing influence further legal action for those charged in relation to the riots? This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach.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, this is Alan, and I am in Mooresville, North Carolina, currently waiting in line to pick up my kids after school. It's a whole lot of sitting and waiting, but it's also the perfect time to get my dose of the NPR Politics Podcast. This one was recorded at 1.32 p.m. on Thursday, August 4th, 2022. Remember that things may have changed by the time you hear this. Enjoy the show. Investigations team is here with us. Good to have you on. Hey, thanks for having me. So before we dive in to the main topic of our podcast today, Carrie, since you cover the Justice Department and you are with us, we have some news into the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor from the Justice Department. Can you fill us in on what's the latest?

Some big news. In fact, the Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that four current and former Louisville police officers have been charged with federal crimes related to the death of Breonna Taylor two years ago. Two of the officers allegedly submitted what they knew was a false affidavit to get a search warrant for her home and setting off a chain of events that resulted in her death. Two other officers at least conspired after the fact to obstruct justice. One lied to federal investigators. And then the fourth officer is charged with using excessive force for shooting 10 times through the window after the search was executed. So those are long awaited charges. Remember Breonna Taylor's death, along with George Floyd's death at the hands of police, helped spur an international movement for police accountability and racial justice.

Now the Justice Department is involved here. Thank you for that update, Carrie, and I'm looking forward to hearing more of your reporting on that. Today on the show, we're going to shift gears, and we're going to look at two sides of the ongoing litigation fall with the midterm elections or even into 2024. And key to this effort is a Republican lawyer named Cleta Mitchell. Remind us who she is. Yeah. So Cleta Mitchell is a longtime Republican elections attorney. I think the reason many listeners might have heard of her in the first place, though, was from this audio of a January 2nd, 2021 call. So this is right before the Capitol riot when Donald Trump was on the phone with Georgia election officials and he was pressuring them to essentially overturn the

election result in Georgia. Right. Find 11000 votes, he kept saying. Cleta Mitchell was on that call offering backup. Since then, she has been subpoenaed by the Select Committee investigating January 6th. And she's also been subpoenaed by a grand jury as part of a Georgia district attorney's criminal investigation into Trump's election efforts after the 2020 election. Meanwhile, she is now part of this new organization called the Election Integrity Network, which is under the umbrella of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a major pro-Trump nonprofit in Washington, D.C. That in itself is a rather interesting name. And my understanding, Tom, is that she has been leading these conferences, conventions with other election deniers.

And you obtained audio that provides an inside look at this effort. So walk us through what you heard in the provides an inside look at this effort. So walk us through what you heard in the audio and what exactly she's doing. Yeah, so this is audio that was leaked to an organization called Documented. It's a watchdog group based in D.C., nonpartisan. They shared it with us and other media outlets. And basically, it's audio of these election integrity summits is what they call them. Cleta Mitchell is leading them, but they rely on outside groups like the Heritage Foundation, various Tea Party organizations, a group called ALEC,

or the American Legislative Exchange Council, which works on conservative causes at state legislatures. So they're using that energy, but they're also working with the Republican National Committee and the National Party. And they're leading volunteers basically on what they call a step-by-step guide to monitoring elections. And here's a bit of tape of Cleta Mitchell from one of those events. This is in Pennsylvania, where she basically says, we're not going to let 2020 happen again. We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020, and we are going forward to make sure that they know they're being watched by, in some cases, people who outright deny the validity of the 2020 election.

And I should say that Cleta Mitchell does say at her trainings that all of the volunteers should remain polite, never get angry with election officials. That's one of their important lessons to their volunteers. So what is their ultimate goal? Well, they say they just want to provide election integrity. The concern, though, from outside experts, though, is that a lot of these people believe in conspiracy theories. One of the people on the tape from this Pennsylvania event is a woman named Toni Shoup. She runs a group called Audit the Vote Pennsylvania, and she has posted QAnon memes in the past and other conspiratorial content. When I asked her about some of the QAnon material she has shared, she did not disavow it.

She said that QAnon and various conspiratorial videos online raised some interesting questions that made her question narratives. And she still does question all narratives in her words. So the concern is that people who believe these kind of conspiracy theories and that are monitoring elections or that are working as poll workers or poll watchers, that they might see conspiracies essentially around every corner and disrupt the very administration of the elections. You know, Tom, you're describing a situation in which officials like Cleta Mitchell are embracing conspiracy theories, denying the results of the 2020 election. And yet these are

not fringe elements within the Republican Party. I mean, your reporting shows that we have seen the RNC, the Republican Party at a national level, embrace Mitchell and defer to her in some cases. Yeah, that's right. I mean, one striking moment in the tape that we should play is when the director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, so the National Party, essentially said that he would defer to Cleta Mitchell on matters of election integrity. Cleta Mitchell, she's like the best election law expert out here. We're not going to tell her what to do. So essentially, you know, the RNC is walking a bit of a tight line where officially they don't always say that they believe the election in 2020 was stolen or that

there was some vast conspiracy to rig the election. And yet they are relying on a lot of this volunteer energy, the basis for which is the big lie. Carrie, I want to hear your thoughts, because it is no doubt one thing for a person to individually believe in conspiracy theories about the election. But when that shifts from individual statements to bringing groups of people together, persuading them that those falsehoods are real. At what point does the Department of Justice get concerned? At what point does that actually raise alarm bells? This is really complicated for the Justice Department and the FBI. You know, the First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech

and the right to assemble. And so that is hard to penetrate. What the FBI and the DOJ officials would tell you is that they get involved when there are threats of violence or actual violence. You know, they've gotten hundreds and hundreds of complaints about threats to election workers, but maybe only one in 10, the DOJ said this week, are things that they can take action on. We do know the Justice Department is investigating those fake electors, that scheme that was underway in December of 2020 and early 2021 to try to substitute legitimate slates of electors with fake names, with illegitimate ones. But that has not resulted in any criminal charges so far. And that's a pretty narrow thing as opposed to just raising conspiracy theories. Moreover, we may be believing too much in the power of criminal law here. If we want to get rid of conspiracy theories, prosecutors are not the answer to that problem. All right, well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back,

we'll talk about the longest prison term to date for one of the January 6th insurrectionists. And we're back. And let's stick with January 6th, but pivot a bit and talk about the case of Guy Reffet. He was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in the January 6th attack. Carrie, how does that compare to others who've been sentenced so far? I mean, it's the harshest. It is the harshest. Seven and a quarter years, about two years longer than anyone else who's been sentenced so far. One reason the judge said he was sentenced that harshly is because he brought a firearm to the Capitol, holstered on his hip on January 6th. Another reason is that he was talking about not just stopping the electoral count, but he wanted to overthrow Congress. He talked on tape about dragging Nancy Pelosi House Speaker out of the building and the sound of her head hitting on every step. This was very, very disturbing remarks to the judge

that she cited at sentencing. And finally, Guy Reffitt was the first one of these January 6 defendants to actually take his case to trial before a jury. The jury did not think too much of his defense. He didn't testify in his defense. The jury came back with a verdict rather quickly, and he didn't get any credit for accepting responsibility. And that's part of the reason why he was sentenced to so much time. So I want to ask you about Donald Trump's role in all of this, because after the sentencing, Reffitt's daughters, Sarah and Peyton, suggested their father was not the only one to blame for his actions, that former President Trump, who has not faced any criminal charges, we should point out, bears responsibility to. To mark my dad as this horrible person and then having him prosecuted

like this when somebody is maybe even able to get elected again doesn't seem right to me. Trump deserves life in prison if my father's in prison for this long. You know, Carrie, that is no doubt a political argument, but is there any legal validity to the idea that while the insurrectionists are personally responsible for their actions on January 6th, that they were indeed listening to the President of the United States at that time? A number of defendants currently in court over January 6th-related charges have tried to make this argument in court. Judges mostly have not bought it at all. I mean, as a legal matter, this kind of thing is not persuasive to federal judges

who are adjudicating some of these prosecutions. But as a matter of common sense, it's hard to hear those two daughters of Guy Reffitt and not wonder. you know, Peyton Reffitt stood up in court during the sentencing for her father and said, it wasn't my father's name on those flags at the Capitol that day. And I think, you know, to some extent, the judge took that into account. She talked about Guy Reffitt's history of mental illness, his excessive drinking, the fact that he lost his job, and the fact that he may have been lost in his life and thus more susceptible to some of these conspiracies. But she still came down pretty hard on him. And other judges are doing the same in that courthouse with respect to January 6. I'd also point out, there are increasing signs, of course, that the Justice Department

is trying to move up the ladder. We have reported on grand jury subpoenas to organizers and funders of the political rally that immediately preceded January 6. We've reported on grand jury subpoenas to senior Trump aides and testimony by people who were top aides to then Vice President Mike Pence. So DOJ is getting somewhere. There's no allegation of wrongdoing, formal wrongdoing against the former president yet, though. So, Tom, I want to bring you into the conversation because, you know, as you've been reporting, what happened on January 6th is not entirely isolated. There remain organized efforts to convince people that the election was a fraud and that there should be, you know, continued efforts to

undermine elections, the lies that essentially drove folks like Guy Reffitt to violence. And I'm just curious how you interpret the sentence he received and what may follow. Well, yeah, there's certainly widespread concern about a combination of sort of grassroots and political effort to continue to claim that the 2020 election was stolen and to make changes based on that false claim. And, you know, the energy that went into and motivated a lot of the people who went to the Capitol on January 6th is still there. It still remains. It didn't go away because of this massive criminal investigation and because of the House Select Committee's work. The big lie continues on. And I think we see that in part, D.C. for the pro-Trump rally on January 6th. The candidate for Pennsylvania governor was also in Washington on January 6th.

So a lot of this volunteer energy, a lot of the energy that led up to the Capitol riot is still very much a part of our politics. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. Tom Dreisbach of NPR's investigative team. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. And I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.