The NPR Politics Podcast - 'Trump Summoned The Mob': What To Know About The First Jan. 6 Hearing

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee's vice chair, summed up the hearing's thesis like this: "On this point, there is no room for debate: Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them."The hearing featured produced videos of the assault on the Capitol, recorded clips of interviews with insurrectionists and senior aides to Donald Trump, and live testimony from a Capitol police officer and a documentary filmmaker.This episode: White House correspondent Asma Khalid, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and senior political editor and correspondent Ron Elving.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.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And it is currently 10.49 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, June 9th of 2022. Thank you all for joining us. We are actually taping this just moments after the first January 6th hearing concluded. The House is holding six hearings that dig into former President Donald Trump's role in the Capitol riot. And for those of you all who were not able to watch the hearing, I just want to quickly recap the evening. At the outset of this nearly two-hour hearing, Congresswoman Liz Cheney from Wyoming spent a good amount of time just laying out the narrative.

She was attempting to show that President Trump and most of his senior aides actively precipitated and encouraged the rally at the Capitol and waited hours and hours and hours to encourage the pro-Trump extremists who broke into the Capitol building to leave. On this point, there is no room for debate. Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them, that the election was stolen and that he was the rightful president. President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.

Then the committee showed an 11-minute film with footage of the insurrection on January 6th. And after a short break, the committee then heard from two witnesses, a documentary filmmaker named Nick Quisted and a Capitol Police officer who was injured during the riots, Caroline Edwards. Edwards described part of what she experienced in pretty raw detail. What I saw was just a war scene. It was something like I'd seen out of the movies.

I couldn't believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. They were, you know, they had, I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people's blood. You know, I was catching people as they fell. You know, I was, it was carnage. It was chaos. After the hearing wrapped up for the evening, Edwards was seen embracing Sandra Garza, the partner of Brian Sicknick, who was the Capitol Police officer who died on January 7th following the insurrection. And Deirdre, I want to begin with you. I mean, what did you see as the goal of this committee coming into tonight's hearings? I mean, they've been saying that they wanted this to be their opening argument. And I think

what they were trying to do was remind the American public what happened that day and just how violent it was, and also about sort of how coordinated it was. It was a deliberate attempt to sort of bring people viscerally back to feeling, you know, how close we came to our democracy being in jeopardy, right? That these violent protesters wanted to overturn the election and were going after elected leaders, including the vice president, the speaker of the house, and were attacking Capitol Police officers. And I think what it did was try to draw people in with a preview and some tidbits of what we will be seeing in coming hearings. I mean, I think the question for me is, you know, was it enough to keep people interested for the remaining five hearings? I think that's an open question.

I feel like it was really compelling television. But I think we still have to see sort of how much the public will stick with it. Yes, but we need to remember, too, that the next four of these sessions, at least tentatively, are scheduled to begin at 10 o'clock in the morning. So it's going to be a somewhat different kind of atmosphere. It's going to be a somewhat different time of day, not a bid for prime time. Obviously, high points will be rebroadcast throughout the day and will be available for people to look at through various kinds of media 24-7, but it won't have nationally the same kind of impact as tonight was to have in the minds of the committee. They really intended it to have exactly as you just described, Deirdre, that kind of an impact. But in the long run, the key for this committee,

I think they've decided, is for them to persist and to penetrate. If it takes a while to drive home the points they're trying to make, they think they can get through the shell that has clearly grown over this incident since January 6th and all the other things that people have been dealing with the past couple of years. They think they still can drill through that and get to that part of the American brain that can be stimulated by all this information to have a really strong reaction. Deirdre, you were getting at this a bit earlier, but I recognize maybe it is a premature question because you say you don't know how this will play out in subsequent hearings. But do you feel at least for tonight that the committee was able

to succeed in conveying what it was trying to do? I do. I mean, I think some members of the committee were sort of raising expectations, promising bombshells. I don't think they had those, but they really had, I think, a very effective narrative. I think especially Vice Chair Liz Cheney did a really good job at sort of laying out what was coming and teasing some really, you know, interesting on-the-record, on-camera comments from Trump's inner circle. I mean, to me, seeing Ivanka Trump, the president's own daughter, saying on camera that she agreed with Attorney General Bill Barr's push back to the president that there was no election fraud. It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying. I think we can all have a certain amount of sympathy or empathy with Ivanka Trump's division here. She has, on the one hand, extraordinary loyalty to her father. And on the

other hand, she seems to be aware of the facts. And she knows that the facts contradict her father. So on the one hand, she was the truth in the presence of her father, she represented the truth, and she would have probably brought that to his attention at some point or another that she believed Bill Barr. On the other hand, she also accompanied him on the day of January 6th before he spoke to the crowd on the Ellipse. She had not separated herself from him at all. And then later on in the afternoon, she played the role of begging him, as many others in the White House did, begging him to call off those protesters, to call off the riot, to get those people out of the Capitol,

to do it much more forcefully, to do it much more directly. And perhaps in the end, she was successful in getting him to do it at all, but not in the terms that she would have liked. I think we can all sort of understand the ambivalence of her position. And I think it to some degree represents how a lot of other people in the country who might still have their opinions changed feel about all of this. up to January 6th and using people, close Trump advisors like Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller. There was a Trump campaign lawyer who told the committee in these on-camera depositions that they presented the president with data in November that there wasn't there there for him to contest the election, that the results were that he lost and there wasn't enough, you know, there wasn't anything for them to do to push back. story about how they were telling the president that he couldn't contest the election. It was just sort of an interesting way of letting them speak for what was going on around the president instead of having, you know, Benny Thompson say it. You know, Deirdre, you speak about letting

people speak in their own words. There was a clear sense that committee members wanted to show, not just tell people what was being said. And there's this moment where you hear from some of the rioters who were there on January 6th saying that they were there because Donald Trump told them to be. What really made me want to come was the fact that I had supported Trump all that time. I did believe, you know, that the election was being stolen. And Trump asked us to come. He personally asked for us to come to D.C. that day. And I thought, for everything he's done for us, if this is the only thing he's going to ask of me, I'll do it. Two men, Robert Shornack and Eric Barber.

This is a big, big part of what the committee is trying to establish, that what happened on January 6th was not in any sense spontaneous, but that Donald Trump had summoned this mob to Washington and then incited them and then unleashed them on the Capitol. That's what they're trying to show. All right. Well, it is time for a quick break. We'll be back in just a moment. And we're back. And Ron, it seems that the former President Donald Trump has already responded to this hearing on this social media platform that he uses called Truth Social. That's right. The president has sent out a message that the unselect committee, as he calls them, of political hacks, all capitals, refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements and refuses to talk of the election fraud. Well, so there we are.

The president, the former president, is still talking about his election fraud, which has been established by every conceivable method of establishing fact not to have been a fraud at all. The only fraud is his continuing to try to convince people that there was something wrong with the election. And we heard that over and over again tonight, primarily from people who were part of the Trump administration, his attorney general, his Homeland Security Department, and so forth and so on. It's tedious, but it obviously is still playing for people on Truth Social and people who are

following President Trump. He also says that they should have shown more of the positive footage from January 6th. And it is rather an astonishing thought to imagine that there is positive footage of what happened at the Capitol on that day of the riot. But well, we've heard from the former president. You know, congressional Republicans, they aren't highlighting the so-called election frauds that President Trump continues to speak about. But they are still quick to dismiss the hearings as really nothing more than a sham. I mean, Deirdre, they have been very vocal in dismissing these hearings. They did. I mean, hours before the hearing, they had a pre-buttle event on Capitol Hill today, and the top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, was saying, you know, that the

committee was illegitimate, that it damaged the House forever, and sort of asked the question, you know, why aren't they having a primetime hearing on inflation? Why aren't they having a primetime hearing on, you know, feeding children in this country and crime? You know, the third ranking House Republican, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, is also arguing that, you know, they're doing this in primetime to shift the focus away from pocketbook issues that Americans are more worried about because, in Thursday evening, while everyone is at home, often watching TV, and it was broadcast on all of the major TV networks except for Fox News. And I do imagine that this is or was the first time that many Americans were seeing this information together collectively in this way. And I mean, honestly, some of this

information none of us had seen before the deposition videos. Yes, that's true. And I do believe that while many of us in Washington may have been obsessed with this subject for some months, it has not had anything like that kind of salience for the average American. I think it's interesting to note that before the Senate began its Watergate hearings all these many on television, the country had changed. And the trajectory of how the legal system was going to deal with Nixon and his scandals had changed. And that's also very much in the swing here. Whether or not the legal system is going to come down fully on Donald Trump may very well depend on how these hearings go. So it is conceivable. It is conceivable that we are just at the beginning

of a process that's going to change the salience of January 6th in the mind of the average American. And I was struck by so much of the language that we heard tonight was directed solely at the former president. It was not directed at Republicans or conservatives more broadly, perhaps in an attempt to try to reach out to some of those squishy independent voters in the middle. Deidre, what do you think that we ought to keep in mind when we look at the upcoming hearings? Because there are going to be five more of them. Right. There's three of these hearings next week. The first one on Monday is going to talk about how Trump and his allies knew the fraud claims were false. We saw some of the

testimony from Bill Barr sort of previewing that. There's another hearing on Wednesday, and Cheney teased that there's going to be testimony about the effort to install a Trump loyalist at the Justice Department. And Thursday, they're going to focus on the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence. And there was some testimony tonight from his chief of staff, Mark Short, about his decision to go ahead with his constitutional duty. And then the last two hearings, I think, are going to focus on the efforts in the states to try to, you know, push alternate electors. And also, you know, evidence showing this link of Trump trying to direct the mob, you know, that's a big part of this overall message is all of this going back to former President Trump and his role to try to overturn the election results. All right. Well, let's leave it there for today. We will be back in your feeds later for our weekly roundup at our normal time. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress.

And I'm Ron Elving, editor-correspondent. And thank you all, as always, for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.