Today, Explained - The end of January 6

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

The congressional committee investigating the Capitol insurrection has gathered an enormous amount of information. Now it must decide what to do with it. Politico’s Kyle Cheney explains five crucial decisions that remain. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've been talking about January 6th for a long time on Today Explained. It's been 463 days, if you weren't counting. The House Select Committee has been investigating the insurrection on January 6th for over eight months, but now there's a finish line in sight. So we've entered this really important phase for them, which I would call it the endgame phase, where they're figuring out how do we conclude this massive and sprawling probe that could probably go on for years. Kyle Cheney has been writing about it for Politico. So they are trying to figure out how do we bring this to an end so we can present our findings to

the American people? And in bringing it to an end, what are the huge decisions we have to make before we finish this up? There are five of them. Kyle's gonna fill us in, and we're gonna hear some specifics on the massive prosecutorial effort to charge all those insurrectionists among us. I'm Sean Ramos for them. That's what's up on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA

from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Okay, today explained. I've got Kyle Chaney here on the line, and he says this whole January 6th committee thing has to wrap up soon.

So their whole intention was always to try to finish by the spring. Even at the beginning, when they started really in August, September, they said, we want to be done by the spring. So we have enough time to roll out our findings for the American people, let them digest it all. It's going to be very complicated, but extremely compelling. And then let that factor into be done when we're still, the floodgates are still open. But I think they

know that probably June or so is the real hard end for them. So how many sort of storylines or investigations or sub-investigations do they have to wrap up here? So in our view, when we looked at what they needed to do to wrap up the pro, we saw five really distinct decisions that they have to make before the committee can say, we're done, we're ready to show the public what we have. Number one, when and whether to call Donald Trump. Two, when and whether to call Mike Pence, probably the second most important witness here. Three, when and whether to call Speaker Pelosi or Leader Mitch McConnell to talk about capital security issues. Four. What to do about Republican lawmakers who have resisted their investigation but still have key evidence. Five.

And then what to do with just the massive trove that they've collected, whether they decide to dump it all in public, how they get it on DOJ's radar screen, the Justice Department, as they continue their own investigation. So how they handle that big pile of evidence. This is so important. OK, well, let's go through them one by one. First and foremost, the former president himself. What are they going to do there? What do we know?

Number one. So, look, the whole committee investigation is revolving around this question of did Donald Trump violate criminal law in his effort to overturn the 2020 election? And the committee is increasingly confident that the answer is yes. Representative and select committee member Liz Cheney says the panel does have enough confidence to refer Donald Trump for criminal charges, but has yet to decide whether to send the referral to the Justice Department. To close their probe, there's no way I can envision it where they don't at least say, hey, this is what we found. Why don't you tell us your version of events, your side of the story? The only question is, are they going to do this in a way where they're serious about getting him to testify?

Are they going to subpoena him and try to fight him in court and make him answer questions? Or are they just going to do it as a formality, knowing he's not going to cooperate? And when will we find out? Do we know? So we don't. The committee chairman, Benny Thompson, has said, Hopefully, we'll be talking about the likelihood of a Trump interview in the not-too-distant future. It's hard to imagine they haven't already had some preliminary discussions on that, but they know once they start engaging Trump's legal team and talking to him about, you know, hey, we want you to come in, that's going to blow up in public. It's going to become a huge brawl. And so I think they want to hold that out as long as possible.

Whether or not the former president testifies before this committee, his daughter did just last week. Yeah, she did. The former president's daughter and advisor answered questions for nearly eight hours. She was with her father at the rally before the assault on the Capitol and in the Oval Office throughout the attack. It's pretty remarkable. And her husband, Jared Kushner, did the same a week before that. So the committee is very confident that they're obtaining things from the highest levels of Trump world. And what's most interesting to me is the committee told us they did not claim any sort of privilege, no executive privilege,

no attorney-client privilege to try to stop answering questions. So to me, the question is, did the committee not ask certain things that might have triggered that? Or was she really that forthcoming to them? Because if so, she was involved and in the room for some really key moments that could be significant evidence for their investigation. Do we have any idea what Ivanka and Jared talked about for hours on end? We don't, which is another reason why I think the committee, the report that they have could be so impactful is they've been very secretive. And that includes from this high level testimony of people like Jared and Ivanka and dozens of others in that sphere. So the kind of

things that they could know is endless. And they probably did learn some interesting things from those two. Let's pivot to Pence. Does the former president showing up affect whether or not his vice president will? No. And in fact, I think that Mike Pence's closest advisors, his former chief of staff, is cooperating with the January 6th committee. And they've given to the committee some of the most important evidence that they have of Donald Trump's pressure campaign to try to get Mike Pence to help him overturn the election. He was with Mike Pence at the Capitol on January 6th. He was also in the Oval Office on January 4th when former President Trump tried

to convince Pence not to certify the election results. So if anything, Pence is inclined or predisposed to supporting the committee, but whether he wants to put himself out there directly is still kind of an open question. What have Pence's people turned over? So the two most significant people who testified were his chief of staff, Mark Short, and his chief legal counsel, Greg Jacob. And they have talked in detail about the people in Donald Trump's orbit who were pressuring Mike Pence, say, on January 6th, you can go into Congress and single-handedly stop the election of Joe Biden and the legal strategy they were trying to push on Pence. Pence's people kind of resisted that.

And so the testimony they gave was very detailed. You know, on this date, you know, John Eastman, the lawyer that Trump hired to push this idea, met with me and here's what he said to me and tried to get me to do. And here's why I told him it was illegal. And the committee has formed this idea that Donald Trump may have broken the law, partly based on that testimony that they were trying to push an idea that had no legal support whatsoever. And then I guess lower stakes here, but important all the same is congressional leadership, Nancy Pelosi, maybe Mitch McConnell. Three.

Yes. And they figure in a few ways, not only did they flee from the mob that was storming the Capitol, you know, with some calling them out by name. But they also were, are in charge of Capitol security. And the question is, what were these leaders briefed? Were they ever told this was a possibility, you know, that there could be a breach of the Capitol? And if not, why were they not told how, you know, grave the situation could become? Obviously, Nancy Pelosi is a supporter of this committee, but Mitch McConnell, not so much, right? Right, he's not a supporter of the committee,

but when he's been asked about them, he doesn't go on the attack like a lot of his colleagues. He says, It will be interesting to reveal all the participants who were involved. And that's always stuck out to me because most Republicans are not speaking like that. And we do know McConnell after January 6th, you know, he did vote to acquit Trump during the impeachment trial,

but he did have really harsh words for the former president, blamed everything on him and said he could be held civilly and even criminally responsible for what happened. So he's not necessarily in the former president's camp on this one. And we assume Pelosi will cooperate. She has said as much. She said, if they want to call me and they need to call me, I'm in. And what's more most important about Pelosi is Republicans are teeing up this plan to counter the January 6th investigation with their own probe that essentially they've already said is going to blame Nancy Pelosi for the entirety of what went wrong on January 6th. The American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as Speaker

of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6th. If she testifies to the current committee, it's a chance to sort of pre-butt that narrative that Trump himself and members of Congress are trying to push. And then penultimate on your list here is just a sort of hodgepodge of members of the GOP. Yes, Republican members of Congress who three of them have been called by the committee, but basically said, screw you, we're not coming in. And the committee has sort of left to grapple with what do we do with those three. And then additional Republican lawmakers who we know played key roles strategizing with Donald Trump to overturn the election, may have called him on the day of the 6th. There were some phone calls between him and, say,

Congressman Jim Jordan, you know, some senators who were on the phone with him. And the question is, how hard will the committee go after its own colleagues, knowing they have important evidence, but also knowing that the tables may be turned on them in a Republican-controlled Congress in a year? Last on your list is what to do with everything they found, whether to make it public, whether to keep it private. Yes. And this, to me, it's a very process-focused question, but it's really important because the committee, as far as we know, has just this enormous mountain of evidence. They've interviewed 800 plus people. They've got tens of thousands of documents, you know, many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than most congressional investigations obtain. And the question is, will we see all of that at the end of the day? Will they decide, you know what, we're just going to throw it all out there on a website and let people

do with it what they will. They'll have their own report, which will be nice and neatly packaged, but the thousands of pages of transcripts of these interviews might have a lot more value. So both to the public, which could then comb through them, but also to the Justice Department, which is running its own investigation and starting to creep into Trump world a bit in their investigation. They might find a lot of value in seeing these tens of thousands of pages that the committee can't just hand over to a prosecutor. They could by virtue of putting it on the website. Do we have any sense what the Justice Department might do? No. They seem to be in sort of the early phases of pursuing people in Trump's orbit.

That's a big development that's happened in the last few days and weeks. But that's a sign that they are ramping up. And so it could take months, it could take even years to sort of come to fruition. But the committee's information might be very valuable and actually even speed up what they're doing because they're pursuing similar tracks. But if the committee makes this public, we finally get to find out what Jared and Ivanka said for hours on end in the past few weeks? It seems likely. I mean, I can't imagine a scenario where they don't at least use that testimony in their final report and possibly unearth the whole transcript. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

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concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i-gaming ontario this is so important we're back we've've got Kyle Cheney from Politico. We just talked about all the stuff the January 6th committee has to figure out before it shuts down. But on the flip side, the Department of Justice has been prosecuting tons of people who are involved in the Capitol riot. Yes. So this is sort of happening in parallel with the committee, the Justice Department, since January 6th, since the attack on the Capitol, has been arresting hundreds of people who participated in that breach and have begun sort of expanding their investigation. It's already a nationwide manhunt, but it's moved a bit from focused on the Capitol breach itself to the people who are sort of responsible or

for motivating it in the first place. Do we have a number at this point? How many people have been successfully prosecuted? So there are more than 800 people who have been charged. Wow. I'd say about 250 or so have taken plea deals. Most of them should sort of the more minor crimes that occurred that day, if you can call any of them minor. But in terms of just they walked into the Capitol, they didn't hurt anybody, didn't break anything and they walked out. Those kind of trespassing crimes are being resolved very quickly, whereas the more severe crimes, the felonies, the assaults, the conspiracies are still working their way through the courts. Which of them stand out to you? surrounding the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, these two extremist groups that heard and answered

Trump's call to come to Washington. And what they viewed was a call to try to stop Joe Biden from being elected president. And they orchestrated these very heavily militarized, essentially, approaches to the Capitol. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers militia group charged with seditious conspiracy, including the group's leader, Stuart Rhodes, arrested in Texas. The FBI breaking through encrypted apps. They say he allegedly messaged the group

after the election, quote, we aren't getting through this without a civil war. But in addition to like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers out there, there's just like a lot of like dentists and like off-duty cops and I don'ters out there, there's just like a lot of like dentists and like off-duty cops and I don't know, like turkey farmers, stuff like that.

Yeah, it's actually kind of an interesting case study in this cross-section of Trump voters, essentially, and who was motivated to sort of come to Washington for this. And you are finding a lot of these one-off sort of lone wolf type people that got in there. Some of them are charged with assaulting police they were people who bought into q anon conspiracies or people who bought into the the election was stolen and our liberty is at stake uh propaganda from from trump world uh and cited that when they were arrested said that we thought we were saving our

country uh because we've been misled that the election was stolen. And so these are the kind of individual people not connected to these groups that were involved and in some cases thought they were doing good while they were attacking cops and bludgeoning them with poles and sticks and things like that. Someone named Riley June Williams, who's a young woman from Pennsylvania who went to the Speaker's office and allegedly stole a laptop from one of the desks there. Upstairs is Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office. Inside, a female voice the FBI believes to be Williams seems excited.

I'm in Nancy. On the desk is Pelosi's HP laptop. The same voice tells others to treat it carefully. They put on gloves. HP laptop. The same voice tells others to treat it carefully. She, you know, was in there sort of directing traffic among the other people inside the building. And, you know, there was some thought that suggested she wanted to sell the laptop to Russians. Yikes. And it's sort of these very bizarre cases. I feel like every independent, as run of the mill as they might seem, has these weird twists in their stories at how they ended up there. And in prosecuting, quote-unquote, regular Americans who went into the Capitol and did

crimes on January 6th, what's the DOJ's batting average? You said 800 charged, about 200 have taken plea deals? Approximately. And I think that that's going to be the vast majority here. I think they're going to end up getting plea deals with 90% or more of these cases. In the cases that have gone to trial, which is just four right now, they've won two jury convictions on felony charges. Neither of them have been sentenced yet, but that's two for two, essentially, on the jury trials. And then in two bench trials where a judge makes the entire decision, they've actually not fared so well. But it's only because one judge has presided over both of those trials, Judge Trevor McFadden.

And he is not a fan of the government's theories in any of these cases and agreed to acquit one defendant entirely and gave a partial acquittal to a second one. Wow. On what grounds? In the total acquittal case, he said that the defendant plausibly argued that he believed the Capitol Police gave him permission to go inside the building. Oh. That in some of the video, there was a video of a cop sort of gesturing in what the defendant thought was waving him in. And the judge said, you know, I looked at the video. I could see that.

What the judge cited is what Matthew Martin didn't do on January 6th. The judge says, according to the evidence shown at trial, Matthew Martin wasn't screaming or shouting, wasn't crowding people. He was here. He was amid the mob. But the judge says he was not an impactful member of the mob. That's going to be problematic if other judges adopt that theory. But he does seem to be on an island, this judge right now.

Might these prosecutions of sort of low-level insurrectionists go on past, say, Republicans winning the next midterm election? So that's one of the significant things about the Justice Department investigation, which is that there is not the same time pressure that there is on Congress. They have at least through the end of the Biden administration, the first term, if not beyond. And what we do know is DOJ thinks there were about 2,000 to 2,500 people who went inside the Capitol that day. And they've only charged about 800. They're really serious about getting all of them. There may be a third of the way there. So they've got a long way to go. How do they even do that? How do they find all of these people that just walked in and then walked out that day?

It's actually pretty remarkable. I mean, DOJ has made no secret that they consider this the most important investigation, possibly in American history, certainly the most complicated. As the committee is well aware, the department is engaged in one of the most sweeping investigations in its history

in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And because of that, they've unloaded every tool in their arsenal to find these people. So they're using facial recognition software. They're geolocating people's cell phones who were there. They say, oh, we have a reasonable probability that you were inside the Capitol from this time to this time. And these are showing up in court filings, all of these things. They're doing physical surveillance. They're following people. A lot of this comes from tips from neighbors, friends, family members,

colleagues say, oh, my friend posted this on social media showing that they were inside the Capitol. And then the FBI will run with that tip, go to these people's homes, track them, see what they're up to, and then eventually make the arrest, even for people who are sort of on the lower end of the crime spectrum here. Is the DOJ getting as much blowback as the January 6th committee? I mean, there's still obviously a lot of members of the GOP, including the former president, who say this whole thing is a sham. To be clear, the select committee is engaged in an unconstitutional political investigation, a sham investigation. Do people get that mad about these sort of low level insurrectionists slash all in agreement that anyone who committed crimes at the Capitol that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Well, anybody who committed crimes on January 6th should be prosecuted.

If you entered the Capitol and you committed acts of violence and you were there to hurt people, you should be prosecuted, and they are being prosecuted. And so you're not hearing these voices in Congress, even from some Trump allies in Congress, saying what DOJ is doing to these, you know, these rioters is inappropriate. You're hearing bits of that. There's some question about political prosecutions that we hear from Republicans a lot. Are they targeting these people not for their actions, but because of their political beliefs? But the January 6th commission is not the place to do that. That's what prosecutors are supposed to do. This commission is a partisan scam. They're going after, the purpose of that commission is to try to embarrass and smear and harass as many Republicans as they can get their hands on. What do your two Republican colleagues are doing?

I believe that's what the commission is doing. That's a very narrow slice of the Republicans in Congress making that argument. A bigger slice of Trump world and Trump himself who is saying that, but it's not uniform across the Republican spectrum at the moment. And so at least as long as DOJ stays focused on the rioters, I don't think we're hearing that argument quite as forcefully. It's really interesting. So there isn't as much opposition to prosecuting like, you know, Gary Gary the dental hygienist who was at the insurrection. But there is still this resistance to figuring out why exactly this happened. Yes, and, you know, we've heard this in court come out quite a few times.

Some judges who have been sentencing these rioters are saying things like, you know, it's a little bit incongruous for us to be, you know, throwing the book at, you know, someone who just strolled into the Capitol because Donald Trump told them to do it and not going after the people who told them to do it. And so you hear that this discomfort within the legal system about why are we punishing the foot soldiers when the generals are out there, you know, scot-free? And now we do see evidence that DOJ has moved up the chain a little bit in that direction. And so that's when I think we're going to see more of that resistance and that all out pushback from Republicans, Trump world, that kind of thing. And what is that? That's just politics, I guess, huh? Essentially, I mean, Trump has been saying witch hunt, witch hunt, witch hunt since he took office, and he is trying to spin this as a narrative that's just a continuation

of that entire trajectory. And I think we'll see that again. Kyle Chaney, no relation. He writes for Politico. Find his work at politico.com. Miles, Brian produced our episode. Matthew Collette edited it. Paul Malinzy mixed and mastered. Laura Bullard sent the facts Paul Malinzy mixed and mastered. Laura Bullard sent the facts. Get in touch with us anytime. We're on Twitter at today underscore explained, at least until Elon buys it or whatever.

Or you can email us todayexplained at vox.com. Thank you. you