Today, Explained - What the January 6 committee has found (so far)

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

A congressional committee set out to offer the definitive story of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Things got dramatic. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King.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

It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. The January 6th Committee wants access to deleted text messages that members of the U.S. Secret Service sent to each other on January 5th and 6th. If you have them, we need them. The Secret Service says those messages were lost during a pre-planned system migration. What may be the last hearing of the Jan 6th committee is scheduled for this week. No one knows, though, if it will be the real finale. There have been surprises before, like in late June.

— Benny Thompson says, OK, we're done for June. We'll see you after the 4th of July. Many of us were sort of packing up our bags to go when we got word, oh, no, there is another hearing coming, a surprise hearing, and we don't know anything about it. We don't know who's testifying. We don't know why it's coming up. And then we learned who is going to testify. What happened at the surprise hearing and what's going to be done with all this information? Coming up. 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.

Today Explained, we're back. Andrea Bernstein, co-host of the podcast Will Be Wild about the attack on the Capitol and author of the book American Oligarchs, the Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power. Benny Thompson makes that announcement and the surprise witness was 26 year old Cassidy Hutchinson. And there seems to be broad agreement that this is a huge moment, a watershed moment in these hearings. She was, you know, a young person in the White House, but because of the way the White House is organized, she was in the room with all of these immensely powerful people. And, you know, it's also someone who had gained their trust. And they said many things to her. You know, she was texting with people. She was speaking to people. She had a direct relationship with the former president. And, you know, it was this extraordinary moment when this 26-year-old woman comes out and just answers questions.

Thanks to the courage of certain individuals, the truth won't be buried. The American people won't be left in the dark. Our witness today, Ms. Cassie Hutchinson, has embodied that courage. And, you know, what had happened with her, interestingly, was that she'd been supplied a lawyer by the Trump team. She became increasingly uncomfortable with that lawyer and switched attorneys to a man named Jody Hunt. After she hires him, she calls up the committee and she says, I have more to say. They take a fourth deposition and they realize that they need to get her out in the public

right away, both to lock in her testimony and also because they begin to hear that she's being intimidated by people close to the former president and they don't want anything to change. So that's when they spring this testimony on us. And it is dramatic, not only because she's describing all of these interactions with the former president, but because she's telling us things that we just didn't know. For example, that he wanted so badly to go to the Capitol that he had a confrontation with his security team after the infamous speech at the Ellipse. The president said something to the effect of, I'm the effing president. Take me up to the Capitol now. To which Bobby responded, sir, we have to go back to the West Wing. The president reached up towards the

front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engle grabbed his arm, said, Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We're going back to the West Wing. We're not going to the Capitol. Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel. And when Mr. Renato had recounted this story to me, he had motioned towards his clavicles. He was aware that the crowd was armed. And knowing that, knowing the kinds of weapons they had, pepper spray, spears attached to the end of flagpoles, body armor, directed them to go to the Capitol. That was extraordinary evidence. And that was just one part of the testimony that she delivered to the committee that was so revealing. That was one part. What else about her testimony stood out to you?

Well, I think that, you know, she sort of starts out by talking about interaction she has with Rudy Giuliani, the former attorney for the former president. And it's on January 2nd, and she's walking him out to the parking lot. And he says to her, Pastor, are you excited for the 6th? It's going to be a great day. We're going to the Capitol. It's going to be great. The president's going to be there. He's going to look powerful. He's going to be with the members. He's going to be with the senators.

And she is really not sure what that's about. And she goes and she asks Mark Meadow, who is sitting on the couch in his office, looking at his phone. I remember leaning against the doorway and saying, I just had an interesting conversation with Rudy. Mark, sounds like we're going to go to the Capitol. He didn't look up from his phone and said something to the effect of, there's a lot going on, Cass, but I don't know. Things might get real, real bad on January 6th.

So she begins to get worried because this is several days beforehand. She doesn't know what's happening. And she's in on these meetings where the White House is warned that there may be violence, where on January 6th itself, she accompanies the former president to the speech at the Ellipse. When we were in the offstage announced tent, I was part of a conversation. I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, I don't effing care that they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me.

Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away. Well, and she tries to talk to Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff, and he's in his car, and he slams the car door on her, and he does this twice. And this is really an extraordinary moment of what is going on with the former chief of staff, that he won't take this information

about the gathering attack on the Capitol at this crucial moment in history. So, you know, that was something that really, really struck me about her testimony. And, you know, then all of these details about, for example, the former White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, being aware that there might be violence at the Capitol, that the president has legal liability if he goes to the Capitol because of incitement to riot. And she really sort of lays the broad outline of this last desperate attempt by the former president to hang on to power. The most recent hearings centered some extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Was there anything notable about the testimony from members of these groups or ex-members of these groups? I think for most people, it was quite shocking news to have a description from a former Oath Keepers insider of, you know, what the group was, which was, as he described it, a militia group who wanted to sow chaos and violence and bring about civil war. I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths. And what it was going to be was an armed revolution. I mean, people died that day. There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol. This could have been the spark that started a new civil war. The other, you know, sort of person who basically had come to hear the president's

speech and sort of rode the wave of the crowd to the Capitol was basically talking about he was following the former president's orders. No, we didn't actually plan to go down there. You know, we went basically to see the Stop the Steal rally and that was it. So why did you decide to march to the Capitol? Well, basically, you know, the president got everybody riled up, told everybody head on down. So we basically were just following what he said. So if you really had no sort of exposure before to the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys, I think this was a very effective testimony for some people. Can you tell us about the December 18th meeting? The startling conclusion is this. Even an agreed-upon complete lack of evidence could not

stop President Trump, Mark Meadows, and their allies from trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election. So let's return to that meeting at the White House on the evening of December 18. Just to set this in context, so December 14th is the Electoral College vote. And on December 14th, obviously, Joe Biden is declared the president of the United States. And this is the point at which Mitch McConnell, the Senate, then the Senate majority leader, who, you know, really has not been saying anything. He's been avoiding saying anything about Trump losing, says, you know, we have to recognize that Joe Biden is the president. Many millions of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result. The Electoral College has spoken. According to the former White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, he told Trump the same thing. Basically, it's over. Well, what does Trump do? For Trump, it's not over. So he doesn't like the fact that his attorney general, his new acting attorney general, his White House counsel, his other lawyers, even people House and they present this really extraordinary plan. And,

you know, credit to The New York Times and others who had reported on this meeting in real time. But who is there? Sidney Powell, a lawyer who has espoused conspiracy theories so fringy that her own lawyer has disavowed them in court records. Rudy Giuliani is there at some point. General Michael Flynn, who was convicted of lying to the FBI, who had only been recently pardoned by Trump. And they are discussing with the president what is really clearly an extra-legal plan of getting his Department of Defense to seize voting machines.

And Pat Cipollone is telling the president this is a terrible idea. And he is annoyed in his deposition with the committee when they say, well, why did you think that was a terrible idea? I don't understand why we would have to tell you why that's a bad idea. It's a terrible idea. That is the wee hours after midnight on December 18th, so early the morning of December 19th. At 1.42 a.m., the president sends out this infamous message, which starts with a restatement of the big lie that it was, as he said, statistically

impossible for him to have lost. And then he says, big protest in Washington, D.C., January 6. Be there. We'll be wild. What we don't know as we go into the final hearing of the committee is whether the idea of a large rally of summoning a mob to Washington was discussed in that unhinged meeting. And that's one of the big questions that I have. Was this something that General Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell were saying he should do? Or was this something that he came up with on his own? But what happens, and I think is what a very underplayed aspect of hearing number seven,'s according to an employee of Twitter

who we don't know who it is because that person's voice was disguised. He said, what really scared me was that the president was now speaking directly to extremist groups. And we know from what happened that people like Alex Jones, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys

immediately get together and they start talking about working together, deploying people to Washington. There was actually an encrypted chat group with Roger Stone, sort of the devil who's been on Trump's shoulder since the 1980s, advising him on how to get around things, for lack of a better way of describing it. So this is someone who's very close to the president, who he's in phone contact with, who Cassidy Hutchinson, in fact, testified that Trump wanted Mark Meadows to speak to Roger Stone on the evening before the rally, he is in a chat group with the leaders of these extremist groups who are basically saying, you know, come to Washington, come armed. January 6th is going to be a big day where we are going to change the course of history. Thank you. Put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Every one of these elements of the planning for January 6th is an independently serious matter. They were all ultimately focused on overturning the election. And they all have one other thing in common. Donald Trump participated in each substantially and personally. Today Explained, we're back with Andrea Bernstein, host of the podcast Will Be Wild. Andrea, the question was always, will these hearings pull the threads together in a way that is coherent and will be effective? It does seem like since late June, since Cassidy Hutchinson

testified, there's been momentum. But you're the expert. Go ahead. One of the things that I think has been so effective about these hearings is that right after January 6, there was still a spin on the part of some supporters of the former president. look, this was a protest rally that got out of hand. And there was no intent for the president to launch a violent attack on law enforcement. And, you know, had the law enforcement people not been there, potentially on members of Congress. I mean, we know from videotape that members of Congress were seconds away. Mike Pence was, you know, sort of 40 paces away from the mob that was saying, hang Mike Pence, and that had erected a gallows outside the Capitol. So there was a sense of, well, maybe, you know, he didn't know what he was unleashing or what he was trying to do. But one of the things that these hearings have done is almost made that question irrelevant because we know how hard he worked to sub install someone at the Department of Justice who was going to tell

state legislatures to not send up their slates of electors to Washington. He said, so suppose I do this. Suppose I replace him, Jeff Rosen, with him, Jeff Clark. What would you do? And I said, Mr. President, I'm going to resign immediately. I'm not working one minute for this guy. And then I said, and we're not the only ones. No one cares if we resign. If Steve and I go, that's fine. It doesn't matter. But I'm telling you what's going to happen. You're going to lose your entire department leadership. We know that he tried to influence the Secretary of State in Georgia to recount the votes. We know that he was pressuring state legislatures all around the country directly and that he was putting extraordinary amounts of pressure on his vice president, including a meeting that his own daughter described as heated in the White House. The conversation was pretty heated.

Where, according to the top aide to Ivanka Trump, who was senior White House advisor at the time, where he called Mike Pence the P word. This was 1120 on the morning of January 6th. So less than two hours before the vote count, he was screaming at Mike Pence that he had to not to the last minute to block the transfer of power. We know that he directed a violent mob that he knew was armed to the Capitol. So at this point, it's sort of, well, does it matter if he picked up the phone and called someone in the Oath Keepers or called a cutout to get them to stir up the crowd. We know he was communicating with extremists in a language that he often deployed, and we know that they responded. And as Representative Cheney said in the seventh hearing, he's a 76-year-old man responsible for his actions. He is not an impressionable child. As our investigation has shown, Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information showing that the election was not actually stolen

than almost any other American. So it's almost irrelevant exactly what Trump said, because we know he said, to a violent mob, march up to the Capitol. So what I do think these hearings have done is shifted our frame of reference. So it is crystal clear that Trump did not want to leave office, that he wanted to block the transfer of power, and that he did so after being advised over and over again by his campaign team, by his government officials, that he had no basis for doing so. And that is an extraordinary thing. Okay, let's talk about what happens next. What is the January 6th committee building toward?

What are they going to do with all this information? You know, I think one thing that people ask me over and over and over again as well, is anybody going to be indicted? Is Trump going to be indicted? And that's a real question. And I think it's a really, really difficult question for the Justice Department at this point because, you know, we do see people like Stephen Ayers, this protester who, you know, basically said, my life was ruined because I just sort of, you know, rode along to the Capitol on January 6th.

And for me, I felt like I had, you know, like horse blinders on. I was locked in the whole time. Biggest thing for me is take the blinders off, make sure you step back and see what's going on before it's too late. You see people like that who have been convicted of crimes, who've, you know, many of whom have gone to prison, many of whom are in jail awaiting their trials for their violent crimes. Some 800 people's lives have been affected, but not yet President Trump or any of

his top advisors. Now, you know, that yet I realize is a sort of pregnant word. They may never indict President Trump. We just don't know. But I think that one of the things that these hearings have done is made it very difficult for the Justice Department to explain why all these other people are paying, but not the top officials. And I think that was one of the goals of the committee. They have no law enforcement power. They cannot indict people. The question of, will this be referred to the Justice Department is sort of a misdirection because the Justice Department can investigate anybody it wants at any time. What might the Justice Department do? Why does it seem like they've been so quiet? So, I mean, I do think that, you know, the Justice Department, you know, to be fair,

has to do its investigations in quiet. Otherwise, they would appear to be tainted, and, you know, they might tip off witnesses into what they were looking for, and they could change their story, they could hide documents. But there are alarming things that have emerged. For example, there was a story in the New York Times that they were taken by surprise by Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony. Well, why was that? They're the Justice Department. I mean, we've seen the Congressional Committee go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight to get documents. But the Justice Department, you know, they can stage early morning raids. Now, they've done some. For example, they've searched the records of Jeffrey Clark, who is the former Justice Department official who was willing to go along with Trump and try to get state legislators to not participate in the certification of the election.

There was John Eastman. So John Eastman revealed six FBI agents approached him in New Mexico last Wednesday when he was leaving a restaurant with his wife and a friend. They patted him down. They found an iPhone, his iPhone, on him. They were able to obtain access to it through biometrics, his facial recognition. And then they were able to obtain his email communications that were on that phone. There is certainly an effort to look at this question of false electors. Representative Benny Thompson said in a press availability with reporters after the seventh hearing that the Justice Department had been talking to them about this fake elector scheme. Benny Thompson said in a press availability with reporters after the seventh hearing that the Justice Department had been talking to them about this fake elector scheme.

But he said only that. So it's unclear if they're going to be looking at, you know, some of these other things like incitement. A lot of defendants, January 6th defendants, have been convicted of disrupting an official proceeding or conspiring to disrupt an official proceeding. So, you know, that is a sort of easier charge to make out than seditious conspiracy or something else. I mean, I think what they're wrestling with, and I don't disagree with them, is that in a democracy, there is a danger if somebody takes office and then indicts their political opponent.

That is exactly the kind of system that the U.S. prior to 2016 went around the world trying to stop because it does undermine confidence in the rule of law. On the other side, when you have this extraordinary, unprecedented situation, when you know that a former president tried to use his government, tried to use his bully puppet to overturn the peaceful transfer of power, and when none of that work said to a mob he knew was highly armed, go to the Capitol and fight like hell, it becomes hard to say that is not something that we should do something about. And that is what I think one of the reasons behind these committee hearings is to lay out that whole story so that it becomes clear this is not about political retribution. This is about upholding the rule of law. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi.

It was edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.