What we’re learning about how the Jan. 6 attack happened

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• Judy Woodruff:

  The effort to understand how the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol last year happened is a question Congress, reporters and the American people have been confronted with for the past 15 months.

  Lisa Desjardins is here with a new look.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  Radicalized extremist groups, law enforcement bowing to pressure, and the encouraging words of President Trump himself, it's all part of a new podcast called "Will Be Wild" that explores the lead-up to the January 6 attack.

  Andrea Bernstein is an investigative journalist who covers Trump's legal troubles for NPR. And she is the co-host of the podcast.

  Andrea, the name of your podcast is a reference to something President Trump wrote in a tweet before the January 6 rally prepping people for it. He wrote: "It will be wild."

  I want to ask you what you discovered or pieced together, learned about President Trump's role or influence on what happened on January 6.

  Andrea Bernstein, Co-Host, "Will Be Wild": Well, of course, at this point is not what — just what we found. A federal judge recently ruled that the former president more likely than not committed a crime in the run-up to January 6.

  But what we wanted to do was take a really long look, not only at the Trump administration, but in the years prior. And what we found is that there'd been a trend in America, both of radicalization and from government turning away from white supremacist violence, that was very much accelerated during the Trump years, both the radicalization of the people from the country and also the hollowing out of the various federal law enforcement agencies that were designed to protect against domestic terrorism.

  I mean, for example, as a journalist, I covered September 11 and its aftermath. And I was completely baffled by January 6. How could this happen? How could there be a whole federal agency that was set up to prevent against this kind of attack that didn't work?

  And what we found as we began to look at it is that there had been a churn at the Department of Homeland Security. There were six secretaries or acting secretaries. People were cycled in and out of important positions. People who tried to confront domestic terrorism were told directly by the White House, do not do that.

  So, when January 6 came, and the president had sent out that tweet, and tens of thousands of his supporters came to Washington, it was like pushing over those barricades with a feather, because the reinforcements that were supposed to be there to defend the Capitol and to defend democracy had been weakened by four years of President Trump.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  You spoke to different security analysts, former FBI officials, Homeland Security officials.

  One of them was a man named Daryl Johnson, a former Department of Homeland Security analyst. And he talked about this idea of what was going on inside the Trump administration, the problems that he saw. Here's what he told you.

• Daryl Johnson, Former Lead Analyst, Department Of Homeland Security:

  That administration mainstreamed some of these extremist narratives that I had saw on KKK message boards and neo-Nazi Web sites, building a wall on the Southwest border, banning Muslims from traveling into the country, mass deportation of Latino immigrants.

  This was the first time in all the trending that I have looked at that these right-wing extremist groups thrived under a Republican administration.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  It seems this podcast is about connecting some dots. Can you help connect the dots on how our security apparatus missed this, this long look that you're talking about?

• Andrea Bernstein:

  Yes.

  I mean, I think Daryl Johnson is a very interesting person, because he's somebody who actually had tried to warn as far back as during the Obama administration that radicalization was taking place in the military and that domestic terrorism was on the rise, and was somebody whose warnings were not heeded.

  What we found during the Trump administration is, there were officials, for example, the former assistant secretary for counterterrorism, Elizabeth Neumann, who had been somebody who'd worked in Homeland Security since Bush, sort of reluctantly came to the Trump administration, believing that she could sort of stabilize things and make things better, and, when she tried to raise the alarm and to mobilize the country against the rise of domestic terrorism, found this constant pushback from the White House.

  And what many of the experts we spoke to came to conclude was that the White House didn't want to fight white supremacist groups gathering, because it saw those people as among the former president's political base, and that, in fact, these experts told us, the former president sought in his interest to rile up these groups.

  And the disastrous consequences of all of that came together on January 6, when, as we know, people died, more than 100 police officers were injured, people feared for their lives, the temple of democracy was desecrated.

  And, in a way, we're still living with that. We're not just living with the consequences, but we're living with all of the forces that came into play, both the radicalization and the distrust in government. And that's what we're dealing with now. And that's really what we're trying to explore in the podcast, is how these forces remain in play and what it means for upcoming elections, 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  Among those forces — and you mentioned it early on — the thousands of Trump supporters who were there on January 6 initially at that rally.

  One of them you talked to was a woman named Natalie Jangula of Idaho. She went to the rally. She didn't end up inside the Capitol. But she told you some interesting things about why she went to the rally. She said it was because of her election doubts. Here's what she told you.

  Natalie Jangula, Attended January 6 Rally (through translator): It's almost like these feelings just continue to compound of frustration. Like, we have the right to a free and fair election, and it continued to become less free and less fair. Like, it got to a place of, what can I do to be a part of a movement to represent how we are feeling?

• Lisa Desjardins:

  Courts have ruled the election was free and fair.

  But I want to ask you, what did you gather about what drove those people to the rally, to the Capitol that day, and what they still believe today about that?

• Andrea Bernstein:

  Well, this is one of the incredibly disturbing things that we are dealing with, is that, immediately after the election, as we all know, former President Trump said: "Frankly, I did win this election."

  And he began and his supporters and his allies began to pump out disinformation about the election. And we traced directly in the course of this podcast how people heard that and believed that there was some kind of civil war coming and that they had to follow the suggestion of their commander in chief and go to Washington to, as they saw it, defend democracy, when, in fact, they were attacking democracy.

  And that is one of the sort of truly disturbing legacies, is that millions of people in this country still believe. And President Trump, former President Trump, is still saying the results of the election were fraudulent. And it is still a motivating force, so that, right now, the majority of Republicans don't believe that Joe Biden was a legitimately elected president.

  That is something that is not a sort of interesting factoid. That is an active trend that is going on in our democracy that will be confronting us as soon as the elections that are coming up in the fall.

• Lisa Desjardins:

  The podcast is "Will Be Wild."

  Andrea Bernstein, thank you so much for talking with us.

• Andrea Bernstein:

  Always great to talk to you, Lisa.