Byron Tau is an investigative journalist at NOTUS, a publication about politics and policy from the Allbritton Journalism Institute. From 2014 to 2023, he was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, where he covered national security, law enforcement and legal affairs in Washington, D.C.

The following interview was conducted by Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on Oct. 10, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Let’s start with the federal indictment about Jan. 6. When it’s announced the former president of the United States has been indicted for the actions he took after the election, what is your response to that? How unprecedented, how important a moment is that?

Well, it’s obviously a major moment in American history that a president is charged with a crime for actions that he committed while essentially refusing to leave office and transfer power to his lawfully elected successor. So it was an extraordinary moment for reporters that had been covering the years of legal drama between [former President] Donald Trump and the various special counsel and congressional investigations. This was something of a culmination of a number of efforts to hold him accountable that finally landed in a courthouse.

The indictment itself is surprising. … When you read the facts of the indictment, what do you see?

Well, a lot of the facts in the indictment were things that were known publicly, either through reporting from media outlets or from the committee’s report itself. What [special counsel] Jack Smith and the special counsel team did was essentially create a legal theory for how these disparate facts that have been reported at different times or had come out in the committee’s report constituted criminal behavior, and essentially presented that material to a grand jury of Washington residents who believed there was probable cause that Donald Trump had essentially committed a crime.

If you read that indictment, it says, there’s three conspiracies: There’s a conspiracy to defraud the United States; to interfere with the election count; to deprive citizens the right to vote. What does it mean, that word “conspiracy” attached to this indictment of the president? … There’s unindicted co-conspirators, obviously, but he’s the one who has his name after “United States v.”

Right. So in this case, the special counsel’s office seemed to believe that the person at the center of all of these actions, which added up to what they said is multiple conspiracies, was Donald Trump, that ultimately he worked with other people and in concert with other people to carry out his plans, but he is the one, according to the special counsel’s office, deserving of prosecution.

There’s a number of indictments. We’re looking mostly at the federal indictment, but there’s also a Georgia indictment, which in some ways is complementary. I know you’ve written about some of those other people who were indicted. What do you see when you see the Georgia indictment coming so soon after the federal indictment?

Well, the Georgia indictment is a much more sprawling set of allegations. The Jack Smith indictment was fairly narrowly drawn. It listed six other co-conspirators, none of whom were charged. It only charged the president, and it charged him with some very specific things.

The Georgia indictment is very, very sprawling. It involves, I believe, more than 140 separate counts of a racketeering conspiracy. It involves, I believe, 19 defendants, and it tells a very, very detailed story, going back to immediately after Election Day, where, what [Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis, the prosecutor, says, is that Donald Trump, in conjunction with lawyers, with in-state political operatives and with people who he didn’t even necessarily have direct contact with were all engaged in this conspiracy, a criminal conspiracy, to interfere with the Georgia election counting.

So what do we see when these photos are released, these mug shots are released of all of these different characters? There seems to be so many people involved. What does that say about the case against Trump, about the case in general?

Well, the case in general involves a sprawling cast of characters, everyone from a publicist for Kanye West all the way up through the former president of the United States. And basically, I believe the case that Fani Willis wants to make to the public is that this was an organized, orchestrated conspiracy. These weren’t separate, discrete events or people acting on their own accord. This was something driven by the president of the United States, who was trying to remain in office and whose supporters and lawyers and campaign operatives went out and undertook this conspiracy, which she says is illegal.

As you say, they’re two very different indictments. But is the role that Trump is accused of playing shared between the two?

At the center of both of these indictments is this allegation that Donald Trump was the prime mover, the person who was ultimately responsible, who ultimately created what the January 6 Committee calls the “Big Lie,” that there was fraud in our election, and who ultimately was the one making the decisions, pulling the strings and egging on his subordinates, his advisers and his lawyers to take many of these actions on his behalf, either explicitly or implicitly.

So let’s go back to the time after Jan. 6, where this committee is being formed. One of the things about all of this is so much of it happened in public. There were tweets; there were speeches; there was, of course, the Jan. 6 attack itself. But why was the committee created? Why was it important when the event itself had already been so public?

I think that Congress felt that a public accounting, using tools like hearings and even subpoenas, could provide more detail as to how this came together. I think in the immediate aftermath of the attack, people weren’t really sure: Was this a spontaneous set of events that unfolded, or was this an organized conspiracy? And I think what essentially Congress wanted to do was get the answer to that question.

… How different was this committee from other committees that had investigated things in the past?

There certainly have been congressional efforts dating back to the early republic to do oversight or to have investigations. Some of the very famous ones, for better or for worse, include [former Sen.] Joe McCarthy’s actions in the Senate in the 1950s or the Watergate Committee. So this is part of a long series of congressional investigations into major elements in our national life or major controversies—this isn’t abnormal for Congress to hold hearings.

In recent years, however, Congress has been relatively ineffective, especially during the Trump years, in holding the president and the presidency accountable. We saw in two impeachments and in numerous investigations that Congress led during the Trump years that often witnesses would stonewall or they would refuse to appear, or Congress would try to sue to force a witness testify, but the litigation would take years, and essentially, these witnesses would run out the clock.

The January 6 Committee investigation was different. From the get-go, the Biden administration Justice Department threw its weight behind forcing witnesses to testify and visiting consequences on them if they didn’t. And in general, it went about its work very quickly, very efficiently. It managed to get the cooperation from a lot of witnesses, take a lot of testimony, do a lot of this oversight in public. And ultimately, history is going to judge. But it produced a rather lengthy and somewhat seemingly credible report.

… There was controversy over who was going to be on it, and you end up with two Republicans on the committee but who both sort of believe in the mission of the committee.

That’s right. Also, the initial aim was to try to have the committee be bicameral or to set up some sort of national commission, much like the 9/11 Commission. But the Senate did not go along with this plan, so the House acted on its own with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moving legislation that would create this House committee.

She originally wanted it to be bipartisan. However, the members that the Republicans nominated to be on the committee, two of them were people who were directly involved in some of the things that the panel was investigating, so Democrats didn’t want that sort of a conflict of interest. Republicans wanted their choice. So there was a partisan impasse, and essentially Republicans pulled out.

The only two Republican members that ended up on the panel were two sort of very critical members who did not generally see eye to eye with Donald Trump, who had been very critical; some might say they were Never Trump members of the Republican Caucus. But they saw it as their duty to get to the truth.

How important was the vice chair, was [Rep.] Liz Cheney to the committee? How unusual was it that she was there? Who is she on the committee?

I think it was important for Democrats to have some semblance of bipartisanship in this panel in order to give it credibility. Liz Cheney is obviously the daughter of a Republican vice president, a very conservative person ideologically but someone who had been quite critical of Trump, and she played this role on the committee of trying to give bipartisan credence to this investigation that Democrats believed was a very serious inquiry into a major event in our national life.

… Let’s go to the moment where the world does see what is happening, the very first hearing of the January 6 Committee on prime-time television. … But even more than the specifics of it, if you don’t remember the specifics of the hearing, just the show of it and the made-for-TV nature of it. What was that hearing like?

It was highly unusual for a congressional hearing. Most congressional hearings are boring. They air on C-SPAN. They deal with things that the average American doesn’t really follow in tremendous amounts of depth. This was something different. This was a production meant to tell a story to the public. It was aired in prime time, which is highly unusual for a congressional hearing. It was cinematic; they brought in video. And they really used the platform that the committee had to tell this story to the American people in a way that was understandable and digestible, that was visual, that was compelling. It was a very unusual congressional hearing.

In the use of the depositions in that way, where they would play a clip, for example of [former U.S. Attorney General] Bill Barr saying, “I told the president it was bulls—, these allegations,” was that something normal to a congressional committee? How important was it for them, just the theatrics of using moments like that?

So this was, again, very different than your average congressional committee, because usually you put a witness in the chair and both sides take turns, five minutes or 10 minutes questioning the witness. In this case, by taking videotaped depositions and taking certain snippets from them, they were able to highlight certain things they wanted to highlight. They were able to amp up the drama. It was a very effective presentation in terms of getting past the usual congressional format and telling a story to the American people using this wide array of material that they had gathered from either witness interviews or documents or obtaining footage from the protests themselves.

It was very, very different than what you would normally get in a congressional hearing, which is both sides taking turns, making the points they want to make, and the witness sort of sitting there haplessly, trying to say as little as possible that will cause controversy.

At that first hearing, they don’t explicitly say this was a crime. They may have used the word “conspiracy,” and they lay out a multi-part—I think they called it a “seven-step plan” that was orchestrated by the president—but as we look back at what they were laying out in those hearings and having read the indictment, did it seem like they were laying a groundwork for the charges that would come?

Well, they were certainly laying the groundwork to point the finger directly at Donald Trump as the one that was culpable for what happened on Jan. 6. Essentially they were thinking in some ways like prosecutors by going after the lower-level witnesses or targets in an investigation, trying to gain their trust or cooperation or their testimony, and then moving up the chain. That’s what prosecutors do, and that’s what this committee did as well, that they interviewed a tremendous number of Trump’s aides, his associates, people in Cabinet agencies or in the White House, and used their testimony to paint this portrait that the person responsible for what happened on Jan. 6 was Donald Trump.

That’s probably not a coincidence, because we’ve read that there’s 12 former federal prosecutors who were part of the staff. It does sort of feel like a criminal investigation as much as a committee hearing.

That’s right. And I think for a long time, we didn’t know what the Justice Department was doing. We didn’t know if there was an open investigation into Donald Trump or aides in the White House to see if they had broken laws. And I do believe that the committee in some ways wanted to examine this question: Were laws broken, or was this all just political activism, as Donald Trump and his advisers now claim?

And essentially, the committee did end up recommending a number of charges to prosecutors, some of which somewhat look like what did end up in these indictments. It’s not a direct parallel, but it’s something like the legal theory that Jack Smith would pursue.

As you look at the indictments, as you look at the story that they lay out in the report and then in the hearings, one place where they start is that election night and the choice that the president had to make between his campaign advisers, between [Trump’s lawyer] Rudy Giuliani, who’s described as intoxicated in the Jan. 6 report. Can you help me understand the stakes at that moment for what was going to unfold for President Trump on election night?

What I think the committee wanted to demonstrate was that Donald Trump had been advised by a number of people close to him that Democratic votes would be counted later than Republican votes, and there would be this so-called red mirage, where it appeared that he would be ahead on election night, but after all the counting was said and done that these vote tallies would change and the results would change. And the committee wanted to demonstrate that he knew this, that top members of his White House staff and his campaign staff had told him this and that he decided to move forward and declare victory anyway; that this was something premeditated; that this was an intentional effort to deceive the public about the outcome of the election.

And the details of that day, is it just salacious that the campaign staff thinks that Giuliani is intoxicated and Trump is going with him?

I think they’re trying to paint a novelistic portrait of the events that unfolded in great detail. I think they’re also trying to demonstrate who Donald Trump was surrounding himself with and who he decided to listen to, because he had very serious, longtime Republican political professionals telling him one thing, and he had Rudy Giuliani, who, according to the report was intoxicated, telling him something different, and he decided to follow Giuliani.

It’s interesting what you said about the red mirage and what the committee is doing, because this is sort of where we’ve been coming too, which is that it does seem like that there’s a central part of what they’re trying to do, which is not just about what happened, but what did Trump know? When did he know it? What was his motivation? Is that a central question to all of us, to the committee, to the indictments?

That’s a very central question, because oftentimes a crime requires intent. It requires the person to know they’re doing something wrong, and in this case, the portrait that both prosecutors and the January 6 Committee are trying to paint is that Trump knows what’s going on. He was told reliably by the Justice Department that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told by his campaign staff that Republicans tend to vote early and on Election Day, and Democratic votes come in late after Election Day, and he decided to make these allegations in the public eye anyway.

The portrait they’re trying to paint is that Trump knew better, that he knew that what he was saying was false and that it was all part of an unlawful attempt to remain in power.

In effect, they’re saying, the committee, I believe more than the indictment, but the committee is saying, if the pattern of behavior extends back beyond Election Day, then before he knew this, he was working to undermine the election. What is that telling them?

That’s right. And they’ve assembled evidence of people who were close to Donald Trump, like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, his outside political consiglieres, saying before Election Day that this is what Donald Trump will do; he will say that he won regardless of what the real outcome is.

And this goes to try to paint a portrait that this wasn’t something spontaneous; this wasn’t something that the president truly believed, [but] that it was all part of an overall and illegal—according to prosecutors and the committee—strategy to remain in power unlawfully.

And how strong is the evidence of Bannon, which I believe is an audio recording, and Stone, which I think is a video recording? I think there’s emails from [Judicial Watch President Tom] Fitton. How strong is the evidence of this?

They don’t present evidence of Bannon or Stone and Trump talking directly about this, but the fact that these people close to Trump, who are known to be in communication with him, seem to know what’s about to unfold is pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that this was a plan that Trump and his inner circle had hatched from the very beginning to cast doubt on the outcome of the election no matter what happened.

So in the aftermath of the election, as it’s laid out, as the story has been told, there’s one group which has been called “Team Normal,” the campaign staff, the professional political operatives. How are they reacting as these allegations of fraud are starting?

Right. So there’s this group of lawyers and campaign advisers around Trump that includes the White House counsel; it includes his campaign staff; it includes some of his inner circle in the White House political staff, telling him that, look, the election is lost, that there’s very little chance of coming back from a deficit like this, that there’s no real evidence of outcome-changing fraud across any of these states, and that Trump ought to essentially concede. And he does not follow their advice, even though these people are the professionals who run his campaign. They’re the people at the top of the Justice Department. They’re his top legal advisers that he himself and his administration put in these positions of trust.

And so the indictment paints a portrait of Trump ignoring them repeatedly and choosing to go a different direction.

As I said, there’s a difference between what’s going on internally and also what we were all seeing when you watched [the] Four Seasons Total Landscaping [press conference], for example, the day that the election is called by the television networks, and it seemed like a joke to a lot of people. But when we look back at it from what the committee has found, from what the Department of Justice, were things like that a joke? Did we not take it seriously enough at the time?

I think there were certain elements of the media and in Washington that couldn’t conceive of the fact that we might have an election where the transfer of power was in doubt. And even though Trump and his allies had said repeatedly that they might not accept the election results, even though they were quite vocal in the weeks after the election that they believed the entire thing was marred by fraud, it certainly was inconceivable to many people that the president of the United States would try to remain in power through unlawful means.

The indictment has a date, has a moment of when it says that the conspiracy started. It says the campaign concedes in Arizona on the 13th, and by the 14th, the decision by the president that he’s going to move with Rudy Giuliani is the beginning of the conspiracy. … What’s the story that’s being told about the conspiracy and about what’s happening about a week and a half after the election?

Well, essentially, you can’t have a conspiracy of one, so in order to show a conspiracy, you need to show there’s an agreement between two people to go forward and do something unlawful, and they have to take actual steps towards doing that thing. And so the story that the indictment wants to paint is that shortly after his—shortly after the election was declared for [President] Joe Biden, Donald Trump and some people in his inner circle started immediately taking steps to stay in power even though he had lost the election.

And I guess that it was Donald Trump’s choice to elevate Rudy Giuliani to that position, which is an act.

Right. And not only that, it was also Donald Trump’s choice to ignore his Cabinet agencies, like the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security, that said there was no credible evidence of widespread fraud; that it was his choice to ignore advice from his White House attorneys. They want to paint Trump as the one who is at the center of these decisions to make this false public case that the election was tainted and that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.

So who is Rudy Giuliani, the man that Donald Trump is turning to? Who is he at that moment?

Rudy Giuliani had a long career in government. He was a fearsome prosecutor in New York. He later became the mayor of New York City. He ran for president in 2008. He had a sort of tough-on-crime reputation. He was the prosecutor that took on the mob. But over the years, he drifted towards Donald Trump and towards being someone that would be essentially a yes-man to Donald Trump and some of his worst impulses.

And so, on election night, Giuliani was someone who had served as the president’s personal lawyer, as a very close political adviser, as a sounding board, as something of a friend in some cases. And he was essentially egging on some of the president’s impulses to declare that the election was invalid or that essentially that it was marred by fraud.

What was Giuliani offering him when Trump chooses him to be the lead? … He’s got all these regular lawyers, campaign lawyers, but he’s choosing Giuliani for some reason, for something that Giuliani has that the others don’t.

I think Trump chose Giuliani for his willingness to go out there and say some of this stuff. When his White House attorneys, when his Justice Department, and when many other officials in the government refused to say those things, Rudy Giuliani was willing to do it. And I think that’s essentially what he offered him.

Let me just ask you about two other characters … Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell. They seem to be part of Giuliani’s team, at least initially. Who are they?

… I don’t know a ton about Ellis’ biography. I do know about Powell. Sidney Powell was once a well-respected appellate lawyer, but in recent years she had migrated more towards saying things that seemed more like conspiracy theories. She represented Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn and found herself at the margins of Trump’s orbit in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. and she started acting as something of a surrogate. At some point, she indicated that she might have been a lawyer for the campaign, though the campaign later distanced themselves from her. And she was out there essentially promoting conspiracy theories, some of which sounded wild to even Donald Trump.

But she is at the Republican National Committee when she makes some of these allegations, when she talked about Dominion voting machines being switched and [former President of Venezuela] Hugo Chávez being connected to it. What is going on in a moment like that when she’s what she’s making those claims, and why does it matter?

Well, it seems like Trump and many of the people around him were willing to throw spaghetti at the wall, to essentially raise whatever conspiracy theories, whatever discredited anecdotes that they could find, and assemble them into a public case for why they believed—wrongly—that the election was stolen from them. And Powell was one of the figures willing to go the furthest, to say things that, to the outside observer, seemed demonstrably crazy in many ways, and which had no real basis in reality.

… The Dominion allegations, the allegations of voting machines are switching people’s votes? It sounds crazy, but it keeps coming up again and again. And the president is repeating allegations. How does that happen? Or I guess, does that make it not crazy?

I think this was part of a strategy to sow doubt in the minds of Trump supporters. Every court that looked at what Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and many of the others around Trump were trying to sell rejected it out of hand. The Justice Department rejected it; DHS rejected it. But it was part of this public story that they wanted to tell and that many people believed, or at least wanted to believe.

When Bill Barr talks about this period and he gives a deposition for the January 6 Committee, and he’s talked about it in other places, he talks about being frustrated, about watching it, and even intentionally issuing a statement to the AP [Associated Press]. What was Bill Barr’s response to this, and why does that matter?

Well, Bill Barr is a very important figure in this story, because in many ways, he had come under intense criticism from Democrats and from outside observers for seemingly trying to protect Donald Trump while heading the Justice Department. But when it came to the allegations that Trump and many of his close associates were making about election fraud or voting machines being hacked, Bill Barr stood firm, and he essentially ordered the Justice Department immediately after the election to look into any allegations of fraud. And then, when they found none, he said so and he said so publicly. And he refused to go along with the narrative that Trump and Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani wanted to make in public. In fact, he gave a very public interview to the Associated Press saying that the Justice Department had found no evidence that there was widespread enough fraud to affect the outcome of the 2020 election.

And we know from his testimony that he didn’t just tell it to the AP, that he told it to the president, to his face, that he literally called “BS” on it. Why is that meeting a central thing when you look at the indictment and you look at the committee report?

That meeting was important because Trump essentially wanted the Justice Department to participate in this campaign of sowing doubt about the election results. Trump wanted to take the Justice Department, use its prestige and its authority as part of his attempt to remain in power. He wanted them to say that there were irregularities or that there were questions or that there was an open investigation into these things as part of this public case that he wanted to make that the election was marred by fraud, and Bill Barr would not go along with it.

It’s also remarkable, too, because he has a meeting on Dec. 1, and the next day he goes out and makes a Facebook video where he’s repeating the same things that Barr had told him weren’t true. …

That’s right. The January 6 Committee report paints a portrait of Trump being told that something is false and then immediately going out within a few days, or even a few hours, and saying the thing that he had been told was false by reputable sources like the attorney general or like a Cabinet agency, like DHS. And so essentially, this report and these indictments want to paint a picture of Trump ignoring the best advice of some of the most serious people in government.

When you look at the report or you see the presentation at the committee, how powerful is it to see? Because it’s not just Bill Barr, and it’s not just the campaign staff. They list all of these examples of him being told something wasn’t true and repeating it. How strong is the evidence that they gather?

The juxtaposition of the number of times that someone credible or serious told Trump something was false and that he then went out and repeated it is very effective. It’s effective storytelling because it shows that the president was willfully ignoring these things, that he was fixated on stuff he wanted to believe rather than the truth of the matter, rather than the things his own Cabinet agencies or his own Justice Department had found.

The federal indictment says, “The Defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plan[s] to defeat the [federal] government function, obstruct the certification, interfere with [others’] right to vote.” Politicians presumably lie all of the time. Why is this different? Why does it matter?

Well, lying in general is protected by the First Amendment. But in some cases, if you’re lying to the government, if you’re trying to defraud the government, if you’re intending to submit fake documents, as the Trump team wanted to do, fake electoral certificates, it’s important for the government in a trial to prove that the person knew it was false. And that’s what this indictment is trying to do, to show that Trump knew the things he was saying were false; that he knew that he had lost the election; that he had been told a number of times by reliable people. People he put in power, people he put in his administration or in his White House or in his campaign were telling him that these things were not true, that he had lost the election, and he would then go out and publicly say that they were true and that he had won the election.

And so the indictment is trying to paint this picture of someone who knew that what he was saying was false in order to show that this was criminal behavior.

… As these allegations of fraud are going out, you can see protesters, you can see talk of threats, you can see violence in the streets of Washington between protesters and counterprotesters, even in November. Is there a connection between this growing violence that’s eventually going to lead to Jan. 6 and the types of statements the president is making?

That’s certainly the portrait that the January 6 Committee wants to paint in their report. By painting Trump as the prime mover, the person that introduced these conspiracy theories into the media ecosystem, who egged on his supporters and who gave a speech on the Ellipse shortly before the Capitol was stormed, they want to tell the story that all of this goes to Donald Trump.

… One of the pieces of evidence that comes up, I think first in the January 6 Committee is this text message from Don [Trump] Jr. to [White House Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows on Nov. 5, I think, where he’s saying we’ve got lots of routes to win this election, whether it’s the legislature or resolving it with Congress on Jan. 6. How important is a piece of evidence like that?

Well, essentially what they want to demonstrate is that after Trump lost the 2020 election, that people around him and his advisers and his children and others started looking for sort of extranormal or extraconstitutional means of staying in power, and that included doing highly unusual things, like trying to put pressure on state legislatures to change their election laws or to revoke the certification of electors. And all of this was aimed at trying to stay in power past Jan. 20, when Joe Biden was supposed to take office.

… The figure of Rudy Giuliani, who’s traveling to different legislative hearings, and some of them are not real hearings. What is he doing in this period? This is the period before the Electoral College meets.

Rudy Giuliani is trying to get state legislatures to take some action that would bolster the chances of Donald Trump remaining in power. In some cases, he’s trying to get state legislatures to essentially revoke the electoral certifications or to appoint an alternative slate of electors. In some cases, he’s trying to recruit electors. In one case, Trump’s on the phone asking … the secretary of state of Georgia to find extra votes that would change the count.

So as it’s clear that Trump is going to lose the election, he starts putting pressure on state officials that he and his team hoped would be friendly to take these actions that are unprecedented in American history.

And these hearings that Giuliani is at, because in the Georgia indictment they say, “This was a lie, this was a lie, this was a lie, this was a lie.” What is he saying when he’s testifying or presenting at these Georgia hearings?

… It’s a variant of the same case that Trump is making publicly: that we can’t trust the election results and that because they were marred by this supposed fraud, of which there’s no good evidence, that essentially the state legislature should act on their own accord and take some action. In this case, I believe it was to appoint an alternate slate of electors in defiance of the will of the people of Georgia who voted for Joe Biden.

… Looking back and knowing that it ends with Jan. 6, you can sort of feel a jungle beat of menace that’s growing as this misinformation is spreading.

Right. Election workers across the country are starting to get threatening phone calls or mailing or emails, and it’s a real climate of fear among many of the people that were just trying to do their jobs and administer elections fairly.

Why is the Raffensperger call so important, this call where he [Trump] says, “I just want 11,780 votes.” Why is that so central to all of these investigations, to the January 6 Committee and the indictments?

That call is important because it’s direct evidence that Donald Trump is trying to ask a government official to, quote, find extra votes for him. And this is something that’s so out of the ordinary, that so goes against our traditions, that it’s an extraordinary call. And the fact that it’s recorded, the fact that Raffensperger stands up to him, and the fact that it’s the sitting president essentially trying to ask a state official to, quote, find him votes, there’s really no analog that I can draw in history where a president has done something like that.

Who is Brad Raffensperger? Why would he be able to help Trump when he gets that call, or why does Trump think he can help him?

Well, he was the secretary of state, and in most states, the secretary of state is the chief election official. They help administer elections and do some other thing things involving businesses and other things. But essentially, he’s the chief election administrator of Georgia, and Trump believes that, in his position as a Republican official, that he can help affect the outcome in Georgia and be part of this nationwide attempt to cast doubt on the election results and to basically create all this churn in state governments to keep Trump in power.

… The most complicated allegation, or maybe not the most complicated but the hardest to understand simply, is this idea of fraudulent electors that I guess starts with Ken Chesebro’s memo. In the simplest way, what is the fraudulent electors plan?

Essentially, it was a plan to appoint alternative slates of electors in seven different states and then submit these false certifications to Congress in order to gum up the works when Congress met on Jan. 6 to certify the vote. Normally Congress meets in a very ceremonial role and just rubber-stamps what the states do. In this case, Trump and his allies wanted to create confusion, wanted to possibly get the vice president to either accept the alternative slates of electors or declare that there was a deadlock over the issue and throw the election to the House of Representatives.

It was a scheme to recruit people to put themselves forward as the legitimate, in Trump’s view, slate of electors for these states, even though these states were won by Joe Biden fair and square.

… Do you know anything about Ken Chesebro or his involvement?

… Basically, Chesebro in early December came up with this strategy to present a slate of fake electors across states that Biden actually won in order to try to gum up the works when Congress met a few weeks later to certify the election. Chesebro was an attorney who was helping Trump on some matters in some states and came up with this plan. Versions of it were later embraced by other Trump legal advisers, and it ultimately would end up being something like what the Trump operation would try to do in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6.

I guess that’s why it matters, isn’t it? It seems ridiculous, but it sort of paints a target on that date, on Jan. 6. Is that right?

Basically all of the things that Trump and his team were trying to do converged on Jan. 6, converged on the vice president taking some action in his ceremonial role as the president of the Senate to try to keep Trump in power. And all the serious lawyers in the White House and around [Vice President] Mike Pence told Trump and his team that this couldn’t be done, but they were pressing hard for Pence to do it anyway.

And the events that led up to Jan. 6 involved Trump and his supporters trying to put pressure on Mike Pence, public pressure in some cases and private pressure in many cases, to get him to do something in this ceremonial role as vice president to keep Trump in power.

In Trump’s tweet, when he tweets about Jan. 6 and says, “Will be wild!,” I think it’s the middle of December, how important a moment is that?

It certainly goes to show that Trump was trying to bring pressure on the vice president, and that pressure included a rally a few blocks away from where Congress was going to meet to certify the election results in order to try to get Pence to do this thing that would keep him in power.

That tweet when the January 6 Committee goes back to look at it, they find that it activates these groups—Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, various militia groups. Would the president have known what he was activating when he sends a tweet like that, “Will be wild!”?

The portrait painted by the January 6 Committee report certainly shows Trump wanting the biggest possible demonstration for his speech at the Ellipse. In one instance, he’s reported to have told the Secret Service to rip out the metal detectors in order to get a bigger crowd on the Ellipse for his speech, even though he was warned by security officials that some of his supporters were armed. And so Trump was told from the very beginning that there certainly was this possibility for disorder, that the things he was saying were untrue, and he moved forward with this plan anyway.

You talked a little bit before about the pressure on the Justice Department, and there’s a moment where [Trump’s] talking to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and he says, “Just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” What is going on in that moment? What is it that he wants from the Justice Department?

This all goes back to Bill Barr. When Bill Barr decides that he’s resigning from the Justice Department in mid-December, that leaves a skeleton crew in charge at the Justice Department. That leaves this man, Jeffrey Rosen, who had been the number two at the Justice Department, that suddenly leaves him in charge of the department.

… Pretty much every day after Barr left, Trump would call Jeffrey Rosen at the Justice Department or his deputy, Richard Donoghue, and try to put pressure on them to get the departments to go along with this narrative that they wanted to create in public, which is that there were serious questions about the integrity of the election. And that’s what Trump was trying to do in that conversation with Rosen.

… They recruited this guy, Jeffrey Clark, who writes a draft letter that he’s trying to get Rosen to sign. How remarkable is the letter, that Jeffrey Clark has been pulled into this and is meeting with the president?

Jeffrey Clark is an interesting figure in this. So he was a mid-level Justice Department official. He had gone to a good law school. He had done the normal clerkships and went to work for a big law firm. He did an unremarkable stint in government under the George W. Bush administration, and he finds himself in this time period as the acting head of the Civil Division, which is the division of the Department of Justice that represents the administration in court. And allies of the president find in Jeffrey Clark someone who might be more receptive to this idea that the election was stolen, more receptive to get the Justice Department directly involved in making the claim that there are questions about the integrity of the election. Bill Barr wouldn’t do it; Jeffrey Rosen wouldn’t do it. But allies of the president identified in Jeffrey Clark someone that might be willing to do it.

And this draft letter.

So Jeffrey Clark essentially draws up a letter that they intend to send to the state legislature of Georgia, saying that there are these election irregularities and the Justice Department is investigating. This isn’t true. Under Barr and under Rosen, the Justice Department had looked at questions about election integrity, and it concluded there were no irregularities that could change the outcome, that many of the cases and the things that Trump and his inner circle were citing as evidence of voter fraud were in fact not voter fraud, that these things were not true.

And Clark was trying to get this letter signed by the leadership of the Justice Department and sent to Georgia so that it could be included as part of this public case that there were irregularities in the election.

It all climaxes in this amazing meeting where the president has got to decide what he’s going to do, and there’s talk of hundreds of resignations. What’s at stake? What’s going on in that moment?

That’s right. So essentially Trump wants to put Jeffrey Clark in charge of the Justice Department because in him he sees someone that will do something that Jeff Rosen won’t.

… It culminates in this meeting at the White House, where Justice Department officials and some in the White House counsel are all threatening to resign if Trump goes forward with this plan to install Jeffrey Clark as the temporary leader of the Justice Department. That would have essentially crippled the department, and it would have resulted in the department losing a lot of legitimacy in the eyes of the American people.

For prosecutors for the special counsel looking at this, why isn’t this just a personnel matter, the type of thing a president has disagreements and makes policy involving the Justice Department? Why does it get their attention?

The president has the right to choose who he wants to lead the Justice Department. However, what prosecutors say is that there was no good evidence that there was election fraud, and Trump had been told that by multiple acting or actual attorneys general; Bill Barr and Jeffrey Rosen told Donald Trump that the department had found no evidence of election fraud. And Jeff Clark, despite being given a briefing by the director of National Intelligence, despite being shown much of the material, was still willing to say those things. … Prosecutors have essentially alleged that Trump and Clark were conspiring to make false statements and to commit crimes together.

But it fails. There’s been a lot of failure in this story to convince state legislators to send an alternate slate, to get the Justice Department to endorse this strategy. But the pressure does not give up, especially on Pence, who, as you get into late December and early January, is really mounting. Was he Trump’s last hope?

Pence was the last resort. In his ceremonial role as the president of the Senate, the person that presides over this supposedly pro forma session of Congress that marks the transition of power and blesses the election results, Trump and his allies were hoping that he would take some extraordinary action that would keep Trump in power.

Who is John Eastman, and how important was his role in this?

John Eastman was a lawyer and a law professor who, like Kenneth Chesebro, was advancing this notion that it was Mike Pence who had the power to make decisions during this meeting of Congress, and those decisions could include whether to accept these alternate electors that Trump and their allies had put forward in these states across the country or whether to declare, essentially, that there had been fraud or there was competing slates of electors and thus the election should be resolved by Congress.

John Eastman was the one who was providing the intellectual heft to this case that Trump and his allies were trying to make to Mike Pence. He authored a number of legal memos. He was pushing this plan that would have Pence take these actions in this ceremonial meeting of Congress, and Eastman was essentially the intellectual force behind trying to make these outlandish legal arguments that have been roundly rejected by many other legal scholars.

… What was he doing? Was it legal advice? Was it a strategy to bypass the law? What was at the heart of those memos?

… So essentially Eastman was acting as an outside legal adviser, if that. He had no official position. He was just someone who came in with a legal theory, and that legal theory was embraced by Trump and his allies in a desperate bid to stay in power.

There’s a lot of phone calls; there’s a couple of meetings. But there’s a crucial meeting with John Eastman and Donald Trump pressuring Mike Pence, I think, two days before Jan. 6. How important is that meeting? …

Well, it’s an extraordinary meeting. It’s the president of the United States pressuring his own running mate and a longtime political ally to do something that Mike Pence feels is unlawful and would violate the Constitution. And Pence holds firm and says he won’t do it, that his lawyers concluded he doesn’t have that power, that it would essentially, in many ways, end what we know of as the American system of electing presidents. And Pence holds firm.

What does Trump do in response as Pence says, ‘I’m not going to go along’? … There’s more tweets. In fact, he tweets; he says he is going to go along. He certainly doesn’t seem to give up on pressuring all the way into Jan. 6.

So Trump doesn’t take no for an answer, and right up until the morning of Jan. 6, when his supporters stormed the Capitol, he was making the case in public and in private that Pence should take this extraordinary action to keep Trump in power despite Pence’s complete unwillingness to do so.

When the January 6 Committee is putting together their case or their report, they go to great lengths to show that Trump understood what the crowd was, that he’d heard the night before—that he’d heard these warnings about them might having weapons. Why was the focus on his understanding of the crowds?

I think in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, we weren’t quite sure the role that Trump played in inciting this crowd to go to the White House. Obviously, much of this played out in public, but the exact role that Trump played in this versus whether this was a spontaneous event was a very important question. And it was a question answered by many of the people who were later convicted of crimes. They said that they came to Washington because Trump had called them there. And that was part of the story that the January 6 Committee wanted to tell, that this was no spontaneous event; that this was something that Donald Trump had laid the groundwork for, wanted, encouraged, egged on and watched with some apparent enthusiasm.

… Another thing I wanted to ask you about is that speech that [Trump] gives. It’s like an hour-and-10-minute speech. In the indictments, they mentioned how many inaccurate statements he has. But he also has statements like, “You’re allowed to go by different rules when you catch somebody in fraud,” and “We fight; we fight like hell.” Tell me about what’s important of that speech that he gives.

Well, this was a last-ditch effort by Donald Trump to try to remain in power. He knew that when Congress met and assembled that day with Mike Pence in the seat that that was his last best chance to stay in power. And he knew the stakes were pretty high, that once Congress certified the election, that was essentially it. And he was trying to amp up the public pressure and the private pressure on Mike Pence to take the action that Trump wanted him to take.

… So all these events that we’ve been talking about, some of them we saw publicly, but a lot of them were in the January 6 Committee report and especially some of the details about what was going on behind the scenes. They issue their report. What happens after that? Why is the Jan. 6 report so similar to the indictments that the Justice Department is going to issue?

Well, we don’t know for sure, but essentially it points to the fact that the committee found something very similar to what prosecutors found. They were doing their work separately, but the stories they want to tell, the conclusions they reach are similar conclusions. …

As we look at the moment where we are right now with these trials, what’s your assessment of them? What is the greatest challenge for prosecutors as they’re bringing this case against the former president and current presidential candidate? …

The difficult thing for prosecutors will be to get whatever juries that they put together to see beyond politics; that ordinarily these are pretty strong cases, and a defendant who is not Donald Trump would be pretty worried. But in the case of Trump, everything around him is so political, and the case he’s going to try to make to the public and to the jury is that this is a political prosecution, that these prosecutors are really going to need jurors who come into this with an open mind, who are willing to set aside their political priors and are willing to listen and consider the evidence.

And Donald Trump is the most famous person in the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that there’s never really been a criminal trial like this. Finding a jury that’s never heard of Donald Trump or doesn’t know about Jan. 6 or doesn’t have thoughts about these things is going to be very, very, very difficult. And that’s going to be a challenge for prosecutors, to get beyond politics and to present to a jury a sober version of this that 12 or 24 Americans can understand.

Are the stakes as high as the rule of law and whether the justice system can handle a case like this, or cases like these?

It’s never happened before that the justice system has had to try to hold to account a president, and this is a very important test of how well courts, lawyers, prosecutors, the Justice Department—it’s a test of how well they do in holding a president to account.

It’s an amazing moment, isn’t it? With all of these things, the political system can’t handle him or can’t handle the situation, and now we’re turning to the court system to try to handle the situation. It’s a lot of pressure on that particular branch of government.

It is. And we’ve seen all of the branches of government in the United States under stress in recent years, and a lot of that stress is now going to land with the courts, with juries and with prosecutors.

[Question from Michael Kirk] Give me a thumbnail of Jack Smith. Who is he? How does he find himself in this very important position?

Yeah. So Jack Smith is a veteran prosecutor. He, for a long time, was the leader of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which pursued a number of very important and in some cases losing public corruption cases. He also did a stint as a war crimes prosecutor. And he is someone who’s known as a professional, but also someone who sometimes takes tough cases and isn’t afraid to lose.

And so this is sort of the biggest gamble of them all, in charging a president who’s running for reelection and is going to make the public case that this is all a political witch hunt. It’s a very, very high-stakes case, and it’s one that only a prosecutor of a certain sort can really make.

[Michael Kirk] … So when you look at the two cases, the Georgia case, all the defendants, all those wonderful mug shots that make television producers really happy to see them, and Jack Smith, the “Invisible Man,” handicap the challenges between the two cases for me, will you?

Well, in general, state prosecutors roll the dice a lot more than federal prosecutors, and you can sort of see that in the indictment that Fani Willis has brought, because it’s a sprawling indictment. It involves a lot of different characters. It involves a lot of different actions. And she’s willing to put on this trial that could very easily become a circus, whereas the federal indictment is very narrow. It names one defendant. It names a very specific set of charges. And it’s not a sprawling sort of circus of a case in the same way that the state trial might easily become.

And so I think that’s the major difference, that federal prosecutors are much more risk-averse, and they tend to be much more focused. Federal judges tend to run a tighter ship than state judges. And I think that’s going to be the big difference in tone and substance as these cases move towards trial.

[Michael Kirk] When you say “circus,” what do you mean? What’s that like?

Just the sheer number of people involved in the Georgia case. It could certainly get very interesting very quickly. You have a public relations executive who was Kanye West’s publicist. You have a number of state officials. You have Sidney Powell, who’s been advocating a number of conspiracy theories. All these people are part of the same case. And then of course you have Donald Trump, who, as I said, is one of the most famous and brashest people in American life. …

[Michael Kirk] … One other character: Liz Cheney.

Yeah. So Liz Cheney is Republican royalty in many ways. She’s the daughter of the vice president, Dick Cheney. She’s very conservative. She represents Wyoming. No one would mistake her for a liberal, but she also was someone who broke very publicly with Donald Trump and was willing to put her career on the line in order to, as she saw it, deliver the truth to the American people in her role as the vice chair of the January 6 Committee.

And it did end up costing her her political life, but in some ways, it gave some credibility to the committee. Republicans wanted to portray it as a partisan exercise, but when you have the daughter of a former vice president and someone who no one thinks of as a liberal as the vice chair, it’s a little bit more difficult to make that case.

[Michael Kirk] Do you think she really had power? Do you think she really had sway inside that committee?

That I don’t know. By all accounts, it seems like the views of the two Republicans on the committee were taken seriously, that they were valued members of the committee, and that they seem proud of the report that they have produced.