Marc Harris
Marc Harris served as senior investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. He spent eight years as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Central District of California and is now an attorney at the Los Angeles-based law firm Iversen Proctor.
This interview offers perspective and legal analysis on the four-count federal indictment against Donald Trump. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all four counts.
The interview was conducted by Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on Oct. 19, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.
The moment that you hear that this indictment has come out—this is the federal so-called Jan. 6 indictment—what do you think when you hear that? What do you think when you sit down and actually read the indictment?
I wasn’t surprised. There were certain signals in the days and weeks before that this was coming, that we already had the Mar-a-Lago indictment, and it just seemed, based on the news reports, that this was on the horizon, and probably during the summer. So I wasn’t shocked by it. In reading over the indictment, I was struck by how closely it tracked the work that we did on the committee. Again, not shocked by that, but it was pretty much right along the lines of what we had laid out in our hearings and our report, with very little deviation, a few additional facts that were sort of sprinkled in there, but it pretty much tracked what we had done.
That was my first reaction when I read it.
It even seems to have the same organization of steps, of the alleged conspiracy. Was that surprising how close, that close?
I was a little bit surprised. We all knew that we did what we could do to expose and explain the election conspiracy, but we had limitations, and we were bumping up against those limitations the entire time we were working on the investigation and assumed that the Department of Justice, with its vast resources and investigative tools, that they would expand upon what we had done. And the indictment, it’s not to say that they haven’t and that they won’t at the trial, but the indictment, as you say, really does track very closely the structure of what we described and the way we laid out what we were finding.
… How high are the stakes for the trial? Is the trial itself an important thing?
Huge. The highest stakes. The highest stakes that I’m aware of in any criminal case that I’ve ever been aware of or seen or certainly participated in.
Why is that?
It’s unprecedented, to say the least. That term is sort of thrown around, but it’s beyond unprecedented. A former president of the United States under criminal indictment right there is monumental. The fact that the substance and the subject matter of the case is also extremely consequential. It deals with the core of our democracy and the former president’s efforts to subvert democracy. These are issues, just as I thought that the work that the committee did was extremely important, I think this takes it to an entirely other level given the focus on former President [Donald] Trump and the stakes, so I don’t think it could be a more consequential criminal case.
Is it too much to say that it’s a test for the rule of law?
Yes. … It’s not too much to say that it’s a test of the rule of law, but it’s a test of a lot of the principles that we hold dear—the peaceful transfer of power, the fact that no one is above the law. To me, it’s a test of whether truth matters and objective facts matter. We’ve been in this world in the last couple of years, maybe even longer, where there are counternarratives and counterfacts, and there’s a substantial portion of this country that seems to accept and believe completely bogus narratives and unsupported factual allegations. And this trial will test that, and it will, I hope, bring to light the truth and whether there are consequences for making a concerted effort to undermine that truth.
… A lot of what the committee is doing is in secret for a while. There’s a lot of questions about what are you exactly doing? Are you going to be able to find anything? And it goes towards this first public hearing. How high were the stakes, the anxiety as you’re preparing for that first hearing, which is going to be on prime-time television?
Stakes were high from the beginning, I think. I feel like we all recognized the magnitude of this effort, what was at stake, how important it was that we get it right. …
We had to get it right. It had to be 100% right and unassailable in terms of what we were presenting. … There was a tremendous amount of pressure based on that alone, on making sure that we got it exactly right, and make it compelling, and make it so people want to watch and pay attention to what we’re saying. And so that was a lot to work into those early hearings, or all of the hearings.
And we felt the stakes were high. It was a bit frightening to know that we were going prime time on we felt a really condensed schedule, and frankly scrambling to get things done from a production standpoint, from an investigative standpoint. So those were definitely tense times. And it didn’t let up all through that summer. In all the hearings, we sort of redid that cycle of anxiety, stress, fear, ultimately leading to satisfaction when they, for the most part, every one of them came off pretty well, and we got our message across.
What was it like in the room that day if you were in the hearing room, as you’re getting ready for the prime-time, that first hearing?
Well, I was in the room for most of it. We had a sort of a separate side-room set-up. I mentioned to you this rebuttal concept that kind of fell by the wayside during much of the investigation, but we cranked it back up again for that first hearing. And I was in charge of a quick response team, for lack of a better word, thinking there would be counterprogramming. We thought there was going to be a counternarrative that was played on Fox or other right-wing television networks or in the media to try to undermine what we were doing, so we were keeping an eye on that and prepared to respond with facts that would set the record straight if that happened. So that was my task on that first night.
But I can tell you, the Cannon Caucus Room and the Rotunda and the area around it was electric. I have been to several Final Four basketball tournaments. That’s the closest I could come in terms of the anticipation, the excitement, the electricity. And it was exciting just from a personal standpoint to be there and know that this was this historic event, and we were going to be able to watch it unfold.
… Liz Cheney outlines what becomes this theme—it’s in the report; it’s in the indictment—this “multi-part” plan. If you went back and listened to what she [was] saying then, would you be seeing there an outline that early of what ends up in the indictment?
What we see in the indictment—I just want to say, having been a federal prosecutor, and worked on hundreds of federal criminal cases over the years, what we see in the indictment is really just an outline. It’s not to say that that’s what the case is going to look like at that trial. But having said that, the indictment does track many aspects of this seven-part plan that we laid out in the hearings and in the report, from the efforts to convince state legislators to take action to the issues of having alternate electors or fake electors appointed, the pressure on the vice president and so forth. Those steps along the way that ultimately led to Jan. 6 and the attack on the Capitol are what we laid out in that first hearing and subsequent hearings, and it seems to be a good part of what is set forth in the indictment.
If you look at what she’s laying out, that seven-part plan, what’s the heart of it? What’s the idea of it, that she’s saying the president and the others were involved in, or that the government is saying the president and the co-conspirators were involved in? What’s the basic allegation?
The basic allegation is that former President Trump lost the 2020 election, and either before the election or certainly on election night going forward—I think there’s a strong argument to be made that even before the election this was the plan—that from that point forward until Jan. 6, … his goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to stay in power.
And the steps that he took along the way were not a random series of steps. It wasn’t a push on this door to see which one opens. It was a coordinated effort to take various steps that ultimately would lead to him being able to stay in power after Jan. 20, which was the date that President-elect [Joe] Biden was to be inaugurated. … There were several elements to it; there were a lot of people who were involved in it.
And when each of those efforts failed, and we got to the point where he wasn’t able to convince state legislatures to change the result, he wasn’t able to get courts to throw out the result, he wasn’t able to get these alternate slates of electors certified, he wasn’t able to convince the vice president to take measures at the joint session of Congress or agree that he would take measures to overturn or at least stall the inauguration of President Biden, he summoned a mob. And he summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., to assist him in his effort. And I think the committee’s view was that was the culmination of his effort to unlawfully stay in power. And although the DOJ indictment doesn’t focus so much on the Jan.-6-attack part of things, more on the election-conspiracy part, our committee’s view and our role was to investigate what led to the attack. The committee’s view was that’s what led to the attack, the unrelenting effort to overturn the election, to stay in power, and when nothing else worked, to convince an angry mob of his supporters that the election had been stolen, and they needed to fight to take back their country.
So let’s talk about some of those pieces of evidence and steps along the way. The first place you mentioned that you might start it was election night. The committee is able to interview senior staff members who are there, Bill Stepien, Jason Miller. Rudy Giuliani—I think that they discussed whether he was intoxicated or not. What’s important to understand about election night?
There was witness testimony that there was discussion on election night, particularly after Fox News called Arizona for now President Biden. There was discussion about what should be done and whether the president should say something and make a statement. Backing up a little bit, there had been comments made by some of the president’s advisers before election night saying that he should, meaning former President Trump, should declare victory on election night, no matter what.
So there was some discussion on election night among the people gathered at the White House to watch the election returns about whether then-President Trump should say something and should declare victory. The consensus of almost all of his advisers was that he should not; that it was too early; that although he was ahead in several states, millions and millions of votes remained to be counted. They were all familiar with this concept of the red mirage, where early voting would favor Republicans, but as absentee and mail-in votes were counted, that … President Biden was going to do better … in that portion of the vote, and that was going to overtake this mirage or this appearance of a Republican lead.
So there was all this discussion about whether the president should say something, and the consensus was that he should not, with one dissenter, as far as we know from our investigation, and that was Rudy Giuliani. And Rudy Giuliani was of the view that the president should speak out and should declare victory. And that’s what he did. That’s what the president did. … He took to the lectern in the White House and announced that he had won, that it was a total fraud, the election had been stolen from him.
. . . One thing, as we’ve talked to people, they say that it’s crucial for the committee and the indictment was figuring out what was the president’s mental state or what was his intent at a particular moment. And here the committee writes that the president, when he says, “Frankly, we did win,” the president did something he had planned to do long before Election Day: He lied. What did you find about his intent when he goes out there, about whether he believes that the election was stolen? He’s got these two competing camps. And why is that important?
… Why was it important that President Trump knew that he hadn’t won the election when he said he had, knew that the claims of election fraud were not true? I think there’s two reasons for that. One is because it shows his complicity in this scheme or this plot to unlawfully stay in power. And that’s what we focused on for the most part in the committee hearings: What did the president know? When did he know it? And the fact that he knew that what he was saying was false suggests that he was on this improper path, and it’s what’s now led to his indictment to some extent, that he was pushing and peddling election fraud conspiracies that he knew were false with an effort to improperly stay in power.
That’s only part of the equation, from my perspective. The other is that I felt if we were going to convince the American people who believed the election fraud conspiracies, what better way to do that than to show them that the people who were telling you that the election was stolen knew it wasn’t stolen? They didn’t even believe it themselves, and you shouldn’t believe it. And that was my objective in questioning Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell and other members of Trump’s inner circle. We couldn’t question President Trump, but the others who were fomenting this lie and pushing this lie forward, to be able to say to the American people, “They knew it wasn’t true. They didn’t even believe it, and you shouldn’t believe it.”
… But that to me was the heart of the whole thing. It’s not about Trump’s intent. We talk about intent; that’s a criminal concept. It’ll be relevant in the indictment, the criminal case, but from my perspective, it wasn’t about proving his intent. It was about proving his knowledge and proving that he knew what he was saying was untrue.
… Do you ask Rudy Giuliani these questions?
That’s the whole reason he was brought in.
And what does he say?
We talked to as many members of that inner circle as we could. We subpoenaed almost all of them. Some of them evaded service of subpoenas, but those who were served, most of them either took the Fifth or just didn’t show up, and some were held in contempt for that. But some of the president’s supporters, advisers, lawyers were willing to sit with the select committee and answer questions, Rudy Giuliani being one of them. And the main focus, a primary focus in those interviews was, what evidence did you have to support this claim? Were you aware of that evidence that contradicted that claim? And why did you persist in pursuing that claim and pitching that claim to the American people after you knew that it was false?
And from Mr. Giuliani, I wouldn’t say he gave straight answers to many of those questions, but what the deposition revealed, and the transcripts were made public, is that he really had very little evidence, almost no evidence, to support any of the claims that he was making. Same is true with Bernie Kerik, his chief investigator. Same is true with Sidney Powell. They were all asked to put on the record, “We’d like to hear, and have the American people hear, why you believe that the Dominion voting machines were rigged. What made you believe that dead people voted? How did you come to the conclusion that, you know, pick your random Rudy/crazy conspiracy theory?” And he either asserted attorney-client privilege or acknowledged that he really didn’t have evidence of the claims that were being made or that he didn’t really look at the evidence that directly contradicted the claims.
That’s sort of amazing because these are the advisers of the president of the United States, who is repeating that there is election fraud, initially over Twitter, multiple times a day.
Yes. Not just on Twitter. He went on interviews on cable TV. He released a video on Facebook that was 45 minutes or so, where he ran through all of the litany of false claims. He gave public speeches. So Twitter, but also a fair number of public speeches and other instances that also made the same claims.
In those first days, … as he’s making these allegations over and over again, is there even the—what we’ll hear about later, the specific allegations, or does the claim of fraud come first?
So the claim of fraud definitely came first, but it came even before then. And this is the point I was mentioning earlier, that there’s a really strong argument that this was all cooked up well before the election. And you see—and some of this is laid out in the report—in the months leading up to the election, former president is already sort of seeding the ground. He’s priming the public and his supporters for what was to come after. Most of it dealt with mail-in voting and whether mail-in voting was legitimate. And he makes numerous speeches and TV comments on TV interviews, about “It’s all a big fraud. We don’t know where these ballots are really coming from.” And you’ll probably remember, in the summer and fall of 2020, lots of talk about ballots being found in ditches, and we can’t trust mail-in voting.
We learned during the investigation that his aides and Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy—well, actually now former-, then future-Speaker McCarthy—Bill Stepien and Kevin McCarthy told President Trump, “You have to stop denigrating mail-in voting, because you’re scaring your supporters off, and they won’t do mail-in voting. And they’re going to have to go to the polls, and that’s not necessarily—you have Covid; we had weather issues. It’s better to get our votes in and get those people voting mail-in, but you’re out there telling people that mail-in voting is unreliable and it’s all a big scam.”
And the president did it anyway. And the reason he did it was because this was part of this scheme of getting his supporters sensitized to the fact that there’s going to be some fraud here. “Keep your eyes open, because it’s coming. These people are cheaters, and they’re going to try and steal the election.” OK, so that’s pre-election.
Now, to your point, right immediately after the election, he says on election night, “This has been a total fraud. The election has been stolen.” And there was no evidence of that. His attorney general, Bill Barr, testified. He said, right out of the box, “The president starts in with this fraud. It wasn’t based on anything. There was no evidence of it.” And the fact is, this was part of this sort of build-up to what became the Big Lie.
So yes, to your question, he was already claiming it was fraud before it happened, but he was claiming fraud before the election, and it was all as an insurance policy, because the polls were not good for him. It did not look good. It didn’t look like he was going to win. And when he was asked…, “Will you accept the results of the election?,” he refused to do it. He knew he was going to contest the election no matter what happened, and that’s what we saw play out in the 10 weeks or so after the election, leading up to Jan. 6, and frankly, to this day.
That context makes things that we saw at the time look very different, right? We saw the Four Seasons Total Landscaping moment, which is the day that the networks called the election. That was sort of crazy. He surrounds himself with sort of eccentric people, and that seems like what was going on. But you’re saying there was something else, that if you look at that press conference with what you know, that it wasn’t just some laughing matter of what was going on at a press conference like that.
Absolutely. And you’ll see in the depositions of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, both of whom were on television literally the days after the election claiming that the election was stolen. And we asked each of them, “What evidence did you have on Nov. 4 or Nov. 6 or Nov. 7, the day of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference?,” and they had to acknowledge that they had none. They couldn’t cite a single piece of evidence that they were aware of that led them to believe that this was a total fraud and a stolen election.
And it didn’t get better. They didn’t gather the evidence after that. It just became a series of new lies and taking things out of context and having this … social media phenomenon where an incident becomes a claim becomes a narrative becomes a conspiracy, and then it’s amplified and retweeted, and then it’s sort of this cycle of lies that then build on one another. And the president is referring to the fact that the public believes it, and the public is saying, “Well, the president is saying it,” and it’s this never-ending cycle that builds up to the point where you then have tens of millions of people believing it.
… The indictment, also the report, lays out this choice that the president makes—the indictment makes it a very central choice—which is between what’s so-called Team Normal and the group led by Rudy Giuliani. What did you find about that choice that the president was going to make?
So it was very clear from our investigation that there was a group of loyal Trump advisers who wanted him to win, who worked very hard for him to win, who came to the conclusion very early on that he did not win. And they were willing, and because he’s their candidate and they believed in him, to fight things in court, to make election challenges that could be made. But they understood that the chance that he was going to pull this out was very, very slim. His campaign manager said it was very, very, very bleak, the outlook.
There was another group, led by Rudy Giuliani, who were telling the president, “This thing was stolen, and you can win this.” And of course President Trump gravitated to the latter group and pushed the other folks aside. They weren’t doing enough to fight for him; they’re not fighters; Rudy’s a fighter, that sort of thing. And so very quickly, within probably two weeks or so of the election, the post-election challenges and the effort to overturn the election results pretty much shifted to Rudy Giuliani and his team.
The consequence of that decision? … How important was that, that choice as a moment? Because they say that’s where the criminal conspiracy started.
Well, I’d say the conspiracy started before that. What’s not terribly surprising to me that former President Trump, who I believe was intent upon staying in office no matter what, that he would gravitate to someone who was telling him what he wanted to hear. And so the shift from “Team Normal” to “Team Crazy,” as it’s been called, is not surprising to me. It’s sort of keeping in form for the former president. He knew what he was doing. It wasn’t as if he had these advisers in his ear who were telling him things that he then believed or listening to lawyer A instead of lawyer B. He knew what the facts were, and yet he had a lawyer who was saying, “I’m going to keep pushing these conspiracy theories on your behalf,” and the former president gave Mr. Giuliani the authority to do that and asked him to push that forward.
And how central is Giuliani to everything that would happen?
He’s in the middle of everything. … I don’t know that I could say he’s the architect of everything, but he’s got his hands in most of it. He’s running the post-election operation. I think he testified that he was the primary adviser to the president regarding the post-election efforts, and so you’d have to say he’s central to almost all of it.
… We won’t go into all of the various conspiracy theories, but one that keeps coming back is this Dominion conspiracy theory. I don’t think it’s the first time, but it comes in big at that Republican National Committee press conference with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. What is that claim? Is that claim true? Should they have known that it wasn’t true at that point, by the middle of November?
… On election night, in Antrim County, Michigan, which is … a small but strongly Republican county in Michigan, the county voted for President Trump over Vice President Biden. But because of an error in the way that the results were reported from the precincts to the central county clerk, and the way she noted it in pulling the records together, the unofficial tally that was put forth on election night showed that Biden had won Antrim County.
By the morning, the clerk realizes that, “Wait a second, we’ve done this wrong.” You think of a spreadsheet where one of the cells gets moved and everything sort of moves up, and so the cells don’t line up. And the count, the unofficial count, was wrong. It was corrected, and Trump ended up winning Antrim County …. There was a 6,000-vote swing when they sort of corrected the county.
There’s immediately a statement made as to how that happened. The secretary of state of Michigan describes how it happened, and that’s it. So Antrim County, there was this little glitch, human error that caused the glitch. And it’s rectified, and it’s explained. And the secretary of state tells the people of Michigan that Antrim County was won by President Trump, and this is the number.
In those same early few days, Sidney Powell went on television, on Fox News, and started talking about Dominion voting machines being rigged. This was something, again, that had been talked about pre-election. There were some people who were out there trying to question election results and blaming election technology, including Dominion machines, and that became sort of the story as to what happened. This must be what happened in Antrim County; it must have been the Dominion machines.
What happened in Antrim County had nothing to do with the Dominion machines. It was already explained by the clerk. But that’s the story that is floated. And then it just gets more fanciful from there, about Hugo Chávez and Venezuelans and software. And Sidney Powell, who admitted in her deposition that she did not have any evidence that Dominion machines were rigged at the time she made those statements, or by Nov. 19, she appears at this press conference and just goes full Kraken on the Dominion voting machine issue. Rudy Giuliani, with hair dye coming down his face, chimes in. And then we’re off and running on the Dominion thing.
In the days and weeks following, numerous experts say, including within the government, so Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, they look at this issue, and they say, “There’s not an issue with the Dominion machines.” There’s a full hand recount. Every single ballot in Antrim was counted, and it matched what the final results were. So no issue in Antrim County. No issue with Dominion machines. But it’s now become this narrative that’s taken hold, and goes from there.
Experts in litigation saying it didn’t happen. Michigan State Senate, run by a Republican, says not an issue, didn’t happen. So nothing happened with Dominion machines. Here’s, though, where it got sort of brought back to life again. In December, in connection with a challenge of a marijuana ordinance actually up in Michigan, the Trump team gets access to the voting machines in Antrim County. They get a judge to sign off on an order that says, “You can come in and inspect the machines,” and Giuliani and his group send a team up. They do a forensic audit of the machines. They don’t find anything.
But they write in the report, “There’s some sneaky algorithm in there that was designed to change election results.” So they bring back this whole thing to life. They prepare a totally bogus report. They send it to the president. The president blasts it to other elected officials, to the media, and he says, “This is the one. This is going to prove, see, the election was stolen.” His own attorney general says, “This report is garbage. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. There’s been a total recount.” The Department of Justice looks at it, the Department of Homeland Security looks at it, and they all say, “There’s no truth to this report.”
And yet Trump continues to talk about Dominion machines all the way up until Jan. 6. Dominion, of course, is the company that won $787 million from Fox News for defaming them and for promoting these lies. And in that litigation, it was acknowledged and the court found and Fox acknowledged, that the claims regarding Dominion machines were false.
As you say, Bill Barr plays a crucial role in debunking the Dominion story and in some of the others. What was it like to get Bill Barr to sit down and then to be pretty blunt in the way that he described what happened and described what he said to the president?
There was an initial interview of former Attorney General Barr, informal, not on the record, early on in our investigation, and then there was talk of trying to have him come as a hearing witness. We didn’t know exactly what he was going to say, but we knew that he was right there and that there was a lot of work done at the Department of Justice regarding the claims that were being made.
Shortly before that hearing on the Big Lie in mid-June, he agreed to sit for a formal on-the-record interview. … He was extremely blunt, candid about his meetings with former President Trump. He described to us three face-to-face meetings he had. He’d had three meetings with President Trump between the election and the time that he resigned, and he described in detail each of those meetings,and in each of those meetings, he very clearly and explicitly told former President, then-President Trump, that “What you are hearing is not true. It’s BS. It’s nonsense. It’s idiotic.” And he went through each of the allegations at each of those meetings. He didn’t cover each allegation at each meeting, but each of those meetings, he went through specific allegations and told the president, “It’s just not true. We’ve looked at it.” …
And if he’s a potential witness to him at the criminal trial, or as you use him in the Jan. 6 report, how powerful is he, given his past history with the president and given the resources of the Department of Justice?
Extremely powerful. He’s unassailable in terms of his Republican bona fides. He came to serve the Trump administration fairly late in the administration and I think was brought in, frankly, because of his credibility, his prior service. He was not necessarily seen as a Trump person but an establishment Republican who had served his country in the past with distinction, and so he has immense amounts of credibility in that regard and certainly to the Republican audience. And here he is, saying that the president had no interest in the facts; he didn’t want to hear facts and that he was “unhinged.” And I think that, if he testifies in the criminal case, will be as powerful as it was when we played that testimony at our hearing.
When he testifies, … are you looking at the dates of what the president said? Because that’s one of the more powerful things in the report, is that comparison between what he heard and what he said. Can you just tell me about what that was like or how you realized that these moments butted right up against each other?
Yeah. So let me back up on that for a little bit. … So what we called Hearing 2 was the “Big Lie” hearing, and the goal of the hearing, as I alluded to earlier, … the hope was, once and for all, we have a national audience in the American public paying attention to these issues. We’re going to put forward for the American people the real facts about what happened in the election, and our hope was to take on as many of the prominent conspiracy theories, because there were lots of them. As Attorney General Barr said, “It was like playing whack-a-mole”; you debunk one theory, and then he’s got another one the next day.
So we tried our best to find a way to take on the biggest issues and to present to the American people, “This is what was claimed; this is what really happened.” As we were putting that together, we also knew that it was important to show, not for the reasons I mentioned earlier, not just what the true facts were but that the people who were peddling the lies knew the true facts, and that included Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Powell and President Trump. And so showing what the facts were, but also what facts were conveyed to or known by the people who were then promoting these lies, goes to the issue of what I talked about earlier, which is trying to convince the American people [that] even the people who were telling him this stuff knew it wasn’t true.
And so juxtaposing or comparing what President Trump was told on day one and what he went out and publicly said on day two or day three, immediately after, we felt was extremely powerful evidence that he was not acting in good faith, that he knew it was false, and that anyone listening to this hearing should come to the same conclusion.
But the lies become part of the indictment, although the indictment says you’re entitled to free speech, but in this case, because they’re part of other acts, it’s criminal. But the president’s defenders say politicians lie; there’s a First Amendment. Why would this be part of a criminal case against the president?
Well, I won’t speak for the Department of Justice, and I don’t want to pre-judge the issues in the criminal case. That was not our focus. We weren’t building a criminal case. But I can tell you why it was important to the committee and why it’s important to me. Because this isn’t just political rhetoric. Politicians do lie. None like President Trump. I don’t think there’s ever been a politician who lies like President Trump. But stretching the truth in a campaign ad or on the debate stage is one thing, but when you are using that lie to subvert the democratic process and to convince people that they need to overturn the election, that false electors need to step forward and overturn the results, electoral college votes in a particular state, or the vice president needs to intercede and change the result; or a mob needs to attack the Capitol because the election has been stolen from them, now you’re going outside just, “Hey, I’m just making stuff up here. What’s the harm? Don’t vote for me if you don’t believe me.” Now you’re talking about obstructing Congress; you’re talking about a conspiracy to defraud the United States, and that’s what he’s charged with. He’s not charged with making political lies. He’s charged with using those lies in order to foment a coup or an insurrection.
As we get to the section that’s about pressure on local officials, … what was the effort, the effort on all of these local officials from the president, from Giuliani?
There was a theory that was floated before the election and became very prominent after the election that state legislatures had the power to alter the election results in a given state. . . .
And you see that in the text messages and the emails and the memoranda that we uncovered, that early on, that becomes—that’s the move, that you have several of these states that are controlled by Republicans, Republican governors, and we’re going to make our play in those states to have the Republican legislature overturn the will of the people.
So that’s where this comes from. And it took various forms. It was originally lobbying the leaders, the leadership in the various states. Within two weeks of the election, the president has the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate from Michigan and some of their colleagues flown out to—they fly out to Washington, and they meet in the Oval Office with the president and talk to Rudy Giuliani on the phone. You heard from Rusty Bowers and others about the efforts in Arizona. We saw the same thing in Pennsylvania and in Georgia. But that’s what that was about, was trying to get the leadership to overturn, to get their legislatures and their governors to assist in overturning the results that the people had voted in those states.
… What was it about the Rusty Bowers story that made it a good one to highlight in the hearings?
… I think that the reason Mr. Bowers stands out is because he was just such a compelling, compelling speaker and presence. Again, someone whose bona fides were unassailable. This is a person who was a staunch Republican, a supporter of President Trump, just a very humble, religious, sincere person, who without any fanfare or really efforts to call attention to himself told a very compelling story about the pressure that was put on him by primarily Mr. Giuliani but also former President Trump and others, to try to get him to take steps to overturn the election, and he refused to do it. And he was extremely passionate and clear and compelling in the way he described those efforts. I think that’s why he was such a memorable figure and why his testimony was among the most if not the most powerful testimony that was presented in the course of the hearings.
He talks about that phone call with the president, with Giuliani. I think he said from his car. What are they asking him? What are they asking of him as he tells the story?
So there are a few different asks. One of them is to convene the legislature, get them back in session. And so the idea was, there were enough Arizona legislators who had expressed support for President Trump in this effort that if they could get the legislature convened, they could wreak all sorts of havoc and delay the certification or do whatever it is they thought they were going to be able to accomplish.
So it was more of a procedural thing, but the speaker of the House needed to be part of that, and he wouldn’t do it. So much of the discussion with Mr. Giuliani was about that and them trying to convince—them being Giuliani, Trump and others; I think John Eastman might have been on one of those calls—trying to convince Speaker Bowers, “You have the power. You can do this.” And Speaker Bowers said, “I don’t think I do. Show me where I do. Show me where I have the right to override the will of the people of Arizona. I don’t see it. And by the way, what’s the evidence of fraud that I’m supposed to base this on? Have you got evidence to show me?” And Rudy Giuliani, in a moment of remarkable candor, told him, “Well, we have a lot of theories. We don’t necessarily have the evidence.”
And for Rusty Bowers, that was it. That’s game, set and match. …
And you must have noticed, the staff, when you hear that, that quote, that that’s an important piece of evidence.
For sure. For sure. There’s one sort of a backstory on the Rusty Bowers testimony. He was interviewed informally early on in the investigation along with several other people in Arizona, and he made an impression for sure on our investigators, the people who went out and talked to him, that he could be or might be a really good witness. But we didn’t have the full sort of scope of all the anecdotes that he ultimately ended up telling. And he was scheduled to be a hearing witness.
Shortly before the hearing, because of some personal issues involving his attorney, it appeared that he was not going to be able to make it in time, make it out to Washington for the hearing. And so on very short notice, we put together a video deposition of him so that we could get his testimony on video, and if it was possible, we would play that at the hearing. We took his deposition a week or so, maybe, before the hearing, and he told us these stories, the ones that you’re talking about and that he later recounted. Things worked out, and he was able to make it to Washington. But it was extremely powerful. And I remember Congressman [Adam] Schiff, who participated in the video deposition, walking him through some of these issues, and it was goose bumps listening to him, Rusty Bowers, talk about sort of the personal toll that it took on him and some of these conversations that he had with Mr. Giuliani.
The other witnesses at that hearing, Gabriel Sterling is one of them.. . . Why was that press conference that he gives on Dec. 1 such an important moment for the committee that will return to it again and again?
… So that Dec. 1 press conference was remarkable. I remember watching it when it happened before I was involved with the select committee, of course. It was December of 2020. But I kept coming back to it. We kept coming back to it in working through the investigation and what we were doing.
And to me, what was so powerful about it is not just it was so raw and so emotional, but that here is a guy who saw what was coming. He saw that this was getting out of hand, and he said, “This is too much. It has gone too far,” I think he said that a couple times in that press conference. He talked about one of his staffers being threatened, and he said in that press conference, “Someone is going to get killed.” And it was chilling and foreboding.
But what I kept coming back to was President Trump’s response to that press conference; that after this election worker talks about another election worker being threatened and scared, and that someone was going to die, and he was talking about the threats that were being received, the president’s response was to mock him and to double-down in a tweet and in public statements about the fraud in Georgia.
And that was one example of many where it showed that they, President Trump and his supporters, knew that violence was in the offing. I was strongly of that view. And when he invited his supporters on Dec. 19 in a tweet to come to D.C., “It will be wild,” he knew, this is long before the mobs forming and the Secret Service information that they were getting and intelligence information that was coming in about people coming to D.C. armed. This is way before that. This is knowing that these people are angry, and there might be violence in the offing.
To me, that was the most significant part of that press conference. It was powerful and prophetic in a sense, but it was the response to it that was equally chilling and indicative of a mindset that if it takes getting people riled up and making threats to local election officials—and Georgia wasn’t the only place—the Trump team knew that people were threatening election officials, and they took steps to foment that and to encourage it.
… So let’s talk about the other person who was at that hearing, Brad Raffensperger, and that phone call, that recorded phone call, which comes out long before the committee gets together. But that phone call and that recording does seem to be a crucial piece of evidence. Why is that?
So it was important I think it got the attention that it did back in January, shortly after it took place. I think it was within a week or two that the transcript of the call was released. And there are some pretty stunning things on there. I mean, President Trump is clearly trying to bully Secretary of State Raffensperger into taking some measure to, what he said, as President Trump said, “Find me 11,000-some-odd votes.”
There is a threat of criminal prosecution for him, for Brad Raffensperger and his staff. President Trump says, “Hey, this could create problems for you. It might even be criminal,” which I think most people would read that as a thinly veiled threat. There’s the naming of Ruby Freeman and just the ridiculous lies about her and her role long after that had been debunked publicly and made clear that she didn’t do anything wrong. So it was remarkable in a lot of respects. Sort of the Big Lie-debunking nerd of me was interested in that call as we went through it because that was yet another example where President Trump is bringing up claims that he’s been told are false, and Secretary Raffensperger says to him, “That’s just not true, sir. Your data is wrong. I can send you the information if you’d like,” and the president says, “I don’t need to see it.” …
That conversation sort of tracks with the way that Bill Barr describes it, which is it seems like Trump doesn’t have an interest in getting to the bottom of it. He’s not debating them on the details. What does that reveal about Trump?
Well, it proves the point that he wasn’t interested in the facts. He had a narrative that he wanted to tell, and he was going to tell it notwithstanding the facts. So Barr and Raffensperger, I think you’re right to point out that they are—they’re very similar in that here you have law enforcement, the top law enforcement official who has looked into these allegations and is telling the president face-to-face, “These are not true.” President Trump then repeats those claims in various platforms, whether it’s Twitter or speeches, videos that he released and so forth.
Then you have the highest election official in the state of Georgia, who is the most knowledgeable person on the Georgia allegations, who, not face-to-face but in direct conversation with the president, says, “These things are not true.” And you have President Trump just repeating it.
And so when you see in the report there’s a chart that we put together showing statement made to President Trump, President Trump disregarding it and making the false statement anyway, much of that is Attorney General Barr and Brad Raffensperger, partly because they are not the only two but there are a very small group of people that we had access to in our investigation who were directly communicating with the president. So I have no doubt—and we’ve heard from others that there were communications where people were telling the president that “This isn’t true, sir. That’s not true, sir.” But there were precious few of those interactions that we had access to, and we put those before the American people.
I suspect that in the criminal case, the DOJ has access to a lot more, because they were able to get people to talk to them that we couldn’t get to talk to us. So for every Bill Barr, Rich Donoghue, who was a DOJ official, Jeffrey Rosen, acting attorney general, Brad Raffensperger, these people who described their communications with the president, I suspect there are many, many more who had similar communications, and whose advice and information was similarly disregarded by President Trump.
… That tweet, where he first says Jan. 6, where he says, “Will be wild!,” it comes after a really crazy, I think—Cassidy Hutchinson refers to it as an “unhinged” meeting. What do you learn about … what was in the president’s state of mind when he sends this tweet?
… There was a wild meeting, described by some as the craziest meeting to ever take place in the Oval Office, on Dec. 18, and it went on for hours and hours.
… Rudy Giuliani, who was not present at the beginning, was summoned to the White House and came later. And there was a break where the participants were sort of talking amongst themselves without the president, and then they went up to the residence portion of the White House and continued the meeting there, until probably close to midnight on the 18th.
And the main topic of discussion and debate at that meeting was that Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne was there, and an attorney named Emily Newman were trying to convince the president that he had the authority to order the seizure of voting machines in various states.
… It devolves into a discussion prompted by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Eric Herschmann, an adviser to the president, and others who were in that room, saying to this group, “Well, what evidence do you even have that there was fraud in the election? You don’t have any evidence.” And that became a heated discussion, a shouting match, people threatening to fight other people, and really just an unhinged meeting.
The president is taking all this in, mostly a passive observer in this meeting. But he is watching this play out. So that’s one important part of this meeting, that you have his close advisers telling his lawyers, “You have no evidence that there was fraud in the election, and you’ve lost every case. Every case you brought in court, you’ve lost.” And Sidney Powell says, “The judges were corrupt. That’s why we lost.” And Eric Herschmann, supporter, close adviser to the president, says, “What are you talking about? Every case? The judges? We appointed many of those judges. You’re saying they’re all corrupt? You people have nothing. You’re crazy.”
And so the president is watching all this—again, more evidence that these claims that everything is based on are bogus and unsupported. So that’s one big piece of what happens. They then, when they’re up in the residence and they’re talking about continuing the debate on these issues, Rudy Giuliani says, or claims, that he pulled the president aside, and he said, “Sir, this idea of seizing the machines, you can’t do it. It’s bad. In fact, all the stuff, that nonsense that they tried to impeach you over, this is actually something you can get impeached for. You can’t do this. And by the way, I’ve got another idea. I’ve got a plan. I think we can get these machines. You don’t have to do this thing with the seizure.”
Now, I don’t know if that’s true, that conversation that Rudy Giuliani described, but that’s what he says he told the president … in the residence. The meeting then breaks up close to midnight, and at 1:15 or so in the morning is when the president sends that tweet that says, “Big rally on Jan. 6. Be there. Will be wild!” And so one could surmise or conclude from that that in the sense this Dec. 18 meeting was … a watershed event, when the president could see that maybe his lawyers don’t have it; maybe they’re crazy; maybe there is no evidence of fraud, that there’s no avenue through here. Remember, we’re after the certification of the electoral count. He is sort of running out of options. And then we have the tweet.
Yeah. And he’s running out of options there. He’s being told seizing the voting machines isn’t an option. And whatever the motivation is, from that point, Jan. 6 does become something that they’re looking towards as a chance to change the outcome of the election.
Yes. And not to say that the other efforts ceased, because, as I said, the effort to corrupt the Department of Justice and the state legislators and all that continued right up until the end. But you’ve now got this added element of summoning the mob to Washington, D.C.
And you said that you thought the president understood the potential violence and the reaction of his followers. And the committee also looked at what the reaction actually was among militia groups, among Alex Jones. And how was that tweet received, and what was the response?
Well, you could see from the hearings there was very compelling evidence that was gathered regarding the direct and immediate effect that that tweet had among certain elements of Trump supporters. And we put forward at the hearing some of the tweets in literally the hours after that tweet about “Hey, the president has called us to action. Game on. Let’s go.” And then it gets more graphic and violent from there.
One of the challenges that we had on the committee was trying to establish that the highest levels of the White House were aware of that traffic. We believed they were. We think there’s evidence that Dan Scavino and others in the White House communications team were monitoring the traffic. We saw some email chains … among high-level Trump people that included some of the most disturbing and graphic tweets and posts regarding people coming to D.C. armed and what they were going to do.
So there’s no doubt that there was a violent, immediate, threatening atmosphere that sprung out of that tweet. And I think we made a decent case based on the limited evidence we had available that people within the White House were aware that that was what was going on.
The penultimate pressure that was laid out in your report and in the indictment is on the Department of Justice, especially in that period after Barr has left, with Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue. What is important to understand about that allegation about that part of the story?
Well, the overarching piece of it, and maybe this means more to a former federal prosecutor or someone who has worked in the Department of Justice and who holds that department in such high esteem, and the historical role and the apolitical role that that department has played, and the efforts that the Department of Justice goes through to make sure that it’s not politicized at all. For someone coming from that perspective, the mere fact that the president of the United States is leaning on senior Department of Justice officials to take action is appalling, and it’s horrible and contrary to everything that the Department of Justice has fought to preserve for over 100 years in terms of that neutrality, because it’s the only way the criminal justice system works properly, is if it is an apolitical body.
So that’s sort of the overarching concern I have about just even the fact that he was trying to do it. But there are two aspects of this DOJ pressure campaign that I think are most important for most people to focus on. One is that after being told by senior DOJ leadership—it’s Richard Donoghue and Jeffrey Rosen, the two top-ranking people at the Department of Justice. Of course this is after Attorney General Barr had told the president that it wasn’t true and then he resigned. This is his successor and his successor’s deputy, going allegation by allegation through with President Trump and saying, “Sir, that’s just not true. That’s just not true. You’ve been given bad information.”
… In the course of this discussion, Jeffrey Rosen says, “Sir, I’m not going to go out there. I can’t do anything about it. I’m not going to go out there and change the election. DOJ can’t do anything to change the election results.” And President Trump says to him and to Richard Donoghue, who is also on the call, “I’m not asking you to do that. All you need to do is say it was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and Republican congressmen.”
So the president’s ask of DOJ was, “I don’t need you to indict anybody. I don’t need you to find anything. Just say the election was corrupt, and we will take it from there.” That is horrific and chilling, that he made that ask of the DOJ officials. So that’s the first thing. And they refused, of course.
The second piece of the DOJ corruption process is this Jeffrey Clark letter. Jeffrey Clark was a senior person at the Department of Justice below Donoghue and Rosen, although the president, in the midst of all this, actually told Jeffrey Clark that he was going to fire Rosen and appoint Clark to be the attorney general of the United States. And a key piece of that was that Clark was willing and ready to send a letter to the Georgia state legislature, and he said other legislatures as well, to try to convince them to do something to halt the certification of the 2020 election.
So those were the two prongs of the DOJ pressure campaign. One is to get senior leadership to just say “It’s corrupt, and I’ll take it from there,” and the other was to use DOJ leadership to tell the state of Georgia and other states, “We at DOJ”—this is what was in Clark’s draft letter, that Donoghue and Rosen said, “We are not sending that letter”—“We at DOJ have significant concerns about the election in Georgia, and we think you need to take measures as a legislature, and you need to meet in special session and do something to stop the certification of this election result.”
… Clark was ready to do it. Rosen and Donoghue said, “We are not doing it,” and Clark went to the president and got himself appointed attorney general, or nominated for acting attorney general. Rosen demanded a meeting with the president personally, and there was another crazy White House meeting that’s described in our hearings, where Rosen, Donoghue, Steven Engel, the top three people in the Department of Justice, meet with Clark, the president and then Pat Cipollone and other presidential advisers in the Oval Office for hours, fighting over whether Clark should be the attorney general and whether that letter should be sent. And only when Donoghue and Rosen told the president, “Sir, if you do this, you are going to have the entire top-level staff at the Department of Justice resign”— because all of their people had said that “If this happens, we’re resigning”—“and you’re going to have U.S. attorneys all over the country probably resigning. And do you really want that?” And the president said, “I guess it’s not worth the breakage. So sorry, Jeff Clark, you’re not going to be attorney general.” …
It sounds like the pressure was quite intense on Rosen. Even before this, Clark was telling them that they had to sign the letter or they would be replaced?
… It is long-standing DOJ policy that only topmost senior people at DOJ meet with the White House and the president. Again, it’s to ensure that there’s no politicization of the department. You don’t want line-level—what we would call line-level prosecutors meeting with or getting pressured by the White House. So all communications should be at the top level, attorney general to president or something close.
And they told Jeffrey Clark, “You are not authorized to meet with the president,” because they had heard that he was having those meetings. Clark did it anyway. Met with the president more than once. The president then tells him he’s going to be attorney general. He tells Rosen, his boss, the attorney general, “The president wants me to replace you, but if you agree to send that letter that I’ve given you, that you said you won’t send, maybe I’ll step aside, or I won’t take the job, and you get to remain as attorney general.” And Rosen says, “I’m not sending the letter, and I want to meet with the president in person.” That’s what leads to that meeting at the White House.
… Is that a crime? Did the president commit a crime there? It’s part of the indictment, this pressure campaign on the DOJ.
The crime is the conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to interfere with the congressional proceeding on Jan. 6. And all of these acts, all of the things that we’ve been talking about, they don’t have to be illegal in and of themselves. You could have an overt act in the course of a conspiracy that in and of itself is legal but it’s furtherance of a conspiracy.
So, for example, a conspiracy to rob a bank, if you walk across the street, if you buy a pad and paper to write a note to a bank teller, and then you start walking across the street to the bank, walking across the street isn’t illegal. Buying a pad and paper isn’t illegal. But those could be acts in furtherance of a conspiracy, because you’re taking an action that you intend to have a criminal result.
And so whether or not a particular act that the president is alleged to have engaged in is in and of itself a crime isn’t really going to be question at that trial. It’s going to be whether that act was in furtherance of a criminal objective.
… It seems like it’s all culminating with [Mike] Pence. Can you just help me understand the big picture as we head towards the pressure on the vice president?
… By the time we get into late December, the certification has taken place on Dec. 14. There’s still an effort for state legislatures, but now we’ve got the fake electors’ certificates in our pockets, and now they’re being sent to Washington. Now it kind of all comes down to Mike Pence.
The Supreme Court—they’re trying to do something in the Supreme Court. They’re still trying to pull some other things out. But if Mike Pence will, according to President Trump’s terms, do “the right thing,” open the fake certificates, not the real ones, then they might still have something here.
So you can see in the days leading up to Jan. 6, that pressure really intensifies. And there are numerous calls, meetings. We had visibility to some. I think we’re going to hear about a lot more in the federal trial. But Mike Pence and his staff are pushing back hard on the president and the president’s advisers, that what the president and his advisers are asking is not true—it’s not legal; it’s not constitutional; there’s no support for it. If this ever went to the courts, you would lose, 9-nothing, if it went to the Supreme Court. So we don’t see it, and he’s not doing it, is what Pence’s advisers were telling Trump’s advisers.
… If he goes along with this theory, what’s the consequence of that? What’s at stake in the decision Mike Pence is making?
… Vice President Pence, based on his public comments recently and certainly comments of his staff, or testimony of his staff during our investigation, reflect that they fully understood what was at stake here; that what he was being asked to do was to, on his own, unilaterally decide the outcome of an election, notwithstanding the fact that President Biden, now President Biden, won the election, that though tens of millions of votes that were cast by his supporters were to be cast aside because Mike Pence had the authority and the ability to say, “I’m going to choose this envelope of fake electors versus the one that was certified in the state.”
And the idea that that could happen, it’s anathema to everything that we believe about our democratic system. At that point, what have we got? What’s the point of elections? What’s the point of our democracy if one person, if one man—or now, if Vice President Harris, if one woman can just decide after an election, “I don’t like the outcome, and I’m going to pick somebody else,” it’s outrageous; it’s ridiculous. Vice President Pence knew it. That’s among the reasons that he said he decided and stood firm, notwithstanding his loyalty to the president, and refused to go along with it.
As we get into Jan. 6, there’s a lot of questions about what does the president know? What’s his intention? And the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony is this dramatic moment, as we’re watching from the outside. Suddenly there’s this hearing. … How important was that hearing?
I first became aware of [White House aide] Cassidy Hutchinson a few days before she gave her first interview, on-the-record interview, with the select committee. And other people on staff had identified her as a potential witness. We were casting a pretty wide net to see if we could get people within the White House or the Trump inner circle to talk with us and provide documents. We were not making a lot of progress. There were a lot of people who were either not talking to us, not giving us documents, coming in, saying they didn’t recall or just not telling us the truth.
And in the days before her interview, she produced some text messages that were very revealing, and it indicated that, hey, we may have someone on the inside who is willing to actually tell the truth here. It might have been the first person, actually. I can’t say for sure. I’d have to look at the timeline. But it was pretty important for that reason.
And during her interview, it was clear that she had … remarkable access. She was with Mark Meadows almost full-time. She was invited to or part of really important consequential meetings, phone calls, traveling with the president and Mr. Meadows, and was clearly uncomfortable giving the information, but seemed willing to share information with us. And I remember that moment, actually, as much or more than the public hearing, was here’s someone who was incredibly poised, given her age and relative experience, very thoughtful, careful, and did not seem happy to be there but was willing to share some pretty important and consequential information about what was happening in the White House.
So in that sense, she was a watershed witness … because it was a glimpse inside. And here we had a live witness who could add color to that and give us a lot more information about what was happening. And this is beyond some of the more sort of salacious details about throwing food against the wall and so forth. I’m talking about who was at meetings, what was discussed at those meetings, what was said between the president and Mr. Meadows at critical moments on Jan. 6. That information was extraordinarily important to our investigation.
… What did she add in that regard of Trump’s state of mind on Jan. 6?
… We had a hearing that we would refer to as the “187 Minutes Hearing.” And that 187 minutes is the time between when President Trump left the stage … to the time that he eventually released a video statement, telling the rioters that he loved them but that they should go home. And that 187 minutes was a critical part of what we were interested in looking at.
And she added a lot of color and interesting detail about what was happening within the White House during those 187 minutes. There is the issue of traveling to the Capitol, and we had some information from witnesses about a potential movement, as they call it, of the president in the days before and that had been shot down by Secret Service agents as not being appropriate or safe and so forth. And she shared with us sort of the fact that the president continued and persisted even up until the time he left the stage, or after he left the stage after his speech, that the president wanted to go to the Capitol to do who knows what. To give another speech there? There was talk that he would actually go into the Capitol building itself, into the chamber. And that was, again, fairly telling of President Trump’s state of mind and how he viewed this Jan. 6 proceeding.
The speech that he gives that day … when you look back at that speech, what do you find? What do you find that we wouldn’t know just from watching that speech? And how do you see that speech?
So it’s easy to look at that speech and just see it as another Trump speech of him just sort of stream of consciousness, rambling off these insane conspiracy theories. And it was that; it was definitely all of that. But when you look at it through the lens that we were looking at it, of what role did that speech play in the attack on the Capitol, what did that speech reveal about his view of what he wanted to have happen at the Capitol that day, you see it in a whole different light.
And the language is very dark. It’s very threatening. And he talks about “We’re not going to take it anymore. We need to fight to take back our country,” and words to that effect, and even more sort of graphic and violent. And then you combine that with what we now know, that the Secret Service knew and the White House knew about magnetometers and weapons and so forth, and it becomes extremely chilling and I think very damning of him in his criminal case. …
… How do you feel personally? You moved across the country. You worked on this. The committee lays out this report and committee hearings [and] the document. And you release all of the supplemental evidence. Lots and lots of people watch it. And yet there’s still a lot of Republicans whose minds were not changed. The former president is now likely the nominee of the party. How do you respond to that or feel about it, just as somebody who worked on all of this?
How much time do you have? You’re going to put me in the therapist’s chair here. … I’ll share some personal thoughts on this. You’ve touched on probably the most challenging aspect of the work on the committee for me, and that is this feeling that we knew we were doing something really, really important. I think we all sensed the moment; like you say, we made substantial personal, professional sacrifices in order to participate and to assist in this really significant project. But there were certainly moments, lots of moments, where the sentiment that you’ve raised was palpable, and I felt it very deeply, of, are we making a difference? We are certainly going to tell the story, and for the historical record, we are going to have put forward this information, and history can see and decide what happened here. But in terms of moving the needle in the short term, there have been times where I’ve felt very despondent, dejected over the fact that we weren’t getting through to, frankly, the part of the American public that we needed to. Our hearings were a phenomenal success in terms of public engagement, ratings, critical acclaim of the job that we did and our presentation and how concise and understandable it was, and comprehensive, and all of that. But the polling information, and you look at right-wing media, and just anecdotally, I wonder how much of an impact we had on the people that I felt we needed to connect with.
The fact that we needed to tell people and let people know and see for themselves that the election wasn’t stolen, the election was not stolen, President Biden is legitimately elected president of the United States, and the people who are telling you otherwise know that’s not true, and have known it wasn’t true, and I hope that people were swayed by that. But I don’t know. Certainly not everybody.
Yeah. This may be also not an uplifting question, but you studied the president who tried to stay in office and, according to your report, tried to overcome the rule of law and the way that the electoral process works. Now he’s a defendant. And you can see the statements that he’s made about the court, about the court process. He’s running for president. Do you wonder, is he also trying to outrun that legal process? Just comparing those two, and the Donald Trump that you learned about, and what you’ve seen about how he’s approaching these criminal cases, does it concern you?
It absolutely concerns me. It doesn’t surprise me that these are the tactics, because they seem to be working among the people that he talks to and interacts with and who adore him and who continue to support him. So you know, facts be damned, it doesn’t really matter what the facts are. If he continues to say the things he’s saying, people will believe it. And what troubles me is that we’ve seen up close and personal, with our work on the committee, the lengths that people will go to based on these delusional beliefs that the former president now has instilled in people. And he keeps beating the same drum. The rhetoric almost seems to get more inflammatory, maybe because we know, from our investigation, that there were a handful of people around him who would have liked, if they had stood up more forcefully earlier, but they were acting as a brake, to some extent, on him, people like Attorney General Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, to some extent Vice President Pence and others, who would try to sort of talk him off of these things, as they said. And maybe he doesn’t even have that anymore. So it’s not a good situation, and I do fear for something. If this persists, if he persists in sort of his tactics, yeah, I feel like Gabriel Sterling. Someone’s going to get hurt, and it’s not good.
