Quinta Jurecic is a senior editor at Lawfare and co-host of the podcast “Arbiters of Truth.” She is also a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

The following interview was conducted by Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on Oct. 11, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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So let me start with the indictment, Aug. 1, that comes out against the former president for his actions between Election Day and Jan. 6. When you hear that news, what is your reaction to it? How unprecedented? How important a moment is that?

I can’t say I was surprised. I think it had been coming for a long time, and there had been indications that the special counsel was going to take that step. But if you rolled back the tape to a year previously, I definitely would not have bet on an indictment happening. I think that, really, over the course of the year, from when the January 6 Committee held its hearings to when the indictment came down, it sort of became clear, gradually, that the special counsel was moving toward prosecution. 

But before that—indicting a former president is such an enormous step, and particularly indicting him for this specific set of actions, which, while egregious and a breach of his duty, a breach of his oath, were somewhat more difficult to prove as crimes in criminal court than, for example, the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

I don’t think it was obvious that we were going to go down this path. And so when the news of the indictment did break, honestly, part of what I was thinking was, wow, they really did it. They really decided to take that step and go there.

And it was a big moment. And how profound is it, not just in that moment but in American history, for a former president to be charged with this particular set of conspiracies, of crimes?

A former president had never been charged criminally before former President [Donald] Trump. By the time that the Jan. 6 indictment came down in federal court, he had already been charged in two separate indictments, one in New York state on campaign finance charges and then previously in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. To some extent, we’d kind of broken the seal a little bit. 

The sort of the shock of the idea that a former president could be indicted, I think, had perhaps worn off. But it still was a really astonishing statement, I think, about the rule of law in the United States for the special counsel to be able to go out there and say, “Jan. 6 happened. Here is our account that we are ready to show to a jury about what happened. We believe very strongly in all of these facts, and we believe that this constituted criminal conduct, and we think we can prove that beyond a reasonable doubt”; that that is a very strong statement about the meaning of accountability for something like Jan. 6. And if that indictment had not come down, I think it could very well have sent a signal that this was something that was acceptable, that it was something that the justice system was not equipped to handle. And so in that sense, I think it was really a show of strength.

Was it risky, a former president, a future presidential candidate, to be charged like this?

It’s definitely risky. And it’s risky for a couple reasons. One just has to do with the strength of the case. I think that what the indictment sets out, in terms of Trump’s actions is pretty iron-clad. We have an enormous amount of evidence that he did what the indictment says that he did, from the [House] January 6 Committee, and then there’s of course additional information that’s come out in the press and from the special counsel’s office itself that set out in the indictment.

It’s much more of a difficult argument to make that that actually constitutes a crime. And in that respect, the special counsel’s office is kind of entering uncharted waters, just simply because nothing like this had ever happened before. They’re having to make legal arguments that aren’t well tested, because no one has ever had a reason to test them. 

The conduct in question also has directly to do with things that Trump did while he was the president, which raises questions about sort of internal Justice Department legal opinions, whether the president is immune from prosecution for certain actions, whereas in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which was after Trump left the presidency, or the New York case, which was before he entered the presidency, you don’t have to deal with those problems. 

In that sense, it’s a big swing. It’s also risky in the sense that this is someone who’s going to run for president again, who’s already announced that he’s running for president again and who is going to take this indictment and use it as evidence that he is being persecuted unfairly by an administration that is out to get him. I don’t think there’s truth to that statement, but the special counsel’s office surely knew that Trump was going to make those arguments

So there is a lot at stake here when it comes to public faith in the Justice Department and the ability of the Justice Department to hold people to account for Jan. 6, but also in the ability of the Justice Department to behave fairly and treat fairly someone who himself is running again for public office. 

… And when you read that indictment, and you see how it’s laid out, do you see a similarity there between the indictment and the January 6 Committee investigation?

Reading through the indictment, it is really striking how similar it is to the story that the January 6 Committee told about Trump’s personal culpability for Jan. 6. It’s not a one-to-one. There’s a lot of stuff from the committee report that’s not in the indictment. There is some material in the indictment that was not uncovered previously, or at least didn’t make it into the public eye under the January 6 Committee. 

But the overall story, which is that Trump lost, he knew that he lost, he was told repeatedly that he lost, and then he personally, in coordination with a number of people around him, worked to bully state legislatures into appointing pro-Trump electors instead of [Joe] Biden electors; when that didn’t work, to push for the implement of fraudulent electors who would be selected over Biden electors; and then, ultimately, to try to push [Vice President] Mike Pence into accepting those slates or otherwise throwing the electoral count into disarray, ultimately by threatening him with violence, both the January 6 Committee report and the indictment really set out that that was a plan that unfolded over a period of months and that Trump was very, very closely involved in it.

And I don’t think that we knew that before the January 6 Committee started its work. It was not clear that Trump was so intimately involved in these efforts and that he had been told repeatedly that he lost and therefore was likely engaging in this conduct knowing that he was attempting to overthrow an election.

That’s the next question I wanted to ask you about, was once the January 6 Committee is formed, we’ve seen—we lived through Jan. 6. We’ve seen the tweets; we’ve seen the speech. What was it that they were setting out to find? 

… The committee, when it was formed, the sort of task was, “We’re going to uncover the truth of Jan.6. We’re going to create an official record and tell the story.” And I will confess that, at the beginning of this, I kind of thought, how much more is there to uncover? We all saw it happen in real time on television, on our phone screens; that there is a value in creating kind of an official record with the stamp of approval of the House of Representatives, but beyond that, there’s probably not much more to do.

I think I was really wrong about that. What the committee was able to show in terms of Trump’s personal involvement and knowledge and culpability went well beyond anything that we’d seen in the public eye previously. I think that the most sort of visceral example was the hearing the committee held with [former White House aide] Cassidy Hutchinson, where she testified about Trump telling the Secret Service that they should take away the magnetometers by the entrance to his Ellipse speech, to allow in people with guns, which thereby indicating that he knew that many of his supporters were armed, and that he then demanded that the Secret Service take him to the Capitol after his speech. All of those things we had not known previously, and I think that they did a great deal to kind of shade our understanding of Trump’s personal involvement and culpability.

Somebody told us that the thing that the committee did, which other investigations of the president in the past hadn’t been able to do, was to get to his state of mind, his intent. Do you agree with that, that that was the big contribution from the committee?

Trump’s intent is always going to be a hard nut to crack. We saw it in the Mueller investigation, that that’s something that Special Counsel [Robert] Mueller really agonizes over in his report. How do we know that the president was taking these actions to obstruct the investigation as opposed to just taking these actions for legitimate reasons? And they sort of waffle, and they can’t really reach an answer one way or another.

I think that’s for a couple reasons. One is that Trump lives in a world of his own making in terms of what he wants to believe, and it’s very hard to tell if he knows that things are true or not. And another is just that he doesn’t really leave a paper trail. This is something you see in the Mueller investigation. He doesn’t write emails. He doesn’t text. He tweets. He talks on the phone. But there’s not a paper trail, and so it’s actually really hard for investigators to kind of get at what he was thinking.

I do think that the January 6 Committee was able to get closer than previous investigations. I’m not sure why that was. Possibly it was just that more people were willing to talk to them because they were horrified about what had happened. But the scale of testimony that the committee put forward about the many, many, many people who told him personally or witnessed him being told, “You lost. This is over. You shouldn’t do this,” in the case of the actual Jan. 6 riot, while it was ongoing, the White House counsel telling him, “You need to call this off,” I think makes it very, very, very clear that—or as clear as it could possibly be that he knew what he was doing.

And the committee was also able to point to specific instances where people testified that Trump had made, himself made statements that indicated that he was aware of his loss. So there’s a very striking instance where a Justice Department official testified that Trump said, “You don’t need to find any evidence about that the election was stolen. Just call it corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” And that certainly sounds like he doesn’t actually care whether he won or lost or not. He’s telling the Justice Department, explicitly, “Just go out there and say that it was corrupt.” Once you have evidence like that on the table, I think it paints a much clearer picture of his intent than we have been able to get in previous investigations.

How important do you think it was that [Rep.] Liz Cheney was the vice chair of the committee?

The committee was very, very careful to feature Republicans prominently, so Liz Cheney was the vice chair; [Rep.] Adam Kinzinger, another Republican, was also on the panel. A lot of the witnesses were Republicans. And I think that was a very intentional strategy, because the committee could say, “We are bipartisan. We are speaking not just to Democrats but to the American people as a whole,” and even speaking specifically to Republicans. You saw them emphasize again and again during hearings and in the report itself, all of these witnesses who said that Trump had done these terrible things, they are Republicans; they are people who support him. And I think the committee clearly felt that presenting that kind of unified front of Republicans and Democrats, and allowing Liz Cheney to be in that prominent role, was really important for the message that they were trying to send.

I do think that it had drawbacks too. And you see this in terms of the material that didn’t make it into the report. Specifically what I have in mind is the material about failures of law enforcement and intelligence agencies that did not feature prominently in the report itself. And we saw, after the fact, some reporting from various news organizations, from staffers who worked on that portion of the investigation, saying, “We worked really hard on this, and Liz Cheney and Liz Cheney’s aides cut it out because they felt that it was attacking law enforcement; it was detracting from the focus on Trump.” Whether or not that’s true, I think it points to sort of political divisions that perhaps were never going to be able to be entirely papered over within the committee and also suggests the limits of what you can do with a bipartisan approach; that there was an enormous amount of agreement on the committee about what they needed to do, but there were some things that they couldn’t agree on across that sort of political divide, and so the report is a product of what they could agree on, and is clearly very shaped by Liz Cheney’s hand in both those senses.

There’s the evidence of what they found. But one of the other things that’s remarkable about it is the hearings themselves. The first hearing is prime time, in the huge, huge room, with video clips. Can you help me just understand what those hearings were like, these televised hearings, why that was important?

I think the committee really learned the lessons of the Mueller report in some sense. The Mueller report, it came out. It was this 500-page brick. It was really dense. The legal analysis was confusing. There wasn’t a clear yes or no answer as to whether Trump had committed crimes, and as a result, I think people really struggled to understand it. 

The committee, in contrast, came out there and kind of said, “We’re going to tell the story to people in a medium that is more accessible to them and that they can understand.” And that is a prime-time broadcast that is, with each sort of episode or hearing structured like a story, with particular characters, with sort of a tight arc from beginning to end. Usually when you have a congressional hearing, it’s full of the members of the panel squabbling and talking over one another and sort of jerking the witness back and forth. 

And in this case, they were extremely coordinated because of that bipartisan agreement and were able to kind of walk through a very, very clear, direct story. And I do think that that made a huge difference in terms of how they were able to communicate the findings. The story of the committee’s success I think is both that they were able to uncover really astonishing new information and that they were able to present it in an accessible way that people actually were interested in watching. 

In the use of these clips, I think the first one is [former U.S. Attorney General] Bill Barr talking about “BS” that the president is being fed. What was the power of that, of having video from these interviews and from these depositions?

The decision to videotape these depositions and to show the video was really crucial, because it meant that you don’t have that additional level of remove of Liz Cheney telling you, “Bill Barr told us that X.” You have Bill Barr right there, sort of unscripted, and when he talks about Trump in those clips, you can see just like the deep contempt that he is feeling. That emotion really comes through. 

Other witnesses, when you hear them testify, you can tell that they’re emotional in other ways, and it kind of breaks up the hearing, so it’s not just the congressmen, talking heads, but that you have the people who are actually engaged in that testimony on the screen.

There’s another example that’s really striking, where the committee just showed a video of John Eastman just taking the Fifth repeatedly, over and over and over again. And I think it’s one thing to tell people, “We interviewed John Eastman, and he took the Fifth for however long he took the Fifth for,” and it’s another to actually show him doing it. I think it really, really brings the story home in a different way.

Liz Cheney, she lays out, in that first hearing, which is sort of laying out what they’re going to be reviewing in the hearings, she lays out what she calls a “multi-part”—seven-part, but a multi-part plan on the part of the president of basically a conspiracy. … When we’re watching that, how similar is what she’s describing to what the Justice Department is going to indict the former president for?

The story that the committee tells and the story that the indictment tells about the sort of arc of Trump’s effort to overturn the election is very, very similar. I don’t know if it tracks identically, but this idea that the story kind of begins on election night with Trump’s disbelief and being told by Rudy Giuliani that they’re going to fight this, that it moves from there toward litigation, that it moves from there toward pressuring state legislatures in a variety of different ways, then to putting together the slates of fraudulent electors, then to pressuring Vice President Pence, and then ultimately to threatening violence, that I think is really key as part of the story, and you see that in the indictment and the committee both. And so in that respect, I think there’s a real parallel. If you read the indictment alongside the committee report, there’s really a similar sort of narrative arc in both.

And if you listened to Liz Cheney that day, you would have had a sense of where this was headed.

I think that’s right. And at the time, it was—when the committee had those hearings, it was really not clear where the Justice Department’s investigation was. So the department had at that point been investigating this for a while. They had arrested hundreds and hundreds of rioters. But it was very, very opaque whether and how they were still investigating the former president and sort of those people at kind of the higher echelon of organizing Jan. 6. 

There’s some reporting that the committee’s investigation may have kind of given the department a bit of a kick in the pants, so to speak, that it may have unveiled information that the department wasn’t aware of and sort of made them move a little more aggressively. We, of course, we don’t know if that’s true. It seems possible that it is. But ultimately, I think I was really struck reading the indictment by just how similar they are. 

And that is really telling also, because the special counsel’s office has tools that aren’t available to Congress. They have grand jury subpoenas. They can sort of force people to sit down with them in a way that Congress simply can’t. And so the fact that the story told by the special counsel, in broad strokes, is basically the same story as the January 6 Committee told a year earlier I think is really a triumph for the committee and shows that they were able to get almost all of the story on the record.

As you say, the story for both of them starts on election night, with an allegedly intoxicated Rudy Giuliani and the campaign staff there. Why does it begin there? Why does the committee believe that’s the beginning of a conspiracy? Why does the special counsel believe that? 

Election night is key, because it’s this moment where things could have gone differently. The way that the committee tells it, Trump is there; he has his campaign lawyers; he has Rudy Giuliani. It becomes clear that he’s not going to win. And the professionals on his campaign staff are telling him, “We can’t claim victory. Either you lost, or we have to at least wait and see what’s going to happen. But this is not going your way.” And Trump makes a choice that he wants to listen instead to Rudy Giuliani, who is saying, “No, you won. Let’s go out there. Let’s fight this.” 

I do think that the committee kind of played Giuliani’s alleged intoxication for laughs, but I actually think that there’s an element there that is potentially important, and it’s been reported that the special counsel is actually looking into this as well, which is that if Giuliani was obviously inebriated, he may not have been capable of giving good legal advice, and so to the extent that Trump is going to try to argue in court, “I was just doing what my lawyer told me,” that’s not quite it, because he’s choosing to listen to the lawyer who is obviously not sober as opposed to the many, many, many people, including lawyers on his campaign staff, who are saying, “We can’t do this. We have to go a different way.” And so I think it kind of frames the choice and the intention on Trump’s part really clearly.

That does seem to be what a lot of this is about, is like, what was his intention? And one of the things that the committee writes, is they say, “The president had been planning to do this long before the election.” And they point to evidence is that he knew that it would be how Election Day would play out. What is the case that they’re making about before the election. and why does it matter to this story? 

Key to the story of Jan. 6 is Covid and the fact that the 2020 election was administered in a very different way than previous elections, because an enormous amount of people voted by mail due to restrictions around the pandemic. And right away, when it becomes clear that that’s what’s going to happen in the spring or early summer of 2020, Trump starts going out there tweeting about how mail-in ballots are unsecure and there’s going to be election fraud and really leaning into this idea that this is not a safe way to run elections. 

So he’s kind of seeding that concept that this election may not be fair in the minds of his supporters, very, very early on, before he even knows if he’s going to win or not. And so I think that’s crucial insofar as it suggests that when he goes out there on election night and says, “Frankly, we did win this election,” and talks about fraud, that’s not a spur-of-the-moment decision. This is something that he’s built up and kind of laid the intellectual groundwork over a long period of time perhaps in case he needed to use it.

… The committee also has this audio recording of Steve Bannon before the election. They’ve got a videotape of Roger Stone. What are they using the moments like that for?

Stone’s tape from before the election?

Yeah. They’re saying what he’s going to do.

Right. I think by showing this tape of Bannon saying Trump is going to contest the election and these tapes of Stone also sort of putting forward ideas, it’s all using that to build toward this concept that this was a plan. This was not spontaneous; this was not something that just happened. This was something where the groundwork was laid. Multiple people knew that it was going to happen, that they were working with some degree or other of coordination. … It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision; it wasn’t something where Trump didn’t know what he was doing. It was something where a group of people—we don’t know how large that group was—were putting in place the arguments and the mechanics to contest the election certainly through legal means and eventually by force.

By Nov. 7, the networks called the election. That’s the day of the famous Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, which we laughed about, right, at the time.

Yeah.

But as it’s been investigated, as the committee has investigated it and as DOJ has investigated it, do we see it in a different context, those early claims? That was a time when not a lot of people were repeating these claims, even on Fox News. Do we see it in a different way after this investigation, these early moments?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I will say, I still laugh at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The weird thing about those early moments—the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference; there’s the press conference later in Novartis, where Giuliani is standing there, and the hair dye is running down the side of his face—they are absurd. There’s this sort of slapstick, almost Dada quality to them, and yet at the same time, they’re extraordinarily dangerous. And I think that’s kind of like the double vision of this whole period of time, that it’s both slapstick and incredibly dangerous at the same time, and that slapstick maybe adds to the danger insofar as early on, it was kind of hard to believe that it could ever amount to something quite as awful as Jan. 6, because it was just so cartoonishly incompetent. 

Also in that early period, when there’s some reporting that maybe the president thought that he lost, where Fox News is not onboard, where these other allies aren’t there, and I guess it creates a legal question for Trump of what his intent is at a moment like that, where he’s not seeing much except Rudy Giuliani saying that it’s corrupted. And now things are very different than then, obviously. But what does it say about Trump at that moment?

Trump is able to kind of create the reality around himself that he wants, in a way, by just repeating over and over again, “The election was stolen.” And I think that’s what the committee showed really powerfully, is that this isn’t a situation where he has an enormous amount of people standing around him, saying, “The election was stolen.” It’s the opposite. It’s that he’s surrounded by people at every moment saying, “You lost. This election was not stolen; it was a free and fair election. You need to stop this. We need to have a peaceful transition.” And at every moment, he decides to listen to the one or two people who in some instances, according to the committee and the indictment, he acknowledges are making arguments that are really out there. 

And he is the one who is sort of really forcing people to make this claim that the election was stolen. So eventually you do see Fox News kind of adapt to that reality. But we now know, thanks to documents that have been revealed over the course of Dominion’s litigation against Fox for defamation, that they did that because they were getting pushback from their viewers who believed the election was stolen because Trump said that it was. 

He’s able to kind of force this reality almost into being just by repeating it and making it happen. But it’s something that he makes happen rather than something that organically develops around him. 

That’s interesting, because in that criminal trial, it’s like, was he convinced, or was he the one convincing? And you’re saying that the evidence is that he was the one doing the convincing.

That’s definitely how the indictment and how [the] committee’s report read. … This is not someone who was bamboozled by the people around him. This is somebody who chose to take this view even when everyone around him was saying, “This is wrong,” and who chose to listen to voices that he admitted, in some instances, were crazy. 

And when the indictment comes out, and they point to a moment that is the beginning of the conspiracy, and they say, “Here’s a date; it begins on Nov. 14,” it’s a moment he has to choose between what’s called “Team Normal” and Rudy Giuliani. Why is that central to the indictment? What’s the choice that he’s making? Why does the U.S. government say that that was the beginning of a criminal conspiracy?

. . . In explicitly sort of formally selecting Giuliani as the person who’s going to lead this effort, Trump is very clearly saying, “I am picking this person who is arguing the election was stolen over the voices of everyone else, over my campaign, over all of my other advisers.” And that is kind of the thing that sets him on this path toward all kinds of litigation, towards strong-arming members of state legislatures. There’s material in the indictment and in the committee report about Rudy reaching out to Rusty Bowers, who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, and essentially saying, “We don’t have evidence of fraud, but believe me, there was fraud,” and Bowers, of course, testified before the committee that he wasn’t willing to take action on that basis. 

But that’s sort of first step as the special counsel’s office sees it, this sort of decision to have Rudy lead this effort to have state legislatures appoint pro-Trump electors rather than pro-Biden electors, even though, in these key swing states, the popular vote went for Joe Biden. 

And when you read it, how central is Giuliani to this alleged conspiracy?

Giuliani is listed as co-conspirator number one, or rather, his name is not explicitly in the indictment, but if you read it, it is very easy to figure out who co-conspirator number one is, because the things that he did and said were reported on publicly at the time, and they’re described in the January 6 Committee report. So not only is he in this small group of co-conspirators; he’s number one. He’s central throughout this sort of early process of leaning on state legislators to appoint electors in defiance of the popular vote in that state. 

And so we don’t know if Giuliani might face federal charges. It is notable that he’s not listed as an unindicted co-conspirator, which is sometimes what indictments will do and which might suggest that the special counsel’s office is thinking about charges against him as well. But clearly when they set out this story, he is very much at the center of it.

… One person who apparently knew that this was, as he called it, “BS,” was the attorney general of the United States, who first speaks to the AP and then speaks to Donald Trump. Why is that story so important in this, in the report, in the indictment?

Bill Barr, as attorney general, had been someone who was willing to kind of be a hatchet man for Donald Trump. He came into the attorney general’s role; he was someone with a lot of sort of strong movement conservative credentials. A lot of people thought, finally we have a firm hand on the tiller. And right out of the gate he came in and sort of made a real hash of the Mueller report, and I would argue substantially misrepresented the findings of the report to the public, and did so in such a way that there was a gap in between when he disseminated his misrepresentation and when the public was aware of the findings of the report. 

He really backed Trump in that instance and was someone who was willing to sort of go to bat for Trump over the course of his time in that role as attorney general. He was a loyalist, and so for Barr to go out there and say to the AP and then to the president that these stories about election fraud are just false, that is a really striking break for him, that he had reached something that was too far; it was too much. I don’t know why it was that that was too much as opposed to lying about the Mueller report or, according to the House during the first impeachment regarding Ukraine, significantly holding up the process by which that investigation took place. But clearly there was something about this that just made Barr feel like it was—there was a line past which he didn’t want to go. And I think that is telling in terms of what it says about just how egregious Trump’s actions were in those days after the election that even Bill Barr wasn’t willing to go that far. 

For Trump to sit with the attorney general of the United States and have him say, “This is BS,” … [what does that mean] for Trump’s culpability? 

Right.  So Trump is told by Barr, to his face, there is nothing to these allegations. “We have looked into it, and there is nothing to them.” And you would think that if Trump were acting on a genuine belief that the election was stolen that having someone who has been very loyal to him come forward and say that to him might change his mind, especially because Bill Barr is somebody who has talked about his own belief in election fraud in the past. And so for Barr, who has these kinds of maybe preconceptions going in to say, “There’s just nothing here,” you would think that if Trump were a rational person, listening to that, that that might change his thinking. But it doesn’t. It has no effect whatsoever. And that, I think, is one of the really telling examples of people just trying to get through to him that he lost and him just refusing to listen.

Because here’s a man with the resources of the Department of Justice, the FBI, and says he’s investigated these things, but it doesn’t penetrate.

Even when Barr had made these announcements that the Justice Department was going to look into these allegations of fraud, there were a lot of critiques of that, saying, “This is inappropriate for the Department of Justice to take this step. It’s prejudicial. It’s going to make it look like there’s fraud when there wasn’t,” and even those investigations, which a lot of people in the Democratic Party were critical of from the beginning, even they didn’t turn up anything.  And I think what that kind of tells you is if they can’t find anything, and they seem to want to find something, it really just means that there’s nothing there. 

For the indictment, they’ve got Barr, but they don’t just have Barr. They lay out in the video and in the report President Trump was told this; he said this; he was told this; he said this. What does that evidence, if the prosecutor is using that, what does all of that evidence, taken together, say?

All the evidence that Trump was told repeatedly that he lost, that there wasn’t fraud, he needed to not go this route, is going to be very helpful for the prosecution insofar as it helps establish Trump’s state of mind, his intent; that this is not somebody who truly believed; that he really did lose. This is not somebody who believed that what he was doing was right, or even legal, at the end, but somebody who was told repeatedly not to take the steps that he was taking. 

So that’s going to be very helpful insofar as it shows that he had an opportunity again and again and again not to do these things, and yet he did them anyway. And so in making the argument that these weren’t just breaches of his oath of office or actions that were morally abhorrent but that they were part of a criminal conspiracy, that is crucial. 

. . . The other thing that the committee talks about is pressure on local officials and local states, and we might focus specifically on Rusty Bowers. What is it that they’re trying to get from somebody like Rusty Bowers, from these local officials, as they’re putting pressure on the states?

So initially what Trump and his allies are trying to do, as the January 6 Committee sets out and as the indictment sets out, is kind of trying to lean on and twist the arm of these local officials in order to get them to accept that there was fraud and therefore to ideally appoint electors who would vote for Trump rather than electors in line with the popular vote who would vote for Joe Biden. 

So in this conversation with Rusty Bowers, where Bowers is talking to Giuliani and Giuliani is trying to convince him that there was fraud, even though he says he can’t actually supply evidence of that fraud, so the goal here is to sort of tilt the Electoral College by essentially having the state legislatures overrule the popular vote. And crucial to this part of sort of the arc of what Trump is trying to do is meeting with state legislators. So, for example, the state legislators from Michigan came to the White House, I believe. There’s also a process of Giuliani and others testifying in front of state legislatures, so Pennsylvania, Georgia, for example, sort of trying to provide evidence of fraud, to try to convince these people that something nefarious really did happen. And ultimately of course, those efforts are unsuccessful. All of the state legislators ended up appointing electors who would vote for the person who had won the popular vote in those states.

… How important is the [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger phone call in all of this evidence?

The Raffensperger phone call is interesting because it comes out very quickly. It comes out quite quickly after Trump makes that call to Raffensperger, because Raffensperger himself was recording it. And so it appears in the committee report and in the indictment, but it’s not new per se. What it shows is, it makes very visceral how it is that Trump is leaning on these state and local officials to get them to do what he wants. You can hear him kind of pressure and wheedle Raffensperger into doing what he wants.

And the other thing about that call is that he’s not saying, “Oh, I know that there has been this terrible fraud, and we need to figure out who won.” He’s not sounding like somebody who wants to really know what happened. He’s framing it in very mercenary terms: “I just need you to find 11,000 votes.” That’s not somebody who’s saying, “Will you please do a recount?” That’s someone who’s saying, “This is exactly what I need from you.” 

And that, I think, really just makes clear the extent to which this is Trump trying to put pressure on state officials to get what he wants just because he wants it rather than because there’s a genuine belief on his part that he won.

The next conspiracy that gets laid out in the January 6 Committee report, and adopted in the indictment is this idea of fraudulent electors or fake electors or whatever we want to call them. What’s the simplest way to explain what they were attempting or what’s alleged that they were attempting?

… The story of the fake-electors scheme is complicated. It stems from the failure of the initial efforts to get state legislatures to appoint pro-Trump electors rather than pro-Biden electors. 

And so what happens is, once the state legislatures appoint the pro-Biden electors in accordance with the popular vote, there is this idea in the Trump camp which is set out in memos, written by a lawyer for the Trump team, Kenneth Chesebro, that what the Trump camp needs to do is they need to get their own sets of electors for these swing states in question to cast votes for Trump, the people who would have been selected had Trump won the popular vote in those states.

And initially in these memos by Chesebro, which the committee describes, which the indictment describes, which have been made public, the idea is, “We need to have these votes in because it will allow us to set up future legal challenges, just because of the mechanics of how the electoral process works.” It does not seem initially like they’re doing this as a way to sort of do anything that’s untoward. 

Then what you see and what the indictment and the January 6 Committee report set out is that this becomes this scheme by which the Trump camp decides they’re going to use those slates of fake electors to call into question the integrity of the real electors, the Biden electors; that they’re going to use that during the electoral count to allow members of Congress to say, “Hey, we have some questions here,” to disrupt the certification for Biden and to have Vice President Pence call that into question. And there are a variety of sort of mechanisms by which that could have happened, whether it’s just by Pence saying, “I’m going to choose to accept the pro-Trump slates of electors instead,” or whether it’s Pence saying, “It looks like there’s a real controversy here. Let’s toss it back to the state legislatures.” But it’s essentially, it becomes a sort of mechanism to create chaos, if not put Trump back as the president-elect. And that is sort of the place where it goes wrong in the indictment’s view, and where it becomes something that the special counsel charges as criminal conspiracy.

The indictment points to that one, what they call the fraudulent-elector memo, which I think is Dec. 6, that as being a turning point. Is that right?

That Dec. 6 memo from Chesebro is really important, and it’s actually something that the January 6 Committee did not find, or at least it was not reported on publicly in the committee’s report. And I believe there’s been reporting that the special counsel’s office was able to uncover it. And the January 6 Committee was not. So that’s new information there that we got from that indictment. 

That Dec. 6 memo is key because it is kind of this moment where we go from the fake electors as kind of maybe not so fake, more sort of a fail safe, just sort of allowing Trump to potentially make a future legal argument. It goes from that to something that is outright trying to disrupt the legitimate counting of the electoral vote. And that is the point where, from the special counsel’s point of view, that sets us down the turn that goes directly to Jan. 6, because that’s the point where you have Trump beginning to lean on Vice President Pence and say, “We need you to question the count. We need you to point to these pro-Trump electors and say these are the legitimate electors, or at the very least there is a question there.” 

So this plan that’s outlined in that memo really puts a target on Jan. 6. Is that the moment things start heading towards that as a key moment?

. . . That argument that the existence of these fake electors will allow the disruption of the electoral count on Jan. 6 is sort of the beginning of the creation of the intellectual scaffolding that leads us to that place. It’s sort of the thing that points everything in that direction. I think we’d arguably been heading toward Jan. 6 from the moment when Trump first decided to go out there and say that he’d won, but the Dec. 6 memo is very much the point where it sort of becomes explicit that the 6th specifically is the goal here, and to create trouble, whatever kind of trouble, on that date. 

If you were there where these electors were meeting, where the other electors were meeting, what would you have seen? What were they doing, these fraudulent electors?

It’s not very exciting. It’s not a secret ritual or anything like that. There’s descriptions of, for example, the Michigan fake electors are meeting in I think it’s a basement of some building. They’re there. I believe they signed their names to a document, and that’s kind of it. It’s not particularly significant. And a lot of the fake electors after the fact actually said—and the committee, I believe, included testimony from some of them or from people who had spoken to them—saying that they felt tricked, that they thought that they were basically doing this to provide the Trump campaign with future legal arguments. They did not understand that they were going to be used to disrupt the election in that way; that this, as far as they were concerned, this was more or less kind of the normal order of business. 

And so I think that the sort of mundane nature of what it was they were doing, even though it had some absurd aspects, such as in Michigan, the electors were supposed to meet in the State House, but of course they couldn’t because they weren’t meeting in a sanctioned way. There are sort of strange aspects to it, but in other ways, it’s sort of very ho-hum and mundane.

… There’s evidence that is presented that the January 6 Committee finds and has been reported elsewhere, that there’s moments where Trump says things like, “I don’t want people to know that we lost,” is something Cassidy Hutchinson says. Other people inside the White House say that there were moments where it seems like he admits that he lost. Why is that important? 

Throughout all of this, even though Trump is being told again and again and again, “You lost. You’re going to leave office,” he sort of seems to be holding to this insistence that he actually won and that there was fraud. And so the moments where the committee and the special counsel can kind of point to those cracks in the edifice, and these sort of moments where he seems to really admit what’s actually happening, are crucial. So one of them is when he tells Cassidy Hutchinson, allegedly, “It’s embarrassing that we lost. I don’t want people to know.” There’s another where he tells a Justice Department official, “Just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me.” There’s a moment described in the indictment where he says to a national security official who’s unnamed, after a briefing on an unidentified security issue, “Well, we don’t have to deal with this because it will be the next guy’s problem,” and that certainly seems to indicate that this was not something that he was planning on being around for come the end of January.

All of those are crucial, because that means that the special counsel was kind of able to point to them and say, “He did know what was happening. This was a plan to stay in power illegitimately because he knew that he did not win the election.” 

… It’s early in the morning of Dec. 19. He’s just had a crazy meeting, which I think has been described as “unhinged,” the night before. And he sends that tweet, which does seem to be a central piece of evidence. What’s the context for it, and why is the “Will be wild!” Jan. 6 tweet so important?

When Trump tweeted that, that “Be there Jan. 6. Will be wild!,” I think it was hard to know, as an onlooker, what he meant by that. Often he just tweets things or would tweet things off the cuff. And it was really difficult to know, was there a plan behind this? Was it just that he—the mood came to him? In this case, I think it was very unclear at the moment what the meaning and significance was.

But I think what the committee report really shows is that that tweet sets in motion a real kind of organizational force behind Trump supporters who begin to coordinate to gather in advance of Jan. 6; that there is sort of an understanding of “He is calling us here, to D.C., to the 6th.” People start reaching out to each other on Facebook groups. They start planning about how they’re going to get there. You see people who are making plans for cross-country road trips, bringing weapons with them in some cases, and that there’s a real difference in the energy before that tweet, where people are just kind of milling around, angry about what they believe is election fraud but not necessarily planning on doing anything about it, and then after that tweet, when people have kind of been given their marching orders in a sense, that it makes an enormous difference in kind of channeling that energy and disappointment at the election into action on a specific date.

The indictment says, “After cultivating widespread anger and resentment for weeks with his knowingly false claims, the defendant urged his supporters to travel to Washington.” How important is that question of what Trump—if Trump knew that what he was doing, that did he know that it was going to cause that kind of response?

If the special counsel can show that Trump knew that by sending this tweet, he was going to bring people to Washington for this rally, that allows them to sort of situate it as part of this larger project; that it wasn’t just something that was off the cuff; it wasn’t something that was spontaneous. It was something that, on some level, that he was planning and that he understood as the continuation of these other efforts that he had tried and that had failed, to turn the election upside down, and hold onto power. 

And I think that’s really important, because when Jan. 6 happened, on that day, it was deeply unclear to what extent this was spontaneous or not. And given that Trump sent this tweet, that it made such a difference, and that the special counsel is sort of situating it as this hinge, where things sort of really start to go wrong, that shows that this was part of a plan. And if they can convince the jury of that, that’s a huge portion of the ballgame.

The pressure on the Department of Justice, after Bill Barr has left and Jeffrey Rosen is the acting attorney general, Richard Donoghue the deputy attorney general, what is—and you mentioned this quote, because it’s a key one: “Just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” What is he trying to get from, in those phone calls, in those meetings, what is he trying to get from them?

 . . . What you see in these interactions between Trump and the Justice Department leadership in December is that Trump is trying to use the Justice Department as a tool to further his efforts to claim the election was stolen and to sow doubt, to put pressure on state legislatures, to look into this matter or create circumstances that would allow the Electoral College count to be thrown into disarray. 

And this is crucial, because if Trump can get the Justice Department to say there was voter fraud, the election is corrupt, if he can push them to do what Bill Barr wouldn’t do, then it’s not just Trump saying this; it’s the Department of Justice. That has a much greater force and potentially could convince people who might not otherwise have been convinced, because the Department of Justice is saying that this is the case. That is a very, very powerful tool that Trump is trying to put to use, and that he ultimately isn’t able to get the department to do. But he puts an extraordinary amount of pressure on the department’s leadership to try to get them to bend.

And yet again, a case where they’re saying, “Well, the reason I can’t do this is because I don’t see the evidence there.” He’s trying to override that in this case.

Right. In saying, “Just say it was corrupt,” it’s really making clear he doesn’t care about the evidence. That’s what is so sort of stark about that quote, is he doesn’t want the Justice Department to actually investigate. What he wants is for them to just use their power to declare it to be so. And then he says, “Leave the rest to me.” Once he has that in his pocket, he can kind of take it from there.

The audacity of Jeffrey Clark giving a draft letter. What does the letter say? What is that moment?

So Jeffrey Clark is an environmental lawyer. He’s an official at the Justice Department in charge of the Environmental Division, and somehow he gets involved in this scheme to use the Justice Department to push, to claim fraud and to sort of help turn the election in Trump’s favor. And what he does is he drafts this model letter to the state legislature of Georgia that says, falsely, that the Justice Department has investigated fraud and that it believes that there is fraud or there are irregularities in the state’s election, and therefore that the department agrees that, essentially, the legislature should take some kind of action in response. It’s sort of putting the seal of the Justice Department on all of these claims that Trump has made of fraud and election irregularities. 

That letter, of course, was never sent. Clark tried to push for it to be sent by sort of attempting to dethrone acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. But eventually Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, were able to put their feet down and convince Trump not to take that step of installing Clark as attorney general, essentially by saying that if he did that, they would resign, and a significant portion of the rest of the Justice Department would also resign and that it would be another Saturday Night Massacre, essentially, and they would do their best to send a signal to the American people that something was really, really wrong here.

But that threat that Clark apparently conveys, saying, “You’ll lose your job if you don’t sign this letter,” and some question about maybe they actually did for a little while—maybe Clark thought that he was going to be the next attorney general. Is that threat relevant to this case?

The threat on Clark’s part, I think, shows that Clark really believes that this is something that he’s going to get away with. I think there is evidence that the January 6 Committee shows that Clark’s title is changed, I believe, in the White House directory to “acting Attorney General Jeffrey Clark” for a very brief period. He thinks that this is something where he might actually be able to make it happen. What that shows, I think, is that Clark is not freelancing here, or to the extent that he is freelancing, he’s doing it with some sense that the White House is going to have his back; that this is a very real possibility. 

… The last pressure campaign on Pence—let me start by asking you, how important was it for the January 6 Committee to get access to John Eastman’s email, to his memos, in that court case?

The Eastman memos and documents are a real treasure trove of information, and the committee is able to access them because a judge found that, even if that material was protected by attorney-client privilege, there was sufficient evidence that Trump and Eastman may have committed a crime such that the committee could pierce that privilege and access that information, which is, I think was sort of the first moment that it became clear that an entity in the legal system thought that the actions around Jan. 6 from the top might really have constituted criminal conduct. 

That sounds like a really big moment when he makes that ruling. It’s even one thing for the committee of Congress to send a referral, but for a federal judge to make a finding like that seems like a pretty serious thing.

It’s a serious finding. Attorney-client privilege is not pierced lightly. And you see the committee is clearly very pleased with that ruling, because they cite it again and again and again through their hearings and in the report. I think there’s something a little bit ironic about that in that Congress is pointing to another branch of government’s decision to say, “Look, this was really bad.” But it is certainly useful to them that they’re able to kind of draw on that.

And what does it reveal? What do the Eastman memos reveal, and why are they so damning?

What the Eastman documents show is that Eastman is sort of working for/with Trump—it’s not totally clear what his relationship is, I think—to help put together these different arguments about how Pence should handle the electoral count on Jan. 6. And what’s crucial is that his argument changes over time. This is not a case where he’s making the same argument from point A to point B. There are points where he will make one argument about how it is that Pence has this set of powers under the Constitution, and then he’ll change his argument and say—that he’s kind of backtracking on what he said before.

I think what’s really telling about it is you can kind of see how his legal reasoning shifts to whatever is most convenient for him at the time. And you see this as well in the information that the committee has about how he acted in Oval Office meetings with Trump and with Pence, where he sort of starts giving advice that is perhaps mutually conflicting, that contradicts what he said the day before, but the thrust of it is always that Pence has the power to interfere with the electoral count to Trump’s advantage. And I think what that shows is that it just—it looks like motivated reasoning. It looks like he’s decided that he wants Pence to be able to have this power, and he’s working backward from there, even if the specifics of his reasoning are changing from day to day.

. . . What is he doing? Is he trying to keep it out of the courts? Because there’s this question of whether he thinks the Supreme Court would rule for them. Help me understand that.

. . . I think what you see in Eastman’s strategy is that he’s kind of trying to create facts on the ground, so to speak. He’s put together a variety of legal arguments that he thinks will allow Pence to sort of disrupt the electoral count, either throw the vote to Trump or throw it back to state legislatures and throw things into enough disarray that Trump will have the advantage, rather than going through a more orderly legal process and sort of resolving these legal questions to the extent that there really are questions. I think that’s another way that we see what may be kind of motivated reasoning, like he’s just trying to get this done and sort of come in, and with a bit of a shock-and-awe campaign, as quickly as he can. 

And for lawyers, for people who have looked at it, does he have a basis for the opinions he has?

Yeah. The extent to which there is any real basis in law for Eastman’s arguments I think is disputed. Certainly the fact that his argument changes from day to day and that at certain points he is advocating for things that he had previously said were not permissible, I think is telling. There is a very striking email exchange with Greg Jacob, who is Pence’s chief counsel, during Jan. 6 itself, where he says to Jacob something along the lines of, “I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation of the Electoral Count Act,” which certainly suggests that maybe his advice may not be entirely in good faith if he’s asking for the Electoral Count Act to be violated, and he acknowledges that.

Eastman is facing charges before the California state bar, ethics charges, and the bar has announced that it is seeking his disbarment in part on the grounds that he was making legal arguments that were utterly frivolous, that were not truly based in the law. Whether or not Eastman will be able to hold onto his bar license depends on whether he’s able to convince a judge that his arguments were merited, or at the very least that he believed that they were. 

And for Donald Trump, these interactions with Mike Pence, there’s accounts that he says to him, “You’re too honest.” There’s a meeting with Pence and Eastman and Trump, where they’re sort of arguing back and forth about, “There isn’t fraud”; “This isn’t legal.” What did those accounts of Trump’s interactions with Pence add to the story, to the allegations against the president?

There are these really dramatic accounts of these meetings with Pence and Trump, where Pence is sort of berated by Trump, who’s trying to sort of browbeat him into throwing the electoral vote for him, and it makes it very clear that this was a pressure campaign, that Trump was really just trying to force Pence into a position where he had to do this, even though Pence did not believe that he had that authority or that doing this would be justified. 

And it’s only after those arguments and conversations, when it becomes clear that Pence is not going to take this step, that it seems like Trump moves toward essentially threatening him with physical violence on the day of Jan. 6 itself.

So let’s go to Jan. 6, because you mentioned a little bit about this before, like the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony.  What’s important to understand about the president’s mental state, about what he knew he was doing? What does the evidence suggest?

On the day of Jan. 6, as someone who was watching what was taking place, I will say it was very unclear to me how much Trump knew and when. There is this moment in his speech on the Ellipse where he says, “Let’s all walk down to the Capitol.” It wasn’t clear whether that was just a spur-of-the-moment suggestion. He obviously can be spontaneous in his remarks before crowds. Likewise, after he went back to the White House, I remember thinking, oh, he’s not going to the Capitol; he’s going back to the White House. I guess that that was spur of the moment. 

Now, from Cassidy Hutchinson, we’ve learned that that remark about going to the Capitol, it seems, was planned and that he did try to get the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol after his speech on the Ellipse was done. We also learned from Hutchinson and others that when he was sitting in the White House during the attack on the Capitol itself, it wasn’t that he didn’t know what was going on. He was watching the events unfold on television from the White House and was, it seems like, surrounded by people begging him to send out tweets telling the rioters to call it off, to go home, and instead he went in the opposite direction. He essentially egged them on against Mike Pence. 

And so this, too, I think, really adds to our understanding of Trump’s intent here. It makes it seem like this was not spontaneous; it was planned, and that as he watched it unfold, he intentionally threw gasoline on the flames and used the presence of the rioters inside the Capitol as a way to threaten Pence with physical violence. There is a testimony about someone saying to Trump that Pence is in danger, and Trump responding by saying, “Well, he deserves it.” 

And Cassidy Hutchinson’s role? Some people have told us it was a real turning point in the hearings, and maybe in the indictment, in showing this. How crucial was her [testimony] in that moment, when she comes out before the committee?

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was, I think, a really striking moment for a couple reasons. One is that it was a surprise. We didn’t know what was going to happen. There was just an announcement that the committee was suddenly convening a hearing, that there was a surprise witness. Nobody knew who it was going to be. And then when she came out, Hutchinson is somebody who really had visibility into the White House, because she was essentially the right hand of Mark Meadows, the chief of staff. And so her willingness to go out there and talk about what she saw that day as someone who was glued to Mark Meadows’ side, who was in the room with Donald Trump while all of this was happening, I think was really, really crucial in kind of getting to the inner circle of Trump and getting a better sense of specifically what he was saying and doing that morning on the Ellipse and immediately afterward and then in the afternoon, as the attack unfolded.

And now that you have her testimony saying he knew that there were weapons in the crowd, that he knew, from others too, about the anger in the crowd, from the others that there was preexisting plan to go to the Capitol. Now when you go back and you look at that speech from President Trump, an hour-and-10-minute speech, what do you see? What do prosecutors? What does the committee see in that speech?

If you watch that speech just thinking this is a person who’s talking off the cuff, it looks like someone who’s angry, who’s blowing off steam maybe, but it’s not obvious that he’s planning something. If you go back and watch it with Hutchinson’s testimony in mind, I think you can really see how he’s using those remarks to rile up the crowd, to make them angry, to specifically target Mike Pence. We had testimony in front of the committee that there was an addition made to Trump’s remarks specifically about Mike Pence that was added in, so that was not off the cuff. That was intentional. And then he directs them toward the Capitol. 

And we know from Hutchinson and from others that that direction to the Capitol was also intentional. So it looks like someone sort of winding up a crowd that he knows to be violent, pointing them at one specific individual, Mike Pence, and then directing them where to go. And in context, I think that is extremely damning.

You’re right to mention Mike Pence too, because that’s the other thing, is that he’s been told by Pence that Pence is not going to go along with his plan. How does that fit into that, to sending the crowd down to the Capitol?

What we see in these conversations between Trump and Pence in the White House is Trump trying to sort of berate and browbeat and convince Pence to disrupt the electoral count. Ultimately that fails. Pence tells Trump he’s not going to do that. And then what we see on Jan. 6 itself is Trump essentially directing a violent mob to Pence to threaten him into doing what he wants; that this is his last-ditch attempt to get Pence to do what he wants, not by convincing him of the merits of his legal arguments but by threatening his life.

He’s not specifically indicted for inciting the crowd or for not sending in the military. But the committee makes a big deal, and it’s mentioned in the indictment too, of what he does in what they call the 187 minutes. How is it relevant, what the president is doing in the White House during that 187 minutes?

The committee is able to put together a really striking minute-by-minute reproduction of what Trump is doing during this period when the Capitol is overrun and before anyone can really respond, other than the D.C. police and the Capitol Police. And what he’s doing is, he’s sitting in the White House, he is watching the riot on television, and he’s tweeting. And he’s tweeting in ways that, at least initially, rile up the crowd. He is not talking to national security officials. He is not on the phone with the Pentagon, getting them to deploy the National Guard. 

What you have is someone who is sort of falling down on the job in the sense that he’s not taking the actions that you would want the president to take when the Capitol would be attacked, and he’s also making it worse by encouraging the rioters in these tweets until his staffers are ultimately able to convince him, after the National Guard is already headed there, to go out into the Rose Garden and film this video and tell the rioters to go home. 

But he only takes that action after it’s clear that the whole thing is going to be over soon because the National Guard is on the way. He in no way takes any initiative to stop this catastrophe from happening, and in fact repeatedly holds efforts up to try to stop it by refusing, when the White House counsel begs him, to send out a message telling rioters to back off. 

And what you also see is at the Pentagon at this point, it’s just absolute chaos, because they need approval to send in the National Guard, and they can’t get it, so they don’t know what to do. And that delay is crucial, because it means that the Guard takes hours to show up, and so his silence there really actually matters a great deal in terms of allowing rioters to overrun the Capitol.

And for the special prosecutor for the case against him, what can they point to in that? If they’re not charging him with it, why did they mention it in the indictment?

… The indictment doesn’t explicitly charge Trump for his remarks on the Ellipse. I think that’s probably because the special counsel didn’t want to wade into the First Amendment issues that would be raised by charging incitement or insurrection, for example, but it does set out what Trump is doing during this period. And that I think is key, because this is kind of the capstone moment of what the special counsel alleges was a criminal conspiracy. 

One of the charges in this indictment is a conspiracy to obstruct Congress and obstruction of Congress, and that’s exactly what Trump is doing here. He’s wound up this machine that has now gone and attacked Congress, and he’s sitting there refusing to do anything to call it off. And so in that sense, this is really key to the story that the special counsel is telling, is that he has in his power the ability to take action to stop this, and he chooses, even though he’s begged by a number of people, not to. 

So at the end of the hearings, and we’ve been talking about a lot of it, maybe not all of the details, but a lot of it that’s laid out in those hearings, and they conclude after the midterms in December. They meet; they’re going to issue the report. They also have a referral to the Department of Justice. What are they doing? Are they putting it, pushing it over to the DOJ politically and legally? Just help me to understand that moment at that last hearing, what they’re doing.

The committee was always going to be time-limited. It really started its work with a ticking clock, because the party that is the president’s party typically, if they’re in control of the House, they lose it during the midterms, and so it was always likely, I think, that everyone on the committee knew that the committee was going to wink out of existence after the midterms.

And so, because of that, I think that really shaped how they were working, and it meant that they were working toward this moment of putting together this report and then kind of passing the baton to the Justice Department in a sense. I don’t think that the committee and the Justice Department are doing the same kind of thing. A congressional committee is a lot freer than a prosecutor in terms of its ability to speak to the public, to present all kinds of evidence in different ways, to share aspects of the story that a prosecutor might not be able to share because they’re bound by rules of grand jury secrecy, for example.

But that meant that the committee was able to really tell the story to the public. And then from there, all of this material goes to the Justice Department, which is able to kind of take this into the realm of criminal prosecution. It’s—of course we can’t know from the outside to what extent that final document was key to the special counsel’s investigation, but the extent to which the indictment kind of tracks the [House Jan. 6] Select Committee’s report I think is really telling and certainly suggests that the committee’s work had a significant role in shaping the special counsel’s thinking around the investigation. 

We started by talking about the stakes of the indictment and some of the challenges that the prosecutors are going to face in putting this. The other thing, though, is what’s outlined in the indictment, what’s outlined in the report, is a president who’s trying to override a legal system, a way of counting votes in an election. And here he is, charged in this indictment; it’s not the only one. He’s running for president. He’s making statements about the legal system. Help me just to understand this moment that we’re in of politics, of Trump’s approach to the law, of how all of this is colliding in this indictment and in this pending trial.

As we’ve moved toward the trial phase, as we’ve kind of seen motions from each side in pretrial phase of this prosecution, we have already begun to see how Trump’s mode of engagement is sort of clashing with the legal system. He has attacked the judge; he has attacked the prosecutor; he has gone after witnesses; he has been extraordinarily aggressive in his public statements. 

And I think there’s a real question about to what extent can the justice system handle that kind of opposition? Is it really set up to deal with a defendant who is willing to just burn it all down and then use that sort of opposition to the justice system as a selling point for his political campaign? And so if the first instance of the clash between Trump and the law was the indictment itself, and at some point, this will go to trial, presumably, I think where we’re seeing that clash play out sort of in miniature again and again and again [is] as Trump’s legal team battles with the special counsel’s office.

And so, in that sense, the next year or so, as these trials unfold, as Trump runs for the presidency again, are going to really put at the forefront a lot of those same tensions and dangers that came to the fore in 2020.