Temidayo Aganga-Williams served as senior investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Previously, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. He is now a partner at the law firm Selendy Gay Elsberg.

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. 11, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.

---

The moment that [former President] Donald Trump is indicted for his actions after the election leading up to Jan. 6: When you hear that news and you read that indictment, what are you thinking? What’s your reaction? 

I think I feel vindicated on behalf of the committee. I think from the get-go of our investigation, we saw our work as the first step in a process and not the end of the process. And we, as the vice chair noted from the very start of our investigation in our first hearing, the committee was always thinking about the potential of a criminal referral. That’s something that was in our minds: No conclusions made at the beginning of our investigation, but always with the idea that clearly criminal conduct had occurred when we started our investigation, and the idea was whether we would substantiate that it went all the way up to the former president.

But hearing the indictment news of former President Trump, I think it made me feel that our work was a success, that our referrals were based in fact and were supported by the evidence. So I think “vindication” is the term that comes to mind. 

When you read the indictment itself and you see how they’ve laid out the events that are there and you think back on the work you’ve done in the hearings and in the final report, do you see parallels in the indictment and in the report?

One hundred percent. When you read the indictment, the DOJ indictment, it’s very clear that the select committee laid the path down for the Department of Justice. I think it’s clear that the work that—the parts of investigation we focused on, namely, the fake electors scheme, for example, that those were also found to DOJ to be incredibly important avenues of worthy of investigation. And I think the indictment really tracks our work. It tracks our hearings. It really takes our presentation to the American people and puts it in front of a grand jury. And I think that’s the basis for the indictment. 

How important is it that this goes to trial? Some of the story has been told in public and in the hearings and in other places. What’s at stake in the trial itself? 

I think it’s incredibly important that the department sees this all the way through. I think part of the committee’s work has been that the principle that no one is above the law, including a president, that everyone must abide by the laws in this country, and I think it’s important the department pursues its investigation all the way through to a conviction. I think that is what will matter for historical purposes. I think it’s what’s going to matter to draw the line that this kind of behavior, this kind of conduct will not be accepted and will be punished.

So I think it’s incredibly important there is a trial and that the American people can see the evidence that’s not only geared towards—our hearings were really geared towards a broader-based investigation, right? It was not a criminal hearing we had. What the Department of Justice [is] going to have to do is dig even deeper and prove state of mind in a way that we didn’t have the burden to prove, necessarily. The Department of Justice is going to have to work on proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Again, a different standard than you have in congressional hearings. 

So I do think it’s important for both historical purposes and, frankly, to deal with the threat that is the former president. I think that that’s how you deal with threats in our country: You prosecute them, and then you take them out of commission, effectively. 

Let’s go back to the committee. How do you get involved in the committee? Why do you get involved? 

So I was, before I joined the committee, I was a federal prosecutor in New York, and one of my former supervisors, Soumya Dayananda, who was also a fellow senior investigative counsel, was already on the committee, and she reached out for me to ask whether I was interested. And it was a fast-moving process. I heard about the committee opening on a Wednesday; I spoke to my future boss on a Thursday; I interviewed that Monday, and Monday afternoon I told Department of Justice that I was resigning and going to move to D.C., effectively, to join the committee. 

It’s an interesting thing about the committee, as I’ve read about it, that there’s almost a dozen or more former federal prosecutors who were on the staff of the committee, which is apparently not a usual thing for a congressional committee. Why? Why were you there? Why were other former federal prosecutors involved? 

Well, federal prosecutors are trained in conducting large-scale, complex investigations, and that’s what everyone expected this investigation to be; that it would not be like a typical congressional investigation, where the objective was going to be more narrowly focused, perhaps on a legislative outcome. But here, there would be a large, sprawling set of facts; an extensive amount of actors to interview; a large amount of documents to subpoena and review. And that’s exactly what federal prosecutors do daily across the country in handling criminal cases. 

And frankly, this is unlike other congressional investigations where the criminal conduct in part happened on live television. So I think that the facts here were well suited for the skill sets of federal prosecutors, and I think the work in how this investigation was conducted proved that to be true. We conducted the investigation I think the way you would conduct a large-scale Department of Justice investigation, which often looks at building cases from the bottom up, talking through lower-level folks and building a case to your ultimate potential target, and that’s what we did here. I think that’s why it was so effective. 

As you said, a lot of the actions took place in public. There’s tweets; there’s a speech; there’s what happens on Jan. 6. There’s a lot of things that we were watching. Even some of the elector stuff people saw as they were happening. So what was the point of the committee? Why was the committee investigating things when it seemed like we’d seen so much of it already?

I think it’s one thing to know the general contours of what happened; it’s something different to really know the details of the who, what, where and when. I think that’s what we were there to do. For example, we saw publicly former President Trump’s statements regarding the election. Those were on television daily after the election through Jan. 6 but we didn’t see what was happening behind closed doors. We didn’t see what was happening in the White House. We didn’t have insight, for example, to what he was doing while the Capitol was being attacked. So I think the reason for our work was to really to dive into those details. 

I think, further, journalists had done an extensive amount of work before the committee began. But again, just the way journalism works, journalists use anonymous sources. Journalists don’t necessarily lay out their work product as far as the building blocks in a way that the American people can understand, again, the who, what, where and when aspects. 

I think that’s where we come in, is to really build those blocks so that people can judge the conduct of those involved in detail as opposed to kind of the broad brushes where you generally know what happened. 

One of the things that the criminal case is going to have to prove is intent. Someone we talked to said that one of the things that Jan. 6 committee did was revealing about the former president, President Trump’s mental state, about what he knew, when he knew it. Was that an explicit goal from the beginning, to figure out motive and what he knew?

So I think the goal from the beginning was always to understand, was to follow the facts. So the committee did not start with an end goal in mind. There was no meeting where we said, “This is how we have to get President Trump,” or, “This is who did what, or did—” or an objective in that sense. I think the investigators were committed to going where the facts led, and where the facts led was showing President Trump’s intent here to overturn the election in illegal ways, but there was no preconceived notion as to where that would go. 

The chair of the committee, [Rep.] Bennie Thompson, what kind of a leader is he inside the investigation? 

I think one thing he did was really provide the staff with the kind of moral compass. As he talked about his own political history, and even his own, at times, in one of his prior elections, where there was attempts to keep him from office. So I think what he helped do was to kind of put our work in historical moral context because the work was, I think for some of us, there were ways in which it was, incredibly, like another day at the office. A lot of us had dealt with cases that were life or death, where you had murders; you had violence; you had extensive white-collar fraud. So we had dealt with cases where there were incredibly high stakes. 

So I think, for at least for a lot of the federal prosecutors, there were ways in which this was another day, another investigation. But of course when you’re dealing with American democracy, there’s ways which it’s like no other day you’ve ever dealt with. And I think he was incredibly helpful in providing a moral context with which we could see our work and help us kind of guide how we were moving forward. 

And the vice chair, [Rep.] Liz Cheney, who, as we talk to people, seems to be really a central player in both being a Republican and the amount of work she is sort of in the details. What’s her role? Why is she there? How does she influence the committee? 

So I think to the extent that the chairman provided a moral compass, I think the vice chair would be seen as the kind of the daily drill sergeant. 

… I think the vice chair gave the committee some credibility on a larger scale that we otherwise would not have had. I think without the vice chair, the committee might have been more clearly seen as an endeavor of the Democratic Party. I think what the vice chair did, because of the history that her family name has in American politics, especially in the eyes of the left and, frankly, and the right, of the whole country, she gave us credibility. 

And I think on a day-to-day level, she really guided the work of the committee. Early on, part of the committee’s tension was deciding the scope of our investigation—whether this would be what we were calling at that time, a 9/11-style report or whether this would be something that was more focused and less concerned with telling the entire story from every possible angle, but more so focused on telling the story of what the former president did. And one of the ways that the vice chair, Liz Cheney, was so influential was to focus the committee on former President Trump, and that being the end goal, so unpacking his full culpability and telling that story above other stories. 

She was a pretty public figure before that. Was there anything about her that surprised you as you interacted with her or worked with her, just about who she was or how she operated? 

I think I had thought of her purely as a politician, but in the committee’s work, I got to see her as a lawyer, and I think that she is an impressive lawyer. She is an intelligent, thoughtful person, and she brought that to the committee. She was very much involved in the detail work of the committee. She was, I think, heavily involved in guiding us through a lot of difficult decision-making, and I think her fingerprints are over a lot of our work. 

 … And if we could have seen where you work and what it looked like, would it feel like we would imagine it from a movie, of a bullpen of people going through documents, finding something amazing? What was it like, just the work environment and the team?

So that’s exactly how we worked. We worked in an open-floor plan, bullpen-style situation. It really felt at times—I had a colleague who said it felt like all the Avengers coming together to work on the matter, because you had people who came from all over the country—from Florida, California; I came from New York—really people who left their families, dedicated an immense amount of time to this work, who were working really hand in hand together. 

So as you can imagine, it would be, somebody might find something, and everyone gathers around, and someone says, “You won’t believe what I found,” or, “You won’t believe what someone said in this deposition.” Or someone might be at a computer watching a deposition remotely and say, “Come over and listen to this; this is really interesting.” 

So it really was a collaborative team where I think people worked incredibly well together. And I think it’s important for people to know that it really was a bipartisan team. You had folks who were on the left, who were on the right, and you had folks who had never thought about politics prior to their involvement on the committee, which I think made the work more fulsome in its approach. 

…  A lot of people didn’t want to cooperate, either didn’t comply or took the Fifth. … What were the challenges that the committee faced in trying to uncover this? 

I think one of the biggest challenges is understanding the difference between the congressional powers of investigation versus, for example, the DOJ’s powers of investigation. I was on the committee, and before that I was a prosecutor, and I can tell you, as a federal prosecutor, your powers to investigate and compel are so much stronger, so when you hit people who are being obstructionist, who are claiming not to remember, who don’t want to turn over documents right away, you can move aggressively and quickly and enforce those in house, basically. The DOJ can enforce quite dramatically and really threaten even incarceration if people don’t comply.

Congress just doesn’t have that power. So I think that was one of our limitations that we saw constantly, and that, for us, to really push people—there were folks that came in, and we all believed they were not telling the truth, or that they were lying or misleading or holding something back in some way. And it just was not possible to pursue that any further. It just was what it was. 

And I think the other big limitation for a lot of us was the political component. Now, I’m not a politician; I’ve never worked in politics. So, like many of my colleagues, it was the first time that you had to deal with broader political considerations, at least indirectly impacting how we operated. And by that I meant, for example, is you have someone who may not be fully complying or someone who may not want to speak with you voluntarily, and the question becomes all right, do you issue a subpoena to that person? Well, there may be broader political considerations of how that impacts the investigation because—versus being a prosecutor, where that would not impact our considerations. You would issue your subpoenas, and you would move forward, versus with the committee, the politicians had to make those calls as well. 

Did you get a sense that people were protecting the former president as you were trying to get their cooperation? 

Yes, I think people were protecting the former president. I think people were protecting themselves. I think, also, people were trying to protect their own vision of where they saw themselves in the story of Jan. 6. Effectively, just about all of our witnesses were Republicans. And with every witness, to some degree, asking them about information they knew about either the attack or what could have led up and influenced the attack, to some level, it involves some self-analysis that they have to engage in, meaning, what culpability they had, right? For someone to have information that’s relevant to us, typically they were close enough involved in the kind of matrix of events that their own culpability was at issue. 

You also saw that. You could see the tension in some of the witnesses in deciding what to tell us and how to tell us, because often the questions became about what culpability they had. 

… Let’s go [to] the hearings themselves … especially the first prime-time hearing when everyone is waiting to see what the committee is going to say. Can you take me into the room in that moment, into what it’s like if we were there?

Yeah. So I will say, before the hearing started, a lot of our work felt pretty insulated from the outside world. Every day we came to work, we did our investigation, and I think most of us put our head down and got the job done. We weren’t thinking about the media. We weren’t thinking about all the broader questions. You had a job, and you were doing it. 

Getting to the hearings was the first time where we really almost had the doors blasted open to the public, and we could see them, and they could see us. And going through the first day, the energy was just palpable. You could feel in the air that something historic was happening. The Capitol was buzzing. People were trying to get passes to come in. You had sitting congressmen who couldn’t—who were being turned away. And it felt like something historic. 

And I think that was a day where a lot of us truly felt the weight of what we had been doing up until that point. Not that we hadn’t digested that we were engaged in something historic—I think we all had. But the hearings with the media focus, with the American public keyed in, it was the first time that everyone from our friends and our family to the American public at large got to see the work we’d been doing. And it was in some ways our first grade, the first time we would be judged about our work and not be in a vacuum. So it really was a memorable day for that reason. 

 … What does that mean, to have a television team as part of the hearing?

It means, if you think of a traditional congressional hearing where someone comes up there, a member goes and speaks for three and a half minutes, that may all be substantive, but for the average person who’s listening, that may come up as pretty boring. So you think, all right, 30 seconds in might be a good time to then have a video clip inserted. And you think about, OK, what is the perfect timing of that clip? What clip should we pick? You think about what kind of videos should be interplaying with what kind of voiceovers.

So they really helped us from a creative perspective to think about, what is good television? Because we have so much evidence that we’ve collected that they could help us kind of sift through that and tell us that this video, that’s going to be good; or this video, I don’t think that plays well; or this violence is too much; or this violence is effective. 

One example would be the decision to use Sen. [Josh] Hawley running and how to use that as a moment that would grab the nation’s attention. And that’s a kind of example of, when folks are thinking about how do you make interesting yet informative television, that’s the kind of thing that I think got the job done. 

In that first hearing, when the first clip comes up—I think it’s [former Attorney General] Bill Barr—comes up and it plays on the screen, what is the impact of that? Can you feel it in the room? 

Oh, you could feel everything in the room. And that was what was so special about being in the room is that you were getting the live feedback while sitting there. You would hear the gasps; you would hear the laughter; you would hear sometimes the tears. You could really feel everything in the room with each hearing, and I think that helped us– that helped show that we were on to something, that we were doing this correctly, because you could really feel what was happening with each piece of evidence that we were dropping. 

And I guess that Jan. 6 montage, to show it in the Capitol, must have been an emotional moment. 

Yeah. I think for a lot of us, the Capitol—every time you were in the Capitol drew out a lot of emotion for the entire team, because it really brought home the kind of work, the importance of the work that we were doing. 

I remember my first day on the committee, and I was walking to work from my apartment in D.C., and I saw the Capitol, walking to, and it was actually under some kind of construction, and even that made me tear up because of the work, thinking about the weight of the work that we were about to engage in and to see the Capitol there and to know what happened, I think for all of us, it really heightened the stakes and made us that much more focused. 

… Let’s talk about what the committee found it as it investigated this. And one place to start might be on election night, when the public sees the president come out and say, “Frankly, I did win. We did win this election,” and then the committee was looking at what was going on behind the scenes. What did you find about the backstory, or what was going on? 

… Let’s start first with the timing. I think the point of election night is showing that the efforts that lead up and happen on Jan. 6 start many months earlier. Frankly, they start even prior to election night. And I think understanding that the president and others were aware that on election night he was told by his advisers that it would be very unlikely that we would know the winner of the election on election night. It was well reported that there would be likely a red mirage, where Republicans will appear to be ahead, and Democrats, because of the variance in how folks were voting, would appear to be behind, but with voting-counting would come back. And President Trump was alerted by advisers that that would be the case, that this red mirage would take place. 

But I think the fact that he listened to, one, [his lawyer] Rudy Giuliani, for example, about declaring victory and also that we have Steve Bannon who on Oct. 31st had already had said that there would be a declaration of victory by former President Trump, even though he had not won, I think what it demonstrates is that the conspiracy to both undercut the American people’s belief in a fair election was all hatched quite early. It was not something that came around close to the attack, but there really was a political conspiracy that began from election night and even earlier, that the president knew that he would falsely claim victory in order to sow doubts about the election. 

So we watch the hearings, we see people, we see Jason Miller, we see [Bill] Stepien, and we see Ivanka [Trump] talking about their impressions of that night, of whether it was time to declare victory or not. How important was that to the committee to speak to those people? What is the evidence that comes from that we see in those video clips or in the quotes in the report from those people who are close to the campaign? 

I think it was incredibly important for the committee to speak with the Bill Stepiens and Ivanka Trump and Jason Miller, people that were in President Trump’s inner circle, because these are folks that he selected, and these are folks that he supposedly trusted and valued their judgment. And these were folks who were aligned with him, who had no reason to mislead the committee, otherwise state incorrect facts. And all those folks, none of them stood by the idea that the president should be declaring victory on election night, which shows you that really the decision-making process comes down to what President Trump wanted. It’s not that he was being advised by a whole slate of advisers to do something; it’s that he was the one in control. He was the one who made the determination that it would be advantageous for him to declare victory on election night. 

In fact, one of the memorable things that comes out of all this is that the person who is advising that is Rudy Giuliani, who’s allegedly intoxicated on that night. Does that fact matter that the committee brings that out, that that was the impression of some of the other people there that night?

I think it certainly matters about the assertions that Mayor Giuliani was drunk because what it does is it frames how President Trump was making his decisions and who he was relying on, because here, in both, before the election and throughout, after the election to Jan. 6, President Trump again and again has the choice of whose advice to follow. He has the choice of whether to go left or go right. And I think with election night, the fact that he’s going and aligning himself with Rudy Giuliani, who is, allegedly, visibly drunk, I think shows you the decision-making process of the former president and why it was so problematic.

… The final written report makes a pretty strong claim. “The president did something he planned to do long before election day. He lied,” is what the report says. So how do you know that? Where does that start? …

Well, I think you can see throughout the summer of 2020, the president was making public statements to undermine the public’s belief in a fair election. He had talked about the idea the election was going to be rigged. He had talked about the idea of not trusting mail-in ballots. And even within his own campaign, we spoke to individuals, such as his former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who had indicated to us that he believed that the president in the summer of 2020 had gotten the idea that he may lose and that he would have to basically start thinking about how to deal with that, how to deal with the potential coming loss because he had been showing bad poll numbers. So I think it’s clear that the campaign had conceived of a claim regarding fraud as being how to deal with a potential loss. 

And you see this not only with the former president; you see it with what his campaign was deciding on Election Day. We uncovered information that the campaign, with regard to its fundraising messages, had had certain fundraising messages approved and some not approved leading into election night. It did not have approval, we saw through Signal messages, that there was no approval for messages that he had won, but there was no approval for messages that he had lost. But what was approved is that the Democrats were trying to steal the election. 

I think even at the campaign level, staffers were in the posture of putting out this election fraud claim before anyone actually knew the result of election night, that it showed that the entire structure was prepared for that. 

Something like that statement from Brad Parscale, I imagine that must go to the president’s knowledge, to his intent, to the motivation for why he’s going to create fraud. Is that right? 

I think that’s right. I think the idea of why these statements matter is because if President Trump believes he’s going to win the election, he wouldn’t have the need to undercut the belief in the election system. If he fully is confident that he’s going to be voted president again, going to win reelection, why would he undercut belief in the validity of that result? It makes sense to preemptively undercut the validity because he thinks it’s going to go against him, and that shows his intent. 

Those videos you mentioned, there’s an audio recording I think of Steve Bannon. There’s a video of Roger Stone. I think there’s also [the] Tom Fitton email. How important, especially the audio and the video, since you’re presenting this as a multimedia presentation, how important was it to get a hold of those, and what did those reveal?

Well, I think they were incredibly important because I think that tells a compelling story to the viewer. You can get great evidence on paper; it’s not compelling visually. So I think video and audio, that’s really where you grab people’s attention. And it’s also incredibly important when someone like Steve Bannon, who has been known to be a close associate of the former president, someone who he has trusted, someone who was actively trying to get him reelected, and to have him express those words regarding the president falsely planning to claim victory, I think it’s quite telling. 

 … Why does the committee need to lay out that in such detail, the story that they call the “Big Lie”? 

I think why it matters so much is that underlying all of the discussions as to whether or not the former president did something illegal is understanding whether or not he had any basis for any of what he was saying. If the former president had reason to believe that something illegal had happened that impacted election results in any kind of good faith, then that provides at least some validity to what he was trying to do, even if he undertook it in problematic ways. 

So I think why we spent so much time establishing this Big Lie and the fact that the president and his allies were seeking to repeat the lie again and again, to effectively plant seeds in the minds of his base, but also the broader American public, that it was incredibly important that we undercut and show that that was all based on nothing, that from the Department of Justice, to his campaign, to White House officials, all these folks undertook extensive investigations and no one found evidence that … had a dispositive impact on election results. 

I think the reason why it’s so important to deconstruct the Big Lie is to show the American people that there was nothing there, that there was no there there. And I think that is incredibly important, because if there was nothing to the lie or to the claims to begin with, it shows that the former president this entire time was lying. He was engaged in defrauding American people, and he knew that’s what he was doing. 

In those first few days, there was either silence or even outright skepticism on places like Fox News about some of these claims of fraud. And I guess one of the questions is, when you look at that period, does Trump get swept up in an avalanche of allegations of fraud that he buys into, or is he driving the train? As you look at that period, what did you see in those first few days? What does the committee see?

Well, I think one thing we see is evidence that dispels the idea that the president was ever swept up. And I think that’s an idea that I think the committee—this is the baseline rejected, partly because we didn’t treat the president or presume the president to be an infant. We didn’t presume the president to be someone who was not able to digest information. He was, in fact, the president of the United States, someone who had access to as much information and resources as anyone in the world on any of these issues. 

And what we saw with the president is that he was getting proper advice from people within the normal chain of command. He spoke to, for example, the Department of Justice, and they investigated claims, and they came back and told him that there was no dispositive fraud. He spoke to his White House counsel about claims of fraud; again, did not find support for his claims. So the president was not getting advice from his trusted, handpicked advisers that was leading him towards fraud. He was the one who insisted on going back to claims of fraud, regardless of the evidence as it was presented to him from the folks that he had handpicked to be in government to provide him with this very advice. 

When we were watching things in real time, we see, let’s say, on Nov. 7, the networks call the election, and we see Rudy Giuliani having a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and as you know, it was sort of seen as a joke at the time and people laughed about it. But as the committee looks at what was going on behind the scenes or where a moment like that fit, was it a joke? Was it something to laugh about?

I think that from Election Day forward, I think all of those efforts, none of those should ever have been seen in a lighthearted way. And I think that there was a lot of leeway given by people in the president’s inner circle to allow him to engage with these crazy theories to whatever end, whether it was that he would tire himself out, whether it was that this would all resolve itself with the Electoral College. But I think there were many people around him who allowed him, or at least didn’t stand in his way of exploring some of these fantasy ideas. But those really laid the seeds for what ends up becoming this entire political coup, and eventually the attack, is because the president and his allies who stuck by him dug deeper and deeper looking for a path forward until they effectively found what they wanted. 

When we read the indictment, they have a specific moment they say that the conspiracy started. They said it was Nov. 14, and they have a specific decision which they say that it was, which was the choice that the president faced between what has been called “Team Normal” and Rudy Giuliani. Can you can you help me understand from your perspective, from the committee’s perspective, what that choice was that the president was faced with between these two parties?

I think when you’re talking Team Normal, you’re talking about folks you might say are so-called establishment, people who have official titles within the campaign, people who are officially on the White House payroll. These are folks who work in politics generally and are kind of thought to be the thoughtful establishment people. And I think the most charitable view of that side would be people who thought that the president had every right to challenge the election in the courts, the president had every right to test this election process in every way that the law provided, but that at some point, if you were to lose all those challenges and there were no openings, that they would be over.

You have Bill Stepien, who I believe told the president that after certain losses, he had maybe a 5% chance of success. That would be, I think, the Team Normal idea, that there was a world where this, if you didn’t have success, or things that just didn’t turn your way, this would have to end at some point. And I think the “Team Crazies,” the option they offered the president was creative thinking. They were the ones who were willing to go further than the law, further than court decisions, further than historical precedent. And I think that’s what they offered him, was the binary choice between did he want to follow the law and follow traditional processes, or did he want to go outside the law and do whatever it took. And he chose the latter. 

… And as your team is looking into it and looking into money and all of the other stuff that’s going on, do you see a consequence of this decision in how the campaign is operating and in what is going on? 

Well, I think what’s important on the money side is that the campaign, after the Election Day, immediately pivots to fundraising off of this false election claims. The campaign, as is well reported, ends up taking in $250 million after the election through Jan. 6. And the importance of the president pursuing these false election claims is that it basically provides a basis to continue to keep fundraising. 

You can only fundraise and get people to donate if they think that there’s something coming, if they think that the election could be overturned. If the president throws up his hands and says “It’s done,” people are not going to donate, and that’s what his campaign was aware of. 

So there is a kind of a byproduct of deciding to go down this false election claim route in that there is more financial gain for the president’s political operation, because they take those same lies they lean in on and they fundraise on them. They’re sending emails, sometimes 25 emails a day, on these exact same messages, and that’s how they end up raising hundreds of millions of dollars that, frankly, the campaign does not end up spending on challenging the election. 

And presumably those aren’t just raising money. They’re also spreading what you call the “Big Lie,” right? Are they actively spreading disinformation? 

One hundred percent. And I think the fundraising appeals were one of the kind of most prolific ways to spread the Big Lie, because those fundraising appeals got you into people’s email boxes, they got you into people’s text messages, and you could bombard them every day with this idea that the Democrats were trying to steal the election; that there was massive election fraud; that the president was a victim. And you also saw rhetoric in those emails that was frankly inflammatory, that was talking about the need to fight back, that was talking about a Trump army, things that really were violent at their core being pumped into his most committed supporters again and again and again, dozens of times a day. 

… The group that I think Bill Barr calls the “clown show”—Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, lawyers—how important are they to this story, and especially to this initial part of the story about the Big Lie? 

Jenna Ellis and Giuliani and Sidney Powell, yes, they’re lawyers, but I think a lot of the role that they play that made them so dangerous was not one that was really legal at its core. They’re not crafting these massively complex legal—these lawsuits and going all like. That’s not really what they’re doing. They’re really folks who are working at the president’s direction to help foster these criminal conspiracies, these fraudulent claims. I think that’s the danger they have. They basically happen to be lawyers, but I think what they really should be seen as is as co-conspirators. 

… Probably some of the most dramatic testimony is from Bill Barr. Is it a surprise that he sits down and does an interview or a deposition, that he cooperates with the committee? And how surprising is it when he finally does?

I would not say it’s surprising that Bill Barr cooperated because, frankly, our work was successful because a lot of people cooperated. On average, most people that we contacted I think spoke with us and provided documents with us and testified and helped our investigation succeed. So it’s not surprising. I don’t think Bill Barr is unique in that regard. Our investigation was built upon Republicans in the former president’s circle speaking with us and providing us with information. 

But I think it’s incredibly important that he spoke with the committee because he’s someone who was in the room, and anytime you can get someone who’s in the room, that really is just—it doesn’t get much better for moving an investigation forward. And frankly, he was important because of how frankly he spoke, how explicitly he spoke in his interview. And frankly, some of his colorful language I think made for good television. I think he was the one that said, if I’m not mistaken, that it was “bulls—,” all these claims. And I think that was effective for drawing the stark contrast that the president was somehow in good faith moving these allegations forward and showing that, as Bill Barr said, it was BS. 

Just to be really clear here, how important is it that it’s Bill Barr who is saying it in public to the AP [Associated Press], then saying it in private to the president, that this is BS, the attorney general of the United States? How important is that as an evidentiary point? 

It’s incredibly important because, one, of his role. You’re speaking at the leader of the Department of Justice. So the government agency that’s going to be in charge of investigating for potential violation of federal law, that’s the DOJ, and he’s the head of the DOJ who has the FBI at his disposal and a lot of other federal agencies, and he’s saying that these claims are not substantiated. 

I think it’s also important because of the public perception of who Bill Barr is. He’s someone who was seen as a close ally and supporter of President Trump. He’s someone for many people who saw his decisions as AG with the Mueller investigation as being, in a sense, defensive of President Trump. So he’s not someone who I think anyone a detractor could claim of somehow not being aligned with President Trump up until the post-election period. 

So I think he comes to the committee with a lot of credibility—that he’s a longtime Republican; that he’s a longtime now supporter of President Trump and defender and advocate for him. And for him to come in and draw that stark separation from him and the president I think was powerful. 

And it seems like, and it says something about the president’s state of mind, too, if he’s not listening or he’s not even seeming to engage in the facts from the attorney general of the United States.

For sure. I think that’s a critical component in all of this, is that Trump got advice about all of this from people who knew best. He was told from Bill Barr to [acting Attorney General] Jeff Rosen to [acting Deputy Attorney General] Rich Donoghue, people at the top of the government who had access to extensive resources, who engaged in the investigation that Trump requested, and he did not listen to them because he only wanted the answers that he wanted. 

One thing that’s in the report, it says the day after, he has a meeting with Bill Barr, and the day after he records a video. And I think this is actually the Dominion claim. He records a Facebook video where he’s repeating the claim that Barr had told him wasn’t true. For you, for federal prosecutors, why is something like that important?

It’s incredibly important because it shows intent. It shows that the president was acting with a kind of criminal intent. It was not a matter of mistake. This was not someone who really was confused as to what the facts were. It’s someone who knew the correct facts and chose to disregard them and instead adopt the lie. I think that’s incredibly damning for any judgment of President Trump. 

In that regard, one of the most powerful things that the committee does is this juxtaposition between what the president was told and what he says over and over, not just the Bill Barr example but a dozen examples of that. How did that come together, and why was it important to lay that out in sort of a quick fashion, those two elements?

Drawing the distinction between what the president was told and what he said was important because his defense—and it still is to this day, post-indictment—is the idea that he believes that there’s fraud, and that no matter what anyone tells him, that he believes that there’s fraud, and somehow that absolves him of any other evidence of the contrary. So I think showing that contrast was a way to remind everyone that we still live in reality, that the president was told certain things in the real world; he chose to disregard them. 

So I think trying to get people out of the mindset of treating President Trump like he’s something different, like he’s someone where the rules of logic don’t apply, where he can just believe whatever he wants and he perceives reality differently, but bringing him back to the real world, where he’s told certain things and he says something different. 

So politicians lie all of the time. We all assume that they lie all of the time. But in the federal indictments, it says, “The defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plans.” He’s being charged partly for lying. Why is that? Why does that fit into a federal indictment? 

Well, I think in any federal charge, you have to show that the person was acting with a criminal intent. It’s not that he’s being charged with a thought crime. He’s not being charged for just saying something or just even not just saying a lie, but he’s being charged with taking actions to perpetuate that lie and to take the actions to basically invalidate other lawful proceedings based on a lie. So I think it’s important to note that it’s more than a lie that the president is charged with now. It’s the actions he took that were based upon the lie that he was spreading.

As this is all going on, as the lie is spreading, as his supporters are getting angrier, we can see in the streets, we can see protests outside of voting places, we can see even by November there’s protests in Washington, D.C. Do you have a sense of a connection between the actions of Donald Trump or the knowledge of Donald Trump and this growing unrest in the country?

Well, I think for his supporters, they’re hearing from him every day that this election was stolen. And if you are an American who thinks that you went out and exercised your civic duty and voted for president and that was stolen from you, and not by just the system but was stolen by specific people—you have those fundraising emails that are saying that the Democrats are trying to steal the election—it’s frankly understandable that for those groups of people that anger is going to become an outlet. 

And I think that’s known to the campaign, and I think inflaming those people is a goal. We had … an RNC [Republican National Committee] staffer who talked to us about these fundraising emails being about throwing “red meat” to the base, and that was a term that he used. 

So I think everyone is cognizant that President Trump’s supporters are being riled up and are being inflamed by what he’s saying and the tone of the conversation regarding election that’s happening. And I think that’s on purpose. 

We’ll talk about what happens right before Jan. 6 later, but at this period, … November and in December, do you think he has a sense that these claims are connected to this unrest, this bubbling, what will grow into violence? 

I think he does know, and I think one of the best ways that you can draw those together, the potential for violence and this lie regarding the election, is to look at his Dec. 19 tweet. I think if you think about the lead-up on Dec. 18, where he has the meeting at the White House with the so-called crazies, as has been discussed, and they’re talking about these wild, different avenues, even potentially seizing voting machines, it’s after that meeting, in the middle of the night on Dec. 19, where he then tweets out for everyone, “Be there, will be wild!,” speaking about Jan. 6. And I think the language used there is consistent with someone who is signaling to his base that Jan. 6 is going to be a time for violence. I think that shows his knowledge that there is violence brewing.

And then you see it again in these fundraising messages that are being blasted out, where they are consistently talking to their base about the need to fight back, the need to have a last stand, the need to not let Democrats get away with this. So I do think there’s plenty of evidence that he’s aware. 

… So when it comes to state pressure, which is another chapter in this, it sounded like there’s two sort of things. One is pressure to not certify the election on local officials, and another is to convene the legislature. … In general terms, or to the extent that that you feel comfortable, what was the pressure? Why was that part of this “multi-part” plan or conspiracy?

Well, I think, one of the important things, our federal elections are really state-run. So I think one of the difficulties that President Trump and his allies had here is that in order to overturn the election results here, there wasn’t a centralized way to do that. You had to go to the states. You had to go to state electors and whatnot to basically, one, create the doubts about the elections, but to also, two, take the actions involved in getting a different election outcome. 

So I think that’s why you saw the focus on state and state actors here, because that’s where the elections were really going to be overturned if they were. 

We know about some of the things which are phone calls from Giuliani and from Trump. Was there other methods of pressure on the local officials from the RNC or others?

 … We saw in late November or early December, around there, there was an effort to put on TV ads in battleground states to pressure state legislators to act, to overturn the results ahead of the Electoral College. And the emails and documents and interviews that we undertook showed that President Trump was heavily involved in both reviewing the content of the TV ads, approving even the budgeting for those TV ads, and also evidence that he was the one who insisted that certain false claims remain in those TV ads.

So, for example, the TV ads included the so-called suitcase of ballots, suitcase full of ballots conspiracy, which is about the Fulton County ballots and all that happened there. And we uncovered emails that showed that the Trump campaign folks who were charged with vetting these, the substance of these proposed ads, raised issues with this claim not being able to be proved, that it was false. We had the head of research from the RNC, who was embedded with the campaign, raised issues. We had the deputy general counsel of the campaign raised issues. We interviewed Larry Weitzner, [CEO of] Jamestown Associates, who was the head TV guy about these same issues, and Jason Miller.

And one thing that our investigation demonstrated is that, as these ads went up the chain, that the president insisted that these claims remain in the TV ads. And these also ads were relevant for state pressure because they were often telling the viewers who to contact in order to take action. And these TV ads ran leading up to Dec. 14. Speaker [Newt] Gingrich actually was heavily involved and led that effort with the former president. And again, leading up to Jan. 6, we found documents that showed that President Trump and Mayor Giuliani wanted these same TV ads to go back on the air; again, pressuring state officials and targeting specific individuals in certain states, and again, putting forward these lies, yeah. 

Sometimes this effort is described as Keystone Cops, as bungled, but the way you’re describing it is pretty sophisticated. If you’re trying to reach a politician, you’re creating ads to get to their constituents. You’re calling them. Was it a more sophisticated operation than we would have realized?

I think it was certainly more sophisticated than the general public thought as it was happening. I know some people have viewed these efforts as quite bungled, especially when you think about the Four Seasons Landscaping and whatnot. And I think there’s a way in which there are some missteps that show a lack of polishness around some of the president and him and his allies. 

But I do think that it’s important to know that what the former president and allies were engaged in was not a mere thrown-together, kind of slapstick approach; that this was a thoughtful, pretty sophisticated, multifaceted effort to overturn an election, and it should be viewed through that kind of landscape that’s pretty serious. 

Just to go to the hearings for a minute, when you have somebody like Rusty Bowers, a Republican speaker from Arizona [House of Representatives], speak at the hearings, why is his testimony important? Why is it impactful? What’s the goal? 

I think the goal, one, is, like with a lot of our witnesses, it’s first having someone who can speak with authority and with credibility. It’s someone who’s there on the ground, who’s getting the pressure, but it’s someone who has no otherwise incentive to be dishonest in the testimony they were giving. And I think that’s why those witnesses like Rusty Bowers were powerful. If I’m not mistaken, I think Rusty Bowers still has indicated that he would support President Trump in a potential future bid. 

So I think what that shows you is that the committee was not cherry-picking people who were somehow aggrieved or otherwise had a bone to pick against the president, but was picking people who were coming forward because they were moved by doing the right thing, and that’s what motivated them. And I think that’s what made them powerful witnesses. 

And then he says that Rudy Giuliani tells him, “We’ve got lots of theories, but we just don’t have the evidence.” As you’re talking, as the committee is talking to people like him, what are accounts like that revealing.

Accounts like that, I think, are consistent across the committee’s investigation, which is that the former president and his allies were committed to the conclusion regardless of whether there were facts to support it. They were committed to arguing and claiming that there was fraud, and the question of whether there were facts or evidence was always secondary and frankly not even truly relevant. 

They were never held back by a lack of support. And even when the campaign found evidence that contradicted statements, the president would go out and say them. We deposed campaign individuals who had investigated the dead voters. The head of research, we deposed him and other individuals who looked into dead voters, and what we found is that the campaign knew that there was no support for the claims that Trump was making regarding dead voters, and that it went up the chain. They looked into it; they could not find this evidence of extensive voting by dead voters. But nonetheless, Trump went out and told again on Jan. 6 that there were thousands of dead people who voted.

So I think the importance of those statements, that they were theories in search of evidence basically, I think shows you how they conducted the entire post-election process. 

… One of the most impactful things in the hearing was not somebody who was even in touch with Donald Trump directly, Ruby Freeman talking about the impact and being targeted. Just tell me about for you, to see that, to hear her story, why was it important. What was the impact of that? 

Well, I’ll tell you, in that hearing, you could hear a pin drop. … There were tears in the hearing room as she was testifying. And I think what that hearing brought into focus was just how far Trump and Rudy Giuliani and others were willing to go and how they did not care about who stood in their way, and how they were willing to make everyday Americans victims of their criminal conduct.

I think both Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were, as poll workers, they were trying to do what should be an honorable job, what is an honorable job. They were doinga critical job that was important to supporting elections. They were doing the right thing, and they became victims of a political operation who was willing to throw them away and use them as pawns in order to push forward a lie. 

But I think that’s the value of their testimony, was to show—to bring into focus the real human impact of the Big Lie. 

And it seems like they’re not the only ones, right? Rusty Bowers talks about being tweeted at by Trump, and the militia shows up outside his house. [Georgia election official] Gabriel Sterling warns publicly in a press conference that the committee shows about violence: Somebody’s going to get shot; somebody’s going to get killed. In that period, is there a ramping up? Is it part of the pressure campaign, these threats? Is there culpability for these threats on the part of Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani?

Well, I think the broader culpability for both of them, I think, time will tell with the ongoing criminal cases how that culpability shakes out. But I think what is clear is that President Trump is very aware of the power of his words, and he’s very aware of how to signal to his supporters where he is on an issue and who he thinks his enemies are. 

I think that’s what we saw with people like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, is that when the president and his allies pull out the signal, that his followers listen and they take action. And I think Gabriel Sterling’s warning that someone could get killed, I think that still remains true today, because you still have the president targeting judges and law clerks and witnesses and people going to the grand jury. And I think it is remarkable that no one has been physically hurt, but I think time will tell whether something does happen.

As a prosecutor, former prosecutor and as a member of the committee, how important is the Raffensperger phone call, the fact that it’s recorded, what the president says in that phone call? 

That phone call is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that’s come out of this post-election period. I think what it clearly does is that it shows, one, how kind of frantic and desperate President Trump had become by that phone call. I think it shows how his demands were fully removed from any kind of evidence, right? He is demanding these votes be found but could not care less whether or not there’s evidence to support finding those votes. He’s basically like a mob boss, demanding that these votes be found. And even when there’s pushback, he refuses to listen.

And I think what it shows, again, is his state of mind. He’s focused on an outcome. He’s not focused on evidence. He doesn’t care about the evidence. He doesn’t care whether it’s a lie. He doesn’t care whether it’s fraudulent. He cares that he remains president, or at least certainly does not lose Georgia, which appeared to have some specific level of significance to him over other states. 

So I think that call is damning and I think it’s going to be damning potentially in front of a jury, because juries, when they can hear a defendant’s voice on tape, when they can hear something that is that real and that visceral, it can be incredibly powerful testimony, and I think prosecutors are certainly going to use that. 

But what is it that makes all of this a crime, this state pressure, this campaign? What is it that makes it part of your recommendation that the DOJ makes it part of the indictment? 

So I think one of the things about the state pressure is that, here, going back to the first point about the Big Lie, when the president is trying to have state government officials engage in criminal conduct, right, which is what is happening here. The former president who knows that there’s no fraud that’s dispositive is now asking … a state official to take official government action to obstruct what otherwise would be the rightful outcome, and that’s the issue here. 

It’s not merely getting on the phone and lying to someone, even though that’s a crime in and of itself. And in the Georgia case, that is relevant. But it’s that he’s trying to get people to take official actions. This is not the president getting punished for getting on Twitter and spouting off. It’s that he’s trying to get people to join in his criminal conduct. He’s basically trying to enlist government actors, and that’s where you cross the line.

One of the allegations that I think a lot of people have cited the committee with really drawing attention to is the fraudulent electors scheme, which even as we talk to people from the committee, say this is sort of hard to understand. … In the simplest terms, what is that plan, that conspiracy, that scheme involving the fraudulent electors? 

So the scheme, initially, in its most charitable view, would have said there are electors that are going to vote—that are selected for each candidate that will send their votes to the vice president to be counted, and if you win a state, that victor—if it’s, for example, Joe Biden—sends his electors to vote for him in the Electoral College. 

The Trump campaign initially starts by saying that if we were to win or overturn an election in a state, we would want the ability to have electors that could vote for the president. That never happened. The president was never able to overturn any states. The scheme here that’s problematic is that they sought to have people pretend to be duly elected electors and have those people send their votes in order to give Vice President [Mike] Pence a way to overturn the election unlawfully, so that Vice President Pence, who normally would have the ministerial duty of just counting these electoral votes, could then have a way to basically throw out certain votes or at least pause the proceedings, and that’s what becomes illegal about that, because they’re looking for a way, with the cooperation of Vice President Pence, to obstruct the counting of the votes and not certify Joe Biden’s win. And that’s where it becomes problematic. 

The indictment points to this memo, this Ken Chesebro memo of Dec. 6 that they call the “fraudulent elector memo.” How important is that? How surprising is it when the committee gets its hands on it? Does it feel like a smoking-gun type of document? 

I think it’s important because any document that gives insight into the inner workings of these conspiracies is always going to be helpful, and I think that’s what prosecutors want. Any prosecutor’s challenge is getting in between someone’s mind, into a defendant’s mind, into getting why they did something and what was their thinking. And I think that’s the value of having that memo and other communications surrounding the fake elector scheme, is you’re getting into the objectives and the thought processes, and I think that’s really important to proving up intent. 

And what does it prove when you can see what they’re saying?

I think what it proves is the transition from a purported preservation of rights for the electors, and it shows transition to something more deviant, something that is seeking to overturn the will of the voters that’s not based on any fraud. I think that’s also key in all of this, why the committee was so focused on the Big Lie.

In all these efforts to do the fake electors, the Chesebro memo, this entire scheme, there’s no underlying, proven fraud that justifies any of this. There’s no world where folks are trying to get these other electors in because they expect that this fraud is going to be finally shown to the world. They have seen no dispositive fraud. They have no evidence of it. None of it is there. 

So I think when you couple those together, that it’s all a Big Lie underpinning all of this, and then they’re putting together this scheme to get these voters in front of Vice President Pence, I think put those together, it shows criminal intent. 

And for a lawyer like Ken Chesebro to be orchestrating something like this, which as you’re describing is not legal, but he’s a lawyer. What is his role? What’s the role of lawyers in this situation? What are they trying to do? 

Well, I think lawyers should be in a position to advise their clients how to act in accordance with the law. But that same kind of wisdom or background can also be dangerous, which means lawyers can then often be the most creative thinkers of how to potentially undercut the law, challenge the law. And I think that’s what you see with Ken Chesebro here, is using those same legal skills in a creative way that’s not for good. 

So in this period, some of the testimony from someone like [White House aide] Cassidy Hutchinson says that there’s this suggestion that Trump knows that he lost, that he’s saying, “I don’t want people to know we lost,” talking to [White House Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows. Why would that matter in this, in the potential criminal trial and in the investigation that you did?

Because it shows exactly that he knows it’s a Big Lie, that he knows that everything he’s been engaged in was done with criminal intent. And by that I mean if President Trump knows he lost and he knows there’s no fraud, there’s no basis for him to have done the fake elector scheme; there’s no basis for him to keep challenging the election after going through all the lawsuits; there’s no basis for him to even be calling [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger or pressuring any other state official. 

So all these actions that he and his allies undertake, if he knows he lost the election, it is all done with bad intent. I think that’s why it’s so critical to establish that he knew he lost. 

You’ve already described the tweet “Will be wild on Jan. 6” and a little bit about the run-up to it. How important is that moment, though, as a turning point in what would happen, that tweet that he sends out early in the morning on Dec. 19?

Well, it’s critical because that’s what starts the entire chain of events that leads to a rally before the attack. Before the Dec. 19 tweet, there wasn’t a rally planned like [the one] that ended up coming about on the 6th. The eventual planners of the rally, in response to President Trump’s tweet, basically kick planning into gear. They go out, talk to the National Park Service. They get the permit for the 6th. There’s some internal disagreement as to who’s going to have the permit, but that gets settled.

And after that permit is obtained and they start planning on the 6th, they start fundraising for the 6th, the White House then comes in and basically takes over the planning and turns that [Jan. 6th] rally into effectively a formal White House event. But importantly, it’s that Dec. 19 tweet that really starts as the trigger for what happens in bringing together all these parties to create the rally that precedes the attack. So that tweet really does start it all. 

And that strange thing we were talking about, this fake elector scheme, is that integral to that tweet, to the Jan. 6 date?

Well, I think what’s interesting about the indictments is that the fake electors scheme is really separate from what happens as far as the rally and the 6th, right? And the “Be there, will be wild!,” which I think is really invoking a sense of some violence, that’s all separate. I think that’s what’s so interesting about the DOJ indictment, right? It’s not charging the president for any violence that happens on the day of. It’s not focused on the rally and what happened. It’s really focused on this political coup that happens preceding, but that “Be there, will be wild!,” I think that is a call to violence on the 6th, which I think is part of the reason why you have what happens on the 6th.

Yeah, but they’re all pointing—all of these things are pointing to Jan. 6. That’s when that would all come to fruition too, right, the fake elector scheme. 

Correct. And I think the campaign is aware that it’s the last stand. We had fundraising emails that went out on the day of the 6th that told his supporters that it was a historic day, that said language like it was the “last stand,” things really of that kind of that framing. So it was clear that everyone understood that Jan. 6 would be the last day for whatever could happen; that would be the last day. I think that’s why you have the panicked, aggressive phone calls from President Trump to Vice President Pence, because everyone understands that once that certification happens on the 6th, that it’s really over. 

So after Bill Barr leaves, the next chapter is DOJ pressure. Why is the story of DOJ, of the pressure on the acting attorney general, the deputy acting attorney general central to the report, to the indictment? 

I think it’s essential because it was another part of his multifaceted plan that Liz Cheney spoke about; that the president, President Trump, wanted the official stamp of approval of the Department of Justice on his election fraud claims. I think he understood that the power that the DOJ has in the mind of the American people, that if you get the DOJ to adopt his claims, to intervene, to use the power and the force of government, that that would be incredibly forceful and could be a turning point for him. I think that’s why he sought to use—to try to corrupt the DOJ, to bring them into his fold. 

In the testimony from them, from Rosen, from Donoghue, they’re saying, “We told the president it was a lie. He was saying, ‘Just say the election was corrupt, and leave the rest of me and the Republican congressmen.’” When the committee talks to them, what are they learning about the interaction of the president? What does that reveal? 

I think the conversations with Rich Donoghue actually—Rich Donoghue was my former boss when I was a prosecutor, so someone that I knew before the committee. And I think his, for example, his interactions with the former president demonstrate the president’s state of mind and that President Trump is so focused on pushing forward the Big Lie that he does not care what the truth is. And he’s being told by people who he handpicked that these claims are not true, which Donoghue and the DOJ investigated these claims, and they’re coming and telling the president that there simply is not fraud to support. 

So the fact that President Trump goes out to the American public and says that there is fraud and tries to return the election as if there’s fraud, it shows that he’s not working in good faith, that he knows the truth and is disregarding it. I think that’s going to be used against him.

 … How close did we come? There was a lot of attempts, and at the end of the day, Joe Biden was sworn in as president. But at a moment like this, when you look back on it, did we come close to that not happening? 

One of the things I take away from being on the committee was how incredibly close we came, I think, to the end of American democracy as we know it. So I think people should take comfort in that the institutions held up, but people should not take comfort in how close we came to them breaking apart. And that goes from the DOJ to state actors to the vice president, and that we shouldn’t have a system that requires specific individuals to hold strong against the pressure of a sitting president. And here it happened to work out, but I think that was, to some degree, luck. 

And especially on the day of, with the attack, I think that’s another example of how close we came to the end of American democracy as we know it through violence. And again, that was not by design, but I think by luck is it that we didn’t have senators and congressmen who were killed that day. 

So I feel hopeful that these institutions held up, but I would not have the same kind of trust that these institutions could take a beating again and again and continue to hold up. 

… The John Eastman memos, emails. How hard was it for the committee to get them? How important was it to pierce that confidentiality? 

Well, it’s incredibly important, because I think John Eastman is a critical actor here, someone who—we talked about the Cheseboro memo, but Eastman’s kind of serving as an architect for this attack on the vice president is incredibly important. 

So piercing that privilege and getting in between—and I think the litigation the committee engaged in to get Eastman’s emails was incredibly important, because again, getting in the room is how you understand a criminal conduct. Getting in someone’s mind, seeing their documents, seeing their thought process, that’s how you establish the elements of an defense a lot of times, and I think that’s what we did here.

[District] Judge [David] Carter rules that based on the evidence, it’s more likely than not that the president corruptly attempted to obstruct Congress. What did that ruling mean to the committee when you’d been working in secret during this period and not much public, but when that ruling came out?

The way I would describe it is some level of being emboldened. I think when that ruling came out, one of the—I don’t want to call it touchy, but one of the interesting developments as the committee did its work was, how do you talk about criminal conduct as the work developed? When the committee started, there was not—I think people were incredibly, rightfully, very sensitive about talking about criminal conduct because the facts were not there yet. But as the investigation continued and went down a variety of paths, more and more it became clear that there was evidence of criminal conduct.

And I think the committee and its members were more and more trying to get almost primed to the idea that the committee might eventually be making a criminal referral here, which of course would be historic of being a former president. And I think rulings like Judge Carter’s ruling I think helped not only, I think, prime the committee in a way, but primed the American public that this is where this investigation would be going. 

… What’s the plan that he’s laying out, and do the memos reveal any doubts about the legality of it? What is he outlining?

I think what’s important that even Eastman, in crafting this, trying to craft this plan with the vice president, of how the vice president can effectively assist in at least pausing the certification, otherwise sending it back to the states, is that even Eastman in his own documents, expresses a lack of belief in the validity of his own claims about whether this is truly something that’s legal and supported. And I think that helps establish for any prosecutor that if the person crafting it does not believe wholeheartedly that what they’re doing is legal and supportable, that’s going to help prove criminal conduct there. 

Yeah, the line that always stood out to me was, he writes in one of them. “We’re no longer playing by Queensbury rules.” This is a lawyer saying that at this point, maybe the rules don’t apply. 

Yeah. And I think that’s—John Eastman, I think, was very clearly willing to push his theories as far as they would go, regardless of whether or not he thought they were legal or whether or not precedent supported it. And I think if they could find a willing partner in the vice president, they would go all the way. And fortunately they did not. 

… In this story, as the committee is telling it on television, Eric Herschmann comes out as quite a character, at least for those of us watching. Who was he, and why did he stand out?

I think he stood out, one because he’s, as a White House lawyer, he was someone who was trying to bring some level of sanity to some of the insanity that was going on in the post-election period. And I think his colorful language expressed how crazy some of the theories were that John Eastman was pushing forward. And even [Justice Department official] Jeffrey Clark—when he’s telling Clark, “You’re going to need a good criminal defense lawyer,” I think it’s showing that folks who are of sensible mind are seeing the criminal conduct in real time and are saying that this is crazy, and people should not be doing this. 

He also [said something] in the indictment, something that comes from the committee. He says, I think to Eastman, “You’re going to cause riots in the streets,” and Eastman says something like, that sometimes that’s necessary, right; you need violence.  What does that reveal, this talk of violence just days before Jan. 6?

I think what it does further establish is that it was not a surprise to a lot of people that there could be violence on the day of the 6th, and I think that it shows that many people thought that if violence were to happen, that that would not be the worst outcome. And I think, sadly, the president’s actions during the attack further support that even President Trump did not think that violence occurring on the 6th was the worst outcome, that there were things that he wanted less than he wanted violence.

Some of the details of the interactions between Trump and Pence, he says at one point, “You’re too honest.” He’s pressuring him relentlessly over a period of days. What does that reveal about Donald Trump, the future defendant, as you’re investigating as a committee?

I think it shows his desperation as it becomes closer and closer to the 6th. There were a lot of ways that people could have assisted President Trump in overturning the election that had failed by that point, and the closer and closer he gets to the 6th, Vice President Pence becomes the critical last step, the one person who really—besides just raw violence at the Capitol, he’s the one person who can really kind of do something to stop this process, and I think that President Trump’s insistence in seeking to influence him shows how important he saw his actions to be. 

And for Pence, when he says, “I don’t see the fraud. I don’t believe that this is legal; I’ve talked to my lawyer,” and at some point he’s going back and forth with Eastman, trying to prove that Eastman doesn’t know. What does that do for the mental state or the criminal intent of the president?

Well, I think, one, it shows that the president is on notice that all of this is not aboveboard, right? I think that’s what’s clear, is that this entire process, everyone who is a government employee effectively has rejected President Trump’s overtures regarding the fraud, from the Department of Justice to state officials to Vice President Pence. Frankly even his own—his White House lawyers, Eric Herschmann, Alex Cannon, all these folks have said they don’t want any part of this. 

And I think it’s telling that, at this point, that the people who are standing by the president are all people who are outside of government, right? The Rudy Giuliani and the Sidney Powells and Ken Cheseboro and John Eastman are people who are outside. I think the fact that you have people who are pushing back, including the vice president, this idea of illegality is not at the—it’s at the forefront. People are thinking about it and are struggling with it and are pushing it into the president’s face and saying, “This is not legal,” and the fact that he pushes forward throughout this entire process shows you that he disregarded that because he was aware that it was illegal and didn’t care. 

As we get into Jan. 6, one of the big questions, of course, is what does the president know about what he’s doing, about what is his intent in what he’s doing? And one of the key players in that seems to be Cassidy Hutchinson, who has her own hearing. Tell me about that, about how she suddenly ends up with her own hearing and how important she was to the committee. 

Yeah. Cassidy Hutchinson was, I think, she was a special focus of Liz Cheney. I think Liz Cheney really took Cassidy kind of under her wing and took that hearing and took the development of those facts and those interviews really something that she kept close to her chest and was deeply, intimately involved in. And I think what Cassidy Hutchinson really gave was, again, bringing the American people into the room, but also into the room while the violence was happening, into the West Wing. 

And I think she showed a couple of things as well. One, she showed … how those allied with President Trump were seeking to obstruct our investigation. The fact that she initially had a lawyer that was paid for by the Trump political operation and who, according to her, basically told her to lie to the committee about information that she had, and until she got a new lawyer, that’s when she came and she told us the truth about what she understood. 

But I think her hearing was so powerful because of the juxtaposition of a young woman who has everything to lose, who has nothing to gain, but nonetheless coming out and telling her truth to the entire American population I think was a powerful visual that really, I think, helped our case. 

And what does it go to the—on the mental state question, on the criminal intent question, when she talks about he was told that there were weapons in the crowd, he wants to move the magnetometers, that he wants to physically go to the Capitol, that that wasn’t just something that just happened, what does her testimony reveal on his state of mind?

I think her testimony reveals that the president was aware that violence was likely that day, that the president wanted people to go to the Capitol, where they had no reason to be besides to pressure sitting members of Congress during an official proceeding. And her testimony, especially as it goes to the time between when the attack began and when President Trump first told the insurrectionists to go home, it shows his state of mind effectively being one of approval of the violence.

And I think that’s where she was really critical, because you have 187 minutes from when Trump gets off the stage to when he tells folks, I think at 4:17 p.m., to go home. And throughout that time, while there’s hand-to-hand combat at the Capitol, when members are in hiding and running for their lives, President Trump is refusing to tell the rioters to go home. He’s refusing to call them off. He’s refusing to intervene to save the life of Vice President Pence and other members of Congress.

And I think Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, which was verified and supported in other ways, shows that the president’s state of mind being effectively in support of the violence, permitting it to go forward, and that’s, I think, quite damning. 

The committee goes to great lengths to prove that the march to the Capitol was not just impulsive. One of the things is a draft tweet that it finds about march to the Capitol after his speech. Why is that important? Why is a piece of evidence like that draft tweet important? 

Well, I think, one, there were a lot of suggestions in the general public that what happened at the Capitol was all born out of a peaceful rally that just took a turn that no one saw coming and that no one could have predicted and no one instigated. And I think what the committee sought to do was to establish that, again, the president went up there in the rally and repeated many, many lies that he knew were false and that he sought to inflame the crowd, the same crowd that he had told to be there and ready to be wild; the same crowd that he was aware had weapons; and I think, then, the same crowd that he then sent to the Capitol, where he knew that an official proceeding was going on and that he knew that this crowd was effectively out for blood. 

I think that when you piece that out all together, sending them to the Capitol and even him wanting to go to the Capitol, where he had no official duty there, no official role, no reason to be there, and certainly no reason to send an angry mob who he knew that he had for months been priming to think about the election is stolen, and they had no reason to be there either. So I think it shows that he was sending folks that he knew were dangerous to members of Congress. 

And she’s saying he’s almost violently trying to get there, which is disputed, but not disputed that he wanted to go to the Capitol. Maybe you just said it, but what does that reveal that he wanted to be there? 

I think it reveals that this army that’s being sent to the Capitol, that he really sees himself as their leader, and if he had it his way, he would have been out there in front of them somehow going and putting the pressure to these members of Congress in person. And I think that would have been the goal. That was the goal, is that these folks were there as part of this pressure campaign that had come from all kind of different ways for months on end. That pressure campaign was now out there in force with people at the Capitol, and he was the one sending them, and he was invested in it. 

When you look at the speech, I think it’s an hour-and-10-minute speech, he says something at one point about being peaceful. He also says, “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by different rules.” Then he talks about how “We fight like hell, [or] we’re not going to have a country anymore.” When you look at that speech, when the committee looks at the speech, what do you see? What is the evidence inside that of what we’ve been talking about, of the alleged criminal intent?

Well, one, you see multiple repeated lies. You see, for example, talk of dead voters, which was disproven by DOJ and told to the president; it was disproven by his own campaign. But he goes, and then he repeats lies again and again. 

I think, two, you also see what President Trump is now well known for, which is he knows how to talk in an intentional but then yet guarded way about what he wants from his supporters. And he knows how to walk up to the line, say what his supporters he knows they’ll understand, but then perhaps walk it back in a way that’s not quite believable, but says the right words. And that’s what he’s doing there at the Capitol, right? He’s telling his supporters that violence is understandable and OK here, but he knows that he can’t just say outright “Go commit violence,” but he can talk to them in a way where he knows they understand; he knows they’ll follow suit. And they did. 

And if true what Cassidy Hutchinson says, he knows this crowd is armed, and he’s saying, “Fight like hell, or you’re not going to have a country.”

Exactly. And I think when you marry those together, … when you say he’s been inflaming them for months; he’s called them to D.C. to “be there and be wild”; he knows that they’re armed; and knowing all of that, he’s going to repeat what he knows to be lies about a stolen election to them and then send them to the Capitol, where these folks he’s built up as “enemies of the state” are waiting inside, I think you can infer that he knew that was a recipe for disaster. 

By this point, he’s talked to the vice president. The vice president has said he’s not going to go along with the plan that he has, and he knows that by the time he goes to the crowd. He does talk about Pence there. In the indictment, they talk about the speech as a means to obstruct the certification and pressure the vice president. What does that context about what Pence has said to him add to what he says in that speech and the meaning of that speech? 

Well, I think what it adds in context is that he’s seeing the army there, his crowd for him there, as the next step in the pressure campaign for Vice President Pence. He has not been able to convince Pence directly, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to stop now, and that doesn’t mean he’s going to call off his supporters to stop. And I think it shows that he was willing to continue the pressure campaign with an army. 

Was it that Pence wasn’t going to go along? Did it shut anything down? Because they’re still making phone calls as the attack is happening. Rudy Giuliani is calling members of Congress. 

Yeah, they continue calling folks as the attack is happening. They call people after the attack has been put under control. The president and his allies do not seem remotely bothered by the attack, or at least even pausing in their efforts to overturn the election, even as the violent attack was going on. They continued those calls into the night, even after the attack has been pushed back. 

… The committee seems to be very interested in the tweets that he issues during that time, not explicitly calling people out. He says, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.” So that wasn’t—was that something that was of interest to the committee?

Yeah, no, 100%. That was something we were very focused on because, again, the committee’s work was not focused on whether or not we could prove a crime. What we were trying to do was to give a full picture to the American people as to what happened, and people should be able to know what the sitting president did while an attack was underway on the U.S. Capitol. People should know that whether or not any crimes come from it. The American people should know that and have a right to know that. 

And I think what he did here was make a choice not to act. He could not be moved. And people tried—Republicans, his staff, his daughter all tried to get him to move, and he refused. 

… The committee obviously laid out a historical record that hadn’t been there before, and a lot of people watched it, but a lot of people didn’t watch it. And if you look at the polling, it’s not clear that it convinced a lot of Trump supporters to change their mind. When you look back at that, how do you feel about what the committee accomplished, about America when you see poll results or you see part of the country not seeming to pay attention?

When I joined the committee, we had these discussions as to what success would be for the committee, and different folks had different views. And my view was always success for us could never be convincing a majority of Republicans to turn from President Trump. I think what success for us would be would be pretty incremental, which can we at least change the dynamic enough in this country that there’s culpability for those who engage in criminal conduct? Can we tell the story here in a way that the needle moves a little bit further than when we started?

I think we did that, I think. And I’m not a politician, so I can’t speak to politics, but as a casual observer, when I look at the midterms that followed our work, it did appear that the—folks like [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer talked about the work that we did and how that impacted the national dialogue and impacted candidates being able to speak about election fraud attempts and attempts to overturn the election.

So I can’t say that we changed a majority of Republicans’ minds, but I don’t think that ever was the goal, because I don’t think that’s a goal we ever could have accomplished. I think what we did was create a factual record and give DOJ the necessary facts to pursue an investigation. And the thing about criminal investigations is that regardless of what the general public thinks or what politics thinks, those investigations move forward regardless, and I think that’s going to happen here. Separate from whether people believe in our work, I think the investigation will nonetheless move forward. 

And so this trial that that you’ve helped, the committee’s helped spark, your hopes and fears for it?

I think my hopes for it is that … it will hold the former president responsible. I think that’s what’s important. I think if we’re going to be a society that respects the rule of law, that comes with culpability, and that comes with responsibility under the law. That means that if you break the law, you’re held accountable. And it’s even more important when you’re someone like the president. You cannot pick a role in our government that is more essential to executing and supporting the rule of law. I can’t think of anything more core to our country than our democratic system, and to have the president undermine that, I don’t know that it gets much worse than that. So I think my hope for the trial is that it holds former President Trump accountable.

I think my fear for the trial is, frankly, what happens if there isn’t a guilty, if there isn’t a conviction. And the difficulty about trials is that prosecutors have to get all 12 jurors; the defense lawyer has to get one. And in something as partisan as American politics, there’s always a possibility that someone in that jury just is not going to listen and gets on the jury. And I’m confident, if the jury has an open mind and listens to the evidence, that they’ll be able to convict the former president and his allies in both those criminal cases. But if not, I think there is a danger that all of our work is looked back on with some suspicion, and there’s a danger that all of it means nothing if the former president comes out of it acquitted or otherwise a hung jury in a way that he can look to American public and say, “I told you so; I didn’t do anything.” I think that’s a big danger. But I have confidence in the department, and I think they’ll be successful. 

---