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FEMALE NEWSREADER:
An historic day here in Washington. A federal grand jury here has indicted former president Donald Trump.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Mr. Trump is charged with three counts of conspiracy and one count of obstruction.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
This is the third criminal case brought against the former president this year.
MALE NEWSREADER:
He will now head to appear in federal court for the arraignment. This was not quite the return to Washington this former president had envisioned for himself.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:
We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes. There’s no way I lost Georgia, there’s no way. I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.
DONALD TRUMP:
Make no mistake, this election was stolen from you, from me and from the country.
DONALD TRUMP:
And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
NARRATOR:
For the first time in American history, a president charged with crimes in office.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A major development in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into former President Trump.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Special Counsel Jack Smith will make remarks at a news conference from the Justice Department shortly.
MALE NEWSREADER:
This is a climactic moment, certainly, in this investigation.
JACK SMITH:
An indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. Since the attack on our Capitol, the Department of Justice has remained committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day.
KEN WHITE, Criminal defense attorney:
Jack Smith is sort of like the central casting career federal prosecutor. He’s been doing this for 20 years. He has a reputation for being thorough and methodical. He’s fairly aggressive, but not reckless aggressive. He’s a very formidable opponent for Trump’s lawyers.
JACK SMITH:
In this case my office will seek a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens.
NARRATOR:
And in the middle of a presidential election, a critical moment for American democracy.
ROBERT RAY, Fmr. Trump attorney:
It lands us right in the middle of a presidential campaign. It is unavoidably going to be tainted with the appearance of politics at play. Obviously, that’s the card that Donald Trump will play.
DONALD TRUMP:
They waited right to the middle of an election, until I became the dominant force in the polls.
I got indicted over bulls---. I got indicted over bulls---. I get indicted for saying the election was rigged!
KEN WHITE:
If he’s convicted, then he’s running for president as someone who has been found guilty of federal crimes.
DONALD TRUMP:
I love that mugshot. I love that beautiful woman right there with a mugshot!
PETER BAKER, Co-author, The Divider:
To say the stakes for that trial are high doesn’t even begin to cover it, really. We often, in the media, use the phrase "trial of the century" for this sensational trial or that one. But really, this would be, I think, the trial of the century. Because I cannot imagine anything more important than a former president on trial, charged with trying to subvert American democracy.
The Blueprint
January 7, 2021
MALE NEWSREADER:
Tensions are still high following the chaos at the Capitol.
NARRATOR:
The federal indictment has its roots in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The chaos here has shaken the U.S. Capitol and the country.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Our nation’s Capitol under a state of emergency under a citywide lockdown.
NARRATOR:
In Congress, there were calls to create a blue-ribbon bipartisan commission.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A 9/11-style commission to look into the causes of the attack.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
A bill to create a bipartisan commission faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
SUSAN GLASSER, Co-author, The Divider:
What was amazing was that the Senate Republicans refused to do that, to do what Congress has done in many previous incidents of great national catastrophe or crisis or controversy, which is to create a bipartisan special committee across both chambers.
NARRATOR:
Republicans in Congress, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell, wouldn’t support forming a commission that might go after Trump.
DAVID FRENCH, Conservative columnist:
Leader McConnell almost instinctively goes into damage control mode. He’s not necessarily going to go out on a limb when the rest of his caucus isn’t going to go with him.
NARRATOR:
In the face of Republican opposition, the Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, created a committee of her own.
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA):
Morning. With great solemnity and sadness I’m announcing that the House will be establishing a select committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The House of Representatives today did what the Senate would not: voted to create a select committee.
ROBERT DRAPER, The New York Times Magazine:
It was the hope of Pelosi and the Democratic majority that they’d be able to pick off at least some Republican support, that there wouldn’t be that great a pushback. But, in fact, there was. And in the end, only two Republicans voted for the formation of that committee. In fact, those two Republicans, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, were the two Republicans who ended up serving on the committee.
BILL KRISTOL, Conservative columnist:
The fact that Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are the only two House Republicans who believe that we should know what happened on Jan. 6, that people should obey subpoenas from Congress, that people should provide documents when requested, that’s itself incredibly astonishing.
NARRATOR:
They would spend a year and a half examining the evidence.
Tim Heaphy was the chief investigator. A former U.S. attorney, Heaphy led the independent review of the violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and was now taking on Jan. 6.
TIM HEAPHY, Chief Investigative Counsel, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
We ended up hiring I think it was 14 or 15 former prosecutors—lawyers that have the skill set to interview witnesses, to digest a large amount of documents and to sort of discern what’s relevant, and separate that from what’s not. That skill set is developed largely by trying cases, by investigating cases in federal and local prosecutors’ offices.
NARRATOR:
They conducted more than 1,000 interviews.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The House select committee is shifting into high gear, preparing to do battle with some pretty big names in the Trump world.
NARRATOR:
Reviewed millions of documents.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The House committee probing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot has issued 10 new subpoenas.
NARRATOR:
Thousands of hours of video evidence.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
These subpoenas bring the focus to the actions of former President Donald Trump in the days and weeks leading up to the insurrection.
DONALD TRUMP:
They’re con people. They’re con artists.
NARRATOR:
From the beginning Trump denounced the committee.
DONALD TRUMP:
The select committee on January—you know, like these people are legitimate. Every one of them is a radical left hater.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The committee issued a subpoena to none other than former President Trump himself.
NARRATOR:
He refused to cooperate.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Trump suing the January 6th Committee to block a subpoena for his testimony.
NARRATOR:
And while many of his aides did testify, others followed his lead.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Criminal contempt charges against former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Peter Navarro refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee.
NARRATOR:
The committee’s final report spans 692 pages, a case against Donald Trump. A blueprint for Special Counsel Jack Smith.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS, Sr. Investigative Counsel, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
We saw our work as the first step in a process and not the end of a process. It’s very clear that the select committee laid the path down for the Department of Justice.
ROBERT DRAPER:
The Jan. 6 case that will be heard in Judge Chutkan’s courtroom in Washington, D.C., has the most striking resemblance to what unspooled itself from the January 6th Committee. The basis of the indictment looks like a carbon copy of what the January 6th Committee uncovered.
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON (D-MS), Chairman, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
A lot of the evidence that we uncovered is now in the hands of the Department of Justice. I just think all what we see now is a byproduct of the work of the January select committee.
NARRATOR:
Bennie Thompson, a longtime Democratic congressman, chaired the committee.
ROBERT DRAPER:
Bennie Thompson is a Mississippi congressman, a Black man who grew up during the civil rights era in Mississippi, during the last vestiges of Jim Crow, and saw how hard-fought the franchise to vote was for so many Black Americans.
NARRATOR:
In Jan. 6, Thompson saw parallels.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
One of the symbols of Southern resistance to voting rights and equal opportunity was the Confederate battle flag. And to see that flag being waved by many of the protesters brought back those memories.
TIM MULVEY, Communications Director, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
When he saw rioters storm the Capitol carrying the Confederate battle flag, essentially trying to take away the votes of the American people, that I know affected him profoundly and certainly was a driving factor in the way that he led the select committee.
NARRATOR:
Thompson’s committee had gathered a trove of information. The challenge: what to do with it.
REP. ADAM KINZINGER (R-IL), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
The one thing that we knew was the information that we have is compelling. The thing we needed to do was tell that to the American people in a compelling way. So that’s why we brought in a former president of ABC News.
JAMES GOLDSTON, Producer, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
Yeah, I got a call pretty much out of the blue from the January 6th Committee. They wanted a storyteller. And while they were brilliant lawyers, storytelling for a mass audience is not what they do.
ROBERT DRAPER:
To bring in a guy like this who would think outside the box really did prove to be fruitful. And it was Goldston who really began to envision this as, in a way, a kind of miniseries, that there would be sort of nine episodes, and that these episodes would tackle particular themes.
FEMALE VOICE:
Attack on the Capitol: The Investigation
NARRATOR:
The first hearing was prime-time television.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—because the nation is about to witness a defining moment. The first hearing before the country, the results of the Jan. 6 investigation.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
This is an extraordinary moment in American history.
JAMES GOLDSTON:
When it came to that first hearing, we knew how high the stakes were.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—is about to hold its first prime-time hearing.
JAMES GOLDSTON:
We were either going to make people realize that this is important, or once you’ve lost them, you’ve lost them for good.
TIM MULVEY:
On the evening of June 9, 8:01 p.m., the doors opened. My heart was beating pretty fast on June 9, and it was a real question of “is this going to work or not?”
DIRECTOR:
All right everybody, here we go. Five on the line, please.
JAMES GOLDSTON:
I’m in this tiny control room right up the stairs from Cannon Caucus. And we count down to the start the hearing, and at that point, what can you do?
DIRECTOR:
Here we go, in 3, 2, 1.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will be in order. Without objection—
TIM MULVEY:
We wanted to make sure that this was a presentation that would grab the audience and hold onto them. Chairman Thompson loved to say, “It’s gotta pop!”
NARRATOR:
To get it to “pop,” they had just the thing.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. Don’t believe me? Hear what his former attorney general had to say about it.
BILL BARR:
I had three discussions with the president that I can recall.
NARRATOR:
Former Attorney General Bill Barr.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
This is the attorney general of the United States of America. For him to come forth, under oath, I think it was very powerful.
BILL BARR:
I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was “bulls---.”
ROBERT DRAPER:
Bill Barr, who had been hated by the left and who had been beloved by Trump all the way until December of 2020, to hear him say, mincing no words, that there was all this bulls--- that was being perpetrated by Trump, made you realize that OK, we’re now about to walk into a portal of evidence that is in fact different than everything else.
NARRATOR:
Following Barr, shocking video.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Most of the footage we are about to play has never been seen. The select committee obtained it as a part of our investigation.
MALE CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER:
Hold the line! Hold the line! Hold the line!
JAN. 6 POLICE RADIO TRANSMISSION:
We have a breach of the Capitol, breach of the Capitol on the upper level!
MALE CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER:
We can’t hold this, we’re going to get too many f------ people. Look at this f------ vantage point. We’re f-----.
JAN. 6 POLICE RADIO TRANSMISSION:
We need to hold the doors of the Capitol! I need [unintelligible] support! We lost the line, we've lost the line! All PD pull back! All PD pull back up to the upper deck! All PD pull back at the upper deck, ASAP!
HANNAH MULDAVIN, Dep. Communications Director, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
In the room that moment, we had officers that had been there on Jan. 6. There was a real gravity that we wanted to bring to that first hearing that that video really put in perspective for us there.
MALE CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER:
Get him up! Get him out! Officer down, get him up! Get him up! Hold him! Get him up!
JAMES GOLDSTON:
I don’t think anyone, until that footage was shown, had really fully understood the violence of the day.
MALE CAPITOL POLICE OFFICER:
Help!
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Those law enforcement personnel, here are people who were sworn to protect the Capitol, come to work on that day to do just that, and they are assaulted.
NARRATOR:
Paying special attention to the hearing: Donald Trump, who responded on his own social media platform.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
The so-called “Rush on the Capitol” was not caused by me, it was caused by a rigged and stolen election!
NARRATOR:
The committee continued laying out its evidence to the contrary.
REP. LIZ CHENEY (R-WY), Vice Chair, Jan. 6 Cmte.:
The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot. President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.
NARRATOR:
Vice chair at the hearing: Liz Cheney, a lifelong Republican and rock-ribbed conservative.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
I chose Liz Cheney as my vice chair. She had Republican credibility in the broader sense. So you take an African American liberal and a White female conservative to lead this committee.
BYRON TAU, Fmr. reporter, The Wall Street Journal:
Liz Cheney is Republican royalty in many ways. She’s the daughter of Dick Cheney, the vice president. She’s very conservative. She represents Wyoming. No one would mistake her for a liberal, but she also was someone who broke very publicly with Donald Trump.
DONALD TRUMP:
And there is no RINO in America who has thrown in her lot with the radical left more than Liz Cheney. She has gone crazy!
LIZ CHENEY:
I will do everything I can to ensure the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.
BILL KRISTOL:
She’s been so strong on "we need to have the truth about Jan. 6. We need to have the truth about what happened before Jan. 6. We can’t have Trump again. He can’t be president again."
PETER BAKER:
I talked to her about what was motivating her. And she said every time she sees the video of Mike Pence being rushed to safety for fear of his life on Jan. 6—
MALE VOICE [on radio]:
—on your way to reach the security members on the other side, copy!
PETER BAKER:
—she saw, in her mind, the image of her father.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Oh, my God! That looks like a second plane.
PETER BAKER:
Dick Cheney, the vice president, being rushed away from his office in the White House to the bunker on 9/11.
MALE NEWSREADER:
It is one of the darkest days in America, attacked in an act of terrorist war.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Tremendously sad day, insurrectionists have stormed the U.S. Capitol, and they have been cheered on by the president.
PETER BAKER:
And suddenly I got it. Suddenly I got it. For her, this was what Al Qaeda and 9/11 were to her father. To the extent that her father became really quite driven by his view of the mission to protect America after 9/11, she saw her mission the same way, to protect America from Donald Trump.
NARRATOR:
Now helping to lead the January 6th Committee, Cheney was determined to lay out the case against Donald Trump.
LIZ CHENEY:
Over multiple months Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.
TIM HEAPHY:
In the very first hearing, she kind of laid out the theory of the case, right. The opening statement where she puts forth this multipart plan. I think that will sound very much like Jack Smith’s opening statement in the trial in March. It is a summary of how all this fits together.
LIZ CHENEY:
In our hearings you will see evidence of each element of this plan.
DONALD TRUMP:
Frankly, we did win this election.
LIZ CHENEY:
Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election. But despite this, you will see evidence that President Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change election results.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.
PETER BAKER:
We saw that hearing, methodically laid out by Liz Cheney, show that it wasn’t just some sort of like random, off-the-cuff, impulsive actions on his part, but that there was in fact a strategy and a pattern and a methodology to what he was doing.
LIZ CHENEY:
President Trump's efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to act illegally likely violated two federal criminal statutes.
DONALD TRUMP:
Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.
ADAM KINZINGER:
If I could have been a fly on the wall in the Department of Justice during that, I would certainly probably expect everybody sat up and took notice of what she said after that.
LIZ CHENEY:
In our final hearings you will hear how President Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them illegally to march on the United States Capitol.
DONALD TRUMP:
We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
With that, the committee stands adjourned.
NARRATOR:
The hearings got the public’s attention.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The first prime-time Jan. 6 hearing laying the foundation for a specific case against Trump.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The House committee went into graphic detail on the results of—
ROBERT DRAPER:
To put it crassly, the January 6th Committee was a ratings hit.
MALE NEWSREADER:
From NBC News, Jan. 6 revelations will, quote, “blow the roof off the House.”
PETER BAKER:
The very first one, the prime-time viewing, was at 19.4 million, which was really, really remarkable.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Huge, surprisingly huge numbers last night, that’s on par with events like Sunday Night Football games.
MALE NEWSREADER:
There were still multiple, multiple brand-new revelations last night that took us by surprise.
NARRATOR:
But for his supporters, Trump had a different story.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
The unselect committee of political hacks refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements.
DAVID FRENCH, Columnist, The New York Times:
It’s a broadside. And it’s not just one broadside, it is a continuous series of broadsides.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
Bill Barr was a weak and frightened attorney general who was always being “played” and threatened by the Democrats.
DAVID FRENCH:
It’s just so relentless, it’s so constant, it’s so loud, that in parts of MAGA America, that MAGA barrage drowns out anything else.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
Warmongering and despicable human being Liz Cheney, who is hated by the great people of Wyoming.
NARRATOR:
And on the conservative airwaves, they amplified Trump’s message.
TUCKER CARLSON:
Every news network in this country but this one faithfully surrendered its entire prime-time lineup. The effect was North Korean, every channel the same.
SEAN HANNITY:
A full-on Hollywood, multimedia extravaganza.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—to prosecute Trump with this show trial, with this kangaroo court.
ROBERT RAY:
I don't think, really, by any large stretch can you characterize it as bipartisan. This is, I guess, a consequence of bigger issues about the evenly divided country that we're in and extreme partisanship in the political process.
MARK LEVIN:
Can they show us one damned sentence in the hundreds of thousands of documents that they have collected, the thousand witnesses they’ve had, anything, anywhere that links Donald Trump to directing or ordering an attack on the Capitol Building? Where is it?
DAVID FRENCH:
If you’re talking to somebody who’s deep in MAGA America, they didn’t pay attention to the January 6th Commission. They were told not to pay any attention to it, that whatever was going to come out it was going to be fake or fake news. And this is the way a lot of Americans live their lives. It’s not just red Americans—blue Americans as well. We live in bubbles. And this is the way millions upon millions of Americans live.
A Question of Intent
NARRATOR:
In the weeks that followed, the committee laid out the details of their case.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
This morning we’ll tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and as a result of his loss decided to wage an attack on our democracy.
NARRATOR:
A central question: what the president knew and when he knew it.
PETER BAKER:
For a long time people who have pursued Donald Trump tripped up on the question of whether they could prove that he knew what he was doing was wrong, or that he knew what he was saying was a lie. The January 6th Committee got past that by demonstrating that he was told, time and time again, that he did not win the election. Not by Democrats, not by the media, but by his own people.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
I want to start by showing a video that tells the story of what was going on in the Trump White House on election night in November of 2020.
MALE NEWS ANCHOR:
The Fox News Decision Desk is calling Arizona for Joe Biden. That is a big get for the Biden campaign.
JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
Arizona is called. Do you remember that?
BILL STEPIEN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I do.
JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
What do you remember happening where you were when Arizona was called?
BILL STEPIEN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I, uh—There was surprise at the call.
MARC HARRIS, Sr. Investigative Counsel, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
After Fox News called Arizona for Biden, there was discussion about whether President Trump should say something and should declare victory. The consensus of almost all of his advisers was that he should not.
BILL STEPIEN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
It was far too early to be making any calls like that. Ballots were still being counted. Ballots were still going to be counted for days, and it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that.
QUINTA JURECIC, Lawfare:
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." And Trump makes the choice that he wants to listen instead to Rudy Giuliani.
JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
Were you part of any discussions about whether the president should make any sort of speech on election night?
RUDY GIULIANI [Jan. 6th Committee deposition]:
I spoke to the president. They may have been present, but the president—spoke to the president several times that night.
NARRATOR:
Rudy Giuliani’s advice was very different than that of Trump’s political advisers.
ROBERT COSTA, Co-author, Peril:
His personal lawyer Giuliani tells Trump, "Keep fighting. We will have a legal crusade, a political crusade to keep you in power." Trump loves the idea.
TOM JOSCELYN, Co-author, Jan. 6th final report:
Rudy Giuliani is one of the most prominent figures in American politics in the last 25 years, who is remembered fondly for his leadership post-9/11.
BYRON TAU:
But over the years he drifted towards Donald Trump. Towards being someone that would be essentially a yes man to Donald Trump in some of his worst impulses.
NARRATOR:
And on election night, Giuliani insisted Trump should fight.
TIM HEAPHY:
The president ignores the sound advice that he’s getting from Bill Stepien, from the political professionals around him, and he’s listening to one voice that is telling him something different, and that’s Giuliani saying, “You should go out there and declare victory.”
JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
And did anybody disagree with your message?
BILL STEPIEN [Jan. 6 Committee interview]:
Yes.
JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
Who was that?
BILL STEPIEN [Jan. 6 Committee interview]:
The president disagreed with that. He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to—he was going to go in a different direction.
JONATHAN KARL, Author, Betrayal:
I think the most dangerous speech that Donald Trump ever gave was not the one that he gave on Jan. 6. I think it’s the speech that he gave at 2:30 in the morning on the night of the election.
DONALD TRUMP:
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election.
JONATHAN KARL:
Trump knew that the trends looked bad. Trump knew that there were hundreds of thousands of votes still to be counted, and he came out and he said, "Frankly, we did win the election."
DONALD TRUMP:
We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. OK?
NARRATOR:
In the years since, Trump has claimed that he believed what he said that night.
Meet the Press, Sept. 17, 2023
DONALD TRUMP:
I saw what happened. I watched that election, and I thought the election was over at 10 o'clock in the evening.
NARRATOR:
But according to the committee, his claims of fraud were part of a well-established plan.
MONA CHAREN, Conservative columnist:
The moment when he said, "Frankly, I won this election" was telegraphed many, many times, and throughout the campaign of 2020 he repeatedly cast doubt on the legitimacy of the outcome, cast doubt on absentee ballots, etc.
REP. ZOE LOFGREN (D-CA), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
As early as April 2020, Mr. Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election would be as a result of fraud.
DONALD TRUMP:
The only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose this election.
This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen. Did you see what’s going on? Take a look at West Virginia. Mailmen selling the ballots. They’re being sold. They’re being dumped in rivers. This is a horrible thing for our country.
JOE BIDEN:
There is no evidence of that.
DONALD TRUMP:
This is not going to end well.
NARRATOR:
For the January 6th Committee, it was crucial evidence of Trump’s intent.
MARC HARRIS:
He makes numerous speeches and comments in TV interviews.
DONALD TRUMP:
You’re going to see corruption like you’ve never seen. You’re going to see a rigged election.
It’ll be the greatest rigged election in history. It’ll be the greatest fraud ever perpetrated.
MARC HARRIS:
It’s all a big fraud.
DONALD TRUMP:
It’s a crooked deal, it’s a rigged deal. New ballots are coming out that are thrown in garbage cans with the name Trump on it.
MARC HARRIS:
This was part of the scheme of getting his supporters sensitized to the fact that "there’s going to be some fraud here."
DONALD TRUMP:
Because the only way they’re going to win is by a rigged election. I really believe that.
PETER BAKER:
This is a pattern for Trump. He has done this every step of the way through his career, long before politics.
DONALD TRUMP [on "The Apprentice']:
My name is Donald Trump, and I’m the largest real estate developer in New York.
PETER BAKER:
When "The Apprentice" lost an Emmy to "The Amazing Race," he claimed that the Emmy contest was rigged.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
"Amazing Race" winning an Emmy again is a total joke. The Emmys have no credibility.
The Emmys are all politics, that’s why "The Apprentice" never won.
DONALD TRUMP:
The public is smart. They know it’s a con game.
MITT ROMNEY:
I have just called President Obama to congratulate him on his victory.
PETER BAKER:
He claimed that the election was rigged in 2012 when Mitt Romney, whom he had endorsed, lost to Barack Obama.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!
More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama.
Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice!
We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington.
PETER BAKER:
Every step along the way, everything he has ever lost is because somebody else has cheated and stolen it from him.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Fox News can now project that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has won Iowa.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Ted Cruz wins the Republican contest here in Iowa.
MALE NEWSREADER:
The big question now: How is Donald Trump going to handle a loss?
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
The state of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated—a total fraud!
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
You have tweeted that Sen. Ted Cruz stole the Iowa election.
DONALD TRUMP:
Everything about it was disgraceful. It was a fraud, as far as I was concerned.
TIM ALBERTA, Author, American Carnage:
Knowing what we know now, I think you would go back to February 1st of 2016.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
It’s a total voter fraud, when you think of it, and actually I came in probably first, if you think about it.
TIM ALBERTA:
That episode was a bright red blinking light foreshadowing everything that was to come.
BYRON TAU:
The portrait that both prosecutors and the January 6th Committee are trying to paint is that Trump knows what's going on, that this wasn’t something spontaneous. This wasn’t something that the president truly believed. That it was all part of an overall—and illegal, according to prosecutors and the committee—strategy to remain in power unlawfully.
NARRATOR:
And in court filings, prosecutors have said Trump’s statements are evidence of the criminal conspiracy at the heart of the case.
Prosecution filing
MALE VOICE [reading prosecution filing]:
They demonstrate the defendant’s common plan of falsely blaming fraud for election results he does not like, as well as his motive, intent and plan to obstruct the certification of the 2020 election results and illegitimately retain power.
ROBERT RAY:
Intent is the whole ball game. The jury is making an evaluation of that. That's the most difficult thing to prove. Not impossible, but it is the most difficult thing to prove.
NARRATOR:
Robert Ray was an independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton and helped get Trump acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial.
ROBERT RAY:
Our system requires that a jury of 12 unanimously—meaning all of them, all 12 of them—find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
NARRATOR:
To try to show the president’s intent, the committee focused on his own statements after election night.
ADAM KINZINGER:
Although he publicly claimed that he had won the election, privately he admitted that Joe Biden would take over as president.
ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I remember maybe a week after the election was called, I popped into the Oval just to like give the president the headlines and see how he was doing, and he was looking at the TV and he said, “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?”
ADAM KINZINGER:
At the same time that President Trump was acknowledging privately that he had lost the election, he was hearing that there was no evidence of fraud or irregularities sufficient to change the outcome.
TIM HEAPHY:
His campaign team, and this included his son-in-law Jared Kushner, went to him after the election was declared. And they didn’t just rebut the claims of voter fraud, they explained to him their analysis of why he lost. They showed him the numbers, state by state, in the swing states.
ALYSSA FARAH GRIFFIN, Fmr. Trump Communications Director:
I made this case, I know Hope Hicks and others did to him, which was, “You should make this a victory lap. Go around the country, talk about what you have accomplished, and you’re going to be in a great place in 2024 to win the presidency back."
PETER BAKER:
But then you had Rudy Giuliani, who was whispering in his ear what Trump wanted to hear. Trump likes the people who tell him what he wants to hear, and he picked, in effect, Rudy Giuliani in order to go down the road of challenging the election.
RUDY GIULIANI:
There is strong evidence that this was an election that in at least three or four states, and possibly 10, it was stolen.
Bringing in 100,000 ballots in garbage cans, and every single one of them was for Biden.
NARRATOR:
The federal indictment alleges that by the middle of November, Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the election was underway.
Federal indictment
SUSAN GLASSER, The New Yorker:
Nov. 14, 2020, is an important date in the federal indictment of Donald Trump. It is the moment when Donald Trump said, "Rudy Giuliani, he’s the only one who’s providing me with a plausible path forward, and I’m going to take it."
RUDY GIULIANI:
Look, you can fight it all you want. The reality is, dead people voted. Over 300,000 ballots were counted in secret.
KEN WHITE:
Rudy Giuliani was central to a lot of these schemes, framing them, orchestrating them, directing other people, being in on the communications. And so once Trump made a decision to defer to Rudy Giuliani as the person who was setting the tone and giving people their talking points for what the approach was, that’s when he decided to go after these nutty theories.
RUDY GIULIANI:
Eight thousand twenty-one ballots from dead people, mail-in ballots for dead people. We’re checking the records of the cemeteries around Philadelphia. [Laughter]
NARRATOR:
During that period, Giuliani and Trump would repeat dozens of false allegations. And the committee believed they had evidence it wasn’t an honest mistake.
Jan. 6th Committee final report
PETER BAKER:
One of the things the committee did that was critical was putting together this timeline in which they showed, very clearly, the president would be told one thing one day, "Not true, don’t say that," and he would go right back out and say it the next day anyway. That’s really important toward, I think, establishing intent to lie, intent to defraud.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
Each ballot went three times. Here’s ballot number one. Here it is a second, third time. Next ballot.
Two days earlier . . .
RICHARD DONOGHUE, Fmr. Acting Dep. Attorney General:
I told the president myself that these allegations about ballots run through the machine several times, it was not true.
DONALD TRUMP:
In several counties in Georgia there is clear evidence that tens of thousands of votes were switched from President Trump to Biden.
Four days earlier . . .
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER (R), Georgia Secretary of State [on phone]:
Well, Mr. President, we did a hand re-tally of all the ballots and compared that to what the machine said, and it came up with virtually the same result.
DONALD TRUMP:
In Detroit, a vote dump came in unexpectedly. I’ll tell you what’s wrong: voter fraud.
One day earlier . . .
BILL BARR:
—and then he raised the big vote dump in Detroit, and I said, “There’s no indication of fraud in Detroit.”
DONALD TRUMP:
Over 10,300 ballots in Georgia were cast by individuals who died prior to the election.
Four days earlier . . .
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER [on phone]:
The actual number were two. Two people that were dead that voted.
DONALD TRUMP:
You have Dominion, which those machines are fixed, they’re rigged. You can press Trump and the vote goes to Biden.
Three days earlier . . .
BILL BARR:
I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines. I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, and I told him that it was crazy stuff.
MARC HARRIS:
Stretching the truth in a campaign ad or on the debate stage is one thing. But when you are using that lie to subvert the democratic process and to convince people that they need to overturn the election, now you’re talking about conspiracy. And that’s what he’s charged with.
NARRATOR:
Trump wouldn’t talk to the committee, but he did talk to NBC News.
Meet the Press, Sept. 17, 2023
KRISTEN WELKER, NBC News:
The most senior lawyers in your own administration and on your campaign told you that after you'd lost more than 60 legal challenges, that it was over. Why did you ignore them and decide to listen to a new outside group of attorneys?
DONALD TRUMP:
Because I didn't respect them—
KRISTEN WELKER:
You’d hired them.
DONALD TRUMP:
—as lawyers. Sure. But that doesn't mean—you know, you hire them, you never met these people. You get a recommendation. They turn out to be RINOs, or they turn out to be not so good. In many cases, I didn't respect them. But I did respect others. I respected many others that said the election was rigged.
KRISTEN WELKER:
Were you calling the shots, though, Mr. President, ultimately?
DONALD TRUMP:
As to whether or not I believed it was rigged? Oh, sure. It was my decision.
Federal indictment
NARRATOR:
One of the allegations in the charges against Trump is that he used lies to carry out his criminal conspiracy.
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant’s knowingly false statements were integral to his criminal plans.
NARRATOR:
But to the president’s defenders, his statements about the 2020 election, true or not, should be protected under the Constitution.
SUSAN GLASSER:
You will see Trump and those who defend him essentially using the free speech defense and saying that these are just words and in the end it's not a crime in America to lie to the American public, even though Donald Trump lied to the American public a lot.
ROBERT RAY:
This is a central area of the president’s defense. He does have First Amendment rights, and particularly as president. And trying to turn words into criminal conduct is a very slippery road for the prosecution under the First Amendment. And in the event of a conviction, I can guarantee you this— this will be point one in the brief on appeal.
KEN WHITE:
Lying to the government is not protected by the First Amendment. Obstructing justice is not protected by the First Amendment.
NARRATOR:
Ken White is a prominent criminal defense lawyer and a First Amendment expert.
KEN WHITE:
And so here the government's position is going to be, "We are not going after him for what he said on the news. That’s not the crime. The crime is he specifically pushed to derail specific government functions."
The Warning
NARRATOR:
As they gathered their evidence, the January 6th Committee returned again and again to one state: Georgia.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
When Donald Trump tried to overturn the election results, he focused on just a few states. The former president had a particular obsession with Georgia.
JEN JORDAN (D), Fmr. Georgia state senator:
I think that Trump chose us because Republicans did control basically every level of government. You got the House, you got the Senate, all Republican controlled. Not even close. I think he thought he could come here and basically just by some kind of fiat say, “OK, make it happen.”
NARRATOR:
And it was in Georgia that Donald Trump received a stark warning from Gabriel Sterling, an election official.
LIZ CHENEY:
Gabriel Sterling explicitly warned President Trump about potential violence on Dec. 1, 2020, more than a month before Jan. 6. You will see excerpts from that video repeatedly today.
GABRIEL STERLING, Georgia elections official:
Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia. Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right.
ADAM KINZINGER:
Gabe Sterling called out Donald Trump. He was the first to really, as far as I remember, to really come out and say, “There’s going—This is going to lead to violence.” Gabe Sterling is not listed as some kind of a "Republican in name only" or some kind of liberal Republican prior to that moment.
GABRIEL STERLING:
I’ve been a Republican since I was about 9, when Reagan was running for reelection. I was 9 years old when I first kind of declared myself. My mother was not very happy. But my dad was pleased. I was working campaigns in the late '80s and early '90s. So yeah, I’ve been around Republican politics as an operative and a volunteer since before I could drive a car. So yeah, I’ve been at it for a while.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
The chair recognizes the gentleman from California, Mr. Schiff, for an opening statement.
REP. ADAM SCHIFF (D), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
Mr. Sterling, thank you also for being here today.
GABRIEL STERLING:
Schiff. I remember they told me he was going to question me. I’m like, "Damn it. I can’t stand that guy." He irritates me to death because I think he’s wrong and doesn’t tell the truth a lot. But I said, you know what, I’m just going to play this straight. I’m a fact witness. Just answer the questions.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Donald Trump claims that there was, quote, "massive voter fraud in Georgia." Mr. Sterling, that was just plain false, wasn’t it?
GABRIEL STERLING:
Yes, sir.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Nevertheless—
GABRIEL STERLING:
I want to give some perspective for this. I was a voting system implementation manager. I was a bureaucrat of all bureaucrats basically at that time. No one should know who the hell I am. I just was doing my job.
NARRATOR:
Sterling was on the front line as Trump attacked the Georgia election results.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
Thousands of uncounted votes discovered in Georgia counties.
Big voter fraud information coming out concerning Georgia.
Georgia Republicans are angry, all Republicans are angry. Get it done!
LIN WOOD:
The people in Georgia are mad. They know their votes were stolen.
PETER NAVARRO:
Georgia, of the six states I looked at, is a cesspool.
SIDNEY POWELL:
Georgia’s probably going to be the first state I’m going to blow up and the secretary of state need to go with it.
ALEX JONES:
Everyone must go to the capitol of Georgia now. We need to see people power and this will do it.
CROWD [chanting]:
We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump!
NARRATOR:
On the ground, tensions were mounting.
OLIVIA TROYE:
I mean, you have a whole voting population out there who still today believes that this election was stolen.
CROWD [chanting]:
It’s only going to be America first! America first! America first!
OLIVIA TROYE:
And they think that some fraud happened. And that’s how you end up in situations where they’re threatening the election officials in Georgia.
Texts to GA election officials
MALE VOICE [reading text]:
Keep opposing the audit and somebody in your family is going to have a very unfortunate incident.
MALE VOICE [reading text]:
Please pray. We plan for the death of you and your family every day. I’m sorry.
MALE VOICE [reading text]:
You and your family will be killed very slowly.
GABRIEL STERLING:
It wasn’t fun, I can tell you that. We were in the mix of a radicalized lie, essentially. And it just kept on escalating.
MALE VOICE [on voicemail]:
You oughta blow your f------ brains out you piece of s---.
NARRATOR:
The threats poured in to the voicemails of election officials.
MALE VOICE [on voicemail]:
Hope you’re happy with the way s---’s going, 'cause you know who’s fault this is when the f------ s--- hits the goddamned fan. 'Cause you know it’s coming.
MALE VOICE [on voicemail]:
We’re coming after you and every motherf----- with our Second Amendment. F------ enemy, communist, f------ c---------. You will be served lead!
GABRIEL STERLING:
It’s all gone too far. All of it. It has to stop!
I had no script. In fact, I didn’t realize I was going to call out the president until I was literally saying the words out loud at the time.
Mr. President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. This has to stop. We need you to step up, and if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some.
ADAM SCHIFF:
After you made this plea to the president, did Donald Trump urge his supporters to avoid the use of violence?
GABRIEL STERLING:
Not to my knowledge.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Now, as we know, the president was aware of your speech because he tweeted about it later that day.
TIM MULVEY:
The president retweeted a criticism of Gabriel Sterling’s press conference. So the president was aware that there were threats of violence, and he persisted in the Big Lie.
CHARLIE SYKES, Conservative commentator:
You have Gabriel Sterling say, “People will die.” This was the warning and Donald Trump was unmoved by it. Was there any sort of a sense that maybe we ought to dial down the rhetoric, that maybe this is getting out of hand, maybe this is dangerous? No.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
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 I think it is remarkable that no one has been physically hurt. But I think time will tell whether something does happen.
The Ask
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The committee plans to reveal even more evidence former President Trump pressured state officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
NARRATOR:
Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House and lifelong Republican, was a crucial witness to Trump’s campaign of pressure on local officials.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifying today. He received numerous calls asking him to decertify the Arizona electors.
NARRATOR:
Bowers would testify about his private conversations with the president.
RUSTY BOWERS (R), Fmr. Arizona House Speaker:
Going in the room, we walked down through the hall, and there’s lots of people in the hallways, and then guards, and then there’s a doorway, and I’m thinking, "OK, how big is this room?" And then I walk in the room and I’m thinking, "Oh, my word. This is one big room." [Laughs] I’m like, “Wow.” And there’s 10 million photographers all jammed together, jostling in front of us. And I’m trying to maintain composure and not run screaming off down the Mall, down towards the Lincoln Memorial, but I saw Liz Cheney and she was looking at me and that kind of calmed me down.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
I now welcome Rusty Bowers, a distinguished legislator from Arizona. Speaker Bowers, thank you for being with us today.
TOM JOSCELYN:
This is a loyal, lifelong Republican. He’s a conservative who fought to get Trump reelected.
DONALD TRUMP:
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, come on up here.
TIM HEAPHY:
Rusty Bowers is just a compelling person. It’s hard to talk to him and not believe him. And the stories that he told about his direct communications with the president were just so indicative and so powerful that he was kind of an obvious choice, frankly, for somebody that America needed to hear from directly.
ADAM SCHIFF:
After the election you received a phone call from President Trump and Rudy Giuliani in which they discussed the result of the presidential election in Arizona. If you would, tell us about that call.
RUSTY BOWERS:
The president initially laid out the broad claim of fraud across the country and named different states, including my own.
ADAM SCHIFF:
What was the ask during this call? He was making these allegations of fraud, but he had something, or a couple things, that they wanted you to do. What were those?
RUSTY BOWERS:
He said, “Well, we have heard by an official high up in the Republican Legislature that there is a legal theory or a legal ability in Arizona that you can remove the electors of President Biden and replace them.”
Well. [Laughs] For them to say to me, “Yeah, we just want you to throw out those electors and put in Trump’s,” I’m thinking, "Have I gone to another planet?" I mean, it’s like, "What? I’m not going to do that.” I mean, I wanted him to win. OK, so what. I’m not going to cheat. I’m not going to cheat to win. What’s that? I flat-out said, "You’re asking me to break my oath. I swore an oath. I’m not going to break it, period. Not going to break it."
I said, “Well, if you’re talking this, I gotta have the proof.” I said, “Rudy, do you have the names of the dead people who voted?” He goes, “Yes.” “And do you have the names of the 200,000 illegals who voted in our election?” “Yes.” I said, “I want those names.” And the president says, “Rudy, give the man what he wants. Give him what he wants.” He says, “Yeah we’ve got them, Mr. President, and I’ll get them to him.”
NARRATOR:
In the criminal indictment, Jack Smith saw the call as evidence of a crime.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant and Co-Conspirator 1 asked the Arizona House Speaker to use the legislature to circumvent the process by which legitimate electors would be ascertained.
DAVID FRENCH:
If you are calling a state official and you’re asking them to nullify lawful votes and to replace them with unlawful votes, that is squarely within federal statutes regulating election conspiracy.
NARRATOR:
Not long after the call, Rudy Giuliani himself arrived in Arizona.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Did you meet with Mr. Giuliani and his associates while they were in Phoenix?
RUSTY BOWERS:
Yes, I did, sir.
There was a row of people and—Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, I recognized them. And I sat down on the opposite side. I just said, “Did you bring me the proof?” And he said, “What?” And I said, “Do you remember our phone call when you said you were going to bring me the proof?” And he said, “Oh, yeah.” And I said, “Did you bring it?” And he turned to Jenna Ellis and he says, “Do you have the proof?” And she said, “Yeah.” “Well, can we see it?” And she leans over and fumbles through her briefcase and says, “Oh, no, I don’t have it here. It must be at the hotel room.”
ADAM SCHIFF:
This meeting or at any other later time, did anyone provide you with evidence of election fraud sufficient to affect the outcome of the presidential election in Arizona?
RUSTY BOWERS:
No one provided me, ever, such evidence.
Giuliani is kind of frustrated with us all and he said, “You know, we’ve got a lot of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.” And when I heard him say that I said, “Did he just say what I thought he said?” [Laughs] And they all looked at me with the same thing on their mind, like, “Whoa. Yeah, he just said that!” That was like a rocket’s red glare moment. Like, wow, that's—You gotta be kidding. This is like a—this is the clown show. They’re out hunting. They’re trying to find something and they’re wanting us to participate in this. And he says that? Holy moly. We can’t do this stuff, you know? It’s like . . .
NARRATOR:
Rudy Giuliani refused to answer questions from the committee about his conversations with Bowers. Trump attorney Jenna Ellis also refused.
For the January 6th Committee, that meeting with Bowers was a bombshell revelation.
TOM JOSCELYN:
“We have a lot of theories, but we don’t have any evidence.” That shows that none of this had to do with evidence or reality, right? This is all about just making stuff up in order to justify keeping Trump in power.
NARRATOR:
The phrase Giuliani uttered would become iconic, and Giuliani a central figure in Trump’s indictment, listed as Co-Conspirator 1.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
Co-Conspirator 1 responded with words to the effect of, "We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories."
KEN WHITE:
It shows Rudy Giuliani admitting that there’s no evidence for the theories they had. That these are just talking points, not backed with any fact. And that’s exactly the theory of the government.
ADAM SCHIFF:
During the conversation did he bring up the fact that you shared a similar party?
RUSTY BOWERS:
He would say, “Aren’t we all Republicans here? I would think we would get a better reception. I would think you would listen a little more open to my suggestions." That we’re all Republicans.
For someone to ask me to deny my oath and just let the courts figure it out, or let somebody else—punt it to someone else, is not something I will do.
TOM JOSCELYN:
What you have to understand here is that Rusty Bowers, this guy who worked for Trump, wanted Trump to be reelected in Arizona, worked for Trump’s reelection, is given a choice. He can choose between his oath to the Constitution or President Trump. And he stays loyal to the Constitution. That is, in effect, the choice that he is given. Rusty Bowers speaks with a moral and legal clarity that’s very necessary to understand.
RUSTY BOWERS:
We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people.
It’s my oath. And I hope that I’ll never break that. I know I’m not perfect. I’m certainly not a perfect witness, but I am a witness. And I had my say. And I wasn’t trying to flower it up. I wasn’t trying to be anything other than just Rusty.
NARRATOR:
Rusty Bowers is now a key witness on a central charge of the indictment.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct and defeat the federal government function.
NARRATOR:
In their filings, Trump’s lawyers have argued he is immune from prosecution because was doing his job as president when he worked to change the election results.
Trump defense filing
MALE VOICE [reading defense filing]:
The indictment is based entirely on alleged actions within the heartland of President Trump’s official duties, or at the very least, within the “outer perimeter” of his official duties.
ROBERT RAY:
The former president has a motion claiming that he is immune from criminal process with regard to these charges which involve his official acts as president of the United States.
Trump defense filing
MALE VOICE [reading defense filing]:
As President Trump is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for such acts, the court should dismiss the indictment.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Donald Trump’s legal team suggesting that even a president who had a political rival assassinated could still be immune from criminal prosecution.
NARRATOR:
The federal judge presiding over the case has already rejected Trump’s immunity claims, saying a president is not entitled to a lifelong get-out-of-jail-free pass.
DAVID FRENCH:
The questions being raised right now regarding presidential immunity are absolutely key to the very foundation, the very philosophical foundation of this republic. Because if you take an oath of office in the United States of America, you’re swearing an oath to our system of government. And so, if a president is not subject to that system of government, if he’s not subject to that code of laws, we don’t have quite the republic that we thought we had.
NARRATOR:
An appeals court is now considering the question of immunity. Whatever the decision, both sides could appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
Collateral Damage
NARRATOR:
The committee’s investigation kept bringing them back to what happened in Georgia.
MALE REPORTER:
Mr. Giuliani, what are you doing here in Georgia?
RUDY GIULIANI:
You’ll see.
NARRATOR:
Giuliani was there to make his case to the Republican state Legislature.
RUDY GIULIANI:
Bless you, too. Oh, I'm not going to give up. Nope.
JEN JORDAN:
He was very jovial, I have to tell you. I think he had gotten basically a king’s welcome by all the Republicans. It was like he was their superstar or whatever. They all wanted pictures with him. They were all so impressed with him and couldn’t believe that he was there. Very obsequious.
FEMALE VOICE:
We love you, Rudy!
NARRATOR:
Giuliani and others from Trump’s team had come with a conspiracy theory: Election workers were counting suitcases of illegal ballots.
MALE VOICE:
Sen. Jordan.
JEN JORDAN:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
NARRATOR:
Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator, was in the room with Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Trump’s other lawyers.
Voice of Jacki Pick Deason, Trump attorney
JACKI PICK DEASON:
They are going to pull ballots out from underneath a table. Watch this table.
JEN JORDAN:
You had the woman who was narrating—
JACKI PICK DEASON:
This table, the black one, was placed there by the lady with the blonde braids.
JEN JORDAN:
—and saying, “You see this woman here? You see her here?”
JACKI PICK DEASON:
At about 8 o’clock in the morning, we’re going to roll this back and show it to you—there you go. So now they’re going to start pulling these ballots out from under this table. I don’t know the name of the lady in the blonde braids, but one of them had the name Ruby across her shirt somewhere.
JEN JORDAN:
She’s taking the ballots out, and now she’s filling them in, or she’s stealing these ballots.
NARRATOR:
It was an allegation Trump personally amplified.
DONALD TRUMP:
There’s even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.
GABRIEL STERLING:
They kept on recycling these things.
TUCKER CARLSON:
The footage appears to show poll workers pulling ballots out of suitcases after—
GABRIEL STERLING:
It’s like playing whack-a-mole.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
How about those suitcases that were pulled out from the table in Georgia?
LAURA INGRAHAM:
Looking at ballots, they’re finding them under the tables. I mean, this is like a banana republic.
NARRATOR:
But the full surveillance video didn’t show what Trump and Giuliani claimed.
GABRIEL STERLING:
The magic suitcases, which were really just ballot carriers that had been put under the table about an hour earlier, and they were placed under there with the monitors and the press in the room.
NARRATOR:
A day after Giuliani’s presentation, the video aired on local TV. Their claims were debunked.
JUSTIN GRAY, Georgia TV reporter:
This is the short section of the video the Trump team has shared. It’s not suitcases being pulled from under that table, but official sealed ballot containers. If we go back in the video to hours before, you can see that table being brought into the room at 8:22 a.m.—nothing underneath, no hidden suitcases—as ballots that have been opened but not counted are placed in the boxes, sealed up and stored under the table.
GABRIEL STERLING:
No magical appearing ballots. These were ballots that were processed in front of the monitors, put in the boxes in front of the monitors and placed there in front of the monitors.
And I’ll go to my deathbed knowing that they knowingly lied. They looked in the state senators' eyes, the people of Georgia, the people of America and lied to them about this, and knew they were lying, to try to keep this charade going on that there was fraud in Georgia.
NARRATOR:
But the conspiracy theories continued.
TUCKER CARLSON:
This is not a conspiracy theory. Those are legitimate questions.
RUDY GIULIANI:
I think the woman in charge here is named Ruby Freeman, and I think her daughter Shaye Freeman Moss either was helping her here or helping her earlier.
NARRATOR:
Giuliani had called out by name two election workers, Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
OAN NETWORK REPORTER:
After pulling out hidden boxes stuffed with ballots, Ruby Freeman, as seen here in this video, repeatedly scanned the same batch of ballots at least three times.
NARRATOR:
Like the claim about suitcases of ballots, it wasn’t true.
GABRIEL STERLING:
The secondary part of that was, "They're scanning multiple times, multiple times." And a standard operating procedure is if there’s a mis-scan, you delete that batch and straighten it up like you do and then run it through again. And that’s what they were doing. And the reason we know that’s the case because we had a hand tally which showed the number of ballots matched what was counted. So we know that they didn’t do that.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
I now welcome Wandrea ArShaye Moss. In December 2020, Miss Moss and her mother, Miss Ruby Freeman—
People say, "You know, I know somebody just like those two ladies in my community who work elections. And they’re just everyday people." To have them as a witness for our committee, they were very powerful.
I understand that you are here along with your mother today. Would you like to introduce your momma? Hi, Mom. [Laughter]
ADAM SCHIFF:
Well, I know the events that we're here to talk about today are incredibly difficult to relive. I’d like to show you some of the statements that Rudy Giuliani made a week after that video clip from State Farm Arena was first circulated by Mr. Giuliani and President Trump. I want to advise viewers that these statements are completely false and also deeply disturbing.
RUDY GIULIANI:
Tape earlier in the day of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Freeman Moss and one other gentleman quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.
JEN JORDAN:
He sounded a lot more desperate. Quite frankly, he seemed more unhinged. He made some overtly racist comments.
RUDY GIULIANI:
They look like they’re passing out dope, not just ballots. [Laughs] It is quite clear they're stealing votes. And they’re still walking around Georgia lying. They should have been—they should have been questioned already. Their places of work, their homes should’ve been searched for evidence of ballots, for evidence of USB ports, for evidence of voter fraud.
NARRATOR:
But there was no evidence that they were passing USB drives.
ADAM SCHIFF:
In one of the videos we just watched, Mr. Giuliani accused you and your mother of passing some sort of USB drive to each other. What was your mom actually handing you on that video?
SHAYE MOSS:
A ginger mint.
TIM HEAPHY:
Passing along a ginger mint back and forth gets spun up into this baseless theory. Not an accident. It is meant to stir up people’s anger. And these two Black women who are doing their civic duty are vilified.
JEN JORDAN:
It really does end up ruining people’s lives. I can’t tell you how many emails I got with respect to Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and that they should be strung up.
Ruby Freeman 911 calls
FEMALE 911 OPERATOR:
County Police and Fire.
RUBY FREEMAN [on phone]:
Yes, I, um, I’m Ruby Freeman. I need an officer to come out. I’ve been having terroristic threats. I’ve been having harassing phone calls. And now somebody is slamming on the door again. Oh, they’re screaming—He’s still banging on the door.
FEMALE 911 OPERATOR:
OK.
RUBY FREEMAN [on phone]:
He’s still banging on the door. Lord Jesus, where’s the police?
FEMALE 911 OPERATOR:
They are on the way, ma’am.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Were a lot of these threats and vile comments racist in nature?
SHAYE MOSS:
A lot of them were racist. A lot of them were just hateful. A lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, “Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”
SOUMYA DAYANANDA, Sr. Investigative Counsel, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
These women, whose lives had been completely destroyed, that’s where the story about the state pressure campaign becomes real.
SHAYE MOSS:
I felt horrible. I felt like it was all my fault, like if I would have never decided to be an elections worker—I could have done anything else, but that’s what I decided to do. And now people are lying and spreading rumors and lies and attacking my mom. I’m her only child. I just felt like it was my fault for putting my family in this situation.
SUSAN GLASSER:
There are real-world consequences to lying and attacking and demonizing innocent people in this country. And Donald Trump has always been very heedless of the human costs of his lies and his gaslighting. And this is a very painful example of that.
ADAM SCHIFF:
Ms. Moss, I want to thank you for coming in to speak with us, and to thank you for your service to our democracy. With your permission I would like to give your mother the last word.
RUBY FREEMAN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
My name is Ruby Freeman. I’ve always believed it when God says that he’ll make your name great, but this is not the way it was supposed to be. I built my own business around that name—LaRuby’s Unique Treasures, a pop-up shop catering to ladies with unique fashions. I wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed that I was and I am Lady Ruby. Actually, I had that shirt on—I had that shirt in every color. I wore that shirt on Election Day 2020. I haven’t worn it since, and I’ll never wear it again. Now I won’t even introduce myself by my name anymore. There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stand up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic.
NARRATOR:
Federal prosecutors have cited the lies about Freeman and Moss in their indictment of Trump.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
Co-Conspirator 1 orchestrated a presentation to a judiciary subcommittee of the Georgia state Senate, with the intention of misleading state senators into blocking the ascertainment of legitimate electors.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Breaking news in Georgia’s investigation into alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election.
NARRATOR:
In Georgia, prosecutors have also weighed in with their own charges.
Georgia indictment
MALE VOICE [reading Georgia indictment]:
Members of the enterprise, including several of the defendants, falsely accused Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman of committing election crimes in Fulton County, Georgia.
NARRATOR:
Trump, Giuliani and others have been charged in Georgia with a host of crimes related to their attempts to overturn the 2020 election. While Trump and Giuliani await trial, four of their co-defendants have pled guilty, including Jenna Ellis.
Jenna Ellis plea hearing
JENNA ELLIS:
If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse for those failures of mine, Your Honor.
DAVID FRENCH:
It’s very important that Jenna Ellis pled guilty to criminal charges, because it raises the point that, wait a minute, this wasn’t a traditional lawyer-client relationship. And so when you have lawyers pleading guilty to crimes, that is broadcasting loudly that they were not providing conventional legal advice.
NARRATOR:
In a separate civil case, a federal court ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $146 million for defaming Freeman and Moss.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A legal loss for Rudy Giuliani that could cost him millions.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Rudy Giuliani, the once-respected New York mayor and former attorney for Donald Trump, has filed for bankruptcy.
MALE NEWSREADER:
—forced to declare bankruptcy, the latest chapter in a dramatic fall for the man once dubbed "America’s Mayor."
The Phone Call
NARRATOR:
As the Jan. 6 hearings continued, the committee linked the efforts in Georgia to Trump personally. They had evidence and a witness.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Brad Raffensperger is the 29th secretary of state of Georgia, serving in this role since 2019.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
My job as secretary of state is to make sure we have honest, fair and accurate elections.
GABRIEL STERLING:
He’s a very strong Christian, he’s a very strong Republican and he’s very conservative. He was an engineer. Now, being an engineer allowed him to lean into the numbers and lean into the data. That he felt very comfortable with that, which is a rare thing for anybody in politics, because engineers are very mathematical, very linear, not always the biggest personalities.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
I looked at the office of secretary of state as, "How do we really improve the process of elections?" All 159 counties had new election equipment with a verifiable paper ballot ready for the election of 2020.
NARRATOR:
It was a phone call from the president that put Raffensperger at the center of the hearings.
MALE VOICE [on phone]:
Everyone, I’m going to conference you through to POTUS momentarily. One moment.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
That phone call is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that’s come out of this post-election period.
MALE VOICE [on phone]:
The conference is now connected.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
Hello?
MARK MEADOWS [on phone]:
Mr. Raffensperger, are you on the line?
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
Mark Meadows reached out to my deputy secretary of state and she called me. And I told her I didn’t think that was a good idea. And we were kind of told that, no, we definitely need to have this conversation.
[oh phone] Brad Raffensperger here.
MARK MEADOWS [on phone]:
All right. Mr. President, everybody is on the line. And just so, this is Mark Meadows, the chief of staff. So, Mr. President, I’ll turn it over to you.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
OK, thank you very much. Hello, Brad and Ryan and everybody. We appreciate the time and the call.
Uh, if we could just go over some of the numbers. I think it's pretty clear that we won. We won very substantially, Georgia.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
It shows how 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.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
So dead people voted. And I think the number is close to 5,000 people. And they went to obituaries. They went to—
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
I just listened to him talk. I was making some notes. OK, 5,000. OK, great, I’ll respond to that. But when I got an opportunity to speak, then I just said, “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is your data's wrong.”
[on phone] Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong. So, the actual number were two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.
My job was just to respond with the facts. And if I had a different set of facts, I would have responded with whatever they were. We just—Our job was to give him the true data, which I did.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
But why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad, instead of keep saying that the numbers are right? Brad, we just want the truth. It’s simple. And the truth, the real truth is I won by 400,000 votes at least.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER [on phone]:
We believe that we do have an accurate election.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
No, I—no, you don’t. No. No, you don’t.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
The former president was pushing to see if he could somehow, it would move me somewhere, someplace. Because I think that’s been an effective strategy for him over his business career and political career, that people tended to buckle instead of stand firm on their principles.
NARRATOR:
In Georgia, Trump had lost to Biden by 11,779 votes.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break. Why, why do you keep fighting this thing? It just doesn’t make sense.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER [on phone]:
We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.
GABRIEL STERLING:
Trump didn’t understand. It just didn’t click with him that someone wouldn’t just give in. It just did not occur to him that there was some higher level of loyalty to the law and the Constitution.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
I knew that we had followed the law and we had followed the Constitution, and I think sometimes moments require you to stand up and just take the shots. You’re doing your job, and that’s all we did. We just followed the law and we followed the Constitution, and at the end of the day President Trump came up short. But I had to be faithful to the Constitution, and that’s what I swore an oath to do.
PETER BAKER:
This call becomes critical, because it’s recorded. We get to hear in the president’s own voice how he’s doing it, what he’s doing, how he’s putting pressure on these people.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
So look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes.
DAVID FRENCH:
This is a scheme to overthrow an election. He knew the number that he needed to hit to change the outcome of the election.
NARRATOR:
And Trump accused Raffensperger himself of a crime: allowing election fraud
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
It’s more illegal for you than it is for them. Because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That's the thing, you know. That’s a criminal—that’s a criminal offense.
DAVID FRENCH:
The president of the United States demanding that an election official find thousands of votes, and then strongly implying that there would be criminal sanction in the event that those votes were not found. I mean, that is terrible evidence for the president.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find. We had continued to look. We investigated. I could have shared the numbers with you. There were no votes to find.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
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.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
OK, thank you, Brad. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER [on phone]:
Thank you, President Trump, for your time.
DONALD TRUMP [on phone]:
Thank you very much. Bye.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant said that he needed to "find" 11,780 votes.
KEN WHITE:
It shows him demanding a remedy that doesn’t make any sense in the context of anything lawful. That’s just asking, "I want to win. You gotta do it." I think it’s going to be a very powerful call for that jury.
NARRATOR:
For his part, Trump has defended the phone call with Raffensperger, describing it as “perfect.”
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
A “perfect” phone call to discuss a rigged and stolen election, and what to do about it, with many people, including lawyers and others, knowingly on the line.
The Invitation
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
After weeks of trying to overturn the results of the election, his legal team has come up with nothing.
NARRATOR:
In the middle of December 2020—
MALE NEWSREADER:
In the courts, where evidence gets scrutinized, authenticated and tested, they’re getting hammered.
NARRATOR:
—as the president was failing in his attempts to reverse the election—
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
All but now ending the president’s attempt to reverse his election loss.
NARRATOR:
—a new phase began.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
—and it comes as the Electoral College is set to cast their votes for president tomorrow.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
On Dec. 14, 2020, the presidential election was officially over. The Electoral College had cast its vote, Joe Biden was the president-elect of the United States.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The president has reached the end of the road. The Electoral College certified the election. His legal team and allies lost more than 50 challenges.
TIM HEAPHY:
The cases run their course. The Electoral College meets. People are saying no. So he’s running out of options, right? The sequence is increasingly desperate.
REP. JAMIE RASKIN (D-MD), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend.
PETER BAKER:
This meeting is one of the most extraordinary meetings that ever happened in that building, in more than 200 years of history. Here you had a president of the United States who had lost an election, in the Oval Office, being advised by a swarm of colorful characters, to say the least.
NARRATOR:
At the meeting: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell, by then both known for their embrace of conspiracy theories about the election.
SUSAN GLASSER:
You had people in there counseling Donald Trump that he should explicitly order martial law, that he should create a special czar. The person they had in mind for this was Sidney Powell, that she should become the special elections czar and be empowered to use the machinery of government itself to overturn the election.
NARRATOR:
As word of the meeting spread, senior White House lawyers rushed to the Oval Office, including White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I opened the door and I walked in. I saw Gen. Flynn. I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice.
MARC HARRIS:
President Trump’s close advisers, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Eric Herschmann, adviser to the president, and others who were in that room were saying to this group, “Well, what evidence do you even have that there was fraud in the election?”
NARRATOR:
The White House lawyers were insistent that the president shouldn’t declare martial law to overturn the election or empower Sidney Powell.
DEREK LYONS, Fmr. Trump Staff Secretary [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
At times there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other.
SIDNEY POWELL, Fmr. Trump attorney [Jan. 6th Committee deposition]:
Cipollone and Herschmann and whoever the other guy was showed nothing but contempt and disdain of the president.
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I remember the three of them were really sort of forcefully attacking me verbally. And we were asking one simple question, “Where’s the evidence?”
SIDNEY POWELL [Jan. 6th Committee deposition]:
I mean, if it had been me sitting in his chair, I would’ve fired all of them that night and had them escorted out of the building.
MARC HARRIS:
The president is taking all of this in, mostly a passive observer in this meeting. But he is watching this play out. His close advisers telling his lawyers, “You have no evidence that there was fraud in the election. And you've lost every case. Every case you've brought in court, you've lost.” And Sidney Powell says, “The judges were corrupt. That's why we lost.” And Eric Herschmann—supporter, close adviser to the president—says, “What are you talking about? Every case? The judges? We appointed many of those judges. You're saying they're all corrupt? Like, you people have nothing. You're crazy.”
ERIC HERSCHMANN, Fmr. Trump senior adviser [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I think that it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there. I mean, you have people walk in, it was late at night, it had been a long day. And what they were proposing I thought was nuts. Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything, kept on standing up and turning around and screaming at me. And at a certain point I had it with him. So I yelled back, “Sit your effing ass back down.”
RUDY GIULIANI [Jan. 6th Committee deposition]:
I’m going to categorically describe it as "you guys are not tough enough." Or maybe I put it another way: You’re a bunch of pussies. Excuse the expression.
SUSAN GLASSER:
At the end of it, Trump sees that there is so much opposition, including from his White House counsel. He understands that people would very likely resign, and so it seems that he reluctantly concludes that he’s not going to declare martial law.
NARRATOR:
Instead, late that night after the meeting had broken up, the president turned to Twitter.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on Jan. 6. Be there, will be wild!
JAMIE RASKIN:
Dissatisfied with his options, Donald Trump decided to call for a large and wild crowd on Wednesday, Jan. 6, the day when Congress would meet to certify the electoral votes.
PETER BAKER:
While he doesn’t actually go ahead with martial law, he is embracing a path that is, in fact, radical anyway. He’s not using the United States military, but he’s summoning his own army of supporters to Washington, some of whom were known to be extremists and in some cases violent, to help him stay in office, over the will of the voters.
ALEX JONES:
It’s Saturday, Dec. 19. And one of the most historic events in American history has just taken place. President Trump, in the early morning hours today, tweeted that he wants the American people to march on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6.
SUSAN GLASSER:
This wildly inflammatory tweet was a bullhorn that immediately went out to some of the more violent, organized Trump supporters. The Oath Keepers.
Oath Keeper Facebook message
MALE VOICE [reading Facebook message]:
He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild! Gentlemen, we are heading to D.C., pack your s---!
SUSAN GLASSER:
The Proud Boys.
Proud Boys Jan. 6 plans
MALE VOICE [reading Facebook message]:
It’s all or nothing, patriots. Boldness and bravery is necessary.
SUSAN GLASSER:
They heard it as a message from their leader: “Come to Washington.”
TIM MULVEY:
The “Will be wild!” tweet was the call in a call and response. They mobilized to come to Washington. These individuals came to Washington because Donald Trump told them to be there. Because Donald Trump told them the election was rigged. Because Donald Trump told them that someone was trying to take their votes away from them and silence their voices. They believed it.
TIM POOL, YouTube personality:
This could be Trump’s last stand. And it’s a time when he has specifically called on his supporters to arrive in D.C.
ALEX JONES:
The time for games is over. The time for action is now. Where were you when history called? Where were you when you and your children’s destiny and future was on the line?
NARRATOR:
For prosecutors, that tweet, the call to march on Washington, represents a crucial step in Trump’s criminal conspiracy.
KEN WHITE:
Jack Smith’s theory is that that was part of the attempt to obstruct the proceedings on Jan. 6. That Trump wanted a large, at least boisterous, if not violent crowd there to interfere with the proceedings, maybe stop them, put pressure on the people there. And that was one component of his obstruction.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
After cultivating widespread anger and resentment for weeks with his knowingly false claims of election fraud, the defendant urged his supporters to travel to Washington on the day of the certification proceeding.
QUINTA JURECIC:
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 ball game.
NARRATOR:
In their filings, Trump’s attorneys have argued that his statements were protected by the First Amendment.
Trump defense filing
MALE VOICE [reading defense filing]:
The indictment therefore attempts to criminalize core political speech and political advocacy, which is categorically impermissible under the First Amendment.
ROBERT RAY:
There should be room under the First Amendment and otherwise for the president to say an awful lot without having to tag him with a criminal offense. That’s why there's a First Amendment. You're given a big amount of latitude to say a lot of wild and crazy, even stupid, things, without having to worry about somebody afterwards deciding that you should be sent to jail for it.
DAVID FRENCH:
While prosecuting the president in an electoral context is new, prosecuting people for electoral fraud is not new at all. There are burdens of proof, there are legal tests, there are jury instructions. And if you can meet those elements, then you’re outside of the protection of the First Amendment. This is not a novel legal theory here.
Rule of Law
NARRATOR:
As Jan. 6 approached, Trump refocused his efforts closer to home, at his own Department of Justice.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Today we’ll tell the story of how the pressure campaign also targeted the federal agency charged with enforcement of our laws, the Department of Justice.
TOM JOSCELYN:
Trump tried to weaponize the Department of Justice against our own democracy. Bill Barr is the first one to stand up and say, “No, I’m not going to do that.” He steps aside, he resigns. And he’s replaced by Jeff Rosen and Richard Donoghue as a sort of a tag team here.
NARRATOR:
Rosen was a Republican political appointee who had served throughout Trump’s administration. Donoghue, also a Republican, had spent much of his career as government lawyer, in the Army and at the Department of Justice.
HANNAH MULDAVIN:
These are folks who were appointed by Donald Trump. They are aligned with him politically.
BYRON TAU:
Pretty much every day after Barr left Trump would call Jeffrey Rosen at the Justice Department or his deputy, Richard Donoghue, and try to put pressure on them to get the department to go along with this narrative that there were serious questions about the integrity of the election.
ADAM KINZINGER:
Mr. Donoghue, you had a conversation with the president where he raised false claim after false claim with you and Mr. Rosen. How did you respond to what you called a, quote, “stream of allegations”?
RICHARD DONOGHUE:
I wanted to try to cut through the noise because it was clear to us that there were a lot of people whispering in his ear, feeding him these conspiracy theories and allegations. As the president went through them I went piece by piece to say, “No that’s false. That is not true.” And to correct him, really, in a serial fashion as he moved from one theory to another.
ADAM KINZINGER:
How did the president respond to that, sir?
RICHARD DONOGHUE:
He responded very quickly and said essentially, "That’s not what I’m asking you to do. What I’m just asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen."
KEN WHITE:
He’s saying, “Don’t care about evidence, don’t care about facts, just say this, and then I’m going to be able to use that to give people political cover to do what I want them to do, which is give political cover to do what I want them to do, which is to overturn the vote."
ROBERT RAY:
I—Look, I think that's a very unfortunate statement on the president's part, but, it wouldn't be the first time that a president made a conscious decision to reject advice from his legal advisers, including the Department of Justice. Is that evidence of criminal misconduct? Could be. Could be. But sorting that out before a fair-minded jury, assuming that there's a fair-minded jury, is, I think, another question.
NARRATOR:
As it became clear Rosen and Donoghue wouldn’t go along, Trump looked for someone who would.
TOM JOSCELYN:
Trump turns to this mid-level Department of Justice employee, Jeff Clark, and he says, “Let’s put him in as the acting attorney general.”
SUSAN GLASSER:
He had been an environmental prosecutor. Clark’s official role has nothing to do with anything involving election fraud. He had no business at all being involved in this.
NARRATOR:
Clark drafted a letter that would claim publicly that the department was concerned about serious allegations of election fraud, even though his superiors had said there was no such evidence.
QUINTA JURECIC:
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.
NARRATOR:
According to testimony and evidence before the committee, Trump told Clark that he was going fire Rosen and make him the new attorney general.
SUSAN GLASSER:
Well, Clark makes an incredibly stupid mistake, which is that he tells Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, that he is going to be replaced.
JEFFREY ROSEN, Fmr. Acting Attorney General:
On Sunday, the 3rd, he told me that the president had offered him the job and that he was accepting it.
SUSAN GLASSER:
Clark tells him, “Oh, yeah, Trump is going to put me in.” And he gives notice to his opponents. That’s always a huge mistake, in Washington or anywhere else.
JEFFREY ROSEN:
Well, you know, on the one hand I wasn’t going to accept being fired by my subordinate, so I wanted to talk to the president directly.
MARC HARRIS:
And there was another crazy White House meeting where Rosen, Donoghue, meet with Clark, the president and other presidential advisers in the Oval Office for hours, fighting over whether Clark should be the attorney general.
ERIC HERSCHMANN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Jeff Clark was proposing that Jeff Rosen be replaced by Jeff Clark. And I thought the proposal was asinine.
Jan. 6th Cmte. interview
RICHARD DONOGHUE:
He repeatedly said to the president that if he was put in the seat, he would conduct real investigations that would, in his view, uncover widespread fraud.
ERIC HERSCHMANN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
And when he finished discussing what he planned on doing, I said, "Good f------"—excuse me, sorry—"effing luck, a--hole, congratulations. You just admitted your first step or act you take as attorney general would be committing a felony and violating Rule 6E. You’re clearly the right candidate for this job."
Jan. 6th Cmte. interview
RICHARD DONOGHUE:
And I said, “That’s right, you’re an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill?"
ADAM KINZINGER:
Mr. Donoghue, did you eventually tell the president that mass resignations would occur if he installed Mr. Clark and what the consequences would be?
RICHARD DONOGHUE:
I said, "Mr. President, within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions. What’s that going to say about you?"
SUSAN GLASSER:
In the end, that proves to be enough to stop Trump, very reluctantly, very reluctantly, from putting Clark in as his acting attorney general. Talk about a close call.
NARRATOR:
But for the January 6th Committee and federal prosecutors, the pressure on the Justice Department was another part of the conspiracy.
PETER BAKER, The New York Times:
He’s trying to enlist as part of the scheme these officials of the Justice Department—lawyers, officers of the court, people who have taken an oath to uphold the rule of law—and they won’t go along with it.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant and co-conspirators attempted to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations.
NARRATOR:
As with the pressure on state election officials, Trump’s attorneys have argued that he was just doing his job.
Trump defense filing
MALE VOICE [reading defense filing]:
Urging his own Department of Justice to do more to enforce the laws that it is charged with enforcing is unquestionably an official act of the president.
NARRATOR:
And the president is entitled to name anyone he wants as the attorney general.
Trump defense filing
MALE VOICE [reading defense filing]:
Deliberating about whether to replace the acting attorney general of the United States is also a core presidential function.
ROBERT RAY:
Jack Smith has made that judgment that that has crossed over the line into criminal conduct. But he is now going to have to prove that the president went over that line, whatever that line is.
Pressure on Pence
NARRATOR:
Having called his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, Trump turned his attention to a key player in his effort to stay in power: Vice President Mike Pence.
LIZ CHENEY:
Today we're focusing on President Trump’s relentless effort to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on Jan. 6.
TOM JOSCELYN:
The pressure campaign on Vice President Pence is the last gambit to keep Trump in power. I mean, basically, it’s the last lever that they can pull to try and steal the election.
NARRATOR:
It was based on an obscure legal theory: that the vice president had the power to overturn the election results.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Greg Jacob was counsel to Vice President Pence. He conducted a thorough analysis of the role of the vice president in a joint session of Congress under the Constitution. I now recognize the gentleman from California, Mr. Aguilar.
REP. PETE AGUILAR (D-CA), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
Mr. Jacob, did you go to the vice president’s residences on the morning of Jan. 6?
GREG JACOB:
Yes.
PETE AGUILAR:
And did the vice president have a call with the president that morning?
GREG JACOB:
He did. We were told that a call had come in from the president. The vice president stepped out of the room to take that call and no staff went with him.
PETE AGUILAR:
The president had several family members with him for that call. I’d like to show you what they and others told the select committee about that call along with never-before-seen photographs of the president on that call from the National Archives.
IVANKA TRUMP:
When I entered the office the second time he was on the telephone with who I later found out to be was the vice president.
MALE VOICE:
Could you hear the vice president or only hear the president’s end?
ERIC HERSCHMANN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Could only hear the president’s end. But at some point it started off as a calmer tone, and then it became heated.
JONATHAN KARL:
Donald Trump is focused on this idea that Pence wielding the gavel on Jan. 6 can single-handedly overturn the election because he was presiding over this final certification of the electoral votes.
IVANKA TRUMP:
The conversation was pretty heated.
PETER BAKER:
It’s an extraordinary thing, a president pressuring a vice president this way, insulting him that way, a person who had been nothing but loyal to him through months and years.
JAN. 6 COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
Did Ms. Trump share with you any more details about what had happened?
JULIE RADFORD, Fmr. Ivanka Trump chief of staff [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Her dad had just had an upsetting conversation with the vice president.
IVANKA TRUMP:
It was a different tone than I’d heard him take with the vice president before.
ERIC HERSCHMANN [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I mean, I think she was uncomfortable over the fact that there was obviously that type of interaction between the two of them.
JAN. 6 COMMITTEE ATTORNEY:
The word that she relayed to you that the president called the vice president. I apologize for being impolite, but do you remember what she said her father called him?
JULIE RADFORD [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
The P-word.
JONATHAN KARL:
Trump told Pence, "You have a choice. You can either be a patriot or you can be a pussy. Patriot means turn the election over to me. Being a pussy means being afraid to use your power."
PETE AGUILAR:
Mr. Jacob, how would you describe the demeanor of the vice president following the call with the president?
GREG JACOB:
When he came back into the room, I’d say that he was steely, determined, grim.
NARRATOR:
In almost four years, it was the first serious break between Pence and Trump.
PETER BAKER:
Donald Trump had every expectation that he would go along with him on this. Why wouldn’t he? He’d done everything else up until now. Pence is a vice president who has been exceedingly loyal to Trump. For three years, 11 months and however many days Mike Pence never, ever broke with the president.
NARRATOR:
Now Pence had to make a critical decision.
BILL KRISTOL:
Pence had just a clear conflict between what Trump wanted him to do and what the Constitution and the rule of law required him to do. I think he'd managed to navigate those conflicts in various ways over four years. Not always, in my view, the right way. But this was such a blatant transgression.
NARRATOR:
Pivotal to the plan was this man: John Eastman.
KEN WHITE:
Here’s this law professor, a member of the Federalists. His role was to provide a sort of a pseudo-intellectual cover for legal arguments.
TOM JOSCELYN:
And he manufactures this theory of the vice president’s power that says that the vice president of the United States is the "ultimate arbiter" on Jan. 6—those were his words, “the ultimate arbiter.” And Trump fully endorses Eastman’s plan.
MICHAEL LUTTIG, Fmr. U.S. Court of Appeals judge:
Well, John Eastman was one of my law clerks, perhaps 20, 25 years ago. I was greatly concerned that John had given the advice that he had given.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Judge J. Michael Luttig is one of the leading conservative legal thinkers in the country. He’s served in administrations of President Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
ROBERT DRAPER:
Judge Luttig had a kind of moral authority within the conservative community. A guy himself who had been short-listed for the Supreme Court. Was on a first-name basis with members of the Supreme Court.
JOHN WOOD, Jan. 6th Cmte. counsel:
Judge Luttig, I had the incredible honor of serving as one of your law clerks. Another person who did was John Eastman. And you’ve written that Dr. Eastman’s theory is, in your words, “incorrect at every turn.”
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Mr. Eastman said to the president that there was both legal as well as historical precedent for the vice president to overturn the election. This is Constitutional mischief. I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election.
I diagrammed his legal analysis, from beginning to end, and concluded that he was wrong at every turn of his analysis, every turn of his thinking.
PETE AGUILAR:
Judge Luttig, you wrote that the efforts by President Trump to overturn the 2020 election were, quote, “the most reckless, insidious and calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history.” What did you mean by that?
MICHAEL LUTTIG:
Exactly what I said, Congressman.
NARRATOR:
White House lawyers had also warned about Eastman’s theories. But Trump persisted, summoning the vice president to the Oval Office.
ROBERT COSTA, CBS News:
The Eastman plan. It was the last option for Donald Trump. Jan. 4, 2021. In the Oval Office, John Eastman, President Trump. They pull Vice President Pence in. He’s joined by his aides, Greg Jacob and Marc Short. Trump says to Pence, in front of others, “You have to now listen to John Eastman. You have to follow the Eastman plan—object to the certification.” It’s a pressure campaign. Pence says to Trump, “I’m going to do what I can, Mr. President. I want to help you out, but I’m listening to my lawyers.” He turns to Greg Jacob, his advisers, and he says, “They’re telling me I can’t do it. I can’t do it. It’s not constitutional. It’s not legal.” Trump says, “You can do it. Listen to John.”
PETE AGUILAR:
Mr. Jacob, during that meeting between the president and the vice president, what theories did Dr. Eastman present regarding the role of the vice president in counting the electoral votes?
GREG JACOB:
So during that meeting on the 4th, I think I raised the problem that Mr. Eastman’s proposals would violate several provisions of the Electoral Count Act. Mr. Eastman acknowledged that that was the case.
PETER BAKER, Co-author, The Divider:
Pence turns to Trump and he says, “Are you listening to this? Do you hear this?” But Trump isn’t listening to that. He just—he’s banging away on Pence. “You're the guy who’s going to keep us in power.”
NARRATOR:
Pence stood firm.
OLIVIA TROYE:
This is a man who has been so loyal for so long, but I think, at the end of the day, Mike Pence knew that he was going to uphold the Constitution. And he knew that he had no power to overturn and do the things that the president was saying.
BRENDAN BUCK, Conservative strategist:
The choice Mike Pence was facing was not really a choice. He had no choice to do anything other than count the votes that took place. But at this point, Donald Trump had surrounded himself with people who were feeding him more and more nonsense about how this process worked. It was just another situation of the president creating his own reality, deciding things that can happen that simply can’t, and set Mike Pence up for the fall in a way that he had really no choice in what to do.
NARRATOR:
The pressure on Pence figures prominently in the indictment of Trump.
Federal indictment
MALE VOICE [reading federal indictment]:
The defendant and co-conspirators attempted to enlist the vice president to use his ceremonial role at the Jan. 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results.
NARRATOR:
John Eastman is listed as one of those unindicted co-conspirators, though he still defends the advice he gave the president.
KEN WHITE:
Trump’s interactions with Pence, direct and indirect, are crucial. They really go to showing that part of the way he obstructed justice was trying to wrongfully pressure Pence, who had an official task, not to undertake that task.
ROBERT RAY:
Is the fact that Donald Trump asked him to do that, is that criminal? Again, I think you’ve got to be really careful there. I don’t think that’s something you want to make criminal on its own. The mere ask to say, "I want you to not certify the results." It doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a violation of the criminal law. It depends on context and whatever other evidence the government has.
MARC HARRIS:
Whether or not a particular act that the president is alleged to have engaged in is in and of itself a crime isn’t really going to be the question at that trial. It’s going to be whether that act was in furtherance of a criminal objective. All of these acts, all of the things that we’ve been taking about, they don’t have to be illegal in and of themselves. The crime is a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
The Insider
MALE NEWSREADER:
There’s a lot of anticipation for today’s hearings. The committee says it will present newly obtained evidence and testimony.
NARRATOR:
In the midst of the January 6th Committee’s hearings, a dramatic moment.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Live testimony from a White House adviser who was right there in the West Wing on Jan. 6.
NARRATOR:
A surprise witness.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
During the Watergate hearings there was only one surprise witness. It was Alexander Butterfield. While in the Jan. 6 hearings, the surprise witness is Cassidy Hutchinson.
NARRATOR:
Cassidy Hutchinson, a 25-year-old White House staffer.
ADAM KINZINGER:
The most intimidating thing is all those cameras sitting one foot from her face taking pictures of her.
ROBERT DRAPER:
This is a young woman standing in a setting that could almost feel amphitheatrical.
HANNAH MULDAVIN:
I was with Cassidy on the day of her testimony. During it, I’m sitting behind her. She was incredibly nervous, I think like any normal person would be to do this. There was a time beforehand where she wanted to back out, because it was really scary. To go up against the president of the United States and speak the truth is something that only a few people will know.
ADAM KINZINGER:
She was a hardcore Trump loyalist. And she’s getting ready to destroy the tribe that she gets her identity from. I’ve been there, right? I’ve been in that moment. It was pretty awe-inspiring, to be quite honest with you.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
I will now swear in our witness.
ROBERT DRAPER:
Knowing how Trump had become so intimidating a person for people who crossed him. And this one young woman, doing what so many other much older, frequently male staffers wouldn’t do, which is come forward and testifying truthfully under oath.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
—the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, Fmr. Trump Special Assistant:
I do.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
Thank you, you may be seated.
NARRATOR:
Inside the White House, Hutchinson had been a top aide to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and in the room during key events the committee was investigating.
ROBERT DRAPER:
Hutchinson was a crucial witness in terms of helping to shine a light on the president’s state of mind because so few people were capable of doing that.
NARRATOR:
Hutchinson revealed details about Trump’s plans for Jan. 6
LIZ CHENEY:
On Jan. 2, four days before the attack on our Capitol, President Trump’s lead lawyer, Mr. Giuliani, was meeting with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others. Ms. Hutchinson, we understand that you walked Mr. Giuliani out of the White House that night, and he talked to you about Jan. 6. What do you remember him saying?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON:
As Mr. Giuliani and I were walking to his vehicle that evening, he looked at me and said something to the effect of, “Cass, are you excited for the 6th? It’s going to be a great day.” I remember looking at him saying, “Rudy, could you explain what’s happening on the 6th?” He had responded something to the effect of, “We’re going to the Capitol. It’s going to be great. The president’s going to be there. He’s going to look powerful.”
PETER BAKER:
She clearly had nothing to gain by doing it. She was telling the truth as she saw it. This poised, composed young woman with no obvious axe to grind and she’s telling her story. It’s the most powerful moment, I think, in the entire hearings.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON:
And I found Mr. Meadows in his office, scrolling through his phone. I remember leaning against the doorway and saying, "I just had an interesting conversation with Rudy, Mark. It sounds like we’re going to go to the Capitol." He didn’t look up from his phone and said something to the effect of, “There’s a lot going on, Cass, but I don’t know. Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6.”
CROWD [chanting]:
USA! USA! USA!
MALE NEWSREADER:
Tensions are running high—30,000 supporters of the president are gathering right now.
MALE NEWSREADER:
They’re having what they’re calling a “Stop the Steal” rally.
NARRATOR:
And on Jan. 6, Hutchinson was in the president’s inner circle.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
I think the campaign is aware that Jan. 6 would be the last stand. Once that certification happens on the 6th, that it’s really over.
LIZ CHENEY:
Miss Hutchinson, did you go to the rally in the presidential motorcade?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON:
I—I was there, yes.
LIZ CHENEY:
And were you backstage with the president and other members of his staff and family?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON:
I was.
NARRATOR:
It was in the tent backstage that Hutchinson heard crucial evidence of what Trump knew about the potential for violence that day.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
When we were in the offstage announce area tent behind the stage he was very concerned about the shot—meaning the photograph that we would get, because the rally space wasn’t full.
TIM MULVEY:
The former president was unhappy with the crowd size. We learned that some of the crowd size inside the barricade was due to the fact that people were unwilling to pass through the magnetometers, presumably because they had—they were carrying contraband—weapons.
LIZ CHENEY:
Several thousand members of the crowd who refused to go through the mags watched from the lawn near the Washington Monument.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I overheard the president say something to the effect of “I don’t effing care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in, take the effing mags away.”
TIM MULVEY:
There was awareness that there were weapons in that crowd, and that Trump didn’t care because, as he put it, “They’re not here for me.” Which begs the question, well, who were they here for?
LIZ CHENEY:
Let’s reflect on that for a moment. President Trump was aware that a number of the individuals in the crowd had weapons and were wearing body armor. And here’s what President Trump instructed the crowd to do.
DONALD TRUMP:
We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down—anyone you want, but I think right here—we’re going to walk down to the Capitol.
CROWD [chanting]:
Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!
DONALD TRUMP:
And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.
TOM JOSCELYN:
He told them to fight over and over and over again. And he told them if they don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore. What could be more existential to his supporters than, "if I don’t fight here and now, America’s gone"? That’s what he’s telling them.
NARRATOR:
And he focused the crowd on his last hope for overturning the election—Mike Pence.
DONALD TRUMP:
And Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country.
TEMIDAYO AGANGA-WILLIAMS:
He has not been able to convince Pence directly, but he’s seen the crowd for him there, and he was willing to continue the pressure campaign with an army.
DONALD TRUMP:
And if you’re not I’m going to be very disappointed in you, I will tell you right now.
JONATHAN KARL:
Look at that speech, at how many times he invokes the name Mike Pence. Over and over and over again. He is telling that crowd not once, not twice, not three times, but many times that the thing they want most, which is to keep Joe Biden from becoming president, that the one person that can make it happen is Mike Pence.
DONALD TRUMP:
Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
CHARLIE SYKES:
It’s important not just to focus on what he said, but on the entire context—the way he had been spreading the Big Lie, that he had gathered people together, that he called the mob to Washington, D.C., for Jan. 6, specifically for this moment. This was sponsored by the president of the United States, who had lied to his own supporters and convinced them that something could happen on Jan. 6 that would change the outcome of the election.
NARRATOR:
While the special counsel did not directly charge Trump with inciting violence, prosecutors have pointed to his speech repeatedly.
Prosecution filing
MALE VOICE [reading prosecution filing]:
That day was the culmination of the defendant’s criminal conspiracies to overturn the legitimate results of the presidential election, when the defendant directed a large and angry crowd to the Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification proceeding.
KEN WHITE:
The First Amendment standard for incitement is extremely difficult to reach. But what the special counsel does instead is wrap it into the concept of obstruction, that Trump is whipping up the crowd in order to obstruct what’s going on in the Senate.
Federal indictment
DONALD TRUMP:
So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Ave.
KEN WHITE:
That’s the way you build the outrage over the speech and over the riot into causes of action, into criminal charges that the special counsel knows that he can prove.
NARRATOR:
Donald Trump has insisted that his speech that day was “totally appropriate” and called the crowd “peaceful people.” And his defenders question whether a jury should sit in judgment of a president’s speech at all.
ROBERT RAY:
I do not find that charge to be sustainable, irrespective of whether a jury could return a verdict on it. I do not find that charge to be sustainable on appeal for First Amendment reasons. I just—that’s a bad idea. You don’t like what happened there, about what the president said? Remove him from office. OK? Don’t elect him president of the United States ever again. That’s the solution to that one.
DAVID FRENCH:
I do understand the argument that prosecuting a president criminally is incredibly divisive. But the Constitution as it currently stands and federal statutes as they currently stand do not exempt the president from the operation of law. If you don’t believe the president should be subject to law, amend the Constitution. But until it’s amended, the president is a citizen just like the rest of us.
187 Minutes
NARRATOR:
For the January 6th Committee, a crucial question.
LIZ CHENEY:
What exactly was our commander in chief doing during the hours of violence? Today we address precisely that issue. And I now recognize the gentlewoman from Virginia.
REP. ELAINE LURIA (D-VA), Member, Jan. 6th Cmte.:
From the time when President Trump ended his speech, until the moment when he finally told the mob to go home, a span of 187 minutes—more than three hours. What you will learn—
ADAM KINZINGER:
So Elaine Luria and I decided that to lead the 187-minute hearing because we were both veterans on the committee. Elaine and I had taken the oath twice, as a member of Congress and as a military member. And I think it was important for us to just hopefully express that outrage of how there are people that are willing to die for this country, and this guy couldn’t even follow through on his basic oath to defend the constitutional branch of government.
ADAM KINZINGER:
Here’s what’ll be clear by the end of this hearing: President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home. He chose not to act.
NARRATOR:
The 187 minutes began as Trump left the stage and demanded that his motorcade drive him to the Capitol.
ELAINE LURIA:
The president was still adamant to go to the Capitol, but his Secret Service detail was equally determined to not let him go. That led to a heated argument with the detail that delayed the departure of the motorcade to the White House.
NARRATOR:
Later, Cassidy Hutchinson heard reports about what happened.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON:
So once the president had gotten into the vehicle with Bobby Engel, who was the head of Mr. Trump’s security detail, he thought that they were going up to the Capitol. And when Bobby had relayed to him, “We’re not. We don’t have the assets to do it. It’s not secure. We’re going back to the West Wing,” the president had a very strong, very angry response to that. The president said something to the effect of, “I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.” To which Bobby responded, “Sir, we have to go back to the West Wing.”
SOUMYA DAYANANDA:
He saw this crowd and he wanted to participate in some manner, whether it was leading the crowd or being part of the crowd or going. But certainly there was a level of frustration when he was told that he couldn’t. That he was so focused on disrupting the joint session that day, he himself wanted to go.
NARRATOR:
When he couldn’t go to the Capitol with the crowd, the president returned to the White House.
PETER BAKER, The New York Times:
In some ways, the most telling portrayal of the president and his intent here is not what happens in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol, but what he does or doesn’t do when it’s taking place and in the aftermath of it.
Jan. 6th Cmte. exhibit
ELAINE LURIA:
President Trump went to the private dining room off the Oval Office. Witnesses told us that on Jan. 6, President Trump sat in his usual spot, at the head of the table, facing a television hanging on the wall. We know from the employee that the TV was tuned to Fox News all afternoon.
FOX NEWS ANCHOR:
This is real, it’s happening on Capitol Hill. We’re trying to get some ground truth to exactly what’s happening on the ground. To your point broadly—
PETER BAKER:
He's in that little private dining room off the Oval Office. The TV is on, he’s watching it take place. He knows what’s happening; he understands what’s happening. And his instinct is to, in effect, egg them on.
ELAINE LURIA:
At 1:49, he tweeted out a link to the recording of his Ellipse speech. This was the same speech in which he knowingly sent an armed mob to the Capitol, but President Trump made no comment about the lawlessness and the violence.
FOX NEWS ANCHOR:
They’re locking down the Capitol complex; no one is allowed in or out. Now just a few moments ago—
SOUMYA DAYANANDA:
The White House is just in shock. Many of them testified that they tried to get the president to take some sort of action to get the crowd to leave the Capitol.
NARRATOR:
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was one of Trump’s advisers urging action.
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response, statement, public statement, that people need to leave the Capitol now.
MALE VOICE:
Did you continue, Mr. Cipollone, to push for a stronger statement?
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Yes.
MALE VOICE:
Were you joined in that effort by Ivanka Trump?
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Yes.
MALE VOICE:
Eric Herschmann?
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Yes.
MALE VOICE:
By Mark Meadows?
PAT CIPOLLONE [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
Yes.
PETER BAKER:
These aides and lawyers rushing into this private dining room, trying to get him to do something, trying to get him to speak out, trying to get him to stop the attack. And he won’t do it.
CHARLIE SYKES:
He was enjoying this. These were his people. He loved them. And they were accomplishing something that he wanted to have accomplished, which was to delay and derail the certification of this election.
NARRATOR:
The committee saw it as evidence of what the president had been planning all along.
TIM HEAPHY:
It says volumes about the president’s intent. It suggests that the president is reluctant to call this off, that he sees his people fighting as a potentially positive thing. His own daughter is encouraging him to more forcefully stop the violence. And the fact that he does not, for hours, after being aware of the violence, tell people to go home? Really, really powerful evidence of his intent.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Now, look at what you’ve got now. You have protesters inside the Capitol Building.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The other big question is, where is the vice president?
SECRET SERVICE [on radio]:
Hold, they’ve entered the building. Hold.
NARRATOR:
The Secret Service rushed Pence away from the crowd.
SECRET SERVICE [on radio]:
Copy.
If we lose any more time, we have—we may lose the ability to leave.
NARRATOR:
With the Capitol overrun, the president fired off a tweet about his vice president.
MALE VOICE [reading Trump social media post]:
Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution.
MALE JAN. 6 PROTESTER:
Is that true? I’m hearing reports that Pence caved. I’m telling you, if Pence caved, we’re going to drag motherf------ through the streets.
TIM MULVEY:
As that tweet goes out at 2:24 p.m., his supporters see it, and there is an intense surge in the rioting. That tweet threw fuel on the fire.
MALE JAN. 6 PROTESTER [on bullhorn]:
Mike Pence has betrayed the United States of America!
CROWD [chanting]:
Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!
TIM MULVEY:
The mob goes down there, to the Capitol, and chants, “Hang Mike Pence!” And they actually build a gallows out in front of the Capitol. I mean, they meant it.
CHARLIE SYKES:
I can only imagine what Mike Pence must have thought when the full weight of the betrayal must have become so palpable for him. When he must have thought, “It has come to this, that the one moment as vice president where I have stood on principle, I am being treated as the enemy. And they've come for me. And the president is attacking me." Not only is he not calling to say, "Are you OK?" He’s egging it on. It's, it is—it is an amazing moment.
NARRATOR:
At the White House, Pat Cipollone was growing concerned for the vice president.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON [Jan. 6th Committee interview]:
I remember Pat saying, “Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice president to be effing hung.” And Mark had responded something to the effect of, “You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
PETER BAKER:
When the crowd is chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” he says, “Well, maybe our people have it right. Maybe Mike deserves it.”
SUSAN GLASSER, The New Yorker:
Donald Trump embraced the whirlwind on Jan. 6. He, in his speech at the Ellipse, in his tweets afterwards, in his indifference to the pleas of his family and advisers to do something more, to call them up, he seemed to revel in the chaos and violence that he himself had unleashed.
CROWD [chanting]:
Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!
SECRET SERVICE [on radio]:
Copy? Clear. We’re coming out now, all right? Make a way.
SOUMYA DAYANANDA:
We had the footage from inside the Capitol where Pence is rushed down the steps by his Secret Service detail along with his family.
BENNIE THOMPSON:
To his credit, he did not take the Secret Service advice and leave the Capitol. He stayed. He provided direction to what was going on. He offered the stability at the moment that the president refused to do.
NARRATOR:
Finally, police began to regain control of the Capitol.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The Capitol grounds have been secured. Police had to use tear gas.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
Troops are deployed around the Capitol perimeter to prevent any more violence of what we saw this afternoon.
MALE WHITE HOUSE STAFFER:
When you’re ready, sir.
ELAINE LURIA:
President Trump finally gave in and went out to the Rose Garden at 4:03.
DONALD TRUMP:
You tell me when.
MALE WHITE HOUSE STAFFER:
When you’re ready, sir.
ADAM KINZINGER:
For 187 minutes, he was sitting there watching the news wondering if his people would win, until he saw that law enforcement had turned the tide. And only when law enforcement turned the tide did he then begrudgingly try to cover his backside and look like he was against the violence in the first place.
DONALD TRUMP:
Who’s behind me?
MALE WHITE HOUSE STAFFER:
He’s gone. He’s gone around. We’re all clear now.
DONALD TRUMP:
I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had a election—let me say. I know your pain. I know your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We to have order.
TOM JOSCELYN:
When he ultimately issues this video, this isn’t a guy who’s apologetic for any of this. This isn’t somebody who says, “Oops, this is gone awry or this has gone too far.” Quite the opposite.
DONALD TRUMP:
So go home. We love you. You’re very special. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.
JONATHAN KARL:
“We love you. You are special.” These are people that have assaulted the U.S. Capitol Building, have attacked Capitol police officers, are trying to stop the proceedings of Congress. And Trump does tell them to go home, but then immediately adds, “We love you. You are special.”
NARRATOR:
Special Counsel Jack Smith has cited those 187 minutes in his conspiracy case against Trump.
Prosecution filing
MALE VOICE [reading prosecution filing]:
The defendant’s knowing and corrupt intent is clear from his actions, and purposeful inaction, during the attack on the Capitol.
KEN WHITE:
The prosecutor is going to show that as, he got the result he hoped for—a big scene, a riot. And then, of course he wasn’t going to do anything to stop the riot because he had use to make of it. And that use was to use the people’s fear to try to get them to do what he wanted.
The Looming Trial
NARRATOR:
After more than a year, the Jan. 6 select committee issued criminal referrals against Donald Trump.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
For the first time in American history, Congress has referred a former president to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution.
NARRATOR:
Jack Smith’s indictment followed.
MALE NEWSREADER:
A first in U.S. history: a former president criminally charged with—
MALE NEWSREADER:
Special Counsel Jack Smith called the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol an attack that was fueled by lies.
NARRATOR:
The criminal indictment contained it all: the false claims of fraud. The demands on Rusty Bowers. The phone call to Secretary Raffensperger. The conspiracy theories about Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. The pressure on the Department of Justice. Pushing Vice President Pence to overturn the election. And the president’s actions on Jan. 6.
But a criminal trial will be very different from the committee’s hearings.
KEN WHITE:
A committee hearing is not a federal court trial. There's barely any rules, other than what the committee says there are. The rules of evidence don't apply, and they will very much apply in federal court. There are numerous privileges and other barriers to getting in evidence that don't apply. So you can't look at the testimony in front of the January 6th Committee and assume that the same testimony can come in at trial. The prosecutor has to figure out, OK, what parts of that can I get in, will the judge let me do?
SUSAN GLASSER:
There’s so not a script for this. [Laughs] It’s hard to imagine how it’s going to play out. Donald Trump is going to be the defendant and the candidate all wrapped into one. It’s just unprecedented.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The state Supreme Court has ruled to remove Donald Trump from the state’s 2024 ballot.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Trump’s attorneys say that he is immune from prosecution because he was president of the United States.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
There is a real possibility the trial will be delayed. The question is, how long?
DAVID FRENCH:
Trump’s best strategy right now is delay.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Donald Trump is trying to do everything possible to delay this trial until after the election.
DAVID FRENCH:
Because he’s a very unusual defendant in terms of his potential power. If he wins the election, he can just order the DOJ to drop the case entirely. So he has an enormous personal incentive to win the presidency just to get himself out of legal jeopardy.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Donald Trump I think understands that his best chance to avoid conviction and stay out of jail is to return to the White House.
NARRATOR:
Trump’s defense is aimed not just at the courts, but also the voters.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
About six in 10 Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen.
MALE NEWSREADER:
Republican voters don’t believe Jan. 6 was that big of a deal.
NARRATOR:
Now a looming prosecution. A presidential election. Democracy on trial.
FEMALE NEWSREADER:
The 2024 election is one where American democracy very much is on the table.
MALE NEWSREADER:
From the rule of law to American democracy itself, too much is at stake.
