REP. BENNIE THOMPSON: The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will be in order.
CAROLINE EDWARDS: What I saw was just a war scene. It was something like I’d seen out of the movies.
REP. STEPHANIE MURPHY: So why did you decide to march to the Capitol?
STEPHEN AYRES: Well, basically, you know, the President ... told everyone to head on down.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: As an American, I was disgusted.
REP. LIZ CHENEY: Can a President who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?
RANEY ARONSON-RATH, HOST: Last week, the congressional hearings into the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol wrapped up for the summer after weeks of testimony. Among the key witnesses to appear before the committee was J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and renowned conservative legal scholar.
J. MICHAEL LUTTIG: Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: On this special edition of the FRONTLINE Dispatch, excerpts from an extensive interview with Judge Luttig - and with Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the committee investigating January 6th.
The interviews were conducted by producer Mike Wiser for our upcoming documentary, Lies, Politics and Democracy
I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer and editor-in-chief of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: We’ll start with Judge Luttig on the critical moment on the eve of January 6, when Vice President Mike Pence's personal lawyer called for his help.
MIKE WISER: And then you get a call from Richard Cullen. Can you tell me about that?
J. MICHAEL LUTTIG: Yes. On January 4th in the night, certainly in the middle of the evening in Colorado, which is where my wife and I were, Richard called. Richard Cullen is a longtime and dear friend of mine, and had been Vice President Pence's outside counsel for several years at that point. … I knew on January 4th that Richard was very close to the vice president. So my wife and I were having dinner, and Richard calls. It was nothing at all because Richard and I had been talking multiple times every day or two for two plus years over everything that was going on in Washington, just because we're that close friends.
So the call itself was nothing. He called and he said – he calls me judge, which is fine. And he said, "Judge, what are you doing?" I said, "Well, Elizabeth and I are having dinner. What's up?" And he said, "Do you know John Eastman?" And I said, "Yes." And he says, "Well, what can you tell me about John?" And I said, "Well, John was one of my law clerks perhaps 20, 25 years ago. He's a professor, an academic," I think I said, "At Chapman Law School in California." And I said, "Why are you asking?" And he said, "You don't have any idea, do you?" And I said no.
And he said, "Well, John Eastman is advising the president and the vice president that the vice president on January 6th can essentially overturn the 2020 election unilaterally." I said to Richard, "Well, Richard, you can tell the vice president that I said that he has no such authority at all and that he must accept and the Congress must count the Electoral College votes as they have been cast, and that he is not free to not count any of the votes, count other votes, or otherwise discount any of the votes that have been cast. If that's to be done at all, that's an authority and a power that's vested in the Congress of the United States, and certainly not in the single person of the presiding officer of the Senate, which is the vice president of the United States."
And Richard said, "He knows that that's your view." And I said, "Okay." Okay. And I said, "Well, look Richard, of course I understand the gravity of this. I'd be willing to help the vice president in any way I can, and please tell him that." And we hung up. My wife, having heard only one side of that conversation, said something like, "Oh my god, what was that?"
MIKE WISER: I mean, you've worked in the office of legal counsel, the White House. I mean, there's lawyers, there's institutions inside the executive branch. There's a Senate parliamentarian who you would think would be activated at this moment. What does it mean that you are being called?
J. MICHAEL LUTTIG: I understood immediately why I was being called because I understood everything about the process and the individuals involved. But at that point, none of that was relevant. I mean, we are at January 5. And I had been following the lead up to that day intensely for three or four days. And as I remember, the vice president was going to meet for lunch with the president in the Oval Office. And at that time, we now know the vice president was going to tell the president one last time that he was not going to do what the president wanted and that he was going to accept and count the Electoral College votes as they had been cast.
MIKE WISER: So, let's go to the second phone call that you get the next day from Richard Cullen.
J. MICHAEL LUTTIG: So, I'm still in Colorado with my wife. I had had my breakfast and I was having my cup of coffee probably around 6:00, I think no later than 6:30 Colorado time. And Richard called. And he said, "Judge, we need to help the vice president." And I said, "Okay, what do we need? What does he need?"
I believe in that first call, Richard told me that the vice president was going to meet with the president for lunch that day, that afternoon of January 5th. And my understanding, I think then, but I know subsequently, was that the vice president was going to tell the president one last time that he was not going to do what the president wanted him to do the next day.
And Richard said, "We have to do something very quickly." I understood that to mean before the vice president met with the president in the noontime hour. And again, it would've been 8:30, 8:00, 8:30 East Coast Time. And I said, "Richard, I understand the momentous nature of the moment and the gravity of the moment. But I don't have any idea even what you're talking about." And Richard said, "Well, judge, I don't really either." And then he said, "Somehow, we need to get your voice out to the country." And I said, "Okay. On what?" believing I knew what, but I just wanted to hear him say it.
And he said, you know, "On what the vice president must do tomorrow." And I said, "Okay." I literally said, "Richard, as you know, I don't even have a job right now. I'm unemployed. I'm retired. I haven’t been in public life for, you know, 17 years, and I haven’t been in political life for 35 years. I don't have a fax machine. There's no possible way that I can, you know, get my voice out to the country. And besides," I said to Richard, "I'm a nobody. Nobody cares what I think anyway. So what's this all about?" And Richard said, "We need to get your voice out to the country very, very quickly somehow." And I said, "Okay." And he said, "I'll call you back in ten minutes." So I continued drinking my coffee and brainstorming and thinking as seriously as I can think about anything. And he calls back in ten minutes and he says, "So, what are you going to do?"
And I said, "I have no idea, Richard. I haven’t had a single thought. Just think yourself about what you're asking me to do: get my voice out to the country. How is that even possible? And you want this done immediately." I said, "Richard, I honestly don't even have a thought as to what to do." And he said, "I'll call you back in five minutes." So he calls back in five minutes, and he said, "So, you thought of anything yet?" And I said, "Well, I've had one thought." I said, "I just opened a Twitter account within the past week or two or three. I guess I could tweet something. But Richard, I don't know how to tweet something." And he said, "This is perfect." He says, "You have to do this right now."
And I said, "Richard, I don't know how to tweet something." And he said, "You just have to do it." He said, "I'll call you right back." So I'm sitting there, still in my dining room having my cup of coffee. And all I had there with me was my iPhone. So I typed out the words that I ended up tweeting and that everyone knows right now. And I typed them out essentially verbatim as I tweeted them. And then I go downstairs to my office to try to figure out how to tweet this. I had just learned how to tweet 100 and whatever characters you're allowed, but no more. And I obviously had a lot more to say than 140 characters, or however many. And so, I was panicked about all of this.
But specifically about that. You know, my wife and kids had always said that there's no way I could be on Twitter because it's not possible for me to say less than 140 characters, you know? But there I was on the morning of January 5th and I had to do this. So I did the best I could. And what that meant was I copied and pasted from my iPhone an email that I sent to myself on the iPhone that included the text of the tweet. Then, I copied and pasted that on my laptop into a Word document because a Word document was the only thing I knew how to do. So then I'm sitting there, and I'm nervous, right? I don't get stressed. But that's the word that would communicate, you know, to others. I was stressed out, not just because of the moment but because I didn't know how to do this. So I just thought, okay, the first thing I got to do is divide this long Word document into 140 or 180 character individual tweets.
So I go through all that rigmarole. And I proofread it like I've never proofread anything in my life, which is not to say that there are not typos in it as I tweeted them.
It's just that I gave it all I had. And then, I took a deep breath and I tweeted it.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: That was former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig in an interview with Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE's upcoming documentary Lies, Politics, and Democracy.On January 6, Vice President Pence certified the votes of the electoral college, defying pressure from President Trump. In a letter, Pence cited Judge Luttig's reasoning, saying that he had no unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not."When we come back, we'll hear an excerpt from Mike Wiser's interview with Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans serving on the House January 6th committee, on what he hopes the hearings will accomplish.
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: It is a stain on our history. It is a dishonor to all those who sacrificed and died in service of our democracy.
MIKE WISER: So let's go to that moment, where the President walks out in the early hours after the election and says, “Frankly, I did win the election.” How important a moment is that in everything that would follow?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: When the President came out on election night and basically said, “I won. You know, stop counting the votes,” that for me, that was it. You know, I had condemned a lot of the President's words leading up to that, about undermining democracy. But the second he tweeted something along the lines of, “Stop counting the votes,” or something, I knew it was going to be a huge problem. And I knew this could be a President that's not, for the first time, at least in modern history, willing to accept election results.
And the problem is, when you have a base, people that are so faithful to you, that have put their trust in you, and now you don't have a counter to that, you don't have a Kevin McCarthy out there saying otherwise, instead you have him being silent in the beginning, and then ultimately supporting those conspiracy theories, it's not hard to think that people wouldn't buy into it. And, by the way, every American, if you truly believe the election was stolen, or there is some secret, you know, society running government, I mean it's really in our nature for a revolution. So January 6th should have been no surprise to anybody.
MIKE WISER: How important was the choice that members of the party faced in that moment right after the election in those first few hours?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: So right after the election, I mean every member of Congress, Senate, any party leader, they faced a choice on, you know, what position they were going to take. Too many of them took the position of, we're going to at least tolerate these conspiracy theories. And then we'll go through to, when all the lawsuits are exhausted, and then the President will accept the outcome. And at every moment, even in this kind of post-election period, there was always something over the horizon that people convinced themselves would stop the insanity. And it never did, I mean even after January 6th.
And those were—those were very defining moments, right after the election. And another defining decision was, frankly, Mitch McConnell making the decision to not go after the President's conspiracies, because Mitch McConnell needed him onboard to win the two Georgia Senate seats that he ultimately lost anyway. I heard from a specific Senator, who said, “You know, Mitch has told us to stay quiet against the President in this period, because we need him for Georgia” And I think that led to a lot of what otherwise would be kind of influential Senators, at least countering the voice of Donald Trump, being silent. And silence is complicity.
MIKE WISER: how much has the caucus changed since January 6th?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: for me, the Republican caucus is unrecognizable. Um, you know, there was a fundraiser for the opponent to Liz Chaney, and I saw a hundred of my colleagues on it, you know, 50 of which blew me away that they would do it.
And as I talked to most of them, they just said, well, Kevin asked me to do it. And in essence, he threatened my committee position. If I didn't, uh, yeah, that's not a caucus or a party I recognize anymore. Um, it's sad, but again, you. I choose to remain optimistic someday. I hope it's sooner than later, but it may be later, uh, this generation of people that are still kind of mired in their political battles of 50 years when they move on and pass that torch to the next generation.
That's a little more optimistic and is kind of sick of politics as usual America will be back in, in, in full bore.
MIKE WISER: So. You that moment where, uh, the Republican national committee censures you, um, and the reference to, and Liz Chaney and the reference to January 6th is legitimate political discourse. What does that, what does that say about where we are?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: It says that there's a lot of dumbasses running the RNC.
No, that moment says to me, you know, look, I didn't care if I was censured by the RNC. It was the last thing in the world. I really did care about. um, but it was so like kind of delicious when you had the legitimate political discourse, because it's like, even when you're censuring Adam Kinzinger and Liz Chaney, you still can't help yourself from looking completely out of touch and insane.
And that's exactly what happened. I'm glad frankly, that happened because I think it exposed the mindset. And I think the most important thing is that of all those members there, that resolution passed unanimously of all those members there, they didn't all believe it, but there were people that probably supported Liz Cheney and I, that we're too scared to speak out.
And that to me is a microcosm of exactly what's happened in the party for the last decade. Some people with reasonable beliefs are too scared to speak out because they'll be overcome by the mob, which is why Liz Cheney and I are pretty lonely out here with not a lot of colleagues that are internally cheering what we're doing, but too scared to speak out.
MIKE WISER: And when you look at, when you look at everything that has changed since then, um, efforts on voting, who's running for secretary of state or governor. Um, how concerned are you about how things are changing about the, um, integrity of the next election and whether we'll be honored?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: You know, I'm really concerned about the future because I think once, you know, when we hold kind of standards as sacred, you know, the standard that if you're a Republican or a democratic local elected.
You're gonna put party away and you're gonna count votes, right. When that gets violated, once it's gone. Um, you know, we always say out here, when you throw out a norm, that norm never comes back. And I, and I fear that when you start kind of making it a litmus test to say, I would've overthrown the election for Donald Trump and you win, that becomes now what you have to do, you know?
And, and it won't be long until the Democrats are, you know, doing the same thing. Trust me. That's how it always works. So, yeah, I'm very concerned about the future.
MIKE WISER: What role did you hope that the commission and then eventually becomes the select committee would play? And, and, and what did you think of, of Republican opposition from McConnell, from McCarthy um, to, to, to a investigation, a bipartisan investigation?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: Well, I think the opposition was insane. Um, I think we could have had, you know, a complete accountability of what happened outside of politics, which is what we all wanted. Um, and so in essence, to support and then oppose the commission was silly. And I don't understand it.
My hope is through all this investigation though. Uh, and now that it's become a select committee, is that we can just give a historical record to the American people. Look, I don't know if we're gonna convince anybody to change their mind. In the near term, I think some, but I, you know, I don't expect to, to that.
It's gonna be some Eureka moment, except I know that in five or 10 years, when my kid’s in school, he's gonna learn the truth about January 6th and he's gonna learn it because of the work we've done. Conspiracies always die out eventually. Um, and so that's, what's important to me is the legacy we're leaving, uh, for the truth.
MIKE WISER: Can you just describe what it is at risk? If this moment goes wrong, what, what is on the line?
REP. ADAM KINZINGER: Look, if this moment goes wrong. We're back to we're, we're gonna be fighting a politics that just is about power and not about principle. Uh, look at a lot of failed democracies or struggling democracies. And that's what you see. You see politics that's about vindictiveness or about power, about violating the law.
That's what's at stake. We need truth. We need to get back to the basic commitment to democratic norms. That's what's at stake at this moment.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thanks so much to Mike Wiser and the Kirk Documentary Group for conducting these interviews. To watch the interviews with J. Michael Luttig and Adam Kinzinger in full, part of FRONTLINE’s Transparency Project, head to frontline.org.
The new documentary Lies, Politics, and Democracy premieres Tuesday, September 6th on PBS.
Thanks for listening.
