Jordan
As you likely know, roughly 18 months ago, the United States had some issues with the peaceful transfer of presidential power. That much was obvious on January 6th, the day it happened.
In the time since, it has only grown more apparent that an attempt to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory was much deeper and wider than a bunch of yahoos storming the Capitol building.
News Clip
In a stunning display from a sitting President, Donald Trump launching an assault on the integrity of the election, unleashing a barrage of false claims of fraud and corruption without evidence.
News Clip of Donald Trump
If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
Jordan
What can be harder to discern, though, is the big picture, which is what the January 6 Select House Committee is attempting to lay out in a series of televised hearings that began last week and will continue for at least the next few. The committee is answering a lot of questions about what really happened on that day, but there are a few big ones that remain open. How much support did the people seeking to overturn the election have from all levels of the Republican Party? Is it possible these hearings could lead to criminal charges for former Trump administration officials, for the former President himself, even? And perhaps the biggest and most important question still out there. Will these hearings matter to voters in November or when Donald Trump runs, as he said he intends to do for his old job in 2024?
I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Aaron Rupar is a political journalist. He has covered Donald Trump and American politics for Vox. He currently writes a newsletter called Public Notice, which you can find on substack. Hey, Aaron.
Aaron Rupar
Hi.
Jordan
Aaron, you’re talking to a Canadian audience right now, so we’re not as tuned into the intricacies of a Select Committee. So maybe can you just explain what the hearings we are watching on TV about January 6th actually are?
Aaron Rupar
Yeah. So it is a committee of members of Congress, including two Republicans. So it is technically a bipartisan committee, even though Trump supporting members of Congress like to say that it really isn’t because the two Republicans are critics of Donald Trump, which kind of sets him apart from most of the Republican Party these days. But it is a committee of members of Congress who have been conducting an investigation into the January 6th insurrection and into the organizing that led up to it. And so these hearings that we are now seeing, there was one yesterday, one last week, a few more later this month after that are basically presenting the findings of this investigation. There’s been clips of depositions of Trump officials that have been played throughout. There have been video packages that have been kind of pre-produced that have been played interviews during the hearings. So it’s not clear if this will result in any sort of criminal charges or any sort of legal action of that sort. But really, it is meant to be a forum for the American public and for obviously the world more broadly to get a better understanding of what happened on January 6th in hopes that I guess it doesn’t happen again.
Jordan
I want to ask you about the partisanship or nonpartisanship of these hearings you mentioned. There’s only a couple of Republicans on the committee, and most Republicans are calling this partisan. I want you to walk me through how that came about, because I think back to January 6th and the days that followed, most Republicans were pretty strongly against Trump. I believe both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy came out and said he had something to do with it. So there was kind of a nonpartisan condemnation in the days after the attacks. What happened?
Aaron Rupar
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There was a brief period of time after January 6th where it seemed like this might finally be the off ramp that Republicans would take to distance themselves from Trump. It didn’t turn out that way, of course. But yes, Kevin McCarthy gave us a floor speech on the House of Representatives floor in which he said that Trump was responsible and Mitch McConnell said similar things. And I think basically what happened is these Republicans realize that their voters are still big fans of Trump and that it was endangering their own political futures if they were seen as being an opponent of him or being overly critical of him. I think it was basically a self interested move that all these Republicans kind of lined up in the months following January 6th behind Trump once again.
But what happened was that there was talk after January 6th of a 9/11 style commission to investigate it. When I say 9/11 style that’s often held up here in the States, the 9/11 commission that Congress put together as kind of the gold standard of a bipartisan, kind of sober and investigative committee that really tried to get to the bottom of something without political rancour and partisanship. But the problem was that Republicans, led by Kevin McCarthy, wanted to put on the committee members of Congress who had voted against accepting the results of the election and had basically endorsed Trump’s big lie.
And so what you were faced with and what Democrats and the small group of Republicans who were willing to take a fair look at this we’re faced with was basically a scenario that would be equivalent with having someone who is accused of a crime on the jury sort of thing. It just was a weird conflict of interest where, to use the 9/11 style example, it’d be like having Al Qaeda on the 9/11 commission. It just didn’t make any sense. And so that proposal for a bipartisan committee that would have had buy in from the leadership of both parties just didn’t work out. And so what Democrats were left with was doing this select committee that, like I said, is bipartisan because you have Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, where two House Republicans who voted to accept the election results have been very critical of Donald Trump. But Liz Cheney, as of just a few months ago, was in Republican leadership, was the number three House Republican. So this is not some sort of fringe character, a Liberal Republican or something like that. Obviously, her father was the former Vice President, and she’s known as basically as traditional of a Republican as you can find.
So we basically had a situation where, yes, there was that moment after January 6th where it seemed like there was genuine interest in getting the bottom of it. There was genuine interest among Republicans in holding Trump accountable for January 6th. But I think there was a dynamic where Republican voters still love Trump. And I think that put kind of elected officials in a tough spot because they were getting out on a limb that their constituents weren’t on with them. And so that kind of put them in danger. And then the other just the fact of the matter is that a majority of House Republicans there’s something like 147 of them, and there’s like roughly 250 House Republicans, maybe a few less than that. But the vast majority of House Republicans voted against accepting the election results on January 6th, which shows that they were kind of complicit in this effort to overturn the election and endorse the big lie. And so it just wasn’t really in the cards to have a true bipartisan Commission look into that in that sense where you would have Trump supporters on it because they’re the accused party here. So it didn’t make sense. So that’s kind of how this played out.
Jordan
We can talk about the details where they are in a few minutes. But just speaking in general, what have we learned in the 18 months since January 6th that we didn’t know in the days immediately following, like what’s been teased out as we’ve gone through this process?
Aaron Rupar
Yeah, there’s been a lot of things that have come to light. I mean, I think the thing that is kind of important big picture to keep in mind is that we already knew a lot about it because Trump basically organized the January 6th insurrection on Twitter. I mean, we saw him summon his supporters. We saw his supporters go on cable news, do press conferences where they endorsed the big lie and said the election had been stolen and all this stuff that wasn’t based on any actual evidence. And so sometimes I think people kind of get lost in the weeds of, like, what’s new in kind of the TikTok of revelations and lose sight of the bigger picture that we already knew a lot because this all basically happened or the very important parts of it happened in public.
But the committee, as it has gone and done its work over the past year or so, has released information as they have gone. And there have been a number of explosive revelations. They have released multiple batches of text messages that basically all came from the inbox of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who his text message inbox was basically like a clearing house of ideas of how a coup should be executed in the weeks following the 2020 election leading up until January 6th. One thing that I wrote a lot about in my newsletter is all these revelations of Fox News hosts who were texting him with ideas about talking points that he could use to defend the idea that the election had been stolen. And then after January 6th, some of these same Fox News hosts were texting him and telling him that Trump needed to tone down the rhetoric and stop talking about a stolen election. And at the same time, they were texting Meadows and blaming Trump for the insurrection. They were on TV trying to blame Antifa or left wing activists for the unrest. And so there was really kind of a stunning dishonesty there between what some of these people were saying privately and what they were saying publicly.
There were also, of course, the text messages from Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, which were very newsworthy because she was texting Mark Meadows, similarly offering him advice about how to execute this coup, basically providing him encouragement during tough times following the election to keep going, to keep up the fight to try to overturn the election results. And at the same time, her husband was hearing cases that pertain to some of these communications. And so there is also a pretty galling conflict of interest there. So there’s been multiple batches of text messages that have been released. These hearings, the two hearings that we have had so far June 13th, really focused on depositions that Trump officials gave to the January 6th committee, both campaign and White House officials, which made very clear that officials were under no illusions about what happened in the 2020 election. They understood that Trump lost. They understood that their legal challenges were unsuccessful, that they didn’t really have a case, and yet they’ve forged ahead Trump, particularly with trying to organize the January 6th insurrection anyway.
One of the revelations that was really fascinating, not maybe one of the central ones, but I think it kind of sheds light on what was happening here is the fact that the Trump campaign raised $250,000,000 in the weeks following the election for a so-called Trump Election Defense Fund that did not actually exist. They basically took this money. They donated some of it to organizations that were associated with White House officials, Mark Meadows organization, the Trump Campaign and White House officials understood that a lot of the stuff that Trump was saying publicly about the election being stolen was a lie. They understood that they didn’t really have a case legally to overturn the election results. And yet they were out there raising hundreds of millions of dollars based on these lies, basically bilking their own supporters and then using that money to self deal. And so none of that kind of narrative and all of those different connections that wasn’t really completely sketched out publicly before. I mean, people kind of suspected parts of that story. But this was presented, in the words of Trump officials, using clips from their depositions. And so that’s really what we’re learning now is kind of seeing during these hearings what Trump officials were saying about the events of election night, the weeks after leading into January 6th, and kind of using their own words to indict Trump. So there’s a lot more that could be talked about. But I think that gives you kind of a broad idea of what we’ve learned.
Jordan
That’s a whole lot man, and my producers are going to bleep me, but politics in your country is ******.
Aaron Rupar
Yes, it is. It’s fascinating to cover, but it’s fascinating to cover like I guess a train wreck would be or something.
Jordan
I want to ask you about the hearings themselves, especially for casual viewers, because I’ve seen a lot of live testimony from them, and I think a lot of us probably consume it in the social media highlights that go out. Are these hearings discovering any new facts, like in real time in front of people watching, or are they all packaged versions of things that the committee already knows?
Aaron Rupar
Yeah, they’re definitely more packaged presentations of things that the committee has already learned. And that’s kind of by necessity because some people who have been subpoenaed or just flat out not cooperating, like Kevin McCarthy, for instance, who he had a phone call with Trump on January 6th that for a year and a half now, people have been wanting to understand what was said because there have been reports that McCarthy basically tried to talk Trump down, demanded that he put out a statement calling off his supporters who were ransacking the Capitol. And Trump reportedly was very defiant and swearing at McCarthy. But we don’t really know. We could get to the bottom of it if McCarthy would testify, but he refuses to do that. And so there is still kind of a legal fight going on in terms of at what point does he have to cooperate? These things can be kind of dragged out for months and years in courts here.
So the things that we’re seeing during these hearings, like I kind of mentioned earlier, are like produced video packages, clips from depositions. There has been live testimony, but it’s basically coming from people who are on the same wavelength as the committee. Yesterday, one of the star witnesses was Chris Stirewalt, who was a former official in Fox News. He ran their polling apparatus there. So he was involved in the fateful decision that Fox News made to call Arizona for Biden on election night, which kind of went down as one of the major turning points in Trump’s ultimate defeat because calling that state. We have a very complicated election system here. But the way the Electoral College works is that Arizona was a very key state in 2020. And so when Biden was predicted as the winner or was determined to be the winner of that state on election night, that really kind of sealed Trump’s fate. And it was viewed as kind of a betrayal because Fox News, of course, is very friendly with Trump and supported him for years. So Stirewalt testified about kind of the factors that went into that decision, what pressures he felt from the Trump White House, maybe not to make that decision and how that went over within Fox, but he since left Fox. And so he clearly seemed to be very sympathetic and supportive of what the committee is up to. It’s not like if people in Canada can recall or are familiar with the Watergate hearings here, which was another very famous set of hearings basically, I think 50 years ago now in 1973, that ultimately led to President Nixon’s resignation. Of course, the reasons that those are so memorable is because you had a lot of really contentious adversarial testimony from Nixon White House officials to members of Congress. And so kind of had that almost like courtroom drama aspect. And we’ve had that here recently, of course, with the Trump impeachment trials as well. But these hearings are not that it’s more of like a presentation.
Jordan
How are these hearings being covered in the right wing news networks?
Aaron Rupar
Yeah, there has been a lot of intrigue surrounding that. The first hearing last week, I believe it was on Thursday night of last week was in primetime, which is very unusual for a congressional hearing here. Typically, they happened during business hours, morning, early afternoon sort of thing. But the January 6th committee decided to have a prime time for kind of the obvious reasons, trying to get as many people watching as possible. And they were covered, which I was a little bit surprised by, by all of our major broadcast networks, like CBS, ABC, NBC all carried that hearing live, which is unusual for political events. People tend to be kind of I don’t know if disinterested the right word, but political hearings don’t typically rivet the nation here. We got a little bit of that with impeachment, but that’s unusual. So that was different that all these networks were carrying it.
But very notably, Fox News did not carry the hearing, and instead they just had their usual primetime lineup, including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. And Tucker Carlson has been one of the leading purveyors of conspiracy theories about January 6th in the country. He did a whole documentary last year on the idea that January 6th was basically a trap set by the FBI meant to kind of implicate Trump supporters in wrongdoing and get them in legal trouble. There’s no evidence to back this up, but it makes for a kind of a good narrative that is sort of confirming the priors of all of these Trump supporters. And so while the hearing was taking place last Thursday night, Tucker Carlson had his normal show, which was presented commercial free, because I think Fox executives were concerned that people might flip the channel for a couple of minutes and see some of this hearing, and it might kind of pierce their information bubble. And then maybe even more egregious than that was while Tucker Carlson was talking, they were showing in a little box video of the hearings to kind of give the illusion that they were actually covering the hearings or monitoring them while Tucker Carlson is doing a show. But when the hearing got to points where video was showing of people ransacking the capital or violence against police officers on January 6th, they cut away from that video. They didn’t even want their viewers to see that video without the accompanying audio.
And so it was really this kind of surreal spectacle of Fox kind of providing the illusion of covering these hearings when they weren’t actually covering them and then also kind of censoring even within that what viewers were seeing, because clearly they’re afraid that people might actually seek out information and it might sort of undermine the talking points that they’ve been feeding their viewers for 18 months now, basically. So yesterday during the day, Fox did cover the hearing, but their audience during the day is quite different than the prime time line up. The people watching Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, who are more primed for these conspiracy theories and for the idea that kind of the true narrative of what January 6th was somehow misleading and that really Trump supporters and Trump himself did nothing wrong.
Jordan
So that brings me to, I think, kind of the pervasive attitude I’ve seen, at least among the Americans that I follow on social media, which is that while these hearings are necessary and while it’s good to broadcast them, they won’t actually change anyone’s mind. Do you see that and feel that in your reporting, is the country just set, or can prime time revelations like this actually move the needle still?
Aaron Rupar
So we have a very polarized country here. And I do sense that the people who are really hanging on these January 6th hearings and watching them and consuming them are people who have very established opinions or ideas about what happened already. It’s hard to say. I haven’t really done that style of reporting to kind of talk to people, for instance, who maybe didn’t have an opinion made up. I’m not really sure at this stage to what extent they are breaking through to people who really need to be informed, because the idea is that Trump in particular in the Republican Party in general, is an existential threat to our democracy here at this point. They tried to overturn the last presidential election, which basically would have ended free and fair elections here. And since that effort failed, they’ve been passing all these state level laws to give Republicans greater control over how elections are decided that are providing represent a huge threat here in our midterm cycle this year. And then, of course, we’re only two, three years away, 2024 will be our next presidential election. It looks like Trump is going to run again. And so, meanwhile, we have people who seem to be more concerned about–and not that these are non issues–but with inflation, with kind of transitory economic things rather than the bigger picture, which is that our democracy is under great threat here.
The thing that I will say is that because we are so polarized here, it’s still the case that elections are kind of decided on the margins. I mean, you look at the 2020 election, and it basically came down to a handful of purple States, including Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, States like that. And these States were decided by a few thousand up to 10,000 or so votes. And so while there is kind of this fatalism about, well, everybody just has their mind made up, and none of this is really breaking through. It doesn’t really take that many people to have their minds changed or to be persuaded for it to swing an entire presidential election. And so that’s kind of the weird dichotomy of our politics is that everybody is so polarized. And at the same time, the few people in the middle are the ones who are ultimately deciding these elections because the divide between Republicans and Democrats. There’s slightly more Democrats, as we’ve seen with how the popular votes have gone. I mean, for instance, Trump lost the popular vote here in 2016, but won the presidency because of the Electoral College. But because those two camps are divided pretty evenly, it’s the people in the middle that still are the decisive voters.
There still are a lot of people who are open to be persuaded. There are a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2016, who voted for Biden in 2020. And there are a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 who, because of the way the economy is right now, will likely vote for Republican in 2024. And so we can’t lose sight that these people are reachable. There was something like 20 million people who watched the first hearing, which is a very large number. So it’s hard to say at this point how much is changing minds. But definitely people are tuning in and aware of these hearings.
Jordan
What about outside the court of public opinion? I know this is not a trial and these are hearings, but what are the potential ramifications in the legal and political system to the things that these hearings are presented. Is there a path, say, from some of the stuff that you just explained to me to criminal charges against people?
Aaron Rupar
There is. So there was a lot of talk after the first hearing of comments that Liz Cheney made during the hearing because she used the term seditious conspiracy in the same sentence as Trump. And seditious conspiracy is a charge that some of the key organizers of the January 6th insurrection have already faced. Some of the leading Proud Boys, for instance, and it’s a very serious charge. Now, the problem is that charging an ex President with crimes has never happened here in the States. And we have an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who seems to be very, I don’t know if conservative is the right term, but very kind of by the book, not someone who’s created a lot of waves. He seems to be very much of kind of an institutionalist.
And so it seems like the January 6th committee during these hearings, even with the stuff I was mentioning earlier with the fake election defence fund that Trump was raising hundreds of millions of dollars for, and then not really using the funds for that purpose, basically using the funds to kind of line the pockets of his supporters in one way or another. There’s been some talk that could involve wire fraud, some sort of charge like that. But it just seems very unlikely to me that the Department of Justice would pursue charges against the former President, especially given that it seems like he’s trying to run for the presidency again, because you can kind of see how that could be spun into they can’t beat me at the polls, so they’re going to try and take me out legally or it can kind of be used. The political blowback could be quite severe from taking that step.
The committee is empowered with making criminal referrals, but basically what a criminal referral is here in the States is nothing more than a letter that sent to the Department of Justice saying, hey, we this committee believe that there should be criminal charges against this person based on evidence we’ve uncovered as part of our investigation. It’s up to the DOJ to act on that. And they have already with the criminal referral that was made by the January 6th committee for Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff we mentioned earlier, who cooperated to a point with the committee but then stopped complying with subpoenas and is no longer cooperative. And the January 6th committee issued a criminal referral for him that the Department of Justice has already indicated they are not going to act on. So basically, the committee can make recommendations. They seem to be trying to leave breadcrumbs that are leading to possible criminal charges. And then it’s kind of up to the Department of Justice, which has really given no indication at this point that they are interested in pursuing criminal charges against the top ring leaders. Like I said earlier, there have been charges against Proud Boy leaders. There have been charges against a number of figures involved in the January 6th insurrection, but not Trump, not anybody kind of on that top level of power.
Jordan
So that leads to the last thing that I want to get at, which is the future of your country. I guess, we’ve been pretty worried about America and its slide towards authoritarianism that Donald Trump has kind of represented, I guess, for lack of a better term. And if these hearings continue as they will over the next few weeks, and they’re as devastating as some of the stuff you’ve described or we’ve seen. And the midterms come up and the Republicans win in the kind of wave that a lot of people are predicting, despite all of that evidence, like what will be left to stop the next election from being stolen or the slide into authoritarianism to continue when Trump runs again? It seems like the guardrails are off, I guess.
Aaron Rupar
I’ve talked to a number of experts kind of on this exact topic. And the theme that people who are experts in authoritarianism political scientists keep coming back to is that it’s really tough when you get to a spot where every election is kind of an existential threat for our politics here, for the fact that we still do have free and fair elections. And so the fact is that kind of our freedom is on the line in a sense here. And so I think what we’ll see is that the likely result of this midterm is going to be Republicans retaking control of the House, and then we’ll have a presidential election in two years. And for Trump to be successful in this effort to overthrow the election, he had to overturn the results in a number of States that he lost pretty decisively. So we had to overturn Arizona, Pennsylvania and Michigan. If it just came down to one of those States, I think it would have been much more possible for him to pull it off. But it’s almost like needing to get a Royal flush in poker or something like it’s possible, but it’s very unlikely. It’s much easier just to get a normal flush.
And I think that the true stakes of the elections, and I would hope that Democrats could do a better job framing this in the months to come, too, is really that these elections are now kind of referendums on free and fair elections themselves. And that’s sure economic considerations are obviously very important and decisive for people, and that can’t be held against anyone. But really, I hope that the stakes can be framed in an appropriate way, which is that we can’t let Republicans retake power because they’re basically trying to end free and fair elections in this country. It’s kind of a scary thing to give voice to, but that’s where we are right now.
Jordan
Always good when you’re having elections that are about if you should continue to have elections. Aaron, thank you so much for this.
Aaron Rupar
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Jordan
Aaron Rupar writing Public Notice on substack, you can find it at aaronrupar.substack.com
That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN, talk to us via email [click here!], or call us leave a voicemail 416-935-5935. You can find The Big Story in every podcast player and wherever it lets you, don’t forget to leave us a five star review.
Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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