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A
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B
Hey everyone, it's Russell and Cristine. So I just found this mobile game everyone's talking about. Royal Match. Gorgeous graphics and super fun puzzles.
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C
Bro, you're late. I'm already at level 700. I play it every day on the subway because it doesn't need wi fi Wa.
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B
What? I've got to catch up.
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C
Oh, and they just added new mini games. They make it even more fun and challenging.
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B
Alright, show's over.
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C
I'm gonna go play Download Royal Match on the App Store or Google Play today.
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D
I'm Isabella Royal, intern at Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare archive for January 10, 2026. This week marked the fifth anniversary of the January 6th attack in which Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to block certification of the 2020 election. On the anniversary this year, the Trump White House released a document casting those who broke into the Capitol as peaceful protesters, prosecuted by a weaponized Department of Justice and claiming that it was the Democrats who staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud ridden election. You can access five years of written and audio analysis on January 6th and its consequences at the January 6th project on the Lawfare website. For today's archive, I chose an episode from February 15, 2023 in which Quinta Jurassic spoke with Jacob Glick, who served as an investigative counsel on the January 6th committee and who focused specifically on the role of social media and far right extremism in the attack. The two discussed how the investigation changed Glick's understanding of the forces that led to January 6, how he understands the threats behind posed by extremism today, what it was like interviewing Twitter whistleblowers and members of far right groups who stormed the Capitol and more.
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E
I'm Quinta Jurecik, a senior editor at Lawfare, and this is The Lawfare Podcast. February 15, 2023. The January 6 committee's final report on the insurrection is over 800 pages, including the footnotes. But there's still new information coming out about the committee's findings and its work. Last week we brought you an interview with Dean Jackson, one of the staffers who worked on the January 6th Committee's investigation into the role of social media in the Insurrection today, featuring a conversation with Jacob Glick, who served as investigative counsel on the committee and is currently a policy counsel at Georgetown's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. His work in the January 6 investigation focused on social media and far right extremism. We talked about what the investigation showed him, about the forces that led to January 6, how he understands the threat still posed by extremism, and what it was like interviewing both Twitter whistleblowers and members of far right groups who stormed the Capitol. It's the Lawfare podcast. February 15, a January 6 committee staffer on far right extremism.
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C
Just to start off, tell me about your role on the committee. What work were you doing?
- [04:06]
B
I was an investigative counsel on the Select Committee for about a year. I was on the Purple Team, which if you're familiar with all the color coding, the Purple Team was largely responsible, responsible for looking at domestic violence, extremism, and social media and their role in the attack on the Capitol. So I actually was a counsel responsible for parts of both that portfolio, or both of those portfolios, rather. So I worked on the social media portfolio as the lead counsel in a lot of depositions and things of that nature. And then I also was part of a team of about five lawyers on the Red Team and the Purple Team that interviewed rioters and domestic violent extremists from various militias and other groups.
- [04:46]
C
And so what is the Red Team for people who aren't as familiar with the COVID crowd?
- [04:49]
B
Sure. So the Red Team was a team that we worked very closely with that was very focused on what happened to the crowd that day. So talking about the movements of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers from the Peace Monument near the Capitol into the Capitol, for example. Whereas the Purple Team was tasked with figuring out how the Proud Boys operated as an organization, their motivations and things like that. But by the time we started getting into the nitty gritty of report writing and hearing planning, we ended up working on many of the same topics as we tried to string together all we had learned into one cohesive narrative.
- [05:23]
C
And so, as you said, the investigation was kind of split up into these different color coded groups. How much apart from the collaboration with the Red and Purple Team, were you all working among one another? Was that sort of the Red and Purple collaboration was that unusual or was it sort of all intermingled to the.
- [05:42]
B
Extent that anything was relevant to other teams? My personal experience was that there was a lot of inter team coordination since we were all trying to get at the same essential facts. So there were oftentimes witnesses, for example, who were more in the Gold Teams investigation that might have information that was relevant to things the Purple Team was looking at, for example, prominent Trump influencers and their use of social media or links to extremist groups like the Oath Keepers. And so we did a good job of keeping one another abroad, abreast of questions we might want to ask in depositions or documents we might be interested in looking at, even if we were not always in each deposition each team was conducting.
- [06:20]
C
And the Gold Team is having to do with Trump personally?
- [06:23]
B
Yes, sorry, I forget that the jargon of the teams isn't completely widespread. So, yeah, Gold was Trump for obvious reasons. Purple was seen as a mix of the red team, which was the rioters, and the blue team, which was law enforcement and sort of more structural issues with the government. Then there was also the Green team, which was money.
- [06:40]
C
We can have a color coded chart. So I want to just dive in and start talking about the substance. You said you're conducting all of these interviews with folks who were showing up at the Capitol, including members of extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. First off, just what was that like talking to these people? Did they tend to be reluctant to talk to you or sort of eager to get their side of the story out?
- [07:04]
B
It really varied. So I think there were many individuals, as you can see from the transcripts that have been publicly released, that were eager to talk to us about why they went or why they were involved in these organizations, and they did not see themselves as the bad guys in this situation. There was an eerie ability, uncanny ability, to distance a witness's experience from the violence that occurred, particularly the violence against law enforcement. And I think it took some real work by the investigative team to get to those core questions of what motivated them to participate in the insurrection and what did they think about the events of that day? Because it was very easy to let them sort of take the wheel and describe what they wanted us to think of as their experience that day. While others who I think were perhaps more aware of the criminal exposure were pretty tight lipped. So I think many of the folks that you'll see in the depositions who were more verbose, did not have a significant amount of criminal exposure, perhaps didn't enter the Capitol, perhaps hadn't even been in D.C. that day, but had been speaking to folks who had. And then when you talk to others, up to and including Stuart Rhodes, he wanted to talk about things before the election. But once we got to the election, you'll see in the transcripts, he was pretty tight lipped.
- [08:17]
C
And yeah, since you mentioned criminal exposure, one thing to dwell on here is that a lot of the folks who you were speaking with in these depositions would later be indicted by the Justice Department. And so that criminal exposure was extremely real. And many of those prosecutions are still going on. So, zooming out a little bit, I'm curious, sort of what your experience was conducting these conversations at the same time as you were, of course, aware that DOJ is also going on in these investigations?
- [08:48]
B
Well, I think we always saw what we were doing, obviously, as quite separate from what the Department of Justice continues to do. And so when I came in, especially from the Purple Team's perspective, I was looking at these depositions as an opportunity to explore the underlying causes of the insurrection as required by House Resolution 503, as opposed to the nitty gritty of what happened on the day itself. And so the questions we were asking really had no bearing on the ongoing investigation that the DOJ was conducting and continues to conduct, because we were asking some deeper questions about the nature of far right extremism in the country. And then obviously, as the depositions progressed, we would end up talking about questions that more directly bore on what the Department of Justice is also interested in. But I will also leave that to them to characterize further.
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C
So when you talk about the House resolution, that sets out what the purpose of these conversations that you're conducting is for listeners who haven't followed closely, just talk a little bit about what that is and how it connected to this particular thread of the Purple Team's work.
- [09:52]
B
Sure. So House Resolution 503 was the authorizing resolution for the Select Committee, and it essentially laid out what we were supposed to look into, our investigatory remit, for lack of a better term. And also laid out that we were instructed to, or the committee was instructed to submit a final report on its findings to Congress and then would be dissolved essentially 30 days after that final report, which didn't end up being an issue because I think there are only about four days left in the Congress when the report got released. But in that resolution, the text clearly talks about the committee's responsibility of investigating certain underlying causes of the attack, and that includes domestic violent extremism and social media, as well as law enforcement failures and a number of other things. But the Purple Team task in a large part was to look at that part of House Resolution 503 and figure out what can we do to explain to the American people in the context of this broader narrative, these underlying causes of extremism and social media.
- [10:53]
C
And so what did you find in the way of those underlying causes?
- [10:56]
B
Well, I'll speak for myself that I think that the role of domestic violent extremism is often understated when we're talking about January 6th in the popular imagination, because there's a real tendency to talk about the events of that day solely in the context of President Trump's rallying cry to his supporters to come to Washington and try to stop the steal one last time. But what we found, and what is public in a lot of these transcripts, is that there was a real slow burn towards insurrection that stretched months before January 6, often intersected with President Trump's calls endorsing vigilante action or otherwise flirting with political violence. But there had been groundwork laid far before Election Day that really empowered and enabled domestic violent extremists to stroll onto center stage by the time Trump needed them. And so that was one thing that was really striking to us, and that did interweave itself a narrative that didn't interweave itself into the final report. But I think there's a lot more for us to say, because obviously, a domestic violent extremist movement really coalesced far right authoritarian faction isn't going to go away after the exigencies of January 6th dissipate. And so, obviously, a lot of the committee's work focused on describing those exigencies and the legal schemes of Trump and Eastman and Giuliani to undermine the election. But now, of course, that immediate threat has passed, and what we're left with still is a coalesced authoritarian faction on the far right that continues to support political violence. So that was something that stuck with me and kind of haunted me as we began to paint this picture through week after week of depositions, and still haunts me to this day.
- [12:45]
C
I think at this point, saying that there's an authoritarian faction of sort of American political life has become less alarming than perhaps it should be. But it is a strong word, and I want to push you on it a little. What leads you to describe this faction in that way and also how broadly would you scope it? Are we just talking here about the proud Boys and the Oath Keeper sort of members of defined extremist groups? Does it spread more broadly? How would you understand it?
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B
So a couple of things there. The way that I think about this is what happens to a society when we begin to abandon the idea that military force should be the power of the state and the state alone. And so what we saw in talking with members of these paramilitary groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, is that they felt a necessity and a desire and a capacity to take the law into their own hands and march into the public square, in many cases armed with weapons, to be a sort of morality force, a police force unto themselves, either because law enforcement was unwilling or unable to counter the threats they described to us. And that to me, constitutes the very core core of this faction that I'm describing. And of course, you have a lot of interplay with close allies of President Trump like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, but also prominent political organizers, such as Stop the Steel organizers and others who were in the broader Trump circle who welcomed this sense of extralegal military force, private security by these far right extremist groups. And so I do think it stretches a little bit broader than the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers themselves. But I don't think this is a problem that is unable to be contained, because we need to state very clearly that the mythologies around the Second Amendment, for example, don't give a group like the Oath Keepers the capacity to march into the streets and assume the duties of law enforcement and direct protesters on their own. And that's what we saw over the summer, into the fall. And obviously we saw that spin under control on January 6th. But that sense of self empowered extremists is separate from what we've seen in recent years in sort of multiracial American democracy. And it should be viewed as foundationally anti democratic and dangerous.
- [15:12]
C
So you talked about what was happening in the summer and the fall of 2020 and how that eventually turned into January 6th, and that there's kind of this groundwork that was present well before the 6th. Tell me about that story. What is the sort of backdrop out of which this violence on the six coalesces?
- [15:31]
B
Well, obviously, the violence on the sixth was in many ways years in the making. You look back to Charlottesville and even before that, and President Trump had, unlike any president in modern history, embraced the prospect of political violence to intimidate and browbeat his ideological opponents and often deputized his supporters to do the same. And we saw that going back to his rallies in 2016. But what we saw conducting these depositions was that beginning in the early months of 2020 and the onset of COVID many of these folks who would become entangled in far right extremist movements started to articulate a really self empowered thesis statement that said that the government was trampling on their liberty by imposing lockdown orders and other safety measures in March of 2020, and we should embrace extrajudicial private paramilitary force to try to push back and defend our freedom, defend our Constitution. And so for the first time, you have really mainstream far right talking points about COVID intersecting with the propaganda of the Oath Keepers and other groups like the Oath Keepers in the militia movement that say that private citizens need to take up arms to defend the Constitution. And that coalescing moment, as Kelly Sorrell, Oathkeeper's lawyer, said, that coalescing moment led to a months long process of sort of a deteriorating situation on the ground. Because a couple months later, of course, you have the Black Lives Matter protests, and those were met with armed counter protests by many of the same groups who had become emboldened by the pandemic restrictions. So some groups, you know, in Michigan had stormed the State House with weapons in, I believe it was May 2020. And that scene, eerily reminiscent of January 6th, was then replicated a couple months later as you have Oath Keepers and others patrolling streets and public venues to protect against imagined threats of antifa at overwhelmingly peaceful protests. And so that story is a story of vigilante violence being normalized on the far right and being normalized because of President Trump's particularized calls to action. So President Trump was talking about liberating Michigan from the pandemic restrictions. President Trump was emphasizing that all Black Lives Matter protests were somehow violent antifa operations. And we saw in these depositions that witness after witness basically parroted those talking points. And that's a road that deposited them very neatly into the fall of 2020. When President Trump said, hey, guess what? The corrupt Democratic politicians who locked you up and then let antifa loose, they're now trying to steal the election from me and what are you gonna do about it? And they already knew what to do about it. It was to grab their guns, polling stations. And we saw that happen in multiple swing states. And so that's a long way of saying that January 6th was really something that goes far beyond Stop the steal itself.
- [18:37]
C
I find this really interesting because I have always wondered to what extent a lot of the political phenomena we've seen over the last few years are sort of outgrowths of the fact that everybody got really weird in quarantine essentially, Covid is a unbelievably massive, traumatic, strange event that people who are living now hadn't experienced before. So from the story that you kind of set out there, it sounds like the role of the pandemic and pandemic response and how it interacted with American focuses on liberty and freedom really was a driving engine of what ended up happening on the sixth. Is that fair?
- [19:13]
B
I think it is. And of course, I don't want to excuse any of the behavior of individuals who ended up participating in the insurrection, but it is important to understand how they got to that point. And so there were multiple witnesses who described to us how they were sitting on their couch because they had nowhere to go. They had been laid off from their jobs at the onset of the pandemic, and they were just watching TV like many of us in the early months of 2020. And by the time that they were imbibing information on far right media, from the far right, Reddit, r TheDonald, Facebook, Twitter, that was already characterizing the COVID restrictions in these apocalyptic terms. And then, then you add in a second part of a one, two punch, which is the coverage of Black Lives Matter protests that make this out to be another apocalyptic event that is threatening their communities and their families. And for many witnesses that we spoke to, that's when they decided to join up. And they thought that the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys in some instances, was a appropriate receptacle for them to funnel their anger at what was happening in the country and basically take the law into their own hands.
- [20:27]
C
So I want to go back to what these groups offer to people and why they turn to them. But before we do that, without asking you to speak to the work of the Blue Team, which is the team that focused on law enforcement, I'm interested in the role of the George Floyd protests in this story. Because reading the report, reading the documentation around the report, those protests turned out to be hugely important for law enforcement response, or lack of response to the 6th. Again and again. You see in depositions in the report put out by the Senate Rules and Homeland Security Committee that officials across the government and the Pentagon and the FBI were really nervous about sending out law enforcement in the national guard into Washington, D.C. on the 6th, because they felt like they had done that during the George Floyd protests. They'd engaged in what I would certainly argue as a D.C. resident was an overreaction and felt that they had really gotten burned and didn't want to do that again. So, again, just from your perspective of Someone who was interviewing the folks on the extremist side. I'm curious what you think about that as a kind of mirror in terms of how it affected law enforcement response as well as sort of the gathering energy of extremism before the sixth.
- [21:40]
B
Well, again, speaking for myself, I find it really troubling. I think it reflects this tendency by greater institutions in the United States to normalize the threat of far right extremism that we're now seeing into buckets that already exist and make sense to us. Because. Because when you look at what happened in Portland, for example, over the summer of 2020, when you have the Trump administration sending out unmarked federal agents to basically snatch up protesters and journalists in some instances into unmarked vans and then let them loose with no due process, that, to me, is the flip side of what Stuart Rhodes was doing the same month. That's two symptoms of the same problem, which is a desire to dispense with the rule of law and liberal democracy in a very real way. And I don't think federal law enforcement wanted to see the structural problems of an emboldened far right violent fringe in the same way that they were willing to look at the problems in the far left fringe of Antifa or however you want to characterize it, and then use that as an excuse to leap up to defend DC for example. To me, I think that goes to much broader questions of whether our government's prepared to handle what we're facing. Obviously, you had Trump appointees at the top of the administration, folks like Chad Wolff and Trump himself, who was fixated on the Antifa threat. And I believe there was reporting, I think, in the New York Times, about how his fixation on Antifa really distracted from far right threats that were emerging at the same time. So it's all part of the same story, which is that unfortunately, there was some implicit alignment, at the very least, between what President Trump was saying in the Oval Office and what Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were doing on the ground in the summer of 2020, and that completely colored how law enforcement was able to treat that threat as the year went on.
- [23:40]
C
So you said people come to turn to groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys during spring, summer, fall of 2020. What did they find appealing about those groups? Is it, you know, the Proud Boys love to talk about how they're a social club. Is it a kind of a social thing? What, from the conversations that you had seemed to appeal to people about these groups.
- [24:03]
B
So I do think there are some differences between the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in this regard. And I think it's a really important and interesting question for us to understand for the Oath Keepers. Obviously, they overwhelmingly target veterans of the military, of law enforcement, of different branches, branches of service. And so when we spoke to many Oath Keepers, they talked about a desire for originally to sort of defend law enforcement from threats they perceived, whether it be Antifa or Black Lives Matter. Obviously, they conflated the two quite a bit, but they saw it as a continuing obligation, a sense that they were upholding their oaths by taking the law into their own hands. And that is what the Oath Keepers and Stuart Rhodes has decided is his most effective propaganda message, which is to say this is actually a group of individuals, Oath Keepers, who want to continue to serve the Constitution after they've already been in the military or in law enforcement. And it's a really insidious message when folks are being bombarded by information that tells them that their country is under siege and that their society is collapsing. A lot of folks that I'm recalling now wanted to get involved to buttress law enforcement. And that obviously leads to some pretty serious questions as to how you can start at that point and then end up attacking law enforcement on January 6th. And I think that goes to the broader question of. Or the broader point, rather, of the Oath Keepers not really being an organization that cares about defending law enforcement, but cares about defending their very particular, I would say, authoritarian vision of law and order, in which they are the ones who get to decide what is truly law and order. So when they were aligned with law enforcement during the George Floyd protests, or they perceived that they were aligned with law enforcement, they wanted to go out and be a constructive force. As soon as they saw that they were not aligned with law enforcement, as law enforcement was defending the peaceful transition of power, all of a sudden, law enforcement became a target. And that's the sort of central flaw of the Oath Keepers propaganda and ultimately why we should all be really aggressive in rejecting their propaganda. For the Proud Boys, they were the ones who really talked about themselves as a drinking club that would sometimes fight Antifa. And a lot of Proud Boys we deposed really said, hey, this was a social outlet. And I think that's a really important tenet for us to grab onto, understand, and then reject in the terms that they describe it. Because I think a lot of times analysts in the sort of broader media sphere will look at the Proud Boys and maybe dismiss their seriousness. Not so much after January 6th, before January 6th, because they just kind of treated themselves as a fraternity, the Oath Keepers tried to style themselves as a paramilitary force because of Stuart Rhodes choice of propaganda. I think Enrique Tarrio is very interested in making himself look like a cool guy who is running a fraternity. And you did see folks who were, I think entirely men who were drawn to or claimed they were drawn to the Oath Keepers because of that social element. But if we dug a little deeper in many of these depositions to ask them, why this group, why this group that places you in harm's way, that places you in the company of extremists, why join them? And you get to some really interesting places that goes to this question of should we use the word authoritarian, should we use the word autocratic or even the F word, talk about fascism. And I think that in the case of the Proud Boys, you really can make case that, yes, we should talk about that. Because their focus almost to a man went back to ideas of core family structure defining Western civilization as superior to other forms of human society because of what they termed freedom and what they termed as sort of normal family dynamics. And of course, this is kind of hard to pull out in a deposition, but you got some pretty, some pretty serious instances of homophobia, transphobia, general air of misogyny that pervaded what they were talking about. So they might have been wanting to get ready for a drinking outing with their friends, but it was a drinking outing that was really focused on a particularized view of Western society as a patriarchal, superior form of being. And that's what led them to meld their social outlet with the sense of vigilante street violence. And so we should reject their self description, but understand why they feel it. And I think it's from a really deep sense of anger at many aspects of our society.
- [28:40]
C
So I agree completely that it's important to understand these extremist groups, the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, others at the same time. There were thousands of people who were on the mall on January 6. There were 2,000 people, I think is the last count I've seen, roughly who went into the Capitol. Most of them were not members of these groups. How do you understand the relationship between these smaller extremist organizations and the sort of general population, for lack of a better term, that entered the capitol on the 6th, many of whom were supporters of Trump, but weren't particularly affiliated with any given group.
- [29:16]
B
Yeah, so that was also part of the task of the Purple Team, often joined with the Red Team, who took the lead on deposing individual rioters who were not part of any kind of extremist organization. And I think that goes to the question of social media's role in the attack and really President Trump's role in facilitating this authoritarian cult of personality around himself. So you had forums like the Donald Win, for example, where members of extremist organizations were posting serious paramilitary tactics, strategies, statements of purpose, that they were going to go to the Capitol to kidnap congresspeople. And that was not something that was in private group chats that we received. So a lot of the private group chats that have now been made public in the committee's underlying evidence talk about similar things, but behind closed doors. But the Donald Win saw extremely violent rhetoric broadcast to the general public. So I think that in many ways the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers groups like the Three Percenters, provide an incubator for this serious anti democratic thinking to develop and then become normalized within those circles. And then you're able to go online and sort of use existing websites as a platform to spread that language. And it's a self multiplying problem. So that's another reason why the preceding events January 6, the racial justice protests and the perceived antifa saboteurs that were orchestrating all of it and the COVID lockdowns were so damaging to our democracy. When you're thinking about January 6th, because these groups had a platform to legitimize themselves to a broader swath of the population and say, hey, we're the ones who are responding to all the threats that Fox News and others are telling you exist. So you should not be afraid to endorse some of the more serious vigilante ideas were spouting. Whether or not folks know it's directly coming from the Proud ways the Oath Keepers is an open question, but obviously these things percolate in many different directions, but they're certainly helping to push those ideas into the public square.
- [31:35]
F
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- [33:52]
C
Let's talk about Trump himself for a minute. I can tell a story based on what you've told me, that Trump is a mastermind and he saw when the pandemic began an opportunity to stop start seeding this ideology and sort of lead people along. And we end up with January 6th, where he's encouraging everyone to go to the Capitol and this is all part of a master plan. I can also tell a story where he's a bumbler. He just says what comes into his mind. He certainly orbits around a very authoritarian view of the world and all these sort of various things that he's saying happen to stack up in such a way that they lead in a very dangerous direction. I'm intentionally setting out those two options as extremes, but I'm curious what your sense is. Where do you think Trump's actions actually fall on that spectrum? To what extent is this a plan and to what extent Is it something that he sort of allows to happen without really thinking about it?
- [34:51]
B
I think the short answer is that doesn't matter, at least in my view. And I was not involved in much of the Gold Teams investigation that circled around Trump and his intent. So, speaking again for myself, I think that. That what we see throughout 2020 is an awareness by Trump and his circle that he does have the capacity to reach out and instruct folks about targets, about threats. I mean, you have numerous instances. One that sticks out to me, and that was really important, I think, in the initial impeachment trial of the president was the fact that he continued to taunt Governor Whitmer and hint at excusing the folks who tried to kidnap her for her COVID policies during the heat of the campaign season. So the first extreme you sketched out, or I guess the second extreme you sketched out, where he is completely unaware of what he's doing, I think is not right. You've seen since January 6th, Trump continuing to lean into these tropes of political violence as recently as his sort of laughing off the attack on Paul Pelosi. And that shows that he knows what he did and he wants to continue to do it, but this exists outside of him as well. And, and he perhaps instinctually is able to tap into the racism and the sort of fear of modernity that a lot of that we're discussing today, when he talks about corruption in Philadelphia and Detroit, for example, maybe that's him just being instinctually a racist and someone who was bought into a half decade of right wing propaganda about the legitimacy of votes cast by African Americans. But he's also speaking to an audience that sees that and then can transmutate that comment into a sort of summons to war. And so I don't spend too much time thinking about the extent to which he's aware, because the reality is that he's aware enough and he is continuing to act the way that he'd acted for all the months before January.
- [36:57]
C
So that, I think, gets to another question I wanted to ask you, which is the extent to which the investigation was able to sort of connect up Trump's personal knowledge of what was happening on the ground on January 6 with the acts of groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. I think one of the things that the report does really strongly is show that Trump was personally aware of and engineering a lot of the lies around election fraud to an extent that I certainly did not realize before the committee began its investigation. But in my mind, there's always been this kind of open question about to what extent does Trump in the White House on the 6th know that the Oath Keepers are standing out there in a semi military formation, or that the proud boys are there ready to go and break the glass and lead people into the Capitol? Is that a hole in the committee's case against Trump?
- [37:51]
B
No, I don't think so at all. I think that there's, there's more than enough evidence to show the nexus of Trump's behavior and the violence of the Capitol. And obviously, this is me again, speaking for myself. There are really disturbing tidbits, obviously, some of which are unknowable, unless we speak to the President himself. And the president did not want to speak to the committee going back to December 18th, when there's that unhinged meeting in the White House. This always has stuck with me. There's a meeting in the White House where the Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are all powwowing. And the Electoral College had just certified Biden's victory. Options are running out. All the lawsuits have been dismissed. They talk about seizing voting machines and White House staff freaks out. And this was covered prominently in the hearings. But one thing that has always stuck with me is that at some point folks leave and a couple hours later, in the wee hours, in the morning, Trump tweets out his call to come to D.C. and that's after stand back, standby, and that was two months after stand back and stand by and the uproar over that comment. So there's an awareness, I think, that Trump had to have about. And this is again, me just speculating that that tweet was going to have an effect to place a target on the back of Congress on January 6. We saw it had a dramatic effect, and we also accumulated evidence. One thing that's cited in the report is a text from Jason Miller to Mark Meadows citing or linking to a post on the Donald win. I believe, like seven days before the attack, he says, we got the base fired up. And that page he links to includes really violent, vile suggestions of a coup, of an insurrection, that the Congress people were going to be carried out in body bags, that there were going to be zip ties, that sort of thing. And I believe Miller said to the committee in his deposition that he just didn't scroll down to see the comments. I don't find that particularly credible, speaking for myself. But that sort of behavior so close to the president should ring every alarm bell in any democracy's arsenal. And that's not even to speak about Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony about the president sort of wanting to welcome in armed supporters because they weren't there to hurt him. I think at a certain point, we have to stop thinking about the president and start thinking about what that means for our society, to have the leader of our nation welcoming in armed supporters and think about when else that's happened in modern history. And there are really dark analogs, really dark parallels that need to be taken seriously. And I think the report did a phenomenal job laying out that fact pattern, and now it's up to all of us to understand what that fact pattern means in the context of. Of history.
- [40:35]
C
So let's talk about Twitter. Twitter is obviously extremely important to the story. As you say, Trump sends out that tweet saying, be there. We'll be wild. And the report shows really clearly that that is kind of a rallying point for a lot of these folks who then show up at the Capitol. Crucial to the committee's investigation are two whistleblowers from Twitter who spoke with you. And listeners who are interested can find transcripts of those interviews on the government Publishing office website. I definitely recommend taking a look. Look, just tell me a little bit about that part of your investigation.
- [41:08]
B
Yeah. So I was privileged to be part of the team that was looking into social media and the attack, and I was the lawyer leading the depositions of both those whistleblowers, one of whom has since come forward quite courageously, Anika Navaroli. And she has spoken publicly about her experience at Twitter. So I would encourage folks to look up what she said on her own terms outside of the deposition as well. But the story that's sketched out by these two whistleblowers, I think shows the extent to which Twitter and other major social media companies, by extension, were simply unprepared to grapple with the reality of an autocrat in the White House. And the sort of story sketched out in these depositions is the complete inverse of what Elon Musk and others have been peddling as the Twitter files. There is a really compelling and consistent story that. That these whistleblowers were able to back up. And there's evidence discussed in the depositions that we walk through with them. And that story is one of Twitter executives being terrified of taking direct action against Trump because of the power he held over that platform and the reticence of Twitter leadership to try to find creative solutions to the type of coded calls for violence that Trump was himself sending out and that other Twitter users were using and were tweeting out in reaction to his content. So we uncovered a story that basically established that after the debate where Trump said, stand back and stand by. Navaroli and others were so alarmed by what they were seeing in response to the President's comments in the real world that they formulated a policy called the coded incitement to violence policy that would have allowed Twitter to basically discipline tweets that were an implicit suggestion of violence. And Twitter did not have a very clear incitement policy at that point. And they thought that was a real hole that needed to be filled. And leadership sat on this policy for weeks. And then you get to the election, and both whistleblowers describe how there was a particular violent turn in content once Trump refused to concede. What is that, November 10th or something like that. And so they again manually scraped tweets that were saying things like, locked and loaded, ready for civil war, American Revolution 2.0. And they came to their supervisors and again begged them to implement this policy that would have allowed sort of escape hatch if things got out of hand. And again, they were denied. And they talked about sort of broader considerations of Twitter being afraid of making Trump angry and things like that. But the reality is that there was no way for Twitter to get at this problem of far right extremism that was being sort of propagated by the President's tweets. And it really reminds me of what we were talking about earlier with the failures of federal law enforcement. I think there's a certain respect, lack of capacity to respond to these problems when the President of the United States is making them actively worse, because major institutions like social media, massive companies, and the FBI don't know what to do with that problem. It's not a problem that America has faced before. And I think that, as we saw leading up to Brazil, according to these depositions, there is still no code incitement to violence policy. And they flagged concerns, particularly about the Brazilian elections. One of the whistleblowers. And now we saw a very similar fact pattern play out after the Brazilian elections. And I think it shows that we continue to have social media companies that are unwilling to tackle this issue.
- [44:57]
E
Right.
- [44:57]
C
And part of that is that it's very striking to look through the report, read through these transcripts, at a time when Meta has just decided to let Trump back on its platforms with some new safeguards that they say they're building.
- [45:13]
B
Could I say something about that?
- [45:13]
C
Yeah, please.
- [45:14]
B
One thing that is in the sort of outline of the new safeguards is that Trump won't be allowed to attack an upcoming election. And I read that, and I was immediately flabbergasted because the biggest problem with January 6th was not attacking an upcoming election, it was attacking an election that already happened. And so, under those guidelines, Trump will still be able to attack the 2020 election in perpetuity, and then he'll be able to attack the 2024 election, it seems to me, as soon as the votes are called. So that doesn't solve the problem at all. And I think that the same dynamics where social media companies are afraid to confront Trump until it's clear that he is actively inciting political violence and could do so again, I don't see why that would be any different this time around. So Meta has promised to police more carefully, but why would they police more carefully if we're going to have cries of bias and cries of unfairness? As soon as they do so, I think we're going to run into the same problems.
- [46:11]
C
And so, you know, Twitter, we have this situation where Trump can post anything he wants, but hasn't so far, I think, because of his agreement with the good people at Truth Social. But what strikes me about all of this is that, as you say, tech companies sort of took action when it was already too late to some extent that there was, you know, we're only willing to take action when there was violence on the ground after January 6th. Now, you know, things have been, let's say, relatively quiet. And it strikes me that there's maybe a little bit of the dynamic in Ginsburg's famous dissent in Shelby county, where, you know, you. You throw away the umbrella because you're not getting wet. Are you concerned that Trump, now that he has access to these platforms again, would be capable of ginning up the same kind of violence? Violence? Or has his influence ebbed such that it's less of a concern?
- [47:06]
B
I think that's a hard question to answer at this stage, because we're not in the heat of a campaign. And I think there are more factors that we'll have to see how they play out in terms of Trump's political future. I think that there's a strong likelihood that he still has that capacity. But the important thing to remember here is that that this dynamic we've seen in the past works both ways. So there are folks on the far right fringe who have regularly interacted with folks like Stuart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio and others who are now, you know, shifting their attention from election denialism to targeting the queer community and targeting transgender individuals and drag shows and other acts of political violence against the LGBTQ population. And so you just saw yesterday Trump making a strong statement about all transgender adults, regardless of age, and making that a centerpiece of his, whatever kind of campaign he's running right now. And so there's a call and response between Trump and this fringe that I think goes both ways. He's having dinner with Nick Fuentes and with others who were firmly in that January 6th coalition. He's learning things, too. And so we just saw, I think it was yesterday or two days ago, the president retruth a call by one of his anonymous supporters that said that next time around, people have to be willing to take up arms to basically defend the country and ensure that Trump is in power. That's precisely the same kind of rhetoric we saw leading up January 6th. It's almost like, embarrassingly similar. And he just reposted it, retruthed it. And so. So I have no doubt he's willing to do that. And I also have no doubt that he is learning from this authoritarian coalition about what their priorities are, whether it be opposition to mask mandates, opposition to LGBTQ equality or other issues, and that he'll modulate correctly.
- [49:07]
C
Do you think that societally we're in any better of a position in terms of protecting against an effort like that happening again? Or. Or do you sort of see this unfolding, watching the train crash and not being able to stop it? Because it really strikes me that there's so much damning material in these documents and the transcripts and the report, and yet, at the same time, it feels like, societally, politically, Americans haven't really grappled with it.
- [49:36]
B
Well, I think it's really easy to place all the blame on Donald Trump and send him out into the desert like some kind of biblical scapegoat and hope that everything goes away. It's going to be funny when he comes running back from the desert and is like the nominee and crushes all the opposition. But more fundamentally, the evidence that's laid out by the committee suggests that, in my view, this problem goes far beyond him, because there are individuals who are foundationally opposed to much of what multiracial American democracy stands for, whether that's LGBTQ equality or racial justice protests or a more critical view of how police interact with black Americans and all of that. That is something that existed far before Donald Trump and will exist far after he's left the stage. But what he was able to do was infuse the idea of political violence as an acceptable piece of our national discourse. And I don't think we're willing to. I don't think many folks are willing to have that conversation. And that's what I am worried about most, because we saw just today a report that a neo Nazi had targeted a power station in Maryland, I believe, as a way to cripple modern American society. And we've seen reports of this happening plots in other states. In some cases, there have been, I think, as of yet, unconfirmed reports that they were targeting drag events in those states, I think North Carolina. So we have to see how those investigations play out. But it's clear that there is a willingness to keep up this vigilante activity in a bold and dangerous way, even when Trump is far from the Oval Office. And so I don't think that we are ready to have that conversation, and I'm not sure that federal law enforcement is ready to have that conversation, too. There seems to be a continuing fixation on lone actors and sort of sporadic events when we see that there is a movement of proud boys that targeted school board events with. With harassment, intimidation over COVID policies and critical race theory. And now they're targeting drag events this year across the country, and many times armed and that sometimes drawn armed counter protesters, which is also extremely escalatory and damaging. So there's only a matter of time before that tinderbox explodes again. And what I am worried about is our broader societal unwillingness to take that threat seriously, too, because it doesn't directly involve Donald Trump at this moment. And if we will wait till we are forced to reckon with another Donald Trump crisis, I don't know if we'll be able to avoid it next time.
- [52:16]
C
I think that's a really interesting thread, and I want to play devil's advocate and push you on it a little, because let's say I'm someone who's looking at this. I'm a Republican. I've voted for Republicans generally. I would describe myself in this hypothetical as having conservative political values, but I was really upset and disgusted by what happened on January 6th. But I look at someone like Ron DeSantis and I say, he's not Trump. He's different. At the same time, what you're describing, there's a similar sort of valence to some of what DeSantis is doing in terms of targeting particular communities that are disfavored. But again, in this hypothetical, if I look at that and I say, well, that's different, that it's not attacking American democracy as such, it's not January 6th, it allows the sort of machinery of democracy to go on. People can have legitimate political disagreements about whether children should be allowed to go to drag shows or something like that. How would you convince that person that these two things are connected in the way that it sounds like you think they are?
- [53:28]
B
Well, taking the example of DeSantis, there has been, I think, significant movement in the political sphere to indicate that he shares a lot of Trump's fundamental rejection of core Democratic values. Take his legislation that makes it easier to prosecute and in some cases, like, harm protesters with impunity and makes it harder to peacefully protest. That was a direct targeted as a direct response to Black Lives Matter protests. I think that's HB1 in Florida. And then there's also, more recently, his order to not recognize the AP African American History course in Florida. And that Timothy Snyder, who's a historian of fascism at Yale, who the committee spoke with several times, talks a lot about this politics of forgetting and just erasing history as a serious precursor to democratic decline. And DeSantis, by trying to marginalize protesters and really whitewash our history while he's targeting the LGBT community and others, shows that I don't know how he'd react differently than Trump did when there are vigilantes trying to enforce his agenda. In fact, it looks like he'll be quite receptive to that idea. So what I would tell this really noble Republican voter who is accepting the idea of political violence being wrong and that's so important for us to encourage and embrace, I would say that you have to look at the roots of January 6th that goes back to Covid and Black Lives Matter and how Trump was encouraging folks to take the law into their own hands long before that meant overturning an election. And how can we avoid that from happening again? How can we ensure that the grounds of our political debate are firmly placed in the idea that we will be forever a political democracy that rejects violence and accepts all kinds of people, and we can't wait for the violence to break out to defend those principles. But what you're saying is a really hard problem, because I don't think we've set ourselves up well to reject Ron DeSantis for the same reasons we've rejected Donald Trump because. Because he hasn't committed a January 6, and he hasn't been at the center of a conspiracy that is broad sweeping, that involves Oath Keepers and proud boys and others. And so I do worry about how our political system will react when Trump is no longer at the helm of the party. If the party hasn't been able to more wholly cleanse itself from this tendency. And I don't think that there's a question that that tendency is in charge of, of significant portions of the governing class of the party. You see Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted about civil war after Trump's home was searched by the FBI. She was tweeting about civil war and she was the pivotal force in the Speaker's vote. And now the Lieutenant for Kevin McCarthy. Apparently you have Jim Jordan sending, I think, one of his first subpoenas to the doj, asking them how dare they investigate proud boy activity and other vigilante activity at school board meetings and kind of adopting this fringe talking point that this was somehow attacking parents when really they were trying to prevent a group that committed seditious conspiracy against the US Government from continuing to intimidate their ideological opponents in the context of school boards, which is the sort of cornerstone of our local self government system. And so I think that it's a complicated question because we're not able the most urgent task of the committee was to say here is, in my view, was to say here is the threat Donald Trump posed and here is why he cannot be allowed to hold office again, and here is why we have to refer him to the Department of Justice for prosecution of these crimes. But the committee, in a, you know, 850 page report, can't cover everything. And this question of what do we do with the sort of like way in which political violence is burrowed into our political system that can't be addressed in a single report. And I think we have to hope we can ride this wave of rule of law Republicans, rule of law Democrats coming together and ride out this storm.
- [57:44]
C
So what do we do on a more concrete level? You wrote about this a little bit in a piece in Just security with Mary McCourt that I'd recommend listeners take a look at.
- [57:52]
B
Well, I think one thing we can do now, I do work with Mary McCourt at Georgetown's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at one of the big priorities at icap, which is what it's called for short, is to have states across the country update and enforce their laws against unauthorized private and paramilitary activity. And that's one way that we can really concretely fight back against the trend towards political violence we see across the country. Because in every state, there are laws against private paramilitary activities that are not protected by the Second Amendment, not protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has been very clear on this point. But these laws are sometimes out of date and they require updates and they also need to be enforced. And a lot of times local law enforcement have connections to local militia groups or they are indebted to conservative voters who believe the mythology of the Second Amendment. And so we need to do a lot of public education to make sure that these laws are enforced. And in Oregon just today, a bill was introduced that ICAP was involved in drafting. A bill was introduced to update Oregon's anti paramilitary laws and basically make it clear how the state is authorized to respond to this activity. And also to make it clear that there are civil remedies for individuals who are harmed by paramilitary conduct and can seek damages. So that's one concrete way that we can firmly place paramilitary activity outside the bounds of protected conduct that is sort of just accepted by American society. And I think that might go a long way in next time there's a Stop the Steal event, Political consultants, political just general operatives won't be able to justify an alliance with the Oath Keepers or with the proud boys like we saw in 2020 and 2021. By placing these paramilitary groups far outside the realm of normal, we can help to excise acts of political violence from our system. And that's really what we're trying to do here. We're not trying to police ideology or police debate. We need to police violence. And so that's one step we can take.
- [60:05]
C
All right, let's leave it there. Jacob, thank you so much for joining us.
- [60:08]
B
Thank you. It's great to be with you.
- [60:13]
E
The Lawfare podcast is produced in cooperation.
- [60:16]
C
With the Brookings Institution. You can get ad free versions of.
- [60:19]
E
This and other Lawfare podcasts by becoming a Lawfare materials supporter@patreon.com Lawfare where you'll also get access to special events and other content available only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. And look out for our other podcasts, including the Aftermath, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series on the government's response to January 6th. This podcast is edited by Jen Patya Howell and your audio engineer. This episode was Ian N. Wright of Goat Rodeo. Our music is performed by Sophia Yan. As always, thanks for listening.
- [61:02]
I
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