On the Hill
‘Red flags everywhere:’ The Post dives deep into Jan. 6
‘Red flags everywhere’: Even 11 months after the insurrection, new details and reporting are still emerging that paint the fullest picture yet of the attack on democracy — and former president Donald Trump's mind-set at the time of the attack.
The Washington Post yesterday published a three-part series delving deep into the attempt to overturn the 2020 election by a team of 75 journalists who worked through much of this year to provide a definitive account of the causes, costs, and aftermath of the attack. We looked at the events leading up to the attack on the Capitol; what happened during the assault by a pro-Trump mob; and the aftermath.
The investigation revealed Trump was “the driving force at every turn as he orchestrated what would become an attempted political coup in the months leading up to Jan. 6, calling his supporters to Washington, encouraging the mob to march on the Capitol and freezing in place key federal agencies whose job it was to investigate and stop threats to national security.”
“Intelligence officials certainly never envisioned a mass attack against the government incited by the sitting president,” our colleagues write. “While the public may have been surprised by what happened on Jan. 6, the makings of the insurrection had been spotted at every level, from one side of the country to the other. The red flags were everywhere.”
Right before Christmas, Trump urged his supporters to turn out in D.C. and protest the results of the election on Jan. 6. The call to action spurred a flurry of online activity on popular social media networks used by conservatives and hate groups. Trump's “message immediately began to shift the intelligence landscape, with the volume of threatening messages about Jan. 6 expanding by the hour.”
“One of the most striking flares came when a tipster called the FBI on the afternoon of Dec. 20: Trump supporters were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to ‘overrun’ police and arrest members of Congress in January, according to internal bureau documents obtained by The Post. The tipster offered specifics: Those planning violence believed they had ‘orders from the President,’ used code words such as ‘pickaxe’ to describe guns and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session. On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) as a target,” our colleagues report.
Not antagonizing Trump
Trump's previous actions in office caused senior leaders in law enforcement agencies to temper their actions to avoid further aggravating Trump and exacerbating an potential for domestic violence.
“After months of the president threatening to fire FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the agency’s senior leaders worried that any public statements by the director might be ‘asking for a desperate president to come after him,’ as one person familiar with the discussions said. At the Pentagon, leaders had acute fears about widespread violence, and some feared Trump could misuse the National Guard to remain in power, new accounts reveal.”
- “Military officials took fateful steps to avoid being entangled in domestic unrest, scarred by the president’s efforts months earlier to use the military to quash racial justice protests. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy sought to require that only senior Pentagon leaders could approve changes to missions for National Guard soldiers. In the end, that posture contributed to the hours-long delay in getting the Guard to the Capitol to help restore order.”
Where was the president?
During the assault: “Trump watched the attack play out on television and resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as commander in chief — a president reduced to mere bystander,” the team reports.
Lawmakers, advisers, and aides frantically tried to reach Trump to get him to denounce the riots but efforts fell short. “Instead, Trump stewed in his grievance: over what he saw as [VP Mike] Pence’s betrayal, over blame in the media of him and his supporters for the death and destruction at the Capitol and, ultimately, over the fact that his final attempt to overturn the election results was about to fail.”
Even after Pence ultimately gaveled the Senate back into session at 8:06 p.m. — two hours after the police and National Guard troops were finally able to establish a security perimeter around the west side of the Capitol — the pressure on the VP did not let up.
John “Eastman, the attorney advising Trump, emailed [Greg] Jacob, Pence’s counsel, around 9 p.m. to try to convince the vice president to move to not certify the election results,” our colleagues report.
“In the past, Pence and his team had cited the Electoral Count Act, which laid out constitutional procedures for counting votes in presidential elections, as a reason he could not send electors back to states. But in the email to Jacob, Eastman argued that Pence had not precisely followed that law by allowing debate to extend past the allotted time — and therefore could disobey it by rejecting electors from Arizona. Jacob told others he was amazed at the email and disregarded it. He did not respond to Eastman. Pence continued to oversee the counting of votes.”
The aftermath: “The violent insurrection aimed at thwarting the democratic transfer of presidential power quickly became known by its date: Jan. 6. But the forces that drove Trump’s supporters into the halls of the Capitol did not fade after that day,” our colleagues report.
Unsubstantiated claims of election fraud have become a galvanizing force for the GOP: “Nearly a third of the 390 GOP candidates around the country who have expressed interest in running for statewide office this cycle have publicly supported a partisan audit of the 2020 vote, downplayed the Jan. 6 attack or directly questioned Biden’s victory,” according to key takeaways assembled by the team. “They include 10 candidates running for secretary of state, a position with sway over elections in many states.”
Trump's attacks have also led to widespread threats of violence. “Election officials in at least 17 states have collectively received hundreds of threats to their personal safety or their lives since Jan. 6, with a concentration in the six states where Trump has focused his attacks on the election results.”
The campaign
GOP governors group memo offers 2022 outlook on Democrat-held states
GAME (WEEK) MEMO: Ahead of Tuesday's gubernatorial races, the Republican Governors Association sent a memo to donors disclosing data from Virginia and New Jersey — and what it means for Republicans in 2022.
The memo, provided to The Early and authored by executive director Dave Rexrode, is bullish on both the GOP's chances in both states:
- “The fact that this is a jump ball the day before the election, in a state that has shifted so dramatically to the left over the last decade, should be a wakeup call to every Democrat on the ballot in 2022,” Rexrode writes. “In New Jersey, Joe Biden won in 2020 by 16%, and just four years ago, [Democratic Gov.] Phil Murphy won by 14%. New Jersey remains one of the bluest states in America, yet on the night before election day, several polls show this as a margin-of-error race with incumbent Governor Phil Murphy sitting below 50% on the ballot.”
- Regardless of the outcome, Rexrode writes that the RGA is in a “very strong position” for 2022: “First, there are eight states that have Democratic governors on the ballot in 2020 where Joe Biden won by the same or a smaller margin than he did in Virginia. Second, swing voters, suburban voters, moderates, and working-class Democrats have become disillusioned by the liberal agenda in both Washington and in their state capitols, and they are seeing first-hand the harmful effects of the liberal left’s agenda.”
Biden's “drag”: “Joe Biden’s declining image has allowed our Republican candidates to communicate more effectively with key voting groups,” Rexrode writes.
- “Democrats should be alarmed by how poorly Joe Biden is performing among independent voters in deep blue states. In Virginia and New Jersey, we found Biden’s image to have taken a massive hit between May and November. The trends aren’t better for Biden in the eight states where he faired the same or worse as he did in Virginia,” Rexrode adds.
By the numbers: “A majority of Americans now disapprove of President Joe Biden's job performance, while half give him low marks for competence and uniting the country, according to the latest national NBC News poll released over the weekend.
On K Street
Democrats add PRO Act provisions to reconciliation bill
What's in the bill: Among the provisions tucked into the draft of Democrats' massive health care, child care and climate change bill released on Thursday is language from the PRO Act, a bill to toughen labor laws that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and other trade groups have lobbied against.
The bill would authorize penalties of up to $50,000 for violations of the National Labor Relations Act. The penalties can be doubled in certain circumstances when the employers has committed another such violation in the past five years.
The Chamber, which opposes the broader bill, decried the provision after the text came out.
“The reconciliation draft includes brand new penalties that would fundamentally change the nature of the National Labor Relations Act," Glenn Spencer, the Chamber's senior vice president for employment policy, said in a statement to The Early. "Civil money penalties have never been part of the NLRA, and it’s improper to try and establish new law like this through reconciliation.”
The Media
Viral
Will the real Four Seasons please stand up?