It posted late Thursday evening
“Should we just deploy now and resign tomorrow?” — Major Gen. William Walker, commander of the Washington, DC, National Guard
It’s long, It’s detailed. Some found time to do more than skim it since its posting last night. The jist of the January 6th Committee report’s conclusions Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) summarized on television last week in outlining the committee’s criminal referrals.
Just Security reviewed the 800-plus page report and considers their deeper meaning:
1. White Supremacists, White Nationalism, Plus Anti-Government Extremists
The January 6th Report does well to make explicit one of the drivers of the efforts to overturn the election: racism. That includes but is not limited to white nationalism, a political project which is a particularly sinister and dangerous manifestation of white supremacist ideology.
The racist dimension is a theme that has been presented most powerfully by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) in his remarks at the opening and the closing of the committee’s public hearings. “I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Klu Klux Klan, and lynching,” Rep. Thompson said in the first hearing. “I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.”
Racism helped propel post-election efforts to disenfranchise voters in major urban areas in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere; helped galvanize the concerted disinformation campaign against Black election poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss; and helped drive militia groups, Neonazis and similarly minded domestic terrorist groups to help plan and participate in the Capitol attack.
Giuliani, for example, “seized on a clip of Freeman passing Moss a ginger mint, claiming that the two women, both Black, were smuggling USB drives ‘as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.’ … Not only were Giuliani’s claims about Freeman and Moss reckless, racist, and false, they had real-world consequences that turned both women’s lives upside down. And further heightening the personal impact of these baseless attacks, President Trump supported, and even repeated, them, as described later,” the report states (p. 280).
“Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, mother and daughter, were besieged by incessant, terrifying harassment and threats that often evoked racial violence and lynching, instigated and incited by the President of the United States,” the report states later (p. 305) – after providing a detailed list of state and local officials across several battleground states subject to a wave of racist, sexist,and antisemitic threats galvanized by Trump and Giuliani’s public demonization of them.
The Report also contains discussion of the role of white nationalist extremists, such as “online provocateur” Nick Fuentes and his Groypers, a loose network made up of figures that hold racist and antisemitic views. It provides an in-depth look at the crucial role of the Proud Boys, “Western chauvinists” known to promote “an exclusionary, hyper-masculine interpretation of Western culture,” in organizing and executing the breach of the Capitol. The report notes that Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys leader involved in the the attack at the Capitol, invoked the “Day of the Rope” when discussing his intent to reject the outcome of the 2020 election, “referring to a day of mass lynching of ‘race traitors’ in the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries.”
“White supremacists and Confederate-sympathizers were among the first rioters to enter the U.S. Capitol,” the report explains.
At the same time as making these racist throughlines more widely understood, the Report helpfully identifies rightwing anti-government extremism– with a focus on the Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters– as a related movement that explains the conditions that gave rise to the January 6th attack It notes these closely related movements produced what might be thought of as a presage for the assault on the Capitol, as “[f]ar-right extremists protested at or inside State capitols, or at other government buildings, in at least 68 instances” between January 1, 2020 and January 20, 2021.
We have always thought that white supremacy should be foregrounded in the analysis of the January 6th attack and the efforts to disenfranchise voters in the ways Trump and his associates chose to do. Policymakers, scholars, and the general public can benefit significantly from grappling with the evidence and analysis provided by the select committee.
2. False Slate of Electors Scheme: The Principals
One of the highly active parts of the Justice Department’s investigation into the efforts to overturn the election involves the false slate of electors scheme. The January 6 Report provides new and compelling evidence pointing to Trump, Meadows, and Giuliani’s direct roles in organizing the scheme to replace the rightful delegates to the Electoral College determined by the outcome of the popular vote with individuals loyal to former Trump to falsely certify his winning the respective state.
What’s more, the evidence against Meadows – Trump’s White House chief of staff – and Giuliani – Trump’s personal attorney – is also evidence against Trump. Meadows and Giuliani appear to have been acting at Trump’s direction in orchestrating the scheme. What’s more, the Report does not include all of the Meadows texts that further corroborate these damning findings.
These passages highlight some of the new evidence:
In early December, the highest levels of the Trump Campaign took note of Chesebro’s fake elector plan and began to operationalize it. On December 6th, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows forwarded a copy of Chesebro’s November 18, 2020, memo to Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller writing, “Let’s have a discussion about this tomorrow.” Miller replied that he had just engaged with reporters on the subject, to which Meadows wrote: “If you are on it then never mind the meeting. We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.” Miller clarified that he had only been “working the PR angle” and they should still meet, to which Meadows answered: “Got it.” Later that week, Miller sent Meadows a spreadsheet that the Trump Campaign had compiled. It listed contact information for nearly all of the 79 GOP nominees to the electoral college on the November ballot for Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And on December 8th, Meadows received a text message from a former State legislator in Louisiana recommending that the proposed “Trump electors from AR [sic] MI GA PA WI NV all meet next Monday at their state capitols[,] [c]all themselves to order, elect officers, and cast their votes for the President. . . . Then they certify their votes and transmit that certificate to Washington.” Meadows replied: “We are.”
Cassidy Hutchinson, a Special Assistant to the President and an assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, confirmed Meadows’s significant involvement in the plan. Hutchinson told the Select Committee that Meadows followed the progress of the fake elector effort closely and that she “remember[ed] him frequently having calls, meetings, and outreach with individuals and this just being a prominent topic of discussion in our office.” When asked how many of his calls or meetings it came up in, she estimated “[d]ozens.” (pp. 345-46)
While the campaign’s core legal team stepped back from the fake elector effort on December 11th, it nonetheless went forward because “Rudy was in charge of [it]” and “[t]his is what he wanted to do,” according to Findlay. When Findlay was asked if this decision to let the effort proceed under Giuliani’s direction “was coming from your client, the President,” Findlay responded: “Yes, I believe so. I mean, he had made it clear that Rudy was in charge of this and that Rudy was executing what he wanted.” (p. 349)
With the committee’s work, the false slate of electors ends up being the scheme in which Trump and Meadows may face the greatest legal jeopardy. The two men (and Giuliani) put their fingerprints all over the plan, and the Justice Department will presumably be able to uncover more information to determine whether to proceed with indictments.
3. Pressure on State Officials – A vast and organized scheme
The January 6 Report provides new information about the breadth of Trump and his closest associates’ efforts to pressure state officials to exceed their legal authority to reverse the election outcome (Chapter Two). “The Select Committee estimates that in the two months between the November election and the January 6th insurrection, President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election result,” the report states.
In other words, Trump and his associates’ efforts were directed not only in the notorious phone call to Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and in phone conversations with Arizona’s Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers, but in a more systematic fashion with state and local officials across the battleground states where Trump lost the popular vote.
Such an overarching pattern of behavior may become valuable evidence in establishing a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States (under 18 U.S.C. 371) in the Department of Justice investigation as well as in establishing criminal offenses under state law, such as in Georgia, Fulton County (see the Brookings Fulton County, Georgia report, 2d edition).
In pursuing criminal investigations, law enforcement agencies, and the Department of Justice in particular, may have a greater ability to get witnesses to testify. The case of Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey provides an example of someone with an apparent story to tell but reluctant to speak with the committee:
President Trump called Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey three times after their White House meeting: November 21st, November 25th, and December 14th. Shirkey did not recall many specifics of those calls and claimed he did not remember the President applying any specific pressure. The day after one of those calls, however, Shirkey tweeted that “our election process MUST be free of intimidation and threats,” and “it’s inappropriate for anyone to exert pressure on them.” From this and other public statements, it is clear that Shirkey was sensitive to outside forces pressuring people with roles in the election. In fact, the same day that the electoral college met and voted former Vice President Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, Shirkey received another call from President Trump and issued another public statement. Shirkey’s statement that day, December 14, 2020, read: “Michigan’s Democratic slate of electors should be able to proceed with their duty, free from threats of violence and intimidation” and “[i]t is our responsibility as leaders to follow the law….” (pp. 300-301)
4. Anatomy of the Attack – Understanding the Trump effect and indicators of a seditious conspiracy
Some supporters of President Trump have argued that the attack on the Capitol was already underway before Trump even ended his speech at the Ellipse. An implication is that his words cannot thus be regarded as incitement or casual. That idea, of course, need not be propagated only by the former president’s supporters. It is an important counterintelligence question worth asking.
The January 6th Report presents in exacting detail an analysis of the structure of the attack that points to two stark conclusions.
First, the Report shows that the attack would not have succeeded without Trump’s fiery speech at the Ellipse. The President of the United States at the time directed a mass of his followers to march on the Capitol. Context is important. He laid the groundwork: he told the crowd they needed to “take back our country” from an election “stolen from you.” Their rightful leader had been deposed in a fraudulent election, and the only way to get him back was to “fight like hell.” “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules,” he said.
But this is not just about analyzing his speech. The Report goes into depth explaining how a first phase of the attack with the Proud Boys and their associates at the tip of the spear was successfully repelled by the DC Metropolitan Police. “After the initial breaches, the USCP was able to deploy enough officers to stop the rioters from advancing past the base of the inauguration stage. More importantly, rioter momentum was further halted when the first group of MPD officers arrived on scene at 1:11 p.m., almost precisely as President Trump finished his Ellipse speech,” the report explains. “A stalemate ensued.”
Law enforcement officers, however, were completely overwhelmed by the second wave, when thousands of rally-goers came over from the Ellipse. Without that speech, without that mob, the report explains in authoritative terms how the assault on the Capitol would not have happened.
Second, the Report presents extraordinary evidence and analysis of a preplanned operation by the Proud Boys that appears to have worked hand-in-hand with the closely held plan that Trump would direct the crowd to march on the Capitol. The Report states:
“Shortly before the joint session of Congress was set to begin at 1:00 p.m., the Proud Boys instigated an assault on outmanned law enforcement at the Peace Circle, a key location. They quickly overran security barriers and made their way onto the U.S. Capitol’s restricted grounds. Throughout the next several hours, members of the Proud Boys led the attack at key breach points, preventing law enforcement from gaining crowd control and inciting others to press forward.
President Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse at approximately 1:10 p.m. Toward the end of his remarks, the President directed his supporters to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Their natural path took them through the Peace Circle, which had already been cleared out by the Proud Boys and their associates.” (pp. 638 emphasis added)
Such a coincidence is not anywhere sufficient to indicting someone on a seditious conspiracy charge, but it raises the chilling prospect of coordination between Trump’s plan to dispatch the mob and the Proud Boys’ planned assault.
This section of the report is among the most impressive. Accordingly, readers should be aware of the remarkable sources and methods the committee used in its analysis:
“The Select Committee reviewed extensive footage of the attack, including that recorded by the U.S. Capitol Police’s (USCP) surveillance cameras, the Metropolitan Police Department’s (MPD) body-worn cameras, publicly available videos, as well as on-the-ground film produced by an embedded documentarian. The Select Committee interviewed rioters, law enforcement officers, and witnesses that were present on January 6th, while also consulting thousands of court filings. Using these sources of information, the Select Committee developed a timeline of events to understand how the unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol unfolded.” (pp. 637-38)
The section discusses in detail the actions of others such as Alex Jones and Ali Alexander in mobilizing and channeling the crowd – and in communicating with the Proud Boys. “Records for Enrique Tarrio’s phone show that while the attack on the Capitol was ongoing, he texted with Jones three times and [Jones’ colleague Owen] Shroyer five times,” as but one example. It will be for the Justice Department to crack open this part of the case. The committee has given them – and investigative reporters – not only many a lead, but a roadmap.
5. A Major Lawsuit in the Offing – January 6th Report points to Dominion Voting Systems’ options against Trump
In its executive summary, the committee stated: “Trump again made false and malicious claims about Dominion Voting Systems.” The reference there is to the former president’s January 6th speech at the Ellipse and a Table the committee presents displaying examples in which Trump made similar public statements about the company. Chapter One of the report includes a lengthy, 8-page treatment of the topic, providing evidence that “Trump demonstrated a conscious disregard for the facts and continued to maliciously smear Dominion.”
We have previously discussed this topic at Just Security, publishing a roundup of leading experts’ views. See, Ryan Goodman, 8 Top Experts on Strength of Dominion Suing Trump for Defamation, If It Wants To, July 19, 2022. The introduction to their views read: “Almost every expert said a defamation suit brought by Dominion against Trump would be very strong, but one expert raised concerns about the practicality of such a lawsuit and another raised issues of presidential immunity.”
6. The Intelligence Failure – The Select Committee refusal to assign blame
One of the topics the January 6 Report addresses is the role of law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies including the FBI and at DHS, and why they apparently failed to anticipate the scale of possible violence at the Capitol and prepare law enforcement agencies accordingly. While the report acknowledges that a vast amount of information was gathered from social media, as well as from tips and other sources of information, indicating extremist groups were openly planning for violence, the committee takes pains to suggest the reason for the failure to reckon with the full extent of the threat was a lack of insight into the schemes and mindset of then President Trump.
In the introduction to the report, the Committee notes that:
Neither the intelligence community nor law enforcement obtained intelligence in advance of January 6th on the full extent of the ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates to overturn the certified election results. Such agencies apparently did not (and potentially could not) anticipate the provocation President Trump would offer the crowd in his Ellipse speech, that President Trump would “spontaneously” instruct the crowd to march to the Capitol, that President Trump would exacerbate the violent riot by sending his 2:24 p.m. tweet condemning Vice President Pence, or the full scale of the violence and lawlessness that would ensue. Nor did law enforcement anticipate that President Trump would refuse to direct his supporters to leave the Capitol once violence began. No intelligence community advance analysis predicted exactly how President Trump would behave; no such analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on January 6th. (p. 6)
This point is underscored again later in the 154-page executive summary, suggesting that direct knowledge of President Trump’s malign intent was the missing component that would have completed the intelligence picture:
Again, this type of intelligence was shared, including obvious warnings about potential violence prior to January 6th. What was not shared, and was not fully understood by intelligence and law enforcement entities, is what role President Trump would play on January 6th in exacerbating the violence, and later refusing for multiple hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and leave the Capitol. No intelligence collection was apparently performed on President Trump’s plans for January 6th, nor was there any analysis performed on what he might do to exacerbate potential violence. Certain Republican members of Congress who were working with Trump and the Giuliani team may have had insight on this particular risk, but none appear to have alerted the Capitol Police or any other law enforcement authority. (p. 66)
In his forward, Rep. Thompson repeats this idea:
But the shortfall of communications, intelligence and law enforcement around January 6th was much less about what they did or did not know. It was more about what they could not know. The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country. Prior to January 6th, it was unimaginable. Whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day. (p. xi)
Rep. Thompson concludes that his “concerns are less with the mechanics of intelligence gathering and security posture, as important as those questions are,” but rather “remain first and foremost with those who continue to seek power at the expense of American democracy.”
The Committee’s framing is odd, particularly given the degree to which the intelligence failure at multiple agencies has been documented, and the extent to which the Report itself makes clear that the threat of organized violence was clear. Was it really impossible to factor in the possibility that Trump might behave erratically or advance false claims, or worse, that might incite the crowd at his rally at the Ellipse? Take these three indicators, which are not mentioned in the analysis:
- Vice President’s Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, was concerned that Trump would endanger the safety of Pence by publicly lashing out on January 6th – so much so that he alerted the head of the Vice President’s Secret Service detail the day before. Short testified: “Concern was for the vice president’s security, and so I wanted to make sure the head of the vice president’s Secret Service was aware that — that likely, as these disagreements became more public, that the president would lash out in some way.”
- General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had repeatedly expressed concerns that Trump might seek to create what he called a “Reichstag moment,” and worked behind the scenes to limit the possibility that Trump might try to take advantage of “brownshirts in the streets.”
- As documented at Just Security, in addition to numerous instances in which Trump fomented violence before 2020, in the year prior to January 6 Trump in word and deed inspired violent groups, gave support and legitimacy to armed insurrectionists in states that had imposed pandemic restrictions, and repeatedly refused to say he would ensure a peaceful transfer of power. See, “Incitement Timeline: Year of Trump’s Actions Leading to the Attack on the Capitol.” That timeline notably starts with reference to an op-ed in January 2020 by former acting U.S. assistant attorney general for national security Mary McCord, now a member of the Just Security editorial board and a leading expert on militia groups. McCord wrote that Trump’s tweets at the time “incited insurrection” against state governments.
In sum, there is reason to doubt where the report lands in its assessment, a set of conclusions that shifts responsibility away from the FBI and other intelligence agencies for the historic intelligence failure.
The Report does, however, include a substantial examination of what should be done differently going forward in other respects.
For instance, the Report’s recommendations include an entry on “Violent Extremism,” noting that Federal Agencies with intelligence and security missions, including the Secret Service, should (a) move forward on whole-of-government strategies to combat the threat of violent activity posed by all extremist groups, including white nationalist groups and violent anti-government groups while respecting the civil rights and First Amendment civil liberties of all citizens; and (b) review their intelligence sharing protocols to ensure that threat intelligence is properly prioritized and shared with other responsible intelligence and security agencies on a timely basis in order to combat the threat of violent activity targeting legislative institutions, government operations, and minority groups.”
And in a recommendation related to “Capitol Police Oversight,” the Report suggests Congress should continue to monitor improvements in the department’s “intelligence processes” and its “critical incident response protocols.”
Crucially, the Committee appears to concur with the findings of a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation that considered why, given the available intelligence indicating the potential for violence on January 6, the events at the Capitol were not designated a National Special Security Event, which would have ensured a higher degree of security at the Capitol. That is a part of the intelligence failure that has nothing to do with anticipating Trump’s actions. The Committee recommends that “[g]iven what occurred in 2021, Congress and the Executive Branch should work together to designate the joint session of Congress occurring on January 6th as a National Special Security Event.”
A 30-page Appendix concerns “Government Agency Preparation For and Response to January 6th,” concluding that “there are additional steps that should have been taken to address the potential for violence on that day.” The Appendix lays out the substantial amount of information collected and disseminated across the federal government and law enforcement agencies. It notes that “[a]lthough some of that intelligence was fragmentary, it should have been sufficient to warrant far more vigorous preparations for the security of the joint session. The failure to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it.”
What then are the causal explanations for the failure” to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence”?
Yet again, even this section hedges, evading placing blame on intelligence and law enforcement agencies. “While the danger to the Capitol posed by an armed and angry crowd was foreseeable, the fact that the President of the United States would be the catalyst of their fury and facilitate the attack was unprecedented in American history,” the Appendix states. “If we lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government, urging his supporters to ‘fight like hell,’ we lack that insight no more.”
7. The Role of Social Media – An afterthought at best
According to the legislation that established the January 6th Committee, the members were mandated to examine “how technology, including online platforms” such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit “may have factored into the motivation, organization, and execution” of the insurrection. Almost a year ago, the committee issued subpoenas to Alphabet (Google), Facebook (now Meta), Reddit and Twitter demanding records “relating to the spread of misinformation, efforts to overturn the 2020 election, domestic violent extremism, and foreign influence in the 2020 election.”
“Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps—if any—social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence,” Rep. Thompson wrote at the time. He indicated the subpoenas were issued because the companies had failed to voluntarily provide information useful to the investigation that the Committee had requested.
Now, in his forward to the January 6 Report, Rep. Thompson notes the Committee “pulled back the curtain at certain major social media companies to determine if their policies and protocols were up to the challenge when the President spread a message of violence and his supporters began to plan and coordinate their descent on Washington.”
The report is replete with references to the role that, in particular, Twitter played as a key channel for the former President and his supporters to advance false claims about the election and ultimately to call on crowds to travel to Washington D.C. on January 6. The central importance of Trump’s December 19th tweet (“Be there, will be wild!”) is made apparent. And there is substantial discussion of the role of fringe sites such as TheDonald[.]win and Parler in the organization of extremist groups and planning for violence, with reference to Just Security reporting, in particular, on TheDonald[.]win. There is a segment on the role of the QAnon conspiracy in animating extremists, mention of key social media influencers and organizers such as InfoWars host Alex Jones, and an appendix that addresses the role of foreign state actors in pushing disinformation and narratives intended to influence the electorate.
That said, there is very little in the Report concerning the types of considerations referenced in the subpoenas. The Committee makes no explicit judgment on whether the platforms themselves could have done more to address the spread of the Big Lie and festering extremism, either in the immediate runup to January 6 or in the years prior, during which networks such as QAnon emerged. Rather, the Committee includes in its recommendations an encouragement to congressional committees to continue to investigate these questions:
“The Committee’s investigation has identified many individuals involved in January 6th who were provoked to act by false information about the 2020 election repeatedly reinforced by legacy and social media. The Committee agrees that individuals remain responsible for their own actions, including their own criminal actions. But congressional committees of jurisdiction should continue to evaluate policies of media companies that have had the effect of radicalizing their consumers, including by provoking people to attack their own country.”
If the committee did collect more specific information from the tech platforms, such as internal assessments or other testimony beyond that of a former Twitter employee highlighted in the seventh public hearing in July, it did not appear to merit mention in the final report.
Now to browse the thing myself. But here’s an eye-popper from page 769.
If only.
Ultimately, Walker waited for approval to deploy his D.C. National Guard contingent to defend the Capitol from rampaging American civilians.
Let’s hope no one ever faces that decision again.
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