Washington Wednesday - Capitol riot commission hearings

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 15th of June, 2022.

You’re listening to today’s edition of The World and Everything in It and we’re glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Washington Wednesday.

The cameras are rolling on Capitol Hill this week as the House panel investigating last year’s Capitol riot continues to present its findings in public hearings.

Democrats (and a handful of Republicans) say they’re presenting evidence showing a clear threat to democracy and that the threat remains.

Most Republicans say the entire investigation has been a witch hunt and pure political theater.

EICHER: Our goal is to help you understand the evidence being presented and let you decide for yourself.

Here to help us do that today is Patrick Eddington. He teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. He is a former CIA analyst. His past assignments included monitoring the breakup of the former Soviet Union and providing assessments to policymakers on Iraqi and Iranian forces.

REICHARD: Patrick, good morning!

PATRICK EDDINGTON, GUEST: Good morning to you. It’s good to be with you, Mary.

REICHARD: Thanks for being here. Well, I do want to get your evaluation of what we’ve learned so far. How much of what happened at the capitol was pre-planned by certain groups and how much was the situation just spinning out of control on that day?

EDDINGTON: We've only had two hearings thus far, by the January 6 Select Committee, the introductory hearing, of course.

But I think from my vantage point, at least in the initial hearing,I thought the committee did an extremely credible job of laying out essentially the overarching information that they have. I do think it's important to kind of remind folks that there is an enormous body of information that the committee has accumulated over the course of the year plus that it's been operating. And I would imagine that the vast majority of that material will be worked into their report, which I would imagine will be released either late in the summer or sometime in the fall.

But I think so far, this committee reminds me very much of how the Church Committee operated in the 1970s. And for those who may not remember, that was the committee that was chaired by then Senator Frank Church of Idaho. It was charged with looking into all the domestic spying that had been taking place by various government agencies and departments during most of the Cold War period. And that committee operated in what I would say is genuinely bipartisan basis. I think this committee is always going to have maybe a little bit of an asterisk next to it because of how things developed, essentially, with respect to who's on this committee from the partisan composition standpoint.

REICHARD: Patrick, we’ve heard testimony both firsthand and secondhand from former Trump administration officials. What is your understanding of what transpired inside the White House the day of the riot?

EDDINGTON: Well, we haven't actually gotten to that point in the hearings to date, but essentially, on the basis of what is public so far, what we know is that multiple individuals—not just in the White House, but on Capitol Hill, including Speaker McCarthy and many others—were pleading with the President to call off the mob, in essence. And he never really responded for the most part during the course of that period until literally the very end after the mob had been rampaging through the capitol for hours. We're going to get a lot more in the way of detail on that. We got a fair amount of detail about that in the committee's initial hearing. You heard a lot of testimony about that and particularly what I found very compelling was the testimony from the Joint Chiefs Chairman General Milley with respect to the fact that it was the Vice President, Mr. Pence, who was attempting to get intervention essentially from the DC National Guard and potentially other assets to essentially clear the Capitol and restore order. I thought that was among the most dramatic aspects, at least of the first hearing that took place.

REICHARD: The committee has spent a good bit of time talking about the underlying claim by Trump that the election had been stolen from him. One former Justice Dept. official testified that he told President Trump that he had been getting bad information from certain people and that there was no evidence of meaningful fraud.

Has any evidence emerged over the past couple of years to support that claim? Or was that former Justice Dept. official correct?

EDDINGTON: There’s no question that everything the former Attorney General Barr and his deputies told the committee is absolutely fact-based. There's absolutely no question about that. Mr. Trump tried to challenge this in court. He lost 60 out of 61 times and one victory was essentially kind of meaningless on technical grounds. So there really is no doubt at this stage of the game that the election was conducted fairly. Any fraud that did take place was literally on the margins and virtually negligible.

I also thought that the testimony that was received in the second hearing by a former Fox News official, who has been in the campaign coverage business for a very, very long period of time, was extremely compelling in terms of the evidence that they had when they called Arizona. Fox News called Arizona for Biden before any other network did. And the recounts have clearly shown that that was absolutely the correct call.

REICHARD: As a former CIA analyst, Patrick, speak to the role of intelligence officials, the FBI and other agencies. Do you feel like they dropped the ball here in not fully recognizing the risk on Jan. 6?

EDDINGTON: There’s been a tremendous amount of commentary and criticism to that effect. And I will tell you that one of the biggest problems that the federal law enforcement, or any kind of intelligence organization has, is essentially sorting out the signal from the noise, so to speak. And while there were some generic indications in some quarters that this kind of thing might happen, there wasn't actually—at least at this point, no evidence has surfaced—that the FBI, for example, which is the primary domestic law enforcement agency responsible for dealing with these kinds of threats, that the FBI actually had anybody inside of Stewart Rhoads - and Stewart Rhodes, of course, the founder and leader of the Oathkeepers - they didn't have anybody inside Stewart Rhoads’ inner circle, essentially, to kind of give them a sense of what might potentially be going on.

But it is, just as a practical matter, it can be very difficult to sort out what's real from what's not. And sometimes, the FBI, they radically overstep if we just kind of look at the Wolverine Watchmen case in Michigan, and that is the case involving several individuals who are charged essentially with trying to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

As we learned through that particular trial, many aspects of that really involved essentially, the FBI kind of facilitating the plot. And it's not the first time that the FBI has overreached in terms of trying to snare people in that respect. And that's why it's imperative to actually have law enforcement adhere to the strictest possible standards with respect to evidence. And I think there needs to be some accountability there if we're going to make sure that we don't have more failed prosecutions like we did with the case involving the Wolverine Watchmen.

REICHARD: If you were advising the federal government on how to prevent anything like this from happening ever again, what would you tell them?

EDDINGTON: I think there are several things ultimately that have to happen here. First and foremost, I don't think there's any question that the mayor of the District of Columbia needs to have full and total control over the DC National Guard. I think that's item one, in order to respond to any potential threat like that that might develop. But number two, and I think this is extremely important, we need to draw a distinction and a clear distinction between legitimate First Amendment related protest, which the overwhelming majority of people who participated in events on January the sixth, did not engage in vandalism, did not engage. And there were literally thousands of people, probably tens of thousands of people who showed up for that particular event. But it was only less than a thousand, essentially, and that's still a large number, to be sure, but it was less than a thousand, who actually breached the Capitol itself, and probably a smaller number than that that engaged in these kinds of violent acts. And that's why I think we have to balance this attempt at protecting essentially, the Citadel, if you will, the symbol of our democratic republic from potential threats in the future while still allowing constituents and others access to the facility.

One of the allegations that was made by Democratic members of the January 6 Select Committee was that Representative Barry Loudermilk was involved, essentially, in some reconnaissance operations before January 6, et cetera, et cetera. And the Capitol Police just this week, the week of June 13, released their report saying that Mr. Loudermilk was simply taking his constituents on a tour of the Cannon and Rayburn House Office Buildings, so they weren't even actually in the Capitol. And that's why getting all of the evidence out, all the available documentary evidence, the video evidence, and so on and so forth, I think is really extremely important because clearly there are folks that have strong feelings on both sides of this issue. And when you're dealing with something that's literally this politically explosive, we need to proceed in a calm, rational and direct fashion.

REICHARD: Patrick Eddington is a senior fellow at the CATO Institute. Patrick, thank you!

EDDINGTON: Thank you.

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