Lawfare Archive: The New January 6 Reports

[MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Marissa Wong in Turnet Law Fair,

“with an episode from the law fair archive for April 18th,”

2020-6. On April 14th, the Department of Justice asked a federal appeals court to vacate the convictions of 12th January 6th Capitol rioters, who are also known members of the oath keepers and the proud boys.

On the first day of his second term,

President Trump issued full part against the majority of January 6th defendants, but granted 14 individuals' commutations, meaning their sentences were not dismissed, but reduced to time served.

If granted, the Justice Department's motion would vacate those convictions. For today's archive, I choose an episode from January 6th, 2025, in which Molly Reynolds sat down with Quintitur Essek and Ryan Riley

to discuss to newly released investigative reports

“on the January 6th riot, and what the landscape”

of accountability looked like on the precipice of Trump's return dominance. (upbeat music) - To the law fair podcast, I'm Molly Reynolds, senior fellow at Brookings,

and senior editor at Law Fair, with Quintitur Essek, a fellow at Brookings, and a senior editor at Law Fair, and Ryan Riley, Justice reporter at NBC News. - One of the things that makes this an intelligence failure on the FBI's part is that everyone knew it was going to happen.

I mean we didn't all know that rioters were going to break into the capital, but we knew that something was going to happen on January 6th, because everyone was posting about it and Trump had tweeted about it.

- Today, we're talking about two new investigative reports on January 6th, and where things stand in the effort to hold individuals accountable on the fourth anniversary of the insurrection. - I wanna start us off by talking about

first the Department of Justice Inspector generals,

long awaited report on January 6th. Quintitur, do you wanna just give us a little bit of context for this report? What is it? Why did it take so long to come out?

Why does it have the scope it does? That's sort of thing. - We've been waiting for this report to come out.

“I think it's fair to say for three years at this point.”

It was announced, I believe, pretty shortly after January 6th that the Justice Department Inspector General, along with a range of others inspectors general across the government, would be conducting an investigation

of how the Department handled the run up to the six in the day itself. - Most if not all of those other Inspector General offices finished their reports in some cases, a very long time ago.

And so anyone who has seen my Molly Slack messages knows that at this point, it is a running joke that every time the DOJ ID would drop something, we would get briefly excited and then not so excited as we realized

that this still somehow was not the January 6th report,

but they were kind enough to finally release it,

so they came in just under the wire on the four-year anniversary of January 6th. - I was pretty surprised when this came out at how short it was. It is a pretty slim 88 pages for report from the DOJ ID's office

and it announces right at the beginning that there is a lot that it is not going to talk about. Some of that has to do with the fact that, as I mentioned, other inspectors general got their first, which I will say the idea that you don't have to do your homework

because somebody else already did theirs is a principal that I wish I could have taken advantage of in high school, but the other part that's kind of missing here is the portion on what happened in the Justice Department as opposed to the FBI.

The report is really focused on how the FBI handled the run-up to January 6th and for good reason, and we'll discuss that. But it basically states explicitly, we decided not to look at a big portion of what happened here

because there was a criminal investigation and prosecution ongoing, and it seems pretty clear that that is referring to the investigation and prosecution undertaken by the Justice Department

and the prosecution of Donald Trump. It is a little unclear whether or not that portion of the investigation is dead, sleeping, maybe will it be revived? We don't really know, and it's not a total black box.

We do have some sense of what it is that went on in the Justice Department that is not described here because we know it from the indictment of Trump in the January 6th. And of course, the January 6th committees work.

This is for those who pay attention, essentially the sort of subplot about Trump attempting to get the Justice Department to reach out to state legislatures particularly in Georgia and say that DOJ was investigating election fraud

and put Jeffrey Clark in charge of the department.

So that failed, but it's sort of a crucial part

of the story in terms of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And it is not in here at all.

“For that reason, I think this is a very odd document”

in that it's missing, I don't know how what percent of the story, 50%, 75%, and then the question of how it handles the remaining 50% to 25% I think is a different issue on which I'm sure we also all have thoughts, but Ryan, I'm curious what you make

of the eventual shape that this took. Yeah, that was a really, really great summary. Yeah, I definitely is just missing a huge part of this story and I think that the narrative that has already emerged from this, despite the fact that I think that the headline

that they wanted to write was that, like, listen, there weren't any FBI special agents undercover out in the crowd, but instead, obviously, the narrative that has been written off of this in conservative media, certainly, is that like,

oh my gosh, look at all these confidential human sources are out there, like, does the level of detail trickle down into those stories that only a very small portion of those individuals were actually tasked by the FBI with going here and some of them were just there.

No, of course it doesn't. Is there any context about how many confidential human sources there are in the United States of America? No, is there a context of how many thousands of people went to DC and whether, you know, confidential human sources

were overrepresented on a percentage-based level of the percentage of Americans who are confidential human sources and then based on how many people actually went to DC and were those numbers wildly off,

because if you think about it for a second,

and you're like, you know, all of these thousands and thousands of people, I don't want to mess up the number but for some reason, 40,000 is striking to me as people who went to DC for this, is that sound about right to everybody?

We'll find out, but basically what I'm saying is that that number of confidential human sources when you step back for a moment is not totally surprising. For, I mean, you know, at first I was like, oh, interesting, a decent amount, but then, you know,

“I think the frustrating thing with the narratives”

that have emerged from this is like the core group that I think you actually need to focus on if I were drilling down on this, is the people who entered the capital who were confidential human sources

who didn't get charged. Those were the only ones who actually really matter, honestly. And I think there's a lot of distraction or people have purposely created distraction from talking about these people were on the property outside

because, yeah, no, a bunch of people were on the property outside, they're not getting charged. In fact, it was only in the very early days of the investigation that people on the law and of the US capital,

like even had a remote chance of being charged. Brandon struck is the one that jumps out of me there where there's someone who didn't commit any violence who was charged in the early days because he was like eight feet from the door,

but nowadays, like that case wouldn't have been charged because they generally only charged people, you know, after the first couple of months, they generally focused on people who either entered the capital

or people who assaulted law enforcement officers outside. So I think it is a little bit of a distraction to say that, oh, look at how many of these confidential human sources were on property

because who knows what time they arrived who knows if the gates were down.

“Like, that's why they didn't pursue a lot of these cases.”

Now, if you enter the capital, I mean, there was an alarm going off, there was a police presence,

there was a million different signs

that you shouldn't have entered the capital. And that's why they've been able to prove those cases overwhelmingly in court. But in terms of just entering the law that's a tougher one, right?

'Cause if I went to the outside of the White House right now and the gates had been opened that are normally outside of the White House and a bunch of people were inside there, I might assume that was open.

So that's where those cases were like tougher to bring and why the Justice Department did ultimately focus on those and that and the fact that they were just so wildly off on their estimations about how many people actually entered the capital itself in the early days of the investigation.

- That was a great sort of intro Ryan into some of the sort of substantive pieces of the report that I think we're going to talk about. Before we turn to that though,

Can you put this report in context with other reports that the Justice Department's Inspector General has done in recent years, particularly around the tone, the way it approaches the material? How does it compare to some of the other things

that we have seen this particular offense? - Get itself involved in. - Well, I love to see the previous drafts

“because I think that there was a huge editing process here”

at sort of the last minute and then they had to get it through the clearance process, right? So that was another hurdle they had to go over. So I think that like they were sort of you know to draw the the Jack Smith metaphor,

they were building this report for speed in the end because they had been a lot of time that had been wasted. My understanding is that actually most of the delay was because of not necessarily the, I think it impacted it, but it was not necessarily

because of the Jack Smith investigation itself, but it was because of the January 6 prosecutions themselves. And so once the big ones got over the line, the big ones, meaning the proud boy seditious conspiracy case where confidential human sources

were actually an issue at play with those cases and with the oath keepers case where sort of the same thing, in fact there was confidential human source to knew about this ahead of time that the FBI ignored the tip on, didn't do anything with and then testified at trial

and it turned out that he was a pedophile or a child sex offender who had sent this in at some point.

So yeah, I mean, I think that that was basically

the reasoning for the delay ultimately was just this notion that there was this massive ongoing January 6 case,

“but in the edit process I think that that's what sort of played”

out because this was supposed to be the Jeffrey Clark Report ultimately, this was supposed to be the report about why the Inspector General was a part of a raid on Jeffrey Clark's house. - And we still don't have the answer to that question.

- We still do not, we still do not. There's like some coordination with Jack Smith's team, but we don't know to what extent was that before Jack Smith's team, I think that maybe that, was Jack Smith's team already announced at that point.

I forget the exact timeline of when Jeffrey Clark's home was searched and we saw that video of him in his, his dress shirt and underwear, but that was I think what this report was originally supposed to be is like who inside the Justice Department was assisting in a tent

to overthrow the United States government? Was really supposed to be the focus of this report,

and that's not ultimately what came out of it.

Instead what we got out of it is a report that I'm sure you'll have a lot of, I'm fairly certain you'll have a lot of Republicans talking about the confidential human sources because that's just been an obsession for years now, and you have members talking about FBI ghost buses

and busing people in and just sort of all these bizarre conspiracy theories. And in the end, what you end up with a report where the government dumped a bunch of resources into researching the sort of really fringe side issue without getting to the core and the heart of the matter,

which was who inside the Justice Department was assisting in an effort to overthrow the 2020 election. So shifting them to the portion of what is covered, setting aside the issue of the confidential human sources,

“I think this sort of remainder of what's there”

is really about one of the questions that I certainly have been obsessed with since the beginning, which is how in God's name did the Bureau not see this coming? And there are a lot of very complicated reasons for that, which this provides a little bit more insight into,

and we can go into those. I think that I will say my sort of top line takeaway and Molly, this goes to your point about situating and in context, is how gentle the tone of the report is,

when the IG's office announced that we're gonna put out this report in the days after January 6th, my first thought was, "Oh, wow, that's really gonna be a barnburn." Because anyone who has followed the Uber of Inspector General Michael Horowitz

knows that he loves to just go in there and slash and burn and really, really criticise the department.

There was a string of highly, highly critical reports coming out

of the IG's office regarding the department's handling of the Clinton email investigation of the Russia investigation of the Komi memos, if anyone remembers those way back in the day, where the language was pretty harsh.

He took a harsh view of how the department had handled itself. And so opening this document up, I was honestly prepared for similarly stark conclusions about the bureau's failings. And particularly because I've heard multiple former FBI officials

call this one of the worst, if not the worst intelligence failure since 9/11,

And the language in the report is just not,

that is not what it sounds like. There are certainly, there are criticisms made.

“And I think some of the evidence there is pretty damning,”

but the overall takeaway, it kind of ends up with, you know, oh, yeah, the FBI, they did a generally okay job. This grew up, some things, you know, better like next time. I'm joking a little bit, but overall it's a very gentle compared to the sort of excoriating tone

that the office has previously taken. And I really don't know what to make of that. I mean, I'm maybe it's a by-product, Ryan, of some of the sort of issues that you're flying in terms of the strangeness of what they were doing

with the Clark material and then this issue of the confidential human sources. But I was pretty baffled, honestly, by some of the ways that the report is constructed. And by some of the things it leaves out as well.

I don't know, am I being too harsh on our words?

You know, it's tough to say because I think that

what I go back to is that the January six committee was supposed to do a lot of this. And they made the political decision to instead focus on Trump. And so, you know, 2020 being hindsight, although at the time,

I did think that that was a missing component and was wondering why that was something

“that wasn't focused on because that's what the report”

was supposed to be about. And that's what they said out to be and they set up a whole blue team to do that. And then in the end, sort of the big wigs that people at the top of the chain,

thinking Trump was this massive threat decided that that would be a distraction that the American people could have walked and chew gum at the same time. And so that's what they chose to do

and sort of left these issues sitting out there, this clear, huge intelligence failure. But yeah, I mean, the stuff with them missing the canvas like the stuff that they did talk about like these basic failures,

I mean, it just echoes from a report 20 years ago, right? Like, you talk about the January six and then you talk about intelligence failure as you mentioned, like the biggest intelligence failure since September 11th, arguably larger

because it was just out in there in the open and somehow everyone on the internet knew it, but the federal government didn't as massive and they didn't really drill down on that

“as much as I think they probably should have.”

Because they're just like a huge, huge systemic problems that that that identifies and there was not a deep inquiry or investigation into those broader topics that could prevent this from happening in the future.

I mean, some of it was just like really obvious, like, you know, stuff like, hey, maybe next time we switch our procurement service, we should have some overlaps. So there's not like,

you know, so that you're not shutting down the tool that you've used for years on one day and then starting up with a brand new tool, like, takes people-- - Oh, but it's time for listeners who are not familiar

is literally a thing that happened. (laughing) - Like, that one shouldn't have been too tough and in fact that was identified contemporaneously by the Washington Field Office

and that was more of the FBI procurement office that probably didn't think that one through or what have you, but I, you know, some of these go to a much deeper issues within the FBI, which I think, you know,

the one thing that I always go back to

and it's a quote that it's a joke that, you know, James Colleen made 10 plus years ago now but like how people want to smoke pot in the FBI. Like, you know, and like, and people always say like, no, I'm being facetious or joking about it,

but like, literally imagine having technological skills and making the choice to make your quality of life worse and I say that on a financial level, right? Like, you're making this huge sacrifice. If you have these technological skills,

you're making a huge sacrifice to go within the FBI because, hey, you know, be wet into the private sector, you're gonna get paid a lot more, you're gonna live wherever you want in the country

and, you know, you don't have to be forced to live somewhere you don't wanna live. Other jobs might care about what your spouse does because I think the FBI still set up in this 1950s mentality where all that matters is your job.

And, you know, you know, in the 1950s, it was whatever your wife was doing though, it was really matter if she was working at all. And nowadays, you know, that's not the world we're living in anymore.

This idea that the FBI can just, you know, dispatch anyone so wherever they want to in the country is not, is not a recipe for a successful organization. And just the salary levels are not necessarily where they need to be and just the training.

I think that that's also just a big failure that they could have gotten into. You know, there's been reports for decades now about the FBI falling behind on technological skills, but there's this huge mismatch between

the Hollywood portrayal of the FBI and what people think the FBI can do and maybe the actual reality of the FBI, which is that, you know, there are a lot of good people there. There are a lot of hard workers there,

but like, there's a lot of structural failures there.

if we're gonna take on 21st century threats.

“- Yeah, so we've covered, I think a couple”

of the sort of specific points already, but I wanna dig into this question of the FBI not canvassing its field offices a little bit more extensively.

So first, there's the question of sort of why didn't it do so

and what does the report tell us about that? And then there's a second question about the degree to which for a while after January 6th, the official line was no they had done a full canvas and that sort of the kind of etymology

of how that line makes its way first from a set of talking points that eventually came into testimony, both before two Senate committees, before the January 6th committee. So maybe Quintel, I'll come back to you first

to talk a little bit about this and then we'll go over to you, Ryan. - This is sort of the biggest failure that the report points out. So when we're talking about canvassing,

“what we mean is that the Washington Field Office”

failed to reach out to the field offices across that country and say, "Hey, can you ask your confidential human sources for information about what might be going on on January 6th and then send that back to us?"

Basically a request for whatever you got on January 6th.

And somewhat mystifyingly, the bureau didn't do that. And I say mystifyingly because as you say Molly, one of the weird things about this whole story is that not only did the bureau in the days after January 6th tell Congress that it had done that,

but that according to this report, multiple former officials when they were being interviewed, thought that it had done that and didn't realize that it hadn't, it was not totally clear to me if anyone at any point made the kind of affirmative decision,

no, we're not going to do. That, my impression and I may be a little bit turned around here. I mean, it's difficult to figure out

“because this is a relatively short report”

describing the workings of an incredibly big and complicated bureaucracy and we're kind of peering through a keyhole a little bit. But it seems like what happened is that the Washington Field Office essentially felt that they were getting too much information

about material that was not 100% in scope. Along lines of, "Hey, there's going to be a rally on January 6th." And there's a very funny email that's reproduced here where they essentially said, you know, why are you guys sending all this stuff to us?

And so what they do is they send out this email

that basically says, when you're sending us information,

can you please send us more specific information about specific threats? It seemed like the people who sent the email possibly and certainly the people above them understood that to have been functionally the canvassing that we're talking about.

But the people on the receiving end, the other field offices did not understand it that way. And so didn't send things in. Which, if you read the actual email, certainly the tone is, "Please stop spamming that mess."

And so there's this real disconnect that happens where the Washington field office thinks, it's sent this canvassing request or some amount of people that think it's on this canvassing request, the higher-up seemed to think that,

but the other field offices don't think that and aren't sending things in. And so again, I mean, right into your point about, you know, this is a couple big organization. It's a little bit behind the times.

Some of what you're seeing here is just, you know, something that people who have worked in any big organization have experienced, which is that, you know, somebody sends an email and it's not totally clear what it is that you're supposed to do and something ends up getting dropped.

What jumped out at me, I will say, and I think this is kind of a thread that I at least saw throughout the report is, there's no point at which anyone says, "Hey, let's not prepare for January 6 or something like that."

But there's also no point where anyone says, "Hey, we really need to be worried about this." Like there's no one above taking initiative and saying, "Okay, guys, we need to buckle down. This is a big deal.

You know, all hands on deck, right? Send out the campus and request." And so what you get is a lot of people who are kind of like doing things like 75% of the way in the hope that the other person will sort of

see what they're getting at and maybe pick up the other 25%, but not actually saying, "I need you to do this."

this is me theorizing more, but unwillingness to be the person left holding the bag, if, for example, the president finds out that maybe you've been looking into the activities of his supporters.

So there's this kind of, there's a level where everything is kind of operating on like implication and nobody quite wants to say it out loud. And what that does is that it means that it's very, very easy for everything to slip through the cracks,

because there's no one who's really cracking the weapon, saying, "Hey, we got to get on this." Again, Ryan, I'm curious. I keep going back to you to check me on my takes, but I'm curious what you think of that.

- That was a great take, a hundred percent.

“Yeah, I think that that was, if I had gotten that email,”

I would be like, "Oh, clearly that I want me to send any more, or that the very least I would be like, "Well, this is an additional burden. I'm not going to do this unless it's like really super serious." And even then it'll be, you know,

like if you impose an additional bureaucratic hurl on people, they're not going to do that. What we are supposed to learn from the 9/11 report was that information sharing is key. And everyone should be having the same info,

because you can make connections that you can't.

I mean, that's really ultimately why the slew

has been so much worse successful than the FBI and identifying people, because the FBI, the way it is structurally set up is not built for the internet era. It's not bill for easy information sharing across,

you know, they're all these various little fiefdoms, you know, different parts of the country were very much so differently. There's not just the ease of sharing that there should be. And there's not, you know, easy communication tools

and the other thing is that everyone's every utterance is being permanently recorded forever. And so you can't have these like honest discussions, because, you know, they can do their red cell efforts and write it in really bureaucratic boring language

that like takes, that doesn't make it compelling to read.

“But if you were to look at this honestly,”

what they're doing is they're focusing all of these individual trees and creating a bunch of bureaucratic hurdles and creating a bunch of make work that's not gonna actually have any benefit

when the actual threat was like clearly the fact that like millions of people thought that the election was stolen thousands of them were coming to DC and the rhetoric around it was crazy. Like that's, that's the threat there.

It's not like, oh, picking off this one individual actor did they cross this threshold of, whatever sort of thing behind the scenes and this is all an effort of setting up a ramps

of forthcoming discussion about the first amendment

they considerations there. - Nah, not yet. - Nah, not yet. Besuch the road kept in a leapness world in Freiburg with Euron Males, Dörona

or in the canal. At the beginning of a new year, and decked our interactive exhibition by the Alitness tool and audio guide and Eimglassek and Kinessten Parve Young

de-gance, Vaid von Root kept in the road kept in a leapness world in a Zickling and found. - So we'll get to that in a second when we get to the heart of the conversation where we cover some more stuff that's not in the report.

I do want to touch on one other thing that is in the report. So so far, we've talked about the degree to which the FBI did not canvas as field offices. Ryan gave us a great overview

of the report's discussion of confidential human sources and the degree to which it sort of robots a set of conspiracy theories about that. The other thing I want to talk about, and again, I'm maybe I'll go to Quintie first on this,

because I know this is the thing that's been another bead that's been in her bonnet for a while, which is this question of confusion among a set of federal agencies, principally DOJ and the Department of Defense,

about who was the lead federal agency on January 6th and then a set of operational decisions that flowed from that. So Quintie, can you just sort of again, for listeners give us a sense of like,

what's the problem here and do we learn anything about the problem from this report?

“- So I believe that we first learned about this”

actually from a report from, I forget which Senate committee might have been Senate rules, committee or Senate his guy. - They did an investigation together,

because sometimes Senate committees aren't capable of playing well with each other. In a way, the House committees are just not, but that's a topic for another day. - Thank you to the Senate.

- Yes, so there was an investigation that came out of those committees that basically said part of the problem was that no one was quite certain which agency was in charge of preparing for January 6th

and one of the things that that report said that has been kind of mystifying is that basically everybody else said that DOJ have been designated as what is called the lead federal agency in charge of preparing.

Except that DOJ, when they were asked, said no, we weren't.

And this has always been kind of puzzling.

I think this report honestly does not offer a huge amount of clarity on that matter, although it does provide a little more detail that essentially there is a specific conference call

the justice department and I believe DHS and the interior department are also on it where the defense department essentially says, okay, you know, we need a lead federal agency, we understand that the White House has designated DOJ

as the lead agency that's gonna be in charge of all this coordination. And then the report says, however, DOD and DOJ officials were not in agreement as to whether DOJ had agreed. And it quotes Jeffrey Rosen,

“who I believe at that time is the acting attorney general,”

essentially saying yes, Milly said that,

but I never agreed that I was going to do it.

And it really seems like for whatever reason, there was just a profound breakdown of communication here. Where, you know, this isn't like the smoking gun that allowed January 6 to happen, but I do think it's just another one of these things

where you see how there are all of these little areas like with, you know, the inability to get the National Guard on the scene for hours where communication kind of breaks down. It's not totally clear who's driving the bus. And I think this report provides more detail there,

but it doesn't to me at least satisfactorily answer that question of why, why did this happen? Although it does, it is perhaps another data point in sort of the story that I'm trying to tell here of like no one wants to be the one left holding the bag.

- So we've talked a fair amount about what is in the report. Let's talk a little bit about what's not in the report. Two things I want to touch on here. And first Ryan, I'm gonna come back to you

on something you mentioned earlier.

One point you described this report is this was supposed to be the Jeff Clark report. So can we talk a little more about what's not in this report in terms of what was actually unfolding at the Department of Justice in the days up to January 6th

and then, you know, on today itself? - Yeah, and you know, this was something that I kind of didn't occur to me until I myself tried putting back together the timeline of what was happening in those days

and lead up to January 6th. And it's relevant to what we were talking about before DOJ not realizing they were in this lead role because there was something else happening within the Justice Department

that might have been slightly distracting in a couple of days before January 6th and it was literally not until I sat down and put this together for shameless plug my book's edition hunters that I recognized

what was happening, right? And I was like, oh, okay, so this event happened on a Wednesday and over that weekend was that crazy moment where Jeffery Clark was like, even on the calendar at the White House at some point

as the acting attorney general that this was all in motion, this was happening

and there was this incredible meeting at the White House

which I believe was on the Sunday night where it was basically a bunch of people that Donald Trump had appointed to be Justice Department officials saying that they would quit rather than work under Jeffery Clark

who, you know, thought there was the potential that the election was stolen via smart thermostat or at least wanted to explore that question and you know, I would say subsequently I also didn't realize, you know, then on Twitter

when you used to start a tweet with an at sign that it wouldn't get as much traction as before just to like set the level on his level of technological sophistication.

“You know, that's what the situation that it was in.”

This was someone who was an environmental lawyer who was clearly susceptible as millions of Americans were to these lies about the election and he was someone who was willing to do what the president wanted at that point

and that's who the president wanted to put it in charge and that could have been if that night had gone just slightly differently like a water gate type moment, right? Where that could have, you know, instead of the Friday night massacre it would have been the Sunday night massacre

where there was literally like a letter written about how Jeffrey Rosen, which I didn't read until years later it was like a resignation letter for Jeffrey Rosen and a bunch of other people and like you could tell it was written for history

like a little bit like, you know, like it was just like this is my moment for the people I'm gonna take by stand and do what I want which, you know, it wasn't that tough of a decision I don't think at that point for folks to make

because literally you're deciding like, "Hey, is the market going to reward someone who tries to overturn the election?" or, you know, the way I sort of described it in the book is that the morally correct decision was also the financially advantageous decision.

They aligned perfectly at that point because you're giving up two weeks of a paycheck and to go down in history as like this hero, right? So it wasn't even that easy, that wasn't even that tough of a moral call

“but nonetheless, that's what was happening inside the Justice Department.”

So it's easy to figure out why they might have been distracted and, you know, when they're literally on the phone call for planning purposes and at that same time, then Jeffrey Clark is like, "Hey, let's go meet upstairs

and somebody's packing their office and, you know, the deputy attorney general is literally taking stuff off of his walls 'cause he thinks that he's gonna be, you know, marched out of the Justice Department building

by somebody from the White House." So that's the sort of chaos that was happening

and, you know, then you get that email late at night on the Sunday. I'm guessing there's a little bit of ketchup to do on that Monday, so that brings us to the fourth

“and then the fifth and then there we are in the sixth, right?”

So there just wasn't a lot of time for anybody to make sure that all the eyes were dotted and the teaser cross in late at the January 6 because of this internal crisis at the Justice Department. That's what was in in the report.

(laughing) So Quinta, now I wanna ask about something that wasn't in the report about which I know you have thoughts which is a robust discussion of claims made by a number of high ranking FBI officials about viewers' inability

to review publicly available social media information as part of their investigation. Touch us about sort of that issue and what is not addressed in the support. - This goes back to something that Ryan was saying earlier

about one of the things that makes this an intelligence failure and the FBI's part is that everyone knew it was going to happen. I mean, we didn't all know that writers were gonna break into the capital, but we knew that something was going to happen on January 6 because everyone was posting about it

and Trump had tweeted about it. And so when FBI director Christopher Ray is kind of hauled in front of Congress in the weeks and months after the sixth, one of the things he says is well, you have to understand

we're limited in our ability to look at and sort of save for future reference, public social media posts because of burst amendment restrictions. I have a very long, very dense welfare article

“spelling out why I think this is arguably inconsistent,”

not arguably, it is an assistant with a pretty clear guidance that is set out in FBI guidelines, what's known is the dialogue. I figured with the acronym precisely stands for. The short version is that Ray is seems to present to Congress a level of difficulty

that is just functionally not actually there when it comes to the FBI's ability to look at, on-line posts that are publicly available because of burst amendment restrictions. You would think that that would be relevant to the intelligence

failures that this report is going into, but it doesn't really feature at all. It kind of shows up here and there where there are references

to the Bureau reminding people about first amendment restrictions

right concerns about getting tips that didn't speak to violence because this is first amendment protected activity, that kind of thing, but it's not addressed head on. And okay, fine, like we all have different priorities, but it did strike me as odd because no one,

as far as I know, has really done a deep dive into, is was Ray's understanding the understanding of the Bureau guidelines that was communicated to people within the agency? Because if so, that seems like a potential problem

when we now have, this is an agency that's continuing to be responsible for responding to potential domestic terror. It would seem relevant to me to look into how the Bureau is interpreting its own guidelines, how it understands its own authorities

and the relationship between its authorities and the first amendment, especially in an environment, increasingly shaped by social media.

But we've never gotten an answer there.

Congress has not really been interested. I was hoping that the IG would be interested and they don't seem to have been either. I found this particularly odd, I will say, because one particular note--

“so one of the examples, I think, of the kind of”

zeroing it on the trees and completely missing the forest that you mentioned, Ryan, is this obsession with making sure that the Bureau was tracking domestic terror suspects who were going to DC. They get very, very invested in making sure

that they have eyes on all these people traveling to DC, which makes sense, certainly. If you're concerned about potential violence, but the way it's said on the report, it seems like there's a very narrow focus

on that to the exclusion of basically all

other intelligence activity around January 6th at that time. And this jumped out at me because the argument that Ray was making in front of Congress is essentially, look, we can't look at tweets because, at first moment, restrictions

where we need to have an open investigation in order to have the authority to look at those tweets. I mean, can't do anything if we don't have a investigation. Now, bracket that, I think there's a very good reason to think that that's actually not true,

but even accepting that Ray's presentation is correct there.

investigations that could have provided you with a hook to look on Twitter.

And this had always seemed odd because Ray said,

when he goes in front of Congress, he says, "Oh, we have over 1,000 open domestic terror operas, "investigations." Again, not one of them allowed you that hook, okay, fine.

“I think it gets even weirder with this report,”

because now we know not only were there, I think he said 1,400 open domestic terrorism investigations. We now know that some portion of the subjects of those investigations were traveling to the Capitol on January 6th, and that the Bureau was aware of this,

because they were tracking them. So none of those instances, there was enough to provide any kind of a hook to look on Twitter, look on parlor, look on gav, like none, zero, really? And again, there are a lot of questions here, right?

Like, I don't know how much of a hook you need, right? Can you only look at one parlor post? If you have a hook, can you look at the whole chain of comments? I think there are real questions here. But to me, it makes the argument

that the Bureau lacked these authorities, even harder to believe, given that clearly there were open domestic terrorism investigations that were relevant to what was happening on January 6th. That's my rant.

- Yes, very good rant. I think-- - Yes. - I think also you've got to look at the history of what has happened to people who spoke honestly about their feelings about the threat that Donald Trump posts

within the FBI. Like, when we were doing a crossfire hurricane IG report, you look back to that one. And people sent a little message that for some reason they didn't recognize

was permanently stored by the FBI. But they were sort of had jokes or made casual water cooler talk over an FBI platform. And then suddenly they're getting hauled before the inspector general, because they made some--

and that wasn't because they actually influenced the way that they do their job. People have the ability to separate their personal opinions or their snark or their sort of their little ramps from the way that they do their job.

That's something that you are able to do and separate and recognize that here's how the law applies. But it's the appearance of in-proper ideas what they really focused on in that report. And I think that that's something people

have been sort of running scared of ever since. And the thought process was, oh my gosh, you got to the end of the Trump era. Here we are almost-- we're almost on the-- if you're within the FBI, first time around you're like, OK,

we got to the end of it. Sure, you say in a bunch of crazy stuff. But like, am I going to stick my neck out at the very end here? And like talk honestly about the implications of what that could mean when all the signs are pointing

towards that, we're going to have an inauguration. And this isn't something I'm going to have to be worried about. But also probably the House Republicans are going to be super interested in this down the line. Yeah, I mean, I think that that people made decisions

based upon the world they were living in.

And also, just again, I always go back to the vacation thing.

But it's a real thing.

“Because I think like 2020 was this awful year, right?”

Like everybody desperately needed that break. And the thing-- one thing that I'd completely and totally forgotten about until I went back into the timeline was that there was a bombing in Nashville on Christmas Day, right? And the FBI served all these resources to it.

Because that's what they do, they're good at these things. So it wasn't as though people were taking two weeks straight off. It was a bunch of people from a bunch of field offices, flooded the zone. Everybody was working this bombing during the holiday

as an interrupting time with their family, right, for this purpose, right? So if someone who gets assigned to that purpose, and that domestic terrorism case, and then you're coming back, it's like, OK, yeah,

let me take a few days off in early January instead. And just the logistical hurdles that you have to deal with around the holiday.

And that was honestly, for me, the first thing

that I thought of when I saw this, what happened in New Orleans and what happened in Las Vegas, New Year's Day, is that that was during the most vulnerable period.

“Now, of course, you should say we don't know”

that there was any FBI failure there yet. But it would not totally and completely surprise me where we to learn down the line that the FBI had at some point received tips about either of those individuals. While we're on the topic of the FBI,

I do want us to talk a little bit about another document that was released recently in the January 6th investigation space, which was a report from the Kminion House Administration, sort of group led by Barry Lattermilk,

member of Congress. Lattermilk has been leading basically a house investigation into the investigators, as has been referred to, an investigation of the house's January 6th

I think I saw Kyle Cheney point out this morning that they have been investigating the investigation longer than the investigation itself happened. But just before Christmas, Lattermilk's panel put out a report on the investigation

that sort of teased the existence of a second document,

which came out more recently, specifically on the FBI's failure to identify who planted the pipelines outside the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee on January 6th. I want to sort of talk about this other particular FBI

failure in a second. But Quinta, can you first give us a little more context that I just did?

“Like, how should we think about what Lattermilk has been up to?”

How do we situate this investigation of the investigators in the broader discourse about Congress? Congress's efforts, the government's efforts more broadly, to hold people accountable for what happened on January 6th? - It's a great question, and I wish I knew the answer, honestly.

This has been a very odd little investigation. So I think the pipeline report is technically the third report.

There was an initial report there, then there was a second one

that came out, I believe, late this fall or early this December, and now we have this pipe bomb document. And certainly the overall posture is investigating the investigators that there's a real tone in the, the first two reports of basically sort of trying

to make the argument that the committee is illegitimate. There's a lot of complaints about how Liz Cheney was in a real vice chair, there's some complaints about the committee allegedly deleting a bunch of material. - Yeah, and these are particularly the parts

about the committee not being properly constituted.

“We'll be really familiar to anyone who, for their sins,”

spent any time reading any of the court filings in any of the cases that challenged the generalist's communities, so Pita Authority, that part of it is sort of well trotting ground for the objections that Republicans had to what that committee did.

- Right, well so, and part of that has been this release of video tapes from the Capitol on January 6th, which right, and I'm curious for your thoughts of to what extent that has achieved what house Republicans might have thought it would achieve

versus provide more fuel for investigating for sort of public open source investigations. So that's one thing, but then what's interesting, I thought in the pipe bomb report is that there actually is like a fair amount of substantive information in here

about a portion of the January 6th story

that has always been a mystery, you know,

they still have not caught the pipe bomber. And it appears that the FBI, maybe interpreted this as a little prod in the back because the day after the revert came out, the bureau released more information about the bomber and say, actually, you know,

we have this person's height and shoe size. Please help us find them. So we do thanks to a louder milk have a much fuller picture of where things stand in terms of the bomber, and it seems to have really pushed

the bureau or pushed the bureau a little bit on an issue where, as we were mentioning earlier, the January 6th committee kind of decided not to bring its focus. So there's sort of a strange mix of feeding red meat to the base and actually producing valuable information

while they're perhaps not valuable in the way that followers of Donald Trump might have anticipated or wanted. - I loved the surprise tone in your voice upon stating that there was valuable information in a report that came out of Barry, about our milk's committee.

I was surprised too, I will say. There was substantive information in that report and that's not to disparage in any way the work that they've done on Mr. Coffee Guy who is the individual that they have said

that the FBI should have investigated for setting up the gallows outside of the Capitol in January 6th. They've done that investigation. It was based off of a right wing thing about, well, what's the FBI doing about this?

Did that report mention, for example, that there's no core criminal offense for setting up a political prop, not that's not inside of the Capitol, that there's not an actual criminal statute

that would, in any way apply to that sort of behavior or that they haven't focused on just general people who were far away from the Capitol. No, of course, it didn't, right? But it did jing up a lot of articles.

And that's a lot of what I think these reports have been formatted to do is just to generate attention

“and fuel conspiracy theories, and that's what they've done.”

It's a little bit of like a flood the zone type of strategy that I think that they're ultimately using here and that sort of ties into the footage because one of the things the slew's have really have really been bothered by

because there are some of the only people

of boring, mostly surveillance footage

that the House Republicans have produced

“is that they've missed all of the key moments, right?”

Like, for whatever reason, I don't know their intent, but what I do know is that the product that they had have put out is all of the most boring footage from January 6th that has no actual relevance and any of the violent scenes of like, they have a few of them

in there. I don't know if that was, they escaped and got through by accident. I don't, again, I don't know their intention, but what I can tell you is that like the footage that would have been the most compelling

is not the footage that they have released. And instead what they have happened, they have happened is dumped a bunch of footage on there that then people on Twitter have then dissected not knowing anything about and then posted memes about

and then members of Congress, including Mike Lee,

have then reposted that and we've always

said a bunch of time and energy and I mean, go on, money, what have you talking about, complete an utter garbage nonsense that just doesn't make any logical sense whatsoever. And that's what has happened. So as a result of this, they've put out things

and it's like, oh, is this person flashing a badge? No, that's a V810, actually. And that person's sitting in jail for sort of six years now, but thanks for your time and service. Like, that's what we've been working on

for that like, there's just been so much waste of time on conspiracy theories. And it's just kind of astonishing that this is where we're at because there's not like a shared reality in America. Instead, we talk about nonsense from people

who don't understand things on the internet. So that's my short version.

“No, I mean, I think it's a really important point.”

And when I think about the degree to which we've learned anything from these hours and hours of security footage, I think that for me, the one important new thing was uncovered by Capitalist Jamie Dupree, who tracked down the path that the fake electors took, the fake elector paperwork,

took from my Kelly's office to attempt to be delivered to the Senate Parliamentarian. And that's a consequential thing that we now know more about, but it's one thing out of all of that footage. I want to ask one kind of higher level question

before we wrap, which is about sort of, how should we think about the value of different kinds of investigations? And so we have this Inspector General Report. And we know we talked about this that the Inspector General

kind of didn't do or at least didn't publicize certain parts of their investigation because of the way that they interacted with the criminal investigation, people left government and did not have to be responsive

to the IG and the way that they would have had to be if they were still in government. In some ways, that's an argument for having a congressional investigation, but we also see the promises and pitfalls

of congressional investigations. And so when Jimmy also had with you and they got a Ryan and just asked for your kind of concluding thoughts and as we sort of approach the fourth anniversary of January 6th, as we kind of move out of this period

of quite likely move out of this period of active criminal prosecution, that sort of thing. Like how do you take stock of the various tools that Congress and the government were brought? They have used to try it and investigate what happened.

“- I don't know, I think that the January 6th committee,”

I will say, I think comes out looking the best in terms of understanding the challenge for what it was and also understanding Ryan to your previous point that need to do something new to communicate in a really fractured media environment

in terms of the prime time broadcasts sort of rethinking the format of a congressional committee investigation. At the same time, as you also point out, Molly, there are limits, unfortunately given the current state of the jurisprudence on Congress's ability

to force compliance with subpoenas and the committee made choices based on its assessment of sort of the political realities and of the time crunch that I think really limited, its ability to really dig into some of these major issues

like the pipeline, like the First Amendment concerns.

I do worry that we've kind of ended up in a situation where everyone feels like everyone else did the part that needs to be done and you sort of see this very literally at the beginning of the IG report, where they basically say, "Oh, well, there's a criminal investigation,

"so we didn't do this." Oh, well, these other inspectors general did this investigation, so we didn't do that. And look, if in a month there's, you know, Jack Smith releases a final report,

is provided for under the special council guidelines and that has further information or criminal referrals or something like that. And then the DOJJ's office picks things up again and starts looking back into it,

But I do now feel like if you look at that

“and then you look at kind of other congressional committees,”

maybe turning to what the January 6th committee didn't say, you know, okay, great. They did January 6th now, you know. We don't need to look into, you know, the judiciary committee doesn't need

to dig into what happened more at the FBI. We don't need the intelligence communities to dig into the intelligence failures here. That there's a desire to kind of like move on that is maybe not helpful, whereas if there had been more

of an understanding that what the January 6th committee was doing was one piece of a much, much, much bigger puzzle that would have been a healthier outcome. I really is what I'm asking is for all different parts of the political and governmental machine

to be singularly focused on investigating January 6th, which may be a bit too much to ask. Before we hear from Ryan, I'll just say to listeners that Quinter wrote a really great piece, making more robust version of the argument

that she just made and published it the day before election day. So it got sort of lost in the great shuffle

of the first week of November 2024, but I would encourage you

all to check it out, Ryan, over to you. - Yeah, well Quinter stole my points about the media environment, so and made them much more articulate evenly than I would have. So now I have to come up with a secondary answer.

But I mean, I do think that that was a big,

“that was a big thing is like, the, I think Daniel Jones”

who wrote the torture report basically or helped write the torture report is spoken about this too. Like, the torture report, but the Senate put together, it was something that everybody had on their shells, but nobody read, and Americans don't read a lot.

So that's the fundamental core problem. So banging people over the head with information in the simplest way possible is really important. And I made the joke before that the Inspector General really needs to get into TikTok and just start making

these videos to get things over the, but to get things to break through to the public, sort of jokingly, but I think that getting information across in the most compelling way possible and making it in the simplest form possible

that people can understand very quickly

without reading the identity report is really essential.

And that's somewhat of a media problem and a government problem because people are very busy. People are very tied up in their own lives

“and have limited time to absorb information”

and they're getting so much incoming information that it can just be way too much for them to absorb. But yeah, I don't know what happens in the future in terms of the Inspector General reports, but I will say, you know, we're going into a time

when there could be some of the same issues that we're supposed to be examined in terms of Jeffrey Clark's behavior once again. That's what we're walking into. We're walking into an administration

where the incoming president has made very clear that he wants people to act in a certain way and has made clear that he has enemies that he wants them to go after. I wish that that report was out.

I wish that that would have served its value to the public in examining these issues and making those bounds in those lines crystal clear about where people within the Justice Department what they are required to do under the oath

if they took to uphold the U.S. Constitution. - All right, Ryan, Quintau, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you both. (upbeat music) The Laugh Fair podcast is produced

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As always, thank you for listening.

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