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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. President Biden last night paid his respects to the remains of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, killed in the January 6th riot at the Capitol. Sicknick is being given the very rare distinction of lying in honor in the Capitol Rotunda. Only the third private citizen ever to receive that honor after Rosa Parks and Reverend Billy Graham. When former presidents and other government dignitaries die, they call it lying in state. For the few private citizens, it's called lying in honor.

Two other Capitol Police officers who responded to the insurrection have also since died but by suicide, and the FBI says 14 more Capitol officers were injured in the attack. As the country gets ready for the impeachment trial of President Trump next week on charges of inciting the insurrection, we'll focus more broadly now on how the wider investigation into the attack is going, how coordinated and pre-planned was it, who were the groups and individuals who most contributed, could it have been avoided, how to prevent more such attacks which we know some people would like to carry out.

With me now is New York Times Justice Department Correspondent, Katie Benner. Katie, thanks for coming on with us for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Katie Benner: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let me begin with the death of Officer Sicknick. I see that investigators are having trouble charging anyone in his death because it's unclear who in that chaos struck the fatal blow. What can you tell us? Can you summarize what is known about how he died?

Katie Benner: What we know is that he died while being confronted by a large group of protesters, and to your point, it's difficult to know if he died because he was engaging with the protesters, there were chemicals in the air, if he had a reaction to that, or if there was some sort of blow. What we have been told is he did not, as far as anybody knows, die of blunt force trauma, and we've known that for a little while so that's taken that idea off of the table. There were officers who were hit, as we saw, with hockey sticks, flagpoles, fire extinguishers, in the melee, but we do not think that that is how Officer Sicknick died.

If he died from some sort of chemical being released in the air, there was bear spray as we know that the protesters had on them, sorry, the rioters had on them and that the officers were using, they were using their own sprays and munitions. If that is how he died, it will be very difficult to assign that cause of death to any one person.

Brian Lehrer: The FBI says 14 other Capitol Police officers were injured, that doesn't get that much attention, and it also speaks to the amount of violence that was involved in the number of people injured, the number of perpetrators it must have taken to injure 14 different officers and the number of separate assaults that must have taken place. What can you describe from what's known about the information that's emerging about the big picture there that involved attacks on so many law enforcement officers?

Katie Benner: I think what we've seen that's very clear is that the officers were not prepared for hundreds of people to descend on the Capitol, to break through the barriers, and then to force their way into the building. They were not prepared for it because they did not have intelligence that told them that this was a serious threat, even though they had intelligence saying that threats were all around them, nobody interpreted it or analyzed it and came to the correct conclusion that it would mean that the Trump supporters posed a serious and violent and dangerous threat.

In the overwhelm of the Capitol Police, you saw hundreds of people descend upon them making it nearly impossible for them to hold the line. We also saw from a testimony that was given to Congress by the acting head of the Capitol Police that protocol was not followed when orders were given like, "Seal all the doors." That their radio communications were not working properly, so people on the ground didn't really understand the big picture of what's happening to them, they were literally under siege, and then, in the course of this chaos, they were overtaken.

Brian Lehrer: You've reported on conspiracy charges, and this is one of the most interesting emerging aspects I think. Conspiracy charges against three members of the militia group, the Oath Keepers, and two members of the white nationalist group, the Proud Boys, they call themselves Western chauvinists, that's their term for it, the Proud Boys. Conspiracy charges I guess would indicate not just the protests that spontaneously got out of control and became a riot and an insurrection, but something planned and coordinated with that in mind. Can you describe the charges in each of those cases?

Katie Benner: Yes. With the Oath Keepers, what we saw is we saw people two people in Ohio and a person in Virginia communicating with one another, saying that they were basically planning to come to the Capitol and stop the vote. That shows that they were pre-planning their trip, they were pre-planning what they intended to do, and that it was a coordinated effort, and that's the sort of thing that officials are now looking at, investigators are now looking at.

If you look at, I guess stepping back, what we saw is we saw a tremendous number of charges and arrests for people who were trespassing in the building, illegal entry, stopping official proceedings. These things, they were able to very, very quickly charge, and once those charges were established, then the investigators' job, and this is why we've seen the pace of the investigation plateau a bit, was to start to make connections to see if there were more serious charges like conspiracy that they could establish.

In this case with the Oath Keepers, that is what they found. They found that these were people that the government has decided based on evidence were working together in order to pre-plan an attack on the Capitol. This is really important because it gives them what they're saying could be possibly even a treasure trove of information as they continue to investigate some of these far-right groups.

Normally what we see is we see groups, we see white supremacist groups, we see militias speak on social media or in their private messages. They're saying that they want to, they're saying that they dislike the government, they're saying that they believe that the government should be overthrown. That is protected by the First Amendment, that is free speech, but now these are people who've committed crimes which gives law enforcement probable cause to go beyond the free speech barrier, and to start seizing communications and to start getting warrants to go into people's phones, start getting warrants to go into their email accounts and their other social media accounts to really see what's going on.

That, investigators hope, will lead to not only conspiracy charges amongst a group of people who attacked the Capitol but give them names and plans, people we don't know about who might be planning other sorts of attacks, who've they've been wanting to go after for a long time but have not had the probable cause to do so.

Brian Lehrer: How can you see those conspiracy charges in context? Not much conspiracy, and pre-planned violence, conspiracy by multiple groups intending to try to kill or hurt people or force their way in? What's the scope of the pre-planning with specific goals that you can say as a reporter with confidence that we know about while they do the rest of the investigation with the additional tools that you were just describing?

Katie Benner: Sure. I think that they're going to see more and more that there were people who were planning to forcibly storm the Capitol, and that is what they're initially going to look for. What was so strange about the attack on January 6th is that for many people, it was almost a crime of opportunity. What we've seen are images of people in military gear who were wearing patches, videos of them giving one another hand signals as they go in, a really coordinated effort, but when you pull that camera back, you also see hundreds of people who had come down to the Capitol probably not planning to storm it, probably not planning to enter, but when the dam was breached and everybody flowed in, they went in too.

It was what we see in crowd behavior. People were committing crimes they might not have normally committed. That is sort of the big picture. Law enforcement is trying to weed out those people and find those who, like Jessica Watkins and Donovan Ray Crowl, and a man named Thomas Caldwell in Virginia, these are the three who have been charged with conspiracy, who like them pre-planned to actually break into the Capitol long before law enforcement was overwhelmed.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your questions on the investigation into the January 6th Capital riot for New York Times Justice Department correspondent, Katie Benner, at 646-435-7280, as we all try to get a clearer and fuller picture of what actually happened that day and as important, maybe more important, what led up to it so we can understand what might be coming next, or at least what people may want to come next from those groups and try to prevent it. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer.

Katie, overall, your number is about 170 people charged with some kind of crime in connection with the riot. What do most of them tend to be charged with?

Katie Benner: Most of them are being charged with illegal entry and illegally trying to stop an official proceeding.

Brian Lehrer: Illegal entry and illegally trying to stop a proceeding, relatively mild charges.

Katie Benner: Exactly, exactly. They're relatively mild charges, though that could open up the door to again, more investigation. Another thing that the investigators are looking at and again, so much of this played out publicly because there was so much video of the attack, they're also really starting now to focus on attacks on the press.

We saw two incidents play out very publicly. A group of reporters near the perimeter of the Capitol basically physically menaced and then chased away from their equipment, their equipment was seized and destroyed. We saw a video of a man trying to light it on fire. Then we also saw and heard the accounts of reporters who were inside the building who felt that they were fleeing for their lives.

I will say one of our photographers at the New York Times, she was jumped by three assailants. They saw her press pass, they ripped it off of her, they ripped one of the cameras off of her body and stole it. They broke another one, and she had to flee. These attacks specifically on the press are of great interest to the FBI and to the Justice Department for a couple of reasons.

One, obviously, the First Amendment protects freedom of the press. These are serious crimes. Two, in part of what we saw with the rhetoric that grew throughout the four years of the Trump administration, was not only a refocusing of Trump supporters as pro-Trump to anti-government, which is something we hadn't seen before. It was a new paradigm, it was people who believed in this single person, not necessarily the US government, not necessarily some of the norms and laws, they grew up around what it meant to have an executive branch, that wasn't what they believe in, they believed in him.

They came to the Capitol, they say they came at his behest, to protect him and to prevent Joe Biden from taking his presidency away. We also saw them act out other things that he had talked about for four years, including thinking of the press as the enemy.

Brian Lehrer: Can you go even a step deeper on that? These people who formed a cult of Trump as opposed to for a particular set of issues or a particular political party, or for democracy itself, as you're describing it. What did they think he was going to do for them? I don't know if you've reported on it that way, but if ultimately, belief in a leader gets tied to some kind of policy, or maybe this has just become completely disconnected from policy, what is it that these people with these hardcore beliefs in Trump think that he was doing for them?

Katie Benner: I think that it's separate from policy. We have written about this a little bit through the lens of the protests that broke out this summer, and the way that President Trump and the top of his administration decided to talk about two very different groups of people we saw show up at the protest.

You saw President Trump and his top law enforcement officials at DHS and the Justice Department speak again and again and again, that the threat to the country was the left-wing, was progressivism, was both progressivism as we think of it in the mainstream, so democratic mayors and governors like Gretchen Whitmer. They were suddenly not just a political opponent with whom you don't agree with all of their policies, but they were actually enemies of the people.

They were spoken about as people who were literally a threat to the country. Then the protesters themselves were spoken about as potential threats specifically around the idea of Antifa, which is a loose collection of people with far-left ideals and the idea of the far-left as being a real threat to the country.

What was so interesting about that is they never spoke of white supremacists as a threat. They did not speak of militias as a threat, even though the FBI was seeing those groups show up at the protest, and even if the FBI had said again, and again, internally, "Hey, these groups are growing in real power and have been growing in power over the last few years. We're ignoring them in our rhetoric to the public."

When you are a member of one of those militias or white supremacist groups, suddenly you see something you have never seen before. You see the President of the United States, these groups tend to be anti-government full stop. They do not tend to align themselves with presidents, but you see the President of the United States suddenly saying the same things you are saying. Saying, "The left is going to destroy the country." Saying, "Progressivism is going to destroy the country." Saying that, "They are the enemies of the people." You actually see a president whose rhetoric is aligned with many of the things you believe, and they actually start to see themselves too as the president's, almost as his true law enforcement.

They start showing up at protests to police the protests. They even start showing up at the polls, we saw reports of that too when election season came, some of these folks showing up just to, you could say intimidate voters, but they would say, "We are protecting this election. We're protecting it for Donald Trump." That is very hard to overstate the importance of that shift, taking us into January 6th.

Brian Lehrer: My guest his New York Times Justice Department, Katie Benner, as we look at what's known about the Capitol Riot on January 6th, as investigators continue their work into the deeper roots of it, the many individuals involved in it. As you heard in Katie's last answer there, this informs the impeachment trial that will begin next week. Carol in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC, thank you for calling in. Hi Carol?

Carol: Hey, Brian, I just have a quick question about the relationship. Is it true that the more you prove conspiracy on the side of the Proud Boys, et, cetera, et cetera, that might mitigate the charges against Trump of incitement to riot? A little curiosity question of this whole idea of it being illegal to call fire in a crowded theater. Is that a law? What's the relationship between conspiracy and incitement? Thank you.

Katie Benner: Sure. That's a really interesting question. On the first part, I think that when you look at what Donald Trump is being accused of in the article of impeachment, he is been accused of telling a massive crowd of people to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and go take the Capitol, fight like hell for our country, take it. If you don't fight, we're not going to have a country anymore.

Even if there were groups of people who came to the Capitol, and there's hundreds and hundreds of people, these three people here, six people there, a dozen people there, who had always intended to breach the Capitol, I think you could argue that the hundreds of people who we saw, including women who looked like soccer moms who could have been going to Costco after this. Families, large groups, religious groups who were going down to march and to pray, that those people were not originally conspiring to break into the Capitol.

That is the bigger issue that I think that the impeachment managers are trying to highlight to the public, is that he's asked people who would not normally do something like violently take a government building and send every member of congress into hiding, send the top leadership, including the vice president into secure locations for the continuity of government.

If Mike Pence had been kidnapped, if the leadership of Congress had been harmed in any way, it would have destroyed the continuity of the government of the United States. Now, what the patriot managers are trying to tell us and trying to tell the public, who knows if they'll convince the Senate, if it will convince the public, is that many, many, many of those hundreds of people would not have done that without the President's words and his exhortations, and that is the issue.

We have seen again and again throughout the summer, that there were going to be either militia members or far-right extremists who support the president, who do show up at his events, who did show up at the polls and they did act as a shadow law enforcement, but this is very different. Even if they had intended to break in, that is almost beside the point. It's the other folks who never would have without what the democrats are describing at the direct command of the president.

Brian Lehrer: Linda in Jersey, you're on WNYC with Katie Benner from the New York Times. Hi, Linda?

Linda: Hi, I wanted to know how in-depth the investigation will be into the other side, the Capitol Police, the government itself that didn't anticipate this? Militia people have been around for decades, and they've gotten stronger and stronger and stronger. They are anti-government, not just pro-Trump, they are anti-government. One of the things that I always go back to is in the 911 Commission, they came out and said, "What we did wrong as a country was our failure of imagination." Why was this not anticipated? [crosstalk]

Katie Benner: Of course, that's a great question. I think there are a couple of things to look at here. One is that failure of imagination is probably the best way to describe what happened. We saw several pieces of intelligence coming up, flowing up to the Washington Field Office of the FBI in DC. We saw intelligence flowing to Capitol Police, but it was the analysis of the intelligence that didn't rise to the occasion.

There were credible reports of extremists, of white supremacist coming, of people coming armed, but for a variety of reasons that people are still trying to determine, nobody read those pieces of information, pulled them all together, and said, "This is going to be a really, really big deal. We need to be all hands and to fortify this building as much as we possibly can." There are people who have already put positive, some theories, I'll throw them out there without saying whether or not I think that they are correct because this is all still being investigated.

It's very difficult for law enforcement to deal with a situation where the executive branch's own supporters, where the president's own supporters, you're right, most of these are anti-government people, but they are not anti-Trump. Trump is the President of the United States at that time, so to say the supporters of the President, we need to treat as an enemy of the people I think was something that I will say that law enforcement may have wrestled with for many, many months leading up to the storming of the Capitol, not just in the weeks leading up to January 6th.

You also saw a situation where, and we've seen some reporting around this, law enforcement felt, possibly because of things like the Blue Lives Matter Movement and the fact that Trump himself was almost very pro-police in his rhetoric, that this crowd would somehow not be as-- They were less afraid that the crowd would attack the police, and that they were more afraid that the Black Lives Matter protesters would have attacked the police, and again, so the failure of imagination certainly, if, at the very least, people have said that it's also extremely, it speaks to racism, it speaks to assumptions about what we think of as a violent protest.

Then, another thing that we've seen that, again, these are all very preliminary investigations, is that the police themselves once again, not only were they not prepared, it felt like nobody knew what to do when they were overwhelmed. We saw video footage of officers trying just to get people out of the building, asking them really, really politely, and there's debate over whether or not they were doing that because it was one officer and 18 people and they knew they were overwhelmed, or they were doing it because they didn't take the crime seriously. These are all things still being investigated.

Now, in terms of the depth of the investigation, I think that what we're going to see if Congress is going to take the lead on oversight here, they already have, this is something very personal to them, it happened to them, it happened in their house, it is something that they very, very much want to get to the bottom of and there will be very in-depth investigations. Hopefully, we will get something like a 911 report.

Brian Lehrer: Do you know anything about the woman who's become known as the woman with the bullhorn, from that video clip shown on TV so much of her giving directions through a bullhorn on how to force their way into the building when the police were trying to resist them? A little bit on who is she as an individual but more I'm interested in how much pre-planning by her or by a group was there if someone thought to even bring a bullhorn to the Capitol's front door?

Katie Benner: Right. You're talking about the woman in the very bright pink hat?

Brian Lehrer: I think so.

Katie Benner: I think so, yes. She's spoken to the press about her role in the attack. She has said she was not part of an organized plot. She has said she was not part of a conspiracy, but she did certainly go hoping to get into the building, and that she went wanting to help other people stuck. In her words, she wanted to prevent the election from being stolen from President Trump.

We know that she is an ardent Trump loyalist and that she thought that what she was doing was right. We know that she also has, I'll say, accepted some conspiracy theories around the Coronavirus. You know that she believed the health officials were exaggerating the deaths, that a lot of these things were being done to undermine the president rather than because there was a genuine health crisis.

We know that she believes in some of the statements that Rudy Giuliani said about the election. She really was a true believer and so when she's giving directions to people, she's doing it because she feels like the revolution that she was anticipating has finally come. She said that she didn't do it because she had coordinated with anybody but just that she came almost to be part of a revolution, and there it was.

Brian Lehrer: There it was, for a brief moment. Vivian in Midtown Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Vivian: Good morning. I was wondering why [unintelligible 00:26:14] the term acting in concert is appropriate here. I've heard it used when a gang of people commits a crime. Even if you weren't the person at the front and center of the crime, if you were part of that gang, part of that group, then you could be just as responsible. I was wondering why I haven't heard that term or heard any suggestion that people that might not have been the person that cracked a window, if they were two people back, word, how come they're not responsible at all?

Brian Lehrer: Is that a legal term, Katie, acting in concert when used like that?

Katie Benner: I think that what the caller just described is what we saw with the Proud Boys conspiracy, I guess. They weren't charged-- The militias we spoke about, the members of the Oath Keepers, they were charged with conspiring to break into the building, that was their intent. Interestingly, with the Proud Boys, two members of this group, they were a very far-right nationalist group and they've actually tried to distance themselves from the riots and say they weren't a big part of them, but we saw those folks be charged with basically conspiring to stop law enforcement, to work in a concerted effort to keep law enforcement from keeping the crowds at bay, and from policing the area.

That was interesting, they were not accused of trying to break in, they were not accused of perhaps leading a group or organizing a group of people to break through a door. They were instead accused of conspiring to stop law enforcement.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Mike in Flatbush, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Mike: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Mike. You're on the air.

Mike: Yes. Thank you for your work. I want to ask that if any Republican members of the House or Senate or staff, and any people in the Republican National Committee, or local Republicans gave tours to this QAnon, Proud Boys, Trump racist mob.

Brian Lehrer: That question has been raised whether any members of Congress or their staffs, I wonder if this generalizes to members of the White House staff other than Trump. We're actually engaging in reconnaissance on behalf of people who became the insurrectionists. [unintelligible 00:29:12]

Katie Benner: All investigators will say on that is that they are looking into any links between members of Congress and the rioters. As we all know, the Capitol, Washington, like every other city, has been very, very tightly under lockdown because of the Coronavirus. There were people who were coming to the Capitol, of course, for the President's rally, who had made arrangements for tours, and I think that basically what law enforcement is trying to figure out is whether any staffers gave access to the building knowing what was coming, knowing that there was going to be an attack.

It does not seem that they've found that kind of intent. Again, this is something that's still under investigation. I think what we are finding though is that Republicans, especially in the House, there's a hardcore group of people who believe that Donald Trump won the election, who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon, and that people who have been treated both by their party and by the Democrats and by the mainstream media as fringe, what we're seeing is that was the power that they're gaining in the House of Representatives with the Senate and the House's inability to censure them, and with Donald Trump's still very powerful, I think we're also seeing that these people are no longer the fringe of the Republican party. There are more and more controlling the Republican party.

As the investigation continues into whether or not they had an active hand in the assault and seizure of the Capitol, in addition to that, we're seeing that they're becoming an extremely important part of a group of people that is taking over the Republican party, that is recreating Republican orthodoxy and almost cementing it in the image of Donald Trump, whether or not he runs again in 2024. We're seeing the beginning of a new Republican party.

Brian Lehrer: Which is why we may see Liz Cheney censored by House Republican leadership today more harshly than Marjorie Taylor Greene. To close, on a related point, you've also written about members of the white supremacist and other far-right extremist groups who feel emboldened by the insurrection, but we did not see the rash of protests, even peaceful ones that had been predicted for around inauguration day at state capitals and elsewhere. What's your current take on how emboldened or how chastened after the national backlash to their attack these groups are?

Katie Benner: I don't know that they were chastened by the backlash. I think that what we saw in chatter that was picked up by intelligence groups and we saw in different bulletins is that there was a lot of paranoia that, and these are groups that believe a lot of conspiracy theories, so there's a lot of paranoid thinking anyway, that calls for protests or planned protests were actually traps and that they would show up and the authorities would be there and they would be arrested.

You're right, we saw things very very quiet around Inauguration Day. Part of it was because of fear of further arrests, that these things were traps designed and intended to get people to show up to rallies where they would really just be rounded up. At the same time, what different intelligence bulletins have said since inauguration is that these groups are emboldened and that they are more likely to start behaving in more randomized ways with lone-wolf attacks, so this is not unlike what we saw with overseas terrorism with groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda inspiring people in the United States to act randomly, to act without pure direction, just inspired to attack.

The Pensacola shooting could be described that way. I believe San Bernardino and other attacks were people who were inspired by an ideology. That is something that domestic terrorism experts are looking more and more at now. They're saying, okay, will we see more coordinated attacks, or will people stay away from those and just start, inspired by the movement, to more individual lone-wolf attacks.

Brian Lehrer: Katie Benner, the great Justice Department correspondent for The New York Times. Katie, thank you so much for so much information this last half hour.

Katie Benner: Thanks for having me.

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