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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom filling in for Brian who's off today. On today's show, we'll turn our attention to the Republicans running for governor here in New York. There's a primary election this month and a debate happening next week. Plus it looks like babies and toddlers from six months to five years old are finally going to be able to get a COVID vaccine in the next couple of weeks. We'll talk about the importance of the shots despite the relatively low risk to this age group and why the COVID vaccination campaign for kids is actually not going so well so far.

Plus it's time to go birding at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, but first, on Thursday night, the January 6th Committee rolled out the first of at least six hearings this month centering on the former president Donald Trump's role in refusing the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2020 election and how his actions fueled the insurrection at the Capitol. Here's the January 6th Committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, making his opening statement.

Bennie Thompson: January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one writer put it, shortly after January 6th to overthrow the government. The violence was no accident. It represents Senate Trump's last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.

Brigid Bergin: Joining me now to recap the first prime-time hearing held by the House Select Committee investigating January 6th is Theo Meyer, national political reporter for The Washington Post and a co-author of the Early 202 newsletter. Welcome back to WNYC, Theo.

Theo Meyer: Glad to be with you here, Brigid.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we can take some of your reactions to last night's hearing or questions you may have for our guest Theo Meyer, national political reporter for The Washington Post. Tweet @BrianLehrer or give us a call now at 212-433 WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Theo, wow, last night's hearing was gripping to put it mildly. Can you set the scene for us?

Theo Meyer: Yes, of course. The January 6th Committee has been investigating the events of that day, as well as what happened in the two or so months leading up to January 6th, everything that happened since election day 2020, essentially. It has been investigating for nearly a year now. They have interviewed hundreds of people. They have compiled thousands and thousands and thousands of documents. Last night's hearing was the beginning of the culmination of that work, it's first real public hearing except for one early hearing that was held last year.

I think the question heading into last night was how much new is there to say given the leaks that have come out, the information that has dribbled out from the Committee's investigation, which has been pretty extensive over the past year? I think the Committee demonstrated that they do, in fact, still have a lot of new information and especially new video and audio that has not been seen that has not been heard before.

Brigid Bergin: Many listeners of this show will agree that President Trump's refusal to acknowledge his loss had emboldened his supporters to storm the Capitol building on January 6th. What was the broader point that the Committee was trying to hone in during its opening hearing last night?

Theo Meyer: I think the Committee really laid out how it is trying to make the case in a very deliberate way that Trump's actions starting shortly after election day 2020 really set the scene for what happened on January 6th, trying to connect the dots between what he was doing, the meetings he was having, what he was tweeting, and what happened, arguing that Trump spread the falsehood that the 2020 election had been stolen and trying to demonstrate that what he said there led to people coming on January 6th, led to groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers coming up with a very specific plan to march on Congress, March on the Capitol, and try to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden's election that day as the final step in what Liz Cheney the Republican Congresswoman who's the vice chairwoman of the Committee described as a seven-part plan to subvert the results of the election.

Brigid Bergin: As you mentioned, this is a bipartisan Committee, and the Committee vice-chair Liz Cheney really seemed to be focused on proving that President Trump was aware of what he was doing. I want to play a piece of new evidence presented last night. Let's go to that clip.

Liz Cheney: You will hear that President Trump was yelling and "really angry" at advisors who told him he needed to be doing something more and aware of the rioters' chance to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, "Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence 'deserves it.'"

Brigid Bergin: Theo, you isolated that moment as a highlight in your newsletter this morning. What struck you about it?

Theo Meyer: Well, I think, it's incredibly striking that a sitting president would say that his vice president deserves to be killed by a mob. This is an example of something that, to some extent, we already knew. It had already been reported before last night that Trump had made such a comment. Having Cheney say it, having Cheney put it in context really gives the moment more depth, I think, even if the underlying accusation is something that had already been reported.

Brigid Bergin: I think the context is a lot of what we saw last night, particularly with the video that the January 6th Committee presented including some of the highest-profile testimony that they gathered and they conducted close to 1,000 interviews. Among them was video of former attorney general William Barr's deposition. Let's take a listen to what he had to say.

William Barr: I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system, and that their votes didn't count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. It was being laid out there. I told them that it was crazy stuff, and they were wasting their time on that and was doing a great disservice to the country.

Brigid Bergin: Of course, that was then attorney general Bill Barr talking about some of those stories related to the Dominion voting machines being hacked, and the myth of election fraud that was being perpetuated. This video was from a closed-door deposition of the former AG who resigned in December of 2020. What else did Barr have to say?

Theo Meyer: Well, Barr was really a central figure in what was presented last night, but I think one of the things that was striking to me was the sheer number of videotaped or audio interviews that were presented last night of Trump aides, Trump administration figures testifying before the Committee, being able to hear them in their own words as opposed to just reading what they said in a transcript.

One moment stood out to me was an audio of General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff describing the phone call that he had with Mike Pence on January 6th and the rather different phone call that he had with then White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows with Pence pleading with him to send in the military essentially to help secure the Capitol and Mark Meadow's worrying about the political optics of what was going on and talking to Milley about the narrative.

Brigid Bergin: Another piece of testimony that was played last night that's getting a lot of reaction this morning in the media, certainly on social media was from Donald Trump's daughter and former senior advisor Ivanka Trump who agreed with Barr's assessment that there was no basis for the allegations of election interference. Let's take a listen to what she said.

Speaker 1: How did that affect your perspective about the election when Attorney General Barr made that statement?

Ivanka Trump: It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying.

Brigid Bergin: Theo, how did the committee use Trump's family and senior advisors like his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner in last night's hearing? Do you think it was effective?

Theo Meyer: Yes, while you heard from Barr several times, there was really a constellation of different Trump advisors, whether they worked on the campaign, whether they worked in the White House or were his family members like Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. The Committee didn't rely on a single witness or a couple of witnesses. They really tried to paint a broader picture, relying on the vast number of people that they have talked to. In the case of Ivanka and Jared, those were two of the interviews that had been teased that Committee [unintelligible 00:11:32] have said, it would be played last night. They were only to a large number of people who worked in the Trump administration and had direct knowledge of the events that day, who we heard from last night.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we can take some of your reactions to last night's hearing or questions you might have for our guest Theo Meyer, national political reporter for The Washington Post. The number 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Let's go to Dan in Brooklyn. Dan, welcome to WNYC. What was your impression of the hearing last night?

Dan: I was horrified. I thought that the feebleness of government and truth in this country is getting really maddening. First of all, you had Fox News, which showed the image of what was going on with no sound of what was going on in there. They had all these apoplectic hysterics yelling all the time about how Trump had offered the National Guard and Pelosi didn't want it, to make it look as if this was preset, that there would be no defense for the Capitol. Nobody discusses that. It's totally irrelevant to the issue. On the other hand, if you watch the sessions, which I also did, it was very striking how the questioner spoke for the witnesses and how this thing was rushed along from both points of view, and how a lot of these guys just got misdemeanor judgement.

For a person trying to sort out what's going on, trying to decide whether in his busy day full of trying to survive and corona and so on, he has to add this to his plate. It's a useless exercise in futility, and will cause this massive Republican victory upon which will come another Benghazi era where all congressional hearings will be this kind of right-wing garbage that [inaudible 00:13:47] them on.

Brigid Bergin: Dan, let me clarify, I just want to make sure that-- From what I hear, you're saying it sounds like you didn't feel the coverage across different networks really conveyed a clear sentiment, which Theo I think is something we could certainly talk about since not all the networks broadcast the same portions of the hearings or broadcast them in the same way. Also, I'm wondering, Dan, this was an introductory hearing. We know that it was setting the stage for additional evidence to be teased apart over the course of the month. Do you plan to watch additional hearings and why not?

Dan: Well, I will want to watch the hearings. I will go through the record thoroughly, because it's so disappointing to see a governmental hearing being handled this way and to hear the media take these positions like Fox did, which is so absurd. Just because Pelosi refused the National Guard that means that these people had a right to do what they did. I've been studying these organizations for a long time. What strikes me most is that everybody's trying to make a show that plays on the emotions and the facts just get lost.

Brigid Bergin: Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks so much for your call. Theo, I think it's an interesting first reaction. I'm wondering, one of the things that we're seeing this morning, certainly one of the Republican talking points is pushing back on these hearings, saying there was no new news here. I'm wondering if you have any reaction to some of what Dan raised and that point that is being pushed in many different- I've heard across multiple channels this morning, that really there was no new news from these hearings last night.

Theo Meyer: Well, I think in addition to that point, you could probably divide the Republican response into two broad categories. One was complaints about the process here. This, which requires going back to a little bit of a history of how this committee was set up. The House voted last year to create a different sort of a body, not a committee but a commission, modelled in some ways on the 9/11 Commission. 35 House Republicans voted to create this commission along with Democrats. The proposal stalled amid Republican opposition in the Senate and never went anywhere. As a backup plan, the House created this committee.

Democrats were to name eight people to the committee, eight lawmakers. House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy named five but Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, a Democrat, vetoed two of McCarthy's choices, which prompted him to pull out of the whole thing in disgust and meant that Nancy Pelosi appointed on nine lawmakers on the committee that we saw last night, including the two Republicans who have been ostracized from their party following January 6th and their criticism of it, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

One of the broad Republican complaints here is about process saying this isn't fair, Republicans did not have the presence on this committee that they deserved. The other, I think, is arguing that this is a distraction from all of the things that are currently going on in the world, that Congress should be focused on bringing down gas prices, solving the baby formula shortage, increasing security at the Mexican border, not looking back to events that happened nearly a year and a half ago.

Brigid Bergin: Theo, I just want to clarify one thing. Our caller said something about how Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused the National Guard. Do you know about that? Can you respond to that?

Theo Meyer: Yes. I think there's a broader complaint among Republicans. When McCarthy named Republicans to this committee before pulling them last year, one of the things that Republicans wanted to focus on more was the failures of security that allowed this to happen in the first place. Why there wasn't a greater police presence, National Guard presence at the Capitol, this on January 6th. The lawmakers teased this a little bit last night, but one of the open questions is how much these hearings are going to focus on that. I think there is a hearing, one of the at least six more hearings that we're expecting here is going to focus at least partly on Capitol security, but it's certainly not as much a focus of this investigation as Republicans would like.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. I think at times FactCheck calls this relatively misleading even though it's something that is being pushed more widely. I want to talk for a moment, we started to talk about some of the Republican response. We've noted that Fox News did not run the hearings in full. NPR reported that this morning. Representative Elise Stefanik who's a Republican from New York who replaced Liz Cheney last year as the number three House Republican, criticized the hearings on Newsmax yesterday. Here's what she said.

Elise Stefanik: There is a reason why Democrats and their allies in the media are shamelessly putting this on during primetime. It's because they're desperately trying to shift the narrative, the narrative of the fact that their policies are failing.

Brigid Bergin: Theo, we've started to talk about some of the response and the talking points that the Republicans are using today. Is this what they're sticking to?

Theo Meyer: Yes, I think this is an element of their broader argument that this is a distraction from the problems facing the nation right now. Given the scope of the Committee's investigation, it's hard to imagine how the Committee could have gotten its investigation done much quicker. They compiled and requested all of these documents. In some cases, they had to fight battles trying to compel people to testify, which is time consuming. It's hard to imagine the Committee could have finished up its investigation soon enough for Republicans not to argue that they're looking back at something that happened a long time ago and that the focus should be on moving forward rather than investigating what happened in the past.

Brigid Bergin: Certainly, some of the witnesses who we heard from last night were people who were actually injured and still recovering from what happened. One testimony that stood out was from Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who described that gruesome scene around the building. Let's take a listen to some of that.

Caroline Edwards: I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people's blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.

Brigid Bergin: Caroline Edwards suffered a concussion while trying to push back the crowd at the Capitol building. She was the first witness. Can you talk a bit more about what she told the committee yesterday and the impact of her retelling that story and how it could have impacted viewers emotionally?

Theo Meyer: I think her testimony was one of the most emotional parts of the hearing last night. She described how she was there confronting the crowd and trying to hold the line at the very beginning of the assault on the Capitol when some of the first groups of insurrectionists breached the outer lines of defense around the Capitol. How she was pushed, and fell and hit her head and passed out briefly, awoke and, as she put it, the adrenaline kicked in and she ran back to the lines where police officers were trying to hold back the crowd, and went back to work after suffering this brain injury.

The Committee has been very deliberate in deciding which of the many people that they have talked to they want to use as live witnesses. Striking that they chose a young woman, a police officer, to come and testify about her experiences here out of all of the Capitol police officers who they interviewed over the course of the investigation.

Brigid Bergin: Theo, I'm also wondering what you made of that moment where as she was telling her story, she described having covered countless number of crowd events like this, but that feeling of both not being combat trained, and also the feeling of knowing when you were becoming the target and the significance of that as the Capitol Police is people who were also targeted during this attack.

Theo Meyer: Yes, she struck a theme that although she had been trained as a police officer, she was not prepared to go into really what she likened to a wartime situation. She spoke about her grandfather, who had served in the Korean War, and how she really saw her experience as analogous to his service in the war as opposed to the kind of police work that she had been trained for and was prepared to do.

Brigid Bergin: Let's hear from some of our listeners. Lisa in Forest Hills. Lisa, welcome to WNYC.

Lisa: Hi, thank you, Brigid, so much for taking my call. You do such a great job substituting for Brian. You're so concise and to the point and I love it. I watched last night for as long as I could before I got too infuriated to listen anymore. I don't understand what they're trying to accomplish. It's like they're just preaching to the choir, because from my point of view, once Trump said to Georgia find me 11,000 votes, how the 25th Amendment wasn't invoked, or how he wasn't arrested just for saying that. What can they accomplish if they couldn't accomplish anything with that?

Brigid Bergin: Lisa, thank you so much. We have another caller. I want to get as much of this reaction as we can and I think this caller has a slightly different take. Louisa from Chesterfield, Virginia. Louisa, thanks much for listening and calling.

Louisa: Thank you so much for this opportunity. I'm very impressed by the job that was done last night from start to finish by Chairman Thomas and Chairman Cheney. I was so encouraged to see that they put forth the people that were most the some of the people that were most affected by the events, and the way that it was put forth, you could almost step into their shoes and imagine the horror that they must have experienced as they were being overwhelmed by these events. That was wonderful that they put the young woman but also all of the officers that have testified before that we could see them that the parents of officer [inaudible 00:27:01] were there.

That was really important to me, because it honored people who are truly patriots, and were truly doing their duty, and that posed the narrative of how all those other crazy people are the patriots that were doing some sort of service to the country. That's number one. Also, I will say I've been paying close attention to all of the events and I thought this is such an important way to put forth the narrative, in a way with detail, with timeframes, with video and audio to completely obliterate the narrative that this is being made up to be something it wasn't. It's hard to believe that anyone to come away, thinking this was just a tourist visit. I'm really so grateful that they took the time to do this and do it with such care and such detail and such respect for the people affected.

Brigid Bergin: Louisa, thank you so much for your call. I want to get one more. Jeffrey from Jamaica, Queens. Jeffrey, what did you think of the hearings?

Jeffrey: I've been told by the Republicans that this is not worth going through as though the attack on the Capitol Building was nothing and that some people just want to point out the ills of another party. It's not true. We had people die. We had people die. This is not nothing. I think it's essential that we go through this but we're in a climate where we're told even if your house is on fire, don't worry about it. Everything is going to be all right but your house is burning down and you're trying to say the house is on fire in everyone's saying, well, you just want the fire department to look bad.

Brigid Bergin: Jeffrey, thank you so much for your call. Theo, I think, really fascinating perspectives there. That idea of you can't convert the converted, the gratefulness for seeing it all laid out in evidence, and then the idea that we're in this moment of such a deep partisan divide where there's just so little convincing to be done. You are going to continue to be covering this. Are you hearing any of that reaction, any reaction far to this first night?

Theo Meyer: Yes, I thought one interesting reaction last night was from Former President Trump's Former Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, who tweeted that he found at least the video evidence that was presented much of which was never before seen footage cut together to show what happened that day, that he found that very powerful and that that would be harder to refute than some of what the Democrats and Liz Cheney said during their opening remarks.

I think one indicator of how the Republican Party is dealing with this is the fact that I mentioned the vote to create a bipartisan commission a little bit earlier that 35 House Republicans had voted to create this commission. Some of these Republicans are now facing primary challenges for merely having voted to create a commission to investigate January 6th. Michael Guest, a Republican in Mississippi was forced into a primary runoff on Tuesday in part because he voted to create this commission. I think that really tells you a lot about how these hearings are viewed by a lot of Republicans.

Brigid Bergin: Certainly Republicans in the primary voting Republicans. Theo, last night was the first of at least six hearings this month, as you reported in your Early 202 newsletter. The second hearing will take place on Monday morning. What can we expect to hear then?

Theo Meyer: This is the first in a series of hearings, although not all of them are going to be conducted in primetime like this. This was unique. Monday's hearing will take place at 10:00 AM on Monday. As Cheney said, last night, she previewed some of the upcoming hearings, said that in the second hearing on Monday you will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election but that despite this Trump engaged in "a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the US population that fraud had stolen the election from him."

These hearings are lined up to coincide with what many has described as a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the election. Monday's hearing will dig into that first point dealing with Trump spreading misinformation. The next hearing after that will look at Trump's plan to replace the acting Attorney General so that the Justice Department would you support his claims that the election had been stolen and then following on the hearing after that will look at his efforts to pressure Vice President Pence and so on through the final hearing.

Brigid Bergin: Theo, as you noted, not all of these hearings will take place in primetime next week. They will be starting at 10:00 AM actually, preempting the show. It makes me wonder. Showing my age a little bit, I remember the collective moment when the Iran-Contra hearings were held and it was really these moments of shared experience where everyone was viewing the same thing. We've already talked this morning about how not all networks were broadcasting these hearings.

Certainly, they're not being broadcast at the same time, so maybe you caught last night's, but you're not going to be able to listen to next week's. Do you think that the way these hearings are being conducted and presented to the American people will have any collective impact or is the divide just so deep and people are going to consume what they choose to consume?

Theo Meyer: Well, I think culturally, we don't live in a media environment anymore where it's possible for a large portion of the population to be watching the same TV program at the same time no matter what it is. The committee has looked back in some ways at the Watergate hearings which were watched by such a huge percentage of Americans back in the early 1970s as a model for this, but we, of course, live in a much more splintered media age.

I think some of what the committee is trying to do is recapture to the extent that it can, the spirit of bipartisan outrage about this that did exist in the days and perhaps even weeks, immediately after January 6th. So many Republicans who expressed outrage at the time walked it back over the past almost year and a half here, including Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell. Part of the idea here is to try to build support for making some of the changes that the committee might call for unit such as changing the Electoral Account Act and making other changes to the law to make this less likely from happening again.

Brigid Bergin: Thank you so much. We're going to leave it there for today. My guest has been Theo Meyer, national political reporter for The Washington Post, and a co-author of The Early 202 newsletter. Theo, thanks so much for coming on and explaining this to us.

Theo Meyer: Thanks for having me.

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