Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Did you watch yesterday's January 6th committee hearing number four or listened to it on the radio? I'll say again something I said after the third hearing, it is all worse than you probably even thought. In fact, I said yesterday on the air when I was previewing the hearing on Alison Stewart's show that this hearing would be different from the earlier ones because it was not going to be about the riot, but about the pressure on state officials to nullify the election results.

Well, that was true about yesterday, except I didn't realize we would hear connections to the break in, in terms of the physically thuggish behavior that got documented there aimed towards several, I'll call them earnest, straightforward, innocent public servants just doing their jobs and provoked by no less than the President of the United States himself, naming these names and a lawyer for him named Rudy Giuliani. There was also a damning material about Giuliani telling people he had a theory of how the election was stolen, but said, "What we don't have is the evidence." Yes, right. No evidence was why dozens of courts threw out their claims, but Trump and his allies were pushing state officials in multiple states to overturn the election anyway. Maybe that's criminal or maybe it's just politically fascist, we'll see.

I'm going to play a few of the clips in which the story of thuggishness that seems to connect with the January 6th riot itself gets told and reveals further how there's a movement of ultra MAGA extremists who could rear their threatening heads at any time, still, to private citizens as well as public officials. Then we'll talk to Quinta Jurecic from the website Lawfare for analysis and we'll take your calls. Here we go.

The worst of the worst to my ear was the way Trump and Giuliani targeted a regular citizen poll worker from Georgia, not even a statewide elected official like in yesterday's other instances. Just a poll worker in Fulton County, Georgia, two of them really, who happened to be two black women, mother and daughter, who got subjected to racist taunts in addition to other personal ones and false accusations.

The daughter's name is Wandrea ArShaye Moss and the public threats and insults were also targeted at her mother Ruby Freeman. We'll begin with this clip that the committee played of Rudy Giuliani testifying before a Georgia State Senate hearing about a month after the election in December 2020. Listeners, a warning as he talks about Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman, the statements you're about to hear are false.

Rudy Giuliani: Taped earlier in the day of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Freeman Moss and one other gentleman quite obviously, surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they're vials of heroin or cocaine. It's obvious to anyone who's a criminal investigator or prosecutor, they are engaged in surreptitiously illegal activity again that day. After a week ago and they're still walking around Georgia. Why? They should have been questioned already. Their places of work, their homes should have been searched for evidence of ballots, for evidence of USB ports, for evidence of voter fraud.

Brian Lehrer: Remember those false allegations of USB ports, those little thumb drives, USB ports being passed around like heroin and cocaine. He has to bring up those drug references when talking about these two women, when talking about these two African American women and again, Giuliani there. I don't generally play things that are demonstrably false because they get into the ether and they run around the world anyway, but the committee played them to establish the evidentiary trail.

We thought they were important to-- those things to re-air because of that. Not true about poll workers Shaye and Ruby as he tried to convince the Georgia State Senate. He said those things to a state senate to support flipping the election results.

Here is Shaye Moss herself from her live testimony yesterday about the effect on her personally of being smeared the way Giuliani did in that clip the committee had just played. She's being questioned here by congressman and committee member, Adam Schiff, who you will hear. We'll pick it up as Ms. Moss is describing how to see the things that were getting posted about her, how she got to see the things that were getting posted about her on her Facebook page.

Shaye Moss: I went to that icon and it was just a lot of horrible things there.

Adam Schiff: Those horrible things, did they include threats?

Shaye Moss: Yes, a lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that I'll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, "Be glad it's 2020 and not 1920."

Adam Schiff: Were a lot of these threats and vile comments racist in nature?

Shaye Moss: A lot of them were racist. A lot of them were just hateful. Yes, sir.

Adam Schiff: In one of the videos we just watched Mr. Giuliani accused you and your mother of passing some sort of USB drive to each other. What was your mom actually handing you on that video?

Shaye Moss: A ginger mint.

Brian Lehrer: A ginger mint that Rudy Giuliani without evidence told the hearing of the Georgia State Senate was a USB drive containing fraudulent votes. That was Wandrea Shaye Moss, a poll worker from Fulton County, Georgia with Congressman Adam Schiff at yesterday's hearing. We'll play more excerpts from yesterday as we go. With me now is Quinta Jurecic, senior editor at Lawfare, the website that describes itself as being about hard national security choices.

She was previously the managing editor there and is the co-host of a Lawfare podcast series called Arbiter of Truth, which is about misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms and elsewhere online. She's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution. Quinta, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: People are subjecting this poor woman to things like that reference to lynching, good thing for you this is 2020 and not 1920, and based on what's been shown to be grossly false allegations that she and her mom were engaging in election fraud while doing their jobs as poll workers. Do you see a connection to what happened on January 6th itself in substance or in form?

Quinta Jurecic: I think that's absolutely right. I think the committee did a really incredible job drawing a straight line between the harassment, the threats of violence, sometimes violence itself that was leveled against people who were just trying to do their jobs like Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and also the elected state officials like Rusty Bowers, for example, the Speaker of the Arizona House who described really horrible harassment against him and his family.

I think you can see very clearly the connection between the willingness to leverage a threat of violence against these people and the violence that erupted on January 6th that the sixth in that sense was not an anomaly. It was a natural outgrowth of the strategy, the techniques that the Trump campaign was using. I think it's also very important as you reference to that.

Of course, Moss and Freeman are Black. They're Black Georgians and many of the threats that were levered against them, as Moss described, were horrifically racist and the language that Giuliani used to accuse them falsely of some kind of vote tampering, as listeners heard, was itself playing on deeply ugly, racist tropes.

I think you also see how that comes to bear on the sixth. Black officers on Capitol Police have described being bombarded with racist rhetoric by rioters. I think there's a reasonable way in which you can see the sixth as a assertion by a certain portion of white Americans that the votes of people of color, particularly Black Americans, don't count. In that sense, there's also a very ugly through line.

Brian Lehrer: The Giuliani clip, if he knowingly made those false statements about the Moss Freeman family, mother daughter, or even statements that he had suspicions of, but didn't have the evidence to back them up, USB drives or whatever, but stating them as facts. I imagine he was under oath. I don't know, but I imagine he was under oath since that was testimony before the Georgia State Senate. Is that a crime, is it perjury, is it defamation or anything under the law?

Quinta Jurecic: Well, I can't speak to the perjury question because I'm also not sure what the situation was in terms of his being under oath or what the relevant Georgia Law is. The bar for federal perjury is quite high. It is worth noting that Moss and I believe Freeman as well are suing various right wing outlets on defamation claims for repeating these false allegations against them. I don't believe that those lawsuits have made it particularly far. If they do, that would be a test of what you're proposing here.

It's also worth noting that Giuliani, I believe, is facing other defamation lawsuits from the company's dominion and Smartmatic, the voting machine companies who Giuliani and others linked to the Trump campaign claimed were involved in some grand conspiracy to rig the election. Again, none of those claims has yet made it all the way to a jury, but it is certainly notable that the falsehoods that were being told by that campaign were so wild so out of control that it does seem like defamation law could certainly be relevant here.

Brian Lehrer: We heard in one of the earlier hearings from attorney general, William Barr, Trump's attorney general at the time saying the dominion voting machine things were wild and false. We have these debunkings on good authority from people in the Trump orbit, et cetera.

It wasn't just Giuliani saying these wild things about these two poll workers. It was the president of the United States himself at the time in the infamous phone call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. That phone call is Mostly famous for Trump asking Raffensperger to find enough votes to declare Trump the winner in Georgia, but here's a snippet of that as it pertains to Freeman and Moss that the committee also played at yesterday's hearing.

Brad Raffensperger: We had at least 18,000 that's on tape. We had them counted very mistakenly 18,000 voters having to do with the Ruby Freeman. That's she's a vote scammer, a professional vote scammer and hustler.

Brian Lehrer: Quinta, at least that was said in private, Giuliani was in a public hearing. Trump is trying to manipulate in what might have been a crime in and of itself Raffensperger to flip the election as Georgia secretary of state. At least to put a little qualifier on how bad that is. It wasn't said to the public about those two, but it was said to a state elections official. Quinta, do you know where things like that even originated or what the food chain is that puts them in the mouth of the president of the United States without actual evidence in an attempt to pressure a secretary of state to overturn election results?

Quinta Jurecic: The video that led to all of these false allegations against Moss and Freeman was a video of vote counting in Georgia. It essentially just showed poll workers going about their work. At one point as the committee describes, they seem to think that they'll be able to go home. Someone comes in and tells them unfortunately that they need to stay and stay working totally normal, totally straightforward. Yet in right wing media and social media around the election, this video is pulled out, circulated somehow as showing evidence that ballots are being carried out in suitcases, that there's some chicanery going on and it's really just all over social media presented in an incredibly misleading way.

I think what you see is I'm not quite sure where specifically it originated, but it immediately goes all over right wing networks, all over right wing social media and clearly made it to Rudy Giuliani and the president. What that points to is I think just how open Trump was to any evidence, even evidence that was obviously falsified that he had, that he could tell himself that somehow he had won and that he was ahead in Georgia even though he obviously was not.

Brian Lehrer: We heard that clip of Shay Moss. Let's listen to a little bit of the mom, her mom, Ruby Freeman testifying about the effects on her life.

Ruby Freeman: I've lost my name and I've lost my reputation. I've lost my sense of security all because a group of people starting with number 45 and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to escape goat me and my daughter, Shay, to push their own lies about how the presidential election was stolen.

Brian Lehrer: It wasn't just on social media that Ruby Freeman felt she was being harassed and followed. She also said this.

Ruby Freeman: There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States to target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American not to target one, but he targeted me, lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud America citizen who stand up to help Fulton county running the election in the middle of the pandemic.

Brian Lehrer: Before we move on to the Rusty Bowers' portion of the hearing and some similar things and more horrific stories, but from the other side of the country in Arizona, Quinta, your podcast series is about misinformation and disinformation on social media and elsewhere online. Where does what we just heard about, especially Shay Moss' Facebook messages fit into any larger pattern you're seeing in the United States right now.

Quinta Jurecic: I think Moss and Freeman's stories were a great demonstration of how the way that information travels and is distorted in the United States right now can have real harms on real people including, as Moss and Freeman were just average people who were just trying to do their jobs and help out their community.

I think it's important to keep in mind of course, that disinformation, misinformation, falsehoods have always been with us. There's never been a time of perfect truth, perfect reason in the United States, but what Moss and Freeman's stories really emphasize is how the ability of someone like Trump to put this material out there, to have it circulate online and travel instantly to everyone across the country and for those people to be able to find Moss and Freeman on Facebook to send them messages, to harass them in their homes is just magnified by the ability that the internet gives us to connect with one another. That can have extraordinarily harmful and dangerous effects.

I was really struck by the testimony you played from Freeman where she says, I lost my name, that this is a feeling of her identity being lost and written over by a mob that the president has directed toward her and that's a very frightening thing.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we hear about the Arizona chapter of the hearings yesterday, including the mob there in some ways even worse than what we just heard from Georgia, right after this.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we break down some important moments from yesterday's fourth, January 6th, select committee hearing and we can take your phone calls too. We're going through some of these clips and I assume and we do these segments that most of you did not sit there for two hours plus whatever watching all of these things live. We've picked out some clips and are presenting this-- I wouldn't even call it a digest, just a few selected moments with maybe some of the Moss important through lines as they pertain to how everybody is affected and potentially affected in the future.

We can also take your calls with your reactions or questions for our guest Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Let's move on to the Arizona chapter of the intimidation and threats and resistance by a Republican elected official that we heard testimony about yesterday. This time it's from the speaker of the house of the state of Arizona, Republican named Rusty Bowers, who was also pressured to overturn the election in that state, despite not being presented evidence of fraud that would come close to changing the result. Speaker Bowers talks here about some of the impact on his life.

Rusty Bowers: Well, as others in the videos have mentioned, we received, my secretaries would say an excess of 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of voicemails and texts, which saturated our offices and we were unable to work at least communicate, but at home up till even recently, it is the new pattern or a pattern in our lives to worry what will happen on Saturdays because we have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with videos of me, proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician, blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood and leaving literature both on my property, but arguing and threatening with neighbors and with myself.

I don't know if I should name groups, but there was one gentleman that had the three bars on his chest and he had a pistol and was threatening my neighbor, not with the pistol, but just vocally. When I saw the gun, I knew I had to get close.

Brian Lehrer: Arizona speaker of the House, Republican Rusty Bowers. Quinta, more mob behavior that reminds many people of a fascist society because it's taking place on behalf of the president who's pushing and pushing theories. He's repeatedly been told or false by many of the people closest to him and not discouraging these MAGA minions of his, with the pedophilia claims, that surfaces again, showing up armed at this guy's house. What kind of country or group of people in power is that?

Quinta Jurecic: Frightening. It speaks to the willingness of Trump to play on his bully pulpit to leverage violence outside the normal constraints. That he is, of course, as the president, he was in control of the armed forces, but he's also able to speak directly to people and wink and nod, suggest that they go out and engage in this harassment or certainly not dissuade them from doing so.

It's also worth noting that this is not something that ended when Trump left office, quite the opposite of Bowers there, I believe is describing how this kind of harassment continues to this day. Moss and Freeman also described how they're still afraid to speak to each other by name when they go outside in case anyone overhears and might hear or do something thinking falsely that they were involved and in some kind of wrongdoing.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Oh, and I'm glad you went back to Moss and Freeman because there was one other point about that, that I wanted to make. I forgot, and actually, a caller is bringing it up and reminds me that there was this other incident where they were trying to break into one of their homes, or I think even another generation up a grandmother's house claiming that they wanted to make a citizen's arrest. Did you hear that part about citizen's arrest?

Quinta Jurecic: Yes, absolutely. That was testimony from Moss testifying that some people tried to break into the house of her grandmother, Freeman's mother, and conduct a citizen's arrest of Moss and Freeman. She testified really chillingly that her grandmother called her essentially screaming, not knowing what was going on just in deep, deep fear. I think it was incredibly jarring. It's also jarring again in context of what Moss was saying of the racist threats that she received. There was one person who sent her a message with what I think was a threat of lynching essentially saying, "You're lucky that it's 2020 and not 1920."

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We played that testimony.

Quinta Jurecic: Right. Moss also testified that one of the reasons that she liked her job as an election worker was because she was very conscious that previous generations in her family had not had the ability to vote. She wanted to embrace that and help give back to her community. The violence against her grandmother, I think is frightening, not only for the sheer fact of it but in how it speaks to a political effort to move back in time and take power and dignity away from this community.

Brian Lehrer: I was really brought up short, almost short of breath. When I heard that reference to an attempted citizen's arrest of a Black person, an innocent Black person in Georgia, by in effect, a white mob. I didn't hear any other commentator make this connection, but maybe others have, and I just didn't run into it. When's the last time we heard about a white mob making a citizen's arrest of a completely innocent Black person of Georgia.

It was the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, do you remember? That was their defense, those guys who got convicted of the murder, that they were trying to make a citizen's arrest, because for some reason, without evidence, they suspected him of a break-in of a home, an unoccupied house, no less under construction, but they suspected him of that. They were trying to make a citizen's arrest. When he was afraid of them and tried to get away and resisted, they killed him and claimed self-defense.

Their defense was that they were making a citizen's arrest. That was the Ahmaud Arbery case. Here again, in Georgia, a mob, trying to make a citizen's arrest of an innocent Black person. It certainly reminded me of Ahmaud Arbery.

Quinta Jurecic: I think that's right. Again, it points to vision of law and of citizenship that is not founded on equal protection of everyone or a democracy that represents everyone, a president who represents everyone as Ruby Freeman said the president ought to, but rather a vision of law and power that under which one group, in this case, white Americans who support Trump are able to leverage that violence against anyone who doesn't fit into that category. That's a very frightening place to be.

Brian Lehrer: Bowers was such a humble [unintelligible 00:26:59] credible witness. It's almost funny, a screenwriter couldn't have made him up and be believed in a movie these days. Someone I saw on TV yesterday called him a Jimmy Stewart character, referring I guess to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and old movies like that. I don't know if there's anyone left to persuade these days, but here's how squeaky clean and choir boy clean he showed himself to be, as he read from a diary or journal entry from during that post-election period when the pressure was really ramping up on him as the Republican speaker of Arizona's House of Representatives.

Rusty Bowers: It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me, turn on me with such ranker. I may, in the eyes of men, not hold correct opinions or act according to their vision or convictions, but I do not take this current situation in a light manner, a fearful manner, or a vengeful manner. I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to. With any contrived desire towards deflection of my deep foundational desire to follow God's will, as I believe he led my conscience to embrace. How else will I ever approach him in the wilderness of life knowing that I ask this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take.

Brian Lehrer: Arizona speaker of the House, Republican Rusty Bowers, reading from his journal yesterday and entry in that post-election period when he was getting all that pressure. Quinta, could you make him up if you tried?

Quinta Jurecic: I thought he was an incredibly compelling witness and in some ways, a throwback to the civil servants we saw with the Mueller investigation and with the first impeachment, these very clean-cut people who just deeply care about their oath, about the constitution, and are looking to do the right thing and run up against Trump, who is very much not that type of person. His testimony was incredibly moving.

That said, I do think it's a statement of where we are right now as a country that the AP reported yesterday after Bowers testified that he said he would vote for Trump again if he was up against Biden. Maybe a little bit of a complicating twist there that speaks to just how deep partisanship right now runs.

Brian Lehrer: Which is pretty much the same thing William Barr has said as well, that he would vote for Trump again up against a Democrat because he thinks the left is a bigger threat to the country than Trump, but there we are. There's that particular Republican lane that holds those political beliefs about what's in the country's best interest, but was not willing to go along with the big lie.

One other thing from Bowers' testimony, when Giuliani was pressuring him to overturn the state's election results, he quoted Giuliani saying to him, "We've got lots of theories. We just don't have the evidence." Bower said, I don't know if it was a gaff or maybe he didn't think through what he said. He said, "Both myself and my council remember that specifically." Quinta isn't that the whole stolen election campaign in a nutshell? We have lots of theories. We don't have the evidence.

Quinta Jurecic: Absolutely. I thought that that quote was absolutely incredible and it reminded me of something that Giuliani said in 2018 where he went on television defending the president and said, "Truth isn't truth." That I think struck people at the time as just a perfect summary of the Trump camp's approach to facts in reality and here now we have the new version of truth isn't truth is we have lots of theories. We just don't have the evidence.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Mary in Montgomery, New Jersey, who is an election poll worker herself. Hi, Mary. You're on WNYC.

Mary: Hi, how are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Mary: I was just saying to the [unintelligible 00:31:39] I was really struck by the Georgia, well, first by the testimony of all of them. I watched the whole thing, the full amount of time, and I was actually crying when Ruby was speaking and I'm thinking, "This is a house committee hearing," and I'm crying. This is unbelievable. The election poll worker, the person in charge-- the one with the gray hair in Georgia, when he said, and he was showing evidence to the folks about the proof that Biden won the election with all the numbers and how they test and what they did, the person said to him, "Yes, yes, I see the numbers, yes, yes, but in my heart, I just don't believe them."

I don't know how to change that. You have facts of empirical evidence and you can't help someone to look at that objectively and say, "Yes, you're right." Has everyone been manipulated that much? It was really disheartening to me and especially as an election poll worker, there are so many checks and balances, and there's an oath you have to take. These fellow citizens of the same county are going after their election poll workers. It was just so disheartening to me. That's all my comment. That's what I wanted to say.

Brian Lehrer: Are you going to go and be a poll worker again after that?

Mary: Yes, because here's the thing. I'm doing it so I can prove to people there is no election fraud. It's in my heart to do it. It's in my heart as the Patriot of this country and maybe we're not in the same party. I'm not in any party, I'm an independent, but I don't care because I want to prove to you and I want to support our democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Mary. Thank you for your service and thank you for your call. I guess, Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare as we analyzed yesterday's January 6th select committee hearing presentation. Another dot that was connected or set of dots with the Freeman and Moss story, the poll workers from Georgia is that the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, the famous Brad Raffensperger who resisted Trump's pressure. He testified to specifics of the false claims that they had Trump and others on tape making 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia and they all voted for Biden.

Well, Brad Raffensperger went through all the returns and they found a total of four votes that were cast in the names of people who were deceased, not 5,000, four. Then he went through other pieces very specifically. I thought that was powerful to have the state's highest election official who just got renominated in a primary over the Trump act Republican, who was challenging him and just going piece by piece. That really fit in on an official level with the Moss and Freeman poll worker stories.

Quinta Jurecic: Yes. It was an incredibly powerful presentation to be able to marshal those numbers and put those facts behind it and yet as the caller said, you end up with this problem where if people don't want to believe it, how do you get past that? That was a conversation that Raffensperger was saying he'd had, I believe with someone in his own family who he had tried to convince by showing these numbers and the person said, "I just know in my heart that they cheated." I think it's a great and unfortunate summary of the problem that we're in.

Brian Lehrer: Susan, in Manhattan. You're on WNYC. Hi, Susan.

Susan: Oh, hi. My question is about the role of Merrick Garland of the Department of Justice trying to divert some of the committee's energies toward providing transcripts rather than having done their own research interviews of witnesses investigations during the past 18 months.

Brian Lehrer: Quinta, working for Lawfare, which is the name is Lawfare and about hard national security choices. What about the role of attorney general Merrick Garland here? One of the news stories that broke after a previous hearing was that the Department of Justice under him is requesting hearing transcripts to use as evidence in criminal and national security investigations that they have ongoing and a number of people have raised the kind of question that Susan, our caller just raised. Really, the Department of Justice didn't have this stuff? How do you hear that?

Quinta Jurecic: What the caller's referencing is there's a bit of a spat between the Justice Department and the committee over whether or not the committee will provide these transcripts. I believe the committee has said, and the Justice Department has said that after that dispute, they have handed them over. The committee has conducted, I think they said over 1,000 interviews. They have an enormous amount of material. You can certainly imagine that that would be useful to the Justice Department in carrying out these investigations and prosecutions.

I think this is a good reminder that the Justice Department and the committee are doing very different work. The Justice Department is a law enforcement entity. It is trying to investigate potential crimes, carry out criminal prosecutions. The committee is a body of Congress. It is a political entity that is able to make a case, a moral, and a political case directly to the American people. You see how those two entities interact.

For example, the Justice Department might want particular evidence from the committee. The committee has been leaning on the Justice Department to provide it with material to hinting, winking, and nodding that it would really like the Justice Department to perhaps investigate Trump himself criminally, but ultimately, they're different branches of government doing different things that are sometimes intention as we see here.

Brian Lehrer: Is it all worse than you thought before the hearing started? Maybe it's worse than Merrick Garland thought if he's now requesting these transcripts, or is it about the degree of lies and threats to individuals and threats to democracy that you thought?

Quinta Jurecic: We don't know what the Justice Department knows, I should say that to begin with. I think it's been reported that they have been investigating the role of Trump and his associates in January 6th. I don't want to say that the Department is necessarily learning things that are new here. For me, certainly, I have been quite impressed and alarmed at the new information the committee has brought to bear.

Once we all saw Trump on Twitter on January 6th essentially encouraging what I think is fair to call a coup attempt. It was a little hard to imagine that things could get worse than that, but the committee has really been very compelling in showing evidence of Trump's personal involvement in these efforts, that he was told repeatedly that he lost and chose to ignore or brush aside that, that he abided by legal advice that he was told was wrong, that his lawyers themselves may have known was wrong and as we've been discussing of the role of violence in these efforts.

I think it is a pretty brutal picture and one that makes the story of the sixth and the months from the election to January 2021 substantially darker and uglier than we had previously known.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, some will say, "Look, this is bad, but it goes on from the left too." Certainly, we heard about the apparent plan by someone to assassinate Justice Kavanaugh, an allegedly armed person close to his house and that person is under arrest as they should be. There have been objections to abortion rights, protestors outside other justices homes, there's a legitimate debate of people should leave protesting to public places not people's homes on any side but that is not this, I think, at very least in degree.

With the backing of the President of the United States for years his years long purposeful provocations and saying, "Beat them up if they try to throw a tomato. I'll pay your legal bills," all of that stuff for years. Or tell me if you disagree and think this is just a problem in American society right now and doesn't belong to one political side more than the other.

Quinta Jurecic: It's certainly true that there seems to be a rise in violence and threats of harassment in American life generally. That said I think you are absolutely right that what we are describing here on the right is categorically different from what we see on the left or elsewhere on the political spectrum. What we see in terms of Trump and his supporters I would describe as a organized or semi-organized political movement that is founded on these threats of violence and harassment and a willingness to turn those threats of violence against people who are perceived as stepping out of line.

This is something that not only is it something that was encouraged by the President of the United States, it's something that he ran on. He promised his supporters in 2016 and 2020 that he would turn that violence of the state of the mob against his enemies and their enemies. That made us an organized political promise I think is something that is deeply dangerous. It is new in American politics or at least in American politics in recent decades and not something that we should ever want to go back to and I think it portends something very, very ugly.

Brian Lehrer: Quinta Jurecic is senior editor at Lawfare, the website that describes itself as being about hard national security choices. She was previously the managing editor there and is the co-host of a Lawfare podcast, I can never say that right. Lawfare podcast series called Arbiters of Truth which is about misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms and elsewhere online. She's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution. Somehow she finds time to come on this show from time to time and we always appreciate it. Quinta, thanks so much.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

 

 

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