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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, and then again, it's not. Good morning, everyone. This show was supposed to be preempted at this hour for live coverage of the January 6 committee hearing. That hearing is still expected to take place but a little later than originally scheduled because they are having some internal drama down there at the committee. What? Political drama in the House of Representatives? Yes, and here's what it is. One of the witnesses, one of the main witnesses scheduled to appear today, withdrew about an hour ago. That witness is Bill Stepien, Donald Trump's campaign manager in Trump's 2020 re-election campaign. Stepien is claiming a family emergency and says a lawyer representing him will make a statement instead. We, like everyone else, are trying to figure out what's really going on here.

Bill Stepien might have an actual family emergency. We all have them from time to time or Trump or somebody representing Trump might have gotten to Bill Stepien and talked him out of anything that would throw the president under the bus, or maybe this was a setup all along. Who knows? Stepien agreeing to testify as a star witness from the inside Trump world but planning all along to sabotage the hearing.

I'm not saying that's the case, I'm just saying, who knows? We have to ask questions like that since Stepien bailed at the very last minute. Also, by way of background, Bill Stepien, some of you with Jersey roots will remember, was a key player in the Bridgegate affair back in 2013, 2014, when Governor Chris Christie's campaign closed off access from Fort Lee to the George Washington Bridge as political payback for the mayor of Fort Lee not endorsing Christie for re-election in that 2013 campaign.

Stepien was Christie's campaign manager that year, and Christie blamed Stepien in a news conference for part of the Bridgegate plot and claimed that he, Christie, knew nothing about it. Let's just say Bill Stepien has an interesting political history. I guess as far as Donald Trump was concerned, Bridgegate was a credential for Bill Stepien, not a strike against him, a feature not a bug, as they say in the tech world.

We've got about a half hour right now, an unexpected half hour and instead of sitting glued to the television, taking notes on the hearing, here I am and here we are talking about it for the moment. Joining us on this very short notice, we are very happy to have 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 The Lawfare podcast series on their podcast, Arbiter of Truth on misinformation and disinformation, social media platforms and the online information ecosystem, all of that. She's a contributing writer at The Atlantic as well, and a fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution. Quinta was on with us a bunch during the Trump impeachment hearings. Quinta, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: To start with a new news, what's up with Bill Stepien as far as you can tell?

Quinta Jurecic: It's a great question. It does seem it's been reported that his wife is going into labor, that strikes me as perhaps a pretty good excuse. As you mentioned, perhaps there were some traffic problems in Fort Lee but it does seem like this is a real family emergency and the committee will be showing videotaped depositions with him in his place, which I think is what's causing the delay as they get that queued up.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, I wonder if it was induced labor or how many conspiracy theories can we concoct here around about Stepien. Can you summarize for us what the committee was expecting to get from Stepien's own lips today?

Quinta Jurecic: We don't have a full sense of what they were planning. I think we know that this hearing is really planned to be about the big lie, about how the Trump campaign and the President specifically built the lie of election fraud. Stepien was supposed to appear on the first panel along with Chris Stirewalt, he's a former political editor at Fox who as of now at least, he's still supposed to appear.

It seems that Stepien was going to testify about the campaign's knowledge of the fact that Trump had in fact lost the election and to what extent the campaign itself was involved in building lies of election fraud. Like I said, the committee has apparently videotaped the depositions with him and plans to show that. We saw on their first hearing last week that they incorporated a lot of video of depositions, this is clearly something that they've planned for. Hopefully, we should still get a good sense of what he spoke to with the committee.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's talk about another key witness today. Mr. Stirewalt, former political director for Fox News, what's his role going to be?

Quinta Jurecic: Chris Stirewalt was a political editor at Fox News during the 2020 election. He's definitely not as high profile a name but he played an important role. Listeners may remember there was a bit of controversy on election night, when Fox called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. They were actually the first network to call that along with the AP. Stirewalt came on screen at Fox to defend the network's decision, essentially saying that they really did think that Arizona had gone for Biden. Now this, of course, became a matter of controversy, given the Trump campaigns, lies about election fraud, and Stirewalt was fired from the network later.

He later has criticized Fox, said that he stands behind the call, though he said he was not personally responsible for it, but felt that it was important to be accurate, fair, say what was really happening as opposed to what the Trump campaign said was happening. Again, we don't know specifically what Stirewalt is going to say. It seems like he may testify to the thinking behind that call, perhaps the political environment at Fox. It's hard not to wonder whether he might have some things to say about perhaps the role of other Fox News personalities, such as Sean Hannity in helping build the big lie of election fraud. We'll wait and see.

Brian Lehrer: There's no sense we have this opportunity for about another, what? 23 minutes or so until NPR special coverage of the hearings is now scheduled to begin at 10:30 instead of ten o'clock. We can open up the phones for some of your questions about the January 6th committee hearing so far, that obviously would be Thursday night's edition if you watched that or saw news reports about it, or what might take place today, or even some larger questions.

The Times had an interesting series of articles over the last few days, asking how would you define success? What would be success, as opposed to failure of the January 6th committee hearings? What would have to happen in politics? What would have to happen in the country? What would have to happen just on the level of knowledge for the sake of history?

Maybe you want to address that or any questions for Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare and the Brookings Institution about what may be yet to come.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer as we await today's hearing. That, as we've been discussing, is expected to focus on evidence that Trump knew he lost the election but decided to engage in what he knew was a fraudulent campaign to claim the election was stolen. Quinta, since you worked for a site called Lawfare, based on what you heard on Thursday night, and we've got a few clips, few choice clips of people close to Trump that will play between now and 10:30. Do you think they were trying to build a case for the Justice Department to indict Trump and do you think they laid out evidence of a crime as opposed to political negligence?

Quinta Jurecic: It's pretty clear that the committee is building a case for a potential criminal prosecution of Trump. This has actually been something that has been clear for a long time. Liz Cheney, who is one of two Republicans, the lead Republican on the panel, the Vice Chair, made a statement I think some months ago essentially saying that she and the committee believe that Donald Trump had violated a statute prohibiting obstruction of Congress.

The argument essentially being that in his role in precipitating the January 6 riot, he was blocking Congress from engaging in its business of certifying the election results and that this constitutes obstruction. This is the same statute with which some of the actual, the capital writers have been charged.

You certainly saw during that first hearing that the committee was really trying to make the case that Trump knew that he had in fact, excuse me, lost the election. He knew that the stories that he was telling about election fraud were wrong and incorrect. That's important because it helps build the case that he had a corrupt intent under the language of the statute that he knew that he was doing something wrong.

That would be potentially very crucial to building a criminal case against him. Now, I think the question of whether the committee has built that case is, of course, a very different question from whether the justice department will bring it. There's been a lot of speculation about perhaps if the committee is able to really show that evidence that Trump knew what he was doing was wrong, that he really was engaged in obstruction of Congress, that might put political pressure on the justice department to bring a case against him.

It's really hard to say. I think the thing to keep in mind here is as you noted Congress and the justice department are doing very, very different things here. The justice department is an entity that brings criminal charges when it thinks that it can prove a case in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt. The committee doesn't have to do that. In some ways, it is freer to make a case to the public, make a moral case, a political case for why the Republican party and perhaps Trump themselves should not be reelected.

It doesn't have to worry about the reasonable doubt standard. It also doesn't have to worry about concerns like important concerns about fairness in a criminal case where you don't want to prejudice the jury. You want to give the defendant a fair shake as a political body. It has a lot more freedom to build this case in a aggressive dramatic manner speaking directly to the public, as opposed to just members of a jury.

Again, it's pretty clear that the committee understands its work as in conversation with what the justice department is doing. It mentioned throughout that first hearing, again and again, different criminal prosecutions of January 6 rioters, of other decisions made in the legal system, but it is ultimately engaged in different work.

Brian Lehrer: Not everything that's morally wrong, even if it's egregious, even if it's a threat to democracy, is necessarily a crime under a criminal statute. The committee is going broad and to paint the moral picture as well as just fill in a lot of facts. Then the justice department will have to decide if they think there's an actual violation of a criminal statute there.

Let me play a couple of what I consider the money clips from Thursday night that make that moral case. The first one is of Trump's up till that point, very loyal Attorney General William Barr. We remember how Barr came on during the Russia investigation, and basically went out in front of the actual investigation report and spun it as exonerating Trump, which it did not. He was really considered a Trump loyalist.

He was very skeptical of the Russia investigation all along and was basically hired by Trump to be attorney general in the middle of that because of his skepticism and his willing to undermine the Russia investigation. Despite that Bill Barr, when push came to shove on the big lie about the election being stolen, decided for whatever reason to stick with the truth, rather than stick with Donald Trump as a person.

Probably you've all heard, folks, the clip of Barr that they played on Thursday night, where he used the word BS, the whole word for BS, about what he thought about the claim that the election was stolen. I want to play the other clip that they used of Bill Barr because I thought he really expanded on the idea that it was BS and why this was dangerous in a really profound way. Here's about 30 seconds, a former Attorney General William Barr.

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 people 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 and I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. It was doing a great grave disservice to the country.

Brian Lehrer: Not just crazy stuff, but doing a great grave disservice to the country by influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system, which Bill Barr maintained that there was not. One other clip that they played a little after that from Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, of course, and who's more loyal to the president than his daughter over the many years.

Even if we remember some of the early history of the beginning of the Trump administration when people were wondering after the way he campaigned as a proto authoritarian if he would then become a normal president and Ivanka was trying to reassure people, "Don't worry, Jared Kushner, my husband and I are going to be a check on this." If she didn't say it in so many words, she implied it. Then she wasn't.

Then she went out defending just about everything that Donald Trump did when she made public appearances. That's the background for Ivanka Trump's loyalty, but in this clip that the committee played on Thursday night, you'll hear that she's asked a question. This is from her videotaped committee deposition, asked if she believed Bill Barr when he said Trump's election fraud claims were false and her response, this is just 15 seconds and begins with the interviewer's question.

Interviewer: 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.

Brian Lehrer: Boom Quinta. That was quite a back-to-back sequence that they had there on Thursday night for anybody who's convincible in this world.

Quinta Jurecic: I think it was very impressively put together and I would note that about 12 hours after that clip of Ivanka aired, Trump posted on his network, Truth Social, saying that Ivanka had checked out and wasn't really involved at that point so disparaging his own daughter.

Brian Lehrer: What a weak defense to say, "Oh, well, she wasn't paying enough attention to the details. She was willing to throw her father, the president of the United States at the time, under the bus, just because she wasn't paying attention very well. Really.

Quinta Jurecic: I think it's not a particularly strong defense and he did a say of Bill Barr. This is a quote of Trump on Barr. "He sucked!" That's the level of discourse we're getting from the former president. I do think that the use of those clips is a really powerful demonstration of the strategy that the committee is trying to use here, that what they're doing is not pulling in democratic strategists who are going to say how terrible what the Trump campaign was doing was. They're pulling in Trump's own people.

As you noted, Barr is someone who really went to the mat for Trump. When it came to the Mueller report, I would argue presenting their reports' conclusions in an extremely misleading way in order to get Trump off the hook politically. The fact that the committee is able to point to Barr himself, making these statements on videotape, saying he thought that these lies about election fraud were meritless, that they can have his own daughter up there saying that, I think really adds to the strength of the case they're making that people who were some of the president's strongest supporters, his own family members, even them were telling him, "This is not true, you did not win the election."

It's hard to say whether at this point anyone is persuadable, but it did make me think that the committee is really working to present their case in the strongest way possible to anyone who might be on the fence, might not have paid particularly close attention in recent years to really stack the deck against the former president and say, even the people who were closest to him thought that he was wrong here.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare and the Brookings Institution. We'll get a few of your phone calls in as we go until 10:30 when NPR live coverage of today's committee hearing is expected to start. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, by the way, there is no hearing scheduled for tomorrow, so we will have a regular Brian Lehrer show tomorrow, we will break down whatever they do today. We'll also break down tonight, Republican gubernatorial debate, which is supposed to take place on channel two for the nomination for governor of New York on the Republican side. That has its own drama, in case you haven't been following this.

Andrew Giuliani, one of the candidates refused to present proof of vaccination, which CBS requires for admission to its broadcast center. He would appear remotely under the current rules and still participate in the debate, but he's trying to get everybody to agree to move the debate to some other venue where you don't need a vaccination card [chuckles] to get in and obviously he's making a political show of that.

It'll be interesting on that level and how they themselves, Andrew Giuliani being the son of Rudy Giuliani, obviously doing a lot of campaign appearances together spins January 6th. Also, Lee Zeldin, the Congressman who's considered the leading candidate from the East End of Long Island who's been a Trump defender in many ways. Republican debate tonight will break that down on tomorrow's Brian Lehrer Show as well, we do expect to be preempted again on Wednesday for committee hearings that are again, expected to start Wednesday morning at ten o'clock. Let's take a phone call. How about Katie in Queens? Katie, you are on WNYC with Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare and the Brookings Institution. Hi, Katie.

Katie: Hi, good morning, thanks for doing the coverage. I just wanted to say there's a lot of talk in the media about will these hearings convince people who are not believing what we all saw with our own eyes, who are not believing the facts? I'm kind of over that, those people may be inconvincible. I think it's important for me, someone who has watched all along and seen this far, seen this disruption of democracy, seen this horrible attack on the capital, it's important for me to see Congress doing this because they're doing their job. It's the right thing to do and it's important for them to hold people accountable to this behavior so that we don't lose our democracy.

If people don't want to believe, you're not going to convince them, I'm sorry, there's no more you can do. It's important for us to see this, for all of us that know how dangerous this was and how horrible it is to be living in this time in this country. I just want to point out that to me, the point of these hearings is not-- I'm done trying to convince anyone, you cannot convince people anymore. If they can't see the facts, I don't know what to do, and the hearing is not going to change that. It's important for us, for the rest of us who know the truth.

Brian Lehrer: Katie, thank you. I think you speak for a lot of listeners and you put that really well. Quinta what were you thinking as you listened to Katie, and this really goes to the question, what are the hearings really for, and how would we define success of these hearings?

Quinta Jurecic: I think that the color makes a great point. We really are at a point where people's views of what happened on January 6th have unfortunately hardened along political lines, but as Kattie points out, that is not a reason for the committee not to act and I think that I've been very impressed actually by how the committee has been really dedicated to moving forward with its investigation, to presenting material to the public in sort of an engaging digestible way.

Even though, people may not be convinced that the members of the committee have really made the case that this is something that is morally and constitutionally, and politically important and that that holds its own weight. I do think, as you say, this gets to the question of what it means for the committee to have success. Now, if the committee did somehow change the tide of public opinion on January 6th, that would absolutely be a success, but I don't think that an absence of that change means that the committee has failed.

It is a very, very powerful thing to create a public record of this terrible event that put our democracy in danger. I mean, that still endangers our democracy to create a record of the facts, a way for people to encounter those facts, an easily accessible and digestible way, not just for Americans today, but for the future as well. Perhaps it might give some other politicians some courage to stand up and do what's right, there's no way to know. I think it's also important to keep in mind that this is really a forum for Congress to show what it can do when it puts its mind to it.

January 6th was an attack on American democracy, but it was also an attack on Congress, it was an attack on the Capital, and what this investigation is, is really Congress standing up to defend itself, which I think is particularly important given that under the Trump Administration, The Executive branch really did a lot to undercut Congress's power. If the committee is able, as it seems like it has been, to dig out new information, conduct a complex investigation, and find out the truth, that's an important test case for what Congress can do, and whether as the first branch of government, it can stand up for itself and for American democracy.

Brian Lehrer: George in Thornwood, New York, you're on WNYC. George, are you there?

George: I hope so, Brian. Thank you. What troubled me the most Thursday night watching those few video clips was how timidly the police responded. I thought back to '68 in Chicago, and then Kent State, a couple of years later, and it looked to me almost as if the police were afraid of injuring one of these demonstrators, and I thought, "My God, what if these people were foreigners that had truly ill intent, deliberate we are going to hang somebody, we would completely." It just troubled me how ineffective our response was crowd-control-wise. Do you know if that is at all in the agenda, either presently or in the near future?

Brian Lehrer: Quinta?

Quinta Jurecic: The committee has said that they are investigating Capital Police's response and preparation for January 6th. It seems quite clear that the various law enforcement agencies involved, so Capital Police, the DC Metropolitan Police Department, even Federal Agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI, were not prepared for what happened on the 6th. I think that pulling on that threat and seeing why it was, that they were not ready for what was about to happen, that they were not equipped to hold back that crowd, will be very important.

That said, I also think it's important to identify that, a lot of what happened on that day, the violence that happened did happen to law enforcement officers and what you see in those videos where riots are really overcoming and brutalizing law enforcement is in many ways law enforcement officers who were not prepared for a riot, they're not wearing riot gear, there's only a few of them, that only had small bike racks to hold people back. As a result of that failure on the part of those agencies, many of those officers were brutally injured. Officer Caroline Edwards, who testified on the Thursday night hearing was knocked over, I believe received a concussion. Many of her fellow officers were seriously injured, and so I think something that's important to keep in mind as we think about what happened with the riot is that we want, and we should want accountability from these law enforcement agencies about why they weren't ready, but we should also keep in mind the bravery of those officers who were wounded and are still struggling with those wounds.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, both things. Quinta Jurecic from Lawfare and Brookings Institution. Depending on how this goes, you and I may be back together on the air in a couple of hours and break it down. Other than that, thank you for coming on with us this morning.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Now we go to NPR's live special coverage. Again, we're told that today's hearing will focus on evidence that Trump knew he lost the election but decided to engage in the big lie anyway.

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