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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning everyone. The big January 6th story you probably heard in the last day is that the White House chief of staff from the day, Mark Meadows, has been held in contempt of Congress with a criminal referral for refusing to testify before the House January 6th Committee, but the bigger news might be what Mark Meadows already revealed to the committee in documents he turned over before ending his cooperation.

We're going to play a two and a half minute stretch now of Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney reading into the record yesterday text messages to and from Mark Meadows that were sent while the deadly capital riot was taking place, while it was actually going on. Now, you've probably heard that some big Fox news hosts and maybe heard also Donald Trump Jr. was texting Meadows to get Trump to call the rioters off.

You will hear Liz Cheney here read some of those. We've bleeped out the S word where it occurs in two of those texts so the FCC will let us keep our jobs, but here's a spoiler alert, the most damning bombshell with possible legal consequences for Trump himself comes at the very end in how Meadows replies to some of these texts. Again, this is two and a half minutes. Here's Republican Congresswoman of Wyoming, Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney: Members of Congress, the press and others wrote to Mark Meadows as the attack was underway. One text Mr. Meadows received said, "We are under siege here at the Capitol." Another, "They have breached the Capitol," and a third, "Mark, protesters are literally storming the capital, breaking windows and doors, rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?" A fourth, "There's an armed standoff at the house chamber door." Another from someone inside the Capitol, "We are all helpless."

Dozens of texts including from Trump administration officials urged immediate action by the president, "POTUS has to come out firmly and tell the protesters to dissipate. Someone is going to get killed." In another, "Mark, he needs to stop this now." A third in all caps, "TELL THEM TO GO HOME." A fourth, and I quote, "POTUS needs to calm this [beep] down."

Indeed, according to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately. They texted Mr. Meadows and he has turned over those texts. "Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy," Laura Ingraham wrote."

"Please get him on TV, destroying everything you have accomplished," Brian Kilmeade texted. "Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol," Sean Hannity urged. As the violence continued, one of the president's sons texted Mr. Meadows, "He's got to condemn this [beep] ASAP. The Capitol police tweet is not enough," Donald Trump Jr. Texted. Meadows responded, "I'm pushing it hard, I agree." Still, President Trump did not immediately act.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, Vice Chair of the House January 6th Committee yesterday, "Mark Meadows was trying to get the president of the United States to call off a violent interaction taking place in his name and for hours, the president of the United States refused." Let's understand more about this with New York Times congressional correspondent Luke Broadwater who's covering it. Luke, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Luke Broadwater: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let me just replay the last 10 seconds of that Liz Cheney reading and ask you to put them into context. Here's Cheney again on how Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff, replied about getting Trump to call the rioters off.

Liz Cheney: Meadows responded, "I'm pushing it hard, I agree." Still, President Trump did not immediately act.

Brian Lehrer: Luke, what do we learn from that about Donald Trump's role in the attempted violent overthrow of the Congress of the United States as it was taking place?

Luke Broadwater: Well, I think we learned a great deal. We knew there, from some initial reporting, that there were delays in calling in the national guard that Donald Trump had watched the violence unfold on television and did nothing much with it, but these text messages that Liz Cheney revealed this week, I think brought it home in a new way and added very important details which was that people, including the president's own son, were demanding that he do more to stop the violence, that he condemn this attack and call off the mob.

One of the important thing that Liz Cheney is getting at with those comments is there are criminal codes about obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. That is the charge that we've seen leveled at a lot of the defendants in the criminal cases related to January 6th. She is laying out the case for why that charge could be applicable to Donald Trump. These emails [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in there because we have the clip that I think you're referring to.

Luke Broadwater: Go ahead. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: This is something that I don't think we've heard before, you tell me if this suggestion of a possible crime committed by Trump is a new idea based on this new evidence. Again, Liz Cheney.

Liz Cheney: Mr. Meadow's testimony will bear on another key question before this committee, did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress's official proceedings to count electoral votes?

Brian Lehrer: Luke, you want to pick it up again there, is that the statement by Cheney you were referring to?

Luke Broadwater: Yes. Liz Cheney has taken on this committee as the biggest, most important assignment of her political career and so she has dug down into the details of the criminal code. When she says certain things, it's very meticulous as to what she's talking about. She has talked before about putting President Trump under oath and how he lies then about election fraud, he will face criminal penalties. This is another criminal penalty she's talking about where the justice department so far has found it quite difficult to prosecute charges of insurrection or sedition.

They haven't really felt like the evidence is there despite calls from the public to press those charges, but they have felt like they can prove obstructing a meeting of Congress. That is not an insignificant charge, it carries something like up to 20 years in prison. That seems to be a case that the justice department is willing to take up. Liz Cheney is saying she wants to provide them a roadmap for how that charge could apply to Donald Trump.

Brian Lehrer: If the committee concludes that Trump, through inaction, corruptly sought to impede Congress's official proceeding to certify the election by passively allowing the interaction to go on when all these people including his chief of staff and his son and Fox News hosts were asking him to do something else, what could the committee do about that?

Luke Broadwater: One thing the committee can do is at the end of this all, when they've done their investigation, they can make criminal referrals. We know that they have made two referrals now with the power of the house votes for people who have not cooperated with the investigation, but they could, based on their findings, make referrals in other areas as well. Several members of the committee have said that is something they will look at as they go. It remains to be seen.

One thing the committee wants to question Meadows about is what he wrote in his book that Donald Trump had ad-libbed the line at the ellipse that day where he said, "We're going to March to the Capitol and I'm going to join you." Then afterwards, as he's coming off the stage, Meadow says that he and Trump discussed this and Trump says, "It's metaphorical."

That is something that gets to the intent of disrupting Congress, whether it was intended or not Was it the plan to match on the Capitol? Was it a plan to disrupt Congress? Was it just an ad-lib thing? Was staff involved? Those are all the things that the committee wants to ask about.

Brian Lehrer: Those things are different. Matching on the Capitol is one thing, that can be done peacefully. The violent break in to the Capitol, threatening of members of Congress, the people who died in the process, those are different.

Luke Broadwater: Oh, absolutely. That's been the whole crux of this investigation and I think the hardest thing to prove for investigators. We know it's really well established at this point, based on a lot of evidence, that there was a plan to try to overturn the election, to not honor the will of the voters. There was a plan to put forward this fake slate of electors to exploit parts of the electoral count act, to have Mike Pence throw out legitimate votes and those things as terrible as they are, may not all be illegal.

They may be problems in our system that were exposed by people who would rather have Trump in power than a democracy, but the crossover into the violence I think is the thing the committee is trying to establish. We know there was some plotting and planning among people who did attack the Capitol. At least that's been alleged by federal prosecutors with groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, but how much if at all were political people involved in those discussions or plans?

It seems to date that there hasn't been evidence of that at all, and so if they can connect violence to the planning to overturn the election and the rhetoric used from that stage that day and through tweets and other comments, that's the thing that they're all trying to prove. I don't know if they will be able to establish that. I don't know if that actually happened. It does seem from some of these calls that if there was a plan to attack the Capitol, a lot of people were not in on that and they were opposed to it. As you can see, they're calling and demanding that the violence stop. I think that's the key thing that the investigators are really looking at.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, your questions and comments on the Mark Meadows texts or other January 6th Committee issues for New York Times congressional correspondent, Luke Broadwater, welcome here at 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692 or a tweet @BrianLehrer. 212-433 WNYC 212-433-9692. again, the phone number. The text from Mark Meadows that we've been talking about mostly so far makes it seem like he was a positive actor trying to do the right thing in getting Trump to intervene with his violent supporters but you also reported an article called, Meadows was deeply involved in fighting election outcome, January 6th panel says. I think you just alluded to that but could you go a little more into the bigger context of his role leading up to January 6th?

Luke Broadwater: Yes. Sure. What the documents Mark Meadows did turn over, and he turned over about 9,000 pages to the committee that he said were not covered by executive privilege. What they show is his role as almost Donald Trump's right hand man throughout several steps of this plan to try to cling to power. Obviously, he's the chief of staff for the president and the president wants to stay president despite what the voters said. Meadows does a number of things these documents reveal.

He starts reaching out to members of Congress and starts planning objections to the election trying to get these alternate slates of electors in instead of the electors chosen by the voters. He starts reaching out to the justice department and various states asking them to investigate unfounded allegations of voter fraud even things as crazy as some wild conspiracy theory called Italygate which has foreign governments taking control of our voting machines and things like that.

He is also in close contact with rally organizers helping to plan the events to put maximum pressure in their words on the members of Congress to go along with the plan. Those are all things that don't include violence but they do include trying to keep Trump in power through political or legal maneuvers that are outside the will of the voters.

Brian Lehrer: That article also sites, your article sites an email that Mark Meadow sent on January 5th saying the national guard would be used to, "Protect pro-Trump people," at the January 6th rally. If he was invoking the national guard on the day before, does that mean he anticipated violence of some kind, maybe violence against them?

Luke Broadwater: Yes. Their explanation is that Meadows and Trump and others in the White House were worried that left-wing groups would attack their supporters as they called for the election to be thrown out. That's why they wanted the national guard to protect their people. [inaudible 00:16:09] They waned to protect everybody from violence but that was what the email said, to protect pro-Trump people.

We do know from some earlier testimony that Trump wanted 10,000 troops on standby. Obviously that didn't happen. The national guard was quite delayed that day. It was delayed by more than three hours in responding to the Capitol for a number of reasons. One of which, the Capitol police lacked the authority to unilaterally call them in. There was just a bill last night that passed Congress to change that to give the Capitol police more power to call for the guard. There was a lot of discussion among top generals, according to testimony, about visuals and optics of sending in the guard. Even though this was something Meadows pledged, it didn't actually happen but it does show that they were thinking about that there could be violence, that they were thinking about how the guard could be used and they wanted the guard to protect their people.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a tweet from a listener who asks, "Why wouldn't such concerted effort to usurp power and prevent Congress from doing its duty through the ways laid out by Eastman in the PowerPoint," I'll ask you to explain that in a second, "be prosecutable via the RICO statute?" This is something else that's in the news, this PowerPoint. What's this PowerPoint?

Luke Broadwater: Right. In the days before the January 6th vote and the attack on the Capitol, a group of, I would say, right-wing conspiracy theorists have a memo that's a 38 page PowerPoint that alleges all kinds of truly insane allegations about China hacking our voting machines, Venezuela taking control of 28 states. They advocate in this PowerPoint that Trump declare a national emergency, the election of Joe Biden be halted and delayed through force, and Trump remain president because of all this alleged fraud.

This document makes its way to Mark Meadows. His lawyer says he does nothing with it. It simply sits in his inbox but we know one of the people circulating this memo a person named Colonel Waldron was a ally of Rudy Giuliani who was Trump's personal attorney and acted as a source of information for the lawsuits he was filing to try to keep Trump in power. Some of these people were brought into the fold, the Trump fold and were embraced their theories, their conspiracies. Obviously it wasn't acted upon, there wasn't a declaration of Martial Law and halting the counting of the ballots by force from military force. It was something allies that Donald Trump wanted and pushed for.

Brian Lehrer: We know from some other reporting in recent books that came out, was it Bob Woodward's book or one of the other books, that the joint chiefs of staff chairman was sufficiently concerned about Trump trying to use the military to keep him in power, and that world leaders were sufficiently concerned about that, that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had to reassure China, among others ,that he wasn't going to let Trump do it, basically, right?

Luke Broadwater: Yes, absolutely. That's what General Milley said, and I actually forget which book it was too. I think it was Woodwork's book, Woodward and Costa, but yes, we know from some other reporting that Mike Flynn, General Flynn, was in the White House, not too long before the election, with, allegedly, draft executive disorders to declare Martial Law. This was something the most extreme members of Trump's circle were advocating.

When you see all this stuff play out, there's this always this debate in the White House between forces of extremism and forces of rationality. One example of this was when Jeffrey Clark was in the Oval Office with eight other members of the Department of Justice. He was calling on Trump to have the justice department declare elections fraudulent in key states and eight other members of the justice department said, "We will resign over that and go public."

Brian Lehrer: Right. He was the acting attorney general at the moment, wasn't he?

Luke Broadwater: Right, exactly. You had forces within the White House that fought back against some of this stuff and I think prevented some of the most extreme things from taking place, but this memo, the Eastman memo, the PowerPoint, they were all very extreme plans going on from some in Trump's orbit, although not necessarily embraced by everyone in the White House.

Brian Lehrer: Why didn't Trump, who we generally consider capable of just about anything, why didn't he take some of these most extreme actions like declaring Martial Law or declaring the election results invalid in selected states?

Luke Broadwater: That's a great question. That's actually one thing I've thought about a lot. I think it would be wonderful to hear Trump under oath testify about this, but there are time is when the eight justice department officials say, "This is wrong and we'll resign," where he sides with them and says, "You're right. Jeff, that's going too far." It oftentimes will be Trump will walk up to some line and then stop. I think people were even worried he wouldn't leave the White House on January 20th and he eventually did, So yes, I don't-

Brian Lehrer: Questions to be answered. [crosstalk] Carol in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Carol.

Capitol: Yes. Hello. I'm just here to say that there was a film that I had been viewing on CNN that shows President Trump with his entourage of his son and his daughter and his future daughter-in-law perhaps of Donald Trump Jr. dancing absurd, she looked possessed. She was dancing and they were watching a monitor or television set, and he was positively gleeful. President Trump was standing there completely mesmerized by this scene of chaos and insurrection at the White House. He looked depraved.

Brian Lehrer: At the Capitol.

Carol: At the capitol, yes, and he looked depraved. The fact is that everybody was behind him. It looked like a garden party with this white tent flapping and the president was completely mesmerized. He looked like he was at least having a situation where he was in a trance. The fact is that this president is so imbecilic and he is so completely a coward that the reason that he didn't call for the military is because, just as he handles his businesses and every other important mission, he's incapable of following through, he is an unhistorical person.

Brian Lehrer: Carolyn, I'm going to leave it there. You put a lot on the table. I guess my own theory, for what it's worth, which is next to nothing, Luke, would be that Trump walked up to these lines and didn't cross them sometimes because probably he thought they would backfire. That if he took that step, that then the police really would come and get him . You know what I mean? Or most of the military would resist the internal coup and things like that. If he thought they would work, he probably would've done them. For what its worth, that's my own theory but to that tape that the caller refers to seeing on CNN, is that something you know of? Is that a real thing?

Luke Broadwater: Yes. As the rally is unfolding, Trump is watching it. I believe they're dancing to Gloria at the time. Mark Meadows is with him and Donald Trump Jr. I do not believe the violence has broken out yet at that point, and it's later when he's back in the Oval Office that he sees the violence on TV and Mark Meadows is with him. Mark Meadows is fielding all these calls from Trump's own family members, members of Congress, members of the media, even Fox News hosts asking him to denounce the violence. According to Liz Cheney, it takes 187 minutes for him to do so, which is very precious time when you're talking about 140 police officers who were assaulted. We're talking about five deaths related to the riot and then a bunch of suicides afterwards, four suicides. Every hour mattered in this attack and every minute mattered.

According to Mark Meadows own text, he is fighting hard, pushing hard, he says, to get Trump to call off the mob, to condemn the violence. I think the committee would like to hear more. I think the public would like to hear more about those conversations. What was Trump saying back? Why wasn't he responsive to Mark Meadows as he's relaying messages from his own son to call off the mob?

Brian Lehrer: That's why they want Mark Meadows to testify about these documents and he won't. That's why they're holding him in contempt of Congress, 187 minutes where this was going on and Trump did not make a clear statement asking them to stand down. For those who haven't done long division in a while, that's three hours and seven minutes. We'll continue in a minute with Luke Broadwater, congressional correspondent for The Times, and ask maybe the most important in question which is, what does this portend for the future, the elections coming up? And we'll take more of your calls and tweets, stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with New York Times congressional correspondent, Luke Broadwater. Listeners, if you missed the beginning of this segment, you might want to go back and listen back to it later because we played a two-and-a-half minute stretch of Congresswoman Liz Cheney reading text messages from Donald Trump Jr. and some Fox news hosts to White House Chief of Staff, Mark May Meadows, during the January 6th riot imploring Meadows to get Trump to call it off. Meadows replied, basically, I'm trying, I'm trying, he won't do it. There are legal implications of that potentially for the president and other implications that we're talking about with Luke Broadwater in your calls. Let's take a call from Jonathan in Bayonne, Jonathan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jonathan: Hello. Thanks for having me. I appreciate your guest and the work that you both are doing. My concerns on this matter is how much does it-- I just would like to have a timeline. I understand things either changed, but how much this is working into progressing towards potential charges and actually having a result versus the timeline of the elections coming up and what we're dealing with as far as how quickly these things need to happen for things to actually fall in line and produce a result that's going to have some form of justice concerning this matter. I can take my question off the air. Have a good day.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You have a good day too. Luke.

Luke Broadwater: Yes. I think the committee is quite aware that their ultimate deadline is probably the end of 2022. There's a belief that the Republicans will take the House that year, and this investigation will be shut down. Now what won't be shut down is any criminal case cases that are filed. The criminal case against Steve Bannon, against Mark Meadows, should the justice department charge in that case, those will still remain active, but it does seem clear that if the Republicans take the House, this committee will be dissolved quite quickly. There had been talk initially about the committee releasing a report in the spring of next year. Maybe the March or April time frame, they are likely going to have televised hearings maybe as soon as January in prime time-

Brian Lehrer: Oh, really?

Luke Broadwater: -to lay out all their, everything they've discovered but I do also think it's important to set expectations here. This is primarily a legislative committee. Their job is to write an authoritative report about what happened and to recommend changes to existing laws, such as the Electoral Count Act to prevent such a thing from ever happening again. If, in the course of doing that, they discover crimes or what they believe are crimes, they can refer those to the justice department.

They can't prosecute crimes themselves. They can't throw people in jail themselves. It is important for people to understand that this is a congressional committee. They are not a law enforcement operation. Their ultimate job is to recommend changes to laws. It would be a byproduct of the committee if they end up making criminal referrals.

Brian Lehrer: Well, this gets me to the forward-looking question that I wanted to ask, because all of this work by the January 6th committee we've been talking about is backwards looking, that's their job, I guess, to report on January 6th, and what led up to it and try to hold people accountable for it, to the extent, as you were just explaining, that a congressional committee has authority to do that, but the threat to electoral democracy that it involved is potentially ongoing as many Republican controlled states are changing their election laws to make it easier to throw out elections that they lose without a violent insurrection. Is the committee dealing with that at all? Or if not then, who in Congress is?

Luke Broadwater: That's obviously-- voting rights is, I would say, a primary concern of congressional Democrats. They have voting right legislation that has all the Democrats in Congress onboard with it. Unfortunately, for them, it's being blocked by the Republican filibuster in the Senate. They feel like they have the solution to those issues at the states on voting rights but they can't get it passed. As long as some Democrats in the Senate are committed to keeping the filibuster in place, I don't see that changing. For most Democrats in Congress, that is something they're very worried about, that these restrictions on voting that Republican states are putting in place are going to deter people from going to the ballot and they feel like there's not much they can do about it right now.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and maybe we even need a different term for it than voting rights. I know it generally gets put in that bucket, but when we say voting rights, the average person, who’s not following the news really closely, thinks of things like, can you get to the polls? Are there enough hours? Is there a poll tax? Are they allowing mail-in ballots? Things like that. But what we're really talking about here is these changes that are allowing state officials to, literally, overturn the results of elections after people have voted.

I don't know if there needs to be another term for that or just we need to explain it very clearly when we're talking about voting rights these days, it includes that which flows directly from the big lie January 6th and the popularity of that among the Republican rank and following around the country right now. Right?

Luke Broadwater: Yes. The big lie has exposed many problems with our system of democracy, which is that, its very core, it's that democracy relies on people. That people in positions of authority, whether it's sitting on a local elections board, whether it's being the governor of a state, whether it's being a member of Congress, that if they're not willing to uphold democracy, then maybe you can't even legislate around that.

If you're going to put people on local election boards who are just going to certify the election for Trump or the Republican, no matter what the vote is, I don't know what is the answer to that. Then it's up to the local justice department official, or the call law enforcement official to enforce that. They want to side with Trump too. You can see how this exposed serious problems with democracy, if people will not stand up for the rule of law and what's right.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Tom in Edison you're on WNYC with congressional correspondent for The New York Times, Luke Broadwater. Hi, Tom.

Speaker 3: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. There was a memo released a couple months ago detailing the plan for Pence to throw out ballots and lie that there was some election controversy in certain states. I've never heard anyone talk about issuing a subpoena to Mike Pence to make him testify as to who was pressuring him to do that. It seems to me that he probably wouldn't resist such a subpoena. He has no reason to continue to be loyal to Trump, and if someone was pressuring him, isn't that evidence of a conspiracy to commit election fraud?

Luke Broadwater: Right. We do know that some of Penn's inner circle are cooperating with the January 6th committee. We do know from reporting in my paper and elsewhere that the pressure campaign for Pence went up to the top. We know that Trump personally called him right before the vote on January 6th and used an expletive demanding that he throw out the legitimate votes of voters. He used a vulgarity trying to pressure him and that Pence decided not to go along with it. We do know that went all the way to the top.

The memo you're talking about is by a lawyer named John Eastman. He has been subpoenaed by the January 6th committee. He has filed a lawsuit against them to try to block his records from being turned over. He's also said he will plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in response to their questions. They are digging down that hole.

Pence himself is in a politically weird situation. He obviously was threatened by the mob. They chanted to kill him, to hang him. At the same time, as he did do the right thing in the moment and didn't go along with this plot, he has since said things trying to minimize January 6th, talking about being loyal to Trump and just this was a small disagreement between them and really the Trump-Pence agenda was much broader because he wants a future in the Republican Party. His situation politically is quite strained and tortured and contorted based on January 6th and his broader goals to try to remain a leader in the Republican Party.

Brian Lehrer: As a closing thought, cycling back to what you said a few minutes ago about them needing to undo the filibuster, at least for this, if the federal government is going to protect people's voting rights in terms of their votes actually being respected when they've elected somebody who the Republicans don't like, it's at least a as big a Joe Manchin issue as his blocking of President Biden's childcare and elder care and family leave, human infrastructure bill, isn't it that Manchin won't support a vote to get around the filibuster just on the fundamental issue of voting rights?

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York was on the show yesterday saying basically, "Please, Joe, please, Senator Manchin, just on this one issue because it's so fundamental to preserving our democracy. We can keep the filibuster for everything else for now." Without that, there's nothing Congress can do to protect election integrity and the respect that we've been discussing, it would be up to the states?

Luke Broadwater: It does seem that way. The crazy thing about Senate rules is they're all made up, the Byrd rule is made up, the filibuster's made up and they can change them. We just saw it this week. They did a carve out to the filibuster for the debt ceiling because the Republicans didn't want to vote it but Mitch McConnell realized it would be calamitous for the country to not have the debt ceiling be raised and to default on the debt. He negotiated a carve out to the filibuster on that specific issue. No Republicans had to vote for the debt ceiling increase and still the fiscally responsible thing was done.

Could a similar deal be struck on voting rights? That remains to be seen. It doesn't look positive in my opinion, based on my read of the playing field, but I've been wrong before. If Joe Manchin and Sinema and some of the other centrist Democrats, who have not wanted to change the filibuster, went along with it, then it's possible they could do a carve out on that specific issue.

Brian Lehrer: Luke Broadwater, congressional correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you so much for your time today.

Luke Broadwater: Thank you.

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