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Brian: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Before we look too closely at the possibility of impeaching Donald Trump for a second time, before we go forward, we should really keep looking back, because details are still emerging about just how bad the Capitol riot was. Now, if you've been watching TV news this weekend, maybe you saw the video on CNN of a guy in the crowd on the Capitol steps, beating a DC police officer with what? An American flag, while rioters around him sang what? The national anthem.

Maybe you saw where at one point, rioters tore down an American flag outside the Capitol and replaced it with a Trump flag. Yes, there is a Trump flag in case you didn't know. Maybe you saw the photo of the guy inside the Capitol waving a really big Confederate flag. So much about flags. These people love flags. Oh, they love shirts, I guess maybe you saw the image of the rioter wearing a camp outfits shirt, with the slogan, work brings freedom. The words that Jews being brought to that concentration camp would see as they arrived.

BuzzFeed reports on Black Capitol police officers being subjected to multiple incidents of being called the N-word multiple times and one Black Capitol police officer who describes having to try to fend off rioters with hand-to-hand combat, as some of them hurled Blue Lives Matter flags at them. Historian Jill Lepore, writing in the New Yorker this weekend says, "Maybe a better term to describe it all than storming the Capitol, would be race riot."

Maybe you saw the video of a lone Capitol police officer who happened to be Black, now being described as a hero, letting rioters inside the Capitol chase him as he chose his path strategically to draw them away from where members of the senate were and toward a different room where he had backups waiting. The Washington Post today reports on a moment inside the Capitol as the breach was taking place, it says, "Three senior GOP aides pile furniture against the door and try to move stealthily, worried that the intruders would discover them inside.

In waves, the door to the hall heaved, as rioters punched and kicked it. The crowd yelled, "Stop the steel." Some chanted menacingly referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy?" That from the Washington Post. We'll speak to a post congressional reporter in a minute. The 100 plus members of Congress around the country who nevertheless voted for overturning the election after the rioters were cleared, are facing backlash in their districts.

For example, in New York City, Republican Nicole Malliotakis, who has been getting mocked on Twitter since Saturday, since she tweeted, despite supporting the lie that helped lead to the riot, this.

Nicole: Hi, it's Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis and Today is National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day. I want to take this opportunity and thank the men and women of the New York Police Department for all that they do to keep our community and our city safe.

Brian: Yes, Saturday was National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day. Nothing there about Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick who got murdered in the melee, not to say the members of Congress who voted to overturn supported the rioting per se, but a reckoning is only beginning to take place over how much responsibility goes to those members who humor Trump and help fire up the base with rhetoric supporting the stolen election falsehood that they knew was false.

Now comes the question, what to do next about Trump and about national security between now and Inauguration Day next Wednesday? Many Democrats and a few Republicans think if Trump doesn't leave or is forced out by his Cabinet, they should impeach him again. Here's former New Jersey Governor and former Trump transition chief Chris Christie yesterday on ABC this week with George Stephanopoulos saying, "Yes, the President's role is an impeachable offense."

Chris: What we had was an incitement to riot at the United States Capitol. We had people killed. To me, there's not a whole lot of question here.

George: You think it was an impeachable offense.

Chris: Oh, sure. Yes.

George: You'd vote to impeach?

Chris: If I think it's an impeachable offense, that's exactly what I would do, George, but I'm not in there, but you want my opinion, that's my opinion. I think if inciting to insurrection isn't it then I don't really know what it is.

Brian: Chris Christie. With me now Washington Post correspondent, Mike DeBonis, who covers the House of Representatives. His latest article is about the split among Democrats on how hard to push for impeachment. Mike, thanks for coming on with us as so much is changing around you there in DC. Welcome to WNYC.

Mike: Yes, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Brian: Before we get to your reporting about what happens next, let's talk a little about what happened Wednesday. Are you learning more along with the general public and I assume you heard those various bullet points from my intro there about just how ugly and just how violent the whole thing was?

Mike: First off, let me say I was not there on Wednesday. I was scheduled to work the overnight shift covering the joint session. I was going to come in later in the day so I was not present, but many of my colleagues were. I've spoken to many of them. I've obviously seen their accounts, seen many of the videos, the photographs, the documentation. As harrowing as this was in real-time, watching this from afar, I think, getting the full picture that's been assembled not only through these accounts, but by my colleagues at the Washington Post and at other news organizations who have really tried to do these reconstructions, I think we're really getting a very vivid sense of how dangerous the situation was.

Not only do we not know the extent of the motivations of the rioters, but people came in with very serious weapons and devices and paraphernalia that indicates some very bad motives. That if it weren't for some quick action by certain people inside the building, it could have led to a hostage situation, certainly, further violence or death. I think that that is weighing on everyone who works in the Capitol, from lawmakers on down to custodial staff of just how explosive the situation was.

Brian: Often, it's custodial staff and other people who don't ever get the glory. People who are not members of Congress, and therefore were not equipped with gas masks as part of their standard-issue equipment, were arguably the most at risk. We should acknowledge their work and their risk. To go one step deeper into what you just said, with five days of hindsight, can you say if this crowd had leaders, and what they were actually planning to do?

If they could, was it not just say, ransack Nancy Pelosi's office, but kidnap her, like those alleged Michigan militia terrorists were out to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer or even kill her or what?

Mike: I don't know that we have a great answer to that question just yet. We know that people inside the building were running around chanting, "Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy?" We know that there were people inside the building coming into the building on video chanting, "Hang Mike Pence." We don't know to what degree this was organized, to what degree folks came on Wednesday with a particular plan in mind. That's going to be a big focus.

We know the law enforcement investigation, the people who have already been charged or are going to be charged further, are certainly going to be investigated as to their motives and whether they planned specific acts of violence or simply wish to-- that it was a riot and the classical sense of people just rush in and want to wreak havoc. I think that that may be true for the vast majority of people who went in, but we certainly can't rule out at this point that there were individuals or groups of individuals in there who had much more nefarious and violent motives.

Brian: Is this your understanding of why Twitter banned the president and other platforms are cracking down on insurrectionist speech now in various ways? Is it your understanding that it's precisely for this reason to make it harder for people to incite another riot before or during inauguration day?

Mike: I don't cover the tech companies super closely. Certainly, the statement Twitter made when they suspended President Trump permanently pointed to their fear that he was seeking to incite more violence. The timing of all this is not coincidental. They took their most aggressive action to date after a violent insurrection had already broken out. I think that it had finally become perfectly clear to everyone whether it's at Facebook, Twitter anywhere else, that allowing this sort of speech has very real-world consequences.

Whether there's a particular thing or a particular conversation that happened inside some of these companies, I think it's pretty manifest that after what happened Wednesday, people are taking a second look at what's going to be permissible on these platforms.

Brian: Listeners will take a closer look at that in a separate segment. The free speech questions involved also the complexity of this, this sort of whack-a-mole nature of trying to tamp down insurrectionist, speech, or other kinds of things that could lead to disinformation in the public with terrible consequences or incitement to riots. Even after Trump's Twitter feed was banned on Friday night, the hashtag Hang Pence, was out there and they were trying to figure out how to tamp that down. Could they stop anybody who forwarded the hashtag all of that kind of thing? We'll do that separately.

Listeners, we can take your phone calls on anything that you've been learning about Wednesday's insurrection attempt as more details emerge that you want to comment on, or you can weigh in on what we'll get to in a minute. Impeachment, yes, or no. Is this what Democrats in the House should do with nine days before Biden's inauguration? How do you see the risks and benefits? 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280 with Mike DeBonis who covers the House of Representatives for the Washington Post. Of course, you can tweet a comment or a question assuming your Twitter feed hasn't been banned at Brian Lehrer.

Mike, I see you tweeted out an article by some of your Washington Post colleagues about how the Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was concerned about how physically threatening it could get at least two days before Wednesday's insurrection attempt, but he couldn't get permission to ask the DC National Guard to be on standby. Can you describe briefly what your Post colleagues have learned?

Mike: Sure. My colleague Carol Leonnig was the first to interview the now resigned Chief of the Capitol Police Steven Sund. He basically laid the blame at the feet of his bosses, the two Sergeant at Arms, the House and the Senate. He reports to them and he basically laid out an account where he, days before the riot said, "I'm concerned about the security situation here. Can we do more with the National Guard? Can you really explore a full deployment?" The message he got back was, "We're not so sure that's a good idea."

Expect to hear a lot more about those conversations in the weeks and months to come. There is no doubt whatsoever that this is going to be the subject of very intense Congressional scrutiny, whether it's by a potential joint committee, or there's talk of a 9/11-style commission being set up, but there's going to be very intense investigation of the exact happenings that led up to last Wednesday. I expect that Mr. Sund would be testifying and expected to-- now resigned Sergeants at Arms to be testifying. There's going to be a lot of questions that are going to be asked, a lot of accountability to be had.

Brian: We should point out that now it is that Capital Police Chief Stephen Sund, who got hamstrung in the efforts to be prepared as the Washington Post is reporting, and our guest Mike DeBonis from the Post was just describing. It's Steven Sund who seems to be resigning under pressure. Are there calls for some of these others to be next or to Sund now as a fall guy rather than a failure?

Mike: Well, the two bosses I refer to are Michael Stenger, the Senate Sergeant at Arms, and Paul Irving the House Sergeant at Arms, have both resigned themselves. There was pretty quickly a cashiering of the top Capitol security ranks. I think that whether it ends there or not, I think it remains to be seen. I think that there is a concern that we are now nine days away from an inauguration, which is typically the most high-profile security event on Capitol Hill every four years. I think that there is some wariness of creating any further disruption in the security management ranks at this time. I don't think we can rule out further action going forward.

Brian: Folks, there's 15 minutes of additional reckoning on what happened Wednesday. When we come back here after a break, we'll continue with Mike DeBonis from The Washington Post and get into his latest article called Pelosi moves ahead with efforts for Trump's removal as Democrats split on how hard to push for impeachment. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Washington Post Congressional correspondent Mike DeBonis. Mike, I'll read that headline from your article that's out this morning, again. Pelosi moves ahead with efforts for Trump's removal as Democrats split on how hard to push for impeachment. What is Speaker Pelosi doing to move ahead?

Mike: On Sunday night, she laid out a timeline. They're going through a sequence. Even in the House of Representatives, nothing happens immediately. Today, later this morning, the House is going to convene for what's called a pro forma session where they basically don't do anything. It's created to prevent the president from taking certain actions. What's going to happen is that the supporters of the impeachment effort are going to file a resolution that would impeach Trump for incitement of insurrection, at the same time, some other pieces of legislation are going to be filed.

Congressman Jamie Raskin has a resolution calling on Vice President Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove the president on those grounds. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton of DC has a censure resolution that she has authored, that she has pitched as the best way to try and get an actual result, that Republicans could support over the next nine days. We're expecting at least one piece of legislation that would censure Republican members of Congress who oppose certification of the election last week. That's too will be in the mix.

What's going to happen today is they're going to ask for unanimous consent to pass this 25th Amendment legislation. We're expecting Republicans to oppose that. You need every member of the House to agree to pass something in this manner. We're not expecting that. What that means is tomorrow they're going to take a vote on that particular piece of legislation.

Speaker Pelosi has essentially delivered an ultimatum to Vice-president Pence and the Cabinet, which is, if you don't move forward with the mechanism, you have to remove the president, the 25th Amendment. Then we're going to move forward with the mechanism we have, which is impeachment. It's certainly possible that this could all come together as soon as Wednesday. Perhaps it moves a day or two later in the week. Right now, the House is very much on a glide path to impeachment. There are still off-ramps, but they are very few and far between.

Brian: Full House vote on impeachment possible by Wednesday, is that what you just said?

Mike: That's right. Things have a way of slipping in the House as circumstances present themselves, as members share their feelings. Right now, I'm just hearing very little certainly on the Democratic side, that would indicate that there's any major obstacle to proceeding with impeachment later this week.

Brian: Then to the second part of your article's headline, as Democrats split on how hard to push for impeachment. Who among House Democrats is split about what?

Mike: Right. The question is how do you do this in a way that doesn't potentially harm the ability of President-Elect Biden to come in on January 20th and move full speed ahead with his agenda and filling his Cabinet, getting his personnel in place? The concern here is that once the House votes to impeach a president and sends it to the Senate, the Senate is obligated under its rules to commence a trial.

In that trial, there are certain rules in the Senate that govern how those trials are conducted. Under those rules, it's a long-drawn-out process in barring an agreement among all 100 senators. You can't do any other business while the trial is happening. Compounding that, the fact is that the Senate isn't coming back until January 19th. To get the Senate back in session before then will again require all 100 senators to agree. We believe that there are supporters of President Trump who would oppose any effort to speed up a Senate trial.

Basically, the situation you have is that the House could impeach this week, send the articles to the Senate, and then the Senate spends the first two weeks of Joe Biden's presidency in a trial of the now-departed President Trump, that, by most accounts, by most expectations, isn't going to result in a conviction.

There are Democrats out there who are saying, "Do we really want to do this and do we have alternatives?" The alternatives that are being talked about, one of which is to delay the transmission of the impeachment article until President Biden allows the Senate to confirm his key Cabinet positions. How long does that take? There are different ways to look at it. The House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said yesterday on a Sunday shows that he was looking at it as much as 100 days delay.

Other members I've talked to, think it could just be a week or two, while you get a secretary of state, a secretary of defense, a CIA director, those very key positions filled. You also have some chatter about, do we instead move to a censure resolution? Very few members are discussing that out loud. I think that there is very good consensus among Democrats that the President committed impeachable offenses and should be impeached.

There is also a desire to try and do something bipartisan to get Republicans on the record condemning Trump and somehow breaking the cycle of partisanship that, in many ways led us to the place we are now. The big caveat on that is that they are looking at Republicans to lead. If they see an alternative to impeachment, they're the ones who are going to have to propose it and make the case for not impeaching the president.

So far, we've not heard really word one from the Republican leadership certainly in the House about what their alternative is to a second impeachment of Donald Trump.

Brian: Deseray in Park Slope, you're on WNYC. Hi, Deseray. Thanks for calling today.

Deseray: Hi, good morning. I wanted to say actually, that I agree with Congressman Clyburn. I think his suggestion makes a lot of sense. I don't think that letting Donald Trump leave office, well, he'll probably be out of office, but I don't think ignoring what he's done is the right way to move forward. I think anything that they can do to make sure that he is held accountable for his participation in inciting a riot makes sense to me. I also think it would be good to give President Biden 100 days to start his agenda.

The other thing that I wanted to say was that I think that social media platforms are not responsible for what people post on them. I think that the media can do a lot better job of educating people about considering the source and figuring out where the information is coming from so that the people who are posting this stuff aren't just repeating what they've heard or retweeting what they've seen, et cetera. I think information literacy is really, really important and that should be part of the Biden-Harris platform.

The third thing that I wanted to say is that I think it's really important to not use the term reconciliation when it comes to the government because I think that the Democratic Party, one of the reasons why it's so difficult for it to make a decision as a joint unit, is because it is so diverse. It has people who are very conservative, and it has people who are super liberal. I think that when people use the term reconciliation, it makes it seem as though the people who are oppressed have to reconcile with their oppressors, which I think is getting moving forward with the new administration.

Brian: Deseray, thank you for all those points. On her Clyburn point, Mike, yes, Clyburn said on TV yesterday, that they might impeach him in the House, but not send it to the Senate right away, as you were indicating before. As Deseray says, maybe not until Biden's first 100 days, not only so he can get his Cabinet nominees confirmed, but also so as not to distract from the policy agenda for the first 100 days, like on racial justice, or on COVID.

That's an interesting scenario, tying it to the first 100 days or putting a pause on it for 100 days to try to stop the media as well as other political actors from continuing to talk about Trump when they want to really be talking about what to do with policy after Trump. Remind everybody, what's the point of impeaching the president after he leaves office? There is a practical element to this. It's not just symbolic denunciation, right?

Mike: That's right. The most important practical effect is that the draft impeachment resolution that we're expecting to be introduced today would bar Trump from holding the office ever again and that is absolutely the main practical effect. There's also a question of whether he might be barred from receiving the benefits that ex-presidents are entitled to. That actually is a more complicated question that would probably be subject to some litigation but it's also part in the mix here, it's part of the practical effects.

I think the Democrats, though, are also looking at the more symbolic importance of proceeding with a trial and a vote. Certainly, the Democrats who were present on Wednesday believe that this was an occurrence so grave, so unprecedented in American history that there need to be consequences of the highest order, whether or not it actually removes Trump from office early, that you need to go through the whole process.

More important than that, to some of them anyway, I think, including the Speaker of the House, is the need to put Republicans, members of Trump's own party on the record as to what they consider to be acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I think that there's going to be certainly several votes this week in the House that are going to do that in the House. I think that there's a big hope that Republican senators as well are going to have to take a vote and explain where they think accountability wise for what happened on Wednesday.

Brian: I saw one tweet from a journalist this morning and I don't know if you can confirm this, that said, "A censure resolution would have the same effect as impeachment and conviction in terms of barring Trump from running for the presidency again." Do you know if that's true?

Mike: I do not know if that's true. It's possible, I'm afraid that I just don't have a definitive answer on that, and that's a good target for me to figure out today.

Brian: I guess, when you get beyond the politics of the individual, Donald Trump, to the social and potential terrorist landscape around the country, there's a question to be asked that for now, I'm just going to put out there as a question that people are starting to debate because we don't really have time to dig into it today.

Is impeachment and conviction or censure, if it would really bar Trump from running in the future? With Trump as discredited as he is by all of this, is it better to just let him sink into discreditation or whatever the right word is? Would it risk giving him another grievance and helping to rally the worst of his supporters to officially bar him from something? Like banning him from Twitter has given some people and other grievance to say, "Look, free speech is being limited in America."

I know Twitter is a private company and all of that, it's not the government limiting free speech, which is what the First Amendment protects against, but will he sink of his own weight as opposed to continue to energize the worst of the worst among us by taking steps that add grievances, that's just a conversation that people are starting to have. Sarah in Ewing, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Sarah. Thank you for calling in.

Sarah: Hi, Brian. Thanks so much for having me. I wanted to pivot away just a little bit from the inauguration or I'm sorry, the impeachment and talk about security measures. On Monday afternoon and Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys was arrested in D.C. on the charge of burning that BLM flag in front of the church, but also because he was carrying a bunch of illegal ammunition. Again, that's the Washington Post.

I'm wondering about the security timeline with that information and kind of the process unfolding of really inadequate defense of the Congress building considering that this person was in D.C. is the leader of this terrorist organization, this white supremacist organization, and then not being prepared for that to be larger than just this one person or just this one item. I just don't understand the disconnect between that arrest and the lack of security seen on the steps of the Capitol. Can you all speak to some of that?

Brian: That's a great question and Mike DeBonis from the Washington Post, do you have anything to that?

Mike: I can speak to that. I think it's consistent in this respect. I think that the security posture that the metropolitan police, the Capitol Police, the other law enforcement and military officials who were planning for this, it was all based on the expectation that this would be like what they had seen before from these pro-Trump crowds, which is small marauding bands of Proud Boys, or just mischief makers who would harass people in the streets.

There would be some street violence beatings, scattered about the city, what they were not planning for was a gathering at the Capitol that would coalesce into a-- what we saw, which was an attempt to storm the Citadel of Democracy. This was not the situation they were planning for. They were seeing things through the lens of what they had seen earlier seen last year and that's what they were expecting to happen again.

Having the leader of the Proud Boys arrested is consistent with that sort of posture, which is, we're going to take care of the guy whose band of thugs has been roaming around our city beating people up, but we're not going to necessarily beef up securing the Capitol expecting a charge of thousands of Trump supporters at the gates and up the steps of the Capitol itself.

Brian: Were they not anticipating Trump's own role in a certain respect? Were they not anticipating moments like this when he addressed the crowd mid-day, Wednesday?

Trump: We're going to walk down to the Capitol.

Brian: Or like this.

Trump: We're going to walk down and I'll be there with you.

Brian: Of course, he wasn't going to be there with them. He was going to be whisked away to safety while they put their bodies on the line, even as rioters who should be arrested and charged with crimes, they were putting their bodies on the line and he was whisked away to wherever he was whisked away to. Was the president's role itself that people are now talking about the possible basis for charges of incitement to riot, something that security forces did not reckon with?

Mike: It's clear that that was the case. We're going to hear from all of these key officials, at some point, they're going to have to testify in public and go through their thought processes, but it seems obvious that they were not expecting the president himself to appear at this rally and basically say, "March down to the Capitol," and in so many words, encourage them to do what they did. I think right now, it seems obvious that that's what was going to happen. I think that they have a lot of explaining to do as to why it wasn't as obvious before it happened.

Brian: How much of the debate in Congress with Republicans opposing impeachment is centered around those words that we just played of the president in saying march to the Capitol doesn't mean break into the Capitol. He never told them to do that, or seem to indicate to them that he wanted them to do that, or supported them doing that.

Mike: There is some of that. I expect as we get closer to actually passing impeachment articles later this week, that we're going to hear more of that. The interesting thing is that Republicans seem to be appealing to this sense of national unity in trying to prevent Democrats from moving forward. They say it would be too divisive. There actually, a lot of them are appealing directly to Joe Biden suggesting it would be a betrayal of his promise to unite America if he were to allow this to happen, to which, of course, Democrats just become enraged because this is a party that's engaged in terribly divisive rhetoric and stood by as President Trump, not only incited the riot on Wednesday, but engaged in just the most extremely divisive and partisan rhetoric for four to five years before that.

Those arguments aren't going to carry much water with Democrats who are going to be voting this week, whether they start to make a more legalistic and technical argument about what the president did or didn't do, I think remains to be seen.

Brian: Mike DeBonis Congressional reporter covering primarily the House of Representatives. You can have a little bit of a busy week, Mike, not that every week isn't, but-

Mike: Unlike the last four to five weeks, yes, a busy week coming up. Yes.

Brian: Or four to five years. Thank you so much for coming on with us and you gave us a lot of time in the midst of all this. We appreciate it.

Mike: Thank you, Brian.

 

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