Brian Lehrer: That is right here on WNYC I'm Brian Lehrer. Good afternoon, everybody. All of it is being preempted today. Allison Stewart will be back tomorrow in her regular slot. We will spend this hour talking about what we just heard from the January 6th committee. We'll continue to piece together what we've learned both on Thursday night and then this morning and early afternoon.

We will take your calls and tweets with your reactions and your questions. You can start calling now if you like at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. We've got two great guests standing by but your analysis matters too. 212-433-WNYC or tweet @BrianLehrer. Maybe you have questions. You can certainly ask your questions of our guests.

Back with us now first to help us through these clips and this conversation with her expertise 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 co-host of a Lawfare podcast series Arbiter of Truth on misinformation and disinformation, social media platforms, and the online information ecosystem. All of that, of course, is so relevant to that period between the election itself and January 6th, as well as ongoing.

She's a contributing writer at The Atlantic as well and a fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution. Hi, Quinta. Thanks for coming on again.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let me start here. The star witnesses today as they were just talking about on the network were really on videotape rather than in person. Very specifically, Trump's former attorney general, William Barr who has so much credibility on the right and so much history on the right was arguably the star witness today along with his deputy attorney general, less well known as a public figure, but very interesting today.

In that chain of command, also Trump appointee from that post-election period, Richard Donoghue. I want to play one fairly long clip of each of them as we go. We chose these clips because, first, Barr and then Donoghue go point by point to debunk the claims of election fraud that Trump continued to make even after he was told they were false.

Let's begin with Attorney General Barr addressing claims by Trump of trucks dumping counterfeit election ballots in the middle of the night in Detroit. Also the claims Trump was making about rig voting machines from the company Dominion Election Systems. Here's Bill Barr.

William Barr: I said, "Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit. Unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralized the counting process. They're not counted in each precinct, they're moved to counting stations. A normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours. There's nothing--" I said, "Did anyone point out to you? Did all the people complaining about it point out to you you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time? There's no indication of fraud in Detroit."

I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public were both-- that the claims of fraud were-- and he was indignant about that. I reiterated that they'd wasted a whole month on these claims on the Dominion voting machines, and they were idiotic claims.

I specifically raised that Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations, disturbing in the sense that 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 or 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.

Brian Lehrer: "Complete nonsense" says William Barr with receipts. That was from his videotaped testimony to the January 6th committee. The committee then played a clip. Before we go onto his deputy, Richard Donoghue, I want to reiterate this because the committee then played a clip of Trump from the day after Barr had told Trump all that, that there was no "There they are" on any of these things.

This is what Trump said. Even after being informed that what he had been saying was false.

Trump: At 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror. We have a company that's very suspect. Its name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What a system is this?

Brian Lehrer: Trump continuing to push the false claims and rally people around him based on what he had been repeatedly told was false by William Barr and others. Of course, he then went on to call his supporters to rally in Washington on January 6th saying the election was stolen even still in the event in DC "Will be wild". With all that as prelude, Quinta, we knew all this, I think, if we've been paying attention in the last year and a half. What did you find new or important in that sequence?

Quinta Jurecic: As you say, I don't think there was a substantial new information that changed the picture we had of what things looked like in the Trump campaign and in the white house after the election. I do think that what the committee was really able to do was flesh out an enormous amount of detail. It's one thing to say, on a high level, Trump was told by his advisors that there was no election fraud and he kept on pushing that line.

What we got here from William Barr or from Richard Donoghue, from Trump's former campaign manager Bill Stepien was testimony about specific instances in which over and over and over again reputable people, members of Trump's own campaign, his legal team, members of the justice department came to him and said, "These claims of election fraud are not true. There is nothing to them."

Again and again, Trump chose to go with the advice of, I think it's fair to say, loose cannons like Rudy Giuliani. What that does is really just paint a picture as the committee has been trying to do of a president who was not interested in the truth. The committee argued again and again that surely president Trump must have known that these claims of voter fraud were false, that they were not substantiated.

I think that because they were able to bring in all these new details, because they were able to show video of Bill Barr himself making this clear, that's a very powerful presentation. The committee also made, I think, what is a important point that the Trump campaign made an enormous amount of money off of these allegations, that they were able to fundraise just an incredible amount by saying there have been voter fraud, sending out appeals to people on Trump list serves saying that they should donate money to help fight for president Trump.

The point that the committee really made is that these people were cheated. They were told to donate money to an effort for which there was just simply no possibility of success. There is some indication that the committee seems to have unearthed that one of the efforts that the campaign said it was raising money for, something called the Election Defense Fund may not even have existed, and that the campaign was simply using this to rake in cash.

I think the overall picture is of willful commitment to an idea that was simply not substantiated on Trump's part that the campaign then also used for its own enrichment. That's a pretty damning picture.

Brian Lehrer: It is. It starts to point to a question about whether Trump was so venal as to perpetrate his fraud on his supporters, his low-dollar supporters as they were talking about on the network a little while ago, and the country at large, or whether he is really deluded and actually believes this stuff for which person after person close to him and on his side told him there was no evidence.

We'll come back to that question. First, let's go onto the clip that I promised of deputy attorney general from that postelection period, Richard Donoghue, in that chain of command where we're playing this one just because he also gets specific. I think that was what probably was so useful for a lot of people who were watching today who are not political junkies.

He gets so specific, as Barr did in the previous clip on debunking the central claims of election fraud, point by point. Here's lots of evidence to use at your next party with a big live believer. Here we go. Former deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue.

Richard Donoghue: I tried to, again, put this in perspective and to try to put it in very clear terms to the president. I said something to the effect of, "Sir, we've done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We've looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada. We're doing our job. Much of the info you're getting is false."

Then I went into, "For instance, this thing from Michigan, this report about 68% error rate. Reality is it was only a 0.0063% error rate, less than 1 in 15,000." The president accepted that. He said, "Okay, fine, but what about the others?"

Again, this gets back to the point that there were so many of these allegations that when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn't fight us on it, but he would move to another allegation. Then I talked a little bit about the Pennsylvania truck driver. This is another allegation that had come up. This claim was by a truck driver who believed perhaps honestly, that he had transported an entire tractor-trailer truck full of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. This was, again, out there in the public and discussed.

I essentially said, "Look, we looked at that allegation. We looked at both ends, both the people who load the truck and the people unload the truck. That allegation was not supported by the evidence." Again, he said, "Okay." Then he said, "No, I didn't mention that one. What about the others?" I said, "Okay, well, with regard to Georgia, we looked at the tape. We interviewed the witnesses. There is no suitcase."

The president kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots. The suitcase was rolled out from under the table. I said, "No, sir, there is no suitcase. You can watch that video over and over. There is no suitcase. There is a wheeled bin where they carry the ballots, and that's just how they move ballots around that facility. There's nothing suspicious about that at all."

I told him that there was no multiple scanning of the ballots when the different part of that allegation was that they were taking one ballot and scanning it through three or four, five times to rack up votes presumably for vice president, Biden. I told him that the video did not support that. Then he went off on double voting, the top of the next page. He said, "Dead people are voting. Indians are getting paid to vote." He meant people on native American reservations.

He said, "There's lots of fraud going on here." I put him flat out that much of the information he's getting is false and or just not supported by the evidence. We look at the allegations, but they don't pan out.

Brian Lehrer: They don't pan out. Trump's own deputy attorney general from the post-election period, not a public figure like William Barr, but they are right under Barr in that chain of command, Richard Donoghue. The committee also heard from officials from Georgia and Pennsylvania describing similar specifics. The Pennsylvania guests said the claim of 8,000 dead people voting in Philadelphia were so false. There weren't even 8 dead people in whose names ballots were cast, never mind 8,000.

Then Republican lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, and some of you may remember Ben Ginsberg from when he was famous, he argued for Bush in the infamous Bush versus Gore 2000 election case that went to the Supreme court and the court stopped the Florida recount. Ben Ginsberg, with those partisan elections lawyer credentials, said no evidence of anything, period. Quinta, taken all together, what have viewers learned so far?

Quinta Jurecic: It's quite clear that the number of claims that Trump seemed to fasten onto showing supposed election fraud simply just didn't match up to the evidence. As both Barr and Donoghue said, that there was a pattern where the president would point to a particular instance, someone would debunk that and he would move on to another one. I think the picture you really get is of someone who just would not be convinced that there had not been fraud to the extent that you would need to see in order to swing an election.

Brian Lehrer: Venal or deluded?

Quinta Jurecic: It's hard to say. I think that Trump's psychology is certainly unique, let's say, or at least in the way he expresses himself publicly. I will say if you told me this story about a person who perhaps wasn't Donald Trump, just a random person down on the street, that they were given all of this information about these claims that could not possibly be true, I do agree that it seems like that person must have known, at that point.

This is after months and months of debunking by credible people that the claims simply were not true. Of course, the trouble with Trump is that he's not your average person. I think the committee has made a very strong case. At the end of the day, it's, it's impossible to really peer into his heart and go deeper than that.

Brian Lehrer: Frank in North Babylon, you're on WNYC. Hi, Frank, thank you for calling in.

Frank: Hi, Brian, how are you? I am a long-term listener. I'm just pulling over here so you guys can hear me better. I appreciate you taking my call. My question and or comment is, unless he is indicted and, or even brought up on charges for trying to overthrow a peaceful election in our democracy, deluded or not, who cares? This man knows what he's doing. He's playing us. He probably put on one of the biggest charades, which we came so close to losing this democracy.

We have more evidence on him than George Washington had on Benedict Arnold. I guess it's like, when do we get to the next step and just make it real, "Look, you're done, we're bringing you up on charges," and how do we take that next step? I would love to hear from yourself and your [unintelligible 00:17:08]

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask our guests from Lawfare. Have they laid the groundwork? Frank, thank you for your call. Have they laid the groundwork for criminal charges against Donald Trump or just a moral case?

Quinta Jurecic: I think they're doing both. The committee certainly seems to understand itself, as you say, laying the groundwork to show that Trump had corrupt intent in obstructing Congress that day on January 6th, that he knew that the claims of fraud, on which he was basing his case, were not legitimate. That he was simply trying to overturn an election that he did not win.

Now, the fact that the committee is building that case, the fact that the committee seems to think that case is strong, is a separate question from what the Justice Department thinks and whether the Justice Department believes that it can prove that case in court beyond a reasonable doubt.

That said, I think the moral case against Trump is, as the caller said, overwhelmingly strong. There is just simply no question that he is morally culpable for what he did on January 6th and ended the run-up. I think that this gets to an important question, which is, I think we've come to see often criminal prosecution, the judgment of the Justice Department, and bringing a case, the judgment of the jury as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, of whether something is bad enough for the Justice Department to bring a case.

In some ways, there is some truth to that, but in other ways, I don't think we should necessarily see the justice department as the ultimate arbiter here, that the criminal legal system is a very different thing than the moral and political judgements that we can pass on our leaders. The fact that Trump is overwhelmingly morally culpable that the committee has laid out an extremely damning case against him for just the astonishing abdication of constitutional responsibility, I think is strong, in indeed of itself even if there is no prosecution that comes out of it

Brian Lehrer: Quinta, I want to thank you for coming on with us this morning. A few of our listeners now are probably around then at 10 o'clock when the hearing was supposed to start, but one of the witnesses pulled out at the last minute because his wife was going into labor and they delayed for 45 minutes so they could reformulate the way they were going to present. You and I jumped on and vamped from 10:00 to 10:30 this morning. I appreciate your flexibility there and for coming back on with us here, Quinta Jurecic, senior editor at Lawfare, the website that describes itself as being about hard national security choices and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, as well as a fellow in Governance at the Brookings Institution. Quinta, thank you very, very much.

Quinta Jurecic: Thanks for having me.

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