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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone and continuing our coverage. As horrifying as yesterday's pro-Trump riot was in Washington, D.C. and as ineffectual as the Capitol police were, as blind to racial double standards, if not complicit some of the Capitol police were, we're learning that it could have been even much more deadly. The Washington, D.C. police chief Robert Contee, says they found pipe bombs at both the Democratic and Republican committee headquarters and a cooler containing the explosives known as Molotov cocktails on the Capitol grounds.

As it is, four people died during this act of domestic terrorism. One woman who was shot inside the Capitol building, and three who the police chief now says died from medical emergencies that the authorities haven't really yet explained, and things are outwardly calm in D.C. this morning from what we're being told, but what kinds of threats are lurking just beneath the surface? Immediate threats from President Trump inciting more violence, a larger domestic terror movement that will take yesterday as inspiration rather than humiliation. It, of course, remains to be seen.

Now, at about 3:50 in the morning, Washington time, for those of you who didn't stay up following Twitter, the president released a statement promising a, "Orderly transfer of power on January 20th." Of course, we know he could say that one day and incite another riot the next, but he did release that statement and CNN says it may have been in part to discourage more people from resigning his administration in protest of his recent actions. One of those who has now resigned is Trump's former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney.

Remember him? Recently, he's been a special envoy for the State Department and this morning, Mulvaney told CNBC that he has submitted his resignation to Secretary of State Pompeo.

Mick Mulvaney: I called Mike Pompeo last night, let him know, and let him, told him that I'd be resigning from that. I can't do it. I can't stay. It's a nothing thing. It doesn't affect the outcome. It doesn't affect the transition, but it's what I've got, right, and it's a position I really enjoy doing, but you can't do it, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more of my friends resign over the course of the next 24 to 48 hours.

It would be completely understandable if they did. If those of those who choose to stay, and I have talked to a couple of them are choosing to stay because they are concerned that the president might put someone in to replace them that could make things even worse. I'm not condemning those who choose not to resign. I understand that, but I can't stay here, not after yesterday. You can't look at that yesterday and think I want to be a part of that in any way, shape or form.

Brian: That was Mick Mulvaney, a long-hauler Trump enabler of all people, saying that. What happens next and what must be done by Congress or anyone else to hold those responsible accountable, and protect themselves and all Americans in the coming days? With us first is Time Magazine, national correspondent, Molly Ball, who is also author of the book about the Speaker of the House called Pelosi. Molly, thank you for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Molly Ball: Thanks. Great to be here as always.

Brian: listeners, of course our phones are open for anything you want to say or ask about the events of the last day or the bigger picture. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet @BrianLehrer, we'll follow our Twitter. Molly we saw Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, and others yesterday break with the president in ways they hadn't done while he was in office, now Mick Mulvaney, is some kind of mass resignation happening this morning?

Molly: I don't think we know yet. We're hearing a lot of chatter myself and my colleagues, out of the White House and its surroundings. People don't know what to do. I think what you heard from Mick Mulvaney actually laid out the dilemma a lot of people feel. Those who are still there, who've stuck with him this long, many were pushed to the breaking point by what happened yesterday, but there is a concern that the last thing you want to do at this moment is essentially take out all the guardrails. Some people have decided that they've got to leave, and others have decided that they've got to stay essentially for the same reason.

Brian: There have been moments during this presidency, after Charlottesville, after Helsinki. Remember when Trump chose Vladimir Putin's version of events over his own appointed director of National Intelligence. A few other times when the press was full of mass resignation talk, but it never really happened. Now, with 13 days left, here we are again, and really there is only this trickle. Why have people who have been morally conflicted, stayed?

Molly: Well, I would say it has been a steady outflow of people from the administration. Let's remember that there has been more turnover, vastly more turnover in this administration than is normal, much of it acrimonious. There's a whole class at this point of former administration officials, including quite high officials, who have denounced Trump, but at various levels of volume, so it's not the case that nobody ever found it in themselves to resign, it's just, there was never a collective decision to make some kind of mass statement.

I think that's the story of the Trump presidency is that nobody ever felt like it was their job to stop him. Everybody could always look around and say, "Well, if that person's not doing it, then I can rationalize not doing it either," and that led to this collective action problem, where I'm not going to say nobody did anything, but no big statement was ever made.

Brian: What was this 4:00 in the morning statement from the president, Molly, referring to an orderly transition on January 20th and what, if anything, does it mean?

Molly: Well, it means that he felt like he had to do that. That's really all we know, I think. The president is obviously cut off from his Twitter account, which is how he usually expresses himself after expressing some quite alarming and dangerous things yesterday, and so he found a way to put this statement out through his long-time right-hand man, his social media guide, Dan Scavino.

It seems clear that there was a lot of pressure on him to acknowledge in some way that he is leaving the White House in two weeks, but it is amazing that he still could not admit that he lost the election, even in this statement after the Congress has made it official that he will not be president in two weeks, he still can't bring himself to face the facts.

Brian: Do you have any reporting of your own that backs up CNN's, that the statement was in part to mollify some of his staffers, so they don't resign en masse?

Molly: I have heard things to that effect, but I think there's so much swirling around right now that there's a lot we don't know about what exactly is going on, and we've never really been able to say conclusively, what was happening inside Donald Trump's mind.

Brian: More importantly, will that statement deter more pro-Trump violence? I don't expect you to definitively know the answer to that question, nobody can, but do you think it was intended to do that? He was back on his heels yesterday a little bit. He did take the pressure from Republicans to put out a statement, even though he wound up getting blocked by Twitter for 12 hours, because the statements were as inciting as they were calming, but he did do something that I'm sure was very hard for him to do, which was to tell his supporters to go home, and go home in peace.

What's he doing? Will that statement from the middle of the night deter more pro-Trump violence, or will they just take it as another nod and a wink, like stand back and stand by to the Proud Boys?

Molly: I think we absolutely know the answer to that and it's the second, it's the latter thing that you said. Our reporters who cover disinformation and extremism, this chatter has been out in the open for weeks. The president himself organized this rally yesterday or helped organize it, but the same people who were remarkably overt about their plans to, in their mind, they were going to violently overthrow the United States government. This was going to be a new American revolution where the Tree of Liberty was watered with the blood of patriots so they meant that literally, they took it seriously. They came to do it, and they very nearly succeeded in shedding even more blood than was shed .

This chatter is rising again. It is right there in all of the same places. I think we know that he hasn't deterred it, and we know that they are planning more in this vein, and that the signal that they took from yesterday was, "Wow, that was remarkably easy." It was remarkably easy to get past the flimsy defenses of the United States Capitol and get really close up to some of the top political leadership for our country. It's very clear that they have taken that as a signal to regroup and try again.

Brian: With Time Magazine national correspondent, Molly Ball. Tom in the East Village, you’re on WNYC. Thank you for calling, Tom.

Tom: Good morning, Brian. Thank you very much. Yesterday's disaster was the culmination of five years of looking the other way. You're correct in using the word enablers. These enablers are equally as guilty as Trump is. My question is, what are the requirements for treason, and why has he not yet been charged?

Brian: We will have Hakeem Jeffries, who's a member of the Judiciary Committee in the House, next. He may be better positioned than Molly to answer the legal requirements for treason, but Molly, do you want to go there?

Molly: I don't have a firm grasp on the law there. I would say that it's probably quite an abstract question, given that it isn't a law that's very frequently used, to my knowledge. There is going to be a lot of talk about what if anything can or should be done about these two weeks that remain on the clock and whether something needs to be done to take the nuclear codes out of Trump's hands, essentially.

Brian: Treason is one word, another word is incite. Some people are probably surprised to see that in a big point, type headline across the New York Times' front page today, or front page of the website, Trump Incites. I don't remember the exact rest of the headline, but they did say Trump incited the riot or whatever they called it. We don't use the word incite lightly. Can you describe, because people probably miss this, many people, the hour-long speech that the president gave around midday yesterday, to the people who gathered in DC, and seemed to egg them on before they stormed the Capitol? The roots of the word incite in this story.

Molly: Yes. That's a really important point. We often hear these fuzzy linkages, or assignments of indirect blame to, "Oh, some terrorist was inspired by someone," or there was some linkage that was several degrees removed, or perhaps a matter of judgment. This was not one of these cases. The president, as I said before, essentially organized this event. He fastened on this date as the final stand. He told his followers over and over again, that this was the way he could stay in power, and they could stop the steal of the election.

He talked about it on Twitter over and over, and then he showed up at this event. He, as you said, right before the Congress convened, stood on that stage and told people, "I'll go over there with you, if you want. Let's go over there and make them pay. The ones who aren't doing my bidding, they're going to be sorry. They're the ones who are doing something dangerous to themselves." You had Rudy Giuliani there, telling people it was time for trial by combat.

I think that's why such strong language is being used by news organizations, including my own today, is that it's not really debatable whether the president was encouraging these people. He was literally there, said he would walk them over, and after the siege of the Capitol occurred, in the course of telling them, "Oh, don't be violent. Okay, it's time to go home," said he loved them, and thought they were special, and appreciated their point of view.

Brian: We'll ask Congressman Jeffries from the Judiciary Committee in just a couple of minutes, if he thinks the president committed incitement to riot or any other crime that's literally on the books. John in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with Molly Ball from Time. Hi, John.

John: Hi. I wanted to ask, why wasn't the Capitol more secure? I'm a local tour guide here in New York City. While I don't do tours in the DC area, I have many colleagues who do, and they will tell you tremendous accounts of the security that you normally have to go through to get anywhere near the inside of the Capitol. I'm just amazed that these armed protesters could do that. What if they had tried to storm the White House, was that unsecure? Will there be a commission to investigate the lack of security? That's my question. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you. Molly?

Molly: I think that is one of the most important questions going forward, is, what were the security breaches that allowed this to happen? The Capitol police are a very large and well-resourced, and professional, we thought, force. This is not just like a bunch of security guards with metal detectors, it's the size of many large urban police departments. They've been known to arrest or eject people from the Capitol for wearing the wrong clothes or holding a sit-in. There's a lot of questions already being raised. Tim Ryan, the Democratic congressman who oversees the budget of the Capitol police, has said that he expects there will be firings. I think there's a lot of demands for accountability here.

Again, focus on the Capitol police, they quite literally have one job, it's right there in the name, and it didn't happen, protecting the Capitol. Also, about the surrounding forces. We've heard that the DC police and National Guard were concerned about overreacting because of Lafayette Square in the summer of protests. That may have led them to underreact in this case.

We've also heard that the president may have tried to interfere with the deployment of the National Guard, not wanting these protests to be put down. That's really disturbing, and it's even more disturbing if the Defense Department went along with it. There's a lot of questions that we needed answers to. I think the major question for all of these different security forces is, are they taking this threat seriously or is there something that they aren't seeing because they don't want to see it, when it comes to far-right extremism and right-wing violence in this country?

Brian: We have Congressman Jeffries standing by, I'll just wrap up with you on this as a follow-up. Do you have any reporting that indicates, as John Heilemann put it on MSNBC this morning, that there might be a fifth column within the Capitol police who are actually with the insurrectionists?

Molly: No, I don't have my own reporting on that, but there has been a lot of reporting about right-wing extremism among law enforcement. I spent a chunk of my summer going to Trump rallies, where people were holding Cops for Trump signs, and waving, instead of the American flag, the thin blue line flag. I think that's another big question that's going to be examined in the days to come.

Brian: Molly Ball, national correspondent for Time, and author of the best-selling book, Pelosi. You can guess who it's about. Molly, thank you very much.

Molly: Thank you, Brian.

Brian: With Hakeem Jeffries in a minute, we continue.

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