Clear Intent
This two-hour special is the longest Gaslit Nation episode we have ever done, and the most serious. We break down the attack on the Capitol by domestic terrorists, showing how this was orchestrated at the highest levels of power and enabled by complicit actors in broken institutions. We lay out probable paths for the United States at this critical juncture, and discuss what we need to do to avoid the fate of the USSR, which is the model for Trump’s crime cult.
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Donald Trump:
We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn't happen, you don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore and that's what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will Stop the Steal. Today I will lay out just some of the evidence proving that we won this election, and we won it by a landslide. This was not a close election. You know, I say sometimes jokingly but there's no joke about it, I've been in two elections, I won them both, and the second one I won much bigger than the first, okay?
Speaker 1:
Stand up and fight. Stand up and hold your representatives accountable.
Rudy Giuliani:
If we're wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail. So, let's have trial by combat.
Donald Trump:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down—and I'll be there with you—we're going to walk down ... We're going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave Senators and Congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
Speaker 2:
We're seeing protesters overcome the police. The police are now running back into the Capitol building. We have cheers from the protesters that are watching behind the scenes.
[audio of domestic terrorists invading the Capitol]
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling books The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And people are finally starting to find their spines now that the Democrats are in power, and Trump went—or tried to go—full dictator. What he did basically showed the world what we've been warning about all along. We're going to dig into all of this, where we are and where we think we're headed next. It's going to be an extra long episode because we are extra furious. So just stick with us as we unpack it all.
Andrea Chalupa:
Here's where we stand currently. Social media giants are finally doing what they should have done all along, and banning Trump. The PGA Golf Tournament cut ties with Trump golf courses, including pulling out of a scheduled tournament, and the president's longtime lender, Deutsche Bank—the Nazi bank—will stop giving him money. Trump leaves office $1 billion in debt, according to Forbes, and with several ongoing investigations and surely more to come now that he incited and relished an insurrection.
Andrea Chalupa:
This week, Trump will make history as the first president to be impeached twice. Yet, there are millions of people who still see him as a victim, a savior, a protector who had a "landslide election stolen from him." So, we have our work cut out for us, America. Five people were killed in Trump's riot on the Capitol; the police officer, Brian Sicknick, and four hardcore Trump supporters.
Andrea Chalupa:
What we want to make perfectly clear is that, as the opening clips of this episode showed us, there was clear intent. This was intentional. The Trump family and their enablers knew what they were doing when they incited a violent attempted coup. That is clear, over and over again. We've seen their violent rhetoric. We've seen their assault on our democracy for the last five years, when they came to power with the help of the mass murdering, xenophobic terrorist regime, the Kremlin, and how they ruled, starting straight off the bat with the Muslim ban and putting kids in cages, separating families. This is who they are, this is who they've always been. It was all done in plain sight. Congratulations to all the white men and the women in the media, who are finally catching up to this. And, thank you to the journalists of color who are coming out and sharing their stories, and naming names, of who in newsrooms were trying to suppress what was very obvious for many of us all along.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, so we are going to keep going here, and just point out some things. Trump started and ended his presidency with the Charlottesville Massacre, a sweeping Kremlin cyber attack, a disastrous and inexcusable intelligence failure, and disinformation-fueled violence enabled by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Donald Trump attacked when we were at our weakest. America was—is—suffering from a pandemic, killing around the total number of Americans that died in World War II. And the Kremlin, which of course helped him come to power, unleashed a massive cyber attack against the US Government and American companies that's being compared to Pearl Harbor. It can take years for us to fully understand and resolve what the Kremlin has done to us. So Donald Trump chose this moment, when America was most vulnerable, to launch a violent coup against our nation.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Guardian has a timeline here of Trump's inflammatory rhetoric leading up to the Capitol riot. I will read from it now: "The violent riot inside the US Capitol on Wednesday by a pro-Trump mob and far-right groups seeking to overturn the results of the presidential election have led to calls for those who incited the insurrection to be prosecuted,"—as they should—"Were Federal agents to investigate the matter, they would find no shortage of examples of inflammatory remarks coming from Donald Trump, his family, and close circle in the immediate runup to the mayhem. 19 December: ‘Be there, will be wild.’ At 1:42 AM, in the early hours of 19 December, Trump tweeted the lie that it was statistically impossible for him to have lost the Presidential election. He gave his first notice of a ‘big protest in DC’ on the 6th January. ‘Be there, will be wild,’ he said. 19 December, ‘The calvary is coming.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“Within hours, fervent Trump supporters began to heed Trump's rallying cry. Kylie Jane Kremer, founder of a Stop the Steal group banned by Facebook, picked up the notice about the march and ran with it. ‘The calvary is coming, Mr. President,’ she said. Trump tweeted Kremer's post saying, ‘A great honor.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“1st January, ‘You've got to go to the streets and be violent.’ Louie Gohmert, a Republican congress member from Texas, responded in inflammatory terms to news that his Federal lawsuit seeking to force the Vice President Mike Pence to block certification of Joe Biden's victory had been dismissed. ‘The bottom line is the court is saying we're not going to touch this, you have no remedy,’ he told the right wing outlet, Newsmax. ‘Basically, in effect the ruling would be that you've got to go to the streets and be as violent as ANTIFA.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“3rd January, ‘We'll not go quietly into the night.’ Ted Cruz, the US Senator from Texas who became a leading proponent of challenging the electoral college vote in Congress to overturn Trump's defeat, addressed a rally in Georgia. ‘We will not go quietly into the night. We will defend liberty, and we're going to win.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“5th January, ‘They will be primaried.’ Eric Trump, the President's son, made a direct political threat to any Republican member of Congress who dared vote in favor of Biden's electoral college victory at the following day's ceremonial joint session. ‘I will personally work to defeat every single Republican Senator, Congressmen, who doesn't stand up against this fraud. They will be primaried in their next election, and they will lose.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“6th January, ‘We're coming for you.’ Trump's eldest child, Don Jr., appeared as the warmup act at the Save America rally at the National Mall, a walk away from the US Capitol. Yelling at the crowd, he turned on the Republicans who, as he spoke, were preparing to vote on certifying the election result. ‘The people who did nothing to stop the steal, this gathering should send a message to them. This isn't their Republican party anymore, this is Donald Trump's.’ Then the President's son said, ‘If you're going to be the zero and not the hero, we're coming for you and we're going to have a good time doing it.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“6th January, ‘Trial by combat.’ Trump's personal lawyer, the former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, who has been a leading proponent of the falsehood that the election was fraudulently rigged, addressed the rally. ‘If we're wrong, we'll be made fools of,’ he said. ‘But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail. So, let's have trial by combat.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“6th January, ‘We will not take it anymore.’ Trump himself then addressed the crowd, just outside the White House, for more than an hour, urging them to march on the Capitol building. ‘We will not take it anymore,’ he said. ‘You'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength, and you have to be strong. I know everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully, patriotically make your voices heard.’ The crowd followed his instructions and began marching on the Capitol.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“January 6th, A raised fist. On Wednesday afternoon, as the crowd of agitated Trump supporters was gaining in strength and anger on the East side of the Capitol, Josh Hawley greeted them with a raised left fist. The Republican from Missouri was the first US Senator to announce he would vote against the certification of Biden's electoral college victory.”
Sarah Kendzior:
I just have one thing I want to add to this, and I'm going to read something. This is an article I wrote on October 13th, but there's a little twist here.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's called ‘Donald Trump's Conspiracy Theories are Making His Supporters Paranoid and Dangerous’, and I'll just read briefly from this: "This is not the first time Trump fans have threatened to take action if their candidate loses in November. Such threats date back to the primaries, where some Trump supporters began telling reporters that they were going to take up arms and form militias should their racist, sexist hero face defeat. The calls continued into the general election, when they were echoed by Trump advisors like Roger Stone, who proclaimed that there would be a 'bloodbath' if Trump loses. On August 1st, following a crash in the polls, Trump himself proclaimed that the election was rigged, a claim he has repeated constantly since. In Trump's universe, it is very easy to tell if an election is rigged, no proof required. An election is rigged if Trump loses, an election is fair if Trump wins."
Sarah Kendzior:
The twist here is that I wrote this article for Courts on October 13th, 2016! I wrote this article over four years ago, because that is how long they have been planning a violent insurrection, a bloodbath, a siege of the Capitol, an attack on America. And all that we've had, over the past four years was our institutions being purposefully dismantled by a Kremlin asset backed by transnational organized crime in order to make this attack more successful, in order to gut the institutions that are supposed to protect us, pack them with lackeys, pack them with violent loyalists and white supremacists. This was coming so far in advance that you literally cannot tell the difference between an article that I published before he was even the President and one that comes out now.
Sarah Kendzior:
And, I know you're going to get into the details of how exactly this happened, and who is complicit and why, so I will let you continue here. But, I just want to bring that point home: they've been working for this for so long. And that is why Stone, and Manafort, and Flynn, and Erik Prince's war mercenaries from Blackwater were pardoned right before this election. One, quite possibly, so that they could be advisors and guide the participation of others. But also, to send a signal that there would never be consequences, that this was the winning side, this was the shameless side, this was the anti-American side, and they were openly encouraging people to join it. In that sense, the lack of preparation and the lack of protection of this country and its people is unforgivable.
[begin advertisement]
Sarah Kendzior:
This episode of Gaslit Nation is sponsored by Best Fiends, a puzzle game you can play on your phone. Best Fiends challenges your brain with fun puzzles, but it's a casual game so it doesn't stress you out, which is just what we need right now. With Best Fiends, you can collect cute characters, solve puzzles, and play alongside your friends and family. There are also new in-game challenges and events every month, so the game always feels fresh. My family members love it, and they've already passed level 220. This is a great way for families and friends to relax while practicing social distancing. Everyone can play Best Fiends, but it's made for adults. Engage your brain with fun puzzles and collect tons of cute characters. Trust me, with over 100 million downloads, this five-star rated mobile puzzle game is a must-play. Download Best Fiends free on the Apple app store or Google Play. That's friends without the “R”, Best Fiends.
[end advertisement]
Andrea Chalupa:
We have, in our Patreon community, people ask us questions. We do a monthly Q and A. And as all of this has been unfolded, a question from I believe it was spring 2019, came back to me, where somebody asked us, "What do you think of Trump pardoning these war criminals? Is it a signal to his supporters that you'll get away with horrendous, horrific violence?" We were like, "Yeah, absolutely. It's a recruitment tool." These police assassination videos, they’re a recruitment tool. They're furthering the crisis of white supremacist terrorists infiltrating our police, our military, and so forth.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ivanka and the whole family, they've been posing with all these police saying, "We're on your side, we're on your side." We heard the protesters storming the Capitol telling the police, "We're on your side, we're on your side," because all of this has been building up to this moment, in terms of recruiting their stormtroopers to wield them as, Steve Bannon said, "a blunt force instrument." This is all done deliberately. These guys rely on terrorist tactics to come to power, to consolidate power, and stay in power. So we're going to break it all down, of who failed us in this moment, who needs to go, and what we all need to do about it and ensure it gets done.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to just highlight how much of the clear intent was there, and the warning signs were there. ProPublica provides us, in a Twitter thread, an excellent breakdown of the invasion of the US Capitol, all the chatter, in this boiling stew of online Trumpism and QAnon cult fever that had been going on for weeks leading up to this. So ProPublica writes on Twitter, "The invasion of the US Capitol was discussed for weeks in plain sight. We reviewed scores of social media posts, many of them public, welcoming violence leading up to Wednesday's attack. See for yourself."
Andrea Chalupa:
“More than a week ago, the founder of the Stop the Steal movement encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags, and avoid wearing masks for the event, ‘if DC escalates, so do we’ he wrote. But far-right supporters of President Donald Trump have been rallying on social media and saying the election had been stolen even weeks before that. They openly discuss the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“On December 12, a poster on the website mymilitia.com urged violence if Senators made Joe Biden's victory official. ‘If this does not change, then I advocate revolution and adherence to the rules of war,’ they wrote. ‘I say, take the hill or die trying.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“On December 13, Todd A. Slee, suggested the rally should be taken seriously. ‘Some of the old timers who don't get easily rattled say it's coming,’ he wrote. ‘We'd best be ready.’ ‘It's already apparent that literally millions of Americans are on the verge of activating their Second Amendment duty to defeat tyranny and save the republic,’ wrote another person.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“By late December, leaders of the Stop the Steal movement were texting supporters. ‘We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the Capitol on January 6th,’ says a message from December 23rd. The warnings of Wednesday's assault on the Capitol were everywhere.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“When January 6th rolled around, thousands of people came prepared to fight. For reasons that remain unclear as of January 7th when this thread was first posted by ProPublica”—and we'll share it in our show notes for this episode so you can read it—"the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation's entire legislative branch did not seem prepared to contain the forces massed against them. Police struggled with flimsy barricades, as a mob in helmets and bulletproof vests pushed its way towards the Capitol entrance. Videos showed officers stepping aside, and sometimes taking selfies, as if to usher Trump supporters into the building they were supposed to guard."
Andrea Chalupa:
“Larry Schaefer, a former Capitol policeman, well versed in his agency's procedures, was mystified by the scene he watched unfold on live television. ‘It's not a spur of the moment demonstration that just popped up,’ he said. Schaefer added, ‘We have a planned, known demonstration that has a propensity for violence in the past and threats to carry weapons. Why would you not prepare yourself, as we have done in the past?’ A spokesperson for the Capitol police did not respond to ProPublica's request for comment.”
Andrea Chalupa:
So, we're going to go into the police as well, and I want to just keep it on the criminals. Opening the show, we heard the President and his family, and Giuliani, calling for a direct assault, "You must show strength." Ivanka and her father both tweeted for their supporters not to harm the police, leaving out elected officials and their staff. "The police were on their side," Donald Trump said in that tweet. Ivanka later deleted this tweet, because she had referred to their supporters as "American Patriots." It's true that the police, many of them, were on the side of the Trump family and their attempted dictatorship. And there were police and military veterans in the violent mob, including the Air Force veteran and QAnon and Trump supporter Ashley Babbitt, who was killed by police while trying to break into the Capitol. We saw video of Capitol police letting the protesters right in, and taking selfies with them, as ProPublica pointed out. Two Capitol police officers have been suspended, and one has been arrested.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to highlight for everybody, if you haven't seen it yet, watch this video we're going to share in our show notes for this episode. Again, you can find our show notes ... Every week, we post our episode on Patreon. It's free, you can listen to it for free. And below, you'll find the show notes. So find the Patreon link for this week's episode, and the show notes are on the bottom. You can access that for free. In our show notes, look for the video that Don Jr. took of his family's tailgating party before their big rally started. Ivanka can be seen staring intently at the screens with her father, showing the rally that's about to get started. Both Ivanka and her father have an intense focused look on their faces as they speak closely together.
Andrea Chalupa:
Immediately following the attempted violent coup, the New York Times ran a piece claiming Charles Kushner—Jared's criminal father and Ivanka's father-in-law who was recently pardoned by the President—Charles Kushner was quoted as saying through a source that "they do not control Donald Trump." Clearly, they profit off of him though, and his antics. Ivanka could have refused to participate in this rally. She could have accepted Biden's victory and committed to fact checking the big lie that the election was stolen, and called for unity, called for an end to the violence being organized online by her father's supporters who are also her supporters. She had full control to do any of those things, but she chose not to.
Andrea Chalupa:
Ivanka stood to benefit should this coup have been successful. Ivanka is a longtime close friend with the daughter of a Russian oligarch, who was married for many years to another Russian oligarch who is like a son to Putin. Ivanka is a craven in her ambition as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. She wanted to stay in power to continue her life of power and escaping consequences. Now that she's forced to leave the White House, she faces investigations and hopefully consequences, into her tax fraud—alleged tax fraud—and also the wrongdoing and financial fraud around the inauguration that's being investigated by the DC District Attorney. And certainly, there'll be more investigations brought against her and her family.
Andrea Chalupa:
Everyone should watch Don Jr's tailgating video as the show's about to start, the show where the family and their accomplices—like chief enabler and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows—they load the gun and hand it to their sea of supporters. Keep your eye on Ivanka and her father. It is chilling to see them together, so serious, so focused. Ivanka is him, and she is his favorite for a reason. Ivanka is her father's ideal. There's even an essay by one of her childhood friends who described how her father knew who Ivanka's competition was for prettiest girl in school. That's how he saw his daughter—as his trophy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are so delusional that they actually thought they stood a chance of being anointed Trump's successor, earning his blessing and his support to run for president one day. Ivanka already holds that spot, and always will. Even idiot son, Don Jr., a true believer in far-right politics, whereas his sister's an opportunist who actually fooled people into thinking she's a Democrat by giving a moderate speech at the Republican Convention in 2016, which was full of fascist pageantry, including Trump telling the crowd, "I alone can fix it," Mussolini style. America First is Trump first. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz can never compete with a Trump like Ivanka.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump mocked Martha McSally when he campaigned for her in Arizona and drove down the conservative vote in Georgia for Loeffler and Purdue. But for Ivanka, Trump would pull out all the stops. She wouldn't even have to waste time running for Congress, she could aim straight for the White House like her father did. If Ivanka doesn't get brought to justice for sedition and her role in her father's corruption and criminality, we'll face the risk of an Ivanka administration, which will be far more dangerous than her father's because she would have learned from his mistakes. And the press are idiots when it comes to Ivanka. Jared and Ivanka know the dark arts of media manipulation well. They ran a New York City newspaper for many years, threw all these media and tech parties in New York. Jared and Ivanka joined their father in running this country into the ground. Together, the three of them were the President of the United States. His crimes are also their crimes, but Ivanka and Jared are so good at leaking to the press, that they're able to live above the fray like mythological creatures.
Andrea Chalupa:
Law enforcement and elected officials must finally do the work of bringing them back to earth by bringing them to justice.
Sarah Kendzior:
Absolutely right. You know, I basically see three potential paths for the United States that are intertwined with the paths of Ivanka Trump as the successor.
Sarah Kendzior:
The first path, the one we dreaded and at least temporarily overrode through the election of Joe Biden—the legitimate election of Joe Biden—is the path where Trump would have won the election, and would have simply stayed in power. We saw, openly, how we was grooming her as the successor. They want to start a dynastic kleptocracy. We've gone over the reasons for this a million times.
Sarah Kendzior:
But, to briefly review, this is a mafia family. Mafia secrets stay in the family. The world of a dictator and of a mafioso is insular and small, and it relies on kin networks. They call it “the family” for a reason. So that could be one potential path for the United States if this violent coup is to succeed, and if he is to stay in power. I completely agree with Andrea that Hawley and Cruz and the rest of these GOP lackeys never stood a chance here to this daughter, who he has a very unique relationship with.
Sarah Kendzior:
The second outcome is another one in which the Trump progeny will benefit, as well as Trump himself, and that is the collapse of the United States. That's the collapse of the United States, and it being partitioned into little fiefdoms that will be ruled by oligarchs and plutocrats, with some sort of state apparatus put in charge. This is a goal of Trump and his backers. It's been a goal of them for a long time. It's in particular been a goal of Vladimir Putin, who never recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union and has sought to replicate it throughout the world, whether breaking up the EU—which he was able to do with Brexit—and then supporting and stirring up backers for secessionist movements in the United States. Those movements, of course, already existed, particularly in Texas. They go way back. They tended to be quite small. The California one is relatively new. They're directly connected to Russia, and there have been a number of investigative journalists who've looked into this. Casey Michel, in particular, is somebody I recommend.
Sarah Kendzior:
If the United States collapses, which I think is an absolutely horrific outcome, and you need to stop this bullshit talk about succession, and let the South secede. All you people who were saying that, look at Georgia. Look at what just happened in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams and the grassroots organizers on the ground not only turned the state blue for Joe Biden, but regained control of the Senate for the Democratic party. Here you were in your little, elite, Northern snobbery, blowing off this whole state and saying that it should leave. So I'm hoping, if anything, you've finally fucking learned your lesson from that. And yes, I'm pissed because I live in Missouri and God only knows where St. Louis is going to go. If this happens, St. Louis will probably try to join Illinois, and Illinois will be like, "Fuck no," and I'm going to live in a city-state.
Sarah Kendzior:
But anyway, that's not the point. If the United States collapses, the Trump children, their backers—foreign oligarchs, Kushner supporters in the Middle East—they will all just come in and scoop up land and resources from the United States. They will continue all of the environmental devastation that Trump has wanted to do. They will drill in arctic refuges. They will drill in, like, the Grand Canyon. You will lose your national parks, you will lose your national monuments, and we'll have a psychological trauma that I can't even begin to describe.
Sarah Kendzior:
I’ve spent a lot of time in the former Soviet Union. That was my area of study before I switched to studying autocracy in my own country. It was traumatic for people when it fell. And let me be clear, the Soviet Union was, indeed, an evil empire. That is one of the few things that Ronald Reagan got right. The formation of the Soviet Union is extremely different from the formation of the United States. These republics each had their own language and culture, and they were colonized. Russia is an imperial power, and it colonized these republics. My specialty was Central Asia, where people were forced to be Atheists instead of Muslims, forced to speak Russian instead of Uzbek or Tajik, or their other native language, forced to get rid of their customs. Where there is a similarity is in the treatment of US settler colonialists to Native Americans, who they primarily wiped out through genocide, but otherwise did the same thing—forced them to convert to Christianity, forced them to give up their identities.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, my point is that even though the formation of the USSR and the US are very different—ideologically very different—the aftermath would look very much alike. It would consist of a bunch of corrupt mafiosos coming in and stripping off this country and selling it for parts, and that is why they put Donald Trump in office to begin with. It was to continue that plan. And many of the participants in the bulldozing of the post-USSR are literally the same people. Paul Manafort, for example, was one of them. They've made an enormous amount of money doing this over there; they simply want to do it over here. Ivanka Trump would be one of the prime beneficiaries of that, and she would probably be installed as one of the leaders of this divided America.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then, that brings me to the third possibility, which is the one we must insist on happening, which is that they are actually held accountable for their crimes. That means that all of their crimes need to be revealed; the crimes that they committed in office, the crimes that they committed before they were in office, the vast international espionage and mafia network that includes people like Jeffrey Epstein, Adnan Khashoggi (recently deceased), all of Trump's backers in the Middle East, like Netanyahu and MBS—these are also people aligned with Kushner—the whole sordid story. I told a great deal of this story in Hiding in Plain Sight, and other authors have told parts of it. You could look at Wayne Barrett, David Cay Johnston, Craig Unger, Malcolm Nance, Julie K. Brown for the Epstein stuff. This all needs to be aired out.
Sarah Kendzior:
There will be no unity with accountability, and there will be no accountability without the truth. So, that is the way forward, is that everyone involved in this needs to be investigated, and they need to be prosecuted where that's merited, and incarcerated, and they need to be removed from power. They need to be ostracized, they need to be de-platformed, they need to be put out of business for good or our country is not going to survive.
Sarah Kendzior:
Andrea and I have been telling you that for four years, and now the Capitol is lying in shards of glass on the floor with bodies removed from it. So hopefully—hopefully—you have finally gotten our point. I'm not aiming this at Gaslit Nation listeners because I know you all already know this. But, anyone else who this is a news flash ... If it's a news flash to you, then you're complicit in it. You helped do this. You helped kill this country, you helped kill people through Coronavirus. You helped bring this down if you're shocked right now. So never forget, people use shock—they feign shock—to dodge accountability. That's what many elected officials are doing right now, many journalists are doing right now, and it's disgusting, and I will now let you continue, Andrea. Sorry about that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, speaking of an utter lack of accountability, why did the sea of mostly white men storm the nation's Capitol? Because they could. Trump has been getting away with crimes out in the open, harassing and purging law enforcement, like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok of the FBI, and Andrew McCabe and Bruce Orr of the DOJ, among others. He and his family escaped the Mueller investigation, which mostly targeted low hanging fruit. Trump went on to pardon Manafort, a pardon he dangled out in the open to ensure Manafort wouldn't flip. It worked. Why did these men—mostly white men—storm the Capitol and post videos of themselves committing crimes? Because they were shown by the President of the United States that they too could get away with crimes. And most importantly, they were acting with the support and the backing of the most powerful person in the world. Trump was reportedly watching with delight from the White House. A complaint that Trump—the professional showman—did have is that his supporters looked low class, something he doesn't like, and that turned him off. But the crimes they committed in his name, the terror they inflicted under his direct orders, pleased him. It was the plan all along. Trump has spent the past five years putting the lives of law enforcement and regular people in danger.
Andrea Chalupa:
I have seen how horrifying this is to go through because my sister, Alexandra Chalupa, the independent contractor who tried to warn both the Democratic party and Republicans that the Kremlin was attacking our democracy through Putin's operative, Paul Manafort, who was running Trump's campaign, she was screaming to the high heavens about that to anyone who would listen, and she paid the price for it. She was a target of Trump and the Kremlin's harassment, and they made her a key figure—a big target—during Trump's impeachment hearings. She counts among them, among the countless who were harassed and hounded for being American patriots and trying to protect this country’s sovereignty.
Andrea Chalupa:
Practically everything Trump and his administration has done over the past five years was an assault on our democracy. What happened on January 6th was always there in nearly everything he did and said. Trump kept telling us he wanted to become a dictator. Only those who live cloistered in their privilege refused to believe him.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, meanwhile, as the angry mob Trump incited attacked the Capitol, showing further proof that this was all coordinated and intentional, as senators are being evacuated and as all of these representatives and their staff are being hunted, what does Trump do? He's not just binge-watching this chaos with delight on live TV. He's calling up newly elected Senator of Alabama, Tommy Tuberville, to make sure that Tommy Tuberville does everything he can to try to stop the certification of the election, to essentially overthrow the election. This all part of his larger scheme that he and Giuliani are desperate to push. We know this because Trump dialed the wrong number. He instead called Senator Mike Lee of Utah, and this is happening while the senators are being evacuated.
Andrea Chalupa:
Trump let the attack continue for hours. And finally, finally after enough people fought to get through to him, he finally posted a video calling for peace. But in this video, he honors the seditious terrorists as “very special”.
Andrea Chalupa:
Later that evening, with the situation at the Capitol still tense and D.C. under a 6:00 PM curfew, Trump railed again on Twitter, lying that the election was stolen from him. He goes on to post another video promising to transfer power to a new administration, but then later regrets it for, as he claims, “making him look weak”, according to The Washington Post.
Andrea Chalupa:
Simply put, the President got what he wanted by inciting an attack on our nation's capital and terrorizing the government officials who refused to make him a dictator. And he got to bask in his supporters’ love and loyalty. Trump remains defiant and a threat. He should be indicted and arrested and prevented from ever running for office again.
Sarah Kendzior:
Absolutely. And one of the chilling things about this and about the complicity, the lack of protection, the fact that all of this was announced in advance and was not stopped and that there's so far been relatively little moves to enforce consequences. We've seen scattered arrests and that's good. A lot of those arrests came because citizens were IDing people from the publicly released video that was all over the internet. Like, some of these guys were doing interviews with The New York Times, giving their real names, their locations, and then they show up and the FBI...the FBI shows up and arrests them. So it's like, "Wow, brilliant work, FBI. Way to go for really cracking that case."
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, they have managed to stop other things, so I am grateful for those FBI agents who are actually trying to stop white supremacist domestic terrorist violence. But one thing that is very alarming to me is that this is a prelude. There will very likely be more attacks to come. And we've been talking about this on this show for months and really for years. We've been saying that this period between the election and the inauguration was going to be one of the most dangerous times in American history, and we were absolutely right. And if there's another lesson to take from this it's that this transition period needs to be like one week, two week, tops because of the potential of this happening.
Sarah Kendzior:
They are planning more attacks, not just in Washington D.C., but in every state Capitol around the country. They're planning more violence. People seem to have forgotten that there was a bomber in Nashville who blew out the infrastructure for a 180 mile radius around the city. He was a suicide bomber. People feel reluctant to call him this because he didn't kill anyone. Instead, he released a warning to get out of the way, but Nashville was destroyed on Christmas day. And the fact that people just kind of forgot that... I know a lot's been going on, but Jesus. That is a sign to come.
Sarah Kendzior:
And that's what I've been worried about. I've never been worried that 70 million Trump voters are going to start blowing shit up. That was not a concern. There's always been a gap between the Trump voter and the Trump base—the fanatics. And it's the fanatics we need to worry about. And I don't think there are that many fanatics, but as we saw abundantly on January 6th, it does not take an enormous amount of people to cause an enormous problem.
Sarah Kendzior:
So we are very likely to see more of these events playing out in different cities throughout the country. We had Bill Barr on a tour of American police bureaus for the last few months of his tenure. Why was he doing that? That's a question that should be asked. We were worried that he was doing that for the exact reasons that we're bringing up now.
Sarah Kendzior:
And to be clear, once again, the participants in this event have announced that this is going to happen. They've given two dates—January 17th and January 20th—and they've posted all of their information and plans on Parler after being removed from Twitter and Facebook and from other social media websites.
Sarah Kendzior:
So perhaps that increases the chances of them getting caught in advance and being unable to carry out these crimes, but I'm very worried that we're going to see something reminiscent of Oklahoma City in 1995 on a massive scale, where there are a lot of backers, there's a movement of support behind them. This lone wolf thing is a myth. But in terms of, like, what does it take for somebody to do a gigantic attack? It takes one guy and a truck of fertilizer and bombs. We just saw this in Nashville and I'm not seeing the proper sense of urgency in response to this. And I'm definitely not seeing the kind of unity you would expect from our law enforcement agencies, from our intelligence agencies that are supposed to counter terrorism. I'm not seeing it.
Sarah Kendzior:
If this had been a foreign attack, the whole country would be up in arms and grieving. If this had been Black people storming the Capitol, Muslim people, Muslim Americans storming the Capitol, this would undoubtedly be declared a terrorist attack. This would have been just unequivocally denounced by every Republican. Instead, they are supporting it, and the reason for that is white supremacy. And white supremacy is as old as America itself. It is not going away. It needs to be suppressed. It needs to be beaten out of the system.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so we're really in a bind if our representatives are instead calling for unity with the violent white supremacists. I'm all for a call for unity, but the unity has to be against white supremacy, against fascism, against corruption, against transnational organized crime. These should not be difficult things for people to oppose. This should just be like your baseline expectation of democracy in America.
Sarah Kendzior:
And if you're an elected official and you can't get on board with that, with that very basic premise of, "Let's not kill each other. Let's not rig elections. Let's not team up with foreign oligarchs and dictators to take down the United States from inside and destroy it and hurt people and kill cops," I mean, that's another thing to bring up is that suddenly blue lives don't matter to the GOP. If a blue life is lost fighting a white supremacist mob, they will choose the white supremacist mob over the police officers who tried to work to protect elected officials from them. That's how deep this goes. That's how serious this is. And I don't know, I'm sure you have more to say.
Andrea Chalupa:
The bottom line is this was a coordinated attack driven by Donald Trump and his family, and they're enablers. That's what this is. There was clear intent throughout everything that we're saying, and there's plenty of evidence of this clear intent.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, let's look at the security failures here, because when we talk about accountability and consequences, what we mean is massively needed, desperately needed systemic changes, including with law enforcement and how they respond to this very real threat of civil war being waged against us—white supremacist terrorism. They are asleep. There's no other way to put it.
Andrea Chalupa:
So just so people understand how serious this is, we're going to slow down now and read from this report in The Washington Post an interview with one of the law enforcement officers who failed our country, even though there were plenty of warnings. So from The Washington Post: "Two days before Congress was set to formalize President-Elect Joe Biden's victory, Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund was growing increasingly worried about the size of the pro-Trump crowds expected to stream into Washington and protest. To be on the safe side, Sund asked House and Senate security officials for permission to request the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup. But Sung said Sunday they turned him down.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"In his first interview since pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol last week, Sund, who has since resigned his post, said his supervisors were reluctant to take formal steps to put the Guard on call, even as police intelligence suggested that the crowd President Trump had invited to Washington to protest his defeat probably would be much larger than earlier demonstrations. 'House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving said he wasn't comfortable with the optics of formally declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration,' Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms, Michael Stenger, suggested that Sund should informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to ‘lean forward’ and be on alert in case Capitol police needed their help." So these are all the individuals who have blood on their hands.
Andrea Chalupa:
"Irving could not be reached for comment. A cell phone number listed in his name has not accepted messages since Wednesday. Messages left at a residence he owns in Nevada were not immediately returned, and there was no answer Sunday evening at a Watergate apartment listed in his name. A neighbor said he had recently moved out. Stenger declined Sunday to comment when a reporter visited his home in Virginia. 'I really don't want to talk about it,' he said." I'm sure you don't.
Andrea Chalupa:
"It was the first of six times Sund's request for help was, 'Rejected or delayed,' he said. Two days later on Wednesday afternoon, his forces already in the midst of crisis, Sund said he pleaded for help five more times as a scene far more dire than he'd ever imagined,"—there we go, that lack of imagination from white men in power that keeps plaguing us—"unfolded on the historic Capitol grounds. An army of 8,000 pro-Trump demonstrators streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue after hearing Trump speak near the White House. Sund's outer perimeter on the Capitol's west side was breached within 15 minutes.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"With 1,400 Capitol police officers on duty, his forces were quickly overrun. 'If we would have had the National Guard, we could have held them at bay longer until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,' he said. Just before 2:00 PM, the pro-Trump mob entered the Capitol, sending lawmakers and staff scrambling for safety. D.C. police had quickly dispatched hundreds of officers to the scene, but it wasn't enough. At 2:26 PM, Sund said he joined a conference call to the Pentagon to plead for additional backup. 'I am making an urgent, urgent, immediate quest for National Guard assistance,' Sund recalled saying. 'I have got to get boots on the ground.' On the call were several officials from the D.C. government, as well as officials from the Pentagon, including Lieutenant General Walter E. Piatt, director of the army staff.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"The D.C. contingent was flabbergasted to hear Piatt say that he could not recommend that his boss, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, approve the request. 'I don't like the visual of the National Guard standing in a police line with the Capitol in the background,' Piatt said, according to Sund and others on the call. Again and again Sund said, 'The situation is dire,' recalled John Falcicchio, the chief of staff for D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser. 'Literally this guy is on the phone, I mean, crying out for help. It burned in my memories.' Pentagon officials have emphasized that the Capitol police did not ask for D.C. Guard backup ahead of the event or request to put a riot contingency plan in place with guardsmen at the ready, and then made an urgent request as rioters were about to breach the building, even though the Guard isn't set up to be a quick reaction force like the police.
Andrea Chalupa:
"'We rely on Capitol police and federal law enforcement to provide an assessment of the situation,' Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said during a news conference last week. 'And based on that assessment that they had, they believed they had sufficient personnel and did not make a request.' Despite Sunds pleas, the first National Guard personnel didn't arrive at the Capitol until 5:40 PM, after four people had died and the worst was long over. Sund, age 55, offered his resignation the next day, telling friends he felt he had let his officers down,"—which he did.
Andrea Chalupa:
"Many lawmakers, infuriated by the breach and angry that they had been unable to reach Sund at the height of the crisis, were only too happy to accept it. Under pressure from lawmakers, Stenger and Irving also resigned. In a wide-ranging interview, Sund sought to defend his officers who he said had fought valiantly. And with threats of violence looming ahead of Biden's January 20th inauguration, he said he remains worried."—No kidding.
Sarah Kendzior:
They need to cancel the public inauguration.
Andrea Chalupa:
Oh, without doubt
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, this is one of these things that I can't believe they're not doing it already. Because first of all, just for COVID purposes alone, we're still at the height of a pandemic and the last thing we want is a bunch of people traveling to Washington D.C. for a big public event. They've already announced that the National Mall area and various parts of D.C. are under a national emergency. I believe the Trump administration announced this. So there's a little bit of...I'm wary of it for a number of reasons because I don't know exactly what it entails, but it is a national emergency, because of Trump. But nonetheless, what they need to do is have Biden and Harris stream the inauguration. Do it virtually. They did the Democratic National Convention virtually and that was fine. I think at this point, quite honestly, they don't need to tell people where they are.
Sarah Kendzior:
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are assassination targets. Trump's backers have made that very clear. They did not go into the Capitol just to break things and take selfies. They went in there to kill people. I believe we have a clip from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she says nearly half of the House was almost murdered. So this is very serious, and any delusion they have that Trump's backers would not go this far, the mob wouldn't take it there, they need to throw those out. There was a mix of people at this event. I'm sure some of them were not murderous. Some of them clearly were. Some were jacked up militants. They'd been taking testosterone and steroids and all sorts of things to make themselves more aggressive, and they have every intention of doing that.
Sarah Kendzior:
And for those who are like, "Oh, if he doesn't have the inauguration, it means the terrorists have won," which unbelievably I've been seeing people say this on Twitter, it is so ridiculous. If we keep our President-Elect safe and get him into office, along with our Black female Vice President, who I think in some respects is a bigger target because of that, if we get them safely into office, that is a victory.
Sarah Kendzior:
And also, Inauguration Day, I mean, it's like a wedding versus a marriage. It's the marriage that matters. Does the marriage last? Is it healthy? Does it endure? Not the day, not the pomp and circumstance and splendor. This is also a very somber time. We're at a time of mass death and tyranny. It's not the time to have a party. It's rather akin, honestly, to when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in, I believe on a tarmac, after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That's the mood of the country right now. So if Joe Biden wants to do a virtual event from a safe location, I think that is absolutely the wisest move.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, without question. So I'm going to continue reading here because it's really shocking. And again, this is The Washington Post and you can find this in the show notes: "Just before noon, Wednesday, Sund was monitoring Trump's speech to the crowd on the ellipse when he was called away. There were reports of two pipe bombs near the Capitol grounds. So Sund didn't hear the President call on protesters to fight against lawmakers preparing to confirm Biden's victory, nor did he hear Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, urging the crowd to engage in ‘trial by combat’, an eerie reference to battles to the death in the series Game of Thrones. Sund said he now suspects that the pipe bombs were an intentional effort to draw officers away from the Capitol perimeter."
Andrea Chalupa:
"Sund, who was officially replaced as chief Friday, said he is left feeling that America's bastions of democracy need far more security. He said the violent crowd that mobbed the Capitol was unlike anything he has ever seen. 'They were extremely dangerous and they were extremely prepared. I have a hard time calling this a demonstration,' he said. 'I'm a firm supporter of First Amendment. This was none of that,' he added. 'This was criminal riotous activity.' Sund blamed Trump for putting his officers at risk, saying, 'The crowd left that rally and had been incited by some of the words the President said.' Sund said he fears what may come next." And again, illustration of clear intent.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I want to also read from this article as well where Sund is describing the attack itself. "'As soon as they hit the fence line, the fight was on. Violent confrontations from the start. They came with riot helmets, gas masks, shields, pepper spray, fireworks, climbing gear, explosives, metal pipes, baseball bats. I have never seen anything like it in 30 years of events in Washington,' he said."
Sarah Kendzior:
Absolutely. And clear intent in that they announced it. They literally announced it. Like, they tweeted out like, "Hi, I'm going to D.C. for the erection." [laughs] Sorry, "I'm going to D.C. for the insurrection on the Capitol."
Andrea Chalupa:
That is fascism, isn't it though? Like masculine strength. You had one of these Trump lackeys going on Fox saying, "Donald Trump is the most masculine President ever," when he just got emasculated from having his Twitter account taken away from him.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh yeah. There is a lot of men trying to make themselves into cliches of manly men-
Andrea Chalupa:
Rambo.
Sarah Kendzior:
And trying to pretend it's 1776. And these are, on the whole, people who burst into tears when they're in the airport and they find out they're now on the no-fly list because they've been labeled a terrorist. These are not tough guys. These are not strong men. These are not attractive men. These are pathetic people who have a lot of money to buy weapons and sometimes private planes, plane tickets, expensive hotels. This is not the salt of the earth. This is not the downtrodden voters. These are spoiled rich men who are forming acts of violent terrorists against the American public. And they're led by others who like to frame themselves also as just like, "Oh, I'm a regular guy," or, "I'm a big New York tough guy," when all they are are multimillionaires or billionaires who are fomenting sedition, or they're mobbed up.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, Giuliani is case in point. Manafort, Flynn, Trump. I mean, all of them. There's nothing about this that can be compared to any of the demonstrations in American history for democracy or freedom. It's just pathetic. The comparisons to Black Lives Matter made by people like Maggie Haberman who, as I've mentioned, whose family has spent literally their lives being the PR agents for Trump and Kushner, she made that comparison. Like there's nothing there. They were not using these tactics. They were there to protest against violence, against police brutality. They were there to protest for democracy, for freedom, for human rights, not against it.
Sarah Kendzior:
These protesters showed up because they wanted less democracy. Like, what the fuck is that? I mean, we have had that to some extent. That's the underlying message of a lot of the Tea Party protests. It certainly was the underlying message of any kind of Ku Klux Klan or white supremacist demonstration we've seen over the last century and a half, as well as the white mob violence beforehand. They want to take away other people's freedom. They want to take away the freedom from people who aren't white men. That's the bottom line for a lot of this. My God, it is so pathetic.
Sarah Kendzior:
But yes, as you said, this was all out there and still is. And it bothers me greatly that our show, as well as bellingcat, as well as a number of investigative reporters who focus on terrorist groups, on groups like the Proud Boys, we all were like, "Yeah, this is coming." Like even I thought, "Well, at least they know.” Like Lin Wood's been on Twitter just yammering away nonstop the details of the plots. Obviously people are aware. Obviously Congress will lock up their doors. Obviously they'll turn off their computers or take their computers out.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, all of this...I don't want to exactly blame the victim here because we nearly lost representatives and I take that very seriously and I realized there's a great degree of trauma, but I don't understand why they weren't prepared either. Some certainly seemed to be prepared. Representative Jayapal did a great interview with New York Magazine about how they were briefed and about the pains they had to go to to try to protect themselves and how she was recovering from knee surgery and was trapped in the chamber. They let the leadership go to one location and left a bunch of people behind, and she was left behind and she was worried she was going to die.
Sarah Kendzior:
And now, she has coronavirus because she was trapped with Republicans who refused to wear masks. And so she has now been infected. We have an element of biological warfare here as well. They are purposefully not wearing masks because they want to infect people. They are completely ambivalent, and sometimes enthusiastic, about whether Democratic colleagues will die. All of those people need to be removed from office. I mean, they are a threat to not just democracy in general, but a literal threat to the people that they work with.
Sarah Kendzior:
If this was any other workplace, my God, if this was a corporation and it was under siege, like the CEO said, "Yeah, 8,000 people with assorted weaponry, come on in and raid us and threaten to murder all our workers and leave five bodies behind you," like, my God, it would be so clear cut that obviously anyone who encouraged it would be fired and jailed. There's no ambiguity here. But yeah, anyway, go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Again, when we talk about accountability and consequences, we're talking about systemic changes because this shouldn't have happened. As Sund, the police chief of the Capitol police, who is shaken to the core for his failure to his officers and American people, we're not ready, our security forces are not ready for what we're up against.
Andrea Chalupa:
For instance, where was the FBI? Let's look into that now. From NBC news: "The FBI officials said that by dissuading some extremists,"—so the FBI, backup for a second. FBI agents visited the homes of some of these white supremacist terrorists to talk them into not going, which is kind of quaint. "The FBI officials said that by dissuading some extremists from traveling to Washington, the Bureau may have prevented an even more violent situation. New York police, who have the most robust intelligence collection and analytical arm of any local police agency in the country, sent law enforcement agencies across the country—including Capitol police—an intelligence packet describing threats and violent rhetoric on social media in the weeks and days leading up to the rally, multiple senior law enforcement officials said.
Andrea Chalupa:
"The officials said Capitol police were given a specific and separate intelligence report describing extremist rhetoric and threats of violence that appeared on social media in connection with the rally. Law enforcement officials familiar with the intelligence assessment said President Donald Trump's exhortation of the crowd to march on the Capitol probably prompted a much larger contingent of people to head there than might otherwise have gone."
Andrea Chalupa:
So yes, they knew. They knew. They saw it coming. They had the intelligence. From an interview in GQ with Arieh Kovler, a political consultant who has been closely researching and monitoring these far-right extremists and their social media online organizing, he told GQ, "By last week, these people were sharing maps of D.C. They were talking about having enough of them, that they would be able to erect basically their own cadre around the entire area of Congress. They had a map of the tunnels in the basement of the Capitol, and they were talking about how they were going to be able to stop Congress from leaving. They imagined that this was the day there were going to be mass executions of congressmen."
Andrea Chalupa:
So in this interview, he goes on to explain how supercharged Trump supporters were to be called to the Capitol by Trump, where they expected some big revelation for justice in their world, something to be done, finally, to install Trump as their Lord and savior. I mean, why else direct them there?
Andrea Chalupa:
So he described how, while many of these protesters arrived with clear purpose to essentially hunt down their ”enemy”, many of them were just sort of wandering around because they were, like, waiting for instruction. That just goes to show that this was an organized action.
Andrea Chalupa:
The American Independent points out that Representative James Clyburn, who holds a lot of sway, he was the one who gets credited with saving Joe Biden's campaign with a South Carolina Primary, turning that sinking ship around, James Clyburn, who's of course Black, he shared this shocking revelation that we're going to play now that the white terrorists went directly to Clyburn's unmarked office, the one that he and his staff mostly use, looking for them. Here's Clyburn now.
Rep. James Clyburn:
We've got to indict. We've got to convict these people because one of those Capitol police died and somebody should be tried for that death. And I think that all those people who were on those grounds the other day are complicit in that, because they post pictures ransacking Nancy Pelosi's office.
Rep. James Clyburn:
And something else was going on here, Joe. My office, if you don't know where it is, you ain't going to find it by accident. And the one place where my name is on the door, that office is right on Statuary Hall. They didn't touch that door, but they went into the other place where I do most of my work. They showed up up there, harassing my staff. How did they know to go there? Why didn't they go over where my name was? There went where you won't find my name, but they found where I was supposed to be. So something else was going on untoward here. So we need to have an extensive investigation to find out.
Andrea Chalupa:
And now we're going to read from an extraordinary investigation by Buzzfeed, by Emmanuel Felton. Black police officers described the racist attacks they faced as they protected the Capitol. And again, this is in Buzzfeed and you'll find in our show notes.
Andrea Chalupa:
"The first glimpse of the deadly tragedy that was about to unfold came at 9:00 AM on the morning of the insurrection for one Black veteran of the US Capitol police. But it didn't come from his superiors. Instead, the officer had to rely on a screenshot from Instagram sent to him by a friend. 'I found out what they were planning when a friend of mine screenshot me an Instagram story from the Proud Boys saying, ‘We're breaching the Capitol today guys. I hope y'all already.'’ The officer, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from his superiors, told Buzzfeed News that it was just a sign of the chaos that was to come, which saw officers regularly finding themselves unprepared and then out-manned and overpowered by the mob.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"The officer said that while the department's upper management had been telling them to prepare for Wednesday's storming of the Capitol, like they would for any other protest, that Instagram post sent a clear message, this wasn't going to be just some kind of free speech protest, this was going to be a fight. Management's inaction left Black police officers especially vulnerable to a mob that had been whipped up by the President, Donald Trump, a man who has a record of inspiring racist vigilantes to action.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"One of the most defining videos of that day was one of their colleagues, another Black officer trying in vain to hold back the tide of rioters who had broken into the building and were hunting for congressional members.” What we now know is that he very smartly led that mob away from the open door of the Senate chamber and directed them towards where there was backup, and he is a hero. He should be awarded by Congress and the White House for his quick thinking and bravery.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now back to this article. “Buzzfeed News spoke to two Black officers who described a harrowing day in which they were forced to endure racist abuse, including repeatedly being called the N-word as they tried to do their job of protecting the Capitol Building, and by extension, the very functioning of American democracy. The officers said they were wrong-footed, fighting off an invading force that their managers had downplayed and not prepared them for. They had all been issued gas masks, for example, but management didn't tell them to bring them in on that day. Capitol Police did not respond to Buzzfeed News' request for comment about the allegations made by the officers.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“While some of the images from that day appeared to show officers standing by to let the mob into the Capitol Building, the veteran officer said they had fought them off for two hours before the attackers eventually gained access. The officer said that many of the widely spread images of smiling marauders wandering the halls dressed in absurd costumes had the effect of downplaying how well prepared some of the rioters were to overtake the building and even to capture and kill congress members.”
Andrea Chalupa:
This is a quote, "’That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,’ said the officer who has been with the department for more than a decade. ‘They had radios. We found them. They had two-way communicators and ear pieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs. They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military,’ the officer said referring to two suspected pipe bombs that were found outside the headquarters of the DNC and the RNC.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“The officer even described coming face-to-face with police officers from across the country in the mob. He said some of them flashed their badges telling him to let them through and trying to explain that this is all part of a movement that was supposed to help. ‘You have the nerve to be holding a Blue Lives Matter flag and you're out there fucking us up,’ he told one group of protesters he encountered inside the Capitol. ‘One guy pulled out his badge and said, 'We're doing this for you.' Another guy had his badge. So I was like, 'Well, you got to be kidding.'"
Andrea Chalupa:
“Another officer, a newer recruit, echoed these sentiments saying that where he was on the steps, the Rotunda on the East side of the Capitol, he was engaged in hand-to-hand battles trying to fight the attackers off. But he said they were outnumbered 10 to one and described extraordinary scenes in which protesters holding Blue Lives Matter flags launched themselves at police officers. ‘We were telling them to back up and get away and stop, and they're telling us they're on our side. And they're doing this for us, and they're saying this as I'm getting punched in my face by one of them. That happened to a lot of us. We were getting pepper sprayed in the face by those protesters. I'm not going to even call them protesters. By those domestic terrorists,’ said the officer.”
Andrea Chalupa:
"’While it was a hard day for almost every officer at the Capitol, Black officers were in a particularly difficult position,’ he said, and he drew a stark contrast with how police handled the Black Lives Matter protest this summer. ‘There's quite a big difference when the Black Lives Matter protests come up to the Capitol,’ he said. On Wednesday, some officers were catering the rioters. He said that what upset him the most was when he later saw images of a white colleague taking a selfie with the attackers, seeming to enjoy his time with insurrectionists who were roaming the US Capitol with Confederate flags and other symbols of white supremacy. ‘That one hurt me the most because I was on the other side of the Capitol getting my ass kicked,’ he said.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“He is certain that if a group of Black Americans had stormed the Capitol, they wouldn't have gotten that kind of friendly reception from his white colleagues. ‘If you're going to treat a group of demonstrators for Black Lives Matter one way, then you should treat this group the same god damn way. With this group, you are being kind and nice and letting them walk back out. Some of them got arrested, but a lot of them didn't. Everyone who came into that Capitol should have been arrested regardless if they didn't take anything.’”
Andrea Chalupa:
“The number of arrests has steadily increased in recent days, but it currently seems unlikely that everyone who breached the building on Wednesday will be arrested for their actions.” Ugh.
Andrea Chalupa:
“The older Black officer didn't think it was a simple case of treating the rioters differently from Black Lives Matter protesters, but instead part of a bigger issue with how the agency is managed. ‘Our Chief was nowhere to be found. I didn't hear from him on the radio. One of our other Deputy Chiefs was not there,’ he said. ‘You don't think it's all hands on deck?’” Ugh.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, I just sort of want to comment on why are we reading so much, giving all of these... So much minutia, so much details. It's because people are going to forget. They are going to forget that this was intentional. They're going to forget how it was executed, and one of the reasons they're going to forget is because despite this incredible array of evidence, despite the urgency of the moment and the need to remove Trump and his backers from power immediately, people are not acting in response with that urgency. We still haven't had an impeachment. It's been nearly a week and we haven't had that. We still haven't had full arrests, and one of the reasons I bring this up is because, as of yesterday, one fifth of GOP voters agree with the storming of the Capitol, and that's not a large number. People forget that the number of people in each political party has dwindled over the last decade. Most voters, including myself, are independent. They don't belong to either party. So this is maybe...if it's one fifth of GOP voters, maybe like an eighth of Americans. That's still a lot. That's still millions of people, and that's very horrifying.
Sarah Kendzior:
But what I worry about is that right now it's one fifth, which is bad enough—this number is going to rise unless there are swift and clear consequences, and the more hesitant officials are to enforce accountability for these attacks, the more support of it is going to grow. And so perpetrators need to be punished, including the elected officials who encouraged the attacks. And normalization is one of the most dangerous threats we face. And to just give one quick example of how this has worked, let's go back to November 10th. This is shortly after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential race on television, including by Fox News and by other Conservative networks.
Sarah Kendzior:
On November 10th, 80% of Americans believed that Joe Biden won, and only 3% believed that Trump won. And then what happened after that? We had weeks and weeks of Trump refusing to concede, Trump taking it to court over 60 times, Trump putting out a vast propaganda operation, lying incessantly, threatening people, not backing down, and getting very little response. What did people do during those weeks of the attempted coup? They denied that there was an attempted coup. They parsed the definition of coup. They had little abstract arguments instead of treating it as a serious threat. So because that happened, and especially, I think, because Democrats and other institutional officials did not respond in kind, voters began to wonder, "Well, maybe Trump is right, because if he's doing all these court battles and people aren't really pushing back that much and Joe Biden's not even really talking about it, maybe it really was illegitimate. Maybe there's something to it.”
Sarah Kendzior:
So the numbers started to grow, and this is the story of the last not just four years but forty years is that people commit crimes in plain sight and officials refuse to hold them accountable. So when Andrea and I come on and tell you things that are just well documented and true, like that Trump is a career criminal who has been working with a transnational crime syndicate for four decades, who's been tied to the Kremlin for about four decades, and all of the other things we tell you that sound like a Tom Clancy novel but are in fact our reality, people say, "No, that can't be right because if that were true, somebody would've done something about it. The Obama administration would have spoken out and never let him run. The CIA would have exposed this threat to America or contained it. The FBI and Comey surely would've let us know beforehand. The media would've reported on it. If Trump had been, say, accused in court of raping a 13 year old girl procured by Jeffrey Epstein,”—which he was—”surely the media would let us know about that." I mean, they think Hilary Clinton's emails are a threat. A child rapist maybe is something that we should think about. But no, they covered up for him.
Sarah Kendzior:
Instead of covering him, they covered up for him. That normalcy bias—this kind of belief that if things are going off the rails, some official’s going to come in and let you know and react accordingly—that created the conditions of Trump's rise, his win, and his ability to take his version of reality and forcefully implement it upon the American public. So one thing that needs to happen now is narrative control. So everything that Andrea has been reading to you, everything that we are discussing, we archive it on our site. We archive it in transcripts. We hope those articles and this information remains online, and we hope that you never, ever forget it and that you never remove it from the broader context of an ongoing threat to the fundamental existence of the United States that has been accelerated for four years but that has existed long before that and has never fully been addressed.
Sarah Kendzior:
You can never forget this. You can never normalize this. You can never find unity with the people who did these actions, and you can never move on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. When you read our transcripts over the last couple years, it's shocking, the play-by-play of Trump and his family's assault on our democracy. So again, as Sarah said, all of this stuff we're discussing is going in the time capsule so we never forget because documenting it all is an essential part of accountability and fighting for the consequences that we desperately need. Again, it's systemic changes. That is the large theme of this security failure from the people who should've protected us and didn't.
Andrea Chalupa:
And I want to end this Buzzfeed article with the most powerful part here because we all need to hear this.
Andrea Chalupa:
The Black officers especially, what they survived is a miracle, and it's a miracle more people weren't killed, including elected officials. I'm going to continue reading now.
Andrea Chalupa:
“At the end of the night, after the crowds had been dispersed and Congress got back to the business of certifying President-Elect Joe Biden's victory, the veteran officer was overwhelmed with emotion and broke down in the Rotunda. ‘I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy, and tears just started streaming down my face,’ he said. I said, ‘What the fuck, man. Is this America? What the fuck just happened? I'm so sick and tired of this shit.’ Soon he was screaming so that everyone in the Rotunda, including his white colleagues could hear what he had just gone through. ‘These are racist ass terrorists,’ he yelled out.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“In the seven years since Black Lives Matter has become a rallying cry, the image of a white cop deciding how and when to enforce law and order has become ubiquitous. On Wednesday, Americans saw something different as Black officers tried to do the same as they attempted to protect the very heart of American democracy. And instead of being honored by the supporters of a man who likes to call himself the ‘law and order president’, Black Capitol officers found themselves under attack. ‘I got called the N-word 15 times today,’ the veteran officer shouted in the Rotunda to no one in particular. ‘Trump did this, and we got all of these fucking people in our department that voted for him. How the fuck can you support him?’”
Andrea Chalupa:
So Sarah referenced this earlier, now we're going to play a clip from AOC.
George Stephanopoulos:
Several Republican members of Congress who opposed raising objections to certifying the Electoral College vote have written a letter to President-Elect Biden opposing impeachment. Here's what the letter says, it says, "In the spirit of healing and fidelity to our Constitution, we ask that you formally request that Speaker Nancy Pelosi discontinue her efforts to impeach President Donald J. Trump a second time. A second impeachment only days before President Trump will leave office is as unnecessary as it is inflammatory." They're saying for the sake of unity, forgo impeachment.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Well, I think there's a couple of things. One is, we have to understand that what happened on Wednesday was insurrection against the United States. That is what Donald J. Trump engaged in and that is what those who stormed the Capitol engaged in. And so, when we talk about healing, the process of healing is separate and, in fact, requires accountability. And so, if we allow insurrection against the United States with impunity, with no accountability, we are inviting it to happen again. That is how serious it is.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
And I do not believe that...Perhaps my colleagues weren't in that room. Perhaps my colleagues were not fully present for the events on Wednesday, but we came close to half of the House nearly dying on Wednesday. And if a foreign head of state, if another head of state came in and ordered an attack on the United States Congress, would we say that that should not be prosecuted? Would we say that there should be absolutely no response to that? No. It is an act of insurrection. It's an act of hostility. And we must have accountability because without it, it will happen again.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, no more reading. That's all the reading out of the way. And the next step in our discussion is accountability. At a minimum, Donald Trump must be banned from ever running for office again. He must be kept off social media, and we must be vigilant of the next Donald Trump. Stalin and Putin both waited in the wings. Strongmen don't always announce themselves. There must be clear and visible consequences. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Lindsey Graham must be removed from the Senate. Graham joined Trump's pressure campaign against officials in Georgia in trying to overthrow the presidential election results there. This pressure campaign put targets on the heads of regular men and women working to help ensure the integrity of our election. These Senators must learn they are not above the law, and their actions have consequences.
Andrea Chalupa:
The companies that donate to seditious members of Congress should be named, shamed, and boycotted. Resist the Rupert Murdoch spin machine of far-right media calling for unity when these are the same ideological heirs tO the traitors who ripped our country apart in a Civil War. No appeasement, no unity with impunity. Protect our democracy at all costs because the Trump family is here to stay—so is their movement—and the Republican party has succumbed to a culture of fascism.
Andrea Chalupa:
Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and Lindsey Graham are holding onto their power. Do not celebrate them for doing the right thing by upholding the transition of power to the Biden administration. They're not being noble by following the rule of law. They would get steamrolled in a dictatorship by younger, aggressive upshots like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. The rule of law as it currently stands in America unjustly favors former slavery states like Kentucky and South Carolina with the Electoral College and the Senate. The Senate itself gives an unfair advantage to Republicans. As Ari Berman wrote on Twitter back in February 2020 during Trump's first impeachment trial, "Mind blowing stat. 48 Senators who voted to convict Trump represent 18 million more Americans than 52 Republicans who voted to acquit."
Andrea Chalupa:
So why would McConnell, Graham, and Pence give up that stability to serve a dictator like Donald Trump and his successor dictator, Ivanka Trump? There are no rules in dictatorship, only cult worship and terror.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now the accomplices. Big Tech cannot be trusted to reform itself. What Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are doing in the US, they're doing to countries around the world. Facebook spread hate that helped fuel the Rohingya Genocide. Facebook must be broken up and laws must be swiftly put in place to end the algorithms pumping disinformation and empowering people to kill.
Andrea Chalupa:
The police and military in the US are in desperate need of de-Nazi-fication. We need greater diversity in leadership across the military and police forces, including increased leadership of women of color. A woman of color should be made director of the FBI. I'm sorry, but Christopher Wray, like James Comey before him, has failed the American people. This was a crime planned out in the open on social media. They kept telling us what they were going to do. The FBI itself has a long history of carrying out genocidal violence against Black and Brown communities. 21 year old community organizer Fred Hampton was killed sleeping in his bed next to his pregnant girlfriend by the FBI.
Andrea Chalupa:
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the lone vote in the Congress for refusing to give George W. Bush the unchecked right to use military force in response to 9/11, which led us into the Forever Wars, was a young organizer in Oakland who had an FBI file on her, as did many other Black community organizers whose lives and work was under a direct threat by the FBI. It's about time that the work and investment was put in place to ensure greater diversity at the FBI, especially in leadership.
Andrea Chalupa:
Dear god, you know what I mean? It's like enough already, FBI.
Andrea Chalupa:
The FBI has a lot to account for. They are complicit in this. Their long history of racism has caused great trauma, and there finally needs to be a reckoning.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. We need a serious reckoning about the FBI because in addition to their long history of antagonizing, threatening and killing Civil Rights activists, I mean, among other things, they sent a letter to Martin Luther King trying to get him to commit suicide. In recent years, there have been direct links between the FBI—particularly the New York branches of the FBI—and the Russian mafia. We have had two FBI heads, Louis Freeh and William Sessions, both of whom were present during the 1990s, go on to work for Semion Mogilevich as "consultants." Mogilevich is the head of the Russian mafia. He's one of the most dangerous people in the world. He worked in arms trafficking, sex trafficking, child trafficking, incredible amounts of money laundering. He's a financial genius in his own horrific way, and he was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List for a long time, until James Comey took him off.
Sarah Kendzior:
We talked about this on this show a million times, but a brief recap: Mueller gave a speech in 2011 about Mogilevich but also about what he called the “evolving organized crime threat”, which was the merging of state corruption, corporate corruption, and organized crime. And he was saying organized crime had become incredibly sophisticated and had moved into corporations, into Wall Street, into Western governments, and it was a profound threat to democracy, and he named Mogilevich directly, the same Mogilevich who his predecessors were working for. This is when Mueller headed the FBI. Mueller, of course, brought absolutely none of this up during the probe, even though all of Trump's coworkers—people like Manafort, who was indicted but for nothing having to do with the 2016 election heist—he left out all of that context. The House left out this context when they did impeachment. None of this has been brought to the fore, so there are a number of conflicts of interests happening with the FBI that has rendered factions of them unable or unwilling to fully protect our country.
Sarah Kendzior:
Another example, of course, is Jeffrey Epstein, where you have the FBI sealing that shut. Guess who was involved in that. Yes, once again, we have Robert Mueller. Robert Mueller was also an obstacle to fully investigating 9/11, according to Bob Graham who was on the 9/11 commission that came out afterwards investigating it. I mean, there are a lot of events in US history that need to be reevaluated, especially in light of what we know about this collaboration between the very institutions that are supposed to protect us and what people saw as a Cold War enemy state. First, to the Soviet Union, and then the very violent Russia of the 1990s, followed by the authoritarian Russia of Putin, which our government and plutocrats worked with for their own financial gain, but which encroached upon democracy not just in the United States but worldwide. That's why London is now nicknamed Londongrad.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are terrible people. This doesn't have to do with the Russian people or being Russian or anything like that. Most of these oligarchs are not ethnically Russian. They're from all over the former USSR. They grew up as Soviet citizens then went on to become disaster capitalists—strip down artists, con men, people who literally want to take the world apart—and that's who the FBI is in bed with. So even when you look at something like the siege on the Capitol, which is a domestic problem—of course it's rooted in American corruption and American white supremacy and American mob violence and gun culture and all of these things—it has the backing of people abroad. And in some cases, we're seeing some direct ties to people abroad. There are a few individuals arrested who are linked to Giuliani and his cohort of pro-Kremlin Ukrainian mobsters, for example. It's very complex.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then one final note is that right before this siege, we had a little alert from Comey saying, "You can't indict Donald Trump. You can't investigate Donald Trump. We're just not going to do that. We're just going to pretend this whole thing didn't happen." Comey doesn't want Donald Trump investigated because he does not want James Comey investigated. He does not want anybody digging into his own shady past, his enabling of a crime cult, him taking Mogilevich off the Most Wanted List, his refusal to listen to Senator Harry Reid who literally said to Comey, "You've got to tell the American public what's going on before they vote in November 2016 because Russia's hijacking our elections”. Harry Reid said this openly. He sent an open letter because he wanted us all to read it, and Comey didn't respond. Instead, Comey went after Hilary's emails.
Sarah Kendzior:
Comey is 100% complicit, and I am so sick of you losers who fill up Twitter with, "Comey's going to save us. Mueller's going to save us. Pelosi's going to save us. Cy Vance is going to save us." Blah, blah, blah. Look where we are now. We had a siege on the motherfucking Capitol. If any of these people gave a shit about this country, they would have been transparent, thorough, patriotic, committed, relentless in battling this domestic terror threat and the foreign backers that enable it. Instead, they did nothing, and their greatest propaganda trick was to tell you over and over that it would all be fine, that there was 3D chess, that there was a secret plan, and that people like Andrea and I were everything from Kremlin agents to proto-terrorists to doom's day sayers.
Sarah Kendzior:
I mean, my god, so much of it was misogynist. So much of it was, "Yeah, Sarah Kendzior, you may have spent your entire life studying authoritarian movements in the most brutal countries in the world, but smile more when you talk about them. Be a little more cheerful. What are your easy, cheap solutions?" There aren't any. You need institutional accountability, and that's very difficult when your institutions are gutted and corrupted. So we all need to have a little chat about that. That's the kind of thing the Joe Biden administration should be doing. That's the kind of thing Attorney General Merrick Garland should be looking at, and we're going to demand that he look at. You cannot let these people off the hook.
Sarah Kendzior:
If Biden manages to get in and remains safe, you can't just let this go and exalt in the moment because none of these people are going away. During the Obama era, all of this was building and people refused to look at it head-on. And look where we are now. But anyway, I know you've got shit to say.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes. It's a very wide-web that we are untangling and sunlight is the show. So let's focus on the Koch funded chaos. There's a brilliant must-watch interview of historian Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, which we have on the Gaslit Nation Reading Guide that you can find on GaslitNationPod.com. The interview was sent to us by a supporter on Patreon—thank you for that—and it is by MSNBC host Joy Reid. We'll link to it at the top of our show notes for this episode, which again, you can find for free on the Patreon page for this episode.
Andrea Chalupa:
MacLean makes the point over and over again that today's Republican party is not a Conservative party, it is a radical Libertarian party that refuses to compromise and protects coal and oil at all costs. The Libertarian takeover of the Republican party was funded by the Koch brothers and orchestrated by far-right groups that actively work to undermine and take away the right to vote as a deliberate strategy to consolidate power. Simply put, it was a decades long well-funded operation and Donald Trump is only the symptom of the larger disease.
Andrea Chalupa:
After all the death and destruction at the Capitol where our elected officials and their staff were hunted, where journalists were harassed by both protesters and police, where many of the police looked the other way, where police were beaten and one was killed, the Koch funded Republican party had the audacity to continue pushing the Big Lie that the election was stolen and that there were voting issues that must be investigated. Let's be clear, the only voting issues the Koch funded Republican party wants to pursue are those that make it harder to vote. Leaders in Congress must stand united in the ongoing assault of our democracy and refuse to play into the farce that a commission must be set up to investigate the vote in 2020.
Andrea Chalupa:
If Republicans and their Nazi stormtroopers want a vote audit, they can start with the 2016 election, which was widely targeted and hacked by the Kremlin's military operation of hackers, and which included well-known Kremlin operative Paul Manafort sharing poling data in the key states Trump needed to win, which he did win, surprising pollsters by turning last minute to Trump. As Manafort broke his silence and predicted this days before the 2016 election, surprising people, Manafort shared this polling data on these key states with a Russian intelligence agent. Trump's long time neighbor and friend, the infamous head of the torturous lobby, Paul Manafort, who served Putin's interest in Ukraine for a decade, shared US polling data in the key states Trump needed to win, states that were then included in the Mueller investigation, which lead to the indictment and arrest of Manafort and his associate Rick Gates.
Andrea Chalupa:
So if the Republicans want a vote audit, we are all for it, and let's focus on 2016.
Andrea Chalupa:
On the day of the terrorist attack, the Koch funded Republican party spread their lies well into the night. A fight almost broke out between Democrats and Republicans in the House as representatives of both sides rushed towards each other during a speech by Representative Conor Lamb, Democrat of Pennsylvania. We'll play his powerful remarks in full, and you can hear a bit of a commotion breaking out near the end of his incredible speech. We'll play that now.
Nancy Pelosi:
Does the gentleman from Pennsylvania seek recognition?
Conor Lamb:
Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition.
Nancy Pelosi:
Without objection, the gentleman is recognized for five minutes.
Conor Lamb:
Madam Speaker, I came here tonight prepared to talk about the place I represent and how well the Democratic and Republican county officials ran our election. I wanted to point out that in my home county of Allegheny County, in the place they were counting the votes, there were 31 video cameras. 31 in the same place just showing people counting votes. Every single one of them on paper with representatives from both campaigns watching.
Conor Lamb:
I wanted to point out to all these great lovers and supporters of the Pennsylvania legislature that it was the Republican Pennsylvania legislature that passed a Republican bill that they all voted for and supported that set up the system under which we just ran the election, and that the reason the president lost was because he was not as popular as other Republicans in our state. He got fewer votes than all of them.
Conor Lamb:
I wanted to lay out all this evidence, Madam Speaker, because I thought it was a sign of respect for my colleagues, for all the Americans out there who don't know who to trust. I was raised on that. I was raised on that respect, which makes this a hard speech for me to give because to do this with any kind of honesty means admitting and declaring in this House that these objections don't deserve an ounce of respect, not an ounce. A woman died out there tonight and you're making these objections.
Conor Lamb:
Let's be clear about what happened in this chamber tonight. Invaders came in for the first time since the War of 1812. They desecrated these halls, in this chamber, and practically every inch of ground where we work. And for the most part, they walked in here free. A lot of them walked out free. And there wasn't a person watching at home who didn't know why that was—because of the way that they look.
Speaker Pelosi:
House will be in order.
Conor Lamb:
My point, Madam Speaker, is this: enough has been done here today already to try to strip this Congress of its dignity, and these objectors don't need to do anymore. We know that that attack today, it didn't materialize out of nowhere. It was inspired by lies, the same lies that you're hearing in this room tonight. And the members who are repeating those lies should be ashamed of themselves. Their constituents should be ashamed of them. And we know what's going to happen as soon as I walk away, what's happened all night tonight, what will continue to happen. They will take these same symbols, these same concepts, they'll smuggle them into their arguments. They'll make the same arguments, and I want people at home, anyone who is still watching to know these arguments are not for them. They're for you. None of the evidence we wanted to discuss here tonight will change their opinions or what they're about to say. But you need to know that's not the end. It's not as if there's nothing we can do because of that, and if there was, I don't think this nation would've made it to almost 250 years.
Morgan Griffith:
Madam Speaker.
Conor Lamb:
The fact is, Madam Speaker. The fact is that at the end of the day people-
Morgan Griffith:
[inaudible 01:38:49].
Speaker 3:
Gentleman from Virginia.
Morgan Griffith:
[inaudible 01:38:51].
Speaker 3:
Gentleman will state his point of order.
Speaker Pelosi:
Gentleman will state his point of order.
Morgan Griffith:
Yes, ma'am. Point of order will be, the gentleman said that there were lies on this floor here today looking over this direction, I ask that those words be taken down. We may have a disagreement on matters but-
Speaker Pelosi:
This demand is not timely. The gentleman's demand was not timely. You didn't register an appropriate time. The gentleman will proceed.
Conor Lamb:
Thank you, Madam speaker. Madam speaker, the fact is that at the end of the day.
Speaker Pelosi:
Yep, look, you say that about me everyday so just hold your-
Conor Lamb:
The truth hurts.
Speaker Pelosi:
The gentleman will proceed.
Morgan Griffith:
Take the words down.
Conor Lamb:
It hurts. It hurts them. It hurts this country, it hurts all of us. But the fact is that the people have made this country work by not giving in. Go ahead, shout it out.
[shouting, argument]
Speaker Pelosi:
The gentleman is not in order. The gentleman will proceed.
Conor Lamb:
One last thing to say, Madam speaker, and I thank you for your patience. All people need to know ... All they need to know tonight, Madam Speaker [crosstalk 00:01:15].
Speaker Pelosi:
There'll be order in the house. There'll be order in the house. [crosstalk 01:40:25] There'll be order in the house. [crosstalk 01:40:34] The gentlemen will clear this chamber. The gentleman will clear the chamber. Gentleman will proceed.
Conor Lamb:
Thank you, Madam speaker. The truth hurts, but the fact is this: we want this government to work more than they want it to fail. And after everything that's happened today, we want that more than ever. Know that. Know that, the people watching at home, we want this government to work. We will make it work. They will not make it fail. Thank you, Madam speaker. I yield back.
[applause]
Andrea Chalupa:
And in the Senate on this same night, the Big Lie was being pushed by senators representing former slavery states, including Ted Cruz of Texas, who Katalin Cseh, a member of European Parliament, compared to Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán. Here is what she said about Ted Cruz, just so you understand the fascism that we're up against that goes beyond Trump. She writes on Twitter, "More than Trump, Ted Cruz reminds me of Viktor Orbán's style of authoritarianism. The truth twisting, the cynicism and arrogance. Not openly out to dismantle democratic institutions, but hollowing them out to the point that they're dead." Yep, that is what the Kochs are paying all that money for.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I just have one thing to add since we're talking about corrupt mega donors to the Republican party, is that this morning we woke up to the news that Sheldon Adelson—the biggest donor to the GOP in its history and a major, major Trump and Kushner supporter—is dead. His activity will largely, I assume, be continued to be carried out through his wife, who was the one who radicalized him. But the Adelson situation is another reminder that we still need to keep our eye on the Middle East and on Iran, and on the moves of Trump's backers and administrative staffs, in particular Mike Pompeo, Kushner, Mnuchin, who were all just in Israel and in the Middle East. We actually talked about Sheldon Adelson last week because he had lent one of his private planes to fly convicted American spy for Israel, Jonathan Pollard, back. Trump had taken him off parole and allowed him to leave the country.
Sarah Kendzior:
So he flew back to Israel. He was enthusiastically greeted by Netanyahu. That is what Sheldon Adelson supported. He did not support the United States, and this is not my opinion. These are just things that he said. He said he wished that he had served in the Israeli Army instead of the US Army. He described himself as a citizen of Israel. He said, "All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel. Because even though I am not Israeli born, Israel is in my heart." And so then today Mike Pompeo tweets, "Sheldon Adelson's life represents the best of the American dream." And then he goes on to say, "From his service to his country and the US Army, to his entrepreneurial spirit ..." I mean, that little comment about the army ...
Sarah Kendzior:
Adelson was very clear that he regretted serving for the United States, that he regretted protecting the United States, and that that was not the country that he was foremost loyal to. He was open about this. He was a one issue donor, and his issue was Israel. Last night, before Adelson’s death was announced, Mike Pompeo was spotted meeting with Mossad agents in a restaurant in Washington, DC. And I feel like Mossad probably wanted us to know this, because they usually don't broadcast things like this, and Pompeo wanted us to know this. So that's an interesting little array of events.
Sarah Kendzior:
And then one more thing about Adelson and his legacy, is one of his great dreams in life was to nuke Iran. He was very specific about this. And today we had John Bolton saying, "Sheldon Adelson was a great American and a true friend. He never forgot the importance of ‘Peace through strength for America.’" John Bolton has also said that he wants to nuke Iran. So we are in a situation where a very volatile Trump, a Trump who wants to declare a national emergency, who wants to prolong his stay in office, who would do that either through domestic means, through the infiltration of our military and police and through violent attacks like the one we witnessed last week, he may do it that way, or he made do the unspeakable and unprecedented action of nuking Iran, or starting a war with Iran, using weaponry on Iran.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I don't think that the goal here is just to ruin Joe Biden's administration. It goes so far beyond that, because the people surrounding him have wanted this for a very long time, foremost among this besides Bolton and Pompeo and Pence, are Netanyahu and the very hard-rightwing movements out of Israel, who have been clamoring for this in a very similar way when we described what Putin wants for the United States and for Europe, for it to be broken up into smaller parts, for its resources and land to be removed, that is what Netanyahu and his supporters want for the Middle East. They obviously want the genocide of Palestinians. There's incredible, constant, ongoing abuse of Palestinians. They want that land, and they want to expand.
Sarah Kendzior:
And I'm very grateful to all the Israelis who have been protesting Netanyahu now for over half a year, because Netanyahu has been indicted multiple times. He's a criminal prime minister. Just like we have a criminal administration, they're also suffering with a criminal administration. And so all of this is interconnected, and I'm just saying this is one more thing to watch out for. It's obviously good that Trump and the GOP lost a source of funding, although, unfortunately my guess is that it will continue through Mariam Adelson, his wife, who is an even bigger hardliner on Israel than Sheldon Adelson, but he also lost Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank may be subject now to more rigorous investigation. We may finally see that money trail and see where it leads. And I think we're in for a lot of confirmation of our suspicions, as well as just terrible revelations.
Sarah Kendzior:
I've said this before, there are a lot of ways to blackmail a government. And not all of it has to do with personal kompromat, digging into someone's private life, exposing their secrets. You could expose what government institutions have done, acts they may have participated in along, maybe, with other countries that hurt American citizens—unspeakable things. I fear that we may hear of such things in the years to come, but I think there's no solution but the full truth and transparency. And especially, if you want to neuter a movement like QAnon—a movement based on conspiracy theories and lies—this is the way to do it, because there are greens of truth in the midst of the QAnon morass.
Sarah Kendzior:
I was reading about one of the individuals at the Capitol demonstrations and how she started out as an Obama supporter, and then she turned into a Trump supporter only in 2018 because of QAnon, and she was reading about the government being engaged in child rape trafficking and blackmail schemes of global elites. And then along with this were lots of other accusations or beliefs, that JFK Jr was rising from the dead, the government is full of cannibals, Pizzagate was real, things that are not obviously based on evidence, but that claim is. That claim is true. That's what Epstein and Maxwell were doing.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so it is important for the government to come clean about all of that, because what happened is then Epstein was arrested, and then he “died" under very mysterious circumstances in prison, and it validated in the minds of many QAnon acolytes all of the other lies, all of the other conspiracies, because they thought, "Wow, if they lie to us this whole time about Epstein, if they cover it up for him, they helped him, they emboldened him, they engaged him, the press wouldn't tell us the truth, then all this other stuff must be true too. They must really be slaughtering babies to get their adrenochrome," and all of these myths and lies.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's what happens when you lie to the public, is that credulity is the result. Not just paranoia, but credulity. And so there really needs to be the most rigorous honesty possible, regardless of who it brings down, regardless of what party they're in, regardless of how lofty and respectable and prestigious they are. Who cares? You just need to tell the truth. So I'll end it there.
Andrea Chalupa:
The most dangerous people are the ones calling for unity without justice, accountability, and consequences. Anybody who is saying, "Move on," should not be listened to. They're going to put us into even more danger. So now we need to underline the fact that this was a foreign aided terrorist attack, and let's focus now on some of the biggest traitors in our nation's history; Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn. Michael Flynn swore allegiance to QAnon. Michael Flynn and his son got wined and dined by the Kremlin, sitting next to Putin himself at a big anniversary dinner for a Russian propaganda network, RT, Russia Today. Paul Manafort, long time operative doing what he did in Ukraine with Kremlin-linked money, turning Ukrainians against each other with disinformation, using that hate—the dark arts—to drive real world protests in the streets against us interests in Crimea. Yeah, he did anti-NATO protests in Crimea years before the annexation. Paul Manafort, his whole playbook that he carried out on Ukrainians has been carried out on us under Trump. Paul Manafort, of course, managed Trump's campaign. He was a longtime friend and neighbor, and was chosen by Ivanka and Jared.
Andrea Chalupa:
And then, of course, you have Roger Stone who loves this stuff, relishes in this chaos. Stone himself threatened the life of a judge who was sentencing. But how did these guys ... How are they involved in this? That should be investigated. We've already seen how they love their blood money, and betraying America's sovereignty.
Andrea Chalupa:
This brings me to my sister, Alexandra Chalupa, who wrote on Twitter, "Years of warning Vladimir Putin's guy Paul Manafort is operational. Now we're living the playbook he used in Ukraine: invade government buildings, seize and annex land, wage a separatist war of domestic brainwashed militia. He's still the same. He's paying off his debt.” And I bring her up because Steve Mnuchan and the US Treasury secretary did something very interesting.
Andrea Chalupa:
The US Treasury sanctioned a bunch of Kremlin-linked Ukrainians, including a guy who relentlessly went after my sister. Now, keep in mind, it was reported that Paul Manafort led a campaign—a media dark ops effort—to tarnish people like my sister, to tarnish Ukraine, in saying that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that attacked our democracy in the 2016 election. He was, of course, outed for this, but a lot of journalists like Ken Vogel fell for it or carried Manafort's water along the way. And one of the sources that was carrying out this Paul Manafort campaign was this guy, Andrii Telizhenko, who the US treasury has now outed as being a Kremlin agent. This is pretty remarkable, because these sanctions have serious bite. And you have to wonder, is Steve Mnuchin—you know, who came from Hollywood—is he trying to make his way back there with a tiny shred of dignity, which we're not going to allow him to take with him because he's a traitor to our country and he weakened our nation by serving this aspiring dictator. He's got blood on his hands.
Andrea Chalupa:
So from the treasury: “Today the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, OFAC, took additional action against seven individuals and four entities that are part of a Russia-linked foreign influence network associated with Andrii Derkach, a Russian agent. Derkach was designated on September 10th, 2020 for his attempt to influence the 2020 US presidential election. ‘Russian disinformation campaigns targeting American citizens are a threat to our democracy,’ said the Secretary Steven Mnuchin”—who serves a Russian asset—"’The United States will continue to aggressively defend the integrity of our election systems and processes.’ Since at least 2019, Derkach and his associates have leveraged US media, US-based social media platforms, and influenced US persons to spread misleading and unsubstantiated allegations that current and former US officials engaged in corruption, money laundering, and unlawful political influence in Ukraine.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“Former Ukrainian government officials, Konstantin Kulyk, Andrii Telizhenko”—that's the guy that was relentless towards my sister—”nd current Ukraine member of parliament Oleksandr Dubinsky, had publicly appeared or affiliated themselves with Derkach through the coordinated dissemination and promotion of fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations involving a US political candidate. They have made repeated public statements to advance disinformation narratives that US government officials have engaged in corrupt dealings with Ukraine. These efforts are consistent with, and in support of, Derkach's efforts acting as an agent of the Russian intelligence services to influence the 2020 US presidential election.”
Andrea Chalupa:
So one of these guys, the guy that I kept highlighting, Andrii Telizhenko, was Ken Vogel's source at Politico in that hit piece that Republicans kept bringing up during Trump's impeachment hearings. They couldn't get my sister's name out of their mouth. Devin Nunes said it a million times. They were trying to flip the script and blame Ukraine and not Russia. So I think all of this points to the fact that we have to look into Stone, Manafort, and Michael Flynn. Yes, we are well aware—with America's long history of white rage—that violent coups have overthrown governments. There's a long tradition of this in America's history, we understand, but what makes this so much more dangerous, this latest incarnation of white rage is that it is aided by a mass murdering, xenophobic, terrorist regime, the Kremlin.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yep, absolutely. And on that note, I'm hoping revelations that may come about the complicity of our institutions and people in them include the media. And I have been both saddened and heartened to see so many journalists of color coming forward and saying that their white racist editor censored their work about Trump, censored their work about white mob violence and the threat of it, called them hyperbolic, called them hysterical. I mean, I've had this experience as a white journalist when I have white editors. I've had white editors want that part of the story cut out. I've had white editors tell me I quoted too many Black people in my story about say ... Once I did a story on a fast food workers union in St. Louis that was comprised nearly entirely of Black people, and I ended up killing my story for the people I was writing it for and publishing it on my own because I refused to accept the racist vision of the editor, who just flinched.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are people who are living segregated lives and they truly do not care what happens to people outside of their social circle. Sometimes they're just overtly racist, sometimes they're just trapped in that bubble and they're obsessed with prestige, and they associate prestige with being white. And they also know, I think, that journalists of color, Black journalists, Latino journalists, Native journalists, also Muslim journalists, anybody from some kind of underrepresented minority in media, are going to be way, way more likely to expose corruption of people around them, people in their social worlds.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've seen journalism become a profession for a rarefied elite, where it pays very little, but you need a lot of education—there are suddenly a lot of requirements that didn't exist before—in order to participate. And there used to be a residence requirement before the pandemic. You need to live in the most expensive cities in the US, and be paid a paltry sum to participate in journalism. So what that did was lock out the vast majority of the country, including white people, from journalism, but it also really lessened the odds of a Black investigative journalist, for example, who doesn't have family-inherited wealth going back generations to buffer their career, being able to be among the people who expose the crimes of this administration.
Sarah Kendzior:
And as we know, Black Americans immediately saw through Trump. We have never in the history of Gaslit Nation had to explain things like laws are only as good as the people who uphold them, or the US has a systemic racism problem, to our Black audience. It's only been some members of our white audience, usually people who don't listen to us that closely, who've been like, “No, I think things will be fine. I think institutions on the whole are good." It's like, no. We've always had this extremely serious undercurrent, and so the result of that is that the complicity of the media has been understated. They prefer to frame it as ignorance. Like, “Oh gee, how could we have possibly known?” Well, for one, everyone in this administration kept announcing their crimes in advance and then committing the crimes, and then confessing to the crimes. That really should've been a clue. We have photographic evidence, we have tweets, we have all this stuff. They just didn't want to go there because it's their social circle.
Sarah Kendzior:
The sheer number of journalists who have their photo taken with Epstein, with Felix Sater, with Ivanka and Jared, with Manafort, with Roger Stone—that's a major one. There are journalists like Maggie Haberman, where Roger Stone is tweeting out birthday greetings to her children because he knows their birthdays. If Roger Stone knew my kid's birthday, I'd fucking run for the hills. These are dangerous, violent, hateful, racist, anti-American criminal operators. Why are you putting them on television? Why was Michael CaPutin ... I'm sorry. Why was Michael Caputo—I should call him Michael CaPutin—Putin's image consultant put on CNN as some sort of objective commentator about US politics? This is nuts. And I go into all this in Hiding in Plain Sight, but yeah, Ken Vogel is up there. Ken Vogel's targeting of Alexandra Chalupa should be investigated. Who prompted that? Who were his sources? Why was he doing this? Why were so many outlets targeting innocent, private citizens who could barely defend themselves and who became the targets of violent, hateful mobs as a result of media complicity? That's something that should be investigated.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. And it's difficult not to see, on top of all of this, the growing death count of COVID in America as a genocide, given how many Native Americans are losing their lives, and people of color. They knew, and they did nothing, and they just let it kill us. And to the Republicans spreading the Big Lie, not just with the election, but about COVID, that are putting the lives of our elected officials at risk, they need to be expelled as well.
Andrea Chalupa:
We should not have to have an assault on our Capitol in order for authoritarian scholars to finally be believed. We shouldn't have to have war like this in order for the Big Tech media giants to finally do what they should have done years ago, and for a handful of Republicans to finally talk to their other members and say, "Stop spreading the Big Lie." The rage we've been feeling since 2016 in November, we need to keep that going and channel it into protecting our very democracy over the next 10 years. If we keep at this pace, if we give Stacey Abrams all the money and resources that she needs, if we keep putting the money into Fair Fight Action, into Future Now, into Every District, we keep elevating leaders who are leading from the outside, and stop putting our faith into mythological saviors, if we keep this energy going, all of us showing up for each other again and again, election cycle after election cycle, we will win. If we do the work, if we show up, if we remain vigilant, we will ultimately win and take back our democracy. And that is what is going to happen.
Andrea Chalupa:
So understand, as demoralizing as this time capsule we've created here in this episode may be, it is important. And history is healing. Where we confront all of this that's going on, this dramatic history we're currently living, if we shine a light on it, we're ultimately going to build a better and fairer, freer country for all of us. And the generations that continue this work will look back and thank us for how hard we worked for them, making their job easier so they can go farther, because there's a lot more work that needs to be done once we get out of the crisis period.
Andrea Chalupa:
So please go to Gaslitnationpod.com, adopt some action on our action guide, read the books. We touched on the surface of things in this episode, but read some of those books on our reading guide. We're all in this together. And I promise, we promise we're going to stick by you and continue to do this show through all of it and keep documenting this, and ultimately we will win.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by standing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand due to the coronavirus crisis. We also would like to share our deepest condolences to Representative Jamie Raskin and his family on the death of his son, Tommy Raskin, an activist who fought for human rights and animal rights. We encourage you to donate to the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals, which we have linked to on our Patreon page.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue committee, a humanitarian relief organization, helping refugees from Syria, donate at rescue.org. And if you want to help critically endangered orangutans, already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to the Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon. It keeps us going. And you can also subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres, and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle. Original music on Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Visenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga, and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our logo design was donated to us by Hamish Smyth of the New York based firm Order. Thank you so much, Hamish.
Andrea Chalupa:
Gaslit Nation would like to thank our supporters at the Producer level on Patreon and higher...