Did the Jan 6 Committee Make the Case Against Donald Trump?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: While these hearings have dropped several bombshells, are they actually changing the minds of those who voted for Trump? Don’t forget, according to “The Washington Post”, the majority of GOP nominees running in a few weeks are election deniers. The Republican strategist, Sarah Longwell, conducts focus groups to understand how these developments are resonating with voters. And she joins Hari Sreenivasan to dissect the hearings and her findings.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks so much. And Sarah Longwell, thank you for joining us. Sarah, the January 6th Committee just held its 10th and what maybe its last hearing. What were your biggest takeaways aside from the fact that at the end, the committee did vote to subpoena former President Donald Trump.

SARAH LONGWELL, CO-FOUNDER, DEFENDING DEMOCRACY TOGETHER: Well, there really were a lot. I mean, one of the things that January 6th Committee has always done is make sure to give us a lot to chew on after every single one of these hearings. But I think today was really about showing how premeditated these attacks were. Both from the side of the people who attacked that day, the secret service text that we were privy to show that they knew that they were planning these attacks. People like, you know, from the Oath Keepers and whatnot, but also how premeditated it was on Donald Trump’s end. On how some of his closest advisers like Steve Bannon, like Roger Stone, you know, these people were saying before the election that if Donald Trump didn’t win, he was going to declare victory anyway. That he was even thinking about, you know, the idea of him demonizing the mail-in ballots was all about creating, sort of, that confusion so that if he was ahead on election night, he could simply declare victory, you know, knowing that the mail-in ballots would be counted overtime and that his lead might erode. And so, the fact that all of that was really thought about beforehand just goes to show how much thinking there was put into trying to keep this sort of free and fair election from being treated that way.

SREENIVASAN: We did see some footage for the first time of what the members of Congress were doing and how they were reaching out, literally, for help. Like, calling local governors asking for the national guard. And there’s even a small snippet that we saw — and maybe there’s going to be more videos released of members from both parties, kind of, huddling together around the phone and having conversations. It was, oddly enough, a moment of bipartisanship, unity, when all these people were scared for their lives. And you saw that reflected in the comments, including from Senator McConnell and Member McCarthy when they got back to the House that day at the end of January 6th. That just vanished.

LONGWELL: Yes, I mean, that was some of the most stunning footage. I guess I don’t know what we all thought they were doing during these moments, but watching Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and Chuck Schumer, and then the Republican members, you know, on the phone with the governors of the surrounding states, in Maryland, Virginia, talking about bringing in the national guard. I will say, I thought, I will give Nancy Pelosi some real credit for what self-restraint it must’ve taken to not, in some of those moments, want to have a word with her Republican colleagues for the fact that many of them thought it was fine to humor Donald Trump in his lies. That many of them were, you know, just letting him have this temper tantrum. There is a, you know, people who were quoted anonymously saying, what’s the harm in humoring him? And so, I think that it showed great leadership on their part to be working with their colleagues. And it was interesting, they had one thing on their mind and one thing only, which was how do we get back into the chamber and take that vote? You know, they were obviously — and they were concerned about Mike Pence’s personal safety. I mean, that was some remarkable conversations between them. And so, I thought that was a good moment for the United States, seeing that when everything — when they were under attack, when they were in the bunker together, they were all trying to problem solve. And that’s because it was them in the bunker who are all being attacked together. And it was Donald Trump was doing it. And so, the betrayal that they must have felt after that, when Kevin McCarthy went down to Mar-a- Lago, and when Mitch McConnell said that if Donald Trump was the nominee again in 2024, of course, he’d endorsed them. I can’t imagine what it’s like to see that and what kind of betrayal that is. Although, I can imagine it a little bit because just as an American, I feel that betrayal.

SREENIVASAN: Do you think that this committee has now made that case? That Donald Trump knew what was going to happen. And then even while it was happening, knew what was happening, and continued to do what he did anyway?

LONGWELL: It’s hard not to look at the way that they went about establishing the timelines, and not see that they were really just laying out the case for how premeditated it was. I mean, that really was the first half of this hearing was showing that between the conversations that Donald Trump was having with his close advisors, and also the moves that he was making publicly. I mean one of the things that they were doing was kind of a side by side. Oftentimes where they would have one of his advisers talking about what they had said to him, and then him going out publicly and saying the exact opposite. And so, it was both the action of premeditation, and then also the action of him knowing that what he was saying was false. That he had been told by everyone around him that it was false. And then him still going out in public and giving the lie. And so, you know, how that would hold up in court, I don’t know. But I do know just as an ethical matter, as a moral matter, when you watch that, this is not a person who cares about the United States. This is not a person who cares about the rule of law, or our system of government. You know, some of the things that were really striking were the people who testified to the president saying things like, well, I don’t want anybody to know that I’ve lost. You know, I don’t want to let anybody think that I’ve lost. And even as he was telling people in private, that he understood that he lost, he still didn’t want it shared publicly, which is just him putting his ego in front of a peaceful transfer of power. And that’s something — you know, Steve Bannon has this line that he would use about. How Trump strategy was to flood the zone with crap, although they would often use a different word. And what the January 6th Committee often does, as it’s able to weave through that crap. And put timelines in place, you know, construct the narrative, share the telling’s from all of Trump’s closest advisers, and put together what is, I think, is an ironclad, irrefutable case that Donald Trump wasn’t planning on conceding this election. That he knew that he had lost and that he sent people to the Capitol to attack it and try to overturn the election anyway. You know, that’s what they hit again this time. And then they closed it all off by, as you noted, they closed it off by Liz Cheney after putting her entire career on the line to do this, putting forward a motion to subpoena Donald Trump, to make him come testify in front of this Committee, and that’s a really important moment. Because the big criticism of this committee is like, well, Donald Trump doesn’t get to tell his side of the story. We’ll here it as. He has been offered the opportunity by the Committee to come and formally testify and tell his side of the story. And if he chooses not to, which I believe he won’t, I think we all know why.

SREENIVASAN: Every week since January 6th, you have been running the focus groups with people you call the flippers. Basically, people who voted for Trump, and then voted for Biden. What kind of trendlines are you seeing and the discussions that are happening? What’s the impact of these hearings?

LONGWELL: Yes, one of the most interesting things that I have found, especially during the summer when the Committee was in full swing, and it was just holding hearings all the time. You know, prior to that, anytime we would ask Trump supporters if they wanted to see Donald Trump run again in 2024, we’d usually get about half the group saying, yes, definitely. At least half the group. Like just — sometimes it was far more than that, but at least half the group would want to see him run again in 2024. When the hearing started though, all the sudden, we were having multiple groups in a row, in which zero people wanted to see him run again, or even — or just by fewer people. And the things that they were saying were, you know, I just think he has too much baggage, or you know, I really think maybe someone like Ron DeSantis, or Christy — you know, they were sort of putting forward alternatives. Now, I don’t think what was happening here is that they’re watching the hearings and being persuaded. Boy, Trump’s a really terrible guy, I can’t support him anymore. They mostly don’t trust the hearings. They think that they’re, you know, dog and pony show, that people are to get Trump, but it was changing how they thought about Trump’s viability, his electability. And that’s really with Trump supporters. But for swing voters, you know, they really are just disgusted with Trump. And whenever the January 6th hearings happen, when it raises the saliency of January 6th, because it’s easy, it’s this thing that fades into background, otherwise. People aren’t thinking about it. They’re thinking about inflation, they’re thinking about just other issues that impact their lives, the economy, things that matter to them closer to home. You know, they don’t think about democracy that often. But when you do raise the salient, when it’s in the news, when everybody is talking about it, when the January 6th Committee, you know, Hearings are on TV and it’s reminding them of what happened, those are the times when they just are remembering how disgusted they were with Trump and why, often as Republicans, they were willing to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 because they just wanted this kind of stuff to end. And when you remind them of that, it brings them back to that place.

SREENIVASAN: Regardless of whether or not the former president becomes the candidate of his party again, you know, you mentioned with my colleague, Walter Isaacson, earlier in the that summer that Trump had unleashed something. What is that something now in hindsight?

LONGWELL: You know, there is a Russian expression, the appetite increases while you’re eating. And I think that what he’s unleashed in people is a couple of things. One is a sense that they really have now crave this combative style of politics, right, which wasn’t the case before. This idea that now, everyone wants a fighter. There’s a reason why Ron DeSantis tends to be the first name that people bring up and it’s because people view him as kind of Trump without the baggage, is what they often say. But he has that same combative style, which is now they like. But a lot of it too is just desensitization toward really bad behavior. You know, if you look at a lot of the candidates here in 2022, take Herschel Walker, you know, has many secret children that have come to light during the campaign, allegedly paid for an abortion despite being a vocal prolife, you know, activist. These things didn’t used to fly. The Republican Party – – I’m thinking about Todd Akin and his comments around legitimate rape, you know, Mitt Romney who was the nominee at the time condemned him. The GOP — the apparatus who tried to get him to step down and resign, nobody’s doing that with Herschel Walker anymore. You know, we now live in a world where if you have scandals, tremendous moral failings, if you deny the results of the election, which, by the way, isn’t even viewed as a bad thing. In fact, it’s viewed by Trump and by many Republicans as a prerequisite to winning a Republican primary. Like those are the forces that Donald Trump has unleased and it has changed and very substantive and meaningful ways how the Republican Party is constituted. I mean, it holds almost no resemblance to the party that I joined that was really oriented around things like, you know, limited government, personal responsibility, free markets, American leadership in the world, character accounts. Like in the ’90s and early 2000s, that is what you heard from Republicans, and it’s just not how Republicans talk anymore. You know, now, power and holding power is the rationalization for everything. And they also — they want, you know, this kind — like people like Donald Trump, who they see as fighters, and they have no interest or care about sort of the moral qualities of these people.

SREENIVASAN: What does that do to people like yourself who joined a very different party than where it is today?

LONGWELL: Well, look, I mean, there’s really not a place for people like me in the Republican Party, just like there’s no longer a place Liz Cheney of for Adam Kinzinger. You know, in fact, you know, both Adam and Liz are doing the same thing that I am right now, which is, you know, we’ve all endorsed pro-democracy Republicans where we can. But for the most part, we’ve had to endorse Democrats against very dangerous anti democracy Republicans, especially at the governor and secretary of state level where you had these election denier candidates who are going to be in a position to certify the 2024 election. There are only two political parties. And when one of them has decided that they are no longer committed to democracy, which is something that we see from Donald Trump in these January 6th hearings and then, something we see from all of these candidates in — you know, that are running in the 2022 election, you know, there’s just — there’s nothing to do but to support Democrats in hoped that they can beat these dangerous Republicans. And only through sustained elect moral (ph) defeat can you hope that the Republican Party will reach for different quality of candidates, a different future. But that’s the only way. It is only by defeating them that you can get that to change.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a lot of concern right now that if the Republicans take back control of the house, certainly the sort of — the January 6th Committee, as we know, it loses its commission at the end of this Congress, and the next Congress can choose to sustain this subpoena and continue to ask the president if he wants to testify or it could just divert its resources somewhere completely different. And there are a lot of concerns that there are going to be people in power who will, you know, make this set of hearings or the Benghazi hearings look like a cocktail party comparatively speaking and where kind of the public time and resources will be spent.

LONGWELL: Yes. Well, we don’t have to speculate about this too much because if Republicans take the house. Republicans have been telling us what they’re going to try to do. You know, Kevin McCarthy is going to have his handful with a bunch of members like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert who are saying, oh, well, we are immediately going to launch impeachment hearings against Joe Biden. We are going to launch investigations into Hunter Biden. Maybe they will even seek retribution against members of this community in terms of trying to investigate the investigators. I mean, this is the kind of thing they’ve been talking about. This is not me speculating, these are things that we heard from Republican members of Congress. I think that if the majorities are narrow though, if Republicans just hold a narrow majority as opposed to a large majority, then it’s going to be harder for them to sort of all coalesce around something like that. And so, you, know that is the biggest hope. But if they win, you know, if this is like, you know, 2010 or a year where you just get big majorities of Republicans get swept in, then I would be preparing for a lot of sort of time wasting political optic hearings.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I wonder what you think Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney’s legacy will be. They’re not going to be members of Congress, at least not this time around, but being the only two Republicans on these 10 January 6th Committee hearings, what do they leave behind?

LONGWELL: So, let me say just how deep my admiration is for Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. They have both been remarkable. They have given up their current careers in order to stand up for the constitution in this moment, to do what they believe is right. And now in some of the ways that other Republicans have where they just kind of put their heads down. You know, I was always been a big Ben Sasse fan. Bug Ben Sasse, you know, he’s going to take his ball and go home. He’s going to leave the Senate. He’s going to go run a university. And — OK. But Liz Cheney stood up in front of everybody and said, I’m not going to let this happen. Like, we — this is unacceptable. We cannot wave this away. She has been magnificent. I think both of them have bright careers in front of them. I would not count either them out. They’re both young, especially by the standards of today’s politicians. And so, my hope — you never know what seeds your planting with your leadership. But my hope is that what they have done will set them up for a future where they are the next generation of leadership, because goodness knows, they would be a dramatic improvement.

SREENIVASAN: Sarah Longwell from the Republican Accountability Project and The Bulwark.com, thanks so much for joining us.

LONGWELL: Thanks for having me.