“Democracy on Trial” The Case Against Trump for Jan 6

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Democracy is also on the mind of our next guest. Michael Kirk is the filmmaker behind a new front-line documentary called “Democracy on Trial.” That premieres tomorrow on PBS, and it charts Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against the Former President Donald Trump which alleges federal election interference in two — in 2020. And Kirk tells Hari Sreenivasan why he chose to release the film now.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Michael Kirk, thanks so much for joining us. Your film, “Democracy on Trial,” lays out the investigation into President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election. Why this film? Why now?

MICHAEL KIRK, DIRECTOR, FRONTLINE’S “DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL”: As we approach what a lot of people are telling us is the most important election, presidential election. And in the face of that it seems like resolving January 6th and what happened and whether Trump has responsibility and what impact that all has on the democracy and how the election is going to go felt like the very 1st piece of business we should do — frontline ask us to. To really take a long hard look at the trial. That is Jack Smith’s special counsel trial that may happen in Washington on March 4th. Take a look there first, what a lot of people think of as the central moment at the end of the Trump presidency, the beginning of the Biden presidency, and the beginning of this particular year, let’s resolve that, people kept saying to us. So, while we went out and tried to tell the story in its simplest but most thorough form, and we ended up with two and a half hours of what I hope is informative television.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I having had to had — had a chance to see it, it is truly amazing how you have, kind of, truncated what took weeks and months for the investigative committee to compile and what went into Jack Smith’s prosecution case and how you’ve laid that out in two and a half hours. But, you know, going to that, kind of, House Select Committee after Republicans in the Senate chose to block anything like that from happening. Like, we’ve had a 9/11 commission before, it was bipartisan. It’s not the case here. And you kind of had an interesting element in here. Representative Benny Thompson from Mississippi. Why was this personal for him?

KIRK: I think — you know, there were — there are many things that Congressman Thompson is in Washington to achieve been there a long time, a long political career coming from a small town in Mississippi, 500 people, I think in the town. You know, at the heart of what Congressman Thompson tells us his life’s work has been his protection of voter rights for lots of obvious reasons. He’s black. He’s been in Congress when all of the efforts to abrogate, to lessen, to make it harder to vote have been happening, he thinks of this. A particular moment, that particular set of events around the January 6th attacks as an example of — as the greatest manifestation of an effort to limit the votes of the American people. And he thinks of it as his as his job to point that out. The second and most important thing to him was the use of the Confederate battle flags at the attack on Congress and how that resonated with him in a lifetime of growing up around the Klan and other whites in the — in his part of Mississippi and what was happening in the South to limit voting rights. You know, the battle flag became the — Confederate battle flag became a symbol of those times that resonates even on the steps of the capital on January 6th. So, Chairman Thompson, you know, was determined to draw a bright red line around that — circle around that and say, this is something we need to talk about because voting rights are at stake here, not just Donald Trump’s presidency or potential presidents.

SREENIVASAN: The layers of showing intent and how your film breaks that down is also very interesting. That the president, he’s warned and told by people that are close to him that he otherwise trusted, yet he goes out and repeatedly, knowingly, goes out and spreads the big lie.

KIRK: We were careful to try to include comments from the people who told him these things three days before, two days before, we have as much evidence as we can find. Bill Barr, the former Attorney General, telling him it was BS. That everything he was asserting, that he had examined it, used the resources of the Justice Department to examine it, and that it was BS. The same is true with Secretary Raffensperger from Georgia and others finding — the acting Attorney General, others, who told him, warned him, said, it’s not true, don’t go forward and say it. We want to make really sure those were Republicans who were making those assertions. Those were people who had been supporters of his, who had worked with him on reelection, who desperately hoped he would win reelection. It is those people who are saying those things in the film, and that felt to me like the next step to take. It’s not pointy headed liberals. It’s not academics. It’s not even mostly journalists. It is people who are close to him, who worked for him, who trusted him, who he trusted, who were telling him what he was asserting were not — was not true. And he, days later, would of course go forward and re-say the lies as we laid them out now.

SREENIVASAN: One of the republicans that you speak with, who was a supporter of President Trump was Rusty Bowers out of Arizona, representative, and he recalls how he was pressured by Rudy Giuliani, and he kind of lays out the tension in, sort of, moral and internal struggle.

TOM JOSCELYN, SENIOR STAFF, JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE: What you have to understand here is that Rusty Bowers, this guy who’s — who worked for Trump, wanted Trump to be re-elected in Arizona, worked for Trump’s reelection, is given a choice. He can choose between his oath to the constitution or President Trump, and he stays loyal to the constitution. That is, in effect, what he — the choice that he’s given.

RUSTY BOWERS, (R) FORMER ARIZONA HOUSE SPEAKER: Even in the past when there have been serious —

JOSCELYN: Rusty Bowers speaks with a moral and legal clarity that’s very necessary to understand.

BOWERS: We choose to follow the outcome of the will of the people. It’s my oath. And I hope that I’ll never break that. I know I’m not — you know, I’m not perfect. I’m certainly not a perfect witness. But I am a witness, and I had my say. And I wasn’t trying to flower it up. I wasn’t trying to be anything other than just Rusty.

SREENIVASAN: What was that emblematic of? Because there’s so many Republicans that you talk to in the film that echo that same struggle.

KIRK: What gives me hope brings optimism to an otherwise very negative last few months, making this film and sensing how just viral the argument — toxic the arguments have become in the country and around this particular issue is this idea that Rusty Bowers, Gabriel Sterling, Secretary Raffensperger, a lot of people in this — Cassidy Hutchinson. These are Americans, conservative Americans, pro-Trump, worked for Trump, wanted to vote — when they voted for Trump, wanted everybody to vote for Trump, were heartbroken when he lost. These are people who, in their official capacities, had also taken an oath to the Constitution. And they found themselves, they tell us, they say — they said it to the committee and they said it to us, they find themselves in a moment, a critical moment in their lives where Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s attorneys, and Trump himself, on the telephone asked them to do something that they felt uncomfortable doing, that they thought he was asking them to lie. And in every case, these Americans, these right-wing conservatives, Trump supporting Americans chose the constitution.

SREENIVASAN: You kind of retell pretty important scenes in the Oval Office, certain meetings that happened with his advisers. I mean, everything from, you know, what Rudy Giuliani suggested to the president and how to deal with, you know, the results going forward, to how the president talked to Mike Pence days before January 6th and even on the morning of.

KIRK: It’s an amazing thing, Hari. Because of what the committee had, which was the subpoena power, you could hear what his daughter thinks when he’s fighting with Pence. You can hear what his own attorneys thought in many critical moments. It was a supercharged environment around the White House. And the great good news for those of us who practice long form journalism is a lot of it exists. Exists on the record, exists by people who are willing to talk to us, exists by audio recordings, video recordings. It’s pretty hard to make the argument, for example, in a very simple way that the crowd was just really slightly unruly. They got a little bit out of hand, but they didn’t really commit criminal behavior when you look at the video of the criminal behavior being committed.

SREENIVASAN: One of the interesting insights that the film recounts is the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson. And she was, kind of, the insider that — and made the testimony that day in front of the committee. But one of the things that she talks about is the president’s displeasure with the crowd size at the Ellipse.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was in the tent backstage that Hutchinson heard crucial evidence of what Trump knew about the potential for violence that day.

CASSIDY HUTCHINSON, FORMER WHITE HOUSE AIDE: When we were in the offstage announced area tent behind the stage, he was very concerned about the shot,

meaning the photograph that we would get because the rally space wasn’t full.

TIM MULVEY, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, JAN. 6TH COMMITTEE: The former president was unhappy with the crowd size. We learned that some of the crowd size inside the barricade was due to the fact that people were unwilling to pass through the magnetometers. Presumably because they had — they were carrying contraband weapons.

LIZ CHENEY, FORMER UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE: Several thousand members of the crowd who refused to go through the mags watched from the lawn near the Washington Monument.

HUTCHINSON: I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, I don’t even care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away.

KIRK: None of us who covered Trump from the very first hours of his presidency should be surprised that he’s interested in crowd size. We all remember the arguments about his inaugural — the inaugural events out on the steps of the Capitol and his American carnage speech and his disappointment that the crowds weren’t bigger. And his, frankly, lies that it was bigger than it turned out actually to be there. So, he was especially, I think, attuned having invited his supporters to Washington on this particular day to disrupt Congress. And as his speech was about to take place to want them all to be on camera, to be a visual manifestation of his power and heft. And how, and the threat that they presented. I’m leaving aside the question of whether he caused them to go up to the Capitol building and commit unlawful acts. But just for the visual alone, the optics of it alone, he wanted them to be in there closer. And as he says, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, they’re not here with their weapons for me. I don’t have to worry about them. You don’t have to protect me. They’re not here for me. And I think he believed the implications of what he was saying was they were body armored up, not all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but enough of them were body armored up and perhaps carrying weapons. As we know, remember people with weapons in the Capitol building and standing up on that hill. That — when we found the shot of the small crowd, around a smaller crowd around him, and then you cut to the wide shot up at the picture of the memorial was behind them and you see the tens of thousands of people who would not go through the magnetometers. That, if I was a Secret Service agent, I would be very anxious about whether I would — whether I would take the President of the United States up to the Capitol building once those people who had not been through the magnetometers were on their way up the street.

SREENIVASAN: Well, a line of defense that President Trump’s lawyers have used in different court filings, as well as in the court of public opinion, is that the sentiments expressed by the President on the social platforms, on campaign stumps is protected by free speech. And you talked to different legal scholars about this, and I’m sure this is going to come up in the trial as well. What did they tell you about that?

KIRK: He has the right as he asserts and his defense team asserts, he has the right to say things that might not be true. He has the right to say things. He has a First Amendment right just like I do and just like you do. It’s the — what I wanted to know from the experts was when does it become a crime? We know he’s a big believer in conspiracy theories. When is talking about a conspiracy a crime? When is it, as they say, crime — yelling fire in a crowded theater when there isn’t a fire. You know, what is the — is that a First amendment right? You have the right that freedom of speech. You do not. And the limits on what the president of the United States can say with impunity, is it limited? His defense team is arguing, no, he can say anything he wants. He’s the president of the United States. And if presidents can’t say anything they want, and if they are not free to speak, be careful of any rules that come along that limit that because someday your president, the one you like the other side maybe trying to get him or her for their speech for things they say in office. So, that fine line, that argument over that fine line, Trump’s lies, are they illegal? And when and where would they be illegal in a case like January 6th? That’s what we set out to explain with the experts, the constitutional law experts. And I hope we did a pretty good job of making that straight and clear for viewers.

SREENIVASAN: You know, with a 30,000-foot view, when you look at this film. Who’s the intended audience here? Because it doesn’t seem that it would do anything but harden the views of his existing supporters. Every time the president faces another indictment, it seems like his support increases and he’s able to parlay that into a campaign donation and say that he is the victim, or people out to get me, this is a witch hunt.

KIRK: I know many, many MAGA supporters. Who say it’s public broadcasting, how can I ever trust that? I’m never going to trust that. And I know what you guys are going to do. So, what can I do about that? There’s almost nothing I could say or do in a film that would make all of those two sides in a very divided country embrace and change any of their behaviors. But I don’t know what changes people’s behavior. So, my job is to lay it out there as straightforwardly and honestly and in a way that’s coherent as a narrative as I possibly can. And hope that if there are — and I suspect there are between seven and 11 percent of Americans who are over the next few months going to make up their minds about Donald Trump returning or Joe Biden continuing to be president, then maybe this information will help people make up their minds. And I think that’s something we aspire to do, and in some ways it’s — why it’s so imperative to us as we’re making it, to try to take into account the fact that we’re not convicting him with what the January 6th committee did. We’re laying out the blueprint for what the federal prosecutors have contended.

SREENIVASAN: The frontline film is called “Democracy on Trial.” Filmmaker Michael Kirk, thanks so much for joining us.

KIRK: My pleasure. Thanks for having me here.