NYT Reporter Jonathan Martin on Jan. 6

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And now, to the United States and politics and a date which still reverberates, of course, January 6, 2021. The findings of a 10-month investigation into that day’s insurrection against Congress will be presented on Thursday. The first public hearing will likely feature videoclips and some of the nearly 1,000 interviews the investigating committee has conducting. Our next guest has documented the political twists and turns over the past 18 months, in his new book, “This Will Not Pass.” Jonathan Martin is a national political correspondent for the New York Times and he is joining Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And, Jonathan Martin, welcome to the show.

JONATHAN MARTIN, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK TIMES: Thank you for having me.

ISAACSON: You and Alex Burns have written this great book, you know, “This Will Not Pass,” that really sets the stage for this week’s hearings on January 6th. The whole thing is in the book. What are you hoping that those hearings will do?

MARTIN: Well, thanks for having me. Yes. And I do think the book does capture the mindset of the senior GOP leadership in the days after January 6th, and their mindset was very different then than it is now, Walter. And we have Kevin McCarthy on audiotape talking to fellow House GOP leaders about how just quickly they can get Donald Trump out of office. It’s not a debate about Trump’s culpability on the 6th, Walter, it’s an urgent question of, what is the most effective and efficient method to get Trump out of the presidency because he represents a threat to the country. They talk about the 25th Amendment, about, obviously, going to Trump and urging him to resign and then, of course, whether or not impeachment will be carried out. And I think to go from that point to — by the end of the month of January 21 where McCarthy is back at Mar-a-Lago does show you how the Republican Party sort of came back to Trump. But in those hours and days after the 6th, there was no question that the senior leadership of the party wanted to cut ties with Trump and wanted to cast him out immediately. And I think this committee’s inquiry is going to capture just how different the thinking was in the party immediately after the 6th. And just how grievous they believe — they, being people like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, Trump had behaved and what he had done to the capital and to the country.

ISAACSON: You talk about Kevin McCarthy being aggrieved, trying to get Trump out of office, being furious, and you reported this and something amazing happened. Kevin McCarthy, repeatedly, in statements said it was totally false and you had made it up. And then, boom, you popped in the audiotape —

MARTIN: Right.

ISAACSON: — that proved to you exactly right.

MARTIN: Yes.

ISAACSON: How did that happen? Was that some set up? Did you know he was going to deny and you’d have to use the tape?

MARTIN: We couldn’t have predicted how Mr. McCarthy was going to respond. But obviously, when you make an emphatic and sort of sweeping denial like he did while knowing that the recording is accurate, it does raise questions about your integrity. And I think Kevin McCarthy has done grave damage to himself in the long-term by openly lying about our reporting. That, obviously, as you point out, the audio tapes that we obtain did prove him to be, you know, wrong. And he has not faced accountability for that yet. And I think in the long- term, I think, there’s real question about him going forward because of his denials, not just because of the matter, Walter, that it raises about his integrity, but also, because the question that raised about his political judgment, as well. So, doing that when you know that what he said was out there, people heard it, I think is the kind of thing that makes people in his own party wonder about McCarthy’s capacity.

ISAACSON: Wait a minute. Trump just, a day ago, endorsed him, again. He is going to be the leader in the House Representative of the Republicans, probably, you know, speaker of the house.

MARTIN: Right

ISAACSON: What you say seems wrong, the Republicans have rallied around him even though he’s done this. Why is that?

MARTIN: I think in the short-term there has been a sort of a rally, a fact, sort of circle of the wagons. But, look, Trump is not exactly a trusted supporter of Kevin McCarthy or of anybody. He’s not known, Walter, for his loyalty. And I think Trump, of course, wants to keep McCarthy close to him and loves that Kevin McCarthy scrambled to fix this political problem. And McCarthy, the night that those tapes came out, you know, got Trump on the phone and tried to make things right. But I think none of that is a guarantee of Trump’s support over the long haul. I mean, I can cite chapter and verse, examples of people that Trump has turned on over the years. And look, when we interviewed Donald Trump for this book in the spring of 2021, we asked him about Kevin McCarthy, an ally of his then and now, and Trump said McCarthy has an inferiority complex, and that is what he said about his allies. So, look, I just think in the long-term, you can’t bank on Trump supporting anybody and especially if somebody is on tape having criticized him, he is not going to forget that.

ISAACSON: Yes. But what about the entire Republican Party, especially the Republicans in Washington, they had totally turned-on Trump, it seems, from your book, especially McConnell, especially, you know, Senate Leader McConnell.

MARTIN: Right.

ISAACSON: How did that change?

MARTIN: Sure. So, this is one of the most interesting things in our book, that immediately after the 6th, McConnell thinks Trump is totally discredited. In fact, Walter, I saw McConnell in the capital late on the night of January 6th, and McConnell told he felt exhilarated from the events of the day. And I said, how can you feel exhilarated? And McConnell said to me, Trump put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. He is totally discredited. And, Walter, that captures the mindset of the highest ranks of the party that day. They believe this was Access Hollywood all over again. There was no way that Trump can recover from this. And we, as a party, could happily wash your hands of him and move on. And, obviously, what happens in the days and the weeks after that is McConnell and McCarthy realized, just like after Access Hollywood in 2016, that their voters don’t want to move on and their voters, frankly, aren’t terribly bothered by Trump’s conduct. And so, they have to, in McConnell’s case go mute, or in McConnell’s case, re-embrace Trump. And that is the real come down that we chronicle in this book, this great deference of Republican leaders to their voters when it comes to Donald Trump. And I think that is really what has sustained Trump now for seven years in American politics, the elites of the party being uncertain about or downright scared of their own voters.

ISAACSON: You talk about speaking to Senator McConnell on the evening of January 6th when you are in the capital. You were in the capital for that entire day. Tell me, what was it like?

MARTIN: Sure. It’s kind of like being in a submarine in the bottom of the ocean, you can’t sort of see what is happening on the surface. But with a periscope, and we did not fully appreciate, Walter, the scale of the attack in those hours because we weren’t watching it on TV, we weren’t really seeing it on our phones like everyone else at home was. And so, I was evacuated with the entire U.S. Senate to one of the Senate office buildings via the tunnel under the capitol building. And so, I was in seclusion with most of the Senate. And I can tell you, there was great anxiety that day, as we record in the book, we have an entire chapter in the book on this, among the senators about their safety and security. Lindsey Graham, at one point, interrupted a capitol police officer who was speaking to the Senate, trying to brief them, and demanded that the capitol police use any means necessary to retake the U.S. Capitol, almost shouting at the police officer. And that set off a brief altercation between Graham and some Democratic senators who weren’t too happy about his interjection. And I think that kind of anxiety quickly became anger at Donald Trump, again in both parties, for inciting this riot. In fact, later that day, on the 6th, Lindsey Graham gets the White House counsel for Trump on the phone and says, if you don’t have Trump, tell these people in the capital to go home, we are going to call for the 25th Amendment. And I think that captures the sort of intensity of the anger towards Trump that day. It was bipartisan and there was a sense of he has really gone too far this time. And there were real concerns about physical safety. I mean, Walter, I can recall Lisa Murkowski, the senator from Alaska, you know, putting her arm through the arm of one of her colleagues who used to serve in the marines and saying, I got my marine right here, and holding him tight. That doesn’t happen in the American seat of government, to put it mildly, where lawmakers are scared for their lives, but that was certainly the case on January 6th.

ISAACSON: You know, one of the news that’s come out more recently, what you have it in the book, but even more so, is — as Donald Trump’s treatment of the vice president, Pence.

MARTIN: Right.

ISAACSON: And almost being willing to encourage people to hang him.

MARTIN: Right.

ISAACSON: Explain that to me.

MARTIN: Yes. Trump had no sympathy whatsoever for the life of his vice president, who along with his wife and daughter, were in the capitol on January 6th. And, you know, Trump is more fixated still on overturning the results of the election than the physical safety of his own very loyal V.P. And, Walter, I don’t think that the relationship will ever recover from that day and from Trump’s lack of concern about Pence. He never really called on Pence to check in on him. And there is now reporting that Trump was happy to hear about the chance of hanging like Pence. So, he’s delighted in the pressure being inflictive on Pence. Even Pence’s inner circle recognize that by rejecting the president urging to overturn the election, Pence was going to invites threats to his safety and that Pence’s own staff warned the secret service about that eventuality. So, yes, I think Pence and his staff are going to be key players in this January 6th investigation because I think that they feel somewhat radicalized, Walter, you know, four years of loyalty bordering on servitude and that is the reward they get because Pence won’t overturn the election? It tells you a lot about Donald Trump. And I think for Pence it was the moment where he really did put country over party. I don’t think people fully appreciate the constitutional crisis that we would’ve had in this country if Mike Pence makes a different choice on January 6th, the uncertainty between January 6th and January 20th when Biden was to be sworn in if Mike Pence folds and bends to Donald Trump’s pressure. It would have been, you know, deeply, deeply, alarming and I think a real challenge to the fabric of our country’s democracy.

ISAACSON: Do you think Mike Pence is going to run for president and do it on the integrity that he showed?

MARTIN: I — to the first part of your question, I think he wants to run for president and I think he would be happy to run against Donald Trump, in part because of what we are talking about here. I mean, I think he wants to be sort of vindicated about what he did on the 6t. I interviewed Pence a couple weeks ago and he told me he travels the country and has people coming him up to bank all the time for what he did on the6t. And I think —

ISAACSON: But do you really think that the Republican Party and its primaries will thank him for this?

MARTIN: That is a different question. Look, I’m — look, I think that Pence would have real difficulty getting the Republican nomination, whether it is against Trump or anybody else in part because of Trump’s contempt for him now. I think that creates challenges for Pence. But, Walter, just the fact that he wants to run and there’s now this fissure between he and Trump, really captures the extraordinary danger of these times. And it is part of the reason why we wrote this book on the last two years of American politics, it is just unprecedented to think of a former V.P. to running against the person who put him on the ticket a mere eight years later — or 12 years later.

ISAACSON: But even more astounding is what happened on January 6th and how unprecedented that was and how everybody felt that day, democrats and Republicans. And yet, you say, this will not pass, and in some ways it has passed. The most amazing constitutional crisis we’ve had in 50 years has passed. Do you think the hearings that start this week could reignite interest, and perhaps outrage, about what happened to our democracy?

MARTIN: I think it will definitely reignite interest. I’m not sure about outrage because I think the people who were outraged after the 6th, and still are, probably don’t need to be reminded. And I’m not sure that those who have kind of moved on can fully be A, touched and B, outraged. Maybe they’ll be touched by it. I just think that Americans have a capacity to move on and they focus on the here and now of their own lives more than the health of the democracy or what happened on January the 6th. I think that is just a sort of commentary on who we are as a country. I am not terribly surprised by it Especially, Walter, in this very polarized moment. We are in our tribal camps and I think because of that siloing that we have in this country, it does make it harder to kind of summon outrage. It is very different moment from when Nixon was president, and that is why we call the book, “This Will Not Pass,” because what won’t pass is this tribalism, is this idea that we are sort of locked in red versus blue and sort of Cold War for years to come. You know, just think about the difference between now and the last president who left office in disgrace, Richard Nixon. You know, the idea, Walter, of Republican leaders in Congress in the 1970s, you know, trekking to San Clemente to kiss Nixon’s ring and try to get Nixon’s blessing for their primaries in 1976 would’ve been unthinkable because Nixon was a pariah. He was tainted by Watergate. His own party didn’t want to touch him. I think now, we just have such different information systems that the idea that Trump would sort of collectively be banished from the country is just never going to happen no matter his conduct because a good chunk of the country is just never going to care.

ISAACSON: One of the stars of this hearing, I suspect, is also one of the stars of your book. And that is Liz Cheney. And what do you think she can do? What were her feelings that you report in this book and how will that affect her role as, I think, co-chairman or vice chairman of the January 6th Committee as a Republican saying, wait a minute, we have to focus on what happened?

MARTIN: Yes. I mean, speaking of being radicalized by the events of the 6th, look no further than Liz Cheney who her — this is important to note, a down the line conservative. And this is what is so striking, Walter, about this era, that the Republican Party has become, you know, such a personality dominated faction in which the test of loyalty has nothing to do with guns or abortion rights or taxes or unions or regulations, it is entirely about fealty to one person. So, Liz Cheney hasn’t deviated from party orthodoxy. And that is what is different about this moment. You know, in the past, we have these grand clashes, Walter, within the two parties. It was always over ideology and ideas. I think that is what is different about the Republican Party today. Yes, Cheney is going to be a central player in these hearings. I think Pelosi has gained trust in her and I think Cheney wants to use this moment as kind of the clarion call for the country. I think she knows that she’s in a tough spot politically. She may not survive her primary in August. She may not be back to Congress next year. And this is her opportunity or best opportunity to use platform she has to speak out about what she thinks is the threat Donald Trump still poses to America and the constitution.

ISAACSON: Jonathan Martin, as always, thank you for joining us.

MARTIN: Thank you, Walter.