Could an Insurrectionist Be Your New Congressperson?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Next, a year since the January 6th capitol riot, how do we hold the instigators accountable. Some lawyers are resorting to the 14th Amendment, using a clause that bans anyone from holding office who has taken part in an insurrection. Now, voting rights organization Public Wise has launched an online database that details those who supported the insurrection. And here’s executive director Christina Baal-Owens speaking to Hari Sreenivasan about why this index is important.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Christina Baal-Owens, thanks for joining us. So, tell me about the Insurrection Index. If I’m scrolling across it right now on your site, what do I see?

CHRISTINA BAAL-OWENS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, PUBLIC WISE: So, the Insurrection Index was our answer to accountability. For some of us who worked in politics for a long time, we know that politics has a strangely short memory. So, some egregious things can happen and one election or two elections later it’s forgotten. So, the Insurrection Index was our attempt at Public Wise to memorialize the actions of January 6th and also, to create a single point of access of all the information and research that’s available about participants on January 6th. So, if you go to insurrectionindex.org, you’ll find 1,432 total records, and each of those records includes sort of the top lines of how people were involved and what we’re calling the receipts. So, screen grabs from their social media, information about where they’re located, any affiliations they might have, their social media handles and information that is particularly important to us is whether or not they’re a sitting elected official or if they have declared candidacy to run for office.

SREENIVASAN: Where do you get your financial support from? How do you make sure that is not used against you while you’re publishing this data?

BAAL-OWENS: Our financial support right now comes from individual donors. There’s actually been quite a bit of — there’s going to be quite a bit of donors who have given once they look at the Insurrection Index. Because we are not getting funding from foundations or any of these institutions or political parties, we have the ability to be completely objective. And I — you know, I’ve always said, you know, right now, if you look at the Insurrection Index, there are quite a few members of one political party. If we found — I said, our political director said this during the staff meeting and I believe this wholeheartedly, if we found a democrat that was an insurrectionist, there is a special place on this index for them, and we would include them and we would highlight them.

SREENIVASAN: So, how many people who have shown up in your Insurrection Index are running for office or are sitting elected officials?

BAAL-OWENS: So, right now, and I should say that the Insurrection Index, we are constantly updating it. It is not as if there was a set universe and we didn’t know going in, starting that, you know, X many people were involved in the insurrection. So, it is something even daily that is being updated. As of today, there are 209 sitting elected officials that we have records on in the Insurrection Index and 37 candidates. And I should say those are candidates who have declared. We expect that number to grow exponentially as the 2022 midterms approach.

SREENIVASAN: So, what does it take to get on your index? I mean, what is the threshold? What’s the bar that you hold and say, OK, this is strong enough where we need to publicize this person’s actions?

BAAL-OWENS: We had a lot of discussion about this within our team and what we landed on was people who attended, funded, organized, did outreach for or otherwise created the climate through the spread of misinformation that created the January 6th insurrection.

SREENIVASAN: OK. That last one, created the climate seems like the biggest gray area. I mean, obviously, if you’re convicted, I get it. If you were somebody who was an insurrectionist who was arrest on the scene, that there is record of that. But kind of going down from that level down to what is the category in spreading misinformation, for example? How do you qualify that?

BAAL-OWENS: So, we found that there are a lot of elected officials who are in public trust. Meaning that their salaries are paid by taxpayers and that are trusted messengers within their community who are spreading complete misinformation about elections and trying to create mistrust in the elections. So, I think a good example of that is Mark Finchem in Arizona. He’s running for secretary of state, which in Arizona is a lead election official. And if you look at his record in our index, there are social media screen grabs of him spreading information just complete, you know, mistruths, lies about the elections in Arizona and their validity. And we know that in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the current secretary of state calls it the fraud it. There was an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars that was spent on looking at the validity of Arizona elections and there was no — there was nothing found that can say anything about the Arizona elections not being valid. So, we consider someone like Mark Finchem an insurrectionist because he was spreading this information to lead people to attend this rally or otherwise, you know, and bring arms or, you know, participate in this event.

SREENIVASAN: Were there members, either elected officials, at the time who were breaking into the capitol that you have on your index or were engaged in violence or were charged with crimes that way?

BAAL-OWENS: I don’t believe we have anyone that was charged with a crime, but someone that I think is interesting is Ken Paxton who is the attorney general of the State of Texas. So, essentially, you know, the lead criminal justice of elected official in Texas was on stage with President Trump at a rally where there were calls to violence. So, you know, this was not — this is someone that we should be trusting to uphold the law and, you know, to look at ways that do not involve violence, you know, to protest, and he was there standing on stage while calls to actions to violence were being made.

SREENIVASAN: If people believe that President Biden is illegitimately in the office, then it seems much easier in their minds maybe to justify what happened because they think they’re doing the right thing by taking the country back. But that breaks down ideologically. I mean, when you survey Democrats versus Republicans on who believes what, it’s night and day.

BAAL-OWENS: We surveyed across the political spectrum people’s thoughts on the insurrections. And I will say that for a lot of the questions that we asked about thoughts on people who participated or people who attended, whether or not those people should hold public office, those went right down party lines. You know Democrats thought that, no, people who attended should not hold office, people who funded the rally should not hold office. Republicans thought, yes, it is fine. Also, I would say that Democrats thought that there was not enough attention paid to the insurrection generally. Republicans thought it was OK to sort of not memorialize it and let it go. Where we saw that there was bipartisan agreement was when we asked if someone, a sitting elected official, coordinated with insurrectionists in advance and made it easier for them to infiltrate the capital should they hold office? And the majority of both Democratic and Republican voters said no. So, I do think that there are some ideological divides here, but I also do think that is there is a group of moderate Republicans who are not buying into the, you know, legitimate political discourse messaging and believed that this was a real problem.

SREENIVASAN: You know, for someone who might be watching overseas and that legitimate political discourse phrase is so important because just recently the RNC censured two of its own members, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but also, they called what happened on January 6th legitimate political discourse.

BAAL-OWENS: Yes, I was pretty blown away by that statement, I have to say. And, you know, my initial thoughts are legitimate political discourse does not include a gallow being mounted outside the capitol for the express purpose of assassinating a sitting vice president. You know, it does not include national calls to arms and telling people to bring arms from all 50 states, and we have found that there are insurrectionists in all 50 states, to come to the capitol and to create harm and, you know, death to capitol police and members of Congress. These are not features of legitimate political discourse. And, obviously, I believe in legitimate political discourse, I just don’t think this was an example of it.

SREENIVASAN: One of the critiques online that you see as soon as people start searching up for the Insurrection Index is, oh, my gosh. You know what, McCarthy had lists, other people had lists before. This is the, you know, latest example of cancel culture, this is about silencing descent, this is — this creation of such a list is un-American. And what is your response to those kinds of critics?

BAAL-OWENS: I think the creation of this list is actually very American and I will say because our call to action here is not about doxing, it’s not about canceling, it is about making an informed choice to vote. So, every person, every voter has a right to search a candidate or a member of their community and see what their involvement was in a violent act against our government and make a decision for themselves on whether or not they choose to vote for that person. Obviously, Public Wise and I have a very strong opinion that anyone involved should not hold office and should not have the right to make decisions about taxpayer dollars, about legislation, about the administration of elections, but making public information easy to search is not McCarthyism, it is a very American concept to be able to educate yourself and to cast a vote that is informed.

SREENIVASAN: You know, how many of the people that are on your list are holding national office versus local ones?

BAAL-OWENS: What we have seen that there are insurrectionists running at every level. And why that is concerning to me is, you know, there’s members of Congress that would be insurrectionists or looking at legislation, voting on voting rights legislation and other legislation like the right to choose or immigration that would affect people’s lives. Then, at the state level, there’s people directly involved in either the administration like secretaries of state or decisions around whose vote counts and how often and when, meaning how elections are administered, when they’re able to vote. And, you know, from the school board level, people deciding how people are educated on civic education. So, the fact that we have found records that are on every level is really concerning.

SREENIVASAN: You know, is there a way to distinguish, for example, somebody’s social media presence who might get them on the insurrectionist list versus the people who were actually smashing windows and hurtling police officers and destroying property and doing that on deck, right? I mean, it’s one of those things where — when people have a tendency to kind of minimize and summarize very quickly, oh, his name or her name is on the list. And then, it’s well, no, you know what, it’s just tweeting, it’s just this stuff. They weren’t actually in D.C. I mean, how do you make sure that people understand what they’re seeing?

BAAL-OWENS: So, the — we have the actual screen grabs. You can see what people said and what people did. So, people can make that decision for themselves. There’s also the topline. We have outlined who was charged, who was not. You can actually search by charges. And, you know, there were various charges brought against people who have participated. I would just also go back to say that I don’t think it’s just tweeting. I think spreading information about elections and trying to erode people’s trust in elections in such a way that would, you know, lead to them and also, you know, some of them — some of the tweets are things like the bus is leaving from here and, you know, we funded a bus to go to this rally. You know, those are pretty egregious and those are things that should be called out. But each record does outline exactly why we included them and people can make their own decision based on that.

SREENIVASAN: Given that there are tax on voting rights and given that there is continued gerrymandering and that there’s no campaign finance reform, all these things seem to be happening at a time, as you point out, when there is a rise in disinformation. Do you think that the group of people who believe that the insurrection was legitimate will grow?

BAAL-OWENS: I think that group of people will grow if we allow insurrectionists to hold office and to have larger platforms. And, you know, I think there could be growth and, you know, there will be ebbing and weaning in the people that believe in these far-right conspiracies and who have, you know, a lot of mistrust in validly held elections, but I think the way that we sort of pick away at this issue, and it is a real issue, is not allowing those people to be able to officiate elections and then, make them really untrustworthy for everyone. And that’s why I feel like, you know, there’s a lot of really amazing work being done by voting rights advocates to combat voter suppression, to fight back against the laws that are happening at the state level. And what Public Wise has chosen as our lane and that we’re hoping that other people will join us is keeping these folks out of office so that this can’t be codified and solidifies any further.

SREENIVASAN: As we head into this midterm, what are you seeing in terms of who is being targeted, where the kind of miscommunication or I should say, disinformation and misinformation is? What are the different communities that you see this happening that’s a little bit under the radar and we’re not paying attention?

BAAL-OWENS: Well, one of the reasons that we focus voters of color is that our research showed us both our, you know, formal research and then, working with our partners who are working in different communities of color and especially immigrant communities, we can see that there is messaging that is directly sent to these communities that give completely false information on elections. And, I mean, as basic as what day the election is.

SREENIVASAN: Wow.

BAAL-OWENS: And I think some of these communities are specifically vulnerable because they’re learning a new election system, which is difficult even for someone like me where this is my full-time job to know every state and to know, you know, when you vote, where you vote and how you find that information. And we found really interesting things like in immigrant communities there’s a lot of organizing that happens on WhatsApp and there were — there was messaging going out from groups that, you know, were questionable that people weren’t sure whether to trust it or not because they had also gotten information that was completely false about elections. So, we really do work with groups that are spreading correct information and that are doing a lot of work within communities through trusted messengers to make sure that people have the right information they need to participate in elections.

SREENIVASAN: What worries you heading into the midterms now?

BAAL-OWENS: I worry about a few things. I worry about fatigue. We are at a turning point in the history of our country and at the shape of our democracy. And, you know, as someone who especially comes from immigrant family, the U.S. has always been held as a beacon of democracy, an example of how elections should be held. And right now, after January 6th, after all of these laws that are being passed at the state level to suppress votes, we’re really struggling for a functioning democracy. And part of the misinformation and the goals of insurrectionists, which I think is not just a day, it’s a larger movement, part of that is to create the mistrust that stops people from voting and that’s another form of voter suppression. So, I understand that people are exhausted, but we still have to participate. If we want any chance of preserving our democracy for future generations and future elections, we still have to participate and we still need to be informed.

SREENIVASAN: Christina Baal-Owens, executive director of Public Wise, thanks so much for joining us.

BAAL-OWENS: Thank you for having me.