Jan. 6 Then & Now: The Insurrection Blueprint (with Tom Joscelyn)

Welcome to another episode of The Oath and the Office. I'm John Fuglesang, so pleased to be with you and so pleased to welcome the professor, the author, Corey Bretschneider, who I have read for years in the New York Times and MSNBC, and I read The Oath and the Office, and I read The Presidents and the People, And now I get to do a podcast with him. Professor, it's good to see you. Thanks, John. And it's been a real pleasure doing this with you. And we have quite a show today. Of course, we're going to talk about the horror that ICE is inflicting on Minnesota, on the attempts to fight back and the hopeful ways in which people are fighting back in the courts and through protest. And then, of course, we have a guest. I think it's going to be one of our most important episodes, literally the author of the January 6th report, senior staff to the January 6th committee. And it's just the person who really knows the most about the details of what unfolded on January 6th, the truth of what happened. And I also want to ask him, too, about, well, part of it, about how we correct the record, because it's really a history that's being written by Trump and his cronies to undermine what really happened. I can't wait for it. I'm really pleased. Let's talk about what's going on now. Saturday, federal agents killed another Minnesotan shooting a VA ICU nurse named Alex Petty seven to ten times. We're not sure yet. After wrestling him to the ground and subduing him, he was filming ICE agents, which is legal in all 50 states, and tackled after helping another woman off the ground. Now, for those who saw the video, they didn't kill him while he was committing a crime. They didn't kill him while he was threatening civilians or while he was fleeing or brandishing a weapon. Nor was he protesting, nor was he interfering with law enforcement. They disarmed and then killed an American citizen while he was trying to protect a woman who had just been shoved to the ground and peppered sprayed by a masked armed government agent. As folks probably know by now, he was a registered nurse, an ICU caregiver for vets, a man with no criminal record, a man who spent his life healing bodies broken by violence, and he was killed for trying to stop it. Following the shooting, Border Patrol humunculus Greg Bovino and a bunch of ICE agents, including those who killed him, have been reassigned out of Minnesota, but they remain on duty. Corey, when federal agents kill a civilian and then immediately try to control the narrative, immediately, as we saw with Renee Good, lie about the victim, lie about the circumstance, and essentially ask us to not believe what our own eyes tell us on video. What core democratic principles are being violated already? It's almost a case study if you want to think about what democracy is and should be. a case study and how to undermine it because it is the definition of authoritarianism the multiple ways that in minnesota and with the second killing that they're systematically trying to destroy our democracy i've used the term self-coup some people worried well that suggests a kind of violence well here it is the violence was not far from the surface and now with a second killing really execution if you see that video uh you see that this is um an attempt to create a group of stormtroopers employed by the government to shut down free speech and what better example than that than to uh look at this horrible second killing uh where um what was he what did uh he have he had a this icu nurse had nothing more than a camera that he was recording what was going on now he did have a weapon on him, which was perfectly legal under Minnesota law, but he wasn't brandishing it. He wasn't threatening them with it. And the lies that they're telling also speak to the way that they're trying to shut down free speech, not just with murder and with the use of force, but by really denying us access to basic information of what's happening, lying to our faces, gaslighting us as we see these videos over and over. It's clear what happened and claiming that somehow Now, this was a terrorist that he was intent on killing people at the scene. None of that is true. And yet Stephen Miller said precisely that. So you ask, you know, what does it teach us about democracy? First of all, the right to protest. If you're an authoritarian, shut it down with the use of force. That's what the most aggressive authoritarians do. What else? Change the information flow so that we can have access to the truth. Those are the two things most obviously that we're seeing right now. You know, Corey, my friend, the great comedian Rick Overton likes to say about everybody, all citizens having a video camera in their pocket. He refers to the phone as little brother is watching. Little brother is watching. And we've already seen now if Renee Good hadn't been filmed, we'd assume she was a terrorist. If this man hadn't been filmed, the government lies would stick that he had attacked agents. Now, folks watching us or listening to us have probably already seen the videos. If you haven't, I highly recommend them. It shows Alex Preddy in the middle of the street, legally recording. He waves a car through traffic. He's calm. He's not shouting threats. He's not a protester. That's another lie they keep telling. There's like half a dozen people out there. There is no protest. There's people on the sidewalk watching. And this DHS agent approaches a woman near Mr. Preddy. Voices are raised. Mr. Preddy moves the woman toward the sidewalk, away from the agent. This other woman comes over and yells at the officer. and the officer, because these are not men, shoves that woman to the ground. And that's the pivot point. Alex Preddy then, instinctively, because this guy is a man who has compassion for people, steps in between the agent and the woman that's just been shoved to the ground, and he softly places one hand on the agent, raises the other hand in the air, like hands up, right? Like his whole body language, Corey, is like, I'm not attacking you. It's not domination. It's de-escalation by a civilian. seeing a woman get hurt, and the agent responds by pepper-spraying the guy in the face. And he turns away. He's still filming. He bends to help the woman. The agent sprays both Preti and the woman. More agents come in. At least six officers tackle this guy, spray him again. They punch him. And, Corey, my understanding is that pepper-spraying a person while trying to handcuff them when they haven't broken any laws doesn't really create compliance. I mean, it creates panic and involuntary resistance. Trained cops would know this. Now, we've heard the initial claim. They said the director of Homeland Security said he pulled a gun on ice. How dangerous? How dangerous is it when the state not just lies reflexively to justify lethal force, but when they lie so broadly and stupidly believing they can get away with it? I mean, this is what you mean when you talk about the erosion of truth as a democratic value. that's right that Stephen Miller thought he could call this person a terrorist and and claim that he was somehow involved in the violent act when we have video after video that that is showing that thankfully we do have these videos because as you say not only would they have gotten away with it the first case they would have gotten away with it in the case of Alex pretty if we didn't have evidence at least a large portion of their base and many Americans who are sort of on the fence about all this might have thought you know this is really what happened it was a justifiable attack But giving you access to the video shows you not just that he didn't pull a gun on them, but that he was disarmed. In fact, they pulled the gun away that he was lawfully carrying well before they began to shoot him multiple times, including after he was clearly incapacitated. This was a panicked group of, as you say, untrained, really, you know, thugs, I think is the right way to describe them. And they're like a violent gang that are trying to act at the behest of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller. And there is a kind of chaos that comes out of the video that that really is what this is about. Now, you know, I love your piece, John, on Substack about, you know, don't invoke the Nazis unless it's called for. Well, I'm going to invoke a comparison because there were a group of stormtroopers untrained in Nazi Germany. The SA, later replaced by the SS, shows you that the kind of training that we're talking about is what's important. We have to talk about training for civil liberties protection, not just for effectiveness in subduing people. And, you know, that's what you have here, a group of stormtroopers acting chaotically, untrained. Many of them, by the way, trained online. That's what's coming out about their training, that they actually haven't been trained in person. Correct. A $50,000 bonus for ICE recruitment. These are not professionals. No. And so we'll get into this later, but that's why this is systemic. It really is. Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, who we talked about the need to impeach, ordering a group of really chaotic, untrained ICE agents. I hesitate to use that term. It sounds too legitimate. Thugs to attack people exercising no more than their First Amendment rights. The fact that he had the phone up, what is that? That is the exercise of something that is constitutionally protected activity. And yet they murdered him for it. Now, some important facts, Professor, that are never going to go away here. As you mentioned, he was a lawful gun owner. He had a permit to carry. Never drew his weapon, never pointed it, never threatened anyone with it. Video appears to show an officer removing the gun from Freddie's holster, and then someone yells, gun, and then the shooting starts. And he's shot between six and ten times by at least two officers. Apparently, several of those are in the back. It's going to be very interesting when the autopsy comes out, and they have to give his body back to his family. And afterwards, you can hear the officers saying, where's the gun? Where's the gun? Like nearly a minute after this poor man's been shot and is motionless. So think about that. If the gun was justification for killing this man, they didn't even know where it was after killing him. This was not controlled force. This was not discipline. The NRA has spoken out about this here and there in pockets. But generally, we've seen tons of our right wing friends who love Kyle Rittenhouse saying this guy should never have brought a gun to a protest. First off, he wasn't at a protest. He was on the streets of America with his firearm. And the liberals, Corey, the liberals are the ones standing up for the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, both of which were taken away from this man. So, I mean, what is the silence of these gun douchebags who've always just praised Kyle Rittenhouse and just bring your gun everywhere, bring your gun to Subway to buy a sandwich? I mean, what does this tell us about those whose rights they actually defend? I think this moment exposes the myth that gun absolutism, what we've gotten used to, is about liberty. Apparently, it really is just about political alignment, as with so much else with right wing fascists in our country. Laws are to be used on the other guy, not for us. That's right, and it's why this really is an assault on the rule of law, because as much as the NRA and other groups talk about gun rights, well, you know, we can disagree with them about the extent to which the Second Amendment protects an individual right. I actually don't think it protects one at all. I think it's clear from the text of the Second Amendment that it's about the outdated and anachronistic institution of militias. But the reality is that this isn't about the Second Amendment, whether it's good or bad or whether we should have more protective gun laws. The laws on the books protect exactly what he was doing. And we've seen at protest after protest people armed who weren't killed, including in state houses. You mentioned Kyle Rittenhouse, instances in which they weren't murdered by ICE agents or by police. So the fact is that he was acting lawfully. There was nothing about his possession of that gun that should have put him in danger. Now, the first people who should have been speaking out about this in the clearest possible voice are the NRA, are the defenders of the Second Amendment, because if you believe there's a Second Amendment right, this is almost a paradigmatic case of it being violated, him being murdered for legally holding a gun on his person. He owned it legally. You know, he wasn't brandishing it or using it in an illegal way. So not only, as you say, were his First Amendment free speech rights shut down, but his like it or not, his Second Amendment rights, he was doing nothing illegal. And that's part of the tragedy here that we're seeing the kind of fake defense of the Constitution that you often get for the right. I'm going to use a phrase. It used to be said this is one of the worst moments of the 60s, that free speech for the left, not for the right. That's not a good way to think about free speech. Free speech is a right of all Americans, whether we agree with them or not. And that's got to be true, too, of the Second Amendment. We can't have a Second Amendment for the right, not for the left. Exactly. And again, wanting to have public safety regulations on who gets to carry firearms that were never intended for civilian use does not mean you want to get rid of our Second Amendment rights. The very fact that citizens aren't allowed to own white phosphorus or tactical nukes shows we already accept some limitations on our Second Amendment rights. I'm not against concealed carry and permits. I'm against civilians having AR-15s and high-capacity magazines and a crummy system of background checks. But I want to bring it back to this administration because they lied that he attacked the officers, that he brandished a gun. I think it was Bovino who said he arrived intending to massacre law enforcement. The cops fired defensive shots. It's all rationales for these folks to say he deserved to be murdered with no trial, having neverly drawn his legally purchased firearm. Kyle Rittenhouse brought an AR-15 he wasn't legally old enough to purchase yet to a protest, killed people. But they were people the right also think deserved violent death. So it's OK, just as this is OK, because the right thinks Alex Preddy deserved violent death. I mean, it looks bizarre if you think of it as a one off. But if you think of it in the wider context, which is an assault on free speech itself, an assault on the rule of law, it makes perfect sense because really. And you're hearing this from I just heard Megan Kelly and other right wing commentators saying, well, if he didn't want to be murdered, he shouldn't have been at a protest. What? Well, yeah, right to protest is our our First Amendment right. It's the core of the Constitution to object to the government. The Declaration of Independence, our founding, one of our founding documents is about the right to protest, the First Amendment, right to free speech, to petition the government, to assemble. All of that is the core to what American democracy is. And now we have commentators saying, stay home if you don't want to be murdered. I don't think so. And that's why the American people are fighting back in such a strong way. Rather than backing down or being scared, we've seen the emergence, I think, of the democratic fire that we need in this constitution. Oh, it's not just democratic, Corey. This is bigger than a political dodgeball team. This is for independents. This is for responsible conservatives. I mean, the coalition, the beautiful multiracial. Right on. Well, in that case, can I just say this was not an isolated incident? There's been five federal shootings during these operations in January. At least six immigrants are dead in federal detention this month alone, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, who was murdered in El Paso. At first, the government said that he just died of natural causes. Then they said it was suicide. And now the autopsies revealed it was homicide, which is what his cellmates say. They are murdering people on our tax dollar. And again, 3,000 agents deployed to Minnesota for what is this stupid thing called? Operation Metro Surge. That's more agents than the combined force of the 10 largest twin cities police departments. And I think, Professor, that Alex Preddy's gravest mistake was touching the officer. He did it gently. He had one hand in Ray saying, it's okay, dude. He was trying to reassure him. He's protecting someone on the ground saying it's okay. He did it in the most non-aggressive, de-escalatory way possible, Corey. It should have earned him some space, but it earned him death. It seems that it was putting his hand on this ICE agent completely nonviolently, completely gently, that sealed his fate. That was all the excuse a man who wants to kill someone needs to kill someone when he has a badge. I want to ask you, what makes this killing qualitatively different from even other cases of police violence that we've seen? How do you separate this from, besides the fact that it was a white guy, how do you separate this from the other police killings that we've seen? Well, I think in most police departments, first of all, the police are not masked. We know instantly who did it. Instantly, there's accountability. Even if there's a problem within the ranks or in the culture of a particular police department, there's going to be an investigation, not just internally from the police department itself, but from the district attorney to hold these people to account. So in some of the most brutal instances of police killing, as terrible as they are, the law is there. And what's happening here is the opposite, that the federal government, ICE, is obstructing the investigators from even coming onto the scene. They're trying to block investigators from finding out what happened. They will certainly try very hard to keep charges from being filed, although absolutely I think charges here in the case of this killing need to be filed unless we're missing something that's not obvious from everything that we've seen. It looks like this is a case in which there should be an indictment for murder. Right. And now, you know, that's what's different here, that we have a not a police force. I wouldn't call it that. We have force that's ostensibly, supposedly going after dangerous, undocumented people. But what it's really doing is stirring up protest, acting in a way that's going to make people angry and then using it as a chance to clamp down on political opponents, political enemies, dissent. And that's not what a normal police force is doing. Yeah, I should take a moment to commend the Minneapolis-St. Paul police departments, because they have shown extraordinary restraint. This is the same department that made history when a commissioner testified against one of his own policemen for murdering a citizen, and that would be Derek Chauvin after the murder of George Floyd. So, I mean, we already have the Minneapolis Police Department in a very special place in terms of justice and progress. And kudos to the Minneapolis local media as well for being incredible and responsible on all this. But we learned last night that Greg Bovino America shortest Nazi is not being fired or demoted They moving him around They cycling some of these guys out of there and they moving Greg Bovino around like a predator priest Corey we discussed Trump hires these idiots because they won't tell him he's breaking the law, right? The idiots he hires, like the Kash Patels and the Kristi Gnomes and the Pete Heggsess, they won't tell him he's breaking the law. So that means when he gets in trouble for something, the idiots don't know they're also going to be the fall guys. So Bovino says he's going to retire now. We still don't know the name of the shooters. At what point does the secrecy itself become a form of injustice, Professor? If ordinary citizens obstructed a homicide investigation like we're seeing here, they're not letting the local cops investigate any of this. If ordinary citizens obstructed a homicide investigation the way the feds are doing here, what would happen to those citizens? Yeah, no question that you'd be guilty of a crime of obstruction of justice. But unfortunately, there are legal resources, including qualified immunity, that are going to be used to try to block this investigation and block the law from being carried out. There are obvious remedies. Congress could fix this tomorrow. It could have a law that strips ICE agents of qualified immunity. We need that. Local prosecutors, I think, have to pursue these charges, even though, of course, there'll be legal objections. They might prevail. And I should say, too, the other hope that I have is there's a lawsuit that's challenging not just individual actions by ICE, but their entitlement to be there. What are they doing there? That argument that I gave you that suggests that they're supposedly cracking down on undocumented people who have also committed violent crimes just doesn't ring true. So under our 10th Amendment, we've talked about this. It's local government, state government and cities that are in charge of basic policing. And the federal government has no generalized police power. That's right. So that I'm hopeful about that argument. I think it's really important. It's before a judge who seems to have a lot of integrity. And, you know, in addition to seeing justice done in this case, the most important thing is that the illegal policy that has ICE there in the first place be pushed back on. You know, before the break, I just want to ask, I want to go deeper on this, but we're seeing judge after judge across jurisdictions rebuke ICE for ignoring warrants and due process and just basic constitutional limits. What is this pattern, Corey, of repeated rebukes by different judges? Tell us about the agency itself. Well, I think that, you know, that's why this overall argument that the whole presence of ICE in Minnesota is illegal is so important. because what's frustrating, I'm sure, for the judges on the bench is as they see case after case. And by the way, ICE is losing almost all these cases within the district court, is that there's obviously a systematic abuse of democratic and constitutional rights happening by ICE. And one of the problems here, too, we've talked about how in the birthright citizenship case, the ability of district court judges to issue universal injunctions to stop ICE, period, from acting illegally, how that has largely been stripped away. And unfortunately, that is coinciding with a massive attack by this rogue agency on our rights, including our right to actually be alive. You know, so courts, I think, are in a frustrating moment where they're pushing back, pushing back. But each of these individual things doesn't do what we really need to do, which is stop ICE universally throughout the country from its constitutional abuses. Well, when we come back, I want to talk about the DOJ interference into the case, how they tried to shut down a civil rights investigation for Renee Good and are doing the same thing right here. And also talk about what's the opposition going to do. There's now talks about defunding ICE and maybe another government shutdown. So I want to ask you a bit about the power of the purse. We will be right back on The Oath and the Office. Hey, all. Glenn Kirshner here. Friends, I hope you'll join me on my audio podcast, Justice Matters. We talk about not only the legal issues of the day, but we also talk about the need to reform ethics in our government. Here's one example. The oath of office. You know the one. I do solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Let's add 22 words to that oath. Quote, and I will promptly report any instances of crime and or corruption by government officials and employees of which I become aware. Friends, our democracy is worth fighting for. Join us in this fight. Because justice matters. Look for Justice Matters wherever you ordinarily find your podcasts. Welcome back to The Oath in the Office. I'm John Fuglesang. You know, Corey, the Second Amendment does not say the right of the people to keep and bear arms unless federal agents get nervous. And the Fourth Amendment does not permit execution for possession. And the Fourteenth Amendment does not allow unequal application of rights based on political convenience. I learned all that from you. So is it fair to say that ICE is operating less like a law enforcement body? And more like an executive enforcement arm that is seemingly untethered by what we call laws? Yes, no question. And I'd go even further that it really is a force, a government agency that is devoted to the shutdown of democracy. And if that sounds like an exaggeration, we don't have to only look at the two cases that we've talked about in the last segment in depth, including the claims afterwards that the fact that this protester had a legal gun was one of the basis for what they were doing, total disregard for the First and Second Amendment. We've talked about that. But the Fourth Amendment, which you mentioned, which protects us in our homes against unreasonable search and seizure, one of the main things that the Constitution is about after the tyranny of the British system of disregarding people's integrity of their homes and providing for a judicial warrant, And I'm going to say more about that as necessary to enter the home after showing in court. And I'm using these emphasizing these words like court and judicial warrant purposely, because that's really the system that we have these external checks that are guaranteed in the Constitution. Now, if you listen to the vice president, maybe I'm jumping the gun here. But but, you know, if you listen to him defend what's going on, he says, well, we have different kinds of warrants. We have administrative. Well, that's just a trick. I mean, he's really trying to say, well, ICE can give itself a warrant. The administration, the executive branch, which is what they mean by administrative, can give itself a warrant. And we don't need these judicial warrants. That's nothing less than the destruction of the Constitution and the total disregard of it. Boy, that's going to really ruin all the respect I've built up for J.D. Vance. You know, lawyers for the state of Minnesota are arguing that this whole surge violates the Tenth Amendment, which protects states from encroachment by the federal government. I learned that from my conservative friends years ago. And that provision has been held both to stop the feds from commandeering local officials and from using coercion to force the state to comply with federal demands, which is really interesting now that we've heard that Pam Bondi stupidly sent a letter to Tim Walls saying more or less a quid pro quo that we will withdraw our forces from your state if you give us control of your voter rolls. I mean, the names are public information, but the actual, that's how you rig an election. So seemingly, if Pam Bondi was a smart fascist, she would have just sent an aide to verbally convey this to a Wall's aide, but being stupid and presumably thinking there will never be any consequences to her for any of this because she enjoys full immunity. She put it in writing. So, I mean, we've got it in paper. We know that they're violating the Tenth Commandment using coercion to make the state comply with federal demands, right? That was a great slip, but you said commandment. Oh, sorry. Well, there you go. I'm always talking tabernacles. But on top of this, we also know that the senior DOJ officials tried to shut down a civil rights investigation into the killing of Renee Good last week. Because normally when a cop murders a citizen, you always have the DOJ civil rights division. And in this case, the guy said effing bitch. So it indicates bias. And they wouldn't allow the division to investigate, just like they won't allow local police to investigate. I mean, it's a cover-up. And isn't this the definition of weaponizing the justice system? I mean, they're smearing the victim to put off an investigation. Yeah, I mean, to launch on the theme, they don't know that they're doing this, but they are inadvertently giving us evidence after evidence of their illegal attempt to shut down our basic liberties and to undermine our Constitution. Tying together the question you asked now from our previous exchange, The reason I know that they're trying to subvert the Fourth Amendment is because they put it in a memo that says, you know, you don't need a judicial warrant anymore, even though ICE had always relied on judicial warrants before barging into people's houses. Now there's a memo that says, no, you only need this administrative warrant. In other words, you need us to tell ourselves that you can ICE to tell ourselves that we could and the administration to tell ourselves that we can bust into people's houses for whatever reason we want. That is a destruction of democracy. The other thing that we're seeing, and you brought this out, too, in the demands to hand over all sorts of information so that the administration can, I'm sure, do lots of evil with it. What is that about? It's a kind of coercion of the states. And, you know, I want to go back to this principle that we've brought out because the Tenth Amendment, although it has a terrible history of being used to subvert civil rights in the mid 20th century, right now it is one of our best tools for fighting back against an evil and, yes, fascistic federal government. What it says is, and I really want to emphasize this, this isn't controversial for liberals or conservatives, it's basic constitutional law. What it says is it makes clear that our system is one of what's known as dual sovereignty. The federal government has certain limited powers granted to it by the Constitution. And what the Tenth Amendment says is those powers that aren't given to the federal government are reserved to the states. What is the bottom line of that? That when it comes to policing, and more generally the police powers to ensure the health, safety, and morals of a population, that's the legal terminology, there is no general power of the federal government, no general police power. They're local powers. And what you see Bondi trying to do is through coercion say, well, give us what we want, or we're going to invade your state. We're going to disregard the Tenth Amendment, disregard local sovereignty. And one of the best chances that we have right now is a case that deals with not just the individual tactics of ICE, but the overall violation of the Tenth Amendment. That's in federal court right now, and that's one of the cases. We don't have a ruling on it yet. They had a hearing very recently, a few days from when you'll be hearing this. And I'm hopeful that they're going to see that this is exactly what the framers feared, not just the break-in of houses, the Fourth Amendment point, but the subversion of the Tenth Amendment, The idea that policing is local, not national. So, yeah, I mean, they're turning state violence into political leverage, right? That's the escalation. Federal violence is no longer just coercive. Now it's transactional. ICE is not just being deployed based on public safety needs. We know they're turning it on and off like a bargaining chip to pry loose a state election infrastructure. So once you have the voter rolls, you know which voters to challenge, which registrations to purge, which ballots to throw out, which districts to throw into bogus investigations. I mean, I got to say, the judges in these Minnesota ICE hearings, it seems to me as a layperson professor, they've been unusually blunt and some of them are openly furious. I mean, when judges speak this way, what does that signal to you institutionally? Is a bunch of angry judges a sign of courts failing or is it a sign of the judicial branch doing its job? Well, I think it's a brilliant question. It goes to the heart of what's happening. I think at the same time, two things are happening. The constitutional violations are so many. And again and again, ICE is being called out for its illegal behavior that judges have had enough. And these aren't hard cases, I should say, you know, saying that you can enter a house without a judicial warrant. Not a hard case. I think, too, deploying ICE, you know, with a subterfuge of trying to arrest undocumented people who are violent. when what you're really doing is trying to shut down protests, violation not just of the Tenth Amendment, but of course of the First Amendment, right to free speech, right to assembly, that all that is so obviously constitutional, that's why you're getting these screaming voices. But at the same time, it's a frustration because there is no longer the ability of federal district court judges to institute these universal injunctions. And that's part of the frustration, too, that you're seeing. So you're seeing a strength in standing up to unconstitutional behavior by ICE and the administration, but you're also seeing a frustration in the fact that they're being bombarded and that they lack a lot of the tools that they had until recently to fight back against it. So in that case, then, the DOJ is filing these criminal complaints against seven of the protesters who went inside the St. Paul Church last weekend. I know this seems like a thousand years ago, but I love this protest. They they they weren't mean. They didn't break anything. They went in and did what Christ did. They flipped tables in the place of worship because of injustice, because this pastor in the church is also an ICE official. And, you know, both God and Jesus are pretty thorough about welcoming the stranger. And so they had a nonviolent protest inside a church. And this was outrageous. Not the dead bodies of Americans, but this. So they filed criminal complaints against seven of these protesters. They tried to charge Don Lemon for filming it. But the magistrate judge refused to sign the warrant against him. This shows how scared they are, I think, Professor, as well as Pam Bondi's memo being public. I mean, this sort of just says nothing but fear to me and authoritarianism that they think is going to be a lot more popular than it really is. Yeah, I mean, the examples are just so numerous of the instances in which they're shutting down protests. We've been focusing on the protests in Minnesota against ICE. But even this protest in the church, they're abusing this 19th century law that basically that's meant to protect civil rights and to protect against violent incursions in churches that will shut down religious freedom. But the way that statute has to be understood is as consistent with the First Amendment. And so the right to protest, and in this story, one of the leaders of the church in question was supposedly working for ICE, and so it was an anti-ICE protest in the church. You know, that's an abuse to use a statute that's meant to protect civil rights in order to shut down one of the main civil liberties, which is free speech. And just to show you that this is what they're doing. Now, they tried to charge a journalist, Don Lemon. and it didn't work. But that's what's going on here, too, when it comes to the less famous people who are trying to protest. So then this leaked memo that you mentioned that reportedly directs ICE agents to enter private property, regardless of legal standing or warrants, I mean, it's just open constitutional defiance, right? I mean, at what point does obeying an order like that expose agents themselves to criminal liability? Because again, these are state charges, Trump won't be in power forever, and there's no statute of limitations on killing people. Well, it's just the overall attempt to shut down our civil liberties is being documented, and what this leaked memo shows is that. And I'll elaborate. The Fourth Amendment couldn't be more clear. You have a right to be free from government just walking into your house willy-nilly for any reason. Now, what's the check on that? It's the judiciary, and the judiciary has to be shown evidence that there is a reason to search your house, that there's reasonable search and seizure. Now, once you get rid of that, what's left? It's the government giving orders to itself. I'll tie this to my theme of the self-coup. Remember, the definition of a self-coup is the administration, the executive branch, destroying the other branches by aggrandizing itself. This one memo strikes me as the ICE memo, an example of doing just that. And they're claiming, okay, now our lawyers have looked at this and said, yeah, you can enter houses. Their lawyers have said, get rid of the Fourth Amendment. How frightening. So, Corey, before we hit a break, I want to ask you this. Defunding ICE used to sound really radical. And I've been telling people who call the SiriusXM show, this is just like abolish the police. It's something the left does so Democrats have a chance to show how moderate they are. I mean, abolish the police was a gift to Joe Biden's campaign because it allowed him to say, folks, I'm not like Donald Trump, but I'm not like those far left. I mean, this is what Democrats, even the ones I like, always do. But now, after everything we've seen, dead civilians, naked stupid lies, destroyed evidence, judicial rebukes, why does it feel like it's almost inevitable? I mean, constitutionally speaking, is the power of the purse Congress's only remaining check on a lawless executive? I would say the difference between abolish the police and abolish ICE is that ICE is not a police force. It lacks any of the basic training, the standards that are used to protect civil liberties in policing to protect, after all, not just our security but our liberty. Instead, what you have is a gang of thugs that are murdering people in the streets that are far from respecting the right to protest, that are, in the case that we've been talking about at length, murdered somebody for having a camera. And, you know, even if he had a gun on him, again, it was a protected Second Amendment right that he was not brandishing that gun. So there is no training, and by training I'll be specific, meaning to respect civil liberties in the way that you get in police force. And that's systematic. And you see that in places like the memo saying, you know, invade houses without a judicial warrant, clearly illegal. You see that in the pattern of violence and abuse. So the Democratic Party has to do something. And I would say at minimum, the limit on funding is one of the few places where they're able to push back. They need, because of the filbusters, 60 votes to get this funding through in the Senate. And that a place where the Democratic Party can finally start to stand up for civil liberties So I think they have no choice When it comes to whether to abolish ICE or try to reform it I mean you know there is something systematically wrong with this agency and this isn't going to happen, you know, unless the Democratic Party takes power. But I do think that we have to look in depth at who these people are. Let's just talk about who's been hired for the $50,000 bonus. I said this before, but I'll say it again, online training, really. So either massive reform or, yes, reconstituting under a different umbrella. Yeah. Those who are going to do the kind of enforcement that ICE is rightly charged with doing. OK, well, in that case, one more really quick question, because I know our guest is waiting. So the Democrats now are saying, hey, we may allow a partial government shutdown again, unless ICE gets reined in. Now, historically, we've talked on the show in the past about how this kind of brinksmanship doesn't usually work out, but I don't see how the Democrats cannot take a stand right now with these bodies of dead citizens in the street. Is a shutdown more dangerous than continuing to fund an agency that openly defies courts? Well, government has proper functions. Its functions are to respect the citizens' rights, to ensure for the public welfare. It's not doing that right now. It's engaged in an authoritarian exercise to try to destroy civil liberties and destroy democracy. So the idea of shutting down a government that's doing that, we're used to thinking of the state as legitimate. Well, it's on the brink of illegitimacy. And so I think, yes, shutting it down seems like a smart place to start. At least there's some bargaining power. And at least it will limit that kind of funding that there is now for this large scale abuse. Thank you very much. Yeah, just please, Democrats, Use the Constitution and outrage and basic morality as leverage and ask for more than you'll know you'll get for once. Okay, we've got to take a break. I'm very excited about our guest. When we come back, we'll talk all about January 6th, which has quite a few not surprising links to what we're seeing in Minneapolis. This is The Oath in the Office. One million downloads. That's the listenership that Good News for Lefties has gotten since we started bringing you positive news stories for progressives every day of the week. These may be difficult times, and the headlines may seem bleak. But if you believe in justice, progress, and democracy, you are not alone. There are millions like you. And there is reason for hope in the news every single day. That's what we remind you on Good News for Lefties and America. Every day of the week, positive news stories for progressive listeners. Because no matter how disturbing the headlines might be, there's always hope that we can build on for a better tomorrow. One million downloads. And more coming. Good news for lefties and America. Listen on this platform at goodnewsforlefties.com or wherever podcasts are heard. Welcome back to The Oath and the Office. You know, Corey, the five-year anniversary of January 6th feels like it's already five years ago, and yet these events are all inextricably linked. Violence against citizens towards corrupt ends, it seems never go out of style, so I'm really excited and honored about today's guest. Absolutely. It's my pleasure to introduce Tom Jocelyn, who was one of the principal authors of the January 6th report and senior staff member of the January 6th committee, which did so much to uncover what really went on in January 6th. And I'm looking forward to a deep dive into what actually did happen, what the report showed and the details behind it. Tom, as a way of just jumping off. Hello, sir. Thank you. Yes, welcome. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be with you. Thank you. Great. And I should say, too, Tom had me on his Just Security podcast, which was really a pleasure. So I'm looking forward to it. Well, I'm sure as soon as I'm an Ivy League law professor, he'll have me on his show as well. Tom, I mean, I just have a first way just to get you introduced to our listeners. I mean, tell us how you came to have this position. It's a sort of extraordinary role in history that you were a senior staffer for the committee that uncovered what happened and really wrote the official account of what happened, including for the first time, taught us about not just the violence at the Capitol, but the widespread plot to undermine the election. So how did this happen? I ask myself that question a lot, too. You know, I have a very strange career story, very circuitous route to the January 6th committee. You know, I originally I went to the University of Chicago. I graduated in three years. I said, hopefully I don't offend you, Corey, but I don't want to go back to academia at all. That's it for me. I'm out. And I went into economics, became an economic consultant, and I sort of was known for running these very large research projects. I'm basically a research nerd who likes to assimilate and accumulate a bunch of different data and evidence and then figure out how to tell the story from it. So I started doing that at a very young age. And then eventually I migrated to after 9-11, I started doing my own independent research on extremism and terrorism and built up my own career on the side doing that type of work and eventually became an expert on counterterrorism, counter extremism. Actually was the chief counterterrorism advisor to Mayor Giuliani during his 2008 run for a bit. Now, I would just say about that, I was working for him when he was technically known as America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, not Four Seasons Total Landscaping Mayor Giuliani. So you've got to forgive me for that one. Many, many crates of Chardonnay before. Many, many crates of Chardonnay. Right. So I built up that career, and I came to know a lot of people on the Hill because I testified a ton of times for the Senate and the House. I testified, I think, more than two dozen times on different foreign policy, counter-extremism, counter-terrorism issues. and I came to know Liz Cheney well and she introduced me to other people on the staff and was basically this is the nerd that she wanted to hire to help put the report together. So that's what I did. I've always been considering myself an American who's very loyal to the Constitution and I saw January 6th and the months preceding it as a dire threat to our constitutional order and I left my job to go work for the committee not because I wanted to document what happened on January 6th although that may seem that was my role but really i was afraid of what was going to come next i thought that if if if trump and his movement got back in power they were going to start where they left off which was in a post-constitutional moment and that's exactly what's happened unfortunately a lot of people see the kind of violence of january 6 i feel like the images in particular of the officers being attacked both inside the capital and at the barricades you know that it's such a haunting image that I think that violence is what people think of as the danger. But of course, as the report shows, and I'm going to ask you to just sort of open up this part of it, it was so much more than that. It was really an attack on democracy itself, and specifically an attempt, and one that in my view might have succeeded, actually had a few things happen differently, to steal the election. And so can you talk to us about that, how in your research, You know, you came to uncover what really is a deep plot to steal the election with a legal theory behind it, all sorts of ideas, seeing the vulnerability of the Electoral College. Like, what was it about in the sense of how was it supposed to work? Yeah, I mean, I think the final report that the committee produced, which I had a big hand in producing, although I wasn't alone, of course, came out to 845 pages. And I think that report could have been 8,450 pages easily in terms of just trying to tell the entirety of the story. And the first thing that I would say is, and I said this very early on to people on the committee, what worried me was that the political conspiracy, the nonviolent part of the conspiracy to overturn the election between Election Day and January 6th, to my mind was just as worrisome, if not more so than the actual violence on January 6th, which came from the political conspiracy. The political conspiracy gave us the violent insurrection on January 6th. And what you see is you see a president and his advisors between Election Day 2020 and January 6th trying to figure out where there are all these holes in our electoral college process that they can exploit to stay in power. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to find any lever they can. And the entire process that they go through, everything they try, is a threat to the Constitution, our constitutional order. It's not nothing they do other than they had some valid court cases they could bring. Of course, they were shot down in the courts, but they had the right under the Constitution to challenge the results in different states in the court of law. Of course, they lost 61 out of 62 times or whatever the number is. But everything else was clearly an assault on the constitutional order and trying to exploit this antiquated electoral college system. That's what they were trying to do. And so they were trying to twist the meaning of those different steps all along the way in order to keep Trump in power. And so just to give a couple examples, cut me off if you want to ask another question, but I'll just give you a couple quick examples for listeners of what I mean by that. So the first thing is under the Constitution, states run our federal elections, right? They have the constitutional authority to oversee our elections. One of the biggest prongs of the political conspiracy that Trump oversaw was dispatching his people, including Rudy Giuliani, again, forgive me, and others, to go to the states and try to interfere with their process. to say, no, no, no, no, no, no, you got it wrong. Trump really won and you need to overturn, go to these Republican-led state legislatures and say you need to overturn the results because there was fraud that we can't prove, but believe us, it was there. And so therefore you need to hand the victory to Trump. And that would have disenfranchised millions upon millions of voters. And in fact, more than 80 million voters who voted for Joe Biden in that election, but would have directly disenfranchised the millions and millions of voters in the states. That is a dire constitutional threat, right? What you have is you have a sitting president of the United States who says he fires or sidelines his previous legal team. He brings in what many people describe as this clown car of lawyers to do what? He brings them in to try to invalidate the state's rights and state's constitutional power of elections and disenfranchise millions of voters. That's long before we even get to the violence on January 6th. Conspiracy against voters. Go on, please. Well, exactly. I mean to me as an American who is – that's a fundamental right. This is a fundamental right that he was assaulting and his advisors were assaulting, and it showed they had absolutely no respect for the will of the people or how this process should be played out. And of course the thing about that moment is it fails. Right. So to their credit, anyway, Republicans leading state legislatures in the swing states, including in Georgia, in Arizona and elsewhere, Michigan, they say, no, we're not going to help you overturn the election. You can't prove any fraud. You're not showing us that the election was actually tainted. And all your lies about Dominion voting systems and all this other stuff. None of that adds up to anything. Right. It's just all conspiratorial nonsense from from the Web. So that whole that part holds. Go ahead. I was going to ask, I mean, and tell us how they're related, because to my mind, reading the report, but, you know, you wrote it. So I was saying to John, you know, there's not a lot of moments where you can say I have Marshall McLuhan right here. You know, the famous line from Annie Hall. But this is it, the guy who actually wrote the thing. And so I've read it. I see what you uncovered. And one question I think that viewers will be interested in is the complicated but important way that they saw the role of the vice president. So on the one hand, you have this fake elector scheme. And then that combines with this reading, as I understand it, of the 12th Amendment that said that really Mike Pence was the one who was going to get to decide what happened. So I think that's a part that's not always understood. And they have this sort of fake constitutional way of reading the 12th Amendment that will give them that supposedly gives the vice president that power. So talk about Pence and his role in all of this and also the setup from people like John Eastman who argued that really he could, what, steal the election. Yeah, I mean that's the next step in the political part of the conspiracy because after the state legislatures turn him down, what they do is they still convene these fake electors in December, mid-December of 2020 to meet and cast their votes on behalf of Trump, these electoral certificates. Now, what's interesting is – so there are people on the right throughout the MAGA world and the American right who would claim that they were just doing what had been done in the past, like in Hawaii in 1960, the 1960 election and other instances in the past. That is complete fiction. In fact, you can go to the report, and we debunk that in the report. This was nothing like those past circumstances. There was no court order or court-sanctioned reason for these fake electors to meet. There was no process here that they were upholding. it was deliberately intended to undermine the actual electoral college process of the legitimate electors. And we know that because actually the evidence that the committee investigation uncovered, but also some of the evidence that they hid from us. So there's a key memo from Kenneth Chesbrough, an attorney, that the committee did not get, which is dated, I think, December 6th of 2020. And if you read that memo, you see that he knows, and you can define this from the other memos he wrote that we did have, but you can see from that memo that he knew as one of the architects, legal architects of all this, illegal, illegal architects of all this, that in fact, they knew that this was not part of any kind of process in the past. Right. This was all about gumming up the joint session of Congress on January 6th. They wanted to find a way to delay or deny Joe Biden's victory and certification was victory on January 6th. And that's what the elect these fake electors were all about. So the Pence part of the conspiracy you're talking about is tied into all this because the states reject this idea that they're going to overturn the popular will. The Trump team keeps going forward with this fake elector effort anyway in order as a gambit to tie up the joint session on January 6th and deny Biden his victory. Pence comes in because they say to Pence, well, Pence – and this is where John Eastman and others are arguing to him, as you mentioned – you can do one of two things. One, you can either reject the legitimate electors outright – and this is what Trump pushed for – and hand the election to Trump on January 6th. So there was a gambit, and you could see this even in what Trump was tweeting at the time. There was a gambit to just outright reject the lawful electors and hand the victory to Trump. Or you could say, well, we have this uncertainty here because we have two slates of electors, and we need to send the matter back to the states for an investigation to tell us which one of the slates of electors is legitimate. But you see, either prong was trying to get Vice President Pence to do something that he and his team determined was unconstitutional. And he said that very clearly at the time, and he's said it very clearly since then. You know, I know it's illegal, and I know it's wrong and unconstitutional, but a part of me is always going to wish Vice President Kamala Harris had ceded some alternate fake electors to hand the presidency over to herself just because our Republican friends would not be allowed to complain if she did it. Mr. Jocelyn, I think that the through line that I keep seeing with the news going on today, back to January 6th, is the same idea that loyalty to a leader is elevated above loyalty to the Constitution. That's the real connecting thread between what we've seen in Minneapolis and when we see cops beaten on the Capitol steps for a lie. And you've written so much about how that was a breaking point that day, and it's so misunderstood. I've generally called it terrorism because that meets the dictionary's definition of using violence against a government or civilian population to bring about policy change. But I accept coup is probably better. And yet our media keeps calling this a riot. And I want to ask you about this, sir. Why is it important for Americans to keep calling it a failed coup attempt and not just call it a riot? Well, you could go to Chapter 8 of the report, and you could see how I described it, because I described it as an organized or planned riot. In other words, it was not something spontaneous. In fact, we debunked the idea it was spontaneous. It was a push. The whole point was in terms of on the ground, for example, the Proud Boys clearly led the charge. They had a plan that day to come in and overrun the Capitol. They had a plan to let these thousands of members of the mob that Trump had summoned to Washington. And they wanted to clear a path for them onto the Capitol's grounds and eventually into the Capitol itself. And they were found guilty of this in a court of law. They were found guilty of seditious conspiracy the leaders were. And a few dozen Proud Boys were convicted for their roles before being pardoned by Donald Trump for doing this, right? And so one of the things the committee did – and there was great reporting in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal elsewhere, so we weren't alone in this. But we did have new footage and new details I think that people didn't have, which was we showed how the Proud Boys did this. at the point of attack, there's this place called the Peace Circle that is – so Donald Trump holds this rally south of the White House on the lawn of what's known as the Ellipse. And, of course, he tells everybody in the crowd that he's going to march with them down to the Capitol. And ultimately, he doesn't, but he says he wants to. And he did want to, but he doesn't. And then, of course, in that speech, he says all sorts of incendiary things, which we can dissect. But anyway, he sends them down to the Capitol. When they leave the Ellipse, they start marching in the Capitol. They're going to march down Pennsylvania Avenue through this circle called the Peace Circle, which sits right between Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol. The Proud Boys and their associates, what they did was they cleared a path at the Peace Circle for this stream of the mob that was going to come down Pennsylvania Avenue. They cleared out. There was a minimal security presence there of Capitol Police officers. They overran them very quickly, and they basically created a path for this whole stream of thousands and thousands of people to get on the Capitol grounds. And that was a deliberate thing they did. They had a plan in mind. It wasn't some sophisticated 9-11-style terrorist attack, but it was – they deserved more credit as somebody who studied terrorism and extremism for 20 years, 25 years now. It was a more clever strategy than they're given credit for, and it worked. It did work. I mean they did delay for the first time in our nation's history the peaceful transfer of power. Tom, this is such a complicated plot, and I think we're doing a very nice job of getting it all out. You have the planned riot part of it, which looks spontaneous or it's been described by Trump, of course, as a protest. We know it was not a protest, it was a planned riot. You have the fake elector scheme, which is very complicated. You have the role of the vice president. And all of this you know designed to as you said in the beginning quite well to exploit the vulnerability of the antiquated electoral college which requires this joint session of Congress and the approval of electoral votes as sort of all these technicalities that lead to the election of a president that we rely on. And they were spotting each of these vulnerabilities and trying to exploit them. And it is a vulnerable system, as you said in the beginning. One big question that I have that I've been dying to ask you is, how did you piece all of this together as You were working for the report. You know, you're a researcher, but I'm fascinated to hear this because, you know, I can talk to our listeners and to others about what happened as a result of your research. But I want to know, how did you do this work? How did you piece it all together? Well, I mean, of course, I wasn't alone. I mean, there was a big team of people. I was not the only one doing this by a long shot. And you could see the committee's work in the hearings, which I contributed to as well, you know, all throughout the summer of 2022 and then, you know, all the way through the reports. So there was a big team of people doing this work and working on this stuff. But to me, to my mind, this always fit the spoken wheel model of a conspiracy. So you have all these different spokes on the wheel to make the wheel go around. And basically they were – Trump was overseeing all these different spokes. He's the center of the conspiracy, and he has all these different spokes that make the wheel go around. And it's really January 6th, the violence and summoning the mob on the night of December 19th to January 6th in Washington, and the dispatching the mob down to Congress, and I'll say more about that in one second, that's really the final spoke of the conspiracy to put in place to make the wheel go around. Now, here's the thing about that, right? So just put aside the violence for a second because you brought up, Corey, a couple times the violence, how awful it was, and it was. And more than 150 officers were assaulted that day, many of whom were seriously injured, one of whom passed away the following day, some of whom committed suicide in the aftermath and the trauma of the whole event. Some of them suffered some very serious injuries. But what I ask you to do is just put aside that violence for just one second and whether or not Trump knew what was coming in terms of the violence or not. Just put that aside as a question in your mind. He had no legitimate reason to send a mob down to the Capitol on January 6th to impede the counting of the electoral college votes. He had no legitimate reason for doing that. This is a fundamentally unconstitutional act. Whether he knew the mob was going to get violent or not, he clearly wanted them to pressure Vice President Pence, because he told him so, to not count the votes. But he's still allowed to – citizens can still petition the government for redress of grievances. A protest, a nonviolent protest itself, while pointless in this case because he couldn't undo it, that's still technically legal, right? Yeah, it's still illegal to protest, sure. But my point is, if you actually look, and he did call it protest, and he could have stopped there. But my point is that the actual reason he wanted them to protest, the thing that he was calling them to protest was to pressure Pence into an unconstitutional action, right? Yes, yes, yes. So that's where it's that's where it's different. Right. It's not just saying, hey, go down to the Capitol and protest the election because I think it was fraud and was stolen. It was no go down to the Capitol and try and convince my vice president to not certify the vote. See, that's where even that part of it crosses a line. Right. And also in the context, Tom, of what you've said, which is the scheme, the electorate scheme at the state level, the role of the vice president, this fake claim that the vice president can really make the decision of whether which is supposed to be just to clarify for listeners. The role of the vice president under the 12th Amendment is purely formal. And as a result of Tom's work and others, that's now clarified, thankfully, in the Electoral Count Reform Act. But they didn't care. They were trying to use this fake argument in order to really destroy our election. So it's all of this that you put together. Yeah, and just on John's point about protests, right, keep in mind, too, that the vast majority of people who attended the quote-unquote protests in Washington January 6th were not charged with crimes, right? Correct. They were not – there was no legal – they were not charged of doing something illegal, right? It was only a very small subset of those people. That's right. That's right. In fact, not even – and here's the sticking point that MAGA tries to cover up. Most of the people who went on the Capitol's grounds illegally, right, into restricted areas, most of those people weren't charged. Correct. Correct. Yeah, so it was really a small subset of about 1,500 to 1,600 people at that day, thousands and thousands more who were actually charged with committing crimes. And that part of it has been obscured by Magdalene, which likes to – It's a very important point. Well, they want to say, oh, well, the feds just locked up people who walked into the Capitol after the doors were open and police said they could come in and these were complete – Whenever your right-wing troll says this to you, please ask them, give me the name of one specific person who just entered the building, broke no laws, and was put in jail. Give me that person's name. Can I ask you about Mike Pence? I love your whole metaphor of the spokes and the wheel. I've always been calling them cogs, and I now realize I mistooled them. They are spokes more than cogs. But Mike Pence's recent comments show he understood the stakes, and he ultimately refused to break the Constitution. How low is the bar that that now qualifies as moral courage? It kind of feels like our constitutional democracy is so fragile that maybe it depends more on individual character than law. Yeah, I mean I can say a couple things about that. I totally agree. I mean first of all, it is a very low bar, right? I mean it's ridiculous. This was a ridiculous scheme that they were trying to – I mean I'm praising Mike Pence. Good Lord. Yeah, I mean so am I. And I actually met with Mike Pence in the Situation Room of the White House in 2018 actually. So I met him and his staff one time, and I'm not a Mike Pence stan or anything like that. But I was laughing, though, because I remember Pence talking about how the January 6th committee, he was criticizing at the time for being political and this and that. And I'm sitting there as the research nerd who's working on this thing thinking, my man, we're holding up your decision. We're saying your decision was the right one. And a lot of the report, a good chunk, a chapter of the report is based on the testimony of your people. Right. Who helped you go through this whole process of trying to fight off this stuff. And the idea and you wouldn't come, you know, testify for us, Mr. Pence. But the idea that, you know, the report is somehow, you know, been tainted by politics when it's actually upholding Mike Pence against Trump's assault. It's really ludicrous to me, you know. So I do praise Pence for a lot of his decisions. Sure, sure. By the same token, it is a low bar. And some of what he said about the committee and some other things I felt like just was like stupid politics. Like if he didn't if he didn't know at that time that he wasn't going to win over MAGA, then I don't know why. Well, because he thought he still had a chance to win over MAGA. I mean, he's more popular with liberals now than conservatives because he followed the law this one time. It's just amazing. Yeah. Was there anything, Tom, as you went through all of this? I'm going to ask one more process question, but like that surprised you that you didn't expect, you know, kind of moment and all of this. I'm just trying to imagine what it was like to look at this vast amount of information. We knew about the violence. We knew generally what happened. But the details of the report, as you said, which could have been 10 times as long, are really incredible. So I'm wondering, as you went through, was there one moment where you're like, well, this is really – I mean what I would say is that Trump has – and I'd like to hear John comment on this too because I've got one that I want to throw his way. Trump has exploited very skillfully a lot of currents in our society, and he did so in the lead up to an odd January 6th, one of which is white nationalism and Christian nationalism, which I, as a counter-extremism guy, think of as like siblings. Correct. They're basically fraternal twins, I would say. Not quite identical, but they look an awful lot alike, and they're both white, of course, for the most part. But he very carefully exploited that. I mean, you know, and one of the things about doing this type of work is it's a short, condensed time period is you have to focus on, you know, what made the wheel go around. Right. The the force at the middle of it, the center of the wheel and all the spokes you can document. And we definitely got a lot out about the extremism aspect of it. And you can see that's chapter six and eight. But there's always more to the story, including on the Christian nationalist aspect of it. I mean, you know, I looked through, you know, all the speeches on the night of January 5th, which were which were riling up the crowd before January 6th. And they were littered with Christian nationalist imagery. So many flags, so much, so much, so much of it. And as they're beating cops for a lie, they're waving their Christian flag. Exactly. And, you know, I mean, Alex Jones is a guy who riled up the crowd the night before. And if you actually want to think I think Alex Jones is actually very misunderstood. He's in the report in a number of places. But if you look at his conspiracism, it's actually littered with Christian nationalism. Oh, always. Yeah, a lot of what he's actually selling is like the most conspiratorial version of Christian nationalism, I think, in a lot of ways. And he evoked God the night before January 6th and painted this as a religious battle. And so you see them doing that throughout the whole thing. And I don't think that that part of the story – we got into it somewhat in the committee, but there was a lot more that could have been done. I think we had more time, and it's a lot more that I'd like to do writing about, because something I've been studying is this Christian National Society. John, I just wonder if you had any thoughts about that. Yeah, I just published a book about it, and I'm writing another book about it right now. I mean, Donald Trump won the hearts of evangelicals not by promising to do a single thing Christ teaches or commands in the Gospels. He promised to get them by putting them first, putting them above other groups, which is the opposite of the humility that Jesus commands. He pandered to them and said they were under siege and played up the persecution narrative. That's how you get Christian nationalists or fundamentalists or authoritarians, or I call them master race Christians, you know, the ones who are so convinced that not that they're better than you, that God thinks they're better than you, those folks. And they exist in every religion, but in our country, they don't follow Jesus. They use Jesus, and they despise the actual teachings of Jesus because those are woke. So they believe in what they fight for, and what they fight for is not anything Christ commands, because then they could never vote for Trump. I mean, on immigration alone, you've got to welcome the stranger. They hate the actual teachings of Jesus. What they fight for is conservative Christian control over society and government and culture. They don't care about religious freedom. They don't care about Jesus. They don't care about God or Satan. They don't care about abortion. They don't care about immigration. Those things are what gets them power. If they wanted unlawful border crossings to stop, they'd lock up the employers and take down the Help Wanted sign. They won't do that. If they wanted abortion to stop, they'd fund sex ed and make birth control free. They won't do it. They don't want it to stop. They only care about power. And these things help them to that eventual end. And that's why I, as bleak as all this is, and zooming out from January 6th to ICE in Minneapolis, I mean, this really coherent theory of power over law that has emerged. I just want to ask you, Mr. Jocelyn, I mean, you know this area better than anybody. What's giving you hope right now? The courts, the public, the whistleblowers, something else? What's giving you hope in this moment? Well, before I answer that, I just want to say one more thing about Christian nationalism. Please, please. You know, I am, as someone who's a student of American history in the founding, I find it amazing how much Christian nationalists lie about the founding. Always. And how much they portray the founding as a fundamental Christian founding. Yeah. But if you actually go through the writings and rhetoric of James Madison or Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine. Tom Paine especially. Right. Tom Paine's been my avatar on what was Twitter since 2014, and we can get into that whole other thing another time. You know, there's all sorts of examples, right? I mean – Treaty of Tripoli. They wrote it down so many times. It's clearly just false, right? But that to me is a commonality here, is that their movement and their leader had no respect for the Constitution up to and leading on January 6th, and it doesn't after the fact. And that seems to be a symbiotic relationship with them because they don't seem to really understand where the Constitution comes from or the founding principles. Extremism and defensive liberty is not a vice, right? Like, God, it's okay if I lie because I'm doing it all for God. This is why people fly planes into buildings. Which was written by Harry Jaffa, I think, right, for Barry Goldwater, that line? Yes, yes, yes. And Harry Jaffa came from the Claremont Institute, which is a Christian nationalist institute. Boom. Yeah. So the bottom line is, like, there's a commonality there. So now to my point about what the hope is, look, I think there's two fundamental competing systems here. One is, like, the MAGA monoculture, right, which wants a certain type of person who thinks a certain way and looks a certain type of way with very minor differences. and they are in the thrall of an authoritarian cult of personality around Donald Trump. And there's all sorts of contradictions and mixed messaging there, but it's not a cohesive logic a lot of times, although they do hate modernity, they hate modern America, and they're bound by their loyalty to Trump and things like that. But there's also this multicultural America that I think is still very much alive and is still very much in the fight. And that's what I see myself as fighting for every day. I want to live in the multicultural America, not the MAGA monocultural hell. And what you see in Minneapolis is the multicultural fighting back. What you see is people standing up. We've had two white people who were killed this month alone by federal agents, Renee Good and Alex Pretty. But they were both killed in the act of standing up for the rights of people who are not white people predominantly. Correct. Correct. Correct. You know, Hispanic populations who are who are being assailed by the Stephen Millers of the world and their whole project. You know, and I think that that says something about what the real tension is here. The real conflict is between this maga monoculture that wants to impose, just like you were talking about with Christian nationalist, John. They want to impose their will and their power on the people and all the other people. And what you're seeing is the hope of the people saying, no, you don't get to impose that here in Minneapolis. You don't get to impose that elsewhere. Tom, we're almost out of time, but I really have a question I want to ask you about rewriting history. You talked about the way that Christian nationalists have certainly rewritten our Constitution, and John and I have that as one of our large themes on the oath in the office. Of course, we have a First Amendment which bars not only the establishment of religion, but laws respecting an establishment of religion. If there's ever a greater rebuff to Christian nationalism, that's it. It's an explicit legal rebuff to it and its entire ideology. You have a right to believe what you want or say what you want, but our government at core is not Christian nationalist or Christian or any religion. We have no established religion. But in the same way that that has been rewritten, so too is the story of January 6th. And that's what I wanted to ask you about, that what does it feel like? And as importantly or more importantly, how can we ensure the truth of January 6th comes out in the face of what you're seeing, which is the rewriting of that story as a nonviolent protest and an illegal attack on constitutional rights. That's how the MAGA and Trumps of the world are framing it. So, I mean, just as a way, you know, listeners now, I think, have a very strong understanding, if they didn't before, of what actually happened in depth. That's what this amazing interview has given us. So how can we fight back against that attempt to rewrite history? Well, I think you and your listeners have a very good understanding of that. I think there's a whole segment of our population, tens of millions of people who don't, right, who have been drinking at a well of disinformation and lies for so long that they believe lies, you know. And I think you both understand as students of history, and I consider myself a student of history. I consider myself a student of basically everything, you know, that history is always contested. It's fought for. It's never just decided, right? It's not like, you know, Corey, your excellent book on the Constitution and your writings, right? You had to weigh into a whole field where there's all sorts of different competing views and competing ideas about what certain things mean and what certain people believed and what the text means and that kind of thing. There's definitely a common agreement on some of it, but some of it is still contested to this day. So the point is you have to fight for that reality. You have to fight for that truth in history and fight for facts. It's not something you can give up on, and everybody has to do it. It's a communal act of civil society. The citizenry have to stand up for what the actual truth is, because otherwise you'll allow an authoritarian figure like Donald Trump to rewrite history for all of us. Brilliant. What a great, great, great statement. Thank you so much, Tom Jocelyn, for joining us on the Oath in the Office. This has been an in-depth discussion, you know, from the person who literally helped write the report that revealed the conspiracy to steal this election, this attempted coup. And we really thank you for joining us on the Oath in the Office. We hope you'll come back. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you, Tom Jocelyn. So, Professor, I mean, when we zoom out from January 6th to ICE in Minneapolis, it's not really isolated abuses, is it? It seems like it's a coherent theory of authoritarian power that is emerging. That's right. And if you think that's paranoid that what Tom Jocelyn gave us was a deep dive into the way in which a coup almost happened in the United States. If you listen to him talking about the vulnerability of our system, of the Electoral College, the details with which it was almost subverted, the way that these plans fit together, the role of the vice president being subverted, the role of the state electors and fraudulent electors being sent to the joint session of Congress and the violence of the Proud Boys and others, the role, as you brought out from him in a great exchange of Christian nationalism. All of that really showed that we almost lost our democracy on January 6th. And these are the same people back in power. So it's not a surprise that they're trying to use the administration again to destroy our democracy, to destroy civil liberties. And when you see them looking for things like voter information in Minnesota, remember what they did last time. It's the same people. Amazing discussion with Tom Jocelyn, amazing in-depth discussion of what's happening now, John, in our first half. What a pleasure to do this with you. Well, that's why I want to thank you for being such an amazing podcast host. My God, why didn't you get into this years ago, Professor? And I want to thank Wendy and Beowulf and everybody who puts the show together. And, of course, I need to thank our deeply sexually attractive listeners for making this show so popular. Hey, Professor, what's the best way for our listeners to follow you and keep up with your brilliance the other six days of the week? Well, follow our newsletter on Substack. It's called The Oath in the Office. Really good. The amazing reviews on Apple keep coming in. We're well over 500, and they're almost all five stars. And, you know, listen to us on Spotify. Tell your friends. And also we have a YouTube channel, The Oath in the Office, so you can watch us, not just listen to us. Brilliant. I'm John Fuglsang. Thank you guys so much for joining us, and we'll see you next time on The Oath in the Office.