Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert about the January 6 report for the December 23, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
New York Times (12/17/22)
Janine Jackson: “The End of the Trump Era Will Be Unsatisfying,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat this week. “There will be no perp walk where Trump exits the White House in handcuffs.”
That’s a little odd, given Trump’s not in the White House, but the point is to reduce calls for accountability for obvious crimes to emotional, unreasonable cries for vengeance.
It’s the same way the Times told us we were “entitled to wonder whether any of the highly paid executives who helped kindle the 2008 financial disaster will ever see jail time.” But, the paper told us, “the harder question…is whether anybody should.”
So here we are again with Douthat’s advice that, while the realities of Trump and Trumpians’ concerted, premeditated efforts to overturn democracy are “yielding some righteous anger,” the intelligent takeaway is that “an unsatisfying absence of repudiation or vindication is a normal feature of democratic life.”
The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal concurs that while the January 6 inquiry “has done useful work gathering documents and putting witnesses under oath,” “the wiser course was to let the established facts speak for themselves.”
After all, the Journal says:
Trump’s ultimate goal wasn’t to obstruct the Congressional session on January 6; he wanted it to go his way. This was nonsense, and it had no chance of success, but was it a crime to lobby Mr. Pence to try?
Wall Street Journal (12/19/22)
So the upshot, lest you miss it, is that it’s appropriate to feel anger and outrage about things, but directing it at the people who orchestrate and profit from it is childish and irrational.
The sophisticated thing to do with our anger over fundamental assaults on our society’s organizing principles is to diffuse it into droplets in the air that never actually land.
So how do we resist this recipe for no change, and turn information about what happened on January 6, specifically, into accountability? Lisa Gilbert is executive vice president of Public Citizen and founder of the meaningfully named Not Above the Law Coalition. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Lisa Gilbert.
Lisa Gilbert: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: Let’s start concretely. Folks will have heard a swirl of stuff, but what are the charges against Donald Trump that come out of this congressional committee, and is there, respectfully, any sense that these charges are inflated, or partisan, or anything other than legal charges?
LG: Well, thanks for that. I think that the herculean efforts of the January 6 Select Committee have really borne fruit. They laid them out in a clear, meaningful and compelling way this Monday.
We’re still waiting for their final report to drop today. But the charges against Donald Trump were clear, and followed in a clear throughline from the evidence that the committee found—in a very bipartisan way; most of their witnesses were high-level Republicans who worked closely with the president.
So the four charges were:
- Obstruction of an official proceeding, the proceeding being the January 6 meeting of Congress itself, where they had intended to certify the presidential results.
- Conspiracy to defraud the United States, and this happened in multiple ways, including the president’s lies about the 2020 election, lies about the vice president’s role in certification and how it works, among many other lies.
- Conspiracy to knowingly make a false statement, so this was the participation in the plot to submit the fake slates of electors.
- And then, finally, assisting, aiding or comforting—that’s an interesting word, but comforting an insurrection. So helping to incite the attack, but then also assisting others who did so as well. The reason for this charge is all the actions he took as the insurrection began to unfold, or actually the actions he did not take: He did not call in additional assistance to the Capitol Police who were under siege, he did not call the Department of Defense. Instead, he just sat and watched it all unfold on TV.
So those are the four charges, I think very clearly outlined by the committee, and very robustly supported by their work.
JJ: Let me ask you, if I could, just another angle on it: What do you see as the harms of not bringing charges here? I think folks are eager to reduce it to partisan back and forth, but it’s so much deeper, and what happens if we just say, “Oh, folks who like Trump like Trump, folks who didn’t like him think something bad happened on January 6”—what happens if we don’t go forward?
Lisa Gilbert: “Not going forward is a recipe for disaster for democracy…if we don’t hold the bad actors accountable.”
LG: I think not going forward is a recipe for disaster for democracy, not to be overblown. I think if we don’t hold the bad actors accountable for what was arguably the most dramatic and dangerous day in recent history of our nation, then what can we hold people accountable for?
And though it is true that referrals to other bodies, referrals to the DoJ or referrals to the House Ethics Committee, are not the same as actually prosecuting or moving forward charges, the committee doing this sends such a clear signal and backup, if you will, to the DoJ, as the special counsel there is working feverishly, as we know, to actually bring charges that will stick. And so having this really clear evidential record is helpful.
JJ: Let’s just draw you out about that in terms of the reality. So what came out of the committee is evidence, is information, and now we’re at a place where that information can be used or not used, what is the state of play here?
LG: That’s right. So the committee is, as advertised, an investigative body. They have spent almost a year investigating, calling witnesses, looking at thousands of documents.
It has been a truly robust, impressive bipartisan effort which led to the findings in their report, the recommendations that we’ll soon see about how to improve democracy, and then these referrals to our bodies of justice that can take it further.
Certainly, that work is essential for laying the groundwork and outside understanding of regular people, such that, as the special counsel moves forward, we all already understand why and what and how important it is.
JJ: When you say “take it further,” I guess what I want to get at is, I think, for the public, there’s an important distinction to be made about Donald Trump, and then what also enablers did, and the idea of, even if Trump, in some fanciful other planet, goes to jail, will that still prevent another thing like this from happening?
So there’s an interest in separating out the criminal charges against an individual, and how do we also, as a society, address the problems that were obviously evidenced on that day?
LG: That’s right, that is definitely right. There is more than one solution needed to the problem of an insurrection. This is a piece of it, what we’re talking about now, the individual who is most culpable being held accountable. And the fact that that person was the president of the United States makes it more important, not less, that we do, in fact, hold him accountable.
That’s the piece the DoJ is pursuing. That’s the piece that is being pursued in Georgia prosecutions. And we want to see it borne out, we want charges and we want them to stick.
However, separately, we also need to reform our democracy such that no other president can ever be this bankrupt morally, and can’t do anything like this again.
NPR (12/23/22)
And so there are a lot of threads to that. One piece, actually, we had a victory this week. I don’t know if people are paying attention to this, but the Electoral Count Act reforms, which many of us in DC have been lobbying for for months now, were included as a part of the year-end budget deal, so will soon pass.
This is critical, because it could prevent the idea of the vice president that, simply in his posture as chair of the Senate as he’s overseeing an electoral account, could change what he’s perceiving.
So that unclear language in the original Electoral Count Act is what Trump relied on. And this led his followers around, and certainly part of what sparked the insurrection. Now, assuming the Electoral Count Reform Act passes, that will no longer be an option. We need that, and we need other reforms that continue to protect democracy to move forward as well.
JJ: Let me ask you about those, because I feel like we’re all getting kind of a civics lesson about what laws are meaningful, what laws, it turns out, don’t mean anything if you don’t push on them. And we’re all learning a lot here. And I think a lot of folks are sort of thinking that their idea about what’s right and what’s wrong is somehow reflected in the law, and we know that that’s an imperfect relationship.
And so there are other things that we could make more sturdy, there are other things that we could back up in order to—setting Donald Trump aside—in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. What are some of those, also?
LG: Certainly a lot of the reforms that we’re talking about are contained in an omnibus legislative package called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which we are hopeful could garner some bipartisan support, as did the Electoral Count Act reforms that I was just talking about.
So what it would do is shore up a lot of the loopholes that the Trump administration showed us exist, as you say. One of the main things we learned from his administration is that many things that we always thought were law were actually just norms, right, were actually just things that presidents have always done, but they’re actually not required to do.
So take his tax returns as a clear example of that. All presidents have always released them, but they were not apparently yet officially required to do so. So those kinds of things.
So some of the reforms carried within that legislation are things like improving our whistleblower laws, so that it is easier for those within government who are seeing things that might be coming from an unhinged president, those can be more easily shared, and those people are protected. Things to shore up our inspectors general so that, if pressure is being applied to agencies, or across the country, they’ll be able to catch it, and they’ll be protected, and won’t have to fear being fired without cause.
Those are just a couple of things. But I think there are numerous places where the fact that laws are not as clear as we once thought, he was able to take advantage of that and abuse our ethical assumptions.
JJ: Absolutely. And, OK, we can all learn, right? Let’s all learn together.
I’m a media critic, and so I fault media, to some extent, with this framing of Democrats versus Republicans, that encourages people to get to a place of, “Oh, you’re mad at Donald Trump, you don’t like his ideas, and that’s why you want him to go to jail.”
And I just think that’s so corrosive. It’s like, “Well, if it was your guy who was inciting insurrection, you’d be for it, right?”
I guess I’m hoping for more than elite media are giving us right now, in terms of—yeah, I understand, they need to have voices from lots of different perspectives, but there is something very fundamental that I feel that journalists could be doing, in terms of holding up the importance of democratic principles. And I just wonder what you would like to see from journalists right now.
CNN (9/2/22)
LG: I think that’s a fair critique. I think journalists have a responsibility to report the threats as they see them, and they are legion right now.
One thing that may help them cover more and discuss this more is that the president, President Biden, has been leaning in quite a bit on these themes, you know, before the election, spending valuable last-speechifying moments talking about the threats of MAGA Republicans to democracy, and the problems of hate speech, and the issues of the insurrection, and the idea that election deniers could perhaps win.
Luckily, many of them did not. But that was a real threat. And he really spoke strongly about the problems with that.
And so I think, hopefully that kind of engagement on the part of the White House, in turn, makes it easier for journalists to spend more airtime, for editors to want to include stories about how we can improve democracy from here. But I agree, I think it needs as much attention as it can get. And I think the American people feel that too.
JJ: Let me ask you, if charges were brought, if the January 6 Commission evolved into indictments, would that mean the end of the Not Above the Law Coalition? What is your purpose there?
LG: That’s a great question. I mean, every policy group’s idea is to be in place until you put yourself out of business because you’ve won. So I am not sure, but certainly we have found a role around ethics scandals in many a moment. So I wouldn’t want to believe that, should we send Trump to jail, that this problem is entirely solved by that, and we’d still have things to do. But it’s a great question.
JJ: Part of what’s happening going forward is that January 6, 2023, is coming up right on us, and I know that you have work planned around that. What’s going on?
LG: We are riding the wave coming out of the Select Committee’s final business meeting and report to memorialize what they’ve done, to celebrate it and to talk about the need for democracy reform going forward.
We’re doing this by holding events all around the country on the second anniversary of the insurrection—”anniversary” is maybe too celebratory a word. We will be memorializing it, and discussing what it means for democracy going forward. These events can be found at OurFreedomsOurVote.org. And hopefully everyone who’s listening can find one near them. And then if you’re in the DC area, the flagship events will be in front of the Capitol at noon. So I encourage everyone to come.
JJ: Can I just ask you, what is the purpose? What’s the intent of these events?
LG: Both to simply memorialize and remember the horror that was the insurrection, but also to pivot forward and to talk about what it means to continue to fight for democracy, to push for voting rights reforms and campaign finance reforms and rule of law reform, and to use the great work of the committee to catapult us into the next phase of that fight.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Lisa Gilbert, co-founder of the Not Above the Law Coalition, and executive vice president of Public Citizen. Their work’s online at Citizen.org. Lisa Gilbert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
LG: Thank you.
The post ‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection’ appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
Janine Jackson | Radio Free (2023-01-04T21:11:05+00:00) ‘There Is More Than One Solution Needed to the Problem of an Insurrection’ – CounterSpin interview with Lisa Gilbert on January 6 report. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/04/there-is-more-than-one-solution-needed-to-the-problem-of-an-insurrection-counterspin-interview-with-lisa-gilbert-on-january-6-report/
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