CHUCK TODD:
This Sunday: January 6th: One year later. It was a violent effort to overturn a free and fair election.
LESTER HOLT:
The deadly siege on Congress as an angry pro-Trump mob storms the U.S. Capitol.
CHUCK TODD:
Behind the violence: former President Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
This is a fraud on the American public. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.
CHUCK TODD:
As he tried to reverse the results --
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I just want to find, uhh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.
CHUCK TODD:
-- supported by elected Republicans --
REP. KEVIN McCARTHY:
How would President Trump lose in an atmosphere like that?
CHUCK TODD:
-- aided by allies --
STEVE BANNON:
All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.
CHUCK TODD:
-- backed by unconstitutional legal strategies to declare President Trump re-elected and accepted by millions.
IDAHO RESIDENT:
How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?
CHUCK TODD:
This morning, as we approach the one-year anniversary of the January 6th insurrection. I'll talk to Congressman Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6th committee and to Peter Meijer, the rare elected House Republican willing to admit publicly that Joe Biden won the election. We'll also look at how The Big Lie had its start in the 2016 campaign.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
The only way we can lose, in my opinion, I really mean this, Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on.
CHUCK TODD:
That our democracy is in peril if only one side is willing to admit that it lost an election. Welcome to Sunday and a special edition of Meet the Press.
ANNOUNCER:
From NBC News in Washington, the longest-running show in television history. This is a special edition of Meet the Press with Chuck Todd.
CHUCK TODD:
Good Sunday morning. Happy New Year. 2022 is here. Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying yes, the Founding Fathers had created a republic, if we can keep it. But nearly 250 years after America declared independence, and one year since the January 6th Capitol riot, American democracy will survive only if we can keep it. In recent weeks we've learned that the riot was not a -- merely an explosion of violence prompted by Donald Trump’s speech but the result of post-election planning by anti- (small-d) democratic forces at the highest level -- up to and including the then sitting president of the United States -- to overturn the election and subvert the will of the American people. Their plan did not succeed because they did not have the power to make it succeed, at least for now. Be it the election laws, the secretaries of state or the local election officials, they didn’t have them there to overturn the result. They don’t plan to make this mistake again, as they work to fill those positions with allies willing to do their bidding. And the more we learn about what the bi-partisan January 6th House committee is uncovering -- the more we see that the focus increasingly is not only what President Trump and his allies did on January 6th, but what they did before January 6th.
REP. LIZ CHENEY:
How we address January 6 is the moral test of our generation.
CHUCK TODD:
Donald Trump's campaign to overturn the 2020 election -- a relentless, systematic effort to claim election fraud, despite no evidence of it, began with the 2016 election --
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
There were a lot of votes cast that I don't believe.
CHUCK TODD:
-- accelerated in the run-up to 2020 --
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
They're trying to steal the election. Steal the election. They steal and rig and rob.
CROWD:
Stop the steal! Stop the steal!
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
We will stop the steal.
CHUCK TODD:
-- and it continued in the January 6th Capitol attack.
HARRY DUNN:
More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area by the Speaker’s lobby. I told them to just leave the Capitol and the response they yelled, “No, man, this is our House. President Trump invited us here. We're here to stop the steal.”
CHUCK TODD:
It's a campaign to undermine the U.S. democracy that is ongoing.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
It was a corrupt election.
CHUCK TODD:
Election Night 2020 -- Trump declares victory, long before all the votes are counted.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
We will win this, and we -- as far as I'm concerned we already have won it.
CHUCK TODD:
November 4th -- a Trump ally texts White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “Here's an aggressive strategy: Why can't the states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS, where conflicts and election not called that night, and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the Supreme Court.” November 9th -- Meadows meets with Trump allies and according to The New York Times, they settle on a strategy to continue to hammer home the idea the election was tainted --
KAYLEIGH McENANY:
This election is not over. Far from it.
CHUCK TODD:
-- while announcing legal action. November 19th - Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell hold a bizarre news conference.
SIDNEY POWELL:
The massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba. A full-scale criminal investigation needs to be undertaken immediately by the Department of Justice.
CHUCK TODD:
Trump's campaign lawyers file 62 federal and state lawsuits challenging the election results. Sixty-one are denied. December 1st: Attorney General Bill Barr tells The Associated Press that the Justice Department did not find widespread fraud. He would resign two weeks later. But beginning December 15th, Trump pressures Justice Department officials at least nine times to overturn Biden's legitimate victory, including in a meeting on January 3rd when he threatens to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with loyalist Jeffrey Clark to carry out his scheme.
REP. LIZ CHENEY:
Trump intended to appoint Jeffrey Clark as attorney general, in part so that Mr. Clark could alter the department of justice's conclusions regarding the election.
SEN. DICK DURBIN:
We were a half step away from a full blown constitutional crisis. If Rosen would have folded --
CHUCK TODD:
December 18th: former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell push Mr. Trump to consider declaring martial law or to sign executive orders to seize voting equipment.
MICHAEL FLYNN:
If he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states.
CHUCK TODD:
December 21st -- Mr. Trump meets members of the Freedom Caucus to discuss their plans.
REP. LOUIE GOHMERT:
This is a desperate time for our country.
CHUCK TODD:
And Trump ramps up his effort in the states. January 2nd -- he appeals directly to Georgia's secretary of state -- demanding he produce more votes in a state Joe Biden won.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes. So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do?
BRAD RAFFENSPERGER:
I heard the threat that he was making. And then obviously when he called me an enemy of the people --
CHUCK TODD:
Chief of Staff Mark Meadows personally travels to Georgia to inspect a county audit. January 2nd -- Mr. Trump, Meadows, members of Congress and attorneys for Mr. Trump's campaign hold a call with “‘some 300’ state and local officials” to discuss overturning some states' Electoral College results on January 6th. Donald Trump also begins to lobby Vice President Mike Pence publicly and privately to deny Biden the 270 electoral votes he needs. January 4th -- Trump and Pence meet at the White House with lawyer John Eastman about his memo laying out steps Pence could take to delay certification and keep Trump in power -- in effect a blueprint for a coup. It's a message Trump hammers home on the Ellipse on January 6th.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn't listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he's listening to.
CHUCK TODD:
As members of Congress inside the Capitol try to prevent Biden's victory from being certified.
REP. PAUL GOSAR:
I rise for myself and 60 of my colleagues to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona.
CHUCK TODD:
Meanwhile, planning for the January 6th rally steps up.
STEVEN BANNON:
All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.
CHUCK TODD:
And January 6th -- Mr. Trump urges protesters.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength.
CHUCK TODD:
During the riot, Meadows texts with at least one rally planner, who tells him "things have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction. Please." As more than half a dozen others reach out to him begging Trump to intervene.
REP. LIZ CHENEY:
“Mark, protestors are literally storming the Capitol. Breaking windows on doors. Rushing in. Is Trump going to say something?” “He’s got to condemn this s*** asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough." Still, President Trump did not immediately act.
CHUCK TODD:
In the last year -- Donald Trump has remade the Republican Party in his own image as Republicans change their tone about the attempted coup:
REP. KEVIN MCCARTHY:
The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. There is no involvement. But this is purely political.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM:
All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.
CHUCK TODD:
And Donald Trump's lies have fueled new voting restrictions in 19 states, something the former President called for on the Ellipse a year ago.
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I'm calling on Congress and the state legislatures to quickly pass sweeping election reforms. Today is not the end. It's just the beginning.
CHUCK TODD:
Recently I spoke to Congressman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, he’s the chair of the House January 6th Committee, to find out where the committee's investigation is heading.
CHUCK TODD:
Let me start with some big pictures here. We're on the cusp of the first anniversary from January 6th. If I asked you today, do you have a better sense of whether this was a protest that got out of hand or a coordinated effort to attack the Capitol, how would you answer that question one year later?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Well, I think it would have been a little bit of both, Chuck. Obviously, some people came upset with what happened in the November election. But others came with ulterior motives. And so you had citizens who have the right to protest, who thought that was the end of what would happen, and you had others who obviously came with bear spray, camouflage, Kevlar, hockey sticks, everything, prepared to do something else. And the fact that those two convergence of individuals came together at the same time, and that is what we ended up with.
CHUCK TODD:
Have you been able to determine what President Trump was doing while the Capitol was under attack? How much clearer is that picture today than it was on January 6th?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Well, you know, it's about 187 minutes. We have now determined he was in the White House. We've determined that a number of people made attempts to contact him through his chief of staff. Some of those text messages we shared on our presentation of the contempt citation for Mark Meadows. We also have information of other individuals who made calls trying to get some semblance of response out of the White House. But for that 187 minutes, nothing happened. We do know now that several videos were made, we don't have them yet, before the right one was released. But we’ve requested it from the National Archives, that and all the other information. So, he -- the president was told, "You need to say directly to your people to go home. Leave the Capitol." And so it took over 187 minutes to make that simple statement. Something’s wrong with that.
CHUCK TODD:
Have you seen any evidence or do you have any indication that maybe members of Congress assisted any of the rioters on that day?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Yes. We have a lot of information about communication with individuals who who came. Now "assisted" means different thing. Some took pictures with people who came to Stop the Steal Rally. Some, you know, allowed them to come and associate in their offices and other things during that that whole rally week. So, there is some participation. We don't have any real knowledge that I'm aware of, of people giving tours. We heard a lot of that. But we're still –
CHUCK TODD:
Right.
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
-- to be honest with you, reviewing a lot of the film that the House administration and others have provided the committee.
CHUCK TODD:
Have you had any members of Congress volun -- who were part of this who have already voluntarily helped you without you having to send a letter?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Well, we've had a number of members of Congress to give us information on what they heard that, that might have gone on. We've heard directly from members referring us to other individuals. But we heard from those early on. Now, we are trying to get to those individuals that we have basically identified that they’ve participated. Representative Perry and Jordan are two of those individuals that we've sent letters to, asking them to voluntarily cooperate. But there were a lot of experiences on that day, Chuck. I was in the Capitol. A lot of other members didn't really know what was going on for quite a while, other than the fact that all hell had broken loose in a place where we thought would never happen. So, those members are concerned, but they have respected the committee's wishes to go forward and find the facts and circumstances. And that's what we're doing. As you know we've talked --
CHUCK TODD:
Are you -- right.
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
-- to over 300 people all over the country about --
CHUCK TODD:
Do you think you're going to have to subpoena -- do you think you're going to have to subpoena a sitting member of Congress?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Well, I think there are some questions of whether we have the authority to do it. We're looking at it. If the authorities are there, there'll be no reluctance on our part.
CHUCK TODD:
Many of the folks you've subpoenaed have filed counter-suits, looked for delay tactics, and it's something you probably anticipated. What is the line for you where, where you and the vice chair say, "Okay, this is a strategy to delay our attempt at a report, delay a public finding"? Is it the spring, early summer? Is there a point where you believe, "Okay, we've got what we've got. We've got to report to the American public"?
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Oh, no question. Our goal is to produce a report. We would like that report to be as thorough as possible. We won't be deterred by the attempts to slow things down by suing the committee. We have a bevy of attorneys who understand the process, will go forward, and a number of people who are cooperating in this investigation. And so we'll continue. Now, to the extent we can access information with the authorities that we have as a committee, we'll continue to do that. But we won't wait until somebody comes and talks to us. We have a number of people we need to talk with. We think we are in a good place at this point in time to begin the process of drafting this report. We will meet and establish a timeline for the production of the report because there is some legislation that we hope to recommend with this report that Congress needs to adopt so that what occurred on January 6th will never happen again. As I have viewed the film, as I've toured the Capitol, as I've talked to the Capitol policemen, Metropolitan policemen, National Guardsmen, we came critically close to losing this democracy as we've come to know it. And so it's our duty as patriots, as Americans, as members of Congress to make sure that we get it right.
CHUCK TODD:
Very quickly, I know we're short on time -- your relationship with Liz Cheney? You've been in Congress with her a long time. I'm guessing this is the closest you've ever worked with her. Tell me about it.
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
No question. Well, she is a straight-up lady. We agree on a lot of things. We disagree on a lot of things. But we both love this country. And I think putting us in a room together has allowed me to see another side of her. And she's seen another side of me. And I think if Democrats and Republicans who are ideologically apart like Liz and Bennie Thompson can come together for the good of this country, we'd be in a better place if others could do the same thing.
CHUCK TODD:
Congressman Bennie Thompson, appreciate your time. I know this is important work. We obviously look forward to seeing this completed and to seeing those hearings. Thanks for coming on Meet the Press.
REP. BENNIE THOMPSON:
Thank you very much for having me.
CHUCK TODD:
When we come back, the anatomy of Donald Trump's Big Lie. How the former president actually spent years manufacturing this epic falsehood and how millions have bought into it.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back. A little twist on Data Download this week. We're going to take a look into the anatomy of the Big Lie -- how it began and how it spread and how, frankly, it has led to this sad fact -- that just 22%, one in five Republicans, say Joe Biden was elected legitimately. So how did we get here? Well, taking a look back shows us that Donald Trump has been laying the groundwork for this Big Lie really his entire political career. In fact, some say it all started more than five years ago, caucus night, 2016 in Iowa, where Trump, faced with his first big loss in the primary season, tweeted, "Senator Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa. He illegally stole it.” Trump would later delete the tweet. But even after he won the presidency, he blamed his massive popular vote loss on these mythical millions of people who voted illegally. And in fact to back up this lie, the president tried to establish a voter fraud commission, which ended up quietly disbanding after finding no evidence of widespread fraud. Then leading up to his 2020 showdown with Joe Biden, Trump spent months repeating lies about the election system overall, particularly casting doubt around increased mail-in voting and other election changes made due to the coronavirus pandemic. He's a sampling.
[BEGIN TAPE]
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do. You're sending out hundreds of millions of universal mail-in ballots, hundreds of millions. Where are they going? Who are they being sent to? This is just a way they're trying to steal the election.
[END TAPE]
CHUCK TODD:
Then before the votes were even counted, Trump attempted to declare victory on election night.
[BEGIN TAPE]
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
You just take a look at all of these states that we've won tonight and then you take a look at the kind of margins that we've won them by. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.
[END TAPE]
CHUCK TODD:
And then less than two days later.
[BEGIN TAPE]
PRES. DONALD TRUMP:
If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us.
[END TAPE]
CHUCK TODD:
And what is a better way to cast doubt on election results than to flood the zone with conspiracy theories, bizarre accusations and lawsuits from your so-called dream legal team here? And the president got a lot of help from some far right outlets like OAN and Newsmax, who sort of mainlined this propaganda, especially when his supporters felt that Fox News wasn't being, quote, "Loyal enough," after they called the election for Joe Biden.
[BEGIN TAPE]
NEWSMAX ANCHOR:
Right now Joe Biden is pretending to be the president elect. They know they haven't won this thing fair and square.
OAN ANCHOR:
We here at One American News are the only ones providing truthful, accurate numbers as we believe President Trump, as you can see, still has a chance of winning.
[END TAPE]
CHUCK TODD:
And in fact, take a look at this Newsmax viewership increase in the days after Election Day, because Trump was trashing Fox and he – basically pointing to the outlets that were believing his Big Lie. But it wasn't just on TV. Let me show you this: the far right social media platform Parler. They went from number 1,023 on the most downloaded free iPhone app ranking on November 2nd, 2020, basically just before the election -- after a week of propaganda -- number one. In a week. At the same time, Trump and his allies were trying to come up with ways to get Congress to overturn the election results. And we all know what that led to. And since the January 6th insurrection, we've seen the Republican Party and the president himself perpetrate the lie and whitewash the violence that happened that day, saying things like, "The insurrection took place on November 3rd, Election Day. January 6th was a protest." In fact, in the first three weeks of December, of just last month, Trump's Save America PAC put out 19 separate releases promoting this Big Lie. That's almost one every day. Again, just last month, nearly more than a year removed from the election. And the impact from this ongoing Big Lie does live on. In fact, 10 out of 15 Republican candidates for secretary of state in five key battleground states still question whether Trump lost the 2020 election. And among Republican voters the impact is simply stark. Take a look at erosion of confidence that their votes will be counted fairly from this October compared to last October. Look at this. Right before the election you had basically Republicans and Democrats feeling pretty confident about the election. A year of questioning it and gas-lighting the Republican Party, as former President Trump has done, it has eroded that confidence basically in half. That is something that we're going to live well beyond talk of the 2020 election. When we come back -- the impact of this. Some scholars look at the attempt to overthrow our election and see parallels with countries that have turned away from democracy towards authoritarianism. Could that happen here?
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back. It is not easy to talk to my next two guests about Donald Trump without using the word coup. Bart Gellman's later cover story in The Atlantic is entitled “Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun.” It looks at how the former president and his allies are plotting to steal the next presidential election. And you may remember Fiona Hill from her testimony at Mr. Trump's first impeachment. Hill was a top advisor to President Trump on Russia. She's an expert on authoritarian regimes. And in her new book, “There is Nothing For You Here,” she describes the January 6th Capitol riot as the culmination of a slow motion coup attempt perpetrated by Trump to keep himself in power even if he actually lost the election. Bart Gellman and Fiona Hill both join me now. And, Bart, I want to actually start with the fact that this is not the first time you've sort of laid out this dark future we may be facing. About three months before the election in 2020, in September, you're almost like the guy, the intelligence report in August before 9/11, "Bin Laden determined to attack the United States." You laid out, and even, sort of, foreshadowed, January 6th as a date that would not be pro forma. So putting that out there, how bad is it? How bad are we looking at the next two years and 2024?
BARTON GELLMAN:
Well, the basic point, Chuck, is that Donald Trump came closer than almost anyone thought he could to overthrowing a free and fair election the last time. And as I walk through it in my new piece for The Atlantic, he is in a better position now to subvert an election than he was last time. And that's pretty bad.
CHUCK TODD:
Why do you say that though when he's not -- I mean, he couldn't do this as the sitting commander in chief. Explain why as not the sitting president he's in a better position to do this.
BARTON GELLMAN:
The last time, in the 2020 election, Trump tried to use his powers as commander in chief and as chief law enforcement officer to marshal the federal bureaucracy in his favor to overthrow the election. He failed at that. Where he came much closer to success was as a politician, as a demagogue, as a rallyer of tens of millions of supporters as a politician. It was private citizen Trump actually who almost succeeded last time. This time he's got several key new factors in his favor. He and the Republican Party operatives all around the country are systematically going through all the places that thwarted Trump's attempt last time and uprooting the obstacles. So if you were an election official who insisted on counting the actual votes and declared that Biden won, you are being hounded out of office or primaried or made irrelevant by changes in the law that take away your power. If Congress changes hands and if Republicans control both houses of Congress after the next election, they'll be the ones in charge of counting the electoral votes. And there's greater willingness now in the state legislatures to do what was Trump's fundamental strategy, which was to induce Republican-controlled legislatures to throw away the votes of their own voters and substitute electors for Trump.
CHUCK TODD:
You made an important point there, if Republicans control both the House and the Senate after 2022. Fiona Hill, assess America as if we were looking at another country. How weak is our democracy right now?
FIONA HILL:
Well, I think the points that we just heard Bart make are very important. If we were looking at other authoritarian regimes, and, like, I'm saying other authoritarian regimes around the world, because what Bart is describing here is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime. The ability to remove people who stand in the way from, you know, basically the point of view of maintaining the democratic institutions, the ease in which that is possible to get rid of any opposition both within the system and also within the political party apparatus as well, these again are hallmarks of things that we've seen historically and also internationally. You know, if we take for example Russia, you know, the area that I am most, obviously, familiar with, my area of expertise, and you see what Vladimir Putin has done systematically over the last 21 years to reduce the opposition — putting opposition figures in jail is obviously the most extreme version — but marginalizing them, as Barton's describing, you know, and some of the things that he just said there. You basically marginalize people. You make them irrelevant. You push them to the edges of the polity. You remove the checks and balances in the legal system. You basically have a compliant legislature. And this is really key. I think that point that Barton said we have to, you know, really bear in mind here, and what you just said Chuck, about the House and both the Senate being in Republican hands – those loyal to Trump that is, I mean, not Republicans who want to actually maintain the infrastructure of democracy here. That will be really critical. Because when you have a compliant legislature and you have an executive that holds all of the power in its possession, that's when you're really in trouble.
CHUCK TODD:
You know, Bart, you were looking at – you found some interesting data when you looked at the counties where people who participated in the insurrection, that felt sort of compelled or motivated by Trump's remarks, that there was sort of a pattern that you discovered. Explain the pattern that you found. And what do you believe that tells us about how his message resonates?
BARTON GELLMAN:
Well, what I'm reporting in the story is the work done at the University of Chicago by Robert Pape and his colleagues who went through all of the, nearly 700 at the time, arrested insurrectionists from January 6th and went back to their home counties and said, "What do we find in common here?" They're not primarily heavy Trump-voting counties. They're not primarily counties where their economies are in trouble. What he found was that the insurrectionists were most likely to come from counties where the white population was in decline relative to minorities. And so if the proportion of non-Hispanic whites had fallen by at least one percent in the previous recent years, then that county was much, much more likely to send an insurrectionist. And what it suggests, and what polling bears up, is that a lot of Trump supporters are believers in a theory called the Great Replacement, which is the idea that the rights and privileges and position of white people is under assault from Black and Brown people who are trying to replace them in American society.
CHUCK TODD:
Fiona Hill, you testified in the first impeachment against Donald Trump. There was an attempt at a second one. Both failed. How are those going to look in five years?
FIONA HILL:
Well, if you mean from the point of view of historians, I think people will look back at this whole period that we're describing here and see that this was a major tipping point in United States politics, a tipping point in pushing us in a direction that I think most people would not have envisaged if we looked back, you know, kind of perhaps to 2010, for example. I think we've got a long tale of events here, as Bart is describing. We've had, you know, the Great Recession, the financial crisis, you know, tipping an awful lot of people into a kind of financial crisis. Some of Robert Pape's work at the University of Chicago also looked at the backgrounds of some of the insurrectionists financially. And some of them had taken a hit in the Great Recession. Then there's that demographic tipping point that he was describing there. And then there's the political tipping point. All of these are sort of fitting together. And when you look at other countries that have gone into civil war, all kinds of civil crisis and political crisis, you see the same hallmark. And you also see a lot of people standing around basically saying, "Look, that couldn't possibly happen here." And that's the problem that we face right now a year on, is that some people still cannot grasp the peril that we're in and the risk that we have to our democracy looking forward.
CHUCK TODD:
Both grasp or don't want to admit the reality we may be facing. Bart Gellman, Fiona Hill, appreciate both of you on this topic. When we come back, what happens when the Republican is willing to say in public what many in his party will only concede in private, that Joe Biden won the election fair and square? Congressman Peter Meijer joins me next.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back. Peter Meijer is a man on an island in the Republican Party. Meijer was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump after the January 6th attack, and he was the first freshman actually lawmaker ever to vote to impeach a president of his own party. He worries that leaving Donald Trump behind is going to be far more difficult for the Republican Party than perhaps he imagined in that first month in office. Congressman Peter Meijer joins me now. Congressman Meijer, welcome to Meet the Press. I think we have a little bit of an audio issue there. You may be on mute. But as you unmute, let me ask the first question here, which is this. I want to play something Mitch McConnell said about the January 6th Committee. Take a listen.
[BEGIN TAPE]
SEN. MITCH McCONNELL:
I think the fact finding is interesting. We're all going to be watching it. It was a horrendous event. And I think that what they're seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.
[END TAPE]
CHUCK TODD:
You didn't vote to establish this committee. I think you wanted the bipartisan committee. Senator McConnell ended up not supporting the bipartisan committee. Now he seems to be embracing what he's learned. I'm curious, what do you make of how the January 6th committee has conducted itself?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
Well, I continue to look at their actions and judge each action accordingly, whether that is the contempt of Congress that was suggested and sent to us for, you know, Mark Meadows, you know, or for Steve Bannon. Now, we'll view each on their merits and again, withhold judgment on the entirety of the committee until we see the end of their work product.
CHUCK TODD:
Given that you did vote in favor of the contempt against Steve Bannon, I'm curious, why Bannon yes and Meadows no? And does that mean you have some – you do think that they're conducting themselves properly here, or you perhaps wouldn't have even voted yes on Bannon?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
I think the ultimate thing to look at here is what precedent is being set and how that could be used in the future. With Steve Bannon, it was very clear: Congress has the prerogative to issue subpoenas and it has to have the contempt power in order for that subpoena to have any weight. And Steve Bannon flat out rejected any cooperation and told Congress to pound sand. So I held him in contempt and voted in support of that. When it came to Mark Meadows, he had been cooperating with the committee while he should have appeared in order to assert executive privilege. And there are two lawsuits ongoing, Trump v. Thompson and Meadows v. Pelosi et al. to determine the limits of the executive privilege that can be invoked. At the end of the day, he was cooperating at least in some degree.
CHUCK TODD:
Take a step back. I think you were among quite a few Republicans in the month of January, right after January 6th, who really thought, in the words of Lindsey Graham, "Enough is enough. I'm out of here," right? "I'm done with this. The party's going to move on. Trump's going to be left behind." Boy, did that not happen. Why do you think that didn't happen?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
There was no alternative. There was no other path. And given how President Biden when he was elected into office, you know, said he would be moderate and look for bipartisan solutions, and then after – and frankly, I blame the former president for this – after we lost the two Senate seats in Georgia and the Senate flipped, it became an exercise in trying to be an LBJ or FDR-style presidency and enact transformational change in the absence of any compelling mandate from the American people to do so. So that gave the rallying signal, that created a very steep divide. And at the end of the day, there's no other option right now in the Republican Party –
CHUCK TODD:
I –
REP. PETER MEIJER:
– And that's a sad test.
CHUCK TODD:
Why is it on President Biden that the Republican Party can't seem to kick their Trump habit? I mean, why isn't it on Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and yourself?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
Well, we have a two-party system. And in the best case scenario, each party challenges the other to do better, to be better, to have a scenario where iron sharpens iron. Instead, if you have one party plumbing the depths and the other just uses that as an excuse to go further, to go more to an extreme, to go more away from any sort of governing consensus and towards trying to enact, you know, whatever the will of the most extreme constituency they have is, you know, that is a recipe for both parties to drive further away from anything that resembles serving the American people as a whole.
CHUCK TODD:
Look, I get our inability to sort of meet in the middle here. But do you accept what you heard in the last panel there, particularly from Fiona Hill, that this is not a political argument. You've got one party that's being led by Trump here that seems to be trying to delegitimize our democracy. Does that concern you? Does that, do you share that fear and view?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
I do. But I also see another party that's trying to delegitimize our democracy in far less dramatic ways. At least, you know, not guys with Viking hats, you know, bare-chested, running into the Capitol, but calling for packing the Supreme Court, calling for abolishing the Senate. And frankly, doing the same thing, the same justifications that I saw from some members of my party after the riots last summer. They say, "Well, why is it so bad that we stormed the Capitol? You know, they were the ones burning down these cities." The sense of riot envy. Now we have this delegitimizing envy where, again, it is creating a reciprocal reaction. I think this is all incredibly dangerous. I think the threat of violence is probably more pronounced on the right today. But that does not mean the left is not capable as well. And that is what we need to cease. We need to cease this opportunity that has been grabbed at to expand the field of contest and the field of play, where instead of working within institutions, we seek to destroy and delegitimize the institutions themselves.
CHUCK TODD:
Can the Republican Party survive Donald Trump becoming the nominee one more time?
REP. PETER MEIJER:
Well, if by "survive," you mean win elections, I think they can. If they "survive" you mean offering a cohesive governing ideology, some modicum of alliance to principles, I think that's something that's going to be a larger project.
CHUCK TODD:
Peter Meijer, a Republican from the Grand Rapids area, very much a swing area. One of the few sort of, I guess, Congressional districts that actually has moderate voters in it these days. Peter Meijer, I appreciate you coming on and I hope you have a happy new year.
REP. PETER MEIJER:
Thank you.
CHUCK TODD:
When we come back, the January 6th committee: Will it change any minds? Will its conclusions be seen as just another partisan attack? The panel is next.
CHUCK TODD:
Welcome back. The panel joins us now from their remote locations: Yamiche Alcindor, the moderator of Washington Week on PBS; NBC News Senior Capitol Hill Correspondent Garrett Haake; Johah Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Dispatch; and NBC News Senior Reporter Brandy Zadrozny, who reports on misinformation for us. Jonah, I want to start with you because I want you to help translate for some viewers that may be frustrated, shaking their head about the Peter Meijer interview, and this idea that, well, the Republican Party may be stuck with Trump and, well, the Democrats are polarizing us too and, you know, "What about this? What about that?" Is that any way to get Trump out of our democratic crosshairs?
JONAH GOLDBERG:
Not necessarily. I substantially agree with some of what Meijer said. I think one way to think about this is that we have elite failure in this country. And the Republican fail – the failure of Republican elites is pretty fricking obvious at this point. They've been feeding themselves one bite at a time to the Trump alligator for five years. They've wrecked their reputation in all sorts of ways and their legacy in all sorts of ways. But, you know, the better example of how the Democrats have been partisan in all of this is, look how the impeachment was handled. An institution that took itself seriously would've impeached Donald Trump within 48 hours of January 6th, or impeached and removed. But Nancy Pelosi, the way she handled impeachment, she gave a lot of Republicans, I think, an indefensible, but a politically defensible, out to not vote for impeachment. Why wasn't Liz Cheney made an impeachment manager, for example? The way the Democrats have handled a lot of the Trump stuff has been for partisan advantage. Why are we not talking about reforming the Electoral Count Act, which is the central tool for any attempt by Donald Trump and his minions to take power again? All the focus from Democrat talking points is about voting rights bills that, you know, you can defend or you can attack for various reasons, but they don't address the actual threat that Donald Trump and his minions present in how they would try to take the next election. And they have not made it a priority to fix it. Republicans haven't either. I've got no brief for how the Republicans have acted. But each side seems to be looking for finding the way to make the best advantage for their narrow partisan benefit –
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah –
JONAH GOLDBERG:
– rather than thinking about themselves as leaders of the whole country. I think that's the real problem about trying to deal with the reality of the Trumpian threat –
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah –
JONAH GOLDBERG:
– is actually identifying the problem and dealing with the real problem, rather than trying to turn it into some sort of omnibus excuse for your entire wish list.
CHUCK TODD:
Yamiche, this feels like we may be in a cul-de-sac.
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
It feels like we're in a cul-de-sac. And it feels as though we're in this sort of polarized moment where the lie of the election and the president – former President Trump claiming that he won, that lie has metastasized. And it's a cancer that's essentially taking over the GOP. I'm thinking about Representative Thompson talking about the fact that it took 187 minutes for former President Trump to speak out. And in that time, I remember standing on the White House lawn and talking to sources. And everyone, including Republicans, they were all sort of seething and saying that the president needed to do something. But that really, that sense of outrage, that sense of urgency, it was gone by the next day. And what you see now is even someone like Mike Pence, former Vice President Mike Pence, who had to run for his life because people were chanting, "Hang Mike Pence," he's saying now we're talking too much about January 6th. And, of course, there is this flow now, second part of January 6th, where January 6th was not, of course, an end of the Trump era. In fact, I think it was the beginning of a new phase, where the president has even more of an outsized influence on the GOP because you can't even get GOP primary candidates to say that Joe Biden is president. So I don’t – I mean, it's interesting to see Republicans point to Democrats and say, "They're the reason why we're so polarized and the reason why people wanted to smash into the Capitol –
CHUCK TODD:
Right –
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
– is because people got mad at Black Lives Matter protests that got a little out of hand and got out of hand in some cities," but I think overall what we're seeing is a fragility –
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah –
YAMICHE ALCINDOR:
– of American democracy and Americans really not quite I think grasping how dangerous this is.
CHUCK TODD:
Garrett Haake, how many Peter Meijers are there now in the Republican Party who are, I would argue, wringing their hands about the state of the Republican party, but are, like, "You know what? I'm just – I’m not going to be on the frontlines of this fight right now"?
GARRETT HAAKE:
In the House, maybe a dozen. Maybe less. And I think the challenge is in the next Congress if Republicans pick up any seats at all, there will be even fewer proportionally. I mean, to Yamiche's point, the idea of the big lie as kind of a campaign issue, as a cultural issue in the Republican Party has worked its way all the way down from former President Trump to state legislatures, to Congressional candidates. It is everywhere. And that's what the next crop of Republican lawmakers in both House and possibly Senate are going to look like. So this isn't going anywhere in the Capitol.
CHUCK TODD:
And Brandy, look, you spend a lot of time covering misinformation. This is – this is so embedded. Paint a picture for us now in this misinformation fire hose that the right is getting.
BRANDY ZADROZNY:
I mean, it's an interesting time to study misinformation because what we saw in the run-up to 2020 was Trump create this sort of, not just a pipeline, which is how we had been used to seeing, but sort of a feedback loop, which was where he primed his base that the election would be rigged. And then he literally sent out a call to his digital soldiers, which is what he called people on the internet, to sort of throw spaghetti at the wall, to choose your own adventure of misinformation or election rigging. And then they would post that on social media. And then that would feed back to the president and his allies, who would then post more things about that, pointing to that as evidence. So, like, when you ask a Republican, which I do as many times as I can find one, including in my own family over the holidays, you know, "What about the election was rigged? How was the election stolen," no one can really answer me. Again, it really is a choose your own adventure. It's so pervasive, that it's just a thing that we have now. And that's really the point of disinformation, right –
CHUCK TODD:
Right –
BRANDY ZADROZNY:
– is to confuse, to muddle, to make everything so you just doubt democracy as it is. And that, as you showed in your Data Download –
CHUCK TODD:
Right –
BRANDY ZADROZNY:
– was exactly what happened. People have no faith in democracy anymore.
CHUCK TODD:
Very quickly, Jonah Goldberg, can the January 6th Committee come up with anything that would change Republican minds?
JONAH GOLDBERG:
Remains to be seen. A lot of people did some very, very bad things trying to steal the election. And it just depends whether they can find the actual evidence, the smoking gun.
CHUCK TODD:
Right –
JONAH GOLDBERG:
If there are in fact videos of Donald Trump practicing his appeal to the mob to go home that have all sorts of damning stuff on it –
CHUCK TODD:
Right –
JONAH GOLDBERG:
– that could be a big deal. But it just remains to be seen because a lot of this is baked in. I do want to say --
CHUCK TODD:
Very quick.
JONAH GOLDBERG:
– I think there are a lot more what I call closet normals –
CHUCK TODD:
Yeah –
JONAH GOLDBERG:
– in the Republican p=Party whose chief crime is just cowardice and not being willing to tell the truth, rather than actually believing the full scope of the big lie nonsense.
CHUCK TODD:
And that's what we're all hoping. Looking for people to just speak the truth. That's all we have for today, guys. Thank you for watching. Have a safe and healthy new year. We'll be back next week because if it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press.