Four months after it launched a series of public hearings, the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its last scheduled hearing on Oct. 13. The Committee’s unanimous vote issuing a subpoena to former President Donald Trump, as well as releasing video recordings of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi desperately calling for police and National Guard troops to protect the Capitol from Trump insurrectionists, captured most headlines. But disturbing revelations emerged about the U.S. Secret Service not acting on information they had regarding armed Trump supporters’ explicit plans to stage a violent attack on Congress to prevent a peaceful transition of power from Trump to Joe Biden, raising serious questions about possible complicity with the coup plotters.
Recent press reports suggest that a sizable percentage of FBI employees were sympathetic toward the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. This information, along with the fact that former and current police and military personnel participated in the coup attempt, has raised questions about these government institution’s allegiance to upholding and protecting the U.S. Constitution.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sarah Kendzior, cohost of the Gaslit Nation podcast and author of “They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent.” Here, she discusses unanswered questions about the Secret Service and FBI inaction to protect Congress in the days before and on Jan. 6 and the sad reality that neither Trump or his Republican co-conspirators have been held accountable for any of their multiple crimes.
SARAH KENDZIOR: With Jan. 6, we all knew it was coming or at least had the ability to know that the attack was coming because the perpetrators were planning it on the Internet and leaving a giant evidence trail.
And so if I was able to see that, if I was able to see, for example, Lin Wood, you know, Trump’s lawyer recruiting participants and if I could hear Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and many others calling for a insurrection and an attack, then obviously the Secret Service could have, the FBI could have. Congress should have been prepared, I mean, everyone prepared for the worst and they weren’t.
And there obviously was some level of complicity from within. You know, you can call it negligence or incompetence, but when there’s so much evidence in the public domain and a very consistent track record from Trump and his cohort of threatening, we should have assumed it would happen.
This is the same plot that they had in 2016 when Roger Stone came up with the term “Stop the Steal” and said, “There would be a bloodbath unless Trump was made president.” He was made president, so they didn’t need to do it. This time around they did.
And you know what I wonder is why Biden would not immediately investigate this for his own safety after taking office in 2021. You know, if there are people in the Secret Service who aren’t protecting him or protecting Kamala Harris or others, you know, he obviously should know — both because it’s a crime, but also because he’s in danger.
And then the same goes for Christopher Wray. I don’t understand why he is still there either, because he let a coup, an attempted coup and violent attack happen and then denied fore-knowledge of it, even though the average American could find that knowledge on the Internet.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well put. Extremely disturbing stuff. Well, Sarah, one thing that really stands out when we look at the totality of the evidence introduced by the Jan. 6 committee, and that is the stark fact that Merrick Garland, the attorney general in the Department of Justice, has not indicted Trump or any of his co-conspirators for their treasonous, violent coup attempt. There’s been really no legal consequences for any of them.
And there’s a lot of predictions of course. Without accountability, the inevitability of another coup attempt will be right around the corner. I heard one commentator over this weekend talking about the impact of the threat to democracy that we’ve seen in the Jan. 6 attack as not being really an effective issue for Democrats in the midterm election coming up Nov. 8, because she says without any indictments, without any accountability, all this for many people is just background noise.
SARAH KENDZIOR: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s worse than background noise because in the beginning after Biden won the election, the vast majority of Americans believed that he was the legitimate winner, including the vast majority of Republicans.
At this point, the majority of Republicans do not because so much time has passed and there’s been so much propaganda, but also because they assume that if Trump were launching a coup and insurrection, sedition, so forth, that if this is serious, Merrick Garland would indict him, the DOJ would act.
That is one of the primary arguments they make, is that he couldn’t have possibly committed any crimes; that Trump is completely crime free and so are all the people surrounding him, because otherwise the DOJ would obviously indict him.
And that’s, you know, Merrick Garland is doing an enormous amount of damage to this country. I mean, damage to the elections, but more importantly, it damages our public safety and our national security. We all witnessed this.
He also could have indicted Trump on other things, like he came into the DOJ role with the Mueller report already written out with, you know, about a dozen counts of obstruction of justice detailed within. He could have indicted Trump. He’s refused to indict him for anything, including stealing classified documents and bringing them to Mar-a-Lago.
And now we Americans are going to bear the consequences of this. And it’s just shameful. I’ve been worried about it for a very long time and a lot of people were in denial. They kept saying, “Oh, you know, be patient. You know, he’s just carefully calibrating and he’s going to do it.”
But when you have a mafia state trying to regroup, when you have a failed coup, you know, that coup becomes a dress rehearsal and the mafia state actors simply return. And anyone who’s studied this type of country knows this, including Merrick Garland. And so his decision to not indict, he knows full well what the consequences are. Biden certainly knows what the consequences are. So I don’t buy the naiveté. But I also don’t understand why they would do this, because it’s going to very badly hurt this country.
And we may well see violence in the midterm elections. Little miniature versions of a Jan. 6 throughout the country if the results are violently contested.
Co-hosts Sarah Kendzior’s and Andrea Chalupa’s podcast Gaslit Nation can be found at gaslitnationpod.com. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahkendzior.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Sarah Kendzior (16:37) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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