--:-- [Upbeat music fades out, and the host, Georgia Howe, speaks]
--:-- Georgia Howe: The NFL is back, and FanDuel's got everything you need to play your game. From same-game parlays to live betting. Right now, new customers bet $5 and get $300 in bonus bets if you win. 21-plus in president select states. 18-plus in Kentucky and Wyoming. Must be first online real money waging. $5 deposit required. Bonus issued is non-withdrawable bonus bets that expire seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at FanDuel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
--:-- [Music transitions to a more serious tone]
--:-- Georgia Howe: New testimony and documents show that Liz Cheney's January 6th committee intentionally suppressed information that contradicted their preferred narrative. A new report shows that President Trump did request National Guard troops to secure the Capitol and undermines explosive testimony from the original committee findings.
--:-- Georgia Howe: In this episode, we speak to the Federalists' [Molly Hemingway], who uncovered the new evidence. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief [John Bickley]. It's March 17th. Happy St. Patrick's Day. And this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to shed light on some of the uncovered testimony related to J6 is editor-in-chief of The Federalist, [Molly Hemingway]. Molly, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Yeah, very happy to be here.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, in the course of your reporting on evidence recently uncovered from the J6 probe that was not previously released, you found that Liz Cheney intentionally withheld testimony and information that contradicted claims that were made very early on by the committee, specifically that President Trump did not secure the Capitol. What was the main gist of what you guys found?
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Well, the January 6th committee bragged that it had conducted a thousand interviews and that they put all the information that was necessary to check their claims online. What's interesting is they only put fewer than half of those interviews online. And when you start to look through some of the interviews that they conducted that they didn't publicly provide access to, you see that these people painted a very different picture of what was going on in the aftermath of the 2020 election leading up to the riot at the Capitol on January 6th.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So for example, Tony Arnauto, who was deputy chief of staff, he did three interviews with the January 6th committee. And the first one, they ask him, you didn't see anything about 10,000 troops being sought by the White House, did you? And he said, no, actually I did. I happened to overhear a phone call between Mark Meadows and the D.C. mayor, Muriel Bowser, where he was encouraging her to request more National Guard to protect the Capitol. She did not want to do that. And so then he sought a quick action force based out of the Pentagon so that people would be ready to go if anything were needed.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: It also shows that the White House had no understanding that there would be any kind of violence that day from people who had gathered to support the president, but that they were worried about Antifa, which had previously in the months prior attacked some Republicans who had shown up to protest in the nation's capital. It's just a very different narrative than the one painted by the January 6th committee.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, is it an important distinction that the committee specifically stated that there was no evidence that Trump attempted to secure the Capitol?
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Well, they said that they had found no evidence, but nothing about this proceeding was actually what you would want if you cared about due process. The committee was put together entirely by one party. Every single person appointed to the committee was appointed by Nancy Pelosi. They were told they weren't allowed to look into whether or not she had done what she needed to do to protect the Capitol. And so everything was a very one-sided presentation of information. There was no counsel for the, in a court of law, you have someone present a case and you have someone defending and you have counsel for both sides. They didn't have that in this proceeding. And yet they were colluding with other entities.
--:-- Georgia Howe: You heard about Fannie Willis down in Georgia. She's prosecuting Republicans for challenging the election in Georgia. And a new book which she cooperated with shows that she was colluding with the January 6th Committee on some of the information that they were providing and accessing in order so that they could prosecute in Georgia.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Another thing that was interesting is that the Colorado Supreme Court, when they were assessing whether or not to disenfranchise voters from having the right to vote for the candidate of their choice, one of the things that they concluded was that there had been no evidence that Trump had sought to protect the Capitol prior to January 6th. So the prevention of that evidence being included in the report and in the show trial that they broadcast actually affected the Colorado Supreme Court decision.
--:-- Georgia Howe: There were witnesses who were saying the same thing as what Tony Arnato said, and they said, this sounds crazy. Nobody else has backed you up. And in fact, there was evidence. Now, this may or may not be known information right now. But what other interviews were not shared? You said 50% were not shared. Do we have any idea what's in those interviews?
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Okay, so this is where things are interesting as well. The House Administration Committee has a subcommittee looking into all the evidence that was provided to the January 6th committee, including the evidence that they concealed. And so they have put out a preliminary report shortly after my piece came out that had some additional information of other interviews, but they are continuing to dig through hundreds of transcripts and other pieces of information.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And in addition to Liz Cheney was sort of like the face of that committee, but Benny Thompson was her co-chair and he has already raised alarms for how the information was not shared in an easy to consume manner, including some information was password protected and he did not provide the password for that.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: So they're having to work hard to get some of that information, but they are working on that. That's led by Representative Loudermilk out of Georgia and other members of his team are looking to have the full truth told.
--:-- Georgia Howe: What's interesting about this is, you know, just apart from the political problems there, I think most Americans agree that you should know what happened to allow the Capitol to be so unprotected that day. And it's a complicated story. It involves the D.C. mayor. It involves the Nancy Pelosi and the sergeant at arms. It involves the fraught moment after the 2020 election. But all Americans should want to make sure that their capital is secure.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: The January 6th committee in no way looked into what happened there. And that was the one thing that was actually a legitimate oversight function for the House. Instead, they just ran this frenzied sort of anti-Trump, anti-Republican narrative in order to affect the 2022 midterms. But we didn't really get the information we needed. And you can't get the information you need if you start out with an agenda to target political opponents as opposed to just seek the truth and find out whatever happens.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, there was a very long delay between when the National Guard was requested and when it actually arrived. What was the exact timeline on that to the extent that we know?
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Well, the interesting thing I mentioned earlier that when Merrill Bowser did not want to bring many National Guard troops in to protect the Capitol, she had a few hundred and she was explicit that they not really do anything, that they just kind of direct traffic. And we should remember that January 2021 is shortly after the summer of violence in which so many cities were besieged by violent rioters. And D.C. was one of those. Tons of arson, violence, assaults, property damage.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And Merrill Bowser had spoken against having National Guard come in to quell riots. So had Nancy Pelosi. I think she called them thugs when they were protecting some of the national monuments.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: You will remember that the New York Times had a complete meltdown over Tom Cotton saying that he thought that National Guard could be used to quell riots. So that's kind of the context of the moment. You also had Liz Cheney. It was later revealed she secretly orchestrated an op to her father by her father and other former secretaries of defense to say nobody at the Pentagon should ever be involved in any use of military as part of election disputes, which was clearly an attempt to prevent anybody from the Defense Department being able to come in to deal with any violence after the very weird 2020 election.
--:-- Georgia Howe: So she had put this high pressure campaign on the Secretary of Defense to do nothing. The White House had worked with him on having a quick action force. But by the time the riot starts occurring at the Capitol and they call for it, it kind of took him a little bit of time to get that all going. And there was a great deal of frustration with that delay. It shows how, had everybody been on the same page about the need to have proactive police presence there or National Guard presence, how that would have helped the situation a great deal. And it's a little difficult to get it to happen afterward.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Now, I want to ask you about the Cassidy Hutchinson claims. They are now being undermined by some of this new testimony. Can you tell us what her claims were and what this new evidence says?
--:-- Georgia Howe: So Cassidy Hutchinson was a low-level White House aide who had a very interesting track record with the January 6th committee. When she's talking with her friends, and Tristan Justice and I at the Federalist reported about this a while back, based on contemporary evidence. Immediately when the January 6th committee gets set up, she was like, why would they want to talk to me? I don't know anything. And she was extremely pro-Trump.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: She does some interviews and then something, there's like a high pressure campaign to kind of flip her that involves Liz Cheney and Barbara Comstack. They replaced her counsel. And all of a sudden she has some pretty dramatic stories. And I have to say that one of her dramatic stories that is false involves me. She falsely claimed that I had had a clandestine meeting in Georgetown with Secret Service agents to improperly receive classified information. And that is not true.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Another story she told was that she had heard, she said, that Donald Trump had overtaken the driver of the beast, which is the very secure vehicle that he travels in, and that he had violently overtaken this person. She claimed she heard this from Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato. But she didn't tell this story until late in 2022.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Well, early in 2022, he had sat for an interview with the January 6th committee. And he was asked if there had been any, you know, if Trump had tried to do anything to join the protesters. And he's like, no, and I would have heard about it if there had been. So before she even makes the claim, he kind of rebutts it. And then once she makes the claim, he's like, yeah, that never happened. But they knew that there was no corroborating evidence that the person she claimed had told the story had repeatedly said it wasn't true. And yet they didn't publicize what he had said or what other people had said that contradicted.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, obviously, it's very hard to speculate on others' motives. But do we have any hard evidence of political motives of members of the committee?
--:-- Molly Hemingway: So the January 6th committee, it should not even really be called a committee. When you think of a committee in Congress, that means they have rules covering the whole situation. You have a certain number of members from the majority. You have a certain number of members from the minority. The minority team has rights, like they have the right to work and defend any witnesses. And none of that happened in the January 6th committee. So really outside media should have never treated it as anything other than a Democrat committee that had Democrat motivations.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It was appointed solely by Democrats. And they, as we know from what they did, you know what was going on by what you saw and by what you read. The concealing of evidence is deeply problematic. It's completely corrupt to not share all the evidence that the committee obtained, even as the committee wasn't trying to obtain a wide variety of evidence. They weren't trying to find exonerating evidence, but just in the process of interviewing, they were able to obtain information that contradicted the set narrative that they'd put forth.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: They hired a TV producer to produce the congressional hearings for maximum impact, for story. That's not what you do when you're trying to find out the truth. And then, of course, all the members have been very outspoken about their personal hatred of Republicans or Donald Trump. You can just go to their Twitter feed to see it.
--:-- Georgia Howe: But I mean, I'd prefer to just focus on what they'd said and what they did and how that violated due process and how that was a complete obstruction of justice in many cases for how they handled this and who they conspired with. But I can't know why they did what they did.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Now, in your recent article, you talk about a book that confirms prior reporting that Liz Cheney secretly conspired with Fonnie Willis, who listeners will remember is the Fulton County prosecutor, and that perhaps Cheney viewed this as, quote, a platform for her to resuscitate her political career and a springboard for a Cheney presidential run. What do we know about that?
--:-- Georgia Howe: Yeah, Michael Isikoff and a co-author just wrote a book. It suffered from poor timing. It was a book to praise Fonnie Willis for being this wonderful prosecutor down in Georgia. And right as the book was coming out, all sorts of other evidence came out that she had secretly hired her lover who was underqualified and how they had benefited financially. And so that's all ongoing.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: But I love to read books and find out information in them. And this book had a ton of information and it was very friendly to Democrats and to the J6 committee. The book was called Find Me the Votes. But it revealed that Liz Cheney did collude with Bonnie Willis on her operation. It painted a portrait of Liz Cheney as being the real leader of the committee, which is not surprising. And yes, it said that she really thought that this January 6th committee, if it went right, it would turn everyone against Republicans and Donald Trump and that she might be able to run for president. And she was really hoping it would springboard her career.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That's Michael Isikoff's presentation in his book. But it also shows that even as she was working with Fonnie Willis to go after these Republicans in Georgia, she was really controlling what information they could get and when. They worked out an agreement that they would get access to information, but they couldn't reveal any of it until after the show trial was done and broadcast by the January 6th committee.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: So it was just interesting details about how much coordination was going on there. There's been coordination between a lot of different Democrat groups in their lawfare, whether it's in New York with people who are placed in different prosecutors' offices to go after Donald Trump there, or in Georgia to go after Trump and a ton of other Republicans there, or the Colorado efforts to remove Trump from the ballot that are happening there and in other states and with the January 6th committee.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's not surprising that this lawfare is all being done and rolled out at the same time because you see how coordinated it is and how the people are placed in different offices to sort of help that.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: All right. Well, that was very interesting and thorough and we're excited to hear what else you uncover. Yeah, there will be much more information to come, assuming I should say that they're able to break through some of the barriers that were put up by the J6 committee to prevent people from being able to read transcripts or get information.
--:-- Georgia Howe: All right. Well, we look forward to it. Thanks for coming on.
--:-- Molly Hemingway: Thank you, Georgia.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was [Molly Hemingway], Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
