--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again. With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Remember the insurrection on the United States Capitol building? there are a whole lot of politicians in Washington who would rather forget. Andrew Prokop has been covering the story for Fox.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So shortly after the Capitol was stormed on January 6th of this year, an idea took hold about what needed to be done. And this idea was mainly pushed by moderate Republicans at first. The idea was that there needed to be a commission, a bipartisan commission established by Congress, to look into what went wrong and how to prevent something like it from happening again.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So naturally, this bipartisan idea is now completely mired in partisan infighting.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So most interestingly, this was originally proposed by moderate Republicans? Yes. So Representative John Katko of New York. It was not only an attack on this institution, but an attack on our law enforcement brethren who defend us every day.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois. This isn't just about, you know, one party or the other. We've got to we've got to bring everybody together to find out why decisions were made and frankly, why decisions weren't made leading up to the six.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They're both Republicans. And, you know, in the days after that chaotic event happened, Republicans were really on the defensive. And not all of them ended up voting to impeach Trump, but they felt pressure to support something. Like they recognized that what happened was horrible and unacceptable and that they needed to explain that they're doing something.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The American people and the Capitol Police deserve answers and action as soon as possible to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So this is when the idea of this bipartisan commission took hold. And it is explicitly and directly modeled after the 9-11 commission, which was established by Congress after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And has this sterling reputation now as the gold standard of members of both parties working together to overcome partisanship and to do the right thing for the country.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The real story is more complicated, but that's the myth, and that's what these moderate Republicans were nodding to.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What would this commission, be it modeled after the 9-11 commission or otherwise, look like? What was the initial proposition?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In the bill that has actually been passed by the House at this point, it calls for a commission of 10 members. It'll have a 50-50 split of Democrats and Republicans with subpoena powers requiring cooperation from both sides.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And they would be tasked with examining things like the preparedness and the day of response of the Capitol Police, of the rest of government.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We need a dedicated bipartisan commission to look at the whole picture. But also of the root causes of contributing factors of why the storming of the Capitol did take place.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that's where the controversy comes in. So if this commission was just going to be limited to did the Capitol Police do a good job or did they drop the ball, I think that's something that Republicans could get on board with.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But, of course, when it comes to anything touching on the behavior of one former president, Donald J. Trump, things get a little more dicey in Republican land.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. Because when you look at the root causes or contributing factors to why these hundreds of people decided to storm the Capitol on January 6th, the reason is pretty obvious.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There are other aspects of this commission's mission that could also reflect very poorly on Trump. Specifically, it would surely dig into the federal government's decision making and any role that Trump himself had in organizing the response on January 6th itself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it could theoretically surface some rather unflattering things. There have already been anonymously sourced reports in the press that when minority leader Kevin McCarthy called Trump to ask him for help at stopping the chaos, Trump responded, quote, well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are, to which McCarthy responded, who the F do you think you're talking to?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: CNN confirmed this exchange, Wolf, with Republican Congresswoman Jamie Herrera, Butler of Washington.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's the sort of stuff that the commission could surface, could more thoroughly document, and could cause new rounds of controversy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's go to our guest, Andrew Prokop. Andrew, you just mentioned the president called Kevin McCarthy and said like tough luck. How does he feel about this commission?
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Back when the second impeachment was taking place in January and February of this year, it was common for members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy to voice support for the commission as an alternative to impeachment.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but is not the path we are on today.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: And so what happened after that was that McCarthy deputized a moderate Republican, John Katko of New York, to negotiate with Democrats on the parameters of this commission.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: And Democrats actually made a lot of compromises. They gave McCarthy almost everything that Republicans had been asking for.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: The commission would be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans rather than giving Democrats who have a House majority the majority on the commission.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: The commission would not be able to issue any subpoenas without some Republicans signing on to it. That is, it couldn't be just turned into a partisan subpoena weapon by the Democratic commissioners.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Um, and yet once these concessions were made, McCarthy decided that he would oppose such a commission anyway.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: You've got two committees in the Senate already doing their investigation. I believe in two weeks, they'll already have their report back, even though Pelosi wasted all this time.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: And then you've got the Justice Department, rightfully does a much better job than we could ever do. Arrested already 445 people.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: I just think a Pelosi commission is a lot of politics.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Yes. It's this afterlife of Trump and the big lie that continues to roil the Republican Party that resulted in Liz Cheney being purged from leadership.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: It is simply not acceptable within mainstream Republican circles these days to do things that reflect poorly on Donald Trump.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: So this culminates last week in a vote in the House of Representatives for this commission.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: And the GOP minority leader essentially tries to scuttle it. But it squeaks through. It squeaks through, but it was always going to pass because Democrats have a majority in the House and they can pass whatever they want.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: So the Democrats were unified behind this.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: What was interesting is that 35 House Republicans voted for it as well.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: You know, that's still the vast majority of House Republicans voted against it. But it showed that some House Republicans were feeling a bit of pressure on this issue.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: And they didn't think that continuing to close ranks and defend everything that Donald Trump did after the 2020 election would be a good look for them when they run for their own reelections next year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it did pass, but now it's in the Senate where there is the problem of the Senate filibuster.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So unlike in the House, Senate Democrats cannot pass whatever they want with just a majority. They need 60 votes to get a bill passed the filibuster.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they have 50 Democrats, which means they need 10 of the 50 Senate Republicans.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What are the chances of that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The chances currently look quite grim.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Even moderates like Susan Collins of Maine are saying they oppose the commission in its current form.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, that could make you think, oh, well, they're open to negotiation. They could reach some sort of deal.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But other Republicans have taken a stronger line.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who was a very surprising vote to convict Trump when the impeachment trial went to the Senate in February.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He said that there's there's no version of this commission that he could support because he thinks it is just a political ploy by Democrats to make Republicans look bad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Mitch McConnell has basically said the same thing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is clear is that House Democrats have handled this proposal in partisan bad faith, going right back to the beginning.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: McConnell's number two in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, gave probably the clearest confirmation that this is what's going on here.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He said anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats very radical left wing agenda.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they want to move on. They want to focus on how the Democrats are bad.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They don't want to talk about bad things that Donald Trump did.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It is at once surprising and not at all surprising that there is now political gamesmanship over an investigation into an attack on the very building where all this political gamesmanship is taking place.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are Republicans feeling any pressure to work with Democrats from, I don't know, Capitol Police who were attacked on January 6th, protecting the very lawmakers who are now saying there's no point in having this commission?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Interestingly the capital police organization themselves is staying out of this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was a letter circulated by certain members of the capital police that uh got some attention uh saying that they needed a commission and they supported it and how could republicans be blocking it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the official organization has has not taken a position as to you know how could republicans defend and attack on democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've been pretty much seeing this play out since the 2016 election.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When the Russian government hacked emails belonging to Democrats and arranged their leaking, and then the Republican Party sort of lined up against investigations about whether Donald Trump had any role in this and whether this was an attempt to interfere with the election result.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we saw it again in the advance of the 2020 election when Rudy Giuliani went looking for dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine and President Trump began pressuring the president of Ukraine to come up with some dirt on Biden.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That led to Trump's first impeachment and the Republican Party closed ranks again on this effort to interfere with the 2020 election, and they acquitted Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: More with Andrew in a minute.
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--:-- Andrew Prokop: Andrew, you mentioned in the first half of the show that this whole commission that now seems all but sure to fail was meant to be modeled on the 9-11 commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Could you just remind us a little bit about how that commission went?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, obviously it was a shocking, traumatic moment for the United States.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And there was a big drive to find out what exactly happened and what went wrong.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What eventually Congress came up with was the 9-11 Commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It would be 10 commissioners, five Republicans and five Democrats.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: A lot of them were retired politicians. So the idea was that they would be freer to fully devote themselves to a mission of seeking the facts and coming up with, you know, a shared kind of national narrative about what happened and fully answering people's lingering questions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I remember the upshot of that was an actual report that was published and sold in bookstores all across the country, right?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Maybe across the world. I remember seeing it in bookstores. I think I own it.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yes, it was a surprising bestseller, even though it was offered for free on the Internet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And it was written very compellingly. It was almost like a novel, not in the traditional confusing jargon of committee reports.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I do think, though, that rose-colored glasses are applied with how we remember this commission as this sterling moment of bipartisanship.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because 9-11 had the potential to reflect very badly on the recent presidents of both parties.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Bill Clinton was in office throughout the 1990s when Osama bin Laden was putting al-Qaeda together and getting entrenched in Afghanistan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And then George W. Bush was in charge for the eight months or so before 9-11 happened.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So, you know, depending on what such a commission turned up, it could have had really serious political consequences for both parties.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Really what happened is that both commissioners ended up kind of making sure their own party wouldn't look that bad.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I want to thank these two gentlemen for serving their country so well and so admirably.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They've done a really good job of learning about our country, learning about what went wrong prior to September the 11th, and making very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: With George W. Bush's election looming, with the Clintons huge in Democratic politics and Hillary Clinton rumored to be thinking about running for president, no one of these commissioners was going to agree to something that was really, really tough on either Clinton or Bush.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Does that mean that the 9-11 Commission was somewhat inaccurate in its final published form?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It was definitely incomplete. And it was incomplete in part because information was withheld from them by the Bush administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the real success of the 9-11 Commission report was PR, basically.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I'm here with the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission. Thomas Caine, the former Republican governor from New Jersey. Lee Hamilton, former Democratic congressman from Indiana.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The two lead commissioners, Tom Caine, the former governor of New Jersey, a moderate Republican, and Lee Hamilton, Democrat from Indiana, they kind of joined hands and agreed to sell the final product as a bipartisan success.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The policymakers were very wary of us. they were wary because they knew we'd be looking back we'd be trying to identify mistakes we would be looking at how well they performed in the clinton administration and then in the bush administration the first eight months so they would always do media appearances together
--:-- Andrew Prokop: they had some gravitas these were the wise men of the american political world and they had managed to come to an agreement and kind of craft this shared national narrative about what happened, where the blame really fell on the intelligence agencies and various mishaps that happened there.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that is part of the story, but it's not the whole story either.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So just thinking about how that commission went in comparison to this one, there were some fears of blowback for the administration.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There were some partisan issues. There was, you know, inaccuracies or at the very least an incomplete final version.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it still meant something. It still resulted in a greater understanding of the event.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Why 20 years later is it an impossibility to achieve something like this?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: If Democrats could achieve something like the 9 commission report for January 6th I think they would be thrilled because you know despite its shortcomings it did have this shared factual understanding and national narrative.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I think there are a few reasons why the same thing is not in the cards today.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: First of all, there's the issue of mutually assured destruction that that was the case for political blame for 9-11.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Both parties had a big chance of looking bad in that report unless they could manage to get together and be bipartisan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When it comes to January 6th, there's really only one party that has a chance of looking bad, and it's the Republican Party.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And everyone involved in this knows that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The second lesson, I think, is that Tom Kane and Lee Hamilton, they really sold a bipartisan product because they wanted to sell a bipartisan product.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But for the January 6th commission, the Republican commissioners would be appointed by McCarthy and McConnell, who are both opposed to the very idea of such a commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they are highly likely to appoint commissioners who will not want to produce a bipartisan product, who will want to defend their own party as much as possible.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And there will inevitably be even more conflicts and gridlock than there was in the 9-11 Commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because, again, this is really an issue that hurts the Republican Party by far the most, far more than the Democratic Party.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Can the Democrats just go it alone and do this themselves?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They absolutely can, but they wouldn't be able to do the 9-11 Commission themselves when it comes to how that commission was viewed by the press and the public.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So when it comes to the actual formal powers of a commission like this, there's nothing special about a bipartisan commission.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They would have the same powers as any ordinary congressional committee.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They can request witness testimony and documents voluntarily, or they can issue subpoenas to try to get sworn testimony and documents when people are a little more recalcitrant.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Any congressional committee can do this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The House, especially the Democrats have majorities on every committee.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they can do this with their votes alone.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Another possibility is after the Benghazi attacks of 2012.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: We are coming on the air because we have just learned that the U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It happened overnight when angry militants stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They fired shots, set the building on fire. Almost a dozen Americans were inside being guarded by Libyan security.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: At least one other American died, most likely of smoke inhalation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: House Republicans created a special select committee that was appointed just for this issue.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Get to the bottom, supposedly, of what happened in Benghazi.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But what people are looking for from this commission is the ability to shape a national narrative, to find a shared factual universe.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that's not what we got with Benghazi, to be clear, right?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Yes, the Benghazi investigations by Republicans were viewed as highly partisan.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So it definitely did not succeed in creating a shared national narrative.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It did have another success, though, which is that the Benghazi committee ended up turning up the fact that Hillary Clinton had not used a government email account and had only used her personal email for all of her work as secretary of state.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted for convenience to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that started the snowball rolling that eventually led Hillary Clinton to be put under FBI investigation and the controversy over her emails that loomed over 2016 and may have ensured Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election that year.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: What are her numbers today?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Her numbers are dropping. Why?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Because she's untrustable.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not thought and made that happen.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I give you credit for that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So a really motivated dirt digging committee can find stuff that hurts the other party when it comes to common ground bipartisanship, feel good kumbaya type stuff.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I don't think that's what would come out of a committee like this.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But if Democrats want to really go after the truth here with the understanding that the truth will make Republicans look bad, they can certainly vigorously pursue that if they want to.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I think the fantasy that if Trump voters only had the right information, that his support would plummet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's been disproven again and again over the past several years.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But I do still think that it is valuable to find facts and get to the bottom of things, you know, in and of themselves.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It might not change anything, but for history, if for nothing else, it is useful to know as much as we can about this effort to prevent the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election from being ratified and moving forward.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Madam Speaker, let me be clear.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Last week's violent attack on the Capitol was undemocratic, un-American, and criminal.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: The president's language and rhetoric often goes too far.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: I think yesterday in particular, the president's language and rhetoric crossed a line and it was reckless.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: When it comes to accountability, the president needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Which is why I think a fact-finding commission and a censure resolution would be prudent.
--:-- Kevin McCarthy: Thank you.
