How early on did you know you had enough material for a criminal referral?
When we started to see intentional conduct, specific steps that appear to be designed to disrupt the joint session of Congress, that’s where it starts to sound criminal. The whole key for the special counsel is intent. The more evidence that we saw of the president’s intent, and others working with him, to take steps — without basis in fact or law — to prevent the transfer of power from happening, it started to feel more and more like possible criminal conduct.
Understand the Events on Jan. 6
For those on your staff who were new to Capitol Hill, how did they adjust to the culture of Congress, where politics and politicians run everything?
The Hill is a different culture than the Department of Justice. A grand jury explicitly is a secret process. And it doesn’t help an investigation when every step you take is reported. I mean, there were days when we would interview a witness and literally 30 minutes later, there’s Luke Broadwater on TV saying the select committee interviewed the witness. And that makes it really difficult because there were times when people would say, “Well, my client would like to help the committee, but she’s concerned that if she does, then she’ll immediately be outed as a turncoat.” So the public nature, the scrutiny under which we operated, was not helpful, and it made it more difficult for us to earn the trust and confidence of people.
The committee’s summer hearings were widely hailed as a success because of both their evidentiary and production value. What do you attribute that to?
Hearings is not the right word for what we did. We called them hearings, but they were presentations more than hearings.
The communications strategy was different than anything I’ve ever done in the grand jury and anything that had been done in Congress. When I started this job, I read the 9/11 Commission Report and I met with its author, Philip Zelikow, because he lives in Charlottesville. I looked at that as the gold standard. But it was pretty obvious to us really early that we can’t just write a long report that you buy at Barnes & Noble. America is different now. So we needed to find ways to present our findings more visually, in shorter chunks, in a social media-fueled information landscape.
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The committee hired James Goldston, who’s the former president of ABC [News], and he brought in a bunch of producers. So there was this collaboration of lawyers and producers. That was a combination of skills that I don’t know if Congress had seen before.