Lies, Politics and Democracy: Adam Kinzinger (interview) | FRONTLINE

as i said i want to talk to you mostly about what happens after the election but let me ask you a question about a little bit before 2020 was there a point when you were watching the presidency of donald trump that you first were becoming concerned about american democracy about his role yeah like early in 2017. i didn't vote for trump in uh 2016. you know i gave him a chance in 2017 and i think at the beginning you know what we could see is he put some good people around him hoping maybe 2016 was election rhetoric and you just saw kind of as 2017 went on when you look at afghanistan you look at the kurdish issue foreign policy in general you saw that he was just kind of shooting from the hip and while i wasn't concerned necessarily about domestic democracy at that moment you started to see frankly a president that was more about himself than he was about the future of people about the future of the country and so that's i think when real concerns started creeping in and of course it got much stronger later and what about charlottesville was that a moment of warning i mean especially we look back now and you see some of those individuals that look very similar to the ones that were there on january 6th yeah i think charlottesville was a big warning um you know i think what it showed is first off the president didn't know how to denounce white nationalism he considered these white nationalists a part of his base and as you noticed he always tried to put these disparate parts of his base together to be a majority and he didn't want to offend anybody in white nationalism and you know we would stand up and say i mean come on if for us it was and for me particularly i had to imagine that maybe there was just some miscommunication because there's no way that he's in essence openly embracing this but as time went on we saw that he was and uh charlottesville was it was a big eye-opener and it's a recognition of what happens when even if you don't outright denounce white nationalism for instance if you're silent on it they often take that as an approval because they know you can't endorse them so if you're silent that's as close to an approval as you can get those first years are very tumultuous very divided between the two parties and one of the things we're trying to understand ask you about briefly is leading up to that first impeachment vote and the role that polarization plays and let me ask you first what were you seeing from the democrats republicans describe a trump derangement syndrome and talk about russiagate and the dossier and all of that what were you seeing from the democrats were they involved in driving a polarization in that period or how did you understand that moment i mean i certainly think there was the democrats had a role in polarization i mean i think if you look at the democratic party even today it's it goes further left it has its own fight it's not really similar to the nature of what the republican party has but it's always a fight against moderates and progressives and the tone is just rotten on on both sides of the aisle here but when it came to impeachment i think one of my criticisms is how the democrats handled that was they rushed it you know they had this report that came out and then there was this decision where we had to vote to impeach i think it was prior to christmas or something like that and it seemed like they really rushed it instead of you know calling certain witnesses and i remember it gave us it frankly gave me an excuse to vote against impeachment that's one of my greatest regrets is not voting for the first impeachment but it gave me a reason to vote against it and of course you know when you're stuck in that kind of a polarized moment you're always looking for kind of a way out and that's to my shame that that happened but certainly i think looking back what we know now looking at the situation frankly between russia and ukraine it's quite obvious that the president violated his oath using american taxpayer dollars as political leverage because we've talked to experts who study democracies and one of the things that they've said is that when you have a highly polarized system that some of those checks and balances don't seem to work when you look at that acquittal is that an example of a strain on our constitutional system i think the acquittal is a is a strain i think it shows polarization uh it shows that people are putting party loyalty frankly and and you know loyalty to one man above the constitution but it's just kind of the nature of that moment we're in right now and that's why i think it's so important for people to stand up from the grassroots up and say we demand different but yeah that's the moment we're in and i think i've come to believe that people less fear death than they do being kicked out of their social circle and what you've seen now in kind of these monolithic views whether it's republicans or democrats or a gun control group or an anti-gun group is people are afraid to go outside of the lines and have a little bit of a different belief because they'll be kicked out of their social circle and that to humanity is probably one of the most frightening things and i think you see that at work particularly in the republican party where leaders members of congress are afraid to tell the truth to their constituents because they might get text messages from their friends like i've been getting for years and uh they might lose their election and that to them is a greater i guess problem than even possibly dying someday as you were watching the run up to the 2020 election how concerned were you about what you were seeing i was very concerned watching the the run-up to 2020. um it started really with the pandemic and the misinformation i was always aware of and always kind of engaged in this idea of having to fight misinformation and misinformation is a cancer democracy basically with democracy you have to agree on just one thing that's it is that we've got a common set of rules and your vote counts everything outside of that you can argue but if you have that basic understanding you're good to go that was being eroded that was being eroded through the conspiracies of q anon that had a much larger following than people realized until it was too late it was being eroded by the president's rhetoric where he was talking about the election was going to be stolen or mail-in ballots are just a way for the democrats to steal the election those are all targeted at eroding faith in democracy and so i would say i was getting really really concerned even prior to the election and were other members of your party concerned did you see the response that you were seeing from the leadership as adequate certainly the response by leadership was not adequate it really has never been to any of these issues you know behind closed doors i could talk to members of congress who you know would express some version of concern but i was i think the thing i'm still dumbfounded by is that so many of them didn't understand the damage this was doing or if they did they didn't care and in fact one of the most eye-opening things is i think it was just after the election when i'm sitting in the cloakroom and to that point i'd never heard a member of congress actually repeat any of these conspiracies about the cia or italian satellites or whatever the latest one was and i heard a member of congress express a conspiracy theory to an audience of other congressmen that were like yeah yeah that seems reasonable and that was a little eye opening for me that now this kind of bulwark of maybe we'll tolerate some of the conspiracies but we know better has been broken and now even those in leadership and in kind of the echelon of governance are buying into these so let's go to that moment where the president walks out in the early hours after the election and says frankly i did win the election how important a moment is that in everything that would follow when the president came out on election night and basically said i won i you know stopped counting the votes uh that for me that was it you know i had condemned a lot of the president's words leading up to that about undermining democracy but the second he tweeted something along the lines of stop counting the votes or something i knew it was going to be a huge problem and i knew this could be a president that's not for the first time at least in modern history willing to accept election results and the problem is when you have a base people that are so faithful to you that have put their trust in you and now you don't have a counter to that you don't have a kevin mccarthy out there saying otherwise instead you have him being silent in the beginning and then ultimately supporting those conspiracy theories it's not hard to think that people wouldn't buy into it and by the way every american if you truly believe the election was stolen or there's some secret you know society running government i mean it's really in our nature for revolution so january 6 should have been no surprise to anybody 36 48 hours there's a period there where it's the president there's don jr there's alex jones there's people very close to the president pushing the conspiracy theories and by the end of the week more prominent figures in the party senators are going on to fox news and at least raising questions about the election how important was the choice that members of the party faced in that moment right after the election in those first few hours so right after the election i mean every member of congress senate any party leader they faced a choice on you know what position they were going to take too many of them took the position of we're going to at least tolerate these conspiracy theories and then we'll go through to when all the lawsuits are exhausted and then the president will accept the outcome and at every moment even in this kind of post-election period there was always something over the horizon that people convinced themselves would stop the insanity and it never did i mean even after january 6th those were very defining moments right after the election and another defining decision was frankly mitch mcconnell making the decision to not go after the president's conspiracies because mitch mcconnell needed him on board to win the two georgia senate seats that he ultimately lost anyway i heard from a specific senator who said mitch has told us to stay quiet against the president in this period because we need him for georgia and i think that led to a lot of what otherwise would be kind of influential senators at least countering the voice of uh donald trump being silent and silence is complicity you've talked about this a little bit but i want to ask you directly when you would talk to other members especially in that period those first few weeks did they believe that there were legitimate questions about the results of the election so right after that election period i'd talk to people and uh i never once talked to anybody that believed any of this garbage in fact they would shake their head and say yeah we gotta let him get it out of his system or you know i'm going to confront this they never would um the few that did you know would confront it ultimately ended up kind of in the end going quiet again because they couldn't take the beatings i guess but i i still believe that even today maybe a couple but the 99.9 almost of congressmen and women in the republican party know that the election wasn't stolen they're just too cowardly to say it and frankly in a republic that's frightening and what were you saying at the time what were you tweeting at the time and what was the response you were getting both from constituents and from other members of congress during all that period i was i started going on kind of an active countering misinformation tweet thing so if i'd hear something about what was the latest dod attacked the cia in germany because they were stealing votes i would put up how ludicrous that was and go after all these little conspiracies that most people didn't know existed but existed in the twitter underworld and what did that lead to well a lot of constituents that would be kind of what i would call base republican voters being upset because i wasn't showing faithfulness to donald trump and there was a period slightly after that when i started to realize that a lot of these folks truly believed these conspiracy theories these are college-educated folks these are business owners in many cases millionaires that would buy into this stuff my colleagues on the other hand actually were all thanking me because they didn't have the courage to do it and somebody needed to that changed of course later on when it became more and more uncomfortable for them but yeah it was a certainly a unique period of time and leader mccarthy what is he doing what is he saying in this period we're not in january yet or the end of december but in that those first few weeks what's his approach and what is he saying he's doing so you know in the first kind of month or few weeks or whatever after the election kevin mccarthy was really silent and there were a lot of us trying to kind of get a position of where kevin sits on this he was our leader we looked at him to say what's the tone you know when is it okay we're you know kind of the party position is hey we'll see how these court challenges go and then we'll accept the winner he was very silent and that was surprising to me too i had started to really kind of have falling out with kevin a few months prior when i noticed that he was more interested in defending donald trump than his own members when donald trump for instance would go after republican members but in that post-election period it was really disappointing eye-opening for me to see a leader that really could have as a leader should been the one standing up taking the initial arrows calling the election fair and allowing in essence breathing room for his members to do the same and he never did it one of the things that we've seen in a lot of the books that have been written was that there was things going on behind the scenes that mcconnell is silent but he's trying to get bill barr to get involved with the president that he's sort of working behind the scenes was that a response adequate from mitch mcconnell working behind the scenes and not saying something publicly for the first six weeks well i mean i'm glad mitch mcconnell worked behind the scenes but he needed to say something publicly i mean if you think about kind of party leadership donald trump yeah let's call him the party leader even in that moment after he lost the next two are kevin mccarthy mitch mcconnell and then there's another echelon under that you would expect they would speak up and the thing is is mitch mcconnell you can work behind the scenes to have somebody like bill barr say something that's great but everybody is watching him to say something and not just him his actions similar to what kevin mccarthy could do which would give freedom to republican members of the house if mitch mcconnell would have spoken up that would give leverage to dozens of other senators to say the same thing ultimately when people start hearing folks they trust tell the truth they may actually start believing the truth but if they don't hear anybody say it and it's just quote unquote the media all that does is feed into the narrative that there's a conspiracy out there by the time he does say biden won the election what had happened in the interim so by the time mitch mcconnell finally outright said it you had this race in georgia you've had election lawsuits you've had you know these briefings uh on some texas court decision that that would be coming by that time it's like too late it's like with a conspiracy there used to be this idea that don't address a conspiracy because you give it oxygen and i've come to believe in the age of the internet twitter and information you have to address conspiracies early because they are going to get oxygen regardless and i think when mitch kind of spoke out finally and i want to say that you know since he's been in mitch mcconnell terms i guess somewhat aggressive and calling it out but that whole period of silence creates a conspiracy narrative that sinks in soaks in and takes hold and that's i think largely why we are where we are today one of the key warnings looking back it seems to us is that moment with gabriel spurling where he talks about there will be violence did you see a threat of violence did you believe things were getting out of hand in that period yeah i saw a real threat of violence coming um if you just take what i would see out there on twitter about you know i don't know various q anon conspiracies or you know you'd see what was posted on telegram or any of these other things and you see people talking about revolution we're talking about you know this cabal that runs government and it's time for 1776 these are all like kind of echoes of things you pick up watching you know threats against me i remember a specific post and somebody posted a hangman's noose under it um those kinds of things you're like yeah this is this is pretty serious and you know that writer protesters showing up at people's homes may be technically legal but you know quickly that can spiral out of control i really sensed it in fact i predicted violence on january 6th not based on any fbi briefing but based on just what i knew was going to happen if you just pay mild attention and you know how people think and that's unfortunately what we got why did another see it why didn't other republican leaders see it i don't know if other republican leaders didn't see it or didn't want to see it but i also think it's you know when you invest yourself in becoming a leader in somewhat of a cultish moment for a party uh you have to suspend any kind of morality um you have to suspend any i'm doing this for the right reason because your end objective isn't to attain power to achieve good it's do whatever you have to do to achieve power and that becomes the ultimate end state so you can easily write out of your mind any concern about violence you can easily you know convince yourself that everything you're doing is for the ultimate good when i warned on january 1st or the 2nd we had a call and i warned kevin there would be violence he just dismissed it operate her next caller didn't listen to it um he should have how serious was the attempt to overturn the election i mean at the time you saw four seasons total landscaping in a crazy press conference with hair dye running down i mean was it a serious attempt to overturn the election i would characterize that whole period and attempt to overturn the election as kind of unserious people seriously attempting to change the outcome and initially it appeared like kind of an amusing clown show a funny point in history but then you realize it doesn't matter how much hair dye somebody wears eventually if they can convince people that's what matters in a democracy in a republic so while you know the lawsuits that you know trump lost all of them you know those are all within his right to challenge it was in the period after the lawsuits were exhausted um when it became what at the time felt like unserious which ultimately you realized is very damaging and was very serious to our democracy and and has convinced people that that election was stolen even if we survived 2020 and thankfully we did or the beginning of 2021 it's not like those concerns go away and i think they've grown ever since there was tremendous pressure put on local officials you know a single individual on a board in michigan or a secretary of state or a governor what did that period reveal about the fragility of our democratic process what did you see when you look back at what what's the warning maybe that you take from those attempts and how close or not close they came i think what we see in in that period is that democracy and this may be something we always should have known democracy is as strong as people are willing to commit to their oath so if you think about it we all take an oath in whatever capacity if you work for the government or you're in a position of leadership that you will support and defend the constitution and that commitment to that oath is the only thing that holds you honorable in that position you know why is it that we respect what the supreme court says because we respect what the supreme court says why is it that the president executes the laws of congress because that's what the president does if the president decided not to it's not like the capital can send the police force and do it it's because we all kind of agree on this real basic social contract and what that period showed is there were spots in government and not really in the federal government in local and state government where people held to their oath and the system worked if they don't hold to that oath we go into real constitutional crisis we go into a real kind of death of trust and uh i think it goes to show that democracy is both strong but also can be very fragile if people don't respect uh their oath to that they take can you bring me into that conference call that you mentioned um at the beginning of the year and what you're saying what liz cheney is saying what kevin mccarthy is saying and what the stakes were at that moment yeah so that conference call was really uh i think it was probably the first opportunity we were hearing what kevin mccarthy was going to do on the january 6 challenge to that point again notoriously he had been very quiet we didn't know that's when he announced in essence that he would be voting with the objectors that was surprising to me and uh you know liz had given a really compelling narrative about why we have to certify the election kevin came on and said liz only speaks for herself not the conference anyway at that point you go through the whole thing and then we all get a chance to ask questions and i was the first in and i just said kevin you need to understand you have convinced a significant amount of american people that an election was stolen and if you look at the history of how we were founded what we believe in there is no doubt this will lead to violence i've seen violent threats i've had threats against me there will be violence on january 6th and he just said okay adam operator next caller that was it and uh you know i mean it was fortuitous and i'm not i don't have a crystal ball i didn't know anything magical i just paid attention if you pay attention you'd notice it if you didn't want to notice that it's easy to miss there's a report in some of the books where there's a question about you know how are you going to tell the caucus to vote and he says you know i'm not going to take the voting card was that that same call i believe it was that same call it was definitely that same time period but yeah it's uh you know which is funny because we always get told by leadership how they want us to vote and at that moment he said well if you want to give me your voting card do it but otherwise you just i'm not going to tell you how i'm going to vote or how you should vote and then eventually he of course did too much pressure i mean same thing so there was a lawsuit for texas that they tried to get uh republican members to sign on to as as part of an amicus brief i didn't sign of course and even kevin didn't sign on to that until the next day the list of people that signed on to that came out kevin wasn't on it and there was twitter chatter about kevin and he put out a press release and said he was accidentally left off that's courage for you right there it's sort of a lonely group and it will eventually become primarily you and liz cheney who are speaking a lot about this what was her position at that time and why did she make a different decision than kevin mccarthy you know why did you make a different decision so liz's position had always been a commitment to the constitution i mean if you look at at liz's whole career it's about defensive democracy it's about promotion of democracy i guess we never expected it would have to be here at home and so i've always had that respect i always knew she'd do the right thing obviously she like me we have moments where we've made political calculations uh it's naive to think that never happens but then there's a moment you look and say this is really an existential issue and why did we make a different decision you know i don't know that i guess that's one you'd have to ask kevin mccarthy because he's the one that has to figure out why he decided that his power or his party or his you know guy that he's sworn some allegiance to was more important than his oath i can't answer that i just know for me and i would argue probably the same for liz we knew the oath we took and we knew the answers we had to do it still baffles me that more people haven't but i'm comfortable in what i've done do you think the result would have been different if he did say this is how you should vote you know you shouldn't support this listen if kevin mccarthy had from the beginning taking the leadership position of we respect the election you know we lost now it's time to reorganize take back the house and win the presidency in four years we'd be in a much different position i i personally think i mean we could talk for hours about the period after january 6 until really just after impeachment there was silence in the republican caucus the vast majority of people thought trump should go it was really a matter of time of seeing how he was going to end up out would he end up in jail would he end up impeached and then there was a day when kevin mccarthy went down and met with trump in mar-a-lago and those of us for instance that voted for impeachment were pretty upset about that and kevin told somebody in our group i don't remember who he said oh i just happened to be in mar-a-lago and the president invited me and so of course i'm going to meet with him he also had some website called trump's majority and kevin's oh i have 100 websites that's kevin mccarthy in that visit to mar-a-lago it was like uh when somebody's in cardiac arrest and you take the paddles and you bring them back to life trump's political career was in cardiac arrest and kevin mccarthy brought the paddles and resurrected him on january 6 though a majority of the caucus it seems like is going to vote not to certify then the attack on the capital happens what is the feeling inside the house inside the caucus for you does it feel like things are changing what's the response of people do they think it's gone too far i mean while january 6 went down i you you couldn't have found a single defender of donald trump in the moment it really seemed like everybody recognized you know this thing's gone way too far i for sure thought that this would be the end of the objections um i personally was angry right i i think most people were fearful i was mad because i knew why this is happening and i knew it didn't have to happen and i also knew as somebody that is a student of foreign policy and and frankly gets very involved in democracy development around the world i knew that this was going to harm our image so this has an effect not just here but in other places when that attack was going down and then at one point i think in a text group i'd heard that there were people still planning to object to the elections i think that's when my anger went from a 10 on a 10 to a 15 out of 10 and to recognize that even in that moment the craven politics of that moment outweighed the gravity of what was happening you know look the house has a lot of passion that's what the founders intended uh it also has a lot of stupidity and i learned that that day i mean trump riles up the crowd it goes to the capitol it's not in the end as we know successful in keeping him in office but there is political violence on the capitol i mean in in some way was it successful in the extent that he wanted to send a message to the republicans in the house about what his supporters were capable of was it successful january 6 in that sense so january 6 in terms of you know the instruments of government and overthrowing him was a failure in terms of the psychological damage in terms of the kind of you know from donald trump's perspective i'm the man i'm in charge i know how to do this probably a bit of a success for him especially given that he ultimately survived and thrived um to show what what was capable in people you lie to and people that you abuse you know it was a bad day and i think ultimately as i look at democracies i say we're not defined by bad days we're defined by how we come back from them so i think it's a question that's still out there i still have no doubt even a percent that donald trump will go down in history as one of the most dangerous foolish presidents of the united states of america but in this short moment uh you know he's still very dangerous we've heard that there were some members who were afraid of violence and that that might have affected how they responded to january 6 how they voted is that something that you have heard or seen i don't want to say i don't have fear you know i've been to war you know my fear i probably have a much higher fear tolerance than other people um i i think there were folks that were afraid and i think there were folks that took that fear and used it to find a reason and this is the thing if you put them on a lie detector test today they probably believe they voted against for instance the second impeachment of donald trump because of some reason that they convinced themselves but the thing that led to finding that reason is that fear i think there were a handful of people like that and look my reaction is this all you have to do is look in ukraine look in iraq look at people that face violence every time they go into a parliament and you look at that and go how can we sit here and not do the right thing because we fear some violence in the u.s you're in the wrong job i got to tell you you can go be a cuddle coach somewhere if you want but if you're going to be a member of congress you're going to have to face sometimes pretty tough positions one of the things people have told us is that one of the things that they get by not criticizing trump is a level of access ability to talk to the president and on january 6 kevin mccarthy does and says you know you need to speak out against this you need to stop this what does he get in that moment and what does it reveal about that relationship so you know some things i have to kind of hold back on with that in terms of january 6 but and what i know i'll just say kevin mccarthy always made it very clear to us how close he was to donald trump now he could pick up the phone he could get him on the phone and i think he had an opportunity on january 6 to and i think he did to his credit on that day i think he aggressively talked to donald trump and told him to stop and and told him what the stakes were kevin mccarthy had access because look if you do the bidding of donald trump you'll get a cell phone number it's like the first time ever that a president has been so accessible to those that love him so much and i guarantee you that is why you have seen so many people come to congress as trump critics and leave as trump sycophants because all you got to do is what he wants and he's your best buddy now you'll always get thrown under the bus but i think that goes to show some of what kevin mccarthy dealt with too he learned that if you stay silent you allow trump to do what he wants and you feed his ego you'll have access and in kevin's world access has been the one thing he's always wanted to fame and power so in that period after january 6 in uh in the run-up to that impeachment vote does it feel like things are changing you know lindsey graham gives that speech we now know about some of the phone calls um that kevin mccarthy had with leadership around that time did it feel like things were changing so right after january 6 there was really a sense that you know we didn't know how it would change but like there's no way it can go on and so we knew something was going to change i did a video which actually ended up launching a movement where i was basically calling out the gop has gone off the rails and i didn't get pushback from all the base republicans it was kind of like yeah that's a good point um so there was some optimism and in fact i even remember during that inner kind of period thinking hey we should we should actually do a vote of no confidence against kevin mccarthy because he had tolerated everything to this point and we got close to launching that and then made the decision uh i didn't make the decision but i was outnumbered by a certain group like uh no in the in the interest of healing since we're probably gonna get past trump anyway let's not do that i think had we launched the vote of no confidence against kevin we'd have had a shot it goes to show how much that changed when you could have had a shot there to like today where he's on top as you get towards that impeachment vote were you expecting more than 10 i mean historically that's a large number but it's certainly not a majority of the caucus what happened in that period well i mean i talked to a lot of people that were right on the edge and a couple days before the impeachment vote i thought we could get as many as 20 or 25 to vote for impeachment i started to see them kind of fall off that courage train if you will and so i was pleased on the day that we actually did get 10 but i look back at okay what's the difference between the 10 that voted for impeachment and the 15 that knew they should have in titan and it all came down to re-election i talked to most of them and you know the ones that ultimately didn't vote for impeachment were the ones that as we talked expressed real concern for whether or not they'd be re-elected look if your in-state is to stay in this job you can do it i mean there is no way you'll lose an election if you just can take your morals out and do whatever you have to do to win some people do that out here by the way shocking and i think that's what people realized but there were some people there were 10 uh that made the decision that regardless of the cost we've got a vote to impeach it's the right thing to do and what were the consequences did that 10 know what the consequences might be politically for threats of violence i think the consequences have been from a political perspective it's intense um you know anybody that would have a primary or normally wouldn't have a primary now has an intense primary i made the decision not to run again which i think i very likely would have made anyway but obviously given that tough thing and i've been in this job 12 years and i want to focus on broader stuff in this political fight that's the decision so there's a cost but i got to tell you i can sleep at night and i know that in five or ten years looking in the mirror i'm not going to be ashamed of what i did in this period there's a lot of people i can't say that i'm confident they won't be ashamed either did kevin mccarthy did mitch mcconnell did they have a chance at that moment if they made different decisions to not revive trump as you say with with the paddles to keep him out of the party to say january 6 was wrong and election fraud didn't happen did they face a moment of choice at that moment i think had kevin mccarthy and mitch mcconnell and frankly every leader but starting with them joined hands and said look we lost you know congratulations joe biden we're going to beat you in four years uh but what donald trump is saying isn't true i think it would be a very different party today you still may have a fringe part of the party that's you know donald trump cultists but it wouldn't be the majority of the party because there would be a counter narrative from people they trust to what they're hearing up to this point there was no counter narrative to what donald trump was spewing or the internet was spewing from people they trust you know you can watch the news but if you think the liberal news media is out to get you you're not going to believe what they say anyway but if the leaders you trust are saying yeah maybe the election was stolen you believe it they personally could have made the decision and changed this around i'm convinced of that and do you know why i mean obviously especially in the case of mitch mcconnell's not a fan of president trump um mccarthy sees access in him and maybe he's a fan or maybe not but but why didn't they make that decision it's power i mean it's tough decision to make because it could you know as kevin mccarthy's sitting there looking realizing he's got a run for speaker in two years and he needs every vote to become speaker because you have to have 218 votes he knew that all of a sudden the small minority of people that maybe still trump cultists have the ability to deny him the speakership so in his mind i think he made the decision to embrace that assuming that everybody else even if they have to hold their nose would come along and vote for kevin i'm not convinced that's going to happen now but that was his calculation he doesn't believe any of the stuff he says he doesn't believe it at all but he just somehow believes that him being speaker will achieve his life goal and somehow change the world and it's not there seems to be a period an initial period right after there where kevin mccarthy seems to believe that there could be a big tent inside the party and that liz cheney can be on the leadership um what happens why does that why does that start to fall apart well so there were people that started to get uncomfortable when liz kept speaking out they somehow believed we needed to put january 6 behind us i would have agreed had we taken full accountability of january 6 and and determined we'll never do that again you know that's a stain on our party i think we could have moved on but we never did that and you had election deniers and and i think kevin started to feel the pressure from not the majority of the republican caucus but from the 10 or 20 crazy members like marjorie taylor greene and he decided they want to oust liz al oust liz and we didn't even take a recorded vote by the time we realized they were in the caucus kind of passing something without even taking a vote it was too late and you know it's fine i think liz is better off because to be the conference chair with you know 30 or 40 people that are constantly trying to undermine you she's way more heroic now and history will judge her better now than had she been a conference chair i mean it does seem like another moment of decision which is you've supported impeachment and do you keep talking about it or do you not keep talking about it and why do you make the decision to keep talking about it some of the ten haven't it is a moment of decision for those that haven't like kept speaking out about it i don't hold any grudge against them as long as you know they don't and they haven't as long as they don't backtrack on the vote right you know it's like hey i took a tough vote i did my tough duty i'm moving on i understand that for me i just realized how how threatened democracy is and i and i i look i've been a republican since i'm a kid since i've been a kid which is weird i get that but i fell in love with a party that believes in optimism that believes in having a government that plays a smaller role in people's life and believes in a strong national defense that can you know help people kind of live the american dream in their own world um and that parties doesn't exist right now nobody's fighting for it and i made the decision that i'll keep fighting for it if it fails it fails but it deserves a battle and how far has mccarthy gone and how far has the the caucus gone i mean you and unless cheney have been attacked as you know pelosi republicans yeah there was an effort to cut off her fundraising you know people working for her for fundraising how much has the caucus changed as kevin mccarthy changed in that period since january 6. for me the republican caucus is unrecognizable um you know there was a fundraiser for the opponent to liz cheney and i saw a hundred of my colleagues on it you know 50 of which blew me away that they would do it and as i talked to most of them they just said well kevin asked me to do it and in essence he threatened my committee position if i didn't uh yeah that's not a caucus or a party i recognize anymore it's sad but again you know i choose to remain optimistic that someday i hope it's sooner than later but it may be later uh this generation of people that are still kind of mired in their political battles of 50 years when they move on and pass that torch to the next generation that's a little more optimistic and is kind of sick of politics as usual america will be back in in full bore so with that moment where the republican national committee censures you and was cheney and the reference to january 6 is legitimate political discourse what does that say about where we are it says that there's a lot of dumbasses running the rnc no that moment says to me you know look i didn't care if i was centered by the rnc it was the last thing in the world i really did care about but it was so like kind of delicious when you had the legitimate political discourse because it's like even when you're censuring adam kinzinger and liz cheney you still can't help yourself from looking completely out of touch and insane and that's exactly what happened i'm glad frankly that happened because i think it exposed the mindset and i think the most important thing is that of all those members there that resolution passed unanimously of all those members there they didn't all believe it but there were people that probably supported liz cheney and i that we're too scared to speak out and that to me is a microcosm of exactly what's happened in the party for the last decade some people with reasonable beliefs are too scared to speak out because they'll be overcome by the mob which is why liz cheney and i are pretty lonely out here with not a lot of colleagues that are internally cheering what we're doing but too scared to speak out and when you look at the at everything that has changed since then efforts on voting who's running for secretary of state or governor how concerned are you about how things are changing about the um integrity of the next election and whether we'll be honored you know i'm really concerned about the future because i think once you know when we hold kind of standards as sacred you know the standard that if you're a republican or a democratic local elected official you're going to put party away and you're going to count votes right when that gets violated once it's gone we always say out here when you throw out a norm that norm never comes back and and i fear that when you start kind of making it a litmus test to say i would have overthrown the election for donald trump and you win that becomes now what you have to do you know and and it won't be long until the democrats are doing the same thing trust me that's how it always works so yeah i'm very concerned about the future the last thing i want to ask you about is the commission and then the committee what role did you hope that the commission and then it eventually becomes the select committee would play and what did you think of republican opposition from mcconnell from mccarthy to an investigation a bipartisan investigation well i think the opposition was insane um i think we could have had you know a complete accountability of what happened outside of politics which is what we all wanted and so in essence to support and then oppose the commission was silly and i don't understand it my hope is through all this investigation though and now that it's become a select committee is that we can just give a historical record to the american people look i don't know if we're going to convince anybody to change their mind in the near term i think some but you know i don't expect that it's going to be some eureka moment except i know that in five or ten years when my kid's in school he's going to learn the truth about january 6 and he's going to learn it because of the work we've done conspiracies always die out eventually and so that's what's important to me is the legacy we're leaving uh for the truth can you just describe what it is at risk if this moment goes wrong what what is on the line look if this moment goes wrong we're gonna be fighting a politics that just is about power and not about principle uh look at a lot of failed democracies or struggling democracies and that's what you see you see politics that's about vindictiveness or about power about violating the law that's what's at stake we need truth we need to get back to the basic commitment to democratic norms that's what's at stake at this moment

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 1,181,943

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Id: Me8JNADr318

Length: 43min 46sec (2626 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022