Here is convicted trespasser, a convicted trespasser.
We're about to explain. You see spot shadow there from
the Janu 6 attack.
You can see him pushing forward.
This is brazenly passing police lines to break into the
Capitol that day.
Evidence shows he also gathered apparent weapons by breaking apart
metal fencing,
hiding it in his pants pocket.
And that's something he's actually admitted.
Speaking of accountability in his legal case,
his name is Charles Hand.
He's a 37 year old January 6th convict from Georgia.
He is the kind of person that the Republican Party
has claimed for many decades should not even be able
to vote.
The party at the state level has stripped voting rights
from millions and millions of people based on exactly these
kind of criminal records.
Donald Trump, if you want to go to the current
party leader has claimed he opposes voting rights for felons.
But now as Trump leads his party towards embracing January
6 felons and other criminals and even those convicted of
super serious and grave and rare crimes like sedition that
day,
Donald Trump's Republican Party not only welcomes January 6th convicts
voting
right, which is a total reversal and hypocritical and quite
obvious,
but also welcomes them as
leaders of their movement able to make policy,
to be on ballots, to be in government.
Some Republicans are backing these lawbreakers quest,
including the one you see on your screen here to
become
lawmakers. Two, and I say this quite literally,
to re enter the Capitol.
They once illegally stormed to
re enter it as Republican legislators.
This is the top story tonight because that convict just
made it to the final step of a primary runoff
for AUS House seat
from the state of Georgia
and he'll face off with another candidate next month.
This is the kind of political process that other failed
democracies have seen.
We as a country are no better or worse than
what other countries and societies and people go through.
But sometimes it does help some people to understand it
that way.
So we've seen this happen in other places.
It does not end well,
where the criminals and the autocrats who actually oppose democracy
begin infiltrating the government.
And sometimes it happens before the entire democracy fails.
Here's another January 6th defendant facing allegations of bringing a
gun
to the insurrection and shooting it.
That is no joke. That right there is a crime
in the District of Columbia.
That person is one of over
1400 defendants facing charges or trials
related to Jan 6. Many of them,
though, we should mention, have been convicted.
They've reached plea deals. Some have taken responsibility,
many have said in public as part of that process
that they were wrong to believe Trump's lies or they
believed it then and they don't believe it anymore.
Again, as part of why the picture is complicated tonight
and whether that makes for a better or more exciting
story is not supposed to be our concern in journalism.
I just want to tell you the nuance.
One recently told the court,
turns out the election was not stolen.
That was an Oath Keeper facing responsibility and accountability in
January 6th sentencing.
And I'll tell you, even if you don't believe that
person,
if you think they only were saying what's true to
try to get a lighter sentence,
I'll remind you that's part of how the criminal justice
system works.
We don't bust out lie detectors and do psychological searches
on everyone's mind.
The system does reward people who say the right thing
and the true thing,
combined with other efforts to take responsibility,
like taking a plea. So that's one reaction.
But as the Republican Party rallies to Trump's more brazen
embrace of January 6,
we're seeing real in court ramifications going the other way.
Take this defendant openly announcing he's above the law because
he expects a pardon from Trump in
about six months. This is real.
If you haven't heard about this yet,
quote, Trump's going to be in office in six months,
so I have nothing to worry about.
Said by a defendant to a judge during arraignment.
That is a truly anti law and order view and
it is fomented by Trump.
The quote says it's directly from Trump,
right? And Trump is now running more blatantly against the
rule of law than even in his past campaigns.
We know that on January six,
Trump welcomed the crowd. We know he didn't try to
try to stop the violence that day.
You remember that by the end of the day,
he was pushed into telling people after they'd ransacked the
place and called for assassinations of Pence and Pelosi and
done all the other things We remember.
He did eventually say go home.
And at that point, after the deed was done,
he talked up peace. At the time,
that seemed like a low point.
But I want to be clear with you.
In measurable ways, he has now gone far lower.
The nonpartisan Associated Press recently reporting Trump now makes defending
the January 6th attack
a quote cornerstone of his White House bid
and it's closing the circle on his own involvement.
Remember, I bet you're old enough to remember when the
one of the conspiracy theory defenses was,
it was somebody else, it was antifa,
it was a bad thing,
but it was liberals. That was a lie.
They gave that up. Now they say not only
did they do it and Jan six people
are OK or they are persecuted,
they did it and now they're trying to sometimes argue
it was effectively OK or even a good thing.
Quote UN quote. Trump literally honors these defendants and convicts
at his rallies.
He falsely refers them as hostages.
That is not what they are.
And an announcer sometimes plays their singing rendition
of the national anthem.
Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th
hostages.
That is Erie. That is the disembodied voice of people
in prison singing.
That's all for the people who stormed the Capitol
this week. The same nonpartisan Associated Press reported election deniers
are closer to the GOP mainstream in Congress.
I told you about that one candidate.
And Americans are learning some of the Supreme Court justices
who take an oath to be impartial actually flew a
flag cheering on the insurrection in the days after,
meaning after they saw the violence.
So the conservative right has grown more extreme on this
issue than ever.
The lies that fed the insurrection are,
for example, what Justice Alito was caught appearing to support.
By flying that upside down American flag,
a symbol of the quote stop the seal effort.
Alito realizes how guilty he looks,
so he's not actually defending that,
unlike, say, a Republican congressional candidate.
He now claims that his wife flew the flag without
his involvement or knowledge,
but since he lives there,
that explanation sounds misleading at best.
That raises questions over whether he should recuse from any
related cases or be put underoath
about his now several scandals,
as some call for him to be off the court
entirely.
Then there's a new speaker who went from warning that
Trump was unfit for office to joining the lies about
Jan Six.
Speaker Johnson claimed, but he wanted to help a cover
up
to hide the faces of the people who illegally stormed
the Capitol.
This is a claim he later walked back.
I made a commitment immediately after I got the gavel
that we would start releasing that originally we were trying
to blur some of the faces to protect the innocent,
you know, people who were just there and just happened
to be walking through the building.
False. The people arrested were not
people who happened to be walking through the building that
day with Johnson knows
because he was there and what you can see on
your screen.
This went on for hours,
hours of what you see here.
This was actually while the police were still holding some
of the line.
This other footage is at one of the doorways.
This went on for hours.
The footage is disturbing. The police were brutally attacked over
and over by those Trump fans.
These are the people, among others,
that Trump is talking about pardoning
and the broader timeline we've shown you before.
I want to remind you,
the GOP went from what you see back in 21
calling this an unamerican insurrection
to later having the RNC claim it was legitimate speech
to then what you see on the right,
the new speaker, Johnson going even farther to the RNC
now only wanting to hire election deniers.
That's the political lens on the bottom Above it,
you have what I told you.
Is that mixed picture? Others convicted other accountability in the
judicial branch.
The timeline plot several points.
The big take away is that the Republican political arm
is different from our justice system.
They are splitting, but the political arm is on record
opposing the rule of law,
democracy and law and order.
That's the political problem. As for the other lens I
told you about,
there is justice accountability, especially in the federal prosecution in
courts and some of the state probes.
It took a little longer to get started up showing
you here Some of the many Trump aides and lawyers
punished,
prosecuted or even now convicted.
All four related cases at the state or federal level
either stonewalling or trying to steal
the election. Trump White House Fed Peter Navarro is in
prison right now.
Steve Bannon is headed there on similar charges of just
affirmed by an appeals court.
Arizona prosecutors just held new arraignments for Giuliani and other
Trump allies indicted for trying to steal the 2020 race.
And that includes Trump attorney Christina Bob.
And she is a defendant who holds
an Orwellian spot on the national Republican Party's
election integrity team,
an embarrassing sign of the kind of hypocritical doublespeak at
the party.
You have Bob just leaving the courthouse,
followed by some reporters. These are big stories,
but some of them, of course,
overshadowed by even larger stories like Trump's trial.
If there wasn't a trial of the former president,
this I can guarantee you with my understanding of the
news would be a multi day national news story.
Here is the mugshot of the person that the RNC
still claims should be in charge of redeeming election integrity.
She is facing justice and accountability.
She doesn't have Trump's ability to use presidential references to
so
slow things down that the Supreme Court buys you an
extra 6 months.
And her current legal predicament is a bracing contrast to
her past claims.
We need everyone to vote.
I certainly hope both sides want election integrity.
Donald Trump won the election this week,
and Democrats have made a nasty play to steal the
presidency.
If you're concerned about is our election safe,
get involved. It's a pivotal election.
Become an election worker. Become a poll observer.
That's the contrast. It is a fact that he has,
through his lawyering and his privilege and his
friends on the Supreme Court,
managed to duck the majority of the cases.
The trial he currently faces is the only one on
deck by the election.
And to be clear, it is not the strongest case.
I've told you that. And it also pertains to conduct
before he ever became president.
That's over here. Over here also is a political party,
the GOP, that is now openly embracing and double down,
doing double down mechanisms to say they're with the Jan
6 defendants and even convicts.
But over here is something else that I showed you,
which was all the places in this country that nonpartisan
prosecutors and the independent justice system and judges are going
through the evidence and punishing these people,
some of whom say they're sorry and they don't believe
the lies anymore.
And occasionally some who, as I showed you,
say they're waiting on their part.
It's a mixed picture. It is not the extremes of
those who say cynically,
we've already lost and nothing works.
And it's also not obviously,
hey, look at our perfect legal system and our perfect
Supreme Court.
Everything's gonna be OK. So with that mixed reality in
mind,
what are citizens going to do as we are in
this interregnum before a jury does?
Judge Donald Trump?