( J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo )
Andrea Bernstein, investigative journalist, "Will Be Wild" podcast co-host and the author of American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power (W.W. Norton and Co, 2020), recaps the second day of hearings held by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We are so happy that Andrea Bernstein could join us today because she has such a relevant background to make sense of the January 6th committee hearing so far. Andrea, as some of you will remember, co-hosted the WNYC podcast, Trump, Inc., which was about the relationship between Trump's business interests and the public interest. Yesterday, we learned that the big lie may have been tied to a big rift, soaking small donors for $250 million to a non-existent Trump defense fund.
Andrea is author of the book, American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. Yesterday, we learned that even Jared Kushner was working on getting Trump to accept reality and concede. Andrea covered Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. Andrea covered Bridgegate for WNYC. Yesterday, we heard central Bridgegate figure Bill Stepien who was Chris Christie's campaign manager in 2013 when that crime took place, and who was also Trump's campaign manager in 2020.
In his deposition before the committee, Bill Stepien described himself as the captain of Team Normal after Trump lost the election as opposed to Team Rudy.
Bill Stepien: I didn't mind being categorized, there were two groups of them. We called them my team and Rudy's team. I didn't mind being characterized as being part of Team Normal as reporters started to do around that point in time. I said, hours ago, early on that I've been doing this for a long time, 25 years. I've spanned political ideologies from Trump to McCain, to Bush to Christie. I can work under a lot of circumstances for a lot of varied candidates and politicians, but a situation where--
I think along the way, I've built up a pretty good reputation for being honest and professional. I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time.
Brian Lehrer: Bill Stepien who was supposed to testify live yesterday, but his wife went into labor so they played clips from his earlier deposition like that one. With me now is Andrea Bernstein, who did all those things I said before and is now co-host of a podcast series about January 6th called Will Be Wild from Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon Music, and Wondery. Hi, Andrea, welcome back to the show.
Andrea Bernstein: Good morning, Brian. Great to talk to you.
Brian Lehrer: First, remind everyone why you titled your new podcast series Will Be Wild.
Andrea Bernstein: Well, Will Be Wild was in that Trump tweet that he sent out inviting people to come to Washington on January 6th. He sent it out on December 19th. For those who may not recall the full tweet, he starts out by quoting a report from Peter Navarro who was Trump's former trade person. Who I guess using yesterday's terminology would seem to have definitely not been on Team Normal. He starts out by quoting a report by Peter Navarro about vote fraud and then he says "Big protest in Washington, DC, January 6.
Be there, will be wild."
When we named the podcast, we were referring back to that tweet, that moment. I think what has become extraordinarily interesting through both the Justice Department investigations that are going on, the prosecutions of the people who breached the Capitol, who assaulted law enforcement, and through the work of this select committee that that tweet was the fulcrum on which this whole thing rested. That when Trump sent out that tweet, there was a vast mobilization across the country of we know both people who were according to prosecutors involved in the seditious conspiracy cases.
Also just regular people we spoke to, we interviewed for our podcast. We said to them, "Why did you come to Washington?" They said, "The president said, be there so we came."
Brian Lehrer: Will be wild and wild it was just like we heard testimony that after he said that thing in the debate against Biden in the 2020 campaign about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, somebody testified that it tripled the Proud Boys membership after that. Talk to us about Bill Stepien. How did the guy who was willing to attach himself as campaign manager to the likes of Chris Christie and Donald Trump with the ways they've been willing to campaign, how did Bill Stepien go from Team Bridgegate to Team Normal?
Andrea Bernstein: Yes. I'd like to talk a little bit about the concept of Team Normal. To answer your question and also just to refer back to your introduction, really extraordinary how all of these people that we've spoken about over the years, the Bridgegate figures, Jared Kushner, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani end up in the same room on during this incredibly pivotal period in American history. Sometimes actually in the same room, sometimes metaphorically in the same room. To answer your question, Bill Stepien really cut his teeth in New Jersey politics.
He was the campaign manager, the campaign strategist at various points. He ran the Republican Governors Association for Governor Chris Christie. He was deputy chief of staff in New Jersey for Chris Christie. He was really the brains behind the idea that led to Bridgegate. Which was that Chris Christie was going to get such overwhelming support in blue counties in New Jersey, that he was going to be the obvious candidate to be the Republican nominee in 2016. That was the strategy. That was really what Bill Stepien was carrying out and he had various things.
He had a list of towns in New Jersey where he thought that they could get more votes out of democratic districts. They would dole out favors to the Democrats who played along like tickets to Giants and Jets stadium and the governor's box, or bits of steel from the World Trade Center. That they would bring to these towns in New Jersey and have ceremonies with the mayors. This was the strategy that Bill Stepien had masterminded. It was a strategy that worked well. Christie, one reelection overwhelmingly in 2013 and was really poised at that point to be the front runner among Republicans.
Then it all unraveled in part as we know because of that e-mail, time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee. Bill Stepien was never charged in the scheme but during the course of the trial, his name was mentioned so many times, and at one point, I decided to count up how many. It was 351 times his name was mentioned. He was certainly speaking to the people who were involved in carrying out this scheme. Of course, it needs to be said that the Bridgegate case was taken all the way to the Supreme court and that charges were thrown out.
Nobody has been convicted in that right scheme right now. That is Bill Stepien. On the day that e-mail was released-
Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.
Andrea Bernstein: -Christie fired him. There was people who were close to Bill Stepien told me and my colleague, Matt Katz, that he was extremely upset, he was extremely angry with Christie, betrayed by him.
Brian Lehrer: Fall guy?
Andrea Bernstein: Yes, that he felt like that. His career went onto the back burner until 2016 when he went to work for Trump. That campaign, of course, was not being managed but being strongly advised by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law and also who saw someone as Chris Christie as his sworn enemy because Chris Christie had put his father, Charles Kushner in prison for campaign finance violation, corruption, and witness tampering. This New Jersey backstory gets Bill Stepien into this position of power or is one of the reasons why he gets into this position of power with the Trump campaign.
He does the same stuff he did, he does microtargeting. He figures out how to move very specific segments of voters. We all know that Trump won in this incredible upset over Hillary Clinton. Bill Stepien goes to the White House, becomes the White House political director in 2020. First, his deputy campaign manager, then he takes over as campaign manager when Christie, as he does, fired his campaign manager. As Bill Stepien pointed out in his deposition, that was the worst day of Trump's campaign according to Bill Stepien. Trump did much better after he came.
Bill Stepien emerges out of all of this as this very powerful, but silent figure. Matt Katz, your WNYC colleague wrote in his book that Bill Stepien was referred to as smoke because now you see him now you don't. He spoke so little. It was really extraordinary to hear so many words coming out of his mouth yesterday.
Brian Lehrer: Why did he wind up on Team Normal rather than Team Rudy when it came to the big lie about a stolen election?
Andrea Bernstein: Well, this is the really, extraordinary and confusing thing about this Team Normal. Who else was on Team Normal according to yesterday's standards? Bill Barr. Bill Barr, who ferociously defended Trump in the Mueller investigation. Who many people argued, undermines the impact by putting out this pre-spin and pre-rebuttal before anybody could look at the report and, gave Trump the opportunity to say that he was totally exonerated. That was the same Bill Barr, who, when he resigned, as he said yesterday because he was so frustrated that Trump was pushing the big lie.
He resigned with this incredibly fawning letter to Donald Trump. One of the things about the Team Normal and it does seem that people who are on Team Normal, "can't see me", putting my air quotes around that but I'm trying to do that on the radio.
Brian Lehrer: Team relatively normal.
Andrea Bernstein: Is the people who went to Trump and said to him, these vote fraud allegations have no merit included his daughter, his son-in-law, his attorney general, his acting Attorney General. His acting Deputy Attorney General, his campaign lawyer, his campaign spokesman. The list just goes on and on and on. People that were incredible Trump loyalists who said to him, "You do not have evidence for this. You should not say this." I think that was one of the most dramatic things yesterday the impact of hearing that advice said out loud by all these people.
Brian Lehrer: One after another after another after another and we'll get to some Jared and Ivanka clips since you wrote that book on the Kushners and the Trumps, and we'll talk about Rudy since you've covered him as mayor of New York back in the day. One more thing about Stepien, one more clip. Remember we heard the bombshell yesterday from Trump's senior adviser Jason Miller, that Rudy Giuliani was drunk on election night when he advised Trump to declare victory before even the first tally of votes had been counted, or the states had been called.
In this clip Stepien and Jason Miller describe how they oppose declaring victory without the election returns. Stepien speaks first.
Cross Examiner: It was far too early to be making any calls like that. Ballots were still being counted, ballots were still going to be counted for days and it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that.
Jason Miller: To the best of my memory, I know I was saying that we should not go and declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers.
Bill: Can you be more specific about that conversation, in particular, what Mayor Giuliani said, your response, and then anybody else in the room's response?
Jason Miller: I think effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying, "We won it. They're stealing it from us. Where did all the votes come from. We need to go say that we won." Essentially that anyone who didn't agree with that position was being weak.
Brian Lehrer: That's Trump advisor Jason Miller, the last voice there. At that time, as Miller went on to testify, Giuliani was drunk. Andrea, you've covered Bill Stepien. When you were a reporter on Bridge Gate, you covered Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor of New York. Did you ever know Rudy to have a drinking problem while in office?
Andrea Bernstein: I did not see him drinking when he was in office, except for, one couple of times during his ill-fated 2008 campaign for president where he used to be fond of staying in pretty fancy hotels. The press would stay also in the same hotel with the candidate it's like it usually works. Sometimes they would have these lavish steak dinners with whiskey and cigars and that kind of thing, but I have not seen that. I've heard a number of people who have seen him recently, or maybe in the run-up to the 2020 election.
This was reporting that I was doing around the time of the first impeachment trial who reported that they saw Rudy Giuliani apparently inebriated. There are some people who were former top New York City officials who were quite close to him at one point. While when he was running a government in New York City, and even after were very much Rudy loyalists, who also told me that they had seen that. Some of them told me they had broken with him as a result of that. I personally did not see it. I felt like many people kept saying it to me.
It was interesting the way it came out open in the hearing yesterday, and that there were eyewitnesses that evening, who said, that's what they saw.
Brian Lehrer: Do you have a take on how Giuliani went from being America's mayor "after 9/11". I know he was controversial in office for some of his conservative policies and things about race and other things when he was mayor. Within the realm of Republican normal, I think it's safe to say no matter what anybody thinks about that Republican normal. What's your take on how Giuliani went from being that and America's Mayor after 9/11, to the leader of Team Abnormal, prodding Trump to pursue the big lie? Even as all these other Trump advisors were trying to get him to accept reality?
Andrea Bernstein: Brian, this is something that I have thought about a lot reported on. Rudy Giuliani was without a doubt Exhibit A, in Team Abnormal in yesterday's hearing. How did he get there? I've asked these friends, these former friends, all of them are mystified. Giuliani went from being the United States Attorney from the Southern District of New York, where his picture still hangs to this day to somebody being investigated by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for lobbying and other violations apparently.
Also, just in plain sight, making arguments on Fox Television. Now this is prior to the war in Ukraine, but he made arguments that were very friendly, very pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine. We know about his role in the first impeachment. How did he get to be that person, it is really unclear. He does seem to have this-- The Trump campaign at one point said that he was no longer working for them. I haven't seen any evidence that he's been doing work for the Trump campaign, but he's obviously, one of Trump's fiercest surrogates.
It is really hard to understand and it is a really lingering mystery. It's just the arc of his life from this incredibly straight and narrow-- Even in the 1980s when Giuliani ran for mayor, he looked like he was a G Man from a 1950s television show with his narrow ties, straight suits, stern glasses and dark hair as he had at the time. How did he go from being that person to this person, it just seems to be almost Shakespearean, the arc of a life. One of the things that came so clearly across in yesterday's hearings was the way in which all of these people around the president.
Who were people who defended him who lied for him in some cases, they are their representatives, and in many cases, lied to me and to my colleagues and reporting. How all of those people were all arrayed in, "There is no fraud. We are not ready to call this election," to Giuliani being the one man who, according to testimony, slips up into their room with Rudy Giuliani into a foyer in the residence hall-
Brian Lehrer: With Trump.
Andrea Bernstein: -and makes his pitch. He's the one that Trump listens to because that's what Trump does. He goes through people until he finds the one that says the thing he wants to hear, and then he does what that person says.
Brian Lehrer: We're going to take a break and then when we come back, I'm going to ask you to put on your hat as author of the book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power, and talk about some of the surprising ways, perhaps surprising that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have come up in the hearings. I want to share some breaking news first with our listeners about the hearings and maybe with you, Andrea, this just came across a few minutes ago.
Tomorrow there was supposed to be another 10:00 AM hearing. This show was supposed to be preempted tomorrow for that but now they've postponed it. They said only that it's for technical reasons. It's a lot to put together all these videos and they need more time. They'll resume the hearings Thursday afternoon, which is the next schedule one o'clock on Thursday. Have you heard this yet and do you have any reason to think it's anything other than technical reasons that are causing the postponement of tomorrow's hearing?
Andrea Bernstein: I did hear this shortly before coming on the show. I don't have any reason to think it's anything else. I think the committee has been pretty straightforward and obviously processing a lot of materials that they want to get in real-time to give the committee a benefit of the doubt. Yesterday they were supposed to have Bill Stepien live. He was in Washington, D.C ready to testify that morning. Then had to come back to be with his wife who was in labor. They pretty quickly pivoted and put all those clips together, and as you and I know having done live broadcast, that is no mean feat.
Brian Lehrer: No they did it in 45 minutes, too, boom.
Andrea Bernstein: They want to get the story right that's what committee members have told me. That's what people who work for the committee have told me. They don't want to blow it. Right now we'll give them the benefit of the doubt that there was something that came up and that they need to reorganize. If we learn more, we learn more but right now there's no reason to believe that there was anything other than trying to put on this very large national show.
Brian Lehrer: Heads up listeners there will be a Brian Lehrer Show tomorrow morning after all and heads up Alison Stewart. You're going to have to come to work tomorrow after all because there will be an all of it tomorrow at noon. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, we continue for today right after this.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Andrea Bernstein lead of our Trump, Inc. Podcast. These days of her Will be Wild Podcast. By the way, before we move on to the Jared and Ivanka portion of this conversation and relevant to your book about them and the Trumps. Some of our callers Andrea are not buying Bill Stepien as a member of Team Normal. Let's hear from one of those people. Joel in Queens you're on WNYC. Hi Joel.
Joel: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Stepien is not Team Normal these days. He is working for Trump-endorsed Harriet Hagerman who is trying to unseat Cheney in Wyoming. She is a Trump loyalist and Trump money goes to her.
Brian Lehrer: Andrea you know about that?
Andrea Bernstein: Yes, that's absolutely right. I think that unsaid at yesterday's hearing, Liz Cheney, she was number three, right Brian? Number three in the House Republican leadership.
Brian Lehrer: [crosstalk] order.
Andrea Bernstein: -on January 6th. Has been outspoken since then in calling out the former president and calling on his election lies. Has been all but excommunicated by the Republican party, censured by the Republican Party. She and Adam Kinzinger for what they said was suppressing, "Legitimate political discourse" which is how they described what happened on January 6th.
Brian Lehrer: Stepien is working for her opponent trying to unseat her in a Republican primary so he's not really just on Team Normal, he's on team play both sides.
Andrea Bernstein: It's not even team both sides because I think that if Liz Cheney loses that's would be the biggest blow in accountability to some ways. To say if you are seeking accountability, if you are standing up for the truth, you will face the wrath of Republican Party. Bill Stepien is working on the team that wants to fight back against Liz Chaney for the work that we saw her do yesterday and last week. Absolutely true. One of the things I really learned in reporting our podcast Will be Wild was that everybody who went to work for Trump had some varying degree of willing to say, "I'm going to go along with this guy because I can think I can make it better."
By the time you got to December of 2020 and January of 2021, the people who were left were people who really carried that far, who really enabled Trump through thick and thin, who were enabling him. The fact that we heard this yesterday was in some ways a relief and also infuriating. Here all these people that knew a thing that haven't said anything to us publicly for 17 months and allowed Donald Trump from Mar-a-Lago to keep spewing these lies. Keep raising money, keep solidifying his position in the Republican Party.
Brian Lehrer: That raises another question about Stepien who as we said was supposed to testify in person yesterday but his wife went into labor, so the committee just used those clips. I saw that Stepien was going to testify pursuant to a subpoena. Would he have been a reluctant witness yesterday? Would he have been relieved for any reason that his wife went into labor yesterday morning just in the nick of time?
Andrea Bernstein: We have no way of knowing that. There was a call with reporters on Sunday night in advance of the committee hearing. The committee spokespeople were asked that question is he testifying reluctantly. They just didn't have anything to say on it. However, it does look like from the depositions that Bill Stepien wasn't holding back that he answered the committee's questions which if you compare it to people like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, who have theatrically refused to testify, it's a very big difference from what we saw in the deposition yesterday.
Brian Lehrer: You mentioned people who enabled Trump. Let's talk about the people who were at the heart of your book American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power. Of course, Jared and Ivanka allegedly at the beginning of the Trump administration were going to try to influence Trump to be within-normal-bounds president. Let's zero in on how the Kushners came up in this hearing set so far. Here's a two-minute clip of the star witness from yesterday.
As we all know by now Trump's attorney general William Barr, who says he would still vote for Trump again in 2024, if Trump is the Republican nominee. Barr resigned in December 2020 rather than become part of the big lie that he apparently didn't believe in. In this videotaped testimony to the committee, Barr describes a day that fall. When Trump called him to a meeting after Barr had begun to cast out on the stolen election claims.
William Barr: I came over to meet with the president in the Oval office and Meadows and Cipollone were there. This is leading up to this conversation with Kushner. The president said there had been major fraud and that as soon as the facts were out, the results of the election would be reversed. He went on this for quite a while as he is prone to do. Then he got to something that I was expecting which is to say that apparently the Department of Justice doesn't think that it has a role of looking into these fraud claims.
I said that has to be the campaign that raises that with the state, the department doesn't take side in elections and the department is not an extension of your legal team. Our role is to investigate fraud. We'll look at something if it's specific credible and could have affected the outcome of the election and we're doing that. They're just not meritorious. They're not panning out. As I walked out of the Oval office Jared was there with Dan Scavino who ran the president's social media. Who I thought was a reasonable guy and believed is a reasonable guy.
I said how long is he going to carry on with this stolen elections stuff? Where's this going to go? By that time, Meadows had caught up with me leaving the office and caught up with me and said, "Look, I think that he's becoming more realistic and knows that the limit how far he can take this." Then Jared said, "We're working on this we're working on it.
Brian Lehrer: Jared said we're working on this, we're working on it. That portrays Jared as trying to convince Trump to stand down from the big lie and hearing it as a big lie. Before I get your comment on that Andrea, here's a clip of Jared himself that the committee played on Thursday from his videotaped deposition to the committee. This one is notable to me for two reasons. One is that Jared is trying very hard here not to distance himself from Trump but the other is that Jared reveals that Trump was going so far into planet delusional.
That Trump's White House Counsel Pat Cipollone kept threatening to resign.
Jared Kushner: Like I said my interest at that time was on trying to get as many pardons done. I know that him and the team were always saying, "Oh, we're going to resign. We're not going to be here if this happens if that happens." I took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.
Brian Lehrer: First, Andrea what was that about Jared's emphasis at the time on getting as many pardons as possible? Were they pardons for anyone who may have been right at that time breaking the law by perpetrating the big lie scheme?
Andrea Bernstein: Well, I don't know anything about that. I did do a spit take when I heard that because who is pardoned in the waiting days of the Trump's presidency? Jared Kushner's own father Charles Kushner. So was Roger Stone, so was Paul Manafort, so was Steve Bannon, so was Elliott Broidy who had been vice-chair of the Republican National Committee. We're a rogues gallery of people committed specifically of corruption. What often happens at the end of a presidency is that people who have been trying to get their cases overturned or people on death row will had new evidence that they're innocent.
Or people who can't get a fair shake in court. Usually poor people who have not had access to the courts get pardons. The rich and powerful and many corrupt figures. I mean Bernie Carrick got a Trump pardon although not at that point.
Brian Lehrer: Former New York City police commissioner. Scandalous.
Andrea Bernstein: Yes, which it always astounds me that he gets referred to as the former New York City police commissioner when his final act in public life before he showed up on January 6th was to be also convicted in a corruptions scandal. That is who was getting pardoned at the end of the Trump administration. I can see why the White House Counsel office was upset because the Justice Department had worked incredibly hard to bring these prosecutions. Mike Flynn was another one and they were thrown out at the end of the Trump presidency.
Brian Lehrer: You mentioned pardon for Roger Stone, we have a Roger Stone-related call. Let me take it because I think it ties in right at this point. Mitch in Maplewood you're on WNYC with Andrea Bernstein. Hi Mitch.
Mitch: Hi. Thank you, Brian. Thank you Andrea. You mentioned Matt Katz several times. We in New Jersey owe a great debt to you and Matt Katz. It's funny Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book about the Lincoln administration A Team of Rivals. Her book about the Trump administration is going to be team of unindicted co-conspirators. Speaking of one of them is Roger Stone. We know he is not going to testify but it seems like there's a direct line drawn from Trump to the Proud Boys that goes through Roger Stone who we see with the Proud Boys on the day on January 6th.
Do you think there'll be any testimony about that?
Andrea Bernstein: I have no reason to believe that there will be. Roger Stone has been named in one of the lawsuits. In fact, Bennie Thompson before he was the Chairman of the Select Committee brought a private action lawsuit under the KU Klux Klan Act of 1871. As a matter of fact, we talk about this lawsuit in our final episode of Will be Wild which means that the whole thing is binge-able. Back from that plug, the case invoked Roger Stone and for conspiring with President Trump and the Proud Boys and suggested that there had been contacts between Roger Stone and the White House.
We know that when he himself was on trial, Roger Stone had some contacts with the Proud Boys. We know that Roger Stone had as security guards some members of the Oath Keepers. What is extraordinary is early on in their defense, one of the arguments of these individual oath keeper defendants in court was that they had come to Washington to protect Roger Stone. That that's what their job was. He has connections to these people but we don't know exactly if at all, that leads to the White House.
That is one of the remaining lingering mysteries. There's all kinds of smoke around the idea that he might have been some intermediary. We know for example from the Mueller investigation that Trump and Stone both said they weren't really speaking to each other during the summer of 2016. That Trump would take the phone of his then security guard Keith Schiller and use it to call Roger Stone so it couldn't be traced. That has happened in the past. That doesn't mean it happened now.
Roger Stone is in the wings but we don't know if he is going to show up in these hearings or what, if any, role he had exactly in the events of January 6th.
Brian Lehrer: Well, that also suggests the $64 billion question that I wonder as close as you've been following these events you have any theory about or knowledge about. That is whether Trump was just trying to politically stop the election from being certified. This is his ally Peter Navarro's line that he says any chance he gets that they didn't want violence at the Capitol that day. They didn't want to break in because that became the story. The riot became the story. The attempt to violently subvert the peaceful transfer of power became the story.
What they were trying to do was a parliamentary maneuver where Congress would do it. That's the Peter Navarro line. The suspicion that the committee seems to be inching toward but they haven't really connected the dots yet is to say that Trump maybe wanted there to be violence. Did coordinate with the Proud Boys through Roger Stone or through whoever and the Oath keepers. Those who came planning a violent break-in and a violent obstruction all along because he thought maybe that could lead to a declaration of Martial law by him and he would stay in power or whatever.
Do you have any reason to believe that it's any scenario like that?
Andrea Bernstein: The answer is we don't know. We do know definitively that the president wanted to block the peaceful of transfer of power. Then he tried several ways to do it. We've seen in the hearings and we're going to hear more about it later in the week about how he tried to get his Justice Department, his acting attorney general to tell state legislatures that they were investigating the election for fraud. That they shouldn't send up electors to Washington. We know that he pressured his very loyal vice president Mike Pence.
We know that there was talk of getting the department of Homeland Security and or the Department of Defense to impound voting machines. We know without a doubt that all of that happened. What is a mystery is we don't know if the White House was apprised of or was any way involved in plans for violence. Now that said, what we do know on this front is still very, very troubling. Through the reporting that we did for our podcast Will be Wild I spoke to many high-level former officials at the Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump.
Actually also someone who worked for President Biden. It was clear that the Department of Homeland Security was getting overwhelming amounts of information about the potential for violence on January 6th. We know from documents that have been released pursuant to foil requests, that Secret Service had information, Park Police had information, Capitol Police had some information. There was all kinds of information out there about the potential for violence. As was explained to me by people who worked in the White House, all of this goes to the White House.
The Department of Homeland Security might have a big chunk. The Department of Justice might have a big chunk et cetera et cetera but it all gets centralized in the White House. That also was affirmed in Thursday night hearings that the White House had this incredible intelligence about these plans for violence. What happened after that? The president went out onto the Ellipse and said fight to take your country back fight like hell.
Brian Lehrer: He also said go peace for me which you will point out, but okay.
Andrea Bernstein: The question of intentionality is something that I would like to understand. I'd like to understand more about those contexts.
Brian Lehrer: We have five minutes left. Let me touch two more things with you before we drop the Jared And Ivanka bit, there is Mrs. Kushner the president's daughter, Ivanka Trump. Who of course you write about at length in your book on the Trumps and the Kushners. In this clip from her videotaped deposition to the committee, she is asked if she believes Attorney General Barr about the stolen election claims. Remember he called them BS and detached from reality. Here's Ivanka.
Cross Examiner: How did that affect your perspective about the election when Attorney General Barr made that statement?
Ivanka Trump: It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.
Brian Lehrer: Andrea, what was up with Ivanka when she testified before the committee? Why was she willing on the record, under oath, not to side with her father?
Andrea Bernstein: Well, [chuckles] it's an interesting question. I mean, she was under oath. It's a federal crime to lie to Congress, so she chose to go the route of telling the truth. Ivanka Trump had an extraordinarily low profile since she left the White House. She was remembered not just as the president's daughter, but Senior White House advisor. I think what sort of hits you like a gut punch with both Jared and Ivanka is that Trump went through so many acting officials. He went through several attorneys generals.
He went through five directors of the Department of Homeland Security, went through two FBI directors, et cetera, et cetera et cetera. He cycled through people, four chiefs of staff, but Jared and Ivanka were constants. They were senior advisors from the beginning to the end. Trump wasn't going to fire them, they were family. I think what really became apparent from last week's hearings is that they were in a position to convince the president to take an alternate course and there doesn't seem to be evidence that they played an incredibly active role.
Jared Kushner was focusing as he said on pardons and he went to the middle east to work on the Abraham Accords and as we've learned from some terrific reporting in the New York Times. Make some contacts that he would later tap into for his business. That's what they were working on, they were the people who couldn't be fired and yet they left the job of convincing Trump not to try to dismantle democracy to people who could be fired. I think that raises very serious questions about which team they were on.
Brian Lehrer: Last question, Andrea. For you as co-host of the former WNYC podcast series, Trump, Inc. about the relationship between Trump's business interest and the public interest. Was it new to you yesterday this thing about raising 250 million dollars for a Trump defense fund that didn't actually exist?
Andrea Bernstein: The specifics of t were definitely new. I was aware that the Trump campaign and these various committees around him have been raising money. In fact, one of the things I looked into deeply for the podcast was this question of disinformation. Disinformation is almost always accompanied by some kind of financial grift that people put out wrong facts and then raise money off of it. That is a pattern that has been tracked by disinformation experts, not only here, but worldwide.
I think that the level of detail was extraordinary. Something that representative Lofgren said after the hearings was that Kimberly Guilfoyle Don Junior's girlfriend received $60,000 for her two-and-a-half-minute speech introducing him at the rally on the Ellipse. There it is, money going straight from these small donors into the pockets of people who are in the broadly speaking Trump family. Some money went to Trump hotels, some money went to Mark Meadows' organization, to other organizations where several former Trump officials have worked.
The contours of it don't surprise me in the least, but the details were absolutely new details and I'm hoping that over the course of the hearings we learn more.
Brian Lehrer: Well, again, the breaking news this morning, tomorrow's hearing, which was scheduled for 10 o'clock and would've preempted this show tomorrow has now been postponed. The committee says it's for technical reasons because it takes a lot of time to put together all those video clips and things. No hearing tomorrow, the show will be on as usual. All of it with Alison Stewart will be on as usual and they will resume the hearings Thursday afternoon at one o'clock. Of course, we will continue to bring you live coverage here on WNYC when that happens.
We thank Andrea Bernstein, lead of WNYC's Trump, Inc. podcast. Now the co-host of the podcast Will be Wild, which is all about January 6th, released by Pineapple Street Studios, Amazon Music, and Wondery. Andrea, thanks a lot.
Andrea Bernstein: Thank you, Brian.
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