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Committee Member 1: We know that the insurrection on January 6th, was a violent attack that involved issues of assault on law enforcement.

Committee Member 2: We cannot leave the violence of January 6th, and its causes uninvestigated.

Committee Member 1: We know there's evidence in a coordinated, planned attack.

Committee Member 2: The American people deserve the full and open testimony of every person with knowledge of the planning and preparation for January 6th.

Committee Member 1: A peaceful transfer of power didn't happen this year.

Committee Member 2: We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House, every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.

Committee Member 1: One rioter has said that they weren't there to commit violence, but that I'm quoting, "We're just there to overthrow the government."

Committee Member 2: If those responsible are not held accountable and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our constitutional republic.

Officer 1: My fellow officers and I would punch, kick, shove, spray with chemical irritants. I too was being crushed by the rioters. I could feel my myself losing oxygen and recall thinking to myself, this is how I'm going to die defending this entrance.

Officer 2: As I was swarmed by a violent mob, they ripped off my badge, they grabbed and stripped me of my radio. They seized ammunition that was secured to my body. They began to beat me with their fists and with what felt like hard metal objects. I was electrocuted, again, and again, and again with a taser. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.

Officer 3: The man in a QAnon hoodie exclaims, "This is the time to choose which side of history to be on. Do you think your little peashooter guns are going to stop this crowd? No, we're going in that building." The man in front of me grabbed my baton that I still have in my hands, under my current state I was unable to retain my weapon. He bashed me in the head and face with it, rupturing my lip and adding additional injury to my skull.

Officer 4: I witnessed the rioters using all kinds of weapons against officers, including flagpoles, metal bike racks that they had torn apart in various kinds of projectiles. I sat down on a bench in the rotunda with a friend of mine who was also a Black Capitol police officer and told him about the racial slurs I endured. I became very emotional and began yelling how the blank could something like this happen, is this America? I began sobbing.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Today is the start of a challenging time for our nation as the House select committee tasked with investigating the events at the Capitol on January 6th, begins its work. We've been watching this all day and feeling all sorts of emotion. You've been thinking about it too.

Katie: Hi, this is Katie Wilde from Portland, Oregon. I've worked in public service most of my life and majored in government. Our constitutional democracy works because of the inherent structure. The January 6 acts of aggression within our Capitol building and against the officers sworn to uphold their peace shook me really severely. My inherent fear was that this was the beginning of the downfall of our democracy, which I care so much about. These hearings are important and I would like to see people do their best work in this process.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We begin today by asking, what do we need to know about January 6, and how can we get the answers? Before the hearings started earlier today and before we'd heard the powerful testimony from multiple Capitol police officers, we spoke to Ryan Goodman, co-editor in chief of Just Security, former special counsel to the Department of Defense, and a professor of law at NYU. He also had not yet seen the testimony of DC police, but we wanted to get a preview of what we'd see during the hearing and why it's so important. Welcome back to the show, Ryan.

Ryan Goodman: Thanks for having me back.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you give us a bit of an overview about what the committee's main goals are?

Ryan Goodman: The committee's main goal is to uncover what happened on January 6 and what led up to it. As some of the listeners are keen to hear, in fact, the committee will get into questions, like was there an intelligence failure? What kind of intelligence failure and why did our intelligence agencies fail us? Were they succumbing to political pressure, for example, at the time? That's one important piece of it.

They'll also look into the law enforcement failure. Why were these individuals treated so well in a certain respect, relative to the ways in which law enforcement handled some of the summer Black Lives Matters protests, which were largely peaceful? The idea that there were no arrests, for example, at the scene of the crime on January 6, is an important law enforcement question. The committee is also going to investigate some deeper questions about what mobilized these individuals to take the actions that they did, for example, social media. How did that figure into either the ways in which some of the individuals organized themselves and some of the individuals became radicalized based on disinformation that they were being fed. Specifically in the text of the committee's mandate is including social media as one of those elements.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've just talked for a moment there about the committee's mandate and the text of it, who is on the committee, and from whence came this mandate?

Ryan Goodman: The committee is something like plan B. Plan A was to create an independent commission very much like the 9/11 commission. It would be created by legislation in Congress, both chambers of Congress signed by the president and then it was to have 10 members who would be selected from the public at large, former members of Congress or statesmen and was going to be evenly split that the Republican members of the Congress would be able to select five of them and then democratic members of Congress would be able to select five of them.

That didn't happen, so now we're at plan B. Plan B is the select committee, which is a specially created committee by legislation, by special legislation which was passed at the end of June. It was designed in a way that there'll be 13 members and 7 would be Democrats and 6 would be Republicans that's partly because Nancy Pelosi was going to use one of her slots for a Republican who ended up being Liz Cheney. We're going to be a pretty evenly split seven to six. There are other select committees that are being formed like that in the past.

What we're left with is that we have seven Democrats and we have two Republicans. We have a bipartisan committee, but it's obviously getting off somewhat of a rocky start, but at the same time, we'll see what happens over the coming weeks and months in the way in which they perform their duties

Melissa Harris-Perry: In a piece that you authored for Just Security, you laid out some topics, witnesses, documents that are your suggestions around what the committee should seek to obtain. Can you walk us through perhaps what some of the key documents and who some of the key witnesses are that you feel are absolutely necessary in order for us to get the information that we need as a nation?

Ryan Goodman: I would put these into different buckets. One bucket really is this intelligence failure. We need to hear from the heads of the intelligence agencies and perhaps subordinate officials as well. That would mean we need to hear from the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, we need to hear from the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Chad Wolf.

Some huge questions there are, was this an intelligence failure in terms of the collection of the information? Was it an intelligence failure in terms of the analysis that they weren't able to analyze the information that they had, or was it an intelligence failure of dissemination that they weren't able to provide the information to the necessary actors? We can get into what each of those might uncover.

Here's one example of documents that I'm sure there are records of inside the FBI. The FBI was warned by the social media company Parlor multiple times that they had information that suggested based on what people were posting on their site, that there was a threat to the Capitol on January 6. They were warned multiple times by Parlor. Christopher Wray testified that that is correct, but he wasn't told about it.

I'd want to know what happened to that information when it came into the FBI? Who received it, why was it not elevated to the director? Why does Christopher Wray not acknowledged that that is a massive intelligence failure that we as a country need to grapple with? Similarly, the NYPD sent the FBI a packet of material that was about social media indications of a threat of violence on January 6, what happened to it inside the FBI? Those are some of the questions.

There was apparently a rare national call on January 4th of fusion centers across the country in which they were discussing the heads of the fusion centers, alarming information that they were receiving about January 6, documents, what documents were presented before that meeting? Is there a summary of that meeting? What action did DHS take after they were provided this information by the heads of the fusion centers?

Those are the kinds of intelligence failure questions that can be answered and there'll be documentation. I think we might get some real answers.

A second bucket of questions is the law enforcement failure, the military, the national guard, the big question that a lot of Americans have, why were they so delayed in getting the national guard to the Capitol? The blockbuster book that just came out last week by the two Washington Post journalists, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, there seems to be a lot of information that the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff would be able to provide to Congress and the American people about his concerns at the time that the president of the United States would indeed try to stage something of a military coup or use of the military or imposition of martial law. My goodness, will he be a star witness and could be a star witness? He seems to have a lot to say.

We also know from the Senate report that the acting secretary of defense of the military called a cabinet-level meeting a couple of days before January 6, in which he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Milley, both raised the concern about the threat to the Capitol, even raised a question, could they revoke the permits for people to gather at the Capitol? It shows you just how specific their threat information must have been. They were told by "the consensus of law enforcement" in the cabinet meeting, that they had it under control. Don't worry. That's a very important piece of the puzzle.

Then the last piece of the puzzle is some people have said you can't have the play of hamlet without hamlet, so it's President Trump. I think there are two sets of questions, at least, that go to President Trump and his culpability. One is the question that was litigated in a certain sense with the impeachment trial, did he incite? A big question is what did he know ahead of time about who was coming and the militia groups that were there and what were his intentions? That's one set.

Then the second set is what did he do once he was in the White House? There are a number of people that could be subpoenaed to testify about very specific questions. What did you, Ivanka Trump, as a official advisor to the president, say to him to try to get him to make a statement to his supporters to stand down? Because it's widely reported that she went in multiple times to try to convince him to make a statement and got nowhere. It would be very important to know what was the president being told? Was he being told there's a real threat of attack against the vice-president? People's lives are at risk and he still didn't do anything? Would be an important question. Is that what happened?

It sounds like that's what happened with news reports, but that's very different from live testimony under oath, under penalty of law.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ryan, I appreciate the clarity and the care with which you've walked us through, these buckets of things that we need to know. In part, my appreciation is the evenness of your tone, but by the end of your last response, I did begin to panic a bit. Help me to understand whether or not, as you just said, news reports are something quite different than testimony under oath. Given how you begin with the partisan wrangling to even pull this committee together, is there a realistic possibility that these particular proceedings can give us these core informational answers that we need as a nation?

Ryan Goodman: I had a lot of hope that the committee will, in fact, give us some real answers on these issues of public policy. The very kinds of questions that the 9/11 commission chillingly had to face which is this massive colossal intelligence failure at 9/11, and I think we had a colossal intelligence failure on January 6. For people who care about those issues and want to understand how susceptible, for example, our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are to political pressure, that's a huge question for the country because we'll have future presidents who might try to bend the law enforcement intelligence agencies.

I think they can get answers to that, and I think they can also produce legislative reforms to address the problems. I do think that that's one part that I'm very hopeful for. I think that the members of the committee are some of the best members of Congress in terms of truth seekers, lawyerly skills, and the like, and it will not be mixed up in a circus that we see with many other committee hearings. It will not be mixed with a huge amount of disinformation coming from actual members of Congress which we've actually seen just incredible disinformation being spread by certain members of Congress and these other committee hearings. I'm actually very hopeful about that.

I'm less hopeful about-- One has to be realistic about, does it break through the information bubbles that people exist in with respect to how they think about President Trump, how they think about his moral responsibility for January 6? That one, I think there may be people in the middle. Maybe there are people who have been told many different kinds of lies. One of the lies they've been told, for example, is that President Trump in scripted remarks on January 8th said that he immediately dispatched the national guard to the Capitol.

Well, we will probably have testimony from his acting Secretary of Defense, Christopher Miller, and Chairman Milley saying that that's absolutely untrue. You have people with pretty good standing among many Americans in the middle maybe that'll penetrate, maybe they'll see that live testimony and think, "This is the acting Secretary of Defense chosen by Trump testifying under oath." Trump did no such thing.

I think that's less likely that that will shift Americans thoughts, but I think we shall see because there's nothing like a spectacle of a trial, and this is, in some sense, a focal point for people to see what the officials will say under oath.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've talked here about misinformation and also about the critical aspects of simply what happened when, who knew what, where were the failures? I'm going to ask you about motivations. Is there a way to begin to explore the ways that white supremacy may have been fueling what we saw on January 6?

Ryan Goodman: I think so. I think to me, this is a dominant theme that should actually run throughout the hearings. I've been disappointed the degree to which it has not been as prominent in some of the other hearings and in the joint Senate report that came out which addressed a partial subset of all of these issues. White supremacy does not figure in very prominently in that report. I think we can get at it because that might very well explain the law enforcement and intelligence failure.

A former counter-terrorism official referred to this as the "invisible bias" and that his opinion was that the reason that the FBI was so under-prepared is because he thought that many of the members of the FBI saw themselves in the Trump supporters, and couldn't imagine that the Trump supporters would engage in such violence and, as he said, "Literally try to and want to kill them." [laughs]

I think we can get at that. We might get at that with expert witnesses, but we might get at that with an acknowledgment on the part of some of the officials and some of those agencies about that. Then I do think that we will see a presentation as we are seeing in a certain sense with all of these charges coming out of the Justice Department, how much white supremacy motivated many of the writers and the militia groups.

Tanzina: Ryan, I can remember distinctly on that day, I said this to the production team yesterday is the only time in my life say for 9/11 when I was watching events unfold and I called my loved ones and asked them to come home. I asked my husband to come home from work, I asked my teenage daughter to come home from work. I went and picked my younger daughter up from school, and it was because I thought if it's happening at the Capitol, it'll be at the state capitals next. It could be in my neighborhood later today.

Honestly, the fact that that didn't happen has allowed me to breathe now for months. The final question I really have is at this point, based on what we know right now, before all of the questions are asked, do we have an expectation around the likelihood that this may occur again in the very near future?

Ryan Goodman: Unfortunately, we do, and I think we are on an intelligence footing and the law enforcement footing where there are warnings coming out of the Department of Homeland Security that say there is an ongoing threat, and this is the greatest threat to the country in terms of white supremacist violence. I think it's a realistic threat.

In fact, we now have a depoliticized Department of Homeland Security that is able to issue these kinds of warnings that they were not able to do under the Trump administration. In fact, we have whistleblowers who have testified before Congress saying that this information was suppressed inside the Department of Homeland Security under the Trump administration. This information being the white supremacist violent threat across the country.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Ryan Goodman is the co-editor-in-chief of Just Security. Also the former special counsel to the Department of Defense and a professor of law at NYU. Thank you for joining us.

Ryan Goodman: Thank you.

Keith: Hi, this is Keith from Dallas, Texas. I have never been so shocked watching television as I was when I saw what was happening to the Capitol on January 6th. It caused me to question the motives of the Republicans and especially since these people had just been with the president was doubly scary. I hope that this is pursued as completely as possible by the justice department and local police agencies. These people need to be put away.

Female Listener: I was incredulous. I was sickened. I felt my world had come to an end. Haven't gotten under my desk in 60s grade school for real earthquakes and duck and cover air raid drills. I never, ever could have imagined that I would witness mobs of rabid citizens storming our most sacred edifice, battering doors and windows, attacking police officers and shouting for the murder of some of our highest elected officials.

Jordan: This is Jordan from Little Rock, Arkansas. What went through my mind when I saw the Capitol insurrection on January 6 was if any of those people were Black or brown, they would probably be dead right now. I think the Court hearings are absolutely essential to the integrity of the country moving forward.

Acacia: I was reading The Handmaid's Tale that day, and that's exactly how that book starts as the sense of Jacob stage an attack on the Capitol and kill Congress and the president. That's the only thing that I could think of that day. I just couldn't really get anything done. It was completely surreal and pretty eerie. I think the current hearings are completely necessary to get to the bottom of what happened because nobody really seems to be taking it seriously or really care that that happened, but it's completely a big deal. My name is Acacia and I'm calling from Bend, Oregon.

Ellen: Hi, it's your friend, Ellen from Pittsburgh. I thought that there was going to be a rally on January 6, that the president had encouraged by asking people to come and asking people to walk on up there together. I didn't think any more of it until later in the afternoon, when I got home and turned on cable news and heard a report that people carrying Trump flags had barged into the Capitol, pushing aside the Capitol guards to the point where the Capitol guards had to step aside.

It wasn't until later that I saw coverage of smoke and violent people pushing through doors and running and men running up and jumping over seats in the chambers of Congress. I was surprised people weren't being arrested. As each hour passed, we found out more and more ugly events that occurred. I say, investigate and prosecute down to the ground because layer after layer of information shows that this was not just a rally, this was violence against our government.

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