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Melissa: Welcome to The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

On Monday, the bipartisan House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, held its final public meeting and released the executive summary of its extensive final report. It's more than 100 pages long, not the report y'all the executive summary. For more than a year the committee has held nine public hearings and presented testimony from dozens of witnesses.

The executive summary explains why the committee was so painstaking in their process, writing, "We understood that millions of Americans still lacked the information necessary to understand and evaluate what President Trump has told them about the election." Here's Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson.

Bennie Thompson: To cast a vote in the United States is an act of faith and hope. If the faith is broken, so here's our democracy. Donald Trump broke that faith. He lost the 2020 election and knew it, but he chose to try to stay in office through a multi-part scheme to overturn the results and block the transfer of power.

Melissa: The key takeaway of the committee was clear. The events of January 6, were not spontaneous, unplanned, or uncoordinated, they were a direct result of the choices actions, and inactions of the former president. Outgoing Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney had this to say.

Liz Cheney: Among the most shameful of this committee's findings was that President Trump sat in the dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violent riot at the Capitol on television. For hours, he would not issue a public statement instructing his supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, for hours he would not do it.

Melissa: Then the committee made history, voting unanimously to refer former President Trump to the Department of Justice on for criminal charges.

Speaker 4: The President has an affirmative and primary constitutional duty to act, to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order. We have gone where the facts and the law lead us accordingly, Mr. Chairman, in light of these facts. I ask unanimous consent that the chairman be directed to transmit to the United States Department of Justice, relevant select committee records in furtherance of these criminal referrals.

Melissa: Joining us now is Hunter Walker, investigative reporter with Talking Points Memo, and co-author of The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th. Hunter, thanks so much for being here.

Hunter: Thanks for having me, Melissa.

Melissa: Help us to just understand the meaning of the words here. What does it mean to refer someone for prosecution?

Hunter: Congress does not have criminal authority. What they've essentially done here is recommend to the Justice Department. I've been saying to people, it's almost an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. In this case, they recommended it specifically to Jack Smith. This is the special counsel that Merrick Garland has recently appointed to take over Trump-related aspects of the investigation into January 6.

Melissa: I hate the crystal balling effect that what will happen next but are there terms given the history of this to actually assess the likelihood that charges will come?

Hunter: This is a pretty rare situation. Referrals like this have not always resulted in charges. However, as I was saying, there's already a special counsel, and they are already focused on Trump. Very funny because I was a White House correspondent throughout the Trump years, and I think as you were any of your listeners will know, there was a tendency among some in the discourse to make every discussion about Trump prematurely legal.

There were a lot of people who indicted him on Twitter themselves about 7000 times during the course of his administration, and it was often premature because there's a lot of bias. Particularly in the Justice Department against filing charges against the president. They tend to take an Office of Legal Counsel opinion on this matter which is also not ironclad, but they have taken it as gospel. All of that being said, this time something is different.

We're already well into an investigation into January 6. It's been the largest in the history of the FBI and it's resulted in over 900 charges against individuals who broke into the building. So far that investigation has focused on just that, the people who stormed into the Capitol that day. I've always been told, from my sources in the Justice Department that there are taking a traditional criminal investigation approach, which means a hierarchical investigation that works its way up the pyramid from the wide base of people at the bottom to the very high-level organizers.

What we're seeing with the appointment of the Special Counsel is they are now focusing on that higher level. Merrick Garland has been explicit that higher level does involve the President and his political allies. The question is how much effect this report will have on it. I'd say it's more of a recommendation but in terms of the principle and the public discourse, it's obviously a huge thing. Congress is saying, "We think that this should be criminal."

They're also previewing a lot of the evidence that we know that the Justice Department, the special counsel may have. We know that the Justice Department has taken some of the evidence that was acquired by this committee, and the committee is now showing us a way that might be used to make charges.

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Melissa: All right, y'all we have to take a break, more of this conversation in just a moment. This is The Takeaway, and we're still with Hunter Walker, investigative reporter with Talking Points Memo. The fact that you mentioned those 900-some-odd people who've been investigated folks who have been-- and I'm not talking here about the high level, we'll get to that. On the bottom, folks who were streaming into the Capitol that day, and while I don't necessarily have the softest place in my heart for them.

They're also ordinary folks. My very first thought yesterday as this recommendation was coming down, was about them, and wondering how they might be feeling or what they might be thinking about the notion that the President at least stands the possibility of being charged for sets of actions they've already been charged in.

Hunter: Yes. My coverage of January 6, began on the day itself. I was there on the ground, basically carried into this crowd as it charged into the building. It was immediately apparent to me that there was high-level organization, and infrastructure, political media, and otherwise, behind what happened that day. We all saw so much of this with our own eyes. I was there at the speech where Trump told the crowd to "fight like hell."

They were going to walk to the Capitol, we all saw the months of Fox News, the late Rush Limbaugh, Trump, Republican members of Congress, and others promote these baseless election lies that made those people angry, and brought them to DC that day.

Of course, standing there with my own eyes, the infrastructure was visible. There was a stage, there's a whole apparatus required for the President to come speak. It was immediately apparent to me that people had been called to the Capitol, and there was a lot more than just the people who did so. In a way, it's been strange to watch the accountability solely focused on the people who heeded that call. One way I've talked about it with people is if you know liberals in your life, what if in 2016 Barack Obama had gone on TV, and Rachel Maddow had gone on TV and said, "Oh, my God, the election is stolen." I think there's a good portion of this country who might have taken to the streets.

When you see the people who actually participated in this, first off, it's important to remember they were following someone's lead here. Within that group, I think, and some of them were quoted. They quoted from some of these depositions and charging documents in this executive summary. Some of them have turned on Trump's, some of them have since become quite angry. There were some pretty impactful quotes, namely, from I think veterans. A lot of these people were actually former service members, and they were upset to realize and think about the fact they'd been sent on their own and sent out to brawl with police in the National Guard, but there are also people who remain true believers.

Last night, I was listening to a streaming audio discussion involving people who had gone into the Capitol, and they are all focused on the various conspiracy theories that have been cropping up that the FBI investigation is corrupt. That this was false flag is your provocateur, and really [unintelligible 00:09:52]. I think the ideology persists. We're now seeing the progenitors of that ideology brought into the fore.

Melissa: All right, Hunter, there were also four Republican members of Congress referred to the House Ethics Committee, including the potential next speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California. What does it mean? What does it entail to have been referred to the Ethics Committee?

Hunter: Well, it really effectively won't mean very much, particularly with the Republican majority taking over next month. Also, I have to say on this front, this is an area where it just does not seem to me that the committee was very aggressive. A lot of my work over the past year or so both in The Breach, which I co-wrote with Denver Riggleman, who is a former member of Congress and staffer to the committee, and in our recent series on Talking Points Memo, where we published for the first time and delved into a lot of Mark Meadows' text messages that were provided through the committee.

We've been looking at the phone records evidence that the committee compiled. I know this was just the executive summary, but that was used very little in the report that we've seen so far. They highlighted a few texts from Meadows' phone, but it was overwhelmingly stuff that was fairly contrite and reasonable, people texting Meadows on January 6th and saying this is getting out of control. That is a very, very, very small portion of what we saw with those records.

By and large, we saw on Election Day 2020, as the votes were still being counted, people beginning to talk about challenging this in an organized way, using violent rhetoric, and people continuing that challenge well after even January 6th. About 20% of those messages were from members of Congress. We counted 34 that were in there talking to Meadows about plans to overturn the election all the way up until January 17th, three days before Biden took office when you had something as dramatic as Ralph Norman, South Carolina Congressman, advocating for martial law.

It was clear to me that there could be criminal referrals against some members of Congress along these same lines as the charges they discussed for Trump. The number is not four. It may not go all the way up to 34 in terms of criminality, but there was a lot more participation in this from the members than what we've seen this committee take on.

Melissa: Hunter Walker is investigative reporter with Talking Points Memo. Hunter, I so appreciate you taking the time today.

Hunter: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate the conversation.

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