Inside the Jan. 6 Capitol riot: Part 2 of 2

0:00A warning that this podcast includes explicit language, depictions of violence, and suicide. On our last episode...

0:36I'm like, here's a common man. Here we are.

0:42After Jason Riddle stormed the Capitol, chugged wine, and ran away, he eventually made his way back home to New Hampshire. But he didn't exactly go into hiding. A New Hampshire man who attended the protest in D.C. Wednesday and even joined the mob as it stormed the Capitol building is now speaking out. Riddle spoke out to a reporter for an NBC station in Boston. Why did you go in? I just, I had to see it. You don't regret it? No. After doing that, I was like, okay, I'm probably going to get arrested. I was on a bender. I drank morning and night. This place was gross. There was a dead Christmas tree in the corner.

1:22It's smelting here. I'd wake up on the floor of the couch, and I was just looking out the window waiting for them to show up. And they did. When the FBI came to his apartment, Riddle admitted that he went in the building, that he was drinking wine as people looted the Capitol. And then the FBI agents asked if he stole anything. At first, Riddle said no. He didn't think so. And the FBI agent went, OK, because we have this. And they opened up a folder and they took out a picture and they have a picture of me holding the book outside of the Capitol building. The FBI knew that Riddle had stolen a book that belonged in the Capitol.

1:55It was about Senate procedure. Riddle sold it to someone in the crowd outside the Capitol for 40 bucks. The FBI also knew what time he had entered the Capitol, what time he left, and what he did inside. Jason Riddle was about to be arrested, and his life was about to completely change, and in ways he never expected. That was true of hundreds of people, because the FBI and the Department of Justice had launched the largest criminal investigation in the history of the federal government. Their cases took them to every state in the country, as agents tracked down a wide spectrum of people. from those accused of orchestrating seditious plots and brutal assaults to the hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol but never threw a punch.

2:37FBI agents and prosecutors used videos, text messages, emails, cell phone tower data, social media posts, confidential informants, and testimony to create a comprehensive history of January 6th across more than 1 ,500 cases. Judges and juries evaluated all that evidence in court. But in the world of politics, President Trump wrote a wave of conspiracy theories and misinformation to turn that history on its head and return to power. And now his administration is actively trying to erase what actually happened. Consider this. How did this massive effort to hold people accountable become Donald Trump's launchpad to return to power?

3:22From NPR, I'm Scott Detra.

3:33It's Consider This from NPR. Here's NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach. Greg Rosen was a federal prosecutor. He'd spent years going after drug and gun crimes in D.C. And on January 6th, he saw a crime playing out on live TV at the Capitol. And he says he knew they needed to move into high gear immediately. The American people expected a peaceful transition of power approximately two weeks later. And we needed to ensure that the rule of law mattered. Remember, Trump was still president. Joe Biden's inauguration was coming. And no one knew if another copycat attack or worse was about to hit.

4:11And so in those early days, hours, minutes, there was a very keen realization that if we didn't act carefully but quickly, we had no idea what was coming next. Those fears were not just speculation. So few arrests had happened on January 6th that the people who led the riot were still out there. There are reports of large armed insurrections that will happen armed to the fucking teeth at every capital in the country. Joe Biggs was one of the leaders of the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol. Afterwards, he was saying publicly that January 6th was just a warning shot. If you don't think that this shit's about to pop off, you're out of your goddamn mind.

4:56So a major part of the Justice Department's mission at first was to prevent a future attack. And leads were pouring in. People provided hundreds of thousands of tips. And those tips could come from family members or friends, or it could come from people who are sort of outside looking in, trying to sleuth their way into identifying an individual or whatnot. People turned in neighbors, a match on a dating app, ex-husbands, a fellow patient at the dentist who was showing off riot videos on a phone, and a son even turned in his father. One tip pointed to a man in South Georgia, the town of Americus.

5:39Hello? McCall. Hey, hey, Lewis. Hey, it's Lewis. Like a lot of people, McCall Calhoun recorded himself storming the Capitol. And like a lot of people, he posted about it online. And that got the attention of local assistant district attorney, Lewis Lamb. And Lamb decided to record their call. You know, those statements that you made on Facebook, those certainly caught my attention, you know, along with the we're coming back armed and ready for war. The exact quote from Calhoun's post was, if this steal doesn't get fixed, there's talk of patriots coming back, this time fully armed for war. Calhoun told Lamb this was all just a big misunderstanding.

6:22As far as the we coming back, what I said was the word on the street is, and people were talking about that in the crowd. That's all I was communicating was what I was hearing. I mean, I'm not going back to Washington armed or anybody. But Calhoun said he was serious about one thing. The people needed to get ready because the country under Joe Biden was set to become some kind of communist dictatorship patrolled by violent Antifa terrorists. I mean, what do you think? I'm not aware of Antifa burning anybody's house down in South Georgia. Yeah, but they're... If this phone call sounds almost a little casual, there's a reason for that.

7:06Calhoun was a local criminal defense attorney for decades, so he and Lamb knew each other. They even faced off in court in a murder trial. Now, Calhoun was posting about killing people, and that made Lamb worried. But it also concerns me for the public at large because... I didn't threaten anyone. Well, I mean, except Democrats and communists and... Well, if I say something like a communist cross the line and start a civil war or something, then... Well, I mean, you did say that you're ready to kill them and get ready. You can do headshots from 200 yards. And I mean, McCall, it makes you sound dangerous and it makes sane, normal people nervous, you know, that somebody who is heavily armed says those kinds of comments.

8:00Yeah, well, everybody's heavily armed. I mean, and it's, you know, it's. Before long, the FBI was at McCall Calhoun's door. All right, McCall, what I'm asking to do is have your consent to go back in that spare bedroom where you were staying. The D.A. had sent the feds a recording of that call, and Calhoun was arrested, charged with multiple nonviolent crimes for storming the Capitol. The connection between talk and action was something investigators had to look at in every case. What was just a wild online rant? And what was a real threat? Because as much as Calhoun ranted online about wanting to kill Democrat communists, he was not personally violent on January 6th.

8:41But for other people, all that talk of civil war, public executions, and revolution helped lead to real violence. Okay. So just so you know, my name is Henry Caramenta. I'm a special agent with the FBI. Okay? My name's Agent Elias. I'm a special agent. You seem to have a pretty good idea while we're here, right? Daniel Rodriguez was arrested in California about two months after the riot. He was in his late 30s at the time. And Rodriguez told the FBI his path to the Capitol kind of all started with the far-right conspiracy show, InfoWars. He said the show opened his eyes to how the world really works and who's really in charge.

9:26Globalists and unelected officials, elitists, you know, people who are obsessed with power and control. When Trump said the election was stolen, Rodriguez believed it. And when Trump called his supporters to D.C. for the sixth, he listened. I thought that there was going to be battles across the country. I thought that there was going to be fighting for some reason in different cities. And I thought that the main fight, the main battle was going to be in D.C. because Trump called everyone there, and then I thought that that was going to bring BLM and Antifa there, and it was going to be like a big battle.

10:00That's what I really thought. On the night before January 6th, Rodriguez wrote to a group chat with other Trump supporters, there will be blood. Welcome to the revolution. The next day, he joined the mob at the Lower West Terrace Tunnel. That was the site of the worst violence that day. His goal, he said, was to do everything he could to push past the police line and get people inside the Capitol. We're trying to get in the building to try to occupy the building. Okay. So I called, I shouted, I turned around, I'm like, hey, we need tasers up here. And I thought someone was going to come up with a taser, not hand me a taser.

10:41After Rodriguez asked for a taser, someone handed him one. That's when the rioters pulled a cop out of the tunnel and into the mob. That cop was Michael Fanone. People started to attack Fanone. They punched him, grabbed for his gun, and then Rodriguez went up in the scrum and plunged the taser into the back of Fanone's neck. Twice. Why did you taser him? You said he was struggling. At that point, he's struggling to be let go. And you chose to assault him while he's struggling? Well, I just felt that, like, I didn't know what they were going to do to him. And so you tasered him to protect him? I mean, that sounds stupid.

11:24I don't know if I tasered him to protect him, but maybe just to like, so he wouldn't struggle and get hurt, maybe. And honestly, I didn't think very much about it because when I did it, I was like, oh my God, would I just do? Rodriguez said he thought he was saving the country. But that's not how things worked out. I'm so sorry. I didn't know that we were doing the wrong thing. I thought we were doing the fucking right thing. I thought we were going to be. I'm so stupid. I thought I was going to be awesome. I thought I was a good guy.

12:07Over time, the Justice Department moved from investigations to court. Here's Greg Rosen, the prosecutor. It is certainly the largest federal prosecution in American history. In terms of the statistics, we prosecuted approximately 1 ,593 cases and had approximately 260-plus trials. There were only two defendants that were fully acquitted, so very high success rate. The only major setback they faced was when the Supreme Court narrowed a law that prosecutors were using to charge certain people with obstructing Congress. But most people, more than 1 ,000, pleaded guilty.

12:50And here's where it's important to understand the wide spectrum of people's involvement in the riot. You can basically separate it into three categories. First, there were a few hundred people accused of some type of violence. These are people like Daniel Rodriguez. And they were some of the highest priority cases with more severe punishments. Rodriguez, for example, pleaded guilty to assaulting Fanon. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. And then there was a second category of cases. Seditious conspiracy, basically planning to use force violence to stop the electoral certification. Conspiracies are dangerous because they represent a tier of conduct that is not impulsive.

13:30It is not, I got swept up in the moment and sort of, quote, walked into the U.S. Capitol. And it's incredibly corrosive to the rule of law when individuals get together and plan behaviors like this. These cases were a big swing from the Justice Department. And after weeks of testimony, juries found leaders of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy. The case against the Proud Boys was especially serious. A judge appointed by Trump sentenced Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in prison. And then there was a third category of cases. This is basically the largest group, including hundreds of other people who did storm the Capitol building, but were not involved in a conspiracy and did not personally assault police.

14:18You know, each one individual did not necessarily commit a violent act, though there were many violent acts that day. But the collective entity, the monolith that existed, created sort of the perfect storm to overrun the U.S. Capitol Police and Congress. Some of the people in that category got prison time, like that South Georgia lawyer, McCall Calhoun. He was convicted and sentenced to a year and a half in prison. But the courts did not throw the book at all the defendants in that category. Hundreds of people got no prison time at all.

14:55Jason Riddle, who chugged that bottle of wine in the Capitol, pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 90 days in lockup. But what happened next showed how the effort to use prison to get people to reform or make amends for January 6th sometimes backfired. First of all, just listen to how Riddle described the prison he was sent to. It's like a nursing home. It's a joke. You're not really afraid for your safety. And there's just a bunch of old people gossiping and talking crap about each other and getting fat. And inside, he was not some pariah for what he did on January 6th. If anything, it was the opposite.

15:34Correctional officers are giving me props, and the guy who ran the block, he was a mafia guy. He was waiting for me in my cell when I got there. He wanted to meet me for just being at the riot, and he loved me for being at the riot. And every day, he'd walk by my cell, and he'd call me a patriot and a hero. He'd be like, hey, you patriot, you hero. He'd call me every single day. I got called a patriot and a hero. My nickname was Trump. This was not just the case at the prison where Riddle was. A few dozen of the people charged with the most serious crimes, like assault, ended up in one section of the D.C.

16:05jail, basically just for January 6th defendants. This is a free call from an incarcerated individual at Correctional Treatment Facility. I got a lot of calls from inmates there while they were awaiting trial. The conditions were bad. It's been well documented that the jail fails to meet basic standards. And there was a lot of infighting. One told me it was like the movie Mean Girls, but with racist, anti-Semitic extremists. But they also bonded. Brandon Fellows had stormed the Capitol and smoked a joint in a senator's office. He was jailed pending trial for allegedly harassing his probation officer.

16:40He told me that getting locked up only made him more radical. They made an enemy, for sure. You know, I didn't like them before, but now they made an enemy. And when you say they, well, who do you mean by they? The DOJ, the Biden administration, that's why when they offered me a time-to-serve plea deal, I'm like, I'm sorry, I just don't negotiate with terrorists. So you're more political than ever, it sounds like. Oh, yeah. No, they really made the wrong decision. Every night at the D.C. jail, the January 6th defendants started singing the national anthem together, and their supporters recorded it over a scratchy jailhouse phone.

17:22Soon, that ritual would become much more famous.

17:31There are a lot of reasons covering January 6th has been an unusual experience. And it wasn't just because of the period of my life where I got multiple calls a day from January 6th defendants in jail. One of the wildest parts has been watching what seemed like a national consensus about the riot crumble under our feet. Back in early 2021, a majority of the Congress believed Trump should be impeached for inciting the attack. And even Republican senators who voted against convicting Trump, like Mitch McConnell, called January 6th an act of domestic terrorism. And a year after the attack, this is what Republican Senator Ted Cruz was saying.

18:10We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week. and it is an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery. But what Cruz did not seem to realize was that the consensus about January 6th had been changing, at least on the right. You called this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That's a lie. You told that lie on purpose, and I'm wondering why you did. Tucker Carlson confronted Cruz on Fox News. And Cruz, rather than stand his ground, seemed to sense which way the winds were blowing.

18:50The way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and it was frankly dumb. I don't buy that. Cruz said he only meant to call the people who assaulted police terrorists. But even that was no longer part of the consensus. January 6th was becoming another Democrat hoax.

19:13In retrospect, all the signs were there from the beginning. The consensus was always a little shaky because the conspiracies had been bubbling up from the very beginning. There's the C-SPAN clip I keep thinking about from the night of January 6th. On screen, police were still trying to secure the building. C-SPAN opened their phones to callers. So just a couple of thoughts. A guy named Brad called in with a theory. There are some pictures of some of the people who have joined in today's crazy acts that have been seen both at prior Antifa demonstrations. Where are you finding that information? On Twitter.

19:53And you trust it? Yeah. I mean, they're pictures. Those photos that spread online on Twitter were of Trump supporters. But that same night, Fox News ran with those theories, too. Keep in mind, we don't know who all were the instigators in this. I think a lot of it is the Antifa folks. I've been sent pictures. There are some reports that Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd. As every conspiracy theory popped up and was debunked, another would take its place, even though they never really made sense together. Like it was Antifa doing all the destruction, or actually a false flag by the deep state to make Trump supporters look bad.

20:35Or maybe it was just not really a big deal. Republican Congressman Andrew Clyde said as much. You know, if you didn't know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit. But what all these stories had in common was this. January 6th was not Trump's fault. And it was not his supporters' fault either. If there are victims, it was the people who were arrested.

21:04Of course, no one can shape the beliefs of the Republican Party like Donald Trump. And in his campaign, rather than running away from January 6th, if anything, Trump ran on it. Ladies and gentlemen, Justice for All, featuring President Donald J. Trump and the J6 choir.

21:27Trump decided to open the very first rally of his re-election campaign in Waco, Texas, with a song. It was that recording of the January 6th defendants in jail singing the national anthem. But now it was mixed with ambient music and Trump reading the Pledge of Allegiance. It was all produced by Kash Patel. Yes, that Kash Patel, the current FBI director. Trump said the people who perpetrated the January 6th attack were political prisoners. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, of which there are many people out there that have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. And it wasn't just in Waco.

22:05Again and again, Trump called the criminal charges against the rioters a con job based on a giant lie. I call them the J6 hostages. Many of those people are very innocent people. They did nothing wrong. And they're great people. Many of them are just great people. That summer, Trump himself was indicted by the Department of Justice for allegedly using fraud and other illegal means to overturn the 2020 election. Trump described himself as one more victim of political persecution, just like the riot defendants. And he kept playing that song at his rallies. Must have been distracting when you have President Trump releasing a song with your defendants' voices recorded on the jailhouse phones.

22:49I mean, that might be the understatement of the century. This is Greg Rosen again, the prosecutor. Distracting is obviously one word for it. What are the words you would use? I mean, insane. What was insane for prosecutors was a badge of honor for January 6th defendants. After being called domestic terrorists by the FBI, now the former, possible future president was calling them patriots.

23:16Jason Riddle was watching all of this unfold, and he had every reason to embrace the story Trump was telling. After all, in prison, people called him a hero, and money was at stake. Some defendants had raised tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. But two things changed for Riddle. First, his drinking problem. After one bender, his probation officer put him on a breathalyzer to make sure he stopped drinking. Otherwise, he'd go to jail. The way he puts it, the law forced him to get sober. And just, I needed help. And that was the problem. I couldn't admit that. And once I was able to admit that, it made it a whole lot easier.

23:54He got his life back on track, found a steady job. And it also made him rethink a lot of things, including Trump. The things he says definitely didn't have the same effect on me without alcohol. Like all these things that I used to find funny. What is Trump's report now? I'm just finding it really annoying. And then Trump did something that shocked him, changed his whole perspective. When Trump was indicted in New York City, this was over the hush money payments he made to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, he called for protests. Trump's saying today he expects to be arrested on Tuesday and is calling for protests.