Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Senior Analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and The Federalist contributor Michael Waller to the newsmakers line to comment upon Senator Ron Johnsons’s hearing and media backlash in which he referenced Waller’s eyewitness testimony at the Capitol riots on January 6.
Leahy: We are joined now on our newsmaker line by J. Michael Waller, who had a terrific article last month at The Federalist. No, Senator Ron Johnson didn’t promote a conspiracy theory about the Capitol riot. Welcome to The Tennessee Star Report Michael. Nice to talk to you again.
Waller: Hey, it’s great to be back.
Leahy: Let me just set the groundwork for this. I have been arguing on the air for several months now that Joe Biden is a legal but not legitimate president of the United States for a number of reasons. Mostly focused on the unlawful election procedures that led up to the 2020 election in the key states, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and the failure of state legislatures to convene to review those processes.
And then, of course, the failure that happened in Washington at the time of the meeting of the joint session of Congress on January 6, the day of this Capitol riot. Now, you’ve looked at this and you’ve written a lot about what really happened that day. Tell us about what you’ve written about and what Senator Ron Johnson has explained about what you observed.
Waller: Sure. I wrote about what I saw because I was there. So it was first hand accounts. I was at the West front of the Capitol on January 6 at the march from the White House to the Capitol when President Trump gave his talk at the White House. And what I observed on the ground as an eyewitness had no resemblance to what was reported and popularly believed, even though those things happened, a lot of those things happened as well.
Really, it was just a huge crowd of ordinary Americans who had voted for President Trump, who were upset about what you were just talking about. Not the election results themselves, they could have accepted a legitimate election loss. They were upset about what they saw as illegal or otherwise rings electric results in certain states where their votes were stolen from them. But it was not an angry mob like the media reported.
We came all the way to Washington from all around the country and we got to see or hear the President speak to us personally. We’re all marching together down to the Capitol and we’re going to express our views. And that was that. Where it went badly was that for weeks, if not since November, this was maybe up to two months, certainly for several weeks, there were organized groups that had trained and prepared to exploit that large crowd for its own purposes and to wage violence that day to attack the Capitol building.
And the Capitol police were completely unprepared for it. The city police of Washington, D.C., that do a fine job at crowd control when they’re allowed to by the mayor, there were not many of them out there, and they didn’t expect any violence. And sure enough, when the organized groups and you could see this happen with military precision, especially looking back at the videos that we shot, just amateur videos showing that this was a covert cadre that had come in with the purpose of committing violence that day. And of course, the media was all over it, saying that it was President Trump’s legitimate supporters. It was not that way at all.
Leahy: And Senator Ron Johnson has talked about that and has been criticized for it. Tell us about that.
Waller: Yes. Ron Johnson is one of the few who’s not afraid to speak his mind and not afraid to use his staff time and his own time to follow up on leads to questions that people might have in their heads and that few of them asked personally. And he did. He was chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee until early or late January, now he’s in the minority.
Senator Amy Klobuchar is chair of a larger committee. So there are two Senate committees all run by Democrats put together to start the first round of investigative hearing. And Senator Johnson raised at that hearing the idea that maybe this wasn’t tens and hundreds of thousands of armed violent conservative Trump supporters.
Maybe it was just a few trained radicals who did this. And so he read portions of my article in The Federalist into the record and asked if the rest of it be entered as eyewitness evidence. And from what I understand, that was the first piece of eyewitness evidence that was introduced into the Senate investigation. He itemized the four different cadre groups that I saw at the time and started asking questions about it. And then he was just (Inaudible talk) because it didn’t fit the narrative.
Leahy: Now let’s talk about this a little bit. Has anyone speculated or is there any evidence about who these radical organizers planned in advance or who are they affiliated with? Is there any information on that out there?
Waller: Yes, there is. In fact, we heard it at the time and I didn’t put it in the article because I didn’t want to name a group falsely, but there was one group was called The Oathkeepers. There were some members of the Proud Boys there. And there were some groups that we didn’t know about and didn’t know their names.
But we did recognize other groups just because they were wearing the insignia on their clothes or identified the people who they were at the event. And this was the other thing, I wrote the article, not for anybody to read, but I wrote them as my own private notes so that I would remember later exactly what I saw on January 6 without any coloring or adjustment from what we later picked up elsewhere.
And we put more information together that colors the view of the past. I wanted this to be a snapshot of exactly what I saw at the time. But there was another group there, and I didn’t know who it was because it doesn’t have a formal membership. But they were more radicalized militants who were wearing MAGA clothes or Trump clothes, but they didn’t fit in.
There were a lot of spirited people there and some rowdy ones of course. Plenty of them. And they were wearing Trump gear. But there was one group where they didn’t fit in. They were acting cautious, paranoid even. They were clustered together in small groups, and they ran ahead forward with a sense of mission as if they knew what they were doing. But they really felt awkward, and they really didn’t fit in.
And this march, it’s about a mile and a half walk from the Capitol to the White House or the White House to the Capitol. And people were just saying hello and chatting and stuff so that they could take pictures of the other people as a group. And asking, hey, can you guys take pictures for us? And then you strike up a conversation about where you’re from. And they’re just, you know, people were obviously in D.C. for the first time.
I’ve been here for almost 40 years. They were just chatting with them. But these people you couldn’t chat with them and they looked to me like Antifa or troublemakers, but I wasn’t sure. And I said so in the article. I said, this other cadre dressed this way, acting this way looked like left wingers like Antifa, but I wasn’t sure. And regardless, I didn’t see them cause any trouble. (Inaudible talk)
Leahy: Has there been any follow-up from law enforcement on these group claims of yours?
Waller: Yes there has. But here’s the important thing. What the media did was they took that little section saying that I saw people who I thought might be Antifa but I didn’t see them do anything wrong. They twisted Ron Johnson’s words to say that he was accusing Antifa of being behind the Capitol attack and then they just ripped into him. And me too also. They said that this is crazy, paranoid talk. There’s no evidence.
Leahy: And it was just Michael Waller and what you saw that you wrote down. Michael Waller with The Federalist. Thanks so much for joining us today. Keep us posted on what develops here.
Waller: You bet.
Listen to the second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Capitol Protest” by Elijah Schaffer.
Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
During the second hour, Carmichael analyzed the Sedition Act of 1798 from a historical perspective and compared it to today’s mainstream media attempts to compare situations between Trump supporters and those on the left that are not of equal value.
Leahy: We are joined as we almost always are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 a.m by the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning, sir.
Leahy: Did you have any trouble driving in?
Carmichael: Not today.
Leahy: Not today. Yeah, so not coming in from Nashville to the studio? Not a lot of snow on the ground?
Carmichael: Not from Green Hills.
Leahy: Green Hills. Well, when I came in earlier today there was some coming up from Spring Hill. Crom, you are a student of history. And one of the reasons we study history is so we try not to repeat the mistakes of the past over the weekend. I was doing a little research on a mistake of the past that it’s rearing its ugly head again. I speak of the Sedition Act of 1798 and I’ll read here from the history of the House of Representatives.
In one of the first tests of freedom of speech, the House passed the Sedition Act in 1798 permitting the deportation, fine, or imprisonment of anyone deemed a threat or publishing ‘false scandalous or malicious writings against the government of the United States.’ This was an era when the newspapers of the day were highly partisan and John Adams was President. He was part of the now-defunct Federalist Party.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were developing what was then called the Democrat-Republican Party. Which is the Democrat Party of today. So they passed this law that says you can’t criticize the president. And it was very unpopular. And ultimately that particular law had a life span that ended and when Thomas Jefferson was elected president in the 1800s when the Democratic-Republican Congress let that law expire. But here we are, gosh 220 years later and that issue seems to be coming up again.
Carmichael: Well, here’s the part that is kind of interesting about that. What I’d like to find out, Michael, is when the “Republican” of the “Democrat-Republican Party,” when that was dropped. I want to know when it became exclusively the Democrat Party and not the Democrat-Republican party. Because Abraham Lincoln was the founder of the Republican Party.
Leahy: We call that today the Republican Party.
Carmichael: Because at some point between 1800 and Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency, the party of Jefferson dropped the word Republican. They had to have otherwise Lincoln couldn’t have been the founder of the Republican Party. But what is going on now I guess because I wasn’t alive then is very similar. But the Federalist Party at that time is from the Republican Party.
It says from the noted historian Gordon Wood who says the Federalist Party never thought that they were a party. They thought they were the government. And so any opposition to the government was then naturally considered to be seditious. And so that to me is the tie-in today. But here’s what’s going on now in the country.
You have you had that law of 1798 which didn’t last long and the public hated it. But now you’re seeing for example you’re seeing the left, and this isn’t just the politicians but it does include the politicians. Margaret Sullivan a Washington Post media columnist wrote this week, ‘corporations that advertise on Fox News should walk away declaring that the outlet’s role in the 400,000 U.S. lives lost to the pandemic and its disastrous attack on January sixth has been deadly.’
And so therefore the competition of Fox News is literally trying to cancel Fox News calling on the advertisers to stop advertising. But they go further. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times calls on cable providers to drop Fox News from their cable channels. First of all, I would imagine that there are contractual relationships between Fox News and the cable companies.
Leahy: Right. Which they come up periodically for renewal.
Carmichael: Yes, but I would imagine that dropping them might create some problems. But I don’t want to go there. I mean that would be like a professional sports team saying that the first-team all-pro quarterback for the other team can’t play in a particular game.
Leahy: Because he’s a bad person.
Carmichael: For whatever reason, they just disagree with him and think his play-calling is just inappropriate for the game. And then a former Facebook executive. So these aren’t small people. These aren’t no-name people. A former Facebook executive was more straightforward on CNN. We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences. And so what they want to do is make it impossible for the opposition to essentially turn the United States government into a version of the Communist Party of China.
Leahy: Exactly. And by the way, the keyword there and these guys on the left Crom they use language very specifically. And there are themes that come back. The operative word in that quote was ‘reach.’ We had a guest on here Dan Gainor from the Media Research Center at 5:30 am and he said the word of the day coming down from all the folks on the left is this. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
Carmichael: Okay, interesting.
Leahy: That’s why that guy said you’re going to hear this word, reach. Reach. You are going to hear it repeatedly.
Carmichael: And here’s the thing about The Wall Street Journal that and some of these other outlets just absolutely frosts me.
Leahy: Hold it. Hold it. The Wall Street Journal frosts you?
Carmichael: Their editorial page is mostly good. Their news section is mostly bad when it comes to their political section.
Leahy: I agree with that. I stand corrected. That’s exactly right.
Carmichael: Yeah, their business section is straight business. Economics is unless they get into a political area then they’re not very good on their political area. But this is in the opinion section. Here’s the last paragraph. The problems of polarization lies and political violence are real on both sides. Now, that’s where The Wall Street Journal loses me.
Because I’d like to have examples where it is where the so-called right did something that was exclusive to the right and they have the evidence that that’s all it was because I don’t believe it. Do I believe that there were some Trump supporters that there were in the Capitol? Yes. Do I believe that there were some Antifa and Black Lives Matter instigators who helped fan the fires? Absolutely yes. But to compare that one instance and even to make that a huge incident compared to all of the other things that happened this summer and say that they are equally bad, that’s where we get into trouble.
Leahy: Let me just add, I don’t disagree with you at all however, Crom what you’ve just described as being not an honest description of the comparing the two sides is not what we’re seeing at all.
Carmichael: I know that. I’m saying that here. The Wall Street Journal has a whole article that is attacking the left for trying to literally shut down the ability of frankly, of your show to reach its audience. The whole article is about that. And it’s not just one person. It’s across their whole spectrum. And then in the very last paragraph, it provides equal responsibility, which essentially gives credence to the entire argument.
Leahy: A very fine point. And I agree with it completely.
Carmichael: Now this is in The Wall Street Journal‘s political section. They ran a very long article almost seven printed pages. When you do the printing that’s a long article, most are two, but a short article where they are identifying the people who funded Trump’s rally. Trump’s rally. And they’re trying to tie the rally itself into breaking into the Capitol. And I want to talk a little bit more about that.
Leahy: That is a very good point.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who discussed how it was the Democrats that benefited from the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday afternoon.
Leahy: We are joined as we almost always are on Wednesdays by our good friend the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning,
Carmichael: Michael, good morning, sir.
Leahy: It’s a little snowy out there this morning. Did you have a safe ride in the snow?
Carmichael: Well the snow had stopped. You saw something I didn’t.
Leahy: Well, Crom I’ve been talking all morning about this. And I want to set it up by saying the event on Wednesday when the peaceful Trump rally on the mall transformed into something that wasn’t peaceful when rioters breached the Capitol rioters. Rioters, it turns out, and possibly some Antifa, possibly some Trump supporters. But nonetheless, the rule of law was broken.
And I’ve said it’s a watershed in this sense that our side of constitutional populist conservatives lost the moral high ground with those events. And the question that I’ve posed is what happens now with the conservative movement? Do you agree with me on the moral high ground issue? And what do you think happens now?
Carmichael: Well, I don’t know if I agree or disagree on the moral high ground issue because I think that there were some Trump supporters who are in the building. I think there were some Antifa people who were instigators of the violence first with the police and then and then the breaching of the building. The Capitol Hill police were strangely and completely unprepared.
Leahy: Strangely.
Carmichael: And when I say “strangely” and I’m putting that in quotes because I think that they were told to stand down and stay away and let the breach happen. because you have to ask yourself who benefited? Yeah who benefited from the breach of the nation’s Capitol. Who benefited? It certainly wasn’t Trump. It certainly wasn’t it wasn’t the Republicans. It wasn’t the conservative movement.
And so there’s a lot in history that is staged. I think this past election, there’s a great deal that we staged. And so do I think there were some people who were in the building? Yeah. Do I think they’re running around kind of having a great time? Yeah. Did they maybe break a couple of chairs and sit in speaker Pelosi’s chair? Yes.
Leahy: I’ve actually seen some reports that the person sitting in Pelosi’s chair was an Antifa person. I’ve seen those reports. I don’t know whether it’s true or not.
Carmichael: Well at some point that may or may not become a factor or not. I don’t know. But but but the bottom line is that the Democrats benefited from what happened.
Leahy: A crisis Crom is a terrible thing to waste.
Carmichael: Yeah. When you create the crisis. That’s part of it.
Leahy: Yeah, exactly.
Carmichael: And so and you know, and then the media called it just ignored what’s happening in the past. Now, I’m not saying all this in complaining because we’re at a point now where I learned yesterday at lunch where the term gaslighting came from. Do you know where it came from?
Leahy: I don’t I’d love to be enlightened.
Carmichael: There was a movie back in the I think in the 30s or 40s. An old movie where the husband wanted his wife to think she was crazy.
Leahy: Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.
Carmichael: Okay. And so what he did was he would do things that were slight and imperceptible. And so then when she would comment on them he would say well that’s not happening. And so and so in other words, it’s one of those things where are you going to believe me or believe your lying eyes.
Leahy: Exactly.
Carmichael: So that’s what’s going on now in this country. I would also recommend to our listeners, my daughter recommended to me that I watch a documentary that’s on Netflix called The Social Dilemma. And it is a documentary with interviews of people with a little bit of drama in it. When I say drama I don’t mean drama in the sense of drama but how it’s done. And that is how social media companies manipulate people’s thinking.
Leahy: And clearly happening.
Carmichael: And that they didn’t intend to do that when they started but now they’re being paid to do it. And these are people who used to work for these companies who have quit because of the ethical problems that they see.
Leahy: There is a professor at Harvard Robert Epstein I think his name is, who’s made that argument for like 10 years and said that Google for instance would be able to change like 5 or 10 million votes using those techniques.
Carmichael: Well, but I’m not talking about votes. I’m talking about thinking. It’s much bigger than voting. And so so I would encourage our listeners to watch it.
Leahy: It’s on Netflix. The Social Dilemma. I’m going to watch it.
Carmichael: Yeah, The Social Network I think was the movie about Zuckerberg and Facebook. But this is The Social Dilemma and it’s well worth watching because we are observing it in real-time. Then you move forward and it didn’t take very long after the Capitol was breached for them to move back into session go ahead and finish what they would have done anyway. And what Hawley was doing and what Ted Cruz was doing would not have changed the results.
Leahy: I use the term Crom, that process, I agree with you on that. I use the term almost akin to a kangaroo court in terms of the way they were looking at the evidence.
Carmichael: Michael there’s where you and I differ. If the outcome were going to be different it would have been done when the electors were voted on. That’s a job for the state legislatures. It’s not a job for Congress to overturn what the state legislators did. They voted for the electors. They sent them to Pence.
Leahy: I will make one little correction on that. The state legislators actually didn’t do that.
Carmichael: Well, whoever did it the envelopes got to Pence. He was going to open them. Nothing in Washington was going to change what was in those envelopes.
Leahy: That is a true statement.
Carmichael: Okay. So if nothing was going to change it, that doesn’t mean that what Hawley and Ted Cruz and the Republican House members when they objected to it and what they were intending to do was shine a light on the election fraud.
Leahy: And they said that. They were saying we don’t expect this will change the outcome. We just want to have the information out there.
Carmichael: And that’s all valid. All I’m saying is for people who thought that once the envelopes were in the Senate that what was in the envelopes was going to be changed by people in Washington, as much as I would like for it to be changed that wasn’t going to happen. So what did happen is because of the breach so-called of the Capitol, all of the House and Senate went to someplace safe. And then after the danger part was over they then raced back and finished their work literally in the middle of the night.
Leahy: Literally. And nobody was paying attention.
Carmichael: Nobody was paying attention.
Leahy: Because it was all about what happened from the breach.
Carmichael: Right. And so then they moved quickly to the next day invoking the 25th Amendment.
Leahy: Well, there were calls for the invoking of the 25th amendment by Democrats but not from the joint session.
Carmichael: No. But the calls were from the leadership of the Democrat Party. From Pelosi and Schumer.
Leahy: Shockingly Crom, we have a story at The Tennessee Star. I know this will shock you. Steve Cohen and Congressman Cooper here have called for invoking the 25th amendment.
Carmichael: Okay. So at any rate. So that is now happening. Then you have to ask yourself, why would a party that claims over and over again with a leader now president-elect Biden. Now president-elect saying that we need to heal and come together? Why would they immediately call for the removal of President Trump?
Leahy: I have an answer to that question. Go ahead. They don’t want to heal. They don’t want to come together. What they want to do is crush any opposition to their agenda.
Carmichael: Here’s what is interesting. I have some friends of mine who are Republicans. They have been supportive of what I would call the institutional Republican Party for years. I have no idea what they think of Ronald Reagan because I’ve never asked them because that’s a long time ago.
Leahy: A long time ago.
Carmichael: But to a person, they are very upset with Trump and have been ever since he’s been the president. And when I asked him why it’s always about his behavior.
Leahy: Yes. Okay, not his policies, his behavior.
Carmichael: Yes. But they can’t get past his behavior and discuss his policies. The Democrats on the other hand are exactly, as far as my friends are concerned, about exactly the opposite.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Capitol Protest” by Elijah Schaffer.
Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star Senior Reporter Laura Baigert to the newsmakers line to describe what she experienced on the ground at Wednesday’s Trump rally in Washington.
Leahy: We’re joined now on the line by Laura Baigert of the Tennessee Star who stayed in D.C. Welcome to the Tennessee Star Report. Tell us your experience at the rally and subsequently. Good morning Laura.
Baigert: Good morning, Michael. Good morning, Carol. It’s good to hear your voices.
Swain: Good morning.
Leahy: So tell us about the rally and what you saw during the rally and after.
Baigert: We left our hotel, about a little after 7:00 a.m., and took the subway up to the Ellipse Park area. The park itself was closed off and you have to go through secret service, but we stood in a large field like outside of that fenced-in area where there was a monitor there. When we first got there there were people but within a very short period of time this field and everywhere around that we could see, no one could move. We were just stuck there like a Times Square type of New Year’s Eve event. It’s hard to describe.
Those of you who have been to these kinds of rallies know. But if you haven’t been to one, there is love and camaraderie. Everybody had signs and flags. And it was just great. And then, you know people were cheering and chanting USA. Then the speakers came out. Very calm, peaceful, and very very cold. We stood there for more than an hour waiting for the President to come out.
Leahy: He gave a speech and what was your reaction to that speech?
Baigert: Honestly, I think people thought it went a little too long and we were freezing. And we were probably hoping for a little bit more action and that we’ve done the talking and so forth. But we were hoping for something more definitive. But course, you know, we love our President. And so everybody was enthralled to have him out there. And he spoke for more than an hour. So that was a pretty impressive thing for him to come out like that and to spend that much time there. And then he said let’s walk together down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol.
Leahy: CNN is reporting that he incited violence. Did you hear him incite any violence?
Baigert: No. Not even close to anything like that. He never said anything that was like that or that would even imply something like that unless you were trying to read into something. Not even that. I don’t know how anybody could say something like that.
Swain: Laura, I noticed that he actually said we were going to walk peacefully to the Capitol.
Baigert: Peacefully. And walk together. It was a walk. It wasn’t like we were going to storm down there. He didn’t say anything like that.
Leahy: So how long did it take you to walk from the the mall down to the Capitol? And what did you see? And when did you first learn that the Capitol had been breached?
Baigert: Okay, so it probably took more than half an hour. We walked down Constitution Avenue because we were kind of in the middle of the field. So when you came out of the field you landed right on Constitution Avenue. And as we crossed all of the cross streets we could see as many people walking on Pennsylvania Avenue and then on the other parallel street in the other direction.
We were probably 20 people wide walking and it probably took more than a half an hour to get from the park to the Capitol. And I can walk really fast. I walk five to six miles a day. So but you could not move because there were so many people. And people were chanting USA. And you know, just again everybody being very kind to each other and no problems along the way. I will say there were people who a couple of times chanted the F expletive Antifa.
Then we got over to the Capitol and there were so many people that were outside the circle around it that you didn’t really even know what was going on. By the time we got there, there were people on the steps of the Capitol. But nobody really thought anything of it. And then after we got closer into that inner circle and we could see that there was some smoke on the balcony and we couldn’t really tell what was happening.
A metro police officer told us, said I would advise you not to go there, over there. And he said there’s trouble And I said, well, what do you mean by trouble? He said, well citizens. And I said but what kind of citizens what do you mean? And he wouldn’t elaborate on anything. So we walked over just to see more of what was happening and we could see smoke bombs going off and tear gas. The fire extinguishers were being sprayed, but I think that was by protesters.
Part of the reason it looked so strange was that they were setting up for the inauguration. And that’s why the fencing was up because they’re putting all the stuff out there for that. So there were people calling with a bullhorn saying move forward or else they’re going to push us out of here and come up onto the bleachers.
I mean, this is somebody with a bullhorn and the only person you could hear and that’s all they were saying was move forward, move forward. Nobody was telling anybody to go into the building or breach the building. And I would have to say that anybody who was over there was already there and got into the building was already there and had that planned much earlier. Because you could not have walked from where we were to get over there in that amount of time.
Leahy: So the people in the front, were they Trump supporters? There have been some reports that they were Antifa wearing Trump gear. Do you have any indication one way or the other as to who the people at the Capitol were?
Baigert: All I’ve seen is what’s been on social media. So you know, I don’t put any faith or stock in that. There was someone reporting from The Blaze last night. There were many people on the ground from Blaze TV that were interviewing people on that. They were Trump supporters. But the thing that you need to understand is that we have people with us who were here in 2010 during the Tea Party and Glenn Beck’s rallies and there were like a million people here.
And they said there was every bit as many people there and maybe more yesterday. How many people went into the building? 20 or 30? This is not the typical Trump supporter. None of us would sanction this. I think it’s just starting to be resonating with us this morning, as we think about it, is that this is the people’s House. As soon as we start going down the path of we have no right to be there to see our elected officials doing the people’s work we have born into the wrong argument here.
And this is much different than what happened over the summer where private property was destroyed. Somebody was killed yesterday. Did we riot? Burn anything down? Or damage anything because she was killed? That’s one of us. And another really disturbing thing is the Democrats and many of the Republicans went and sanctioned and endorsed this kind of behavior with breaching the Capitol when Kavanaugh was being sworn in.
Leahy: That’s a very very good point. Laura Baigert, thanks so much. And be safe coming back here to Nashville. We really appreciate your report.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Trump Rally” by Elvert Barnes. CC BY-SA 2.0.
