BONUS: JANUARY 6TH COMMITTEE HEARING DEBRIEF WITH FORMER REP. REID RIBBLE

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One. 

Weston Wamp: Hi, I'm Weston Wamp, and this is a special episode of “Swamp Stories” focused on the January 6th hearings. A bipartisan committee in Congress continues to hold a series of important hearings to shed light on the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by rioters hoping to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. We're continuing our series of special conversations with leading political experts in response to the hearings to dive into what happened, what we learned, and how members of both parties are responding to events.

Weston Wamp: Today I'm speaking to former Wisconsin Republican Congressman Reid Ribble.

Weston Wamp: Congressman, thanks for joining us. Obviously these hearings are more fascinating to those of us who have expressed concern about not just the country but where we've been in the last couple years. Your thoughts here at the beginning of this conversation on the progression of the hearings from the primetime beginning to these most recent hearings that really drill down into the former president's thinking.

Reid Ribble: I've got two kind of thoughts on it. One is at the beginning I was worried that nobody was paying attention, or that the people that needed to be paying attention weren't paying attention. But what had happened after that first primetime hearing was the mainstream media, virtually all the cable network shows, covered it for days, you couldn't avoid hearing about it. Second thing I was worried about was that it was going to be too partisan, and in fact it had been a bit partisan but mainly because they've only had Republicans as witnesses. And so it's been fascinating to take a look inside the thinking that was going on before the election and then after the election leading up to January 6th from these Republican insiders that were watching it happen in real time.

Weston Wamp: I mean, I think that part of this is undeniable even to the most cynical Republican, or the most disinterested Republican, is that to your point the voices we're hearing in evidence are the voices of Republicans, many of whom had the president's ear or were in or around his inner circle. I suppose that's a part of this that I didn't quite expect was that so much of the content was going to be people who were within the Trump White House or adjacent to it.

Reid Ribble: Yeah, for sure, and even campaign people. You know, Jason Miller, and I'm trying to remember who the other gentleman was that took over the campaign, but they talked a lot about what was going on inside the campaign and how they were on team normal compared to the Rudy Giuliani team. It was absolutely fascinating, and I was particularly interested in seeing what Attorney General Bill Barr said, because he certainly had been on Team Trump for the entire two years that he was at DOJ, and then he just called it right out saying “Listen, we looked at this and there's just no there, there.”

Weston Wamp: I feel like we saw the institutionalists, the George H.W. Bush Bill Barr come out in a hurry, right? When Trump went from an entertaining figure to one who was trying to undermine our core institutions.

Reid Ribble: Correct, yeah. We saw the old Bill Barr in my opinion, the one that was more of a straight shooter, “Hey, here's what's going on.” And I mean his language saying that if the president actually believed this he had lost touch with reality, that's a pretty strong statement to make, from someone who had a chance to look at all the data.

Weston Wamp: With the stakes much, much lower, all of us have been in circumstances in our lives where we ignore this person's advice and that friend's advice, and we're only listening to the people who are telling us what we want to hear. It seems like this John Eastman character was the last person who was telling the president what he wanted to hear. I don't know much about him. I mean, he's not a prominent person in conservative politics or policy. Certainly in retrospect we realized he played a kind of a harrowing role. What does it say that he apparently was seeking a pardon as this went down?

Reid Ribble: Yeah, and it wasn't apparently just him. We heard during the first time, the first day, the primetime, that there was a member of Congress who sought a pardon ahead of time. And what it tells you is that they recognize after the fact, “Oh man, we might have really stepped in it here.” And they started to get fearful if President Biden took over and you had different leadership at DOJ that there might be some criminal liability, and they wanted to try to circumvent it. Now clearly John Eastman at the end who said “Hey, if this is still on the table put me on the list.” It's a pretty casual statement saying he didn't even know that it was on the table, but the fact that he said if it's still on the table means that he was present when they talked about that idea as a possibility.

Weston Wamp: Vice President Pence's role here has gotten almost all the attention yesterday. Certainly he did when the going got tough, he stood up, there was some speculation, certainly you and I are following a lot of the same conversations on Twitter. You hate to go there but it does show the importance of his role, I think potentially also the importance of Vice President Pence speaking up. If Vice President Pence had have tried what the president apparently wanted him to do, what would have happened? I mean, it's easy to speculate that the 250 year experiment in self-government faces... Certainly it would have been a first there.

Reid Ribble: It would have been a true constitutional crisis because you're having one person making the decision. I don't like the results so I'm not going to accept that, I'm sending them back to the states to redo it. And it would have been disastrous. And the riot that we saw at the Capitol, as bad as it was, and it was bad, I think would have been overshadowed by the riots you would have seen in every city across the country when you had 80 million disaffected Americans saying “Hold it here, time out. I know exactly who I voted for and you can't have my vote.” And I think you would have had just real violence just about everywhere. And so Mike Pence clearly was the hero of the day on January 6th, and he was the hero of the hearing yesterday.

Weston Wamp: Do you think he ought to speak up here? Would that be valuable to the country? I mean there may be political calibrations in those.

Reid Ribble: I wish he would speak up. I mean, and he has started to speak up. When he went before the Federalist Society and said “The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone.” That's a pretty powerful statement to make. And to the very people that were in the room possibly thinking about undermining the election, and so he started to speak up. He now might as well finish it and go ahead and actually cut that lane for himself for the presidency in 2024. And if he called and asked for my advice that's what I would tell him.

Weston Wamp: Yeah. I mean, practically speaking those who believe that Dominion Voting machines rigged the election are not going to be voting for Mike Pence at this point, and so I think you're right, maybe just to finish the job would serve him best, and then the country just to hear from him.

Weston Wamp: Lastly, just as we go forward, what have you not heard that you'd like to hear? What do you think might be an appeal to our fellow Republicans who are still sitting back struggling with whether January 6th was a big deal, whether the president's attempts to overturn an election on a basis of fraud that there is no evidence for?

Reid Ribble: I don't think anybody's struggling with it, Weston. I think the sides are already baked in. I think those that are on the side of Donald Trump in this regard, they don't really care what is said. There's nothing that can be said. If what's been said already hasn't changed opinions there's nothing more that can be said. And those that are open minded to it and more independent thinking, I think they've already also been persuaded. And so I think it's important for the committee to complete the work, issue their report, and turn over whatever they have to DOJ. Because I think there were some crimes committed and I don't know how high up it goes, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a criminal attorney, but they should just take everything that they've gotten, all the voicemails, all the emails, all the depositions, and turn it over to DOJ and say “Here you go, do with it what you will.”

Weston Wamp: All right, Congressman, we'll leave it there. Thanks for your time.

Reid Ribble: Hey, good to be with you Weston. Thank you.

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Dokhi Fassihian, senior producer Evan Ottenfeld, producer Sydney Richards, and editor Parker from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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