Lest We Forget

 

On the 5th anniversary of Jan 6th, NPR launches a public archive of evidence Connie Hanzhang Jin/NPR It’s been five years since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In the days that followed the riot, the story the country coalesced around seemed straightforward: a violent attack by Trump supporters that interrupted the peaceful transfer of presidential power — a stunning incident of “violence, lawlessness, and mayhem” that “defiled the seat of American democracy.” Those words did not come from Joe Biden or Liz Cheney. That’s how Donald Trump himself described the attack the following day. The riot stunned the country and triggered the largest criminal investigation in modern American history. Five years later, that consensus has shattered. Trump now describes Jan. 6 as a “day of love,” and issued mass pardons to nearly every rioter, including the most violent. His administration has pushed a version of events that bears little resemblance to what played out in courtrooms and on camera.  In response to this disinformation campaign, NPR’s Investigations team leaned into the evidence. Just after the riot, our team began tracking every criminal case stemming from that day, collecting the evolving information on 1,575 defendants into a public and searchable database, which formed the backbone of our reporting.  Now, NPR has built the most comprehensive, evidence-first archive of Jan. 6, so you can view exactly what happened through the lenses of the people who were there: Rioters who filmed themselves, Capitol surveillance feeds, body-camera footage from cops who were assaulted, screenshots and video podcasts and charging documents. In total, a comprehensive accounting of the riot from evidence vetted in court. As part of this process, I spoke with rioters in jail as they awaited trial, police officers who defended the Capitol, and the families of both Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot and killed by police, and Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who suffered multiple strokes after being pepper sprayed by the mob. Along the way, we broke stories about how rioters descended into bitter infighting over donations, with one likening it to "Mean Girls, but with racist, antisemitic extremists”; about Trump's Bedminster golf club hosting a Jan. 6 rioter alleged to be a "Nazi sympathizer”; about police bodycam footage showing a Trump Justice Department employee calling police “Gestapo” and yelling “kill ‘em” as rioters assaulted cops; and about another Trump appointee comparing Jan. 6 prosecutors to infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. (In one way or another, the people I covered seemed to constantly reference Nazi Germany.) We’ve envisioned the archive to be like a Jan. 6 museum — you can wander through the timeline of what happened that day, go deep on some of the most persistent myths, search the database by name and explore charges, outcomes, and key court records. In hundreds of cases you can also view video evidence pulled from federal exhibits. (Fair warning: many of the videos include profanity and violence.) — By Tom Dreisbach, correspondent on NPR’s Investigations team