The January 6 committee published 19 transcripts on Thursday, adding to a growing list of records it has already released to supplement its final report unwinding the attack at the U.S. Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Transcripts released Thursday include interviews with:
- Christina Bobb, Trump campaign attorney
- David Bowdich, former deputy director of the FBI
- Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C.
- Taylor Budowich, Trump spokesman
- Robert Contee III, chief of the .D.C Metropolitan Police Department
- Ray Epps, ex-U.S. Marine, former president of the Arizona Oath Keepers
- Ruby Freeman, election worker from Georgia harassed by the former president’s supporters and election fraud conspiracy theorists
- Stephanie Grisham, former White House press secretary
- Alyssa Farah Griffin, former White House director of strategic communications
- Kimberly Guilfoyle, former adviser to Trump, spouse to Donald Trump Jr.
- Chris Hodgson, former director of legislative affairs to former Vice President Mike Pence
- Doug Mastriano, former Pennsylvania state senator, failed gubernatorial candidate for Pennsylvania
- Ryan McCarthy, former Secretary of the U.S. Army
- Christopher Miller, former acting Secretary of Defense
- Stephen Miller, former senior adviser to Trump
- Wandrea Arshaye Moss, election worker from Georgia harassed by the former president’s supporters and election fraud conspiracy theorists and extremists
- Mark Robinson, retired D.C. Metropolitan Police Department sergeant
- Steven Sund, former U.S. Capitol Police chief
- Donald Trump Jr., former President Donald Trump’s eldest son and executive vice president of Trump Organization
This story is developing. Updates and highlights from key transcripts to come.
Related coverage available here.
HIGHLIGHTS and RECAPS
Ray Epps
Epps, a former U.S. Marine and one-time leader of the Oath Keepers chapter in Arizona, met with the committee voluntarily on Jan. 21, 2022 and in November 2021. The transcript released on Thursday is from his January interview.
Epps came to Washington on Jan. 6 and was filmed at the Capitol but was never arrested. He has admitted to directing people toward the Capitol after Trump’s speech. Historically, Epps has told reporters he believes he was never arrested because he contacted the FBI promptly after his name first started circulating in FBI alerts about the siege. Phone records, according to The New York Times, have corroborated this account and Epps has maintained that video of him purportedly “urging” people to storm the Capitol is actually footage of him attempting to calm rioters. Epps entered the building briefly but spent most of his time on restricted grounds outside.
Epps became a touchstone for Jan. 6 conspiracy theorists who argued he was a deep state plant and member of the FBI who helped orchestrate the Capitol attack. Those conspiracy theories were spurred by right-wing extremists as well as mainstream talking heads on Fox News and among Republican members of Congress.
Former President Donald Trump namedropped Epps at a rally and intensified unfounded theories about Epps being part of a “false flag” mission attacking the Capitol. Epps caims to have endured multiple death threats since then.
Per the transcript, Epps addressed some of the claims against him head-on.
He told members of the committee that he has never worked for the FBI, and never spoke to law enforcement at the FBI or elsewhere when he arrived in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 4.
He did, however, have an interaction with far-right streamer, Jan. 6 defendant and reported white supremacist Anthime Gionet, also known as “Baked Alaska.” Gionet, who live-streamed himself storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, has accused Epps of being part of the “deep state.”
Epps told investigators on the night of Jan. 5, he was out “trying to protect” law enforcement from people, namely, “antifa.” When he came upon Baked Alaska, Epps said Gionet was “trying to incite violence on the police, trying to get other people involved” and he meant to stop it.
“There was a few megaphones there, people trying to you know, there was somebody screaming about — oh, what’s that guy’s name? Screaming about one guy and then somebody else screaming about antifa, ‘ef Antifa’ and all that kind of stuff. And then people wanting to fight with BLM. And just, like, I can’t believe this is going on. These aren’t—are these Trump supporters? And what it was, I don’t believe they were Trump supporters. I believe they were trying to get Trump supporters to, to back their cause. So I tried to deescalate it. I went over to the gentleman. Well, he’s not a gentleman,” Epps said. “I went over to the guy that calls himself Baked Alaska and had words with him, that this was not what we’re about. We need to stay focused. You guys are — are not right. You shouldn’t be doing this with police. He was saying the police broke their oath, you know, calling them all kind of names and stuff. And I’m sure you can go their body cams and find everything I was saying.”
On the 6th, Epps testified that he tried to convince multiple people to protest peacefully but failed when up against “the ones with megaphones and cameras” who were “trying to drive a different narrative [and] trying to suck people in.”
Epps admits he told people to go to the Capitol. It was “his vision,” he said, to get as many people as possible to “surround it, be there, let them know we’re not happy with the, with what, what has happened and that was it,” he said.
“No violence,” he added.
Epps has said that he left the area around the Capitol before any violence broke out.
“They used violence to enter our Capitol, violence and breaking windows and different things. I wasn’t aware of any of that until later on and seeing it on the news like everyone else. That’s not, that’s not law-abiding and we’re law-abiding people. Without law, it’s anarchy. It’s not good. Without government, there’s anarchy. It’s not good. Any government is better than no government,” Epps testified.
He attended Trump’s speech at the Ellipse but before it began, he had already begun telling attendees to go to the Capitol after Trump’s remarks were over. The idea to march there was organic, he said.
“It was pretty common knowledge that everybody was going to go to the Capitol. I was just trying to help out,” Epps testified.
No one told him to instruct the crowd either, he added. He and others who had “problems” with the outcome of the 2020 election simply “thought it was important that our elected officials know we had a problem with the election.”
Trump had just begun his speech around noon when Epps and others started walking toward the Capitol. He left his adult son, who had traveled with him to D.C. at the rally at the Ellipse. Epps ended up in front of the crowd and told investigators he assumed that the Capitol would be open and welcoming. And warm. He, nor his son, were dressed for the cold weather, he testified.
Most of the people already at the Capitol when he arrived “were not your grandmas and your grandpas,” he said.
“You know, not us fat guys,” Epps told investigators.
Most people there at that time were in their mid-20s and early 30s, he said. Some were wearing identical clothing, like khakis and orange caps. This outfit was common to Proud Boys in Washington on Jan. 6.
Many of those around him, he said, were people he recognized from the night before who had eagerly riled up rallygoers. There ended up being a lot of those people and others “in a rage” on Jan. 6, Epps said.
“It’s almost like they were in a rage the whole time, like they were losing their minds. I didn’t understand it but that’s what was going on… They definitely had an agenda,” he said.
Epps said he tried to convince a man sporting a backward cap to stop pulling at police barriers and knocking cops to their feet. Once people got beyond fencing, Epps said he kept going forward toward the west side of Capitol with them in hopes of talking them down. Those plans started to falter as the chaos around him increased.
“At that point, I wasn’t [trying to de-escalate]. I was in the crowd. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do,” he told the committee.
Coming upon police, Epps said he began talking to them and protesters as they clashed. Body cam footage reviewed by the select committee shows Epps saying ‘we made our point' to other rioters.
Epps said he meant to convince those rioting to stop the “mess.” It was no longer his aim to enter the Capitol and he wanted to prevent others from doing the same since everything had spun out of control. He couldn’t recall how long he tried to de-escalate at that point but once rioters got inside, he followed. A couple steps in, looking around and smelling the tear gas, he felt sick. As he began to leave, he testified, he heard calls for a medic.
Epps was once trained as an EMT, he said, and he was getting ready to do CPR on someone who had collapsed near him. A medic with experience appeared beside them and within minutes, Epps and the “medic” pulled the collapsed person through the crowd and found a spot near a tree to prop them up against.
“I looked back. I saw people crawling all over the Capitol, climbing the walls. It made me kind of ill to my stomach, I decided to go back to the — there was no point, it had gone beyond what I wanted it to be,” he said.
Epps further testified that he did not talk to anyone at the FBI, CIA or the NSA on the 7th. The panel had Epps go down a list of his phone calls from Jan. 5 to Jan. 7 and affirm the identity of each person he called or who called him. Incoming and outgoing calls were to family members and work associates.
After the insurrection, Epps learned he was on an FBI alert list from his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law found a picture of him on Twitter and shared it with his wife on Jan. 8. Epps immediately called the FBI.
“Well, I wanted to— I wanted to straighten them out and let them know what happened,” he said.
He was on the phone for an hour and when he hung up, he had no idea what would happen next. Text records obtained by the committee show Epps sought out a lawyer on Jan. 12 and he sent a letter that same day to the FBI’s field office in Phoenix. He wanted to cooperate with the FBI, he wrote. He finally met with agents in March, with his attorney in tow. There were no documents to produce, he said, but he answered all of their questions. His son was interviewed by the FBI in April and at that time, turned over a series of photographs he took from Jan. 6.
The claims that he was part of a “false flag” or party to a conspiracy to attack the Capitol are claims peddled by grifters who want to “push this garbage” to make themselves more successful, Epps said.
“Or on the other hand, to further them in a political career,” he told the select committee.
These claims against him have ruined several aspects of his life, he said. There’s been serious death threats. He was advised by his attorney not to speak out publicly about the conspiracy theories, so he didn’t, he said. Not speaking made it worse and led people to believe he must be guilty, he said.
“We had a tour bus come by our home and our business with all these whacked out people in it. There are good people out there that was in Washington. Those aren’t the people that’s coming by my house. This attracts — when they do this sort of thing — this attacks all the crazies out there. We’ve got one guy that has been in prison and shot by police once and he’s out on bail right now, and he’s trying to contact me,” Epps testified.
Though Trump namedropped him at a rally and made his life more difficult, Epps also blamed Rep. Thomas Massie and the rightwing outlet, Revolver.
“I mean it’s real crazy stuff and he brought that kind of stuff to the floor of the House. When that happened, it just blew up. It got really, really bad. Him, and gosh, [Rep. Matt] Gaetz and [Rep. Marjorie Taylor] Greene and yeah, they’re just blowing this thing up. So it got really really difficult after that. The crazies started coming out of the woodwork,” he said.
The attention wasn’t limited to Epps alone. His attorney, John Blischak—who sat by his side during the panel’s more than hour-long interview—revealed that when hysteria around Epps hit a fever pitch, he received a threatening call too.
Donald Trump Jr.
Donald Trump Jr. appeared before the committee with his attorney voluntarily on May 3. The committee subpoenaed his call phone records in advance of the meeting without any objection from the former president’s eldest son. It was noted that Trump Jr.’s phone automatically deleted all of the text messages it contained every 30 days; this was something he had in place since the fall of 2021, he said.
When he would contact his father at the White House, he often did so “generally” by going through the White House operator. He denied reports that the former president ever used a burner phone and his memory was fuzzy when asked if he ever received a call from his father when his father was using a staffer’s phone. They never exchanged texts or emails, Trump Jr. said, and he was unsure if Trump would even know how to use messaging apps like Parler or Telegram, let alone know what they were.
Trump Jr. said he was a “surrogate” for the Trump reelection campaign and was “involved peripherally” in planning its overall messaging. He recalled being on “some calls” where legal strategies were discussed to challenge state election laws around mail-in voting. He described his fundraising activities for his father’s campaign as little different: while he might have passing input on fundraising mailers with his name on them, he assumed the legal team had “vetted” everything before it went out.
The Trump campaign raised over $250 million in donations on the premise that the election had been stolen and that it needed funds to make its case in court. Instead, evidence collected by the Jan. 6 committee shows that the lion’s share of that money went to Trump’s Save America political action campaign and other pro-Trump groups and insider
Committee counsel asked Trump Jr. about the haul, and in particular, a news report that suggested just $9 million of the $250 million raised had been spent on efforts to challenge the election.
“Sitting here today, do you know what happened to the other $240 million?” a counselor asked.
“I do not,” Trump Jr. replied.
There was anger and disbelief in the White House when Fox News called the first state for now-President Joe Biden on election night, he testified. Whether there was talk of calling the network to have them rescind the announcement, Turmp Jr. couldn’t remember. He did remember his father’s speech on Nov. 4, 2020: Trump called the election a “fraud” and “very sad” and vowed to contest the results.
On Nov. 1, multiple reports citing sources familiar had already begun to circulate suggesting Trump planned to declare victory on election night, relying on his bogus voter fraud claims to justify the premature announcement. According to testimony to the committee by Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, as well as Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Trump was explicitly told that mail-in ballots were not only safe but a boon for the GOP. Stepien testified that he told Trump to say votes were still being counted on election night and it was too early to tell. Trump ignored the advice and declared victory early anyway.
The victory speech was premeditated. Records obtained from the National Archives show conservative activist and founder of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton urged Trump to declare victory on election day. Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale testified that Trump had planned to say he won the election, even if he lost, in July 2020. Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime adviser, said on Halloween 2020 that Trump would declare victory and direct the attorney general to shut down voting places in all 50 states.
“If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit,” Bannon said at the time.
Trump Jr. recalled Giuliani being at the White House that night, but didn’t remember if his father’s personal attorney brought up any discussion of widespread election fraud.
He also denied having any personal communications with Roger Stone prior to the election and said he didn’t know whether Stone was in touch with anyone at hte White House. It was on Nov. 5 when Stone had a 15-minute call with Michael Flynn, the disgraced national security adviser who promoted baseless election fraud conspiracy theory ad nauseum in 2020 and urged voting machines to be seized. In the call between Stone and Flynn—captured by documentary filmmakers following the Trump ally—Stone is heard telling Flynn to launch the ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging on social media.
That same day, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump Jr. started using the ‘stop the steal’ hashtag on Twitter.
It didn’t originate with Stone, Trump Jr. testified. The tweets were more of a “copy-paste” deal. He couldn’t recollect ever speaking to Stone or Flynn directly during the 2020 campaign either, he said, and when pressed about a Dec. 27 dinner he attended at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach just days after Stone was pardoned, his memory again went hazy.
Trump Jr. was there with his father, Stone and his soon-to-be-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle.
It was around the holidays and Sunday dinners were typical, Trump Jr. said.
Stone wrote on Parler that night that he had counseled the president during this meeting on how he could “ensure that Donald Trump continues as our president.”
“It— I guess it doesn’t surprise me that Roger Stone would say something like that. I — you know, that’s the extent of what I would know about it,” he testified.
Dec. 27 was also the same day that Caroline Wren, a campaign fundraiser, had finally secured financing for the rally. Committee counsel noted this to Trump Jr. in his interview this information had made it all the way up to Mark Meadows on this day.
Trump Jr. couldn’t recall whether a protest for Jan. 6 was discussed at the dinner,
Text messages from Nov. 5 show the former president’s son urging Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, to look into allegations of voter fraud. He could not recall if one of the documents he passed to Meadows came from Stone directly. He defended sending the doc, saying that it was up to Meadows to make sure every effort was being taken by the campaign to review the results. When committee counsel asked if Trump Jr. sent any of this information to Bill Stepien, the actual campaign manager, or anyone else on the actual campaign, he couldn’t recall.
There wasn’t anyone tasked with fact-checking allegations of fraud that he could recall either, he said. And he admitted he did zero independent fact-checking on his own.
“Again, I was mostly out there amplifying whatever got out there,” Trump Jr. said.
This line of questions prompted Alan Futerfas, Trump Jr.’s attorney to call for a break. Once the session reconvened and questions resumed about Trump Jr.’s amplification of disinformation, the former president’s son was suddenly quick to say that he tried not to amplify “the fringy stuff that you see on — you know, from Trump Lover underscore 26436 on Twitter.”
When fielding questions about whether he was aware his allegations of voter fraud had caused election workers in Georgia to “go into hiding,” Trump Jr. couldn’t remember.
Though Trump Jr. publicly criticized former Attorney General Bill Barr when Barr declared that the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread fraud, he told the committee he never discussed Barr with his father.
Trump Jr. couldn’t recall whether he knew that pro-Trump protests in the run-up to Jan. 6 were drawing in extremists like the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys. And he didn’t recall having conversations with Ali Alexander, the far-right leader of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement.
He testified too that he never spoke to his father about what prompted him to send the tweet on Dec. 19 inviting supporters to D.C. for a “big protest.” They also never discussed why his father added, “Will be wild!” to that same post.
He couldn’t remember a time, he said, when he was worried about potential for violence on Jan. 6.
He couldn’t remember ever speaking to his father about Jan. 6, he said. Nor could he remember, even when prompted with copies of emails to show him, if Kimberly Guilfoyle discussed fundraising for Jan. 6 in late December.
He “didn’t believe” Guilfoyle had anything to do with raising money for the rally and he didn’t have familiarity with Julie Fancelli, the supermarket heiress who funneled $3 million toward the rally. Fancelli told investigators on the select committee she paid Guilfoyle $60,000 in speaking fees.
When asked if he understood that his father wanted to go from the Ellipse to the Capitol with his supporters on Jan. 6, Trump Jr. replied: “I don’t know that I knew that or didn’t know that.”
Trump Jr. was unable to recall that he hesitated to appear on stage with the likes of Stone, Alex Jones, or Ali Alexander on Jan. 6, too. In a text message from Wren to Guilfoyle obtained by the committee, Wren said after a meeting with the former president had “just finished” it had been relayed to him that his son was hesitant about speaking.
“So now nobody is speaking. So please thank Taylor [Budowich], Andy [Surabian] and Arthur [Schwartz] for costing you $60,000.”
Trump Jr. said that figure likely came from fees collected from Turning Point USA, an outfit run by Charlie Kirk, a far right figure Fancelli once called “my hero” in a text obtained by the committee.
He fumbled over questions around expectations the Trump White House had for Mike Pence, too.
“Well, as of Jan. 5, so before the 6th, what did you understand the situation to be with Vice President Pence, what he was going to do at the joint session? So, the day before, what did you expect?”
“Well, I ex— I don’t know that I — you know, I don’t know that I expected anything much, you know, from it. I know, you know, there was a notion that he could not certify and send it back tot he states that we’d been hearing about, but you know, I don’t know that there was an expectation to do that he would do that. So I don’t really know,” he said.
Questions over backchannels between Guilfoyle and Steve Bannon as they discussed the ‘stop the steal’ movement also went unanswered by Trump Jr. He also couldn’t recall whether Trump had discussions on the morning of Jan. 6 about potentially becoming a partial partner with Parler, the right-leaning messaging app and though he was in the room with the president when he called Mike Pence, he couldn’t remember what was said.
Though he did tell investigators his father was “actually reasonably composed.” Reports that Trump was “heated” were probably overblown.
“I think, you know, my father’s default mode is probably heated,” he said.
Text messages from Jan. 6 obtained by the committee show Trump Jr. sent frantic requests to Mark Meadows that day, urging that his father “condemn this shit. ASAP” and issue a more strongly worded tweet while the attack raged.
He didn’t remember why he didn’t think it was enough, he said. But he knew it wasn’t enough.
“I’m not saying it didn’t come across as leadership. I think he needs to go further you, I don’t think a — an Oval address doesn’t just magically, you know, appear in seconds. I think that takes time. I wasn’t in the White House to help with that, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened. But I did think we just ended to be more forward and more out there at that point,” Trump Jr. testified.
Other witnesses who spoke to the committee said Trump could have issued a message within minutes on Jan. 6 to quell the mob.
David Bowdich
Bowdich served as deputy director at the FBI in 2021 and assumed the role in 2018. His experience has largely centered on counterterrorism both foreign and domestic. He retired officially on February 15. He now works at Disney.
Bowdich told the committee the FBI received “situational reports” of possible “violence and criminal activity” tied to the 2020 election in November of that year. There were safety concerns specifically for Nov. 5 and Nov. 6. arising in Pennsylvania. That information came to him from the Justice Department. The deputy attorney general at the time, Richard Donoghue passed it along to Bowdich.
Preparations for greater security are common during election periods, he said, and in 2020, the FBI set up task forces specifically to monitor potential election fraud throughout the country. That included task forces in battleground states like Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and others.
Bowdich recalled reading a widely-distributed memo from then-Attorney General Bill Barr urging the task forces to investigate credible claims of fraud. By December, the deputy director of the FBI said he was torn about how to handle probe in Georgia. The Georgia Secretary of State had already done a preliminary investigation and concluded fraud allegations were meritless. It weighed into the FBI’s thinking about how to move ahead, he said. Bowdich stressed that he wanted to keep a clean line between the FBI and the increasingly aggressive political atmosphere.
Both he and Donoghue agreed, however, that the FBI should conduct interviews so they weren’t relying on non-federal entities alone. Agents did eventually connect with investigators working under the Georgia Secretary of State’s office and proved there was nothing untoward happening at the polls there.
In early January, conspiracy theories about Italy interfering with Dominion voting machines were raging. Barr called for a briefing with members of the FBI, DOJ, and CISA, the nation’s cyberintelligence security agency. Bowdich couldn’t recall if he was involved with that specific probe.
‘This is a time when there was a lot of churn out there about these Dominion voting machines,” Bowdich recalled. “Now, keep inmind, this was in early January as I recall. Keep in mind, you’ve got multiple things going on, and they’re swamped both with these types of things, but also you had an attack of SolarWinds, which was a massive cyber intrusion. You also had the one-year anniversary of [Qasem] Soleimani’s death on January 3rd which we were laser focused on. You also had the Christmas bombing in Nashville where downtown was bombed by a guy. ANd there were so many things going on. There were also preparations for January 6. There were so many things going on, everybody was busy. But we felt — the Attorney General felt it was important, understandably, from my mind, to understand what could and could not be interfered with with these Dominion machines. He requested a briefing, CISA came over and briefed him and I believe they satisfied his questions,” Bowdich testified.
Bowdich affirmed there were “several small instances of small-scale fraud” but nothing substantial enough to change outcomes in any state. His position on this hasn’t changed since he left the government.
He couldn’t remember hearing any conversations about a potential leadership change at the FBI while he was still there; in particular, rumors that Kash Patel, a Trump lapdog, was being considered to replace him.
When investigators asked Bowdich if was aware then that he was “disfavored” by Trump or other officials at the White House, Bowdich said it was “pretty clear” FBI director Christopher Wray was “not on the president’s highest list.”
It didn’t change how they conducted themselves at the bureau, he said.
“We were going to conduct and find the facts wherever they would lead us. Now, we didn’t stick our heads up very often either, for obvious reasons,” Bowdich testified.
As Jan. 6 fast approached, tensions were high and Donoghue, who normally spoke to Bowdich daily, had been out of touch. He was “swamped,” he said. They all were. He also recalled Donoghue mentioning “the situation with Jeffrey Clark” but he kept it private.
Clark, an ally of Trump, had drafted a memo stating the agency was aware of credible instances of election fraud. It wasn’t true. Both former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Donoghue have testified to the select committee that when Clark shared the draft memo with them, they were appalled. Clark threatened to replace Rosen, and with Trump’s blessing, Rosen testified, if they didn’t issue the memo. They wouldn’t—and didn’t. Clark and Trump backed off of the plan once Rosen and Donoghue, and other high level attorneys at the department, threatened to resign en masse.
Social media was buzzing with violent talk about Jan. 6 in the days before the insurrection.
The FBI had set up a “tag” for Jan. 6-specific items and dubbed it CERTUNREST. Emails that he was privy to regarding security concerns around Jan. 6 started going out around Dec. 31, he testified. A message went out that day among the bureau about identifying and reaching out to targets on their radar that may have indicated they were coming to Washington. Jill Sanborn, the FBI’s executive assistant director, told senators during a separate briefing on security THAT she thought the agency reached out to about 20 “travelers” of concern.
Bowdich couldn’t recall the exact number but said he knew there were “more active, open investigations” at that time. He conceded that not every “traveler” flagged by the agency was asked directly if they were coming to D.C. on Jan. 6. He also couldn’t remember whether any of those individuals were associated with the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.
It was around this same time that the FBI switched its contract with the social media surveillance company, DataMinr, to a similar outfit, ZeroFox. This reportedly added to already-existing confusion over how agents assessed speech that was overtly threatening and specific versus more run-of-the-mill overheated rhetoric.
Ironically, during the interview with Bowdich, committee counsel asked the former deputy FBI director if a significance threshold would be met if someone spoke of going to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home at a certain time. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked in the couple’s California home this October.
“Definitely the Speaker Pelosi’s house, yes, we would— that provides enough specificity possibly to — you would have to look at the timing of it. People who say, I’m angry and I’m going to Washington, and I’m going to let my voice be heard. No. Now, storm the capitol, I think I should probably leave that one to the lawyers,” Bowdich said.
A chief information officer at the FBI sent an email ahead of Jan. 6 urging that the ZeroFox surveillance system be up and running without any issue by Jan. 4 “in support of some potential issues in the D.C. area.”
Bowdich couldn’t remember whether he recalled reading that email or being briefed at a high level about potential lapses in the FBI’s crisis surveillance systems.
He also fielded questions about the threat of white supremacy. The committee noted that FBI director Wray testified in March 2021 that white supremacy was the biggest terrorist threat in the country and was persistent and constantly evolving. He made similar proclamations before Jan. 6, too. Bowdich recalled that being a priority within the agency.
“Yes, look, I was always worried about all threats in the terrorism realm, whether it was international terrorism or domestic terrorism. Yes, the entire year of 2020 was a difficult year and I’m very familiar with the very significant threat posed by white supremacists,” he said.
Notably, he also testified that the “standard for opening a domestic terrorism case” at the FBI is exceedingly “challenging.”
He didn’t want to add much else, however, noting he had been away from the agency for some time by then.
“There are some — there are some hurdles to climb. I’ll just leave it there. I think its best just to get that directly from the Bureau,” he said.
Today, he said, he thinks the agency has an adequate focus on domestic terrorism. The environment, he said, “ebbs and flows” but the FBI is fully resourced to handle it.
The FBI was aware of the Million MAGA Marches in Washington on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12, 2020. A command post was set up for both events. The agency knew the event in December would feature a heavy number of Proud Boys as well as “antifa types—“a very combustible mix,” he said.
Bowdich would not define what antifa is and what it is not but conceded that it could be investigated under the umbrella of domestic terrorism. Looking back, he said the media engaged in “Monday morning quarterbacking” as it scrutinized the agency’s handling and focus on street clashes and counterprotesters.
“Do you think its accurate in terms of — is that fair, that there was a focus on counterprotesters that actually didn’t play out on Jan. 6?” committee counsel asked.
“Well, I think that’s Monday morning quarterbacking, quite frankly. I think there’s always the possibility of that combustible mix taking place. And I also think if you look at the list of all of the events and I was following closely back then, there’s a lot of events taking place that day. And there was a focus on not just any one building — certainly the Capitol was a focus because that's where the election was to be certified, but there were other potential opportunities for conflict and/or violence,” Bowdich said.
The committee counsel replied: “A lot of this is Monday morning quarterbacking, so that’s right. That’s the bread and butter of what we’re doing right now actually.”
On Jan. 4, Bowdich had a call with the acting Defense Secretary, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the acting attorney general and his deputy. On that call, they discussed how effectively the National Guard had deterred protesters from Lafayette Park during the summer’s protests. The Secret Service almost “lost the fence” to protesters in the summer.
That reinforced what Bowdich said next on the Jan. 4 phone call.
“I think it would have been helpful [to have the National Guard stationed at the Capitol.] I think it would have been helpful, yes. And my point was, we had them in the park, thank goodness, and I felt they were a good deterrent after we almost lost the fence to try to make the point that this was significant,” Bowdich said.
After the call was over, Bowdich said he understood the FBI’s role preparing for Jan. 6 would be split into several “buckets: 1) establish the push and pull of information locally and set up a command post; 2) provide tactical support and response as needed; and 3) conduct investigations of federal violations. But it was not, he testified, his position that the FBI was the “lead agency” in addressing potential security crises that day.
He also emphasized that it would be unfair to compare the bureau’s ultimate evaluation and response to Jan. 6 to the way it evaluated the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Those protests were in multiple cities over an extended period of time while the Covid-19 pandemic was raging, he said.
Comparing the two would be like trying to compare “apples to oranges,” Bowdich added.
He was unable to give an answer when asked about how many resources were taken to deal with pipebombs planted the RNC and DNC headquarters in Washington on Jan. 6. He was also unable to say whether he supported the theory that the pipebombs were placed as a distraction to law enforcement when he was still at the bureau.
“I can’t say I did at that point. I wasn’t sure of the answer to that. We were certainly considering it. I just don’t know the answer,” he said.
Bowdich recalled receiving a call from Senator Mark Warner on Jan. 6 as the mob attacked. A portion of the transcript where Bowdich appears to discuss exactly what Senator Warner said to him was redacted. He also received a text message from Will Levi, the attorney general’s chief of staff. Someone in the Capitol on Senator Mitch McConnell’s staff had messaged Levi saying rioters were trying to kick the door down to a room they had barricaded themselves in. Bowdich called for SWAT teams immediately.
U.S. Capitol Police didn’t need a “formal invitation” to have the FBI respond on Jan. 6, he said.
“No. Not necessarily, no, there did not. Is it ideal when you have a situation like this where you have a traffic cop who knows exactly which team is going to go into which door? Yes. But in this case, it was a very bad situation that was only getting worse, and we ended to get resources over there immediately, regardless of staging areas, traffic cops, so to speak, for resources, just get them in there, which is not ideal because you could have a blue-on-blue situation, which is a dangerous situation potentially, where you have good guys and gals coming at each other with good intent but people can get mixed signals in a stressful situation. But it was one of those situations where we did not have a lot of time. We just ended to get in there and do our part,” Bowdich testified.
Other key highlights fished out from today’s transcripts include:
- Kimberly Guilfoyle testified that she did not know Ali Akbar was an alias used by Ali Alexander, the leader of the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement. Rather she remarked to investigators: “Isn’t that what terrorists yell?”
- Stephanie Grisham, the one-time aide to former first lady Melania Trump, testified that Melania did not want current first lady Jill Biden to be a part of a tea ceremony during the transition. She would only invite her if the White House was officially on board, Grisham said.
- “In my entire career in that White House, she never, ever, ever said that. It was always kind of an ‘F the West Wing’ attitude. And so, that’s — you see, I’m like, ‘I see, OK,’ because I’m flabbergasted. We had never gone along with the West Wing on anything,” Grisham said.
- She also testified that the former first lady was deeply distrustful of Mark Meadows: “She felt that he was letting a lot of people who were maybe being harmful to the President, giving him bad advice. He was clearing them into the residence or getting them into the Oval,” she said. "Mrs. Trump never liked it when people would tell Trump what he wanted to hear rather than the truth or reality of the situation, and she felt that Meadows was always just playing into his hand."
- Former U.S. Capitol Police chief Steven Sund testified that a security assessment by USCP intelligence division director Julie Farnam regarding threats to Congress didn’t set off any waving red flags because Congress was a regular target by protesters
- ”Well, what’s interesting is the two previous MAGA Marches [Nov. 14, Dec. 12] actually weren’t — their focus wasn’t on the counterprotesters, the focus was on the Supreme Court. So their focus being on the Capitol and Congress makes sense. Any group that comes and marches to the Capitol or has events up here on the Capitol that is — whether its immigration, healthcare reform, Supreme Court nominations — their reason for coming up here and protesting is to influence and sway Congress. Their target for the protest is Congress. So that in itself doesn’t send up a bunch of red flags for me,” Sund testified.
- Sund testified that he only spoke to one member of Congress on Jan. 6: Rep. Maxine Waters before he took a meeting that day with then-Vice President Mike Pence. “She called me extremely upset that, ‘I told you this was going to happen, I told you this was going to happen. What are you going to do about it?’” Sund testified that he thought Waters was referring to a time when she had raised concerns about “the people issuing permits to these type of people that were going to be on the Capitol grounds.”
- Trump lawyer Christina Bobb told investigators that Senator Lindsey Graham, a longtime Trump ally, urged Rudy Giuliani in a meeting to show him “just five dead voters; give me, you know, an example of illegals voting. Just give me a very small snapshot that I can take and champion.” Bobb said Graham did receive at least one example but he “did nothing with it.” Bobb also testified that a draft executive order dated Dec. 16 ordering the seizure of voting machines only made its way onto her computer after a lunch meeting with Phil Waldron at Trump International Hotel. She couldn’t recall if Sidney Powell was present at the meeting. She said she offered her computer up to take notes during the meeting and Waldron effectively took it over while she worked on her phone and stepped in and out of the room. When she returned, the document was on the device and she began formatting it and modeling it like other executive orders.
- D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser told the committee point-blank who and what she felt was responsible for the intelligence failures around Jan. 6:
- “That people didn’t think that these white nationalists would overthrow the Capitol building,” she said.
- Bowser said they requested unarmed Guard for Jan. 6 but experienced pushback on the ask. There was concern, she said, by former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy about the optics of “boots on the ground.” According to his transcript released on Thursday, McCarthy said he was particularly worried about having “soldiers in plain view” of the certification as so many of Trump’s supporters were already calling for martial law.
- D.C. Police Chief Robert Contee told the committee the atmosphere in Washington on Jan. 6 was very off, unlike other events where despite some inherent tensions during protests, the “vibe” was still “good.”
- “The way people talked to the law enforcement officers — some people were pleasant, a lot of people were not this last go-around, the last go-around on Jan. 6. I mean, it was just different — it was a different kind of vibe. It was a lot of tension that existed, or at least it felt that way to me. Based upon— i drove up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, Constitution Avenue, around the Capitol, down by the Ellipse, and it was just different. Like I say, some people were pleasant, ‘hey officers, thank you for your support.’ I mean, ‘we support you guys.’ Some people were like that. You know some people were not and saying some not so nice things, right?”
Daily Kos will post more updates from the transcripts in the coming days.