(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) USA, USA.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we fight. We fight like hell.
EMILY KWONG: It has been five years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the building, trying to stop the certification of the presidential election.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Chanting) Treason, treason, treason.
KWONG HOST: In the years since, journalists, investigators and historians have tried to piece together and understand what happened that day. And at NPR, investigative reporter Tom Dreisbach wanted to do even more. He led an ambitious team effort to preserve a comprehensive record of those events for future generations. The January 6 archive is a timeline of the moments before, during and after that attack, built from video evidence gathered over many years. It also includes a database tracking every criminal case tied to January 6.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: We kind of thought of it as, like, a January 6 museum in a way, where it covered different aspects of that day - the violence, the weapons people used, the motivations of people - and tried to preserve, in a way, this history of what happened that day at a time when the government has been actively trying to erase or whitewash or otherwise distort the events of January 6.
KWONG HOST: For this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to talk to Tom about this journalistic project in the name of record keeping. And I started by asking, do you even know how much time you spent on this?
DREISBACH: I could not quantify. You know, the work started on January 6 itself of 2021, so that was more than five years ago. That was really days and days and weeks and months of my life, was obsessively watching video. We started noticing from the criminal cases that a number of the people being arrested had served in the military or had connections to the military or...
KWONG HOST: Wow.
DREISBACH: ...Were even active duty military service members in some capacity. And so we had to decide, OK, could we actually, you know, put some numbers to this? And we did a story pretty early on, I think in the - you know, just a few weeks after the attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ARI SHAPIRO: By NPR's count, nearly 20% of people charged in connection with the attack and rioting are veterans. NPR investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach is here to talk about what we found. Hi, Tom.
DREISBACH: Hey, Ari.
That number has since gone down to about 14%.
KWONG HOST: Wow.
DREISBACH: But it was a significant enough number that it led to a review by the Pentagon of extremism in the ranks. And we realized, oh, wow, this could lead to, you know, information and impact for the public that people were really interested in, what else can we learn by taking comprehensive approach? And then we decided, well, if we're going to do this, we should make it available to the public. We would read every single arrest record, and there would be these arrest affidavits...
KWONG HOST: Wow.
DREISBACH: ...You know, written by FBI agents that would kind of tell the story of each person's participation in the riot. We tracked things like the number of people who had ties to extremist groups - so, like, the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers or people who were followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
And out of that, you know, we picked individual stories that were interesting but also just tried to get a comprehensive picture. And so, you know, there was a question - well, what are the outcomes going to be from all these investigations and arrests? And we were able to put numbers to that, like that the median sentence was 30 days in jail. About a third of people who were actually sentenced got no jail time at all.
KWONG HOST: Wow. I'm really curious about this group of people, this over 1,500 people from all 50 states who were arrested in connection to January 6. What else did you learn about them as people?
DREISBACH: Oh, it's such a varied group. One guy that we ended up profiling was a man named Jason Riddle. He was a big time Trump supporter. He loved just sort of the attention it got him. He loved being in people's faces. He also had a drinking problem. He's very open about this now. He was an alcoholic. And he kind of was lost in his life a little bit. And when he heard about the January 6 rally, he was excited. He was like, yeah. He's been to, you know, more than a dozen Trump rallies in his life. He calls it, like, a party.
So he went into the building. He stormed the Capitol. He found a bottle of wine inside, was drinking it until a police officer said, like, get the heck out of here. And he was sentenced for his participation. He got 90 days in jail. But the process of going through the criminal justice system led him to get sober. And in the process of getting sober and dealing with his alcoholism, he started to rethink a lot of things in his life, including his support for Trump.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JASON RIDDLE: Trump is promoting criminal behavior. That was a criminal act. January 6 was a crime. And I think it's going to result in more death, eventually. There's going to be another riot. Something's going to happen if you keep promoting these lies. That's what January 6 was, was a result of his lies.
DREISBACH: On the other hand, there's many, many people who see themselves as victims, as martyrs in some way, and that they believe that they're still victims, and they deserve restitution from the federal government. There's one man named Jake Lang, who said he is still willing to use violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
JAKE LANG: I'm very proud to have done what I did on January 6, and I think that it was just the beginning of what America needs to cleanse itself.
KWONG HOST: And then, of course, when it comes to President Trump himself, how he publicly talks about this day has changed, too. What was the moment that you realized that this history was being rewritten, by the president himself and by others?
DREISBACH: It started kind of slowly and then seemed to be all at once. Over time, you know, Trump just embraced the January 6 defendants. He started to just say that, no, they didn't do anything wrong. You know, he had gone from, like, he said that they had defiled the seed of democracy, and they must pay, they must pay for their crimes - to saying that they were actually the victims. And he really made his entire 2024 presidential campaign in part about the January 6 defendants.
And so it became clear that the narrative about what actually happened that day was being rewritten before our eyes. And at a time when we were getting more and more information from court records about what actually had happened, because we were getting so much more video and so many more verdicts in these cases that were being proven factually in court at the same time as it felt like the public's understanding was slipping away from us.
KWONG HOST: That sounds like a call to action as a journalist. Like, they say that journalists write the first draft of history, but in this case, you're recovering the first draft of history or at least the elements for the first draft of history. And that was on you all to do because it's who - if not you, then who, it sounds like is what you were thinking.
DREISBACH: Right. That's what it felt like. It was like...
KWONG HOST: Yeah.
DREISBACH: I'm actually not sure anyone is going to do this. And I started getting calls, you know, over this process from prosecutors who were like, hey, I actually was looking for the record from this case that I prosecuted...
KWONG HOST: Wow.
DREISBACH: ...Related to January 6. Do you have it? And in some cases, I was able to help. But...
KWONG HOST: Right.
DREISBACH: ...You know, over time, it just became clear that if we didn't do this, then...
KWONG HOST: Right.
DREISBACH: it's possible some of this stuff would be destroyed forever.
KWONG HOST: What kind of story did you want to tell? With the authority you had of all the materials, how did you choose to, like, focus it?
DREISBACH: Ooh. Well, there's not one story you can tell from this, and our hope is that with the archive, people can find a lot of those stories themselves. They can look at individual cases. They can view surveillance footage, body cam footage for themselves and see what happened that day and maybe discover stories that even we didn't realize were there in the archive. And so our approach was not just telling one story, but trying to make sure that this history is available for future generations.
KWONG HOST: How do you ultimately hope January 6 will be remembered?
DREISBACH: One of the overriding feelings or thoughts that I had throughout the process of reporting this was the level of violence and the level of terror felt by people who were inside the Capitol or defending the Capitol as police officers. You know, it can be sanitized in many cases and has been sanitized by the administration.
And so in some ways, I hope people remember just how traumatic that day was, you know, for the country, arguably, and certainly for all the people who are there. Trump likes to refer to January 6 as a day of love. And I think of it as a day of loss. Everyone connected to that day, you know, seemed to lose something. So it's not for me to say ultimately how people remember that day, but I just hope people remember the specifics and the human lives that were at the center of what happened at the Capitol.
KWONG HOST: Tom Dreisbach is a correspondent on NPR's investigations team. You can look through the reporting and see all the evidence for yourself at npr.org/j6archive. Tom, thank you so much.
DREISBACH: Thanks so much, Emily. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
