Inside the DOJ's Jan. 6 investigation

It’s almost exactly one year since the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Congress.

The Department of Justice is well underway with what’s now the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. Each week, new evidence and new insights.

“What was really stunning and surprising was not that there were Proud Boys involved in this kind of violence,” Heidi Beirich says.

“But there were so many … what you would normally think of as regular conservatives that made up the bulk of the people who were involved in what happened at the Capitol,” she adds.

Today, On Point: What can the DOJ’s investigation tell us about what happened on January 6th?

Guests

Roger Parloff, senior editor at Lawfare Blog and writer for Lawfare’s January 6 Project. (@rparloff)

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer  of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. (@heidibeirich)

From The Reading List

Lawfare: “Government Wins Key Ruling on Issue Affecting Hundreds of Capitol Riot Cases” — “On Friday, Dec. 10, the government won a key early ruling concerning a legal issue affecting hundreds of Jan. 6 Capitol Riot prosecutions.”

Lawfare: “What Do—and Will—the Criminal Prosecutions of the Jan. 6 Capitol Rioters Tell Us?“Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blasted the government on Oct. 28 for its ‘schizophrenic,’ ‘baffling,’ and ‘muddled’ policies in offering lenient plea deals to Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendants for their participation in an event that it routinely describes in sentencing memos as ‘a criminal offense unparalleled in history.'”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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