Probing The 1/6 Attack On The US Capitol: Politics & The Terror Threat

Yesterday, during nearly three and a half hours of raw, emotional, and often irate testimony, four police officers who were on the front lines of the January 6th battle with pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol gave the House Select Committee investigating the insurrection detailed accounts of their harrowing experiences on that fateful day. Their remarks were punctuated by video montages that demonstrated the unrelenting and vicious violence that greatly outnumbered law enforcement personnel encountered. The videos showed an unhinged crowd that was brutal and relentless in their attack, animated by their belief in the fiction that the election of Joe Biden was illegitimate. Officer Harry Dunn repeated, verbatim and unfiltered, the hateful, racist vitriol that the rioters spewed at him. Tom begins the conversation today with analysis by Luke Broadwater, a longtime friend of Midday who covers Congress for The New York Times. In 2019, as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Luke broke the story of the Healthy Holly scandal, which led to former Mayor Catherine Pugh and others being sent to prison. Luke and his Sun colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award for their reporting of that story. Luke Broadwater joins us on our digital line from his home in Columbia, Maryland. Then, Tom speaks with William Braniff. He is the Director of START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland. He joins us on Zoom… Listeners are welcome to join us as well…Email us at [email protected], tweet us: @MiddayWYPR, or call us at 410-662-8780.