The Lawfare Podcast: The Jan. 6 Committee Hearings, Day Five

Jen Patja, Benjamin Wittes, Quinta Jurecic, Roger Parloff, Katie Benner
Friday, June 24, 2022, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

It was Day Five of the House select committee hearings on Jan. 6. This time, the committee was focused on the president's efforts to pressure, and one may even say decapitate, the Justice Department to get it to put pressure on states on voter fraud matters and overturn the results of the 2020 election. In front of the committee were senior Justice Department officials who threatened to resign if an obscure environmental lawyer was made acting attorney general.

It was another dramatic day of testimony, and to chew it all over, Benjamin Wittes sat down on Twitter Spaces with Lawfare senior editors Quinta Jurecic and Roger Parloff, and New York Times reporter Katie Benner, who broke the whole story of the coup attempt at the Justice Department shortly after it happened. They talked about whether they learned anything new. They talked about how the department officials came off: are they heroes or are they apparatchiks? And they talked about how all of it fits into the committee's larger story.


Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
Roger Parloff is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. For 12 years, he was the main legal correspondent at Fortune Magazine. His work has also been published in ProPublica, The New York Times, New York, NewYorker.com, Yahoo Finance, Air Mail, IEEE Spectrum, Inside, Legal Affairs, Brill’s Content, and others. An attorney who no longer practices, he is the author of "Triple Jeopardy," a book about an Arizona death penalty case. He is a senior editor at Lawfare.
Katie Benner covers the Justice Department for The New York Times and she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues.

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