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One phone call occurred at 6:25 p.m. ET, Sund says, when he spoke to Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to coordinate their returns back into their respective chambers.

However, he signaled that perhaps congressional oversight of Capitol Police may have had a role to play in the security failures. "I know a number of a number of groups are investigating this incident. I think they'll find that it's a very convoluted, bureaucratic method of maintaining security in the nation's capital," Sund said.

The day after the attack the top security officials at the Capitol — the House sergeant-at-arms, Irving, and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Stenger — resigned their posts

Sund told NPR he spoke with Pelosi three times on Jan. 6, including a call with top leaders about reconvening in the House and Senate to continue the count of the electoral votes."It was very chaotic that evening, I know. I can only imagine just how busy Speaker Pelosi was that night. I know I had been on at least three phone calls with her,

Sund said Capitol Police did not receive intelligence from the FBI or other agencies of an orchestrated attack. It was later revealed that the FBI was aware of some extremist activity and said it shared a warning with its partners, including the Capitol Police.He also rejects claims that bias, or systemic racism, played a role in the decisions leading up to, or on, that day. He said it's unfair to compare security for the joint session with other high-profile events at the Capitol

Sund told NPR on Friday that he increasingly believes the insurrection was part of a coordinated, planned attack on the Capitol. Specifically, Sund believes that reports of pipe bombs planted at the headquarter offices of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee in southeast Washington were part of an effort to distract police as the violent mob approached the Capitol complex. The Justice Department said it has "no direct evidence of kill or capture teams" but is still looking into what kind of planning there was.Sund said moments before those reports came through, he was in the operations center for Capitol Police and watching the rally with President Trump at the Ellipse.

The FBI has said the first pipe bomb was reported at 1 p.m. ET at the RNC in southeast Washington, followed by a report of a second pipe bomb at the DNC at 1:15 p.m. A suspect in that case has not be identified.

Sund said he believes new information since released by the FBI and others signal this could have been part of a coordinated attack. "This was not a demonstration. This was not a failure to plan for a demonstration. This was a planned, coordinated attack on the United States Capitol," Sund said.

On Friday, Pelosi said she has asked retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré to lead an investigation into security at the Capitol complex following the riot."We must subject this whole complex to scrutiny," Pelosi said.

Pelosi noted she has been in touch with the secretary of the Army and the head of U.S. Secret Service to ensure that all requests for reinforcements from the Capitol Police for security around the inauguration are met. She pointed out that for weeks the inauguration would be a smaller ceremony due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The speaker said security needs should be based on intelligence from law enforcement, but "redundancy may be necessary," adding there should be "not too much, but enough" to meet possible threats.

Pelosi, when asked about allegations that some members of Congress were potentially linked with those involved in the attack, said lawmakers have to trust that their colleagues respect each other and their oath of office.

Nobody knew exactly how that belief would manifest itself; I certainly never expected to see platoons of insurrectionists scaling the walls of the U.S. Capitol and sacking the place in broad daylight. Still, shocking as this was, it wasn’t a bit surprising. The attempted coup d'état had been unfolding in slow motion over the previous nine weeks. Anyone who couldn’t see this coming chose not to see it coming. And that goes for much of the Republican Party.

there’s one conclusion of which I’m certain: The “fringe” of our politics no longer exists. Between the democratization of information and the diminished confidence in establishment politicians and institutions ranging from the media to corporate America, particularly on the right, there is no longer any buffer between mainstream thought and the extreme elements of our politics.

The president’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, urged him to invoke martial law. The Texas Republican Party suggested seceding from the union. The Arizona Republican Party endorsed martyrdom. Eric Metaxas, the pseudo-evangelical leader with a devoted following on the right, followed suit. “I’d be happy to die in this fight,” he told the president during a radio interview. “This is a fight for everything. God is with us.”

All of that was before the president alleged the greatest conspiracy in American history.

More than a few told me I was being “hysterical,” at which point things got heated, as I would plead with them to consider the consequences if even a fractional number of the president’s most fervent supporters took his allegations, and his calls to action, at face value. When I submitted that violence was a real possibility, they would snicker. Riots? Looting? That’s what Democrats do!

So convinced were the president’s allies that his rhetoric was harmless that many not only rationalized it, but actually dialed it up. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who once skewered Trump’s dishonesty, promised “earth-shattering” evidence to support his former rival’s claims of a rigged election. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy insisted that “President Trump won this election,” told of a plot to cheat him and alerted the viewers watching him on Fox News, “We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who famously called Trump “a pathological liar,” himself lied so frequently and so shamelessly it became difficult to keep up. Dozens of other congressional Republicans leveled sweeping, unsubstantiated allegations of mass voter fraud, some of them promoting the #stopthesteal campaign online.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich floated the arrest of election workers. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host, urged Republican-controlled legislatures to ignore the results of their state elections and send pro-Trump slates to the Electoral College. Right-wing propaganda outlets like The Federalist and One America News churned out deceptive content framing the election as inherently and obviously corrupt. The RNC hosted disgraced lawyer Sidney Powell for a sanctioned news conference that bordered on clinically insane, parts of which were tweeted by the @GOP account. The president’s lawyers and surrogates screamed about hacked voting machines and international treachery and Biden-logoed vans full of ballots. One conservative group paid a former police captain a quarter-million dollars to investigate voter fraud; he performed an armed hijacking of an air-conditioning repair truck, only to discover there were no fake ballots inside.

As the Electoral College meeting drew closer, hundreds of Republican members of Congress signed on to a publicity-stunt lawsuit aimed at invalidating tens of millions of votes for Biden. When it failed, the legislatures in several states closed public proceedings in response to actionable threats

The first time I heard someone casually suggest an “imminent civil war,” on a reporting trip in January 2020, I shrugged it off. But then I heard it again. And again. Before long, it was perfectly routine. Everywhere I went, I heard people talk about stocking up on artillery. I heard people talk about hunting down cabals of politically connected pedophiles. I heard people talk about the irreconcilable differences that now divide this country. I heard people talk about the president, their president, being sabotaged by a “deep state” of evil Beltway bureaucrats who want to end their way of life. I heard people talk about a time approaching when they would need to take matters into their own hands.

Despite all of these arrows pointing toward disaster — and despite Trump encouraging his followers to descend on Washington come January 6, to agitate against certification of Biden’s victory — not a single Republican I’d spoken with in recent weeks sounded anxious

the point remains: They were conned into coming to D.C. in the first place, not just by Trump with his compulsive lying, but by the legions of Republicans who refused to counter those lies, believing it couldn’t hurt to humor the president and stoke the fires of his base.

it has long been canon on the right that leftists — and only leftists — cause mayhem and destruction. Democrats are the party of charred cities and Defund the Police; Republicans are the party of law and order and Back the Blue. As Republicans have reminded us a million times, the Tea Party never held a rally without picking up its trash and leaving the area cleaner than they found it.

And yet, the right has changed dramatically over the past decade. It has radicalized from the ground up, in substance and in style. It has grown noticeably militant.

Trump once told me, “The Tea Party still exists — except now it’s called Make America Great Again.” But that’s not quite accurate. The core of the Tea Party was senior citizens in lawn chairs waving miniature flags and handing out literature; the only people in costumes wore ruffled shirts and tri-corner hats. The core of the MAGA movement is edgier, more aggressive and less friendly; its adherents would rather cosplay the Sons of Anarchy than the Sons of Liberty.

There is one thing that connects these movements: Both were born out of deception

Republican leaders convinced the grassroots of 2009 and 2010 that they could freeze government spending and reform entitlement programs and repeal Obamacare

Trump convinced the grassroots of 2015 and 2016 that he, too, could repeal Obamacare, while also making Mexico pay for a border wall and overhauling the nation’s infrastructure

The key difference is that the Tea Party slowly faded into obscurity as voters realized these promises politicians made were a scam, whereas the MAGA movement has only grown more intensely committed with each new con dangled in front of them.

Make no mistake: Plenty of the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol complex on Wednesday really, truly believed that Trump had been cheated out of four more years; that Vice President Mike Pence had unilateral power to revise the election results; that their takeover of the building could change the course of history

The notion of real troublemaking simply didn’t compute. Many of these Republicans have kept so blissfully ensconced in the MAGA embrace that they’ve chosen not to see its ugly side.

For the past nine weeks, I’ve had a lot of highly unusual conversations with administration officials, Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures.

Based on my reporting, it seemed obvious the president was leading the country down a dangerous and uncharted road. I hoped they could see that. I hoped they would do something — anything.

From party headquarters, the Republican National Committee’s chairwoman flung reckless insinuations left and right as her top staffers peddled a catalogue of factually inaccurate claims. The two Republican senators from Georgia, desperate to keep in Trump’s good graces ahead of their runoff elections, demanded the resignation of the Republican secretary of state for no reason other than the president’s broad assertions of corruption, none of which stood up to multiple recounts and investigations by GOP officials statewide

Local lawmakers in states like Michigan and Wisconsin told Republicans they’d been cheated, citing the suspicious late-night counting of mail ballots, when they were the ones who had refused to allow those ballots to be counted earlier,

And some could face more serious charges, including in the death of Brian D. Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who was overpowered by rioters who, according to two law enforcement officials, struck his head with a fire extinguisher. He was rushed to the hospital and died on Thursday.

He also rebutted the notion of any involvement in the violence by left-wing antifascist agitators, whom Mr. Trump’s supporters have falsely tried to blame.

One of the most serious federal cases involved Lonnie L. Coffman of Falkville, Ala. In the bed of his truck, officers found what they described as an M4 assault rifle and magazines loaded with ammunition. They also found rags, lighters and 11 glass Mason jars filled with a liquid later identified as gasoline.

“The goal here is to identify people and get them,” Mr. Kohl said.The Washington police have also arrested dozens, mostly on charges of unlawful entry and curfew violations.

The images of Mr. Barnett were “shocking” and “repulsive,” said Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.

Prosecutors charged the leader and founder of the Hawaii chapter of the far-right Proud Boys group, Nicholas Robert Ochs, with unlawful entry after he posted a picture on Twitter from the Capitol and told a CNN reporter that he had gone inside.

A pair of pipe bombs found on Wednesday afternoon outside the Democratic and Republican Party headquarters, blocks from the Capitol, contained crude mechanical timing devices, according to an official familiar with their initial examination, suggesting they were intended to be detonated. It was not clear when they were meant to explode.

Other close allies of the president made similar comments at the rally. His eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., said that Republicans should back Mr. Trump’s efforts to undo the election result or face consequences. “We’re coming for you,” he said.

Incitement of a riot is a misdemeanor crime in Washington that carries up to 180 days in prison or a $1,000 fine, but the maximum sentence increases to 10 years if victims suffer serious bodily harm or serious property damage occurs.

Remember that when he accepted the party's nomination at the 2016 GOP convention, Trump uttered these now-infamous words: "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it."

Except that Trump can't a) stick to the script or b) avoid saying whatever happens to flash through his mind at that very moment. And so, he flips the script to make the exact opposite point that his speechwriter would have wanted: That the election is, in fact, all about him.

A majority of Americans neither like Donald Trump personally nor approve of the job he is doing. And the way in which Trump has conducted himself as president as well as the way he has positioned himself in his reelection campaign have made it clear that this is -- and always has been -- about him and him alone.

Trump offered himself up as the only person able to fix what ails not just Washington, DC, but the country at large.

He has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality rather than a group of people gathered around a set of shared ideological principles. He has weaponized race for his own political purposes.

No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites.

Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.

where is the good news in all this, you ask? These voices have once again been relegated to the fringes of their respective parties. It’s the quisling moderates and dealmakers they so hate who will soon find themselves in the driver’s seat.

Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.”

because the consequences of Democratic weakness at the polls on Tuesday fell disproportionately on the party’s moderates in purple districts, there will be fewer voices around in 2021 to push back against what is essentially a tantalizing conspiracy theory.

It is unlikely that we will see much productivity under divided government, but that is not the same thing as dysfunctional government—precisely the opposite,

If we’re entering into a period defined by equilibrium in which the federal government is all but paralyzed in the absence of some bipartisan consensus, that would at least be predictable. And predictability has been in short supply these last four years.

Much to the chagrin of the American system’s would-be demolishers, no one assuming the reins of power in Washington seems to have much interest in blowing anything up.

Q: Is the white-supremacist mind-set a Trump problem or a GOP problem?A: The roots of the GOP problem go back at least to the toleration and execution of the Southern Strategy to win elections. When such a tactic is deployed for half a century, no one should be surprised when white-supremacist sentiments turn out to be an animating core of group identity. I hope there can be a more honest reckoning, both for the Republican Party and for its White Christian base that has provided theological and moral cover for this strategy.

Trump is most accurately understood as the inevitable end of a road paved brick by brick through 13 presidential election cycles since 1968. By the time the RNC attempted to apologize for the Southern Strategy in 2005 or advocated for a more pragmatic and humane immigration policy in its “autopsy report” after [Mitt] Romney’s 2012 defeat, this runaway freight train simply had too much momentum behind it to be easily derailed.

I do think the clarity of the current moment is calling the moral question in this election like no other in my lifetime. There is an opportunity here, for both the GOP and for White Christians who are a part of its foundation, to rebuild a party of principle that rejects white supremacy and strategies that stoke white racial fears and grievances.

Cooper wants the GOP to continue discussing a scaled-back convention, while Republicans are seeking assurances that more than 10 people will be allowed in a room.

Dory MacMillan, a spokeswoman for Cooper, said in a statement that the governor "has been clear that the convention could be held with more than 10 people but that plans need to be in place for a scaled down convention with safety precautions

Republican governors in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee have called on Trump to move the convention to their states, and the RNC is scheduled to visit Nashville on Thursday.

Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College, noted former President Barack Obama held his 2012 convention in Charlotte but lost the state to former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2012.

"Conventions don't really have as great of an impact as people think," Bitzer said. "The Democrats had a convention in Charlotte, and the state went for Romney by two points in 2012."

But it is long past obvious that infinitude was a false promise. Traffic, sprawl, homelessness and ballooning housing costs are all consequences of our profligacy with the land and our other resources.

In addition to a hotter, drier climate, the fires, too, are fanned by an unsustainable way of life. Many blazes were worsened by Californians moving into areas near forests known as the “urban-wildland interface.” Once people move near forested land, fires tend to follow — either because they deliberately or inadvertently ignite them, or because they need electricity, delivered by electrical wires that can cause sparks that turn into conflagrations.

In many ways the 2020 election is shaping up to be a fight over the soul of the suburbs — their role in America’s future, and who they are for.

At the Republican convention this week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who brandished guns at protesters in St. Louis, asserted that liberals want to “abolish the suburbs” by ending single-family home zoning.

The liberals who live in California’s suburbs may not identify with the McCloskeys, but their ugly spectacle has helped unmask NIMBYism, one of California’s most reckless ideologies, for the racist vision it has long been.

Neither Biden nor his party nor just about anyone else in national or state politics has been willing to honestly discuss the incalculable damage that California-style suburban life has wreaked on our world. In California, if anything is going to ruin the suburbs, it is more likely to be a wildfire than a new president.

Four years into Trump’s presidency, it’s impossible to catalogue a full list of all the norms and laws he has gleefully broken. But he has argued, again and again, that he’s not the only person to disregard these guardrails

This rhetoric is effective in getting Trump off the hook for his wrongdoing, at least insofar as it helps his allies justify their support. But it is also a manifestation of his inability to empathize, to understand that other people might hold different values — or any values at all. It is literally inconceivable to him that Obama and Holder might really have taken law enforcement independence seriously

This failure to fully conceptualize the existence of other minds may be a fundamentally Trumpian trait. But the resulting insistence on the ubiquity of corruption has also been fueled by a right-wing media ecosystem that focuses outsize attention on supposed violations of norms by those in the Democratic Party.

The same dynamic is at play in the obsession of Trump, and the right-wing media, with Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server — which, for them, became such an iconic example of supposed corruption and impunity that it functioned as an effective rebuttal to more or less anything Trump did during the 2016 campaign.

s far as Trump is concerned, these scandals are evidence that everyone else is as corrupt as he is — so his own corruption and misbehavior are no big deal. 

And so Meadows insisted to Politico that the blurring of lines between government and campaign at the Republican National Convention was fine, because people “outside of the Beltway . . . expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats.”

The Republican National Convention was a natural place to display this gleeful cynicism. It was a television spectacle, and television, as the novelist David Foster Wallace once argued, is a cynical medium. As Wallace explained, the television screen is a perfect canvas for displaying “sights that undercut what’s said”: Consider, for example, the spectacle of former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaking at the convention about the evils of nepotism, while the chyron below announced speeches that evening by Trump’s wife and two of his children. Yet, in Wallace’s view, the cynicism and irony of television tend to overpower any criticism.

This has always been Trump’s real skill: pulling everyone around him down into the current of his cynicism. To paraphrase Meadows, Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan might as well be, “Nobody cares.”

Last week the Republican National Committee launched a digital advertising campaign, raising questions about whether the university is keeping documents under seal related to the Reade allegation. One of the ads alleges: “University of Delaware is complicit in sexual assault cover-up.”

Biden’s defenders argue he is merely following precedent: past senators who ran for president have not been required to disclose all their papers. But Fitton contended: “It’s not that they’re being required; the question is whether the records are available under law. If he had them at his house, maybe there’s an argument, but they’re not at his house. They’re at a university and subject to Foia [Freedom of Information Act].”

“curating the collection”, a process likely to continue well into 2021, and the papers will not be released until two years after Biden retires from public life.

Furthermore, critics on the progressive wing of the Democratic party would be eager to scrutinize Biden’s links to the financial services industry, a big player in Delaware. Conservatives might hunt for documents linking Biden’s son, Hunter, to overseas business interests. In a replay of the 2016 campaign, when he encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, Donald Trump may welcome a chance to make mischief by demanding “transparency”.

There are practical objections, Sabato added, but Republicans will seek to turn those to their advantage. “First of all, you couldn’t publish it all or even open it all. He had an incredibly long career, a 50-year political career, and there are some personal items in there as well, from what I understand. How could you even manage to make it available to researchers, much less the general public, just a few months ahead of an election? It’s not going to happen.

“His papers from the Senate were at the University of Tennessee and his opponents kept quacking about the fact that we had locked them up, literally, because we didn’t want to go through every morning having some 12-year-old take five words out of a 300-word essay and have to defend it all day.

“So we just said to hell with you, if that’s what the fight is going to be about, then the fight will be about not getting access to the papers as opposed to what’s in the papers. And it’s a little hard to make the case that Biden won’t give up the papers at the University of Delaware while Trump has been in federal court for 27 years to protect his financial records.”

One Cabinet official has already run afoul of the rules, according to an independent government watchdog agency; another, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, is now under investigation for the speech he delivered from Jerusalem to the Republican National Convention.

Trump is hoping officials on the government payroll can help fill the void.

Trump has pressed administration officials to finalize announcements in the weeks leading up to the election that could woo key voters, including a plan that would cover the cost of a potential coronavirus vaccine for Medicare and Medicaid recipients or an initiative that would help lower the prices of prescription drugs.

Trump's efforts have differed in their explicitly political nature.

His decision to host the final night of the Republican National Convention on the White House South Lawn seemed both to encapsulate his disregard for separating the two and to permit more rampant politicking by his team.

Trump himself is not bound by the Hatch Act. But the example he sets has clearly been adopted by other members of his administration, whose salaries are funded by taxpayers but who have nonetheless engaged in explicitly political activity over the past weeks. Trump has joked in the past that those found in violation of the Hatch Act won't face consequences, according to people who have heard the conversations.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has made several appearances from what appeared to be the Trump campaign headquarters studio in Arlington, Virginia

"We hand out masks, we encourage people to wear them, we temperature check, we provide hand sanitizer. That's what the campaign does," she said.

"People like Kayleigh can volunteer for the campaign, but obviously not in their government capacity or using their government authority," said Jordan Libowitz, communications director for CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

But she was not the only White House official to participate in campaign activities this week. Stephen Miller, who has orchestrated Trump's hardline immigration policy, spoke in his "personal capacity" as a "Trump campaign adviser" during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, baselessly claiming that Biden would "incentivize child smuggling" if elected president.

And Ivanka Trump, ostensibly a White House senior adviser, has been on the campaign trail constantly in support of her father.

As Vice President Mike Pence rallied supporters in Des Moines on Thursday, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was also in Iowa, touring the historic Surf Ballroom in the city of Clear Lake.

Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette has jetted to states that closely hew to Trump's political map, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Trump has made energy -- and in particular fracking -- a key element of his closing message against Biden.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has traveled in her official capacity to promote school reopening across the country, another item Trump touts during his campaign rallies. On Thursday, DeVos participated in a "Moms for Trump" campaign event in Detroit.

Cabinet officials are permitted by law to discuss the President's actions and how they affect Americans, but they are prohibited from making direct pitches to support Trump's reelection while acting in their official capacity.

This is a problem for governance and for democracy. People with exceedingly low levels of trust are often disposed to favor authoritarian, right-wing parties; embrace conspiracy theories; and feel victimized by outsiders.

So how does one rationalize with and govern a society with low trust, getting lower with each crisis? Democracy in the United States and Europe might depend on solving that quandary.

in hindsight, the real Romney radicalization is far more clear. You could see the seeds planted during the 2012 Republican primary. On January 19, two days before South Carolina primary voters cast their ballot, Newt Gingrich had a moment during the GOP primary debate.

Surely, heavily evangelical voters in a key Republican stronghold would be concerned about Gingrich’s scandals? No, they were far angrier at media outlets than they were at any Republican hypocrisy.

Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary in a “landslide” powered by evangelicals. It was the only time in primary history that South Carolina voters failed to vote for the eventual GOP nominee. But South Carolina voters weren’t out of step; rather they were ahead of their time. They forecast the Republican break with character in favor of a man who would “fight.”

To understand the emotional and psychological aftermath of Romney’s loss, one has to look at the cultural break between the GOP establishment—which commissioned an “autopsy” of the party in 2012 that called for greater efforts at inclusion—and a grassroots base that was convinced that it had been hoodwinked by party leaders into supporting the “safe” candidate.

And so the Republican establishment and the Republican base moved apart, with one side completely convinced that Romney lost because he was perhaps, if anything, too harsh (especially when it came to immigration) and the other convinced that he lost because he was too soft.

When Trump won, the base had its proof of concept. Fighting worked, and not even Trump’s loss—along with the loss of the House and the Senate in four short years—has truly disrupted that conclusion. And why would it? Many millions still don’t believe he lost.

The Mitt Romney martyr theory thus suffers from a fatal defect. It presumes that large numbers of Republicans weren’t radicalized before Romney’s rough treatment. In truth, they already hated Democrats and the media, and when Romney lost, their message to the Republican establishment in 2016 was just as clear as it was in South Carolina in 2012. No more nice guys. The “character” that mattered was a commitment to punching the left right in the mouth.