Aaron C. Davis

Just to add to what Carol said, these fake elector documents were really important in that moment in January 6th, because Donald Trump uses this as a pretense to say that Vice President Pence can actually do something different and not certify Joe Biden that day.

And it's part of the thing that some of the rioters are talking about in the crowd.

You know, Pence should do this.

So this was a real live issue, and here it was that Waleska had seen this and spotted it beforehand.

Well, this is a really interesting point, right?

So right after Biden is successfully inaugurated, and it's hard to go back and think about this, but there was even some concern inside the Department of Justice as to whether that could happen peacefully.

They wanted to arrest as many of these rioters as they could beforehand, warning that there would be violence on that day.

But once they get through that inauguration, there's a group of prosecutors inside the U.S.

Attorney's Office in D.C.,

who say we should really form a task force to broaden this beyond the rioters to look at what is the connective tissue between the people who went in the building that day and the people around Trump who were talking about needing, you know, to go tell the members of Congress to have some backbone and do what they needed to do that day.

And so they put together a PowerPoint presentation.

And again, this is Cooney is one of the prosecutors in the room.

J.P.

Cooney presents to FBI agents a plan to look at people like Roger Stone, who is outside the Willard Hotel the night before the January 6th attack with members of the Oath Keepers, and begin to question, what are they doing there?

Who else were they talking to?

And this is immediately met with some pushback by the interim team that Joe Biden has put in charge of the Department of Justice.

And they say, whoa, we're not going to investigate people.

We're investigating this crime of the riot that just happened outside the Capitol.

And that is a moment that really sets the tone and sets the direction of this investigation for a long time to come after Garland is seated a couple months later.

But they really are opposed to looking at people and want to look at what happened in the crowd and the riot and work their way back up from there.