0 the capitol in an insurrection hoping to hold the presidency illegally for donald trump. that is tonight's last word. the 11th hour starts right now. right n ow good evening once again. i'm ali velshi, they 351 of the biden administration. just an hour from now it will be exactly one year from the day we all watched in realtime as a mob march to the capitol. launched a siege on the building and then tried to stop the duly elected president from being formally declared the winner of the election. it was a scene most of us could never imagine happening in america. earlier today, one of the capitol police officers who took the brunt of the attack from supporters of donald trump summed up where things stand a year later. >> it was hard to believe that it's been a year but here we are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. >> both president biden and kamala harris will speak to the nation tomorrow. this afternoon, the white house gave us a preview of biden's remark. >> i would expect the president biden will lay out the significance of what happened at the capitol and the singular responsibility. president trump has for the casting carnage that we saw it and will forcibly pushed back on the live spread by the former president in an attempt to mislead the american people and its own supporters. as well as distract from his role and what happened. >> democratic members of congress will also mark the anniversary of the insurrection with several events on capitol hill. republican leaders are not expected to take part. senate minority leader, mitch mcconnell, and a bipartisan group of senators made up of multi republicans plan to travel to atlanta to attend the funeral of the late senator, johnny isakson. trump loyalist and house members, marjorie taylor greene and matt gates, will weigh in with their own views of the january six with what they are calling the, quote, republican response. meanwhile, demands for accountability with regard to the capitol riot are growing louder and they're being increasingly directed to the biden justice department. as the new york times asked, quote, will the justice department move beyond charging the rioters themselves? today the attorney general, merrick garland tried to respond to the mounting pressure on his department. during his speech, garland gave something of an update on the ongoing criminal investigation into the ryan. and he noted that more than 700 people have been arrested and charged. he then vowed to pursue everyone who might have been involved in the insurrection. >> the justice department remains committed to holding all january six perpetrators at any level accountable under law. whether they were president that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. we will follow the facts wherever they lead. as long as it takes and whatever it takes for justice to be done because insistent with the facts and the law. i understand that this may not be the answer that some are looking for. but we will and we must speak through our work. >> that one member of the january six select committee says he is concerned about what attorney general garland didn't say. >> what was left unsaid is what about the rules of those involved, not just on the sink, but in the days leading up to the six in the aftermath of the six. who made of broken the law. what comes to mind to me is the efforts of the former president to get the secretary of state of georgia to essentially find 11,780 boats that don't exist. there was no indication from attorney general that issues like that were under investigation. and i don't believe that that could be left to a local or district attorney's office. >> meanwhile, a new report from axios says that people associated with former president, former vice president, mike pence, are helping the january six committee. the pieces they have been particularly cooperative as the january 6th select committee focuses on what former president trump was doing during more than three hours that the capital was under attack. earlier today the panel did meet with former trump white house press secretary, stephanie grisham. she served as melania trump's press secretary at the time of the right. it we're shen says that she plans to continue cooperating with the committee. one of the two republican members on the january six committee says that they are also getting critical information for many former white house aides without having to resort to subpoenas. >> let's say that we never talk to president trump, or we never talk to any high individuals. we are going to have people all that have a piece of that story. a slice of different moments in time that we can put together into the bigger picture as we know how investigations go. you put those pieces together and then you move up the ladder. that is what we are doing. and i think you're going to have continued cooperation by a significant number of people. >> with that let's bring in our lead off guest on this wednesday night, yamiche alcindor, is the white house correspondent for the pbs news hour and the moderator of washington week. also on pbs. jonathan karl jon is the chief correspondent for abc news he is the author of the new york times bestseller, betrayal, the final act of the trump show. and katie benner, is the reporter for the new york times. welcome to all of. you good to have you here. yamiche, let's start with you. we're going to hear for the president tomorrow, the president has given us a preview. they say that they are going to lay the blame for january six squarely at donald trump's feet. but this is a tough line for the president who got elected. he ran and got elected on the idea that he is going to be a unifying near of some sorts. >> that is right ali. but when it comes to january six president biden has always been crystal clear. he saw the attack on the capital as a state on our democracy. he sees it as a real threat to american democracy. and he has always said that the people who are responsible should be held accountable. he has been very clear that he wants to be independent of the department of justice's investigation. but we can expect that tomorrow on the anniversary of this terrible day where we saw white supremacists and all sorts of hate groups and all sorts of people who were fueled by the lies fell to them by the former president trump, that he is going to president biden i'm going to be forceful with this words. he is going to be marking the moments and marking the cinemas of this moment in our history. this is a moment where american democracy was almost brought to its knees. and this, is a white house where it is not clear not only inwards but inaction where people need to be held accountable. we of course know that president biden has waived executive privilege by many of the documents sought out by the january six investigation committee. that is going to be something that he is absolutely going to be clear about tomorrow. tomorrow's gonna be an emotional speech. i am told there's also gonna be a speech where he's marking the day and reminding people that this is not sort of a tourist visit. this was not a sort of protests gone wrong. this was one of the darkest days in american history and we expect the president to say just that. >> not a tourist visit indeed. katie benner, you and i had this conversation a number of time, and the attorney general said it today. he said that we will pursue this investigation wherever he goes for as long as it takes. and there's a lot of people very frustrated with the as long as it takes part. you pointed out that proper investigations, legal investigations to take time. the last four times of the trump administration gave us the sense that everything doesn't work through the normal process. but what merrick garland said today is still going to be unsatisfying to a lot of people. >> it is going to be unsatisfying, but he was really trying to create realistic expectations, first of all investigations take a long time. this is not something that's going to happen quickly even in the court's public opinion that donald trump has already been condemned and convicted. second of all, the reality is that the justice department needs to bring any case against the former president or anybody who worked in the white house any former official. they need to be ironclad. they need to have very strong evidence. not just because it has to get through a district court and the jury. but also the appeals court in washington d.c.. and the supreme court. nobody knows the players in both the appeal court or the supreme court better than merrick garland. and he knows that this is not a place to bring novel legal series, it is not a place to take risks because judges will rejected. keep in mind it is the course that has already expanded the power of the presidency. it is the courts that have expanded the power of the executive branch. so any robust an investigation will start to chip away at the privileges that the court has already brought. and they will have to convince juries in courts that this is a prosecution that is winnable. this is an extremely high bar, much higher bar than we saw in either of donald trump's impeachment. which keep in mind, while the president was impeached, he was not ultimately convicted and removed. this is a much higher burden than that. so even though garland said in his speech today that we are not for closing investigations with the president, we are not for closing investigations into his allies, we still have to meet evidentiary standards. which will take a long time to meet in order to bring a case. >> jonathan carl, good to see you my friend. you write in your book about the last days of the trump administration and you have written in a commentary this week about what would have happened if just little things were different by a matter of degree on january six last year. including if the vice president of the united states at the time, mike, pence had decided to go with what donald trump and his cronies were planning. if you have decided to simply amount while he was in congress that he was not certifying the election in favor of joe biden. >> mike pence is somebody who had been supremely loyal to donald trump. he stood by him after charlottesville. even during the 2016 campaign he didn't utter a peep of criticism after the access hollywood tape came out. he never stood up to donald trump. he had never challenged him once in public and there is little evidence that he had done so in private either. but on this moment he was disloyal at precisely the right time. and whatever about today is that, although the record is pretty clear, when you talk to constitutional scholars from a left to the right. basically anybody who wasn't immediately around donald trump in the days before january six, they will say that pence did not have the authority to single-handedly throw out joe biden's election victory. he didn't have the authority to throughout those electoral votes. and it is kind of insane to think that he did that one person could effectively choose the president of the united states. but here's the question that i explore today. and i talked to michael logic who is one of the most prominent and well respected conservative jurors and former appellate judge, former direct, former head of the office of legal counsel of the justice department under the first george bush. he said that the it is clear and he had vice pence, he said he advised pence not to do it but he had no choice but to simply count the votes as they were open. he said, while pence had no authority to do otherwise. it is unclear who had the authority to stop him if he had done it. and michael luttig, argues that we would've been in the state of maximum chaos. that is not even clear to the supreme court had the authority to take up that question. and this could've been the moment that we would've known -- >> right, that was a question that was swirling around everybody's minds, also it's of issues. including what happened to donald trump when he doesn't leave the white house. people near that he had to but the question is who actually removes it. what does the military do? michael luttig, made an interesting point that this probably would've gotten working out overtime. but in that time we would've been an actual constitutional crisis. an important thing for people to remember. yamiche, a year ago in the days following january six, republicans and democrats seem to genuinely speaking that agreed what happened was really bad and should never happen again, many of them were prepared to blame donald trump for. some, are republicans will not be participating in any of the formal remembrance exercises of what happened last year. >> ali, it is one of the starkest things that happened after january six. at the beginning of january six when the capitol had been broken into, when i was hearing from sources that everyone from how speaker and house minority leader, kevin mccarthy had been calling the president and telling him that he needed to say something, telling him to say something. that this was. wrong -- before january six had stuck by the president through all sorts of mayhem. there was a sense that the republican party was going to move away from trump. and what we saw of course was in fact former president trump really strengthened his grip on the party. and by doing that he was able to sort of metastasized this lie and spread it throughout the gop. and really, now it's become the sort of litmus test of whether or not you are a true conservative. whether or not you believed the election lie. in some states, now across the country, that is how you're going to get elected for local officials. that is how you're going to get elected to different positions in this country. so, what we have seen here is a complete one 80 republicans and establish republicans who would talk about the constitution before january six. we'll talk about the wrong this of former president trump after january six. they have also fallen in line because they want to keep hold of power based on the sources that i've talked to you. and they're all focused on making sure that they stay in the former president's good graces. and this to me, i talk to experts, is how frankly democracy has died. when you have someone like former president trump, who has decided that he is the end all, be all leader of a party. and that he is spreading misinformation and lies and there are people willing to be violent for him. and then the people who are supposed to be in checks and balances. those sort of establishments and figures who have been elected that they don't stand up to that person that is when things really really get dicey and we've seen of course over the last year dozens of whopping passed by gop legislators. restricting the right to vote. all based on this lie and it really is a scary time when you talk to immigrants who have emigrated to america, because they wanted a stable american democracy pleading cases like, in haiti, venezuela, belarus. they say that this is sort of what they have seen in their own countries and how things have gotten really really scary and got in stable. so this is absolutely the thing that we're talking about. and continue to talk about. because it's now a sort of slow january six happening in different states. [interpreter] >> we heard from the chief of the u.s. capitol police, katie, about increasing threats to members of congress. we've heard tonight about sort of rumblings, though nothing specific, about threats about things that could happen tomorrow. what is the federal government and justice department and fbi stands now on dealing with threats like this and how do they think about them differently than they did prior to january 6th? >> internally, the department of homeland security and the fbi, the agencies are taking seriously threats against the capital leading up to january 6th and tomorrow and they are also taking seriously threats against lawmakers. and i want to emphasize that it's not that threats were not taken seriously during the trump administration. and i've spoken with researchers and law enforcement officers inside the hss, and they said that every time the president spoke about someone he did not like, whether that was former officials like jeff sessions or rod rosenstein, whether it was opponents in congress, every time he named people he did not like, the spike of threats against that person was huge. so it's almost like they were under a wash of threat so constant it was really hard to keep up with the flow. obviously, we are in a different political time right now. so, again, threats are taken seriously. it's just a very different tone and tenor of threats. so that is what is happening. second of all, we are definitely seeing the justice department trying to address the idea of threats. we saw that in the attorney general speech today. merrick garland said clearly that despite the fact we have seen startling polling, not the majority, but still the majority, believe that violence is not an answer to political conflict, that is actually not the answer, we cannot think that way. we cannot think that way in a democracy. we have to have a hard, bright line against political violence. >> jonathan was karl, the january six committee is looking at people in trump's inner circle and trying to get information, basically what happened right from the election to january 6th. how does that materialize, in your opinion? are these going to be people who participate in public hearings? what will it end up -- what effect will it end up having? >> i think that the case they are trying to make is the january 6th. it's called the january six committee. but january 6th was about more than the riot that day. it was about more than the attacks on the building and the police officers, all of the mayhem that we saw. it was about the effort to overturn the election. and that began immediately after the election, it began on election night, when trump went to the east room and said he had won an election he had actually lost. so they are going to be going through and they want to establish first and foremost that what he was saying about the election was a lie. we all know that, we've read, it we've seen audits that were done in georgia, we saw that the senate republicans in michigan did their investigation. we saw even the cyber ninjas come up with no evidence in arizona. but i think what you will see is that high profile members of the presidents inner circle thought that what he was saying was flatly wrong, say it in public. i think one person they would like to see testify in public, in prime time, would be former attorney general bill barr, who told me in the interview for betrayal, that it was all bleep. that there was nothing to it. that there was nothing to what trump was saying. he went and investigated the allegations in all those contested states and came back and told the president directly that there was nothing to it. and trump went on and continue to try to overturn the election. >> he was not dissuaded. thanks to all three of you for helping us out, yamiche some alcindor, katie benner and jonathan karl, them and coming, up they told her to then, why can't they tell the truth now. now not so much. our friend eugene robinson and our friend bill kristol are here to compare a contrast. and later, you may think you are fully vaccinated but given recent guidance on boosters, you may be unclear as to what fully vaccinated actually means. one of our top doctors is here to discuss, "the 11th hour" just getting underway on wednesday night. y night.