The FRONTLINE Interviews

Jacqueline Alemany

Reporter, The Washington Post

Jacqueline Alemany is a congressional investigations reporter for The Washington Post. She also appears on NBC News and MSNBC, and previously reported for CBS News.

The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group’s Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on May 4, 2022. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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Lies, Politics and Democracy

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Jacqueline Alemany

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Trump’s Initial Claims of Election Fraud and the Republican Response

It's those days right after Donald Trump comes out and says, "Frankly, I did win this election."Can you describe what it was like, especially for members of the Republican Party, that day or two of trying to figure out how to respond to something like this?What was going on in Washington?What were you seeing?

Yeah.Well, there's one tweet in particular I remember that really sort of shook the party, in Washington, D.C., at least.And that was, I believe it was a Sept. 23, 2020, tweet where President Trump indicated that he was not going to—or it was at a press conference, and then I think he doubled down on it on Twitter—that he was not going to agree to a peaceful transfer of power.

And Liz Cheney—who at the time was in House GOP leadership, still, and had already had some public disagreements with Trump, that was nowhere near the pariah of the Republican Party that she is now—came out and tweeted, without naming the president at the time, Trump, but said that it was a tenet and hallmark of democracy to agree to a peaceful transfer of power and condemned it.And that was the first time, I think, Cheney really laid down her marker in the direction that she was potentially going to be going in.But the rest of the party was already not following suit.

And at that point in time, there were members that were more quietly trying to actually find ways to bolster and constitutionally and legally support a lot of the claims that the former president was making.At this point, he had his outside legal team already sort of—they'd come together unofficially and were working together in some capacity.And then there were members who were searching for these examples of election fraud and already pushing for audits to be conducted in some of the battleground states.

I don't know if you were talking to the members or their staff, but did they believe in that period after the election, did they believe the claims of fraud?

There was a desire to believe it, but look, the conversations I was having with officials in the Trump campaign at that time were basically saying to us, one way or the other, that the teams that they were sending out to battleground states to conduct these fact-finding, quote-unquote, fact-finding operations was really lip service to appease the former president.

And that's what we heard time and time again, that people were humoring former President Trump in order to sort of make this go away.There's actually one quote in particular that my colleagues reported at the time that I just revisited that's actually worth reading.And I think it shows just how unprepared the party was for where things were headed based on this quote.

So this quote came from a Senate GOP aide in Senate leadership, and it was: "What's the downside for humoring Trump for this little bit of time?No one seriously thinks the result will change.He went golfing this weekend.It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.He's tweeting about filing some lawsuits.These lawsuits will fail, and then he'll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he'll leave."

And that quote couldn't have been more off base.

Was that what the majority of the Republicans in Washington, how they felt, that it wasn't going to be that long, that there was no harm in it?Or did some of them recognize … that this was playing with fire?

I think it was a mixed bag.I think there are certainly some true believers who continued to search for election fraud and maintain that these efforts to overturn the president's defeat were legal and legally sound and constitutionally sound and stand by these various suits that they signed on their names to.But I think there were also some who, again, just wanted this to go away and figured it was more politically expedient for them to participate in the process, or at least appear to participate in the process.

So you had members like Chip Roy, who actually traveled down to Georgia to find some of this so-called evidence that people were claiming to find, these affidavits.You had Mike Lee, who was also in touch with conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell, who was at that point in time visiting President Trump in the Oval Office and presenting various plans to try to seize voting machines or devise some other scheme to execute the president's wish, overturn the results of the election.

And then you had those closest to the former president, people like his chief of staff Mark Meadows, who were also playing two sides of the coin, simultaneously telling people that this needed to stop, that he was going to get the president back on track, back on his specific talking points, but then also being the gatekeeper, letting these people into the Oval, giving them access to the president.

… There was a tweet from Don Jr. where he said, "Where are the 2024 presidential hopefuls?"How much fear in that period, how much of it was a fear of Trump, that they had to support him?What are the politics for why people were coming out, like a Ted Cruz or like a Lindsey Graham, and asking questions about the election?

There was a huge fear.That was the dominant threat.I mean, Ted Cruz was really the last very prominent Republican to take a stand against Trump before he became the Republican nominee in 2016 by appearing at the RNC Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and refusing to endorse then-presidential candidate Trump in front of the crowd.He was booed.And that pivot that he did to then somehow coming around to supporting Trump happened shortly thereafter.

So I think that there was a quick realization amongst most people that they could either get behind him or be left behind.

Cruz’s Evolving Relationship with Trump

Let's go back to 2016 and Ted Cruz.One moment that I don't think stood out at the time but seems interesting now is the Iowa caucuses, and it was Trump's reaction to Ted Cruz winning the Iowa caucuses where he said it was rigged.He accused Cruz of rigging it and tries to get it overturned, which doesn't work.At that point, back in 2016, I don't know if you remember that moment, and if you remember it, if you could describe it, and whether people were paying attention to things like that. …

Yeah, I mean, at the time, I was actually covering the New Hampshire primaries; I was living in Manchester, New Hampshire.I spent a tiny bit of time in Iowa but was largely focused on the first-in-the-nation primary.And so Trumpism was very much front and center in New Hampshire.And I think we were expecting Trump to not perform as well in Iowa, where there was, I think, more sensitivities and a less favorable reaction to some of the president's rhetoric and inflammatory policies.

And I don't think at the time the media and the Republican Party, and even the Democratic Party, necessarily put Trump's comments in the proper context or really saw them for what they were now that, you know, we're six years past that and can see just how persistent and corrosive that has been to the anti-democratic platform that's creeped into the Republican Party.

But I do remember that in New Hampshire at least it really did feel like ground zero for Trumpism, and a lot of the false claims that he was already making there about a variety of things that, I think, foreshadowed what was to come.

That becomes a big thing of the Trump presidency is mistruths, misstatements, misinformation.I mean, at the time, how was it seen?I mean, was it humorous?Was it concerning?Was it something that was setting off alarm bells when you were in New Hampshire?

Yeah, I think—you know, I think at the time, actually, because so many of the policies that he was rolling out, things like the Muslim ban, were so extreme and radical, our reaction was less about his rhetoric and his mistruths, and we were covering more of what he was intending to do.

And I think his schtick at rallies was maybe sometimes viewed as him more trying to entertain the audience before him.But what, again, was consistently most shocking was a lot of the Islamophobic and racist undercurrents of the policies that he was bringing up and the support in turn he was getting.

… Ted Cruz had been his own kind of outsider when he came to Washington.The establishment certainly didn't love Ted Cruz.But he gets into this battle with Trump, and maybe you can describe it for us, the attacks on Cruz's wife and the conspiracy theories about his dad.And the question, if you can help us understand it, what was going on?Was Trump operating from a different playbook than even a Ted Cruz was in that campaign?

That's a good question.I don't think Trump necessarily had a playbook, which is what threw so many of his opponents off.And for as much as Ted Cruz claimed to be an outsider, it was clear that he didn't have his finger on the pulse of what voters, Republican voters, conservative voters ultimately wanted.

And I think Ted Cruz became the textbook example of what most Republicans learned after going toe-to-toe with Trump, which was that he could draft off his coattails and have a political future, or he could continue to hack away at a candidate that had just proved time and time again to be Teflon.

I mean, then-candidate Trump at the time embarrassed Cruz in so many different ways, accusing his father of somehow being involved in the plot to kill John F. Kennedy, calling his wife ugly at some point.I think these attacks were more extreme and personal than a lot of the attacks that Trump threw out there at the time, which really underscored just how calculated I think Cruz's actions ultimately were to coming back around and embracing Trumpism.

You talked about Cruz's role at the convention; I don't know if you were there or if you covered it, but what was it like when Cruz goes out there and talks?What's the reaction?

Yeah, he went up there and tried to embrace the constitutionalist, the institutionalist that he's always been and, again, refused to endorse the then-candidate Trump when it was clear that he was the nominee, and he was booed.

And God, it was a pretty surreal moment.… And that was inside the room; people were really aggressive and vocal, and the booing was visceral.The support for Trump has always been very visceral and physical.

And we had seen it on the trail everywhere we went, but I think it was the first time the inside-the-Beltway folks who had traveled to Cleveland were seeing it firsthand.

I was inside the room for that moment, but I did spend most of the convention actually covering the Trump supporters and protests that were happening outside.I had a bulletproof vest that I had to wear, a helmet.There were threats coming in, a steady stream of threats.It was a very tense week to be in Cleveland.

It doesn't sound like covering politics in America, that you have to have protection in order to cover a political convention.

Yeah.And most Trump rallies were like that.… I was there when a Trump Secret Service agent, who had been detailed to him at the time, threw a Time photog across the press pen.There were times where Trump body people grabbed us by our shirts to move us out of the audience because they didn't want Trump getting negative press coverage by, you know, by reporting on what his supporters were saying and … highlighting a lot of the inflammatory beliefs and conspiracy theories that were already swirling around at the time.

The Rise of Political Violence

… Especially looking back at Jan. 6, which is a moment of political violence, what was the political violence that … you're seeing at those rallies?What types of things would you see and should have been a warning about a type of politics you might have missed?

Yeah, there was just casual violence and physical unnecessary contact at every rally.That was a common thread.And as Trump got bigger and bigger, and it was clear that he was actually a serious contender, they started cordoning us off into a press pen.I think the initial reason for them doing that was to try to curb some of the bad headlines that Trump was getting for the types of people that were showing up and giving reporters really extreme, shocking quotes.But it also actually was sort of to our benefit in terms of our protection.A lot of reporters later down the line started actually having security.And Trump's—the people that were close to Trump themselves oftentimes engaged in this roughhousing that Trump was encouraging on the stage.

I remember, I was the reporter that was sitting with my camera in the press pen and happened to be trained on Corey Lewandowski at a moment where I saw him and was able to zoom in on him, even though he was pretty far away, in a huge stadium in the bleachers grabbing a protester who was protesting Trump by his shirt and giving him a shakedown.

This was the kind of thing that was the norm, and you just have to go back and look at transcripts of all of Trump's rally comments where he basically encourages and relishes in that sort of physical energy that was taking place.

What Trump Offered Voters

Going back to the convention for a moment, when Trump gives that speech and says, "I alone can fix this," what is the reaction?Was he giving a different pitch than any other modern Republican candidate had given for who he was and what he was offering in that speech?

In some ways, yes, but in some ways I think he actually was just making the Republican platform more accessible to the base and to some of the voters who got involved in electoral politics really for the first time because of Trump.I think he pushed a lot of these policies to the extremes.

But in some way or the other, these sorts of beliefs had been articulated by the party in the past.Just I think that the way that the ideas that Trump had in executing certain things and the very obvious and blatant dog whistles that he leaned back on and relied on to whip up support and grassroots energy, that was something that I think no Republican had tapped into, at least modern Republican.

… He comes in, and Donald Trump is president, and … that first joint address where he comes in and is surrounded by Democrats and Republicans—what did Republicans think of the new president? …

Well, at this point, things were massively chaotic because this was still the Bannon era, where they came in and right away rolled out a bunch of poorly executed and half-baked extreme policies, including the Muslim ban.So there, I remember at the time, was less focus on whether or not to accept the new president and more concern with how to react to the spaghetti-on-the-wall policies that really had the country completely, even more divided and polarized.

I feel like it was, you know, half of the country was hysterical and terrified, and the other half was cheering a lot of this on and viewed him as an agent of change versus an agent of chaos.

Do you think they were surprised, the Republicans, that he was president?Do you think they were prepared for it?

… I think that the surprise had worn off when Trump really became the nominee, at least in the Republican Party.Obviously I don't think that surprise wore off really until he became the president, at least for Democrats.

But I think Republicans came around fairly quickly.I think there was a part of—there were a lot of people that were involved in sort of blessing what he was doing as normal and mainstream—I mean, people like Chris Christie, who had been heralded as this moderate, even-keeled conservative who was really the first person who came around.And at every step of the way, I think Trump had certain blessings from conservative figures that had traditionally been viewed as more mainstream.And that helped, I think, normalize things for him pretty quickly.

Trump and Charlottesville

About the Charlottesville moment, how much of a challenge was that for the party and for members of Congress…, a moment which we look back on as a moment of political violence with some figures that look a lot like the ones of Jan. 6.How difficult was that for the party?

It felt really difficult at the time for them.You had Gary Cohn sort of publicly agonizing over the comments and, you know, whether or not he could continue to work for someone who had a challenging time condemning antisemitism.But like many other episodes in the Trump presidency, people moved on.There quickly became a pattern of people who diverged from him were punished in some way, whether it was on Twitter or being unceremoniously fired.

… While there were obviously a torrent of maybe statements condemning initially his comments or background quotes, again, that eviscerated the president for his actions, the next news cycle quickly came, and people moved forward.

Let's talk about some of the characters who will start to come into play, and one of the first ones that come into play, going all the way back to the first impeachment, is Liz Cheney.Can you help me understand who she is and where she comes from?

Yeah, Liz Cheney is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, someone who she's still very close with.She ran for office in Wyoming, was elected, although she had not previously lived in Wyoming for very long, which is something that is now coming back to haunt her amongst her constituents as she sort of lacks some of the support, I think, she would have otherwise been able to rely on as she's now sort of taken on the party and tried to steer things back towards the traditional conservatism.

And she is someone who is also steeped in the law and has been very conservative along the way; there's no question about that.She graduated from U. Chicago Law School.

… She really started expressing discomfort with Trump after the election.I think before that, in leadership, she had pretty much stayed the course.But it was the former president's reaction to his electoral defeat that really put her over the edge.She put out a statement with Sens. Enzi and Barrasso as soon as Biden fair and squarely won and the race was called, congratulating him, calling the election legitimate.And from there, that's when the real rift between her and Trump, and her and the party started.

McCarthy and Trump

… Who is Kevin McCarthy?Where does he come from, and what was his approach during the Trump years?

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy represents a district in California that includes Bakersfield.It's pretty conservative.He has been someone who all along has played the game to his political advantage with Trump.You know, he famously, as my colleagues reported at the time, noticed that, on a flight on Air Force One, that Trump only ate pink and red Starbursts, and when he fell out of favor briefly with Trump, he had his staff buy a bag of Starbursts and pick out just the red and pink ones and deliver it to the president in some, like, glass jar.

Trump called him "my Kevin" for a variety of reasons, but not least because he did ultimately mostly shepherd and herd his conference in line with the president.I mean, if you look at McCarthy versus then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, those relationships were night and day, and the Senate was able to maintain a bit more distance from Trump.

But McCarthy really aligned the party with Trump.And actually I think that some people, including Liz Cheney, would say that McCarthy is single-handedly the reason why the party gravitated back towards Trump after Jan. 6.

… What is Kevin McCarthy's response after the president starts pushing the idea that the election was stolen?

He was not one of the members who was in the forefront.Those efforts were led by people in the House Freedom Caucus, primarily Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry, Jim Jordan from Ohio, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert—Scott Perry in particular.McCarthy was able to sort of straddle the line between keeping favor with the more extreme fringes of the party and some of the pro-insurrectionist members and people who were actively seeking to find that election fraud and overturn the results of the election versus some of his more moderate factions of the party.

As we get towards Jan. 6, you said that McCarthy's not willing to say where he is, and Cheney is writing a 21-page memo.… From Liz Cheney's perspective, is she frustrated at that point?… What were the results of her efforts?

… I think she was really frustrated because she felt like there were players involved with the efforts, people like Ted Cruz, who knew better.That's a phrase that people close to her always, often repeat, that Ted Cruz was a Harvard Law grad, constitutional expert, and he still put forward this legally unsound plan for an audit, a 10-day audit in battleground states that Cheney ripped up and knew right away was not going to fly.

… I think she was pretty baffled that people like Ted Cruz were willing to work with people like John Eastman.But I don't think that Cheney at that point was a stranger to fellow lawmakers prioritizing their political futures and their potential 2024 status over democracy or the health of the country.

Jan. 6 and the Aftermath

Take me to Jan. 6.The president specifically mentions Cheney; he mentions Pence as well.Describe that moment and what Trump said and what the result was for Liz Cheney and Kevin McCarthy.

Yeah, I'm forgetting the exact words that Trump said when he called out Cheney explicitly at that rally on the Ellipse.But I do remember the reaction, which was I think she immediately called her dad to ask him for his advice and that her and her staff immediately had security concerns.I'm pretty sure she was already on the House floor at that time.

At that point, Vice President Mike Pence had already made his decision and communicated his decision not to go along with this plan to unilaterally halt the certification of Biden's victory.And his team, meanwhile, in that moment was still sort of going back and forth with John Eastman.He had his counsel, Greg Jacobs [sic], with him; one of his senior advisers, Marc Short; Devin O'Malley; his wife, his brother were with him as well.

What was Kevin McCarthy's reaction to Jan. 6 in that moment, that day and the day that followed?

Actually, I don't recall what his exact, his initial reaction was.But in the following days, he was just as shaken and upset as Liz Cheney, was getting on conference calls with his members, with House leadership, figuring out how to move forward without the president.

… Now we've heard that audio ourselves for—most of the country has at least, through the reporting of The New York Times, and McCarthy really does, I think, articulate where a lot of Republicans were in that moment, which was really being disgusted with what happened, wanting to find a way to move the party forward without Trump and wanting in some way to take punitive measures against—or keep some of his members in line who had been encouraging some of the insurrectionists and that rhetoric that we were hearing.

You had Steve Scalise call out Matt Gaetz specifically.And there was real concern.There was talk of, you know, the 25th Amendment and how that might work.McCarthy actually said that when he spoke with Trump, he was potentially going to ask him to resign.That never happened.

But a lot of the GOP lawmakers I actually spoke to after audio of these conference calls leaked said it was sort of like PTSD hearing these calls, because it was exactly how everyone felt at that time, but that things moved quickly after Jan. 6 and that the desire to get things back to normal and to just land the plane—that was the saying that everyone kept using—helped paper over what had actually happened.

What was that change that goes from Jan. 6 to Jan. 7, from the internal conference calls that we've heard audio of to where they're going to go, which is at least initially not supporting impeachment, other than Liz Cheney and 10 of them?What was that change that happened?

It's a really good question.It's something that the Jan. 6 committee investigating the insurrection is still trying to figure out.Were there any actual threats lobbed from Trump to McCarthy or Republican members?Was there an impetus for this 180-degree pivot, from talking about the 25th Amendment and asking the sitting president to resign after encouraging an insurrection and contributing to something, the worst act of political violence in modern history, to then being the minority leader, being down at Mar-a-Lago and taking a picture with Trump, with a big grin on his face?And that is still the question.

I think at that point in time, the money dried up really quickly.A lot of corporate donors and backers pulled out of contributing and supporting Republican lawmakers almost immediate—in the immediate aftermath of the violence.I think there were probably some raw political calculations that were taking place that, you know, again, from the money perspective, how was the party going to continue to fundraise and move on, and that they still needed Trump in some respects.

I think also members went home after that, and they talked to their constituents who were living in a completely different media ecosystem and silo and didn't care about what happened, and some of whom had maybe participated or supported the efforts, who were—at that point had bought in to a lot of the conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and had a view of the day's events detached from facts and reality.They communicated that to McCarthy as well, that their constituents didn't care.

And again, I think there was just, there was the desire just to move on.And in that push to move on, Trump came right back into the fold as the party sort of declined to grapple with it.

Do you know if Liz Cheney was hearing this?Was she hearing this from constituents?Was she getting threats?Was she getting blowback as she becomes increasingly vocal about this?

Yeah, it's very likely that Liz Cheney is going to lose her seat and her political career over this decision to take on Trump and try to institute some democratic guardrails and strengthen various laws, like the Insurrection Act, and some of these emergency presidential powers so that something like this doesn't happen again.

She's in a tough reelection, has a primary opponent that's supported by what is now the mainstream Republican Party, Trump and McCarthy.She's been basically all but kicked out of the party.Her full-time job is the Jan. 6 investigation, and she's really put politics aside.This is, by all accounts, a very nonpartisan endeavor.And when people have walked us through sort of her decision-making process on a lot of the committee-related things, the committee comes first, and conservatism comes second.

… So that decision that Liz Cheney makes to go onto the committee run by or created by Nancy Pelosi, and Liz Cheney, not only a lifelong Republican but a generational Republican, what went into that decision, and why was that an important one for her?

Yeah.That was an especially important decision for Cheney because it, I think, really cemented her decision to separate herself from the party and try to take a more dramatic and bigger stand against the democratic backsliding that she saw.

I think it also was a decision on her part to, again, potentially see her political future because of her stated commitment to protecting the system and putting country above party.That's what she continues to come back to.

But I also think in that process, Cheney has elevated her own platform.Whether or not that means she can ever be in Republican politics again is a different question, but she pulled in a record fundraising haul last quarter and has created her own independent fundraising apparatus and operation.She's no longer using WinRed, which was the endorsed fundraising platform by the Republican Party and former President Trump, and has really staked out her own sort of independent endeavor.

But it will be a test case for whether or not a Republican can completely separate themselves from Trump and still remain in office in some way.

What does she want to find out on the committee?Why is it important, the substance of what they're doing, to somebody like Liz Cheney?

Look, I think Liz Cheney believes in the mission of the committee, just as much as every Democrat does, that it is the committee's primary responsibility to create the most comprehensive account and record of what exactly happened on Jan. 6, what happened that contributed to Jan. 6 and how to prevent Jan. 6.But I think Cheney uniquely also wants to eviscerate Trump and completely expunge him from the party.And this is her best opportunity to do so.

She's more or less said that herself, but I think that Cheney wants to expose Trump for who she thinks he is, which is someone who has exploited voters, fed them garbage conspiracy theories, fraudulent claims, and make sure that he no longer has a role in this party.

But she really is nearly alone in that endeavor.I mean, there's Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who's also serving on the committee.He has his own super PAC.But he's retiring because of redistricting, so he's not running for reelection right now.So Cheney is taking a pretty big gamble here.

A Changing Republican Party

… Can you tell me, what does it mean that the party is changing?What does it mean for democracy, that there's this new different people inside the party, that they have a different view of things?

I think the mainstream view, at least in the House GOP Conference, is that there was election fraud.And that I think—Cheney thinks that potentially by getting rid of Trump that members will no longer have to propagate some of these corrosive claims.

But it's proven to be a pretty galvanizing issue.There has been some disagreement internally in the party about what is the best way to move forward and elect more Republicans.And we'll actually see that electorally play out in whether or not the, some of the more Trumpier candidates actually win these primaries in Georgia, Ohio—J. D. Vance we saw just won his primary; he was blessed by Trump and sort of backtracked on all of his anti-Trump comments—or if the more moderate candidates who have tried to abstain from some of the 2020 election fraud claims ultimately win.

But this question of, you know, is Trumpism an aberration or not is something I think that both Democrats and Republicans are still grappling with.

… How large is that battle inside the party?The film will be probably after most of the primaries, but we're heading into the midterm elections.Is that battle between Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney, is that still raging inside the party?Is it still being fought, or is it over?

I think it depends who you ask.It's being re-litigated in a variety of ways and members are going to have to be held accountable for some of their past comments come June when all of it's aired in the public hearings that the Jan. 6 select committee are going to be putting on and inevitably dredge up.

But I think most Republican voters have moved on.And if you, I mean, even just look at the polling.Whether or not voters are interested in the work of the Jan. 6 committee is completely divided along partisan lines, and most—the majority of Republicans want to continue to follow Trump and have their elected political leaders follow Trump going into 2024.

So it's certainly a topic of conversation inside the Beltway and amongst lawmakers, but I think voters have, Republican voters in particular, have been pretty decisive about what direction they want to go in.

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