>> This was the United States Capitol under siege by rioters incited by President Trump.

>> All of us here today do not want to our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats.

Our country has had enough.

We will not take it anymore.

>> Fight for Trump!

Fight for Trump!

>> They tried to stop the peaceful transition of power.

>> The United States Senate will not be intimidated by thugs, mobs, or threats.

>> Order was restored, but the stain of what happened will live on.

>> We do need an investigation into irregularities, fraud, so that the American people can have confidence in their elections.

>> Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against out democracy.

>> What's next for American democracy and the Republican Party?

This week on "Firing Line."

>> "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible by... Corporate funding is provided by... >> Representative Mike Gallagher, welcome to "Firing Line."

>> Thanks for having me.

>> You are a Republican and a former Marine captain from Wisconsin entering your third term in Congress, and you have been at times closely aligned with President Trump.

But on Wednesday, as the rioters were storming the Capitol, you said, "The president needs to call it off.

It's over.

The election is over."

How would you describe what happened?

>> Well, I was sitting there in my office, and early in the day we had gotten reports that there were protestors who'd breached the security perimeter.

Another office building had been evacuated, and the situation just seemed to escalate out of control very quickly.

I could hear flash bangs going off in the distance.

Presumably, that was the Capitol Police trying to get the protestors to back off, but they did not and so it just kept escalating.

And all of a sudden, I mean, this got to a point where the protestors breached the perimeter of the Capitol itself.

Things got incredibly violent, just was clear to me in that moment that, you know, we had the significant portion of the Republican party, including the president himself, had told millions of Americans something that was fundamentally not true, which is that on January 6th, Congress was somehow going to overturn the results of the election.

Now, I had opposed this maneuver for awhile as an unconstitutional one, but as a practical matter, I didn't quite realize the flaw in the objectors' argument, which was they could say, "Well, we're just gonna have a debate.

We're gonna shine some light on voter irregularities, voter fraud.

It won't be a big deal.

Don't worry about the Constitutional precedent.

We're just trying to show that we care about the concerns of a lot of voters around the country."

But I think they gave a lot of people false hope.

And the president, in his speech prior to us convening told people that Mike Pence was gonna overturn the results of the election, that he had that power, which of course is not true.

Mike Pence does not have that power.

And so, you know, I think it was incumbent on the president to call it off.

It seems like last night he did commit somewhat to a peaceful transfer of power.

I hope we can build off that.

I think that's what's paramount.

Let's all come together as a country and commit to the peaceful transfer of power.

>> Listen, just in terms of, you know, the fact that there were Confederate flags and there was a man wearing a Camp Auschwitz T-shirt inside the US Capitol.

Conservative writer Matt Continetti opined about the storming of Congress, quote... Is what we saw yesterday tyranny?

>> Well, I think yesterday we saw pure chaos.

I thought -- I called the attempt to overturn the election on January 6th constitutional nihilism.

I don't think it was animated by a coherent ideological belief.

It wasn't like the Tea Party movement in 2012, which was a sincere effort to advance limited government and fight against the access to the federal government.

Indeed, the irony is that what the objectors were advancing was actually an idea of near unlimited power for the federal government.

I mean, if Congress has the ability to overturn the states, then there's no power they don't have.

And so I think the mob was just that.

A lawless mob.

And I don't care, you know, if you're upset with the results of the election.

If you legitimately believe that fraud took place, you don't have license to break the law and storm the Capitol and attack the Capitol Police.

And look at the cost of yesterday.

I mean, four people are dead that did not have to be dead.

Was it worth it?

Did we advance a meaningful discussion about irregularities in the last election?

Of course we didn't.

The floor of Congress, a two-hour contested debate on the floor of Congress in the dead of the night is not a good forum for having that discussion.

And the objectors knew it.

They knew it was theatre, and the only reason they did it is because they knew it wasn't going to be successful, right?

There's no way they would've proceeded if they actually thought they had a chance of overturning the election.

So they thought they could stoke the outrage without it descending into outright chaos.

But guess what.

It did descend into outright chaos.

So I don't know what the word for it is, but I thought the argument being made by the objectors was a nihilistic argument and I thought the behavior of the protestors was pure lawless mob behavior.

>> You wrote in the pages of National Review that, quote...

So, how much blame do you put at their feet for the events of yesterday?

>> Well, there's been a lot of heated passions, and I think a lot of people are quick to kind of point fingers at, you know, some of my colleagues and say you have blood on your hands.

I'm not there right now, because at the end of the day, I think each individual is responsible for their own behavior.

In other words, even if the president is telling people something that's not true at a rally or a colleague of mine is, you know, using a very cynical argument in order to get Twitter famous and increase their likes on social media, I don't think somehow that they're responsible for the death of the young lady that was shot in the Capitol last night.

I think each -- >> Who's responsible?

>> Um, I don't know.

I mean, I think each person that was there yesterday has to take a hard look at their own actions.

>> How about President Trump?

>> Let me say this.

I think for the last two months we have been telling people something that was fundamentally not true, that somehow the results of the elections was going to change.

>> Well, you say "we," congressman.

I don't want to cut you off, but you say "we have been telling people that."

You have not been.

You have not been telling people that.

Well, let's be clear.

And so are you saying "we" as in the Republican party, or "we" as in President Trump?

>> I think it's both.

>> Because it is President Trump who has been propagating this pernicious lie, and members of your conference have also been propagating this lie.

>> It is both.

There were members saying -- again, as I alluded to before -- that Vice President Pence had the power to overturn the election.

And I think early on, I mean, I was in the camp of, okay, you know, the campaign is within their rights to challenge the results, let the legal process play out.

We have guardrails in place, and that happens in a lot of different elections.

But the fact is when multiple court challenges were filed to no avail, when even Trump-appointed federal judges took a look at the evidence and said "nothing to see here," when the Supreme Court dismissed the baseless Texas case, I don't think the Trump campaign could claim anymore that they didn't have an opportunity to present evidence in court.

And in my home state of Wisconsin, where Biden won by 20,000, the fact is that margin has survived multiple court challenges.

But I don't hold myself blameless.

I think I could've more forcefully made this argument early on, and I'll admit to you I think part of the problem with this, I've been trying to investigate a lot of the claims of election fraud that the people I represent are concerned about.

But in an environment where no one trusts what they read in the news anymore or what they see on TV, no offense, they're struggling to understand what's true and what isn't, right?

So in an environment where trust in legacy media has collapsed, people are Tweeting unverified Twitter videos as gospel truth because it's confirming their ideological priors.

And I think part of what we're all struggling with is how do we have a common reality or set of facts that we can dispassionately debate in such a fractured media environment.

>> Well, this is one of the things I think that Mitt Romney said on Wednesday.

>> The best way we can show respect for the voters who were upset is by telling them the truth!

[ Applause ] That's the duty of leadership.

>> Yeah.

>> And so I commend you for taking on some responsibility, but you did tell the truth and you told the truth publicly before the vote on Wednesday.

Listen, even after the Capitol siege, eight senators and more than 100 members of the House of Representatives continued to object.

What do you say to them?

>> I think it's shameful behavior.

I was actually astounded when the Capitol Police finally cleared the scene, when there was some semblance of stability brought back to the Capitol, and in the House -- at least in the Senate there were some people that relinquished their objections, but in the House, it was almost as if it was business as usual.

We just continued the debate we were having before, and then we objected again to the state of Pennsylvania.

And the objectors seemed entirely unrepentant for the arguments that they'd been making.

So I don't understand it.

I'm not in the habit of questioning the motives of my colleagues.

I understand that this is a very difficult issue and a very difficult political issue, but one of the things I heard in the week leading up to it that kind of set me off a little bit is behind closed doors, a lot of my colleagues would say, "Okay, I know this is the wrong thing to do.

Constitutionally, it's a terrible precedent, and it has no chance of succeeding, but I have to do it, I have to object, because I have to pretend that I'm fighting 'cause my voters are so pissed off and I don't want to get a primary challenger."

I mean, these were the cynical arguments being made behind closed doors, and to your point about the truth, you have to be willing to tell people the truth even if it's uncomfortable, and even if it hurts you politically.

>> Even if you get a primary challenge is what you're saying.

>> That's right.

Yeah.

And I'm sure I'll have 1,000 primary challengers for what I said, but how long are we prepared to tell the American people that we didn't actually lose the 2020 election?

And by the way, I've also worked at the state level with my colleagues to lay out a framework for how we can improve our voting processes.

And I would encourage every individual state to do a version of what Florida did post-2000.

A lot of states made changes in the midst of the pandemic.

Most of it was well-intentioned, but there were foolish things that happened that shouldn't happen.

We should all take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But that's separate than saying President Trump won in a landslide.

Because he did not.

>> Congressman, how many conversations behind closed doors did you have with your colleagues?

Of those 100 people that voted, how many were sincere in their belief or cynical and not willing to tell the truth to the American people?

>> I think it was probably a mix for most people.

I think if I had to guess the true believers who actually believed the arguments they were making were less than 10% of the objectors, and most people were in the practical, political "I got to do this, otherwise I'm gonna get crushed," which is a shame.

And one of the arguments I tried to make to my colleagues in conference was, okay, you have -- This was the day before the January 6th proceedings.

I said, "Right now, you have thousands of people coming to Washington, DC, praying -- praying that somehow we are going to overturn the election for Donald Trump.

You're not just having a debate about election fraud.

You are giving these people religious faith in what you're about to do, and they're not going to be satisfied after a couple hours of debate that fail on the House floor."

You always get to this point where the argument, when you strip everything else away, is this -- the left fights dirty, they don't abide by the rules, and the problem we always do, so we have to fight dirty or we'll never win an election again.

No.

You wouldn't use that logic with your children, right?

You wouldn't say, "Celebrities cheat to get their kids into college, so we're gonna cheat, too, to get you into an Ivy League school."

That argument doesn't work.

Or at the minimum, I don't want to be part of a party that believes the ends justify the means, particularly when the means are an end-run around the Constitution.

I think it's a feature, not a bug, of being a Conservative that we adhere to standards of decency and honest.

And so I think America can survive bad presidents.

It can survive bad Congresses.

It has survived many in the past.

We have checks and balances.

But it can't survive two political parties that believe the exact same thing, which is that you need to accrue power at all costs and then weaponize the power of the state against your political opponents.

I mean, that leads us absolutely nowhere as a country, and that's what I worry is happening right now.

I'd be lying to you if I said I knew how to fix it.

>> Congressman, one of the ways you can fix it is by starting to tell the truth in your conference the way you've told the truth to your constituents and the way you've written about the truth.

Listen, do you agree with Senator Romney, that this was an act of insurrection?

>> [ Sighs ] I've been loathe to use that term.

I don't know what the right word is for a violent mob that storms the United States Capitol.

I think it borders on insurrection for sure, but it was less coordinated than that in the moment, I can tell you just as someone that witnessed it.

I think there were a lot of people, no doubt, that went there thinking they were just gonna have a peaceful protest and, you know, make some points about the election and did not anticipate at all that this was gonna escalate into a violent clash, but I'm sure there were a few bad actors that started it and it got completely out of control.

So I don't think it was a coordinated effort, you know, designed to, you know, rebel against the United States of America.

But certainly it was not a patriotic effort, in my mind.

>> As somebody who has fought for American freedom abroad and for the freedom of others abroad, what -- how does this look to America's enemies?

>> I don't think it's a good look.

I said that yesterday.

I mean, you can just bank that the Chinese Communist Party was watching us yesterday and laughing.

But it also -- I think it gets to your earlier question, and this hadn't occurred to me until now.

I think part of the reason that I am not -- that my gut is telling me we don't want to go down this path of 25th Amendment, impeachment.

You know, we're gonna try and tar and feather all the sedition actors that stormed the Capitol.

Because I think what the country needs now more than anything else is reconciliation rather than recrimination.

>> Let me just get back to your colleagues though in the House of Representatives.

For those that were pretending, for those that were pretending, can you still support them?

Can you understand where they came from and forgive them?

>> Of course.

And again, I don't want to come off as holier than thou and I don't want to question anybody's motives -- >> Even given what's happened?

>> I think we need to bring the country back together.

And I'm willing to forgive anybody for the sake of doing that, and we're holding it together with duct tape right now.

We got to get through a peaceful transition of power.

I just really don't think -- I think there's gonna be this tendency right now for, let's say, the never-Trump Republicans to say, "We told you so!

We must purge all the Trump supporters."

But I just don't think we should be purging the party of this or that actor.

We're a big-tent party.

I personally don't think there's any room in the tent for outright falsehoods.

I don't think there's any room in the tent for the idea that the federal government controls elections, but there is still a lot of room in the tent for a lot of oddball ideas and a lot of raucous debate.

>> Let me ask you about security at the Capitol.

That's gonna be something that's under review.

It's no secret there was a protest coming.

Does there need to be an investigation into why law enforcement was not better prepared?

>> Yes.

I was stunned by that yesterday.

I mean, we all knew this was coming.

The president was talking about it for the week leading up to it.

I knew many people from Wisconsin that were flying out.

I was absolutely stunned that they were able to breech the security perimeter so easily, and so I do think we need a hard look at what went wrong.

I don't understand why the National Guard wasn't mobilized more quickly or mobilized proactively in the face of this, so I want to thoroughly understand the decision making or lack thereof that led to the absence of the National Guard.

I will say this, though.

There was a moment on Wednesday night when, after I had been barricaded in my office for about five hours and finally they regained control of the security situation, I had to go the House floor to vote on the decertification of the Arizona electors.

And I walked through the cafeteria on Longworth, and it was just filled with Capitol Police officers in riot gear that were just exhausted.

They were lying on the ground.

They were eating food, and you could tell -- I just...

I had this moment where I realized here I was shut in my office not really knowing what was going on, and these guys were basically in battle for six hours in order to protect me.

And so I'm not saying they did a bad job.

I'm sure they did the best with what resources they had available.

But whatever the plan was, it was not adequate.

Whatever the resources were, they were not adequate.

But I do want to salute their heroic efforts.

And I actually -- I started crying in that moment.

I was just -- I'm getting teary thinking about it right now.

I mean, these guys, it was incredible.

And I sta-- It was lame now that I think about it.

I started clapping and thanking everybody.

It was just -- It was an incredible moment.

>> They may have done their best, but you're right -- the plan wasn't in place.

There have been -- Some people have pointed out a contradiction in terms of the preparations for the Trump rally versus the preparations for other rallies that have been anticipated in the Capitol.

President-elect Joe Biden said this.

Take a look.

>> No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday there wouldn't have been -- they would've been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol.

We all know that's true.

And it is unacceptable.

Totally unacceptable.

>> You know, people point to the image of the National Guard troops who were deployed to the Lincoln Memorial in June in the wake of the protests over the death of George Floyd.

Do you agree with the president-elect's characterization?

>> I don't.

Well, that's a very serious ac-- Let me say this.

That's a very serious accusation.

I mean, you're accusing more than just the president of racism.

You're accusing a lot of people.

You're accusing a lot of people in the Capitol Police command structure.

And I'm just not prepared to make that accusation without more -- more evidence.

But if evidence reveals the opposite, that I'm wrong, that there was some sort of double standard, that because this was a MAGA crowd and not a BLM crowd we didn't deploy the same resources, that would be wrong.

I would want to get to the bottom of it because I think we should have a consistent standard across the board that political violence is unacceptable.

It doesn't matter if you're Antifa or if you're a Proud Boy, you're not allowed to attack the cops, you're not allowed to conduct outright vandalism, you're not allowed to destroy American institutions.

>> As you've referenced, there are growing calls for the president to be removed from office.

Some of your fellow colleagues in the House of Representatives have urged the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment or they may pursue impeachment.

President Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly went on the record -- as you know, a former four-star Marine general -- and said that if he were in the Cabinet today, he would invoke the 25th Amendment and vote for it.

What do you say to that?

>> It's incredibly serious.

We're seeing resignations of high-level Cabinet officials.

The deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger -- I mean, incredibly serious people that would not resign if they were not profoundly concerned about what happened on January 6th.

I'm not there yet.

I think what the country needs more than anything else right now is reconciliation.

I think the best possible outcome is for the president to commit himself repeatedly and thoroughly to the peaceful transition of power.

Vice President Pence showing up and saying he's gonna be at the inauguration is a positive step forward.

I just worry that if we go down the path of impeachment and 25th Amendment that there's gonna be a lot of Republicans that dig in just because they view it as a political stunt from the left and we're not actually gonna have that reconciliation.

So, I'm open to the argument.

>> What about people who have a sincere concern about what could happen between now and inauguration?

Does it strike you that something even worse could happen between now and inauguration day?

>> It could.

I mean, I'm talking to you after something happened in the Capitol that I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams could've happened.

So we're in a combustible situation right now, and all it takes is a few bad actors to take advantage of that.

And so I am profoundly concerned that something else could happen.

We could see more violence around the country.

But all the more reason, in my mind, for Congress to step up and set an example of bipartisanship, send the message to the American people that there are things that are more important than any of our political careers, and supporting the peaceful transition of power is among those things.

And I fundamentally believe, despite my very real concerns about the current moment we're in and the idea that some of our geopolitical adversaries would take advantage of the divisions we have here domestically, that there reservoirs of strength in America are still very, very deep.

We've gotten through far worse than this in the past.

I think we will prevail, but it is important that we look to ourselves and do better going forward.

And, you know, right now, I think in my own party there's an attempt to say, well, this was all the media's fault, right?

"The media doesn't care when there's BLM or Antifa riots, and now it loses its mind when there's, you know, MAGA riots."

Well, no.

You got to be consistent across the board.

We condemned the Antifa riots.

We should condemn this riot, too.

There's an attempt to say, "Well, actually, this was Antifa activists that planted this whole thing."

I've seen no evidence for that claim, and based on my personal experience with what happened on Wednesday, I think it's an outlandish claim.

I just don't think we can do the whataboutism, moral equivalency stuff.

I think we all need to look at ourselves and say, "Hey, we can do better."

>> Well, you've done pretty well, and thank you for telling the truth to your constituents and to the American people.

And, Representative Gallagher, I hope you keep doing it, because we need voices that are honest.

And on that, thank you for joining me on "Firing Line."

>> Thank you.

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