One of President Donald Trump’s first actions in his second term was simple and sweeping: pardoning 1,500 people convicted of offenses related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. That single executive action undid years of work and investigation by the FBI, US prosecutors, and one person in particular: Tim Heaphy.
In the first episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new podcast, host Al Letson talks with Heaphy, the lead investigative counsel for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, who’s arguably done more than anyone to piece together what happened that day. His work helped inform related cases that were brought against rioters, Trump administration officials, and even Trump himself.
“I spent my whole career as a lawyer,” Heaphy says, “and I’ve always believed that accountability is essential to democracy. That when people violate community standards, violate laws—laws like you can’t interfere with an official proceeding, you can’t assault police officers—that there are consequences.” Heaphy, who investigated the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, also draws striking similarities between that event and the insurrection at the Capitol.
Find this episode of More to the Story in the Reveal feed on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app. And be sure you click follow so you don’t miss a single episode.
Credits
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producers: Nikki Frick, Kate Howard and Artis Curiskis | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Dig Deeper
Read: Trump Frees Violent January 6 Attackers (Mother Jones)
Read: Trump’s January 6 Pardons Unleash Legal Chaos (Mother Jones)
Read: Harbingers: What January 6 and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy (Penguin Random House)
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Speaker 1: | We storming the Capitol. |
| Speaker 2: | One house. One house. |
| Speaker 3: | This week. The January 6th Committee finally released its full 845-page report. |
| Tim Heaphy: | I was the General Counsel at UVA, and I took a leave of absence to go run the January 6th investigation. |
| Donald Trump: | So this is January 6th, and these are the hostages. Approximately 1,500 for a pardon? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yes. |
| Donald Trump: | Full pardon. |
| Tim Heaphy: | Not during our investigation or during the time I wrote this book did I think that I would be getting questions about a mass pardon of those defendants and an attempt to change the narrative about January 6th. |
| Al Letson: | Tim Heaphy led the investigation into the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, and it wasn’t without personal cost. Coming up, I talk with Tim about investigating political violence and what it feels like when your contribution to history is being rewritten. |
| This is the first episode of our new show, More to the Story, with me, Al Letson. And I don’t need to tell you, 2025 has been a year. And it’s only March, right? But we made it this far, and from now on we’re going to take it one week at a time. And I’m going to introduce you to people who can help us pierce through the noise and make sense of what’s happening around us. | |
| From the moment he took office, President Trump has set the tone for his second term. One of the first things he did was grant clemency to 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, basically reversing years of work by the FBI to identify the attackers and hold them to account. Tim Heaphy has spent years investigating what happened that day. Tim was the Chief Investigative Counsel for the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. Before that, he oversaw the independent investigation of the violence surrounding the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. His book Harbingers: What January 6th and Charlottesville Reveal About the Rising Threats to American Democracy, is out now and examines what he learned. Tim, I’m so glad to have you here. How are you doing? | |
| Tim Heaphy: | I’m well, Al. Thank you. Good to meet you. |
| Al Letson: | When that insurrection happened, and we all watched it on TV, it feels like where we are right now, there has been a press to rewrite history and change the very nature of the things that I witnessed with my own eyes. I saw what was happening there. And now I’m being told that they were patriots and this was a peaceful thing. And according to President Trump, it was all about love. Now, when you were writing this book, did you ever think that this could happen, this rewriting of history? |
| Tim Heaphy: | No, absolutely not. Look, I’ve spent my whole career as a lawyer believing in and actually contributing to the rule of law. And I’ve always believed that accountability is essential to democracy; that when people violate community standards, violate laws, laws like, you can’t interfere with an official proceeding. You can’t assault police officers, that there are consequences. So no, not during our investigation or during the time I wrote this book did I think that I would be getting questions about a mass pardon of those defendants and an attempt to change the narrative about January 6th. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So before leaving office, President Biden issued preemptive pardons for members of the January 6th Congressional Committee like Liz Cheney and Jamie Raskin. As the lead investigator, do you worry about being targeted by Trump? |
| Tim Heaphy: | So the pardon did extend to us as well, the staff. So I was preemptively pardoned as part of that order as well. I never worried about culpability or the prospect of any criminal charge, Al, because that still requires facts and there are no facts. |
| I do think what’s likely is that there will be investigations, and the pardon doesn’t prevent that, particularly from Congress. I think there will be questions asked by congressional committees about the Select Committee, and I could very well be asked to provide information to them. I don’t know that it helps them or forwards any narrative that they’re trying to develop, but I could obviously be asked to answer questions and provide information. So that’s more of a distraction, frankly. And I think it’s meant to be intimidating, but I don’t worry at all about having any kind of exposure or vulnerability because again, there’s no facts that would give rise to that. | |
| Al Letson: | So you were the lead investigator for both the Unite the Right rally, which happened in Charlottesville in 2017 and the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol in 2021. You have ties to both Charlottesville and D.C. How did these events make you feel, and why did you write this book? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Both events made me feel disillusioned, discouraged. I live in Charlottesville and have spent the last 20 years raising my family here. And when we were subject to that awful racist invasion, it was disconcerting. It made me question my community. Similarly, on January 6th when I saw people attacking the seat of democracy, it’s horribly disillusioning. I’ve been fortunate that in both events I’ve had a chance to be part of the healing, part of the understanding first, which I think is a precondition to healing, trying to just sketch out a credible narrative of what occurred. So I feel fortunate in some ways that I’ve had that outlet, but the bottom line is they’re both, these spasms of violence reveal a much deeper division within our country, and that’s why I felt compelled to write the book. I wanted to develop that and help people recognize it. |
| Al Letson: | Before Charlottesville happened, I remember having an interview with a gentleman who had been studying terrorist threats in America. And a part of his study that was presented to Congress was that the number one threat as far as terrorism is concerned is white supremacy in the United States. And he was shut down. Nobody wanted to talk about it and hear about it. All they wanted to hear is that the number one terroristic threat where from Jihadists. And it feels to me that that story tells a story about America, in the sense that we never want to think or talk about white supremacy and what happens when people get radicalized by it. We never want to think that the person that we should be most worried about is not somebody who’s from the Middle East, but it’s the white guy who’s our neighbor that may have really different views on America than we do and could be violent. And the numbers show us that that’s more likely. |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah, absolutely. That is a hundred percent correct. Your interview with the law enforcement official demonstrates why it’s so important that our law enforcement apparatus should be apolitical and should not be guided by any sort of political or ideological agenda, but rather should be pursuing facts. And if intelligence, if law enforcement investigations are revealing an increasing threat from angry white men, then we need to pay attention to that. |
| One of the things that I write in this book is that a commonality between Charlottesville and the attack on the Capitol was kind of a surprisingly passive law enforcement response. These were not intelligence failures. There was ample warning before each event of the prospect of violence. They were not resource failures. There were plenty of officers and units from different agencies available before each event. Nonetheless, we had this kind of surprisingly passive pre-positioned approach to each event. | |
| And there are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is race. The essence of policing, the essence of law enforcement is the assessment of danger, of threats; whether that’s an officer deciding to pull over a vehicle or intelligence informing approach to events. It’s essentially sort of, “How dangerous is this situation before us?” | |
| And that’s an inherently subjective endeavor. And unfortunately, I think is that implicit bias seeps into that and it affects our assessment of danger. I could not help but notice the striking difference between how law enforcement prepared for the sort of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a much more heavy-handed militaristic approach, versus a very passive approach when we are in Charlottesville or January 6th, and it’s angry middle-aged white men. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. I would add to that another wrinkle as well, though. I think that when you talk to a lot of people in the Black community, I see this online all the time. Their lived experience would say that law enforcement not only has an affinity to the white supremacists, but a lot of them are actual participants in it. And as a journalist, I can say that we have done stories about this where we found several people who were a part of these organizations, these white supremacist organizations, and they were working in law enforcement. We found people that were a part of these organizations and they were in the military. And so, I think from the Black community’s perspective, it’s like who is going to protect us when the people who are supposed to be protecting us are actually playing undercover for the other team? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah. Really striking to me when I was doing the Charlottesville investigation how I would in the morning talk to someone from a relatively privileged affluent background, very surprised at how the police were unable to protect the community and sort of wrote it off to a perfect storm of surprising conditions. And then, later in the day I would talk to someone from a different part of town who would say, “Well, of course, what’d you expect? The police aren’t here for us on a regular Saturday, let alone a big event like this. They don’t protect and serve. They’re not there for us.” So that schism in terms of lived experience with law enforcement is real. |
| I will say though, I have to push back a little bit on this notion that law enforcement is widely infected with racism. I did not find that in either the officers with whom I spoke in Charlottesville or at the Capitol. What I found rather was extreme disappointment in their command staff that they were not put in a position to protect. | |
| Al Letson: | So you were hired by the city of Charlottesville to an independent review of what went wrong. What kind of resistance did you encounter, and what were your general findings of the Heaphy Report? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah. Some resistance in surprising corners. I thought the resistance would largely come from law enforcement. Frankly, it did not. Law enforcement, the line men and women with whom I spoke were very self-critical or self-critical of their organizations and very open with me about the mistakes. I thought our report would be embraced by anti-racist progressive communities, and it was not. They were very skeptical of the process because I was hired by the city, and they therefore felt like it would not be an honest reckoning. And I was a former prosecutor and a lot of them were very suspicious of that experience because of their skepticism about the criminal justice system. |
| I also got a lot of resistance from state government. I was hired by the city of Charlottesville and really needed information from state authorities, the state police, the State Department of Emergency Management. And they were very resistant to cooperating with this local effort. That was surprising to me as well. Despite that, we got enough buy-in and participation, so I don’t feel like it ultimately handicapped our findings because we were able to get a 360 view of these events. | |
| And look, our report was extremely critical of our own client. The law enforcement plan was horribly misconceived and resulted in a failure to protect both public safety and free speech, neither were protected. It was very critical of the lack of coordination between the state and local authority. So it was kind of a resoundingly negative portrayal of how lots of different stakeholders prepared for the event. And to their credit, to the leaders of the city of Charlottesville, they published it without redaction despite its being critical of them. And again, I think that’s crucial. If we collectively are going to understand these horrific events, the first step to me is truth and is fact and is understanding honestly what happened. | |
| Al Letson: | Thinking back to that time, I will never forget the images of white guys, a lot of them dressed in khakis, which was strange, holding these tiki torches and surrounding a church. And I actually spoke to one of the people that were in that church, and they were completely terrified. |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah. |
| Al Letson: | There was a lot of clergy in there, and they were terrified. They thought that this was it, that they were going to die there. And the thing that I kept thinking about was why wasn’t law enforcement there? And did they see what these white guys were doing with these tiki torches as them exercising their First Amendment right? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah. And what we found was that law enforcement at UVA and in the other agencies did look at this as essentially a free speech event, and did not believe that they could interrupt it until violence occurred. They stood back, and frankly, the UVA police resisted multiple offers of mutual aid until there was actual violence. So instead of pre-positioning based on the intelligence, not to restrict speech, but to protect safety, they just sort of stood back and waited for their torches to be literally used as weapons, which they were. And then, they rushed in and declared the event unlawful and dispersed. |
| Insufficient preparation, the intelligence was screaming the potential for violence. Yet again, they said adherence to free speech and going back to the implicit bias, this sort of failure to fully imagine that these angry white guys would actually be aggressive and violent was a fatal flaw. And it led to a plan that left a lot of people feeling vulnerable and some people directly assaulted and hurt by this activity that was way beyond speech. It wasn’t just First Amendment speech, it was conduct and it was menacing and it was criminal. | |
| Al Letson: | So a few years later, you’re tapped to lead the bipartisan House Committee to investigate January 6th. Now, what was the process like to develop an 845-page report? And what were your core findings? |
| Tim Heaphy: | So the first task when I was hired to be the Chief Investigative Counsel to the Select Committee was to define our scope. The House resolution that created the Select Committee was not very helpful. So the first task was how do we define we, the committee, define our scope? And we came up with this kind of five team structure. Each team had kind of a separate subject matter, even if they overlap. And we had to work very closely together over the course of the investigation to ensure that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. |
| And then, the findings, you asked me what we found. We found that essentially what happened was that there was an intentional multi-part plan by the President and his co-conspirators to disrupt the joint session and prevent the transfer of power. It started with lawsuits, filing lawsuits around the country, 62 lawsuits challenging election results, all of which were unsuccessful. | |
| It pivoted to pressure on state officials to do recounts or to not certify electors, and then generate these fake elector certificates, despite the outcome in each state that showed that President-elect Biden had won. The pressure shifted to the Justice Department to take action, again without foundation, onto the Vice President to essentially reject these certified slates of electors. And none of that worked. | |
| And the final letter to poll was launching this angry mob of Trump supporters who mistakenly but sincerely believed the election was stolen at the Capitol during the count to disrupt it. So our findings were that this was a criminal conspiracy led by President Trump to disrupt the joint session. And we actually made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice at the end of our work laying out those findings and that evidence. | |
| Al Letson: | Is it fair to say that their plan actually worked? |
| Tim Heaphy: | It didn’t work in the short term because they did not ultimately prevent the transfer of power. It did ensue that President Biden was ultimately inaugurated. So I don’t think it worked, and I don’t think historically it will be seen as a victory. I think while there wasn’t legal or even political consequence as a result, I think there are broader factors that explain that. And I really think that the long-term view here is that this was an insurrection, and that I hope that we collectively learn from it and are more prepared for it going forward. |
| Al Letson: | Yes, but I would also say that we are watching in the early days of this Trump 2.0 administration that he is systematically trying to disconnect American citizens from its actual past by framing them as patriots. I saw a clip of him and he was basically saying that the January 6th people were people who were victimized by their government, that their government did them wrong. And so, a lot of the American public isn’t hearing the truth. And so, if they don’t hear the truth and they keep hearing from the President this rewriting of history, even though they saw it, they’re still buying into it. They obviously buy into it because they elected him back into the White House. |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yes, some absolutely. Look, it’s hard for me to tell how large of a contingent that crowd that you describe is. You’re exactly right. There are a lot of people in this country who think that they are patriots, that believe that it was, well, a handful of bad actors, but by and large a day of love and harmony and celebration. |
| I don’t interpret the election results to be a complete acceptance of that view. I think there are a lot of people, and this is a little bit off-topic from January 6th. | |
| Al Letson: | Sure. |
| Tim Heaphy: | But there are a lot of people in this country that believe that he’s responsible for the attack on the Capitol, but voted for him anyway. If I had to explain the results, I think that there’s a broad undercurrent in this country of discontent with institutions, with government in particular, and that is right and left and all over the place. It’s people of color, it’s suburban moms. It is a broader and deeper coalition or constellation of people. And I think, I’ve talked to some of them, that there are people that are like, “Yep, he’s responsible for January 6th, but at least he’s going to shake things up. At least he’s going to do some things that have the potential to change a system that is no longer working for people like me.” |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, Tim discovers the similarities between the Unite the Right rally and January 6th. |
| Tim Heaphy: | So to me, the thing that connects these two is that they’re both spasms of extreme anger at institutions. |
| Al Letson: | There’s a lot more to talk about with Tim, but before we do that, I want to remind you there is a really easy way you can keep up with all the important work we’re doing here at Reveal. You can sign up for our free newsletter. Just go to RevealNews.org/newsletter to receive your weekly email reminding you all about our good reporting. We have to stay connected now more than ever. Okay, so don’t go anywhere. There’s more to the story. |
| It’s More to the Story. I’m Al Letson, here with January 6th Lead Investigator Tim Heaphy. Tim, can we talk about the similarities between Charlottesville and January 6th? | |
| Tim Heaphy: | Sure. |
| Al Letson: | What do you see as the overlap between the two? |
| Tim Heaphy: | So they both started with these core impetus events. In Charlottesville, it was Civil War statues. We were having a discussion in this community about whether or not we should keep up the statues to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, despite the fact that many people in our community saw them as racist. And that was the original reason why so many of these alt-right groups chose Charlottesville as a forum to come together and be the forum for their white supremacist ideology, their belief that somehow government was no longer protecting that white supremacy. |
| But it quickly metastasized, Al, beyond statues to a broader forum for people that were angry at government on this issue, this sense that white men were being replaced or their primacy was being diminished. So it wasn’t any longer about the statues, it was a much broader forum for people that were just angry. | |
| Similarly, January 6th started with a discussion about the election. There were a lot of people there that thought that the election was riddled with fraud and that we were about to certify an election that was stolen. But there are other people there that were mad about Covid restrictions or some of the same people that were in Charlottesville that believed that the government is no longer protecting their historic white supremacy. So it too became from the core impetus of a metastasized consolation of grievance and anger at institutions. | |
| So to me, the thing that connects these two is that they’re both spasms of extreme anger at institutions. It’s government, it’s law enforcement, it’s media, it’s higher education, it’s even science, right? There’s so much of this, “These institutions no longer work for me.” And that reveals the core divide in America. In my view, it’s not left versus right anymore. It’s insiders versus outsiders. It’s people who believe in and have invested in those institutions and people that don’t. So to me, they reveal that, that core division. And that’s really what the book is about. It’s about making that broader point, that we have to zoom out from these spasms of violence to understand what informs them, and that then leads to the solution. | |
| Al Letson: | Who were the groups that were in Charlottesville that also showed up at January 6th? |
| Tim Heaphy: | Yeah, the Proud Boys, the 3% Militia. These are loosely affiliated groups. They’re not always very organized. They’re more sort of monikers or ideologies. But there were a lot of people, both individuals and organizations that were very present in Charlottesville who similarly came to the Capitol. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So I’ve read that FBI agents who worked on the January 6th case have sued the DOJ for fear of retaliation, because the DOJ demanded details about more than 5,000 FBI employees who worked on the case. The DOJ has also removed the searchable data of the January 6th participants from the website. How does that make you feel? |
| Tim Heaphy: | It’s frustrating. Again, people should not be fired, should not have adverse personnel action for doing their jobs, for following the facts wherever they lead. There were a lot of men and women at the FBI who were tasked with investigating all of these individuals that were present at the Capitol or who informed those events. And for them now to have their names somehow made public and subject to online or direct threats, that unfortunately has happened, to them having adverse personnel actions like getting fired. The Department of Justice fired young prosecutors for no other reason than that they worked on the January 6th prosecutions. That’s outrageous, and I think it’s against the law. It’s against the civil service protections for those individuals. But it’s certainly against the historic independence of the Justice Department. For years, Republican or Democratic administrations, the FBI, the AUSAs, the Assistant US attorneys who work at Justice have been able to pursue their work free from political influence. And if that’s no longer the case, then that is a really, really problematic development. |
| Al Letson: | As we watch the Trump administration take hold of various departments, it feels like he’s trying to dismantle law enforcement and morph it into his own personal force. |
| Tim Heaphy: | It is shocking and horrific if that’s the case. Again, the law enforcement apparatus in the federal government and the men and women in the State Department who administer our diplomacy and our foreign aid, and the men and women in uniform in our military have historically been able to pursue functions separate from politics. We heard lots of examples over the course of the Jan 6th investigation where the President would propose using the military or asking the Department of Justice to do things that he believed were in his political interest. And the leaders of those organizations pushed back and said, “No, sir, we can’t do that. We can’t put active duty troops on the streets of an American city just because there’s protest activity.” There were guardrails that pushed back. |
| My fear is that in this administration, in part because of that pushback, there won’t be those guardrails; that the people that are going to be leading those organizations will not be adherents to their history and their independence, but will rather have gotten those jobs because of their loyalty to the President and therefore willing to use those agencies and the people in those agencies for purposes that are more political or favorable to the President. And that’s a real threat to the fabric of democracy. | |
| Al Letson: | It is scary to think about during the George Floyd protests, I remember reading a report that the protests that took place in D.C. that he wanted to send troops out there. And the idea that if no one told him no, and those troops had gone out there, it just feels like the likelihood of somebody dying goes up exponentially. |
| Tim Heaphy: | Absolutely. Look, he repeatedly asked about invocation of the Insurrection Act. There’s a provision of law that gives the President the power to invoke the Insurrection Act. If there’s a domestic disturbance that rises to the level of an insurrection, then he can deploy active duty troops, the 82nd Airborne, onto the streets. And when he raised that, it was the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper and the Attorney General, Bill Barr, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, who said, “No. There is not a sufficient predicate. This is not an insurrection. This is protest activity. This is protected speech that is characteristically American. And we have law enforcement who are trained to be prepared to respond and police mass demonstration events. This is nowhere close to an insurrection that gives you the legal basis to invoke that act and put active duty troops on the street.” And he capitulated and did not do that. But again, there were strong voices of people that he and himself appointed that pushed back. I wonder where those voices are in the second Trump administration? |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So you were let go from your job as General Counsel at UVA when you took a leave to head the January 6th Commission. And you expected to go back. Why do you think you weren’t welcomed back? |
| Tim Heaphy: | So there was an election that intervened. I was the General Counsel at UVA, and I took a leave of absence to go run the January 6th investigation that was granted to me by the then Attorney General, the Democrat, Mark Herring. The weird Relic in Virginia law is that the chief lawyers for the public universities are actual assistant attorneys general and are hired and fired by the Attorney General, not by the president and the board of the university; which I think is actually an inherent conflict of interest, but that’s the law. So then, when Mark Herring was defeated and a Republican Attorney General, Jason Miyares was elected, literally on his first day in office, I got an email saying that I was relieved from my service in the AG’s office, even though I was on leave to run the January 6th investigation. |
| My client, the university pushed back strongly. “We want very much to keep our General Counsel. He’s doing a good job, and when he finishes this service, we want him back.” And they said, “Nope. It’s our prerogative. We can appoint whomever we want.” And given my client’s reaction, I think the only answer that I can find for the reason for this was that I was investigating the former President, and a conservative Republican Attorney General could not abide someone on his staff doing that. So I’ve been myself a victim of a politicization of a position that had previously not been political, which was horribly disappointing and unfair despite the fact that it was technically legal. | |
| Al Letson: | So I’m going to ask you a little bit of a hard question, and that is to look into your crystal ball and with all the factors that are happening around us, i.e., The President beginning to break down some of our institutions and filling those roles with people who seem loyal to him and not necessarily to the people of America or to the Constitution. We’re seeing the rewriting of history when we talk about January 6th. And also a lot of those people that were arrested, people like the Proud Boys, are now out in the world. How do you think this is all going to come to a head? |
| Tim Heaphy: | I make the point in the book that the bigger threat to democracy is not anger, it’s apathy. And there are too many people in my view who just don’t participate, and that gives outsized power to people who don’t have the common good as their primary goal, but some different, more nefarious motivation. My hope is that what happens over the next four years is going to encourage participation. It’s going to create a more powerful backlash and resistance and people paying attention and people being willing to get involved in ways that they haven’t. That creates a more powerful backlash and ultimately brings us back into even a better place informed by the hard lessons. |
| Dr. King and President Obama like to say, “The arc of history bends toward justice. It may be jagged, it may go backwards at times, but then overall, we move forward toward a better place.” And my hope is that when we see things like mass deportations or the dismantling of agencies or the firing of people for no reason other than politics, people get mad and people raise their hands and people participate. They participate in civic life, they educate themselves, they engage with each other, and ultimately they vote in two years and in four years. | |
| So maybe this overreach, which I think at times is a clear legal overreach, prompts a more powerful backlash. We’ve got to endure in the short term. There’s a risk that those guardrails don’t hold. But thankfully judges, and there are some folks in the career civil service that’ll push back, those guardrails hold. Then the powerful backlash will save us and will get us to a better place. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. The pendulum of America is exhausting, because I feel like what you’re talking about with overreach and then correction, and when that comes back down, if history proves out to be what we’ve seen, that overreach will cause the pendulum to swing the other way pretty hard as well. |
| Tim Heaphy: | That’s right. But we’ve got to hold on in the short-term. I don’t mean to minimize the damage that can be done in the short-term, that’s a long-term perspective, but day-to-day where people are losing their jobs or people are being targeted for retributive action, then I don’t want to minimize that. We’ve got to day-to-day pay attention and push back. But long-term, I think there could be a positive here. If it gets more people to get off the couch and raise their hand and plug in. If everybody in America participates, Al. I feel like democracy is going to be fine, but not everybody does, and that’s the bigger threat that we face than anger. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. Tim Heaphy, thank you so much for coming in and talking to me today. |
| Tim Heaphy: | It’s been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. |
| Al Letson: | Tim Heaphy is the author of Harbingers: What January 6th and Charlottesville Reveal About Rising Threats to American Democracy. We reached out to Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares to ask why he fired Tim Heaphy from his position at UVA, but did not hear back. |
| I’m hoping you liked our first episode. I’m guessing you did. You got all the way to the end. And since you liked it, I think you’d also like the Reveal episode Viral Lies, where we trace the origin of Stop the Steal. Hint, it was way earlier than 2020. We’ll put a link for you in our show notes. And don’t forget to check out our most recent episode of Reveal because it’s our 10th anniversary show. That’s right. Reveal is celebrating 10 years of bringing you the best investigative journalism. Remember, we can’t do it without your support. Go to reveal news.org to find out how you can keep us going for another 10. And thank you. | |
| This episode was produced by Josh Sanborn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando, my man, Arruda and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson. And you know what? Why don’t we do this again next week? This is More to the Story. |