A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
With the presidential election just a week and a half away, both candidates keep talking about the last one and what happened right after it. But how Vice President Harris and former President Trump describe January 6 could not be more different.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DONALD TRUMP: Some of those people went down to the Capitol. I said peacefully and patriotically, nothing done wrong.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: He sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: But that was a day of love.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HARRIS: He fanned the flames.
MARTÍNEZ: Nearly four years later, the nation is still coming to terms with what happened at the storming of the Capitol and who participated. An NPR investigation shows nearly 1 in 5 people arrested in connection with the attack have military service records. One of them was Sergeant Josh Abate, who followed the crowd along with two fellow Marines, Sergeant Dodge Hellonen and Corporal Micah Comer. NPR's Tom Bowman and Lauren Hodges followed the story for a new podcast with our colleagues at Embedded. Here's a snippet.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "EMBEDDED: A GOOD GUY")
LAUREN HODGES, BYLINE: Josh sat down with both of us for hours, talked about how he ended up in the Capitol. As the pandemic was raging - tens of thousands of Americans had died at this point - Josh was stuck at Marine Base Quantico watching Fox News. The election had just wrapped up, and he was buying into the claims on conservative media outlets that Joe Biden's victory had been fraudulent.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Now, Josh claims he just went to D.C. on January 6 to hear Trump speak and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Capitol attack. He describes a very different scene than what Lauren and I saw out there that day. He says there was no violence, no aggression. They just walked in, strolled around the Capitol, took pictures. That just didn't sound right to us. No chanting, no big crowds, we asked. Nope. I have nothing to hide, Josh told us. He even invited us back for a second interview, which only made us more suspicious.
And you said you wanted to add a few things?
JOSH ABATE: Yeah. I got a couple of bullet points.
BOWMAN: OK.
HODGES: When we sat down, he handed me this one sheet of paper. It was part of the FBI's official statement of facts, and he's like, look, this is all they've got on me.
ABATE: Abate appears in the crowd, and then he walks. And it just - it talks about how we walk and walk and walk and walk and walk. And nothing in their summary of our actions is actually, you know, spooky or violent or scary.
HODGES: He kept using the word humorous.
ABATE: I thought it was humorous that they in their summary of me, like, my time in the Capitol building, that's all they could really sum it up to, was walking.
HODGES: And then I looked at the bottom of the page, and it says, like, one of 45.
BOWMAN: But there's more to the story than just some missing pages. There's also video evidence.
HODGES: The FBI investigation into Josh relied on these screenshots in the Capitol that mostly came from surveillance footage inside. We didn't have access to that. But a few weeks after we talked to Josh, we got an unexpected assist. House Republicans started dropping some 5,000 hours of security camera footage from January 6 on a public video platform. The security footage is silent, so we're going to talk you through it.
BOWMAN: Seven minutes after the doors and windows to the hallway are breached, Josh walks in with Hellonen and Comer.
HODGES: They slowly make their way to the front of this crowd about 20 feet away from the door to the House Chamber. And at one point, Josh cups his hands around his mouth. And when you watch the video, it's pretty clear he's chanting, stop the steal, stop the steal.
BOWMAN: At another point, Josh is holding a Don't Tread On Me flag, just before tear gas starts to fill the space.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HODGES: At that point, Josh and his friends leave that hallway and end up in the Capitol Rotunda in a huge crowd. They help a guy try to put a MAGA hat on a statue. And Josh is the one who finally gets it up there by actually climbing the statue.
BOWMAN: When Josh admitted to putting a hat on a statue, he told us he didn't remember which statue it was, but Lauren and I have seen this bust up close. In shiny gold lettering, it reads...
HODGES: Martin Luther King Jr.
BOWMAN: It's hard to miss.
HODGES: It's only when the police - in riot gear, no less - form a line and start to push everyone out that Josh, along with Hellonen and Comer, are finally forced to leave the Rotunda.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
HODGES: It's clear that the video doesn't match up with Josh's story. Josh said he didn't see any violence. It was peaceful. He didn't do anything but walk around. That's just not true.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR's Lauren Hodges and Tom Bowman. Their new podcast with Embedded called A Good Guy is out now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
