Transcript of Does the Military Have an Extremism Problem?

I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday, we do something special, going beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. Tomorrow marks four years since the attack on the US Capitol as Congress attempted to certify President Joe Biden's win in the 2020 election. On January 6, 2021, then President Donald Trump, now President-elect once again, held a rally to to dispute the election results, and then thousands of people charged into the Capitol. Many were chanting, Stop to steal. Some broke windows and damaged property. Others called for the hanging of public officials like then Vice President, Mike Prince, and then Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. When all was said and done, four people died. 140 law enforcement officers were wounded, and there was nearly $3 million worth of damage. And the FBI soon opened what would become its biggest criminal investigation in history. And as the arrest began, something became clear. There were a lot of people with military ties in the capital that day. It's a fact that continues to have a ripple effect for the Pentagon, especially now on the eve of another transfer of presidential power, and as Trump continues to set up the cabinet for his second administration.

Trump recently said that he might pardon some people who were convicted for crimes on January sixth, on his first day in office. Today on the show, we want to dig into the continued legacy of January sixth, 2021. Does the military have a problem with political extremism in the ranks? And what does that mean with Trump returning as Commander-in-Chief? Npr's Pentagon Correspondent Tom Bowman and producer Lauren Hodges had been asking themselves those questions. Late last year, they released a new investigation with NPR's Embedded podcast called A Good Guy, about an active duty Marine who participated in the Capitol riot. My conversation about extremism in the military with Tom and Lauren after the break.

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We recorded this conversation before the two acts of violence involving trucks on New Year's Day. A pickup truck carrying an ISIS flag intentionally driven to a crowd of pedestrians in New Orleans, which killed more than a dozen people, and a Tesla Cybertruck filled with fuel canisters and fireworks that erupted in front of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, injuring passers by. Both suspects died as well. Since then, law enforcement has identified the two suspects as retired and active duty service members in the army, respectively, and are investigating the motives for both attacks. Tom and Lauren, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Hey there.

I have a lot of questions about this investigation and about the military during the new Trump administration, the upcoming Trump administration. But you I want to go back to January sixth, 2021. I think most of us watched the attack on the Capitol live on TV. I was in the dentist and started seeing reports that the barriers were being broken. And then after I got out of the dentist appointment, I realized, oh, shoot, this is of another level. But you were both there. You were on the grounds.

Yeah. I was at the Capitol when that huge crowd that Trump sent over started to arrive and pressing in from all sides. It was thousands of people. I watched them eventually break through police barriers and rush up the Capitol steps. I asked one man in the crowd nearby, what do you want to see happen if you get in?

The people in this house who stole this lection from us hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see so it never It happens again.

That's what needs to happen.

There were clearly people committing violence or wanting to see violence, and there were hundreds encouraging it, pushing it forward. We're going off to steal.

We're going off to steal.

Well, hundreds more, they were just watching this all take place. There were people of all sorts of motivations. We should say not everyone destroyed property or was physically violent, but most of them had one thing in common, Nayesha. They believe Donald Trump's lie that the election was stolen.

Another thing that a couple of hundred of them had in common was military ties, both veteran and active duty.

Wow. I mean, hearing that tape about hanging them from gallows, I think some of that seems to be like memory white, like the violet rhetoric at that time. But then also that some of these people had military ties. Tom, you've covered the military for decades. You've been embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was it surprising to you to learn that some of these people attacking the capital were actually people in the military who are supposed to be protecting the US?

It really wasn't much of a surprise. I know that militias and far-right groups like the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, they often target veterans for recruitment, in large part because of their military training. But again, not everyone there was part of those groups or committing violence. Earlier in the day, as I was walking through the crowds, I noticed there were a number of people with law enforcement or military ties. I saw some flags with a Marine insignia in a ballcap or a sweatshirt with the Marines EGLE globe and Anchor emblem.

Yeah, I saw a lot of that, too. You know, afterwards, after this day, Tom and I started following the FBI's arrest announcements to see if there really were as many military folks out there that remember seeing. Our colleagues at NPR started tracking it, too. An NPR analysis found that of the 1,500 arrested, some 200 had military experience. That is roughly 13%, about double what you would see with the general population.

We wanted to know more. We reached out to Michael Jensen. He's a researcher at the University of Maryland, and he studies domestic terrorism. He found that nearly every branch of the military was represented at the Capitol that day. It is so shocking when somebody that's taken an oath to protect the country is doing something to harm it. Most of the people with military ties that day were veterans, and one of them you may have heard of who Republican politicians have talked about a lot It's Ashley Babbit. She was shot and killed by a capital police officer as she lunged through a shattered window near the house floor. Babbit was an Air Force veteran.

Some of these people were veterans, right? Right. But were there any active duty military members there on January sixth?

Yeah. According to Jensen, at least 24 of them were active duty across the various branches and the reserves. The branch with the biggest number of participants in relation to its size was the Marine Corps.

The Marines. Do we know why they were so represented or overrepresented on January sixth?

It's hard to say. We asked a lot of people that question Some Marines told us there's a sense the Marines tend to be pretty traditional, more physically aggressive, lean more politically conservative than maybe some of the other branches.

You mentioned you talked to that researcher. What did he think about all this?

The researcher, Michael Jensen, wasn't that surprised. He's been tracking instances of political violence in the military going back 35 years to 1990. In fact, there's been more than 700 documented cases, stuff like starting physical altercations at protests, plotting violence against public figures. Those cases have been rising year after year, leading up to January sixth. As for the Marines, the Marine Corps has the second most cases of former or current members who are extremists, second only to the Army, which is the largest branch. This despite the Marines being the smallest fighting force.

Jensen told us Historically, the Marines don't open very many investigations into these cases. They have a disproportionately large problem with extremism, but they're doing the least amount of investigations.

In your podcast series, A Good guy that you did with NPRs Embedded, you look at the case of one active duty Marine who was stationed at Quantico at the time, and I guess he was there on January sixth?

Yeah. His name is Joshua Bate, Sergeant Joshua Bate.

He's a third-generation Marine and really a high-achieving one. He was promoted to Sergeant early. He has a Navy Commendation Medal, and he got an internship offer from the National Security Agency to do intelligence work.

On January sixth, 2021, he is 20 years old when he says a couple of other active duty Marines at Quantico base invite him to the Stop the Steel Rally.

They see this crowd surging toward the Capitol and decide to join it. I asked Josh why. So you thought it was okay to be in the building?

Well, yeah, because we walked right in.

We didn't see any signs that said, Do not enter, no trespassing. As soon as we walked to the door of the Capitol building, there were two At least the officer stand right across from the door. I figured if we weren't supposed to be there, they would have told us to get out. Of course, we know from being there that the scene wasn't as calm as Josh just described.

No, not at all. We combed through some security footage of Josh and his friends in the capital. They're in there for about an hour altogether, and they are definitely participating in some rowdy crowds. You can see them taking turns, holding a Don't Tread on Me flag. Josh is chanting what looks like Stop the Steel.

Most notably, the three of them help someone else put a MAGA hat on a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. In the Capitol Rotunda, and they take a picture of it.

I don't know what to say about that. I mean, because Martin Luther King very famously died from political violence. That was what a scene to partake in. But Josh and his friends, they're actually active duty Marines So they take an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. How would you characterize what they were doing at the Capitol that day? How does this factor into the idea of political extremism? Is Josh and what he was doing an extremist activity?

It's a really hard question to answer. We spoke with Josh for hours on two occasions, and he cops up to the statue thing, but really down plays or even sometimes denies everything else he did that day. We asked him that same question, How do you see yourself? Were you a protester or an extremist? I would say the line that crosses you from just a peaceful protester just looking around, walking around, and extremist is insinuating violence, being associated with one of the extremist groups.

Once you compromise your headroom far enough to hurt someone or hurt the history behind the building, I think that's what draws that line.

It seems like this guy is trying to carve out this neat little box for as a peaceful protester. It felt like that's why he wanted to talk to us that day.

Maybe that's true. After all, he wasn't beating up cops or breaking off table legs like some of the other people who were there.

The main issue for Josh here is that what he told us did not match what we saw on the cameras. We were wondering, even if he didn't directly hit anyone or break something, did he still engage in extremist activity? After all, this whole day was an act of violence.

That question is what a lot of other people were wrestling with, too. People all the way up to the highest levels of the Pentagon.

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We're back with the Sunday story. Tom and Lauren, you've been looking at political extremism in the military since January sixth. You're seeing all these announcements of arrest, and there were people with military ties among the people being arrested. I would imagine that military leadership is also seeing this in the news. What is their response, or what are they thinking seeing some of the people in their ranks being arrested?

Well, it didn't take long at all for the military to recognize a potential problem in the ranks. President Biden's pick for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, was sworn in just a couple of weeks after January 6.

Yeah. Let us play you an excerpt from our two-part podcast series, A Good Guy, About What Happened Next. It really helps color it all in. At Austin's confirmation hearing, he didn't mention the assault on the Capitol directly, but he said he was really concerned about internal threats. The job of the Department of Defense is to keep America safe from our enemies, but we can't do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks. One of the first things he did was to remind everyone in uniform about their oath.

Austin came up with a plan. It started with something called a stand down. A stand down in military speak is, Okay, we're going to stop what we're doing. We're just going to have a training day to remind services members about what they can't do while on active duty. Dissident activities, overtly political activities, extremist activities. The reactions coming out of these training sessions and from senior officials, they were mixed.

What we were hearing on the ground from units was that there was just a lot of confusion.

Many service members didn't understand what extremism even means.

Well, what is extremism? My extremism may not be your extremism.

That's Bishop Garrison, a West Point grad, an Iraq army vet, and a lawyer. Austin tapped him to answer this huge question for the military. How do you define extremism? I'd love to actually get your personal opinion or definition of extremism.

You, me, and all the joint chiefs would love to have a clean definition of it. The problem is the definition is it depends. It's one of those things where you know it when you see it.

Garrison quickly became the guy that the defense secretary was counting on to to figure out just how big of a problem extremism in the ranks really is. Garrison worked a really long time to come up with a definition. As complicated as the work was, it ultimately led him to a pretty simple two-part test.

It almost has to be like a rubric. You can't make for every instance of what may or may not be extremist activity. It really depends on the situation and the individual.

One, does the person advocate for extremist ideology?

It couldn't just be that you went and read a thing because you could be a historian. You're reading Meinkopf because you want to know more about World War II and Hitler.

Two, did they act upon that ideology?

You have an activity that may not in and of itself be prohibited or be criminal, but it leans in that direction. It gives the commander an opportunity to say, Wait, what is this about?

This isn't about your political views. It's all about your actions. It's inciting violence. It's taking part in violence.

Unlawful stuff, discriminatory stuff.

Raising money for groups that are anti-immigrant, racist, misogynist.

We're not here to be thought police in any way, shape, or form.

Garrison thought, All right, we nailed this.

Extremist activity, active participation, two things go together.

We wanted to know, based on the definition he was working on, whether Josh's actions in the Capitol qualified as extremist activity. He was up in the crowd, ranting, the police were pushing him back, and he was refusing to move.

But those last two things you mentioned would both be activities. That is something that is prohibited. I would even argue it's always been prohibited.

Garrison's goal was to give Secretary Austin a report with recommendations on countering extremism in the ranks. He knew from the beginning that anything related to extremism could get politicized real quick. The trouble actually began before he even got to put out his report. Back when Garrison was hired to do this work, he was given a title.

Senior Advisors to the Secretary of Defense for Human Capital and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Also known as DEI.

That title was typed out in a memo, a memo which the Pentagon released in the spring of 2021. It's standard stuff, three pages long, announcing that Garrison was forming this team to counter extremism in the ranks. Then?

May 6, I'll never forget the day.

His phone started lighting up. He's becoming a target of attacks by the right wing. We uncovered the ideological veteran chief for the United States military, and that's Bishop Garrison.

Suddenly, his name was all over Fox News, The Daily Caller, Steve Bannon's podcast.

So who is the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man?

Just spend five minutes googling Bishop Garrison.

This is an extremist, Black Lives Matter sympathizer type guy.

They're calling him the Pentagon's Hatchet Man.

A man who believes all, all Trump supporters are racist and extremists.

Because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks. They're using January sixth as the ultimate justification. He's a lunatic. Pay attention to this guy. Keep your head on a swivel. I don't think he's up to any good.

In Garrison, he starts getting these messages on social media.

That included everything from threats against my career, my livelihood, to threats of personal violence.

He was really worried about his wife baby back home.

My wife truly was afraid of like, someone is going to show up on our doorstep with a long guy.

Garrison, he started to feel pretty alone. That's because he says the military were shrugging off these attacks against him.

As one very senior official relayed to me, these types of things are quicksand. You say he's a good guy, next question, and that will go away Because if you fight against it, fight against it, you're going to get pulled more into it. I think not pushing back harder and not fighting for it, just let it breathe more and let it breathe longer. That's what we're even, I think, to some degree today still seeing the remnants of that.

So Bishop Garrison, he comes up with this definition of political extremism, but he starts getting attacked by the right, called a critical race theorist and all this stuff, which definitely he was at the center of this firestorm. What happened to the report that he was supposed to file to Secretary Austin and to his recommendations? What did the military do with that report?

Well, Bishop Garrison's report had all kinds of recommendations recommendations, like conducting an insider threat study, developing trainings. Garrison also emphasized in his report that the military really needed to track cases of political extremism. But Ayesha, those recommendations sat on a shelf for a really long time. It took a really long time for anybody to talk with us about this, too. And believe me, we tried. Eventually, I got to sit down with the top Marine officer, General Eric Smith. He told me he doesn't think the Corps has a problem with extremism either. This is something I've heard over and over across the military that they don't believe there's an extremism problem in the ranks. But to this day, they've never collected data to back that up. It's really hard to say.

Yeah. Well, the researcher, Michael Jensen, we talked to, would disagree that they don't have a problem. When we talked to Bishop Garrison, he was really disappointed that the department didn't really take his work as seriously as he wanted them to.

My biggest fear is that it's going to take some type of a major, massive incident in which people get hurt, if not worse, for the department to actually stop and take action on this.

But even still, the military has taken some measures, mostly just this past year. The Army and the Navy posted new guidelines about participating in political rallies or fundraising for extremist groups, even liking extremists posts on social media. They did put out some guidelines.

The Marines outlined some new reporting instructions, how people can tell the military that something's going on. If a Marine suspects a fellow Marine of extremist activity, they have to report it within one to three days to a senior officer, and that might trigger an investigation.

They're also beginning the process of gathering data to determine how prevalent extremism really is.

Why did it take so long for the military to address political extremism?

Right. Well, to answer that question, I want to go back to Josh Abate's story for a sec because it offers a big clue. Josh, of course, is the Marine sergeant who's case we followed and the one who wound up in the rotunda, putting that MAGA hat on the statue of MLK. The FBI eventually arrested Josh almost two years later, connecting him to some social media posts that one of his friends had made, one of the The two guys that he was with in the capital. In court, Josh gets off with a slap on the wrist, just a couple of hundred hours of community service.

His military record clearly helped him out. The judge was especially impressed by character letters that describe Josh as an exceptional Marine.

Right. Then after his criminal sentencing, Josh faces a retention hearing in the Marine Corps, which is like military HR. It's a panel of other Marines randomly drawn, and they decide whether to keep him in the cour or to discharge him. If they kick him out, they then have to decide if the discharge will be honorable or other than honorable. That second one is a huge red mark. No one wants that on their record.

There's a moment in that hearing that just completely shocked us. Is your portrayal of the events of January sixth positive, negative, or are you indifferent about it? At the beginning of the hearing, Josh's civilian lawyer asked all three of the Marines deciding this case. How do you feel about January sixth? One panelist said he had a negative perception of what transpired, but here's what the other two had to say.

I wasn't there.

I can't say I know that everybody had been So I'm on 10 different about what happened that day.

Depending on what news source you look at, you get a different narrative. At this point, to be honest, tired of hearing that three years later.

I mean, it sounds like a microcosm of the US population at this point. But you have two of these three panelists who are deciding Sergeant Josh Bates' future in the Marine Corps. They're pretty indifferent to January sixth. So ultimately, what did the panel decide?

Well, they voted to keep him in the Marine Corps. As you said, it seems like the perception of January sixth at the time of this hearing, which is almost three years layer had gotten much more lukewarm.

But that's not the end for Josh. The Secretary of the Navy, who also oversees the Marine Corps, has to either endorse the panel's decision to keep Josh, or he can decide to kick Josh out. But it's been more than a year since the retention hearing, and as far as we know, the secretary still hasn't made a decision. A new secretary will take over when Trump enters office in a couple of weeks. Trump's nominated John Phelen, a businessman with no military experience for that job, and the decision about whether to keep Josh might just fall to him.

For now, Josh, he's in Marine purgatory doing some standard office work while he awaits his fate. That internship offer from the NSA, of course, that got scrapped, and he's the only one of his friends left. Even though the Marine panels decided to keep those two other Marines he was in the capital with, a top general didn't agree. He later kicked out one of them for his actions. The other one, he just ran out as an enlistment.

Basically, the clock ran out on his time in the military. Is that what you expect to happen with Josh, that he'll eventually just get discharged?

Well, we'll have to see Josh decline further interviews with us.

Yeah, this was after we told his lawyer that we'd found footage of Josh in the Capitol, and it didn't match his story. So he was done chatting with us. Trump said throughout his campaign that he'd be open to pardoning people convicted of crimes for January sixth if they're innocent. In fact, many of the people convicted of January sixth related crimes celebrated from the DC jail cell they call the Patriot's Wing after the election results were announced. Now that Trump's been elected to a second term, it's possible that Josh's criminal sentence, as late as it already is, could be totally wiped away.

As far as his military career, it's possible that he gets to stay in the Marine Corps. Trump has had complicated, often controversial feelings about the military military and veterans. From my reporting, one thing that becomes really clear is that Trump doesn't see the military service members as apolitical, and they're supposed to be apolitical. He sees them as tools to serve the President, loyalists. Since the election, Trump has been stacking his cabinet with those loyalists, people who are highly sympathetic to him and his supporters. Some of them, they're unexpected, like Pete Hexet, a Fox news host and veteran who Trump tapped as defense secretary. You actually heard Hegset's voice in the montage of attacks against Bishop Garrison earlier. He's the one who called Garrison the Magher Purge Man. So if Hegset becomes the next defense secretary, He said he's going to eliminate DEI programs like the one Bishop Garrison was part of, and maybe get rid of these anti-extremist efforts as well. But we'll have to see if Hegset and Trump's other nomination survive a confirmation hearing. With the Republicans control in both the House and Senate, they very well might.

Yeah. If that's the case, it's really unclear how the military's efforts to root out extremism are going to fare. We mentioned earlier, in the year since January sixth, military officials came up with a strong definition of extremism and what actions are prohibited. Just this year, they said, We're going to start collecting data on such incidents. This might all go away under Trump. Hegset has made clear in his public statements his focus will be on undoing some of the changes the military has made in recent years.

We're also left wondering if the military missed its chance to hold people accountable for what happened that day. These are things that Lauren and I will be keeping an eye on over the next months and years of the Trump administration.

It sounds like if the military does have an extremism problem, we may not know officially, at least not in the next four years, tomorrow is January sixth, and Congress will once again gather to certify the votes. What can we expect this time, four years after that other fateful day, what can we expect for the peaceful transfer of power?

Well, from everything I'm hearing, the certification of the 2024 election happening tomorrow will be very safe. It's now considered a national security event. The current director of Homeland Security Security has said it will have Super Bowl-level security.

But that probably won't be necessary because it was Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol during the last certification when the election didn't go their way. This time it did.

Lauren and Tom, thank you so much for sharing your reporting today, especially about an event that now there's so many different accounts and views on it, but you were there personally, and so you saw it for yourself.

Right. Well, thank you for having us. Thank you.

You can hear more of this story, including lots of details in the case of Marine Sergeant Joshua Abate and interviews with military officials in Tom and Lauren's series, A Good Guy. Find it in the Embedded podcast feed. Embedded is NPR's home for ambitious long-form documentary series. I also wanted to recommend a special episode by our friends at NHPR's Document Podcast. It follows a capital police officer as she deals with the aftermath of January 6, 2021, a day that still lives in her brain and in her body. Civil dispute calls, just people not getting along with each other, neighbors not getting along with each other, and just that confrontation of them fighting and yelling at each other that just brings the flashbacks of this guy yelling at me. We want those traitors. Just those emotions and that confrontation of people and those heated arguments are what bring back those images for me. From the Document team at New Hampshire Public Radio, a story of survival and resilience in the wake of January sixth, the episode is called Amelia's Thing, and you can find it by searching an NHPR document wherever you get your podcast. This episode was produced by Adelina Lanceaniz and Andrew Mamba.

It was edited by Liana Simstrom and Irene Noguchi, with help from Louise Treas, and Andrew Sussman. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yann and Jennie Schmidt, fact-checking by Will Chase, engineering by Quaisi Lee and Gilly Moon. I'm Ayesha Rosco, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First We'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.

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