welcome to "meet the press daily," i'm chuck todd here in a solemn washington in a studio that is just outside the perimeter of the u.s. capitol which was stormed one year ago today by a mob of trump supporters seeking to overturn the results of the free and fair 2020 presidential election. it has been a day of solemn remembrances here at the capitol. last hour we saw speaker pelosi lead a moment of silence. members will hold a prayer vigil on the capitol steps this afternoon. we've heard from lawmakers mostly on one side of the aisle recount their harrowing experiences. 17 are speaking on the senate floor. none from the republican side of the aisle. it hasn't just been a day of remembrance about what happened then, it's also been a day of reckoning about what's happening right now to our democracy. as the former president and the lies that incited the riot itself have grown stronger within the republican party not weaker, a lot of us were wrong about that. virtually every elected republican with the exception of liz cheney and adam kinzinger have chosen to ignore what happened a year ago. it's also a reckoning for the current president as he declared today in the most forceful terms we have heard from him so far as president that he is going to fight back. in an address to the nation this morning he said, i will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of democracy. and he didn't dance around the source of the threat, either, former president donald john trump. >> the first time in our history a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the capitol. he can't accept he lost. he has done what no president in american history, the history of this country has ever, ever done. he refused to accept the results of an election and the will of the american people. he's not just a former president, he's a defeated former president. defeated by a margin of over 7 million of your votes and a full and free and fair election. >> importantly president biden didn't just mention the former president, although he never actually said the "t" word, he also spoke in stark terms about the trump supporters. >> former presidential supporters are trying to rewrite history. they want you to see election day as the day of insurrection. the riot that took place here on january 6th as a true expression of the will of the people. can you think of a more twisted way to look at this country, to look at america? i cannot. you can't love your country only when you win. you can't obey the law only when it's convenient. you can't be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies. they want to rule or they will ruin. >> trump supporters have decried biden's remarks. folks today shaping up to be an unfortunate reminder that january 6, 2021 was only the beginning of this fight over u.s. democracy and many thought maybe it was the last sort of thrashing of the trump era. sadly, it was not. the biggest threats facing our political system are coming from within and they are still here. joining me now our senior capitol hill correspondent garrett haake, kara lee, also anna palmer and jonah goldberg the editor and chief of the dispatch. kara, let me start with you. simply, this feels like this shouldn't be an only one political party remembering this day, but i have to tell you the bizarreness of today right now is that fact. that it is only one party that is lamenting what happened one year ago today and another party that is trying to memory hole it, i guess, to be generous. >> it is pretty incredible, i mean, i'm standing in the same spot i was in this time last year, covered this whole thing through the night and in the immediate days that followed. what was striking about january 6 was it did unite this place and people were pretty clear-i had about what had happened, what they had been through, what the possible remedies might be. now, the final impeachment vote didn't necessarily reflect that, but the truth was plain for everyone to see. over the course of a year the two parties have gone back into their camps with only one party willing to look this event in the eye and see it for what it was. the republican party has abdicated any responsibility for the attack and it goes back to donald trump. it started on that night, it has gotten worse and worse every day since. trump's refusal to take any responsibility for this has led to his party's refusal to take any responsibility for it and there is no longer some secret underground cabal of anti-trump republicans in the u.s. congress. it's a 2017 concept that doesn't exist anymore in 2022. there are perhaps a singular handful of republicans willing to say the truth about what happened this day and that's where we are and it's the direction we're going in the next midterm election as well. >> the president's remarks today, some would say where was this before. i talked to somebody in the white house who said, you know, everything has a time and place and that this was the most powerful place to finally push back on a year of the former president's lies, but i think it sort of gets to something else that president biden also underestimated like the rest of us, i think he thought ignoring the former president would let him fade away and that has not happened. >> reporter: yeah, there's definitely a little bit of that, chuck, and it's really been the opposite. i think, you know, this to me sounded like a speech that president biden has been wanting to give for quite some time, he had a lot pent up there that he outlined and it was one of his most forceful speeches of his entire presidency. part of what the white house and the president -- their calculation is, is that it's more powerful when he doesn't speak about this on a regular basis, when he is not constantly talking about his predecessor and what happened on january 6th. to him this is something that when he comes out and he makes a statement like this, the hope is that people will sit up and listen because it's not the same noise they've been hearing from him all year long. now, the question going forward really is did anybody listen? you see some of the polling that's out there in terms of what americans' views of whether or not this was a legitimate election and things aren't necessarily trending in his favor and so did he turn anybody around? did he just speak to people who already believed everything that he was saying, or did he actually manage to reach some folks who might have thought otherwise and listened to his speech? that's a real open question, but his calculation and the way that he has played this is that it's more powerful for him to say things like this when he's not saying them all the time. >> maybe the one audience that he might be able to break through are elected republicans, you know, maybe the information ecosystem won't allow the rank and file that has been mainlining these lies, but what happens the elected republicans who have sort of the way dogs put their tail between their legs, perhaps that was an audience. anna palmer, the theme i wanted to strike for this hour was how did we get here? how did donald trump get stronger since january 6 a year ago, not weaker? and i want to focus on an individual named mitch mcconnell. how much regret do you think he has in how he managed things a year ago this month? >> certainly publicly he has not said anything that he regrets, what he has said or the position that he has taken. if anything, he often tries in almost the same way that joe biden does, to not talk about the former president. they aren't necessarily on the same page when it comes to politics or when it comes to who should be running in some of these districts, and i think that is going to be something that we're going to be watching, but it's not as if, you know, senate minority leader mitch mcconnell is looking to take the former president on on a daily or even weekly basis. i thought the most striking thing to me besides the force of biden's speech today was the fact that dick cheney was on the force floor, a member of the house for ten years, speaking pretty critically of his fellow republicans and the elected republicans, to your point, and their lack of leadership on this issue. >> you know, jonah goldberg, the conclusion i have come to and i feel like because you've started the news organization you've started it's a conclusion you've come to, a year later it's clear to me the information ecosystem in this country is broken and that's why we have 40% of the country that has just been spoon fed these lies. >> i think that's right. i think that the lesson of january 6 for me in some ways is how the power and the attraction of maintaining the right narrative has become more important than maintaining the right facts or speaking honestly about things. we saw this almost instantaneously on january 6 where we now know that, you know, my former fox colleagues, laura ingraham and sean hannity and others saw and recognized at face value that that mob was instigated by the president and by the -- and motivated by the lies that he had spread, and they were saying, this is terrible, don't do it, and call it off, but then almost immediately once they went on tv they started coming up with alternative narratives, alternative interpretations of this that had no bearing on the facts, that had no evidence to rely upon, but they were what the audience wanted to hear. we live in an information environment where a lot of platforms, a lot of voices think they are in the businesses of telling audiences what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. >> explain to me why a steve scalise -- i want to point out there's three types of republican reactions today, jonah, about january 6. there's folks like lisa murkowski, mitt romney who believe this is a solemn day, there's a lot to learn from this, they're sort of speaking where i think you would be comfortable hearing from them. there's this weird middle ground of like steve scalise who says what happened on january 6 was terrible, then pretends everything in the run up to it had nothing to do with it, democrats are playing politics. then of course there's your extreme fringy crowd, your gaetz, your gosar, your former president trump who believes all of this is real. it's this middle ground folks, the steve scalises, the lindsey graham's, why are they behaving the way they're behaving? >> well, look, in part because when you are -- when you have a set of facts that is indefensible, it's a real pain in the nethers to defend it, and so what a lot of the republicans are doing is simply acknowledging, yeah, this is indefensible and then saying, but what about what they're doing? and i do think that there is some credence to charges that democrats are using january 6 in a political way. what i have no sympathy for are republicans who cannot concede that they gave this massive political issue for democrats to use, and if they had separated themselves, which both -- which their consciences and all facts should have dictated, if they had separated themselves in the days after january 6 from having any responsibility or any sense of endorsement of this, they wouldn't be stuck in this position of having to minimize or change the subject because they would be on the property saying, looks, i condemn this, this is outrageous, this has no place in the republican party. they didn't take that position and so now they're just stuck with this albatross and they don't want to talk about it anymore than they have to. >> garrett haake, now what? what happens tomorrow? meaning does any of this today, you know -- is this -- do we really see the electoral count act, does that become this sort of where manchin and sinema go and sort of force democrats to have to go down that road first? i know a lot of senate democrats don't want to do that, chuck schumer said he didn't. where does this go and is this just the next two weeks or is this going to be the agenda for the next few months? >> reporter: it's tough to say, i mean, the electoral vote act issue chuck schumer is pretty well dug in saying he doesn't want to touch that, he thinks it's kind of a distraction issue almost to change small procedural things if there are still giant in his view voting rights issues out in the country that need to be solved. i don't know where this goes and i think that's the frustration for democrats. politically speaking they run up against all the same proceed blocks that have bedeviled them in trying to pass any other element of their agenda. how to keep this issue in the spotlight in a way that might, you know, force the door open on any of the broader discussions we're having i think is a challenge that the january 6 committee, that liz cheney have tried to address. there's a lot of talk about how they might try to hold prime time hearings, how to try to force the republican colleagues to stair at this issue in a way they've been unwilling to do so. i think even the fact that the house isn't in session today and house republicans don't have to be here to even look at what's going on is maybe a missed opportunity. if the point is to force this issue into the public consciousness, there is a lot more forcing that will need to be done. >> carol lee, a lot of the president's supporters today loved his energy, loved his pointedness. i think on twitter it trended as angry biden and that was a compliment. as excited as that base was about president biden's remarks, is as disappointed as that base was in the attorney general merrick garland's remarks yesterday. i'm curious, what did the white house think of the attorney general's remarks? >> reporter: look, chuck, i think this is a white house that does not want to put its finger on the scale or thumb on the scale when it comes to the justice department. their point of view is they're letting him handle his business and they are not going to meddle in the way that they saw former president trump do, however, the president has a bit of a problem with his own party in the sense that there is a pent up demand for some sort of accountability, particularly up high. and to that's where you see the white house try to walk that line of not intervening and not putting pressure on the justice department, but also at the same time trying to say that they want to get to where the facts lead them and eventually make sure that people are held accountable. but this is not going to go away. that drum beat within the president's only party is only going to get more intense as it goes on. >> merrick garland hasn't been a judge for 20 years, that's a different temperament than a prosecutor. i think some folks may need to understand that. let me go to you, anna palmer, and that's just sort of the -- we keep hearing over the last year that the relationship between the two parties has never been worse. when you say that, what does that mean? does that mean like we're going to get to the point where we joke congress -- congress is still functional in that it keeps the lights on, but how much longer does that happen if the party relationship is as frayed? >> it's honestly hard to see it get worse. i don't know how it could. i mean, at this point you're having members in the hallways shouting at each other. even the basic decorum, i think, you know, when i started covering the hill almost 20 years ago it was a lot of more respect not only just kind of publicly, but personally, friendships across the aisle, and at this point it's particularly when you look at going into the 2022 midterms and how these kind of divisions and the gerrymandering in a lot of these districts, they're only becoming more partisan which means you're only going to have people on both of the wings coming to washington and that really is a disincentive to actually find ways to work together. it's really disturbing, i think, as somebody who has been watching congress for a very long time. >> jonah, i didn't want to leave without you -- you wrote a very provocative piece this week in your newsletter on fascism and how you were wrong about the right's ability to be taken in by fascism. explain. >> yeah, look, i come from the william f. buckley mold of conservatism, i was at national review for 20 years and one of the reasons in my first book one of the arguments i made was that you can't say that anglo-american conservatism is fascist and also condemn it for being sort of libertarian on free markets, for limited government, for constitutionalism. those sort of dogmatic commitments, these classically liberal conservative commitments immunize the right against fascism. what i did not anticipate 13 years after the book came out was how much those commitments and how fast those commitments, those dogmatic, you know, habits of the heart could vanish in the era of social media and cult of personality worship of donald trump. i still think knows things immunize you against the fascist temptation but you have to believe in them and big chunks of the right these days have abandoned those commitments and it breaks my heart. >> there is no ideology. i think that's what we've learned here, there's just a cult of personality right now. garrett haake, carol lee, jonah and anna, thank you all for that. still to come, the campaign to undermine u.s. democracy sadly is ongoing. we will talk to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle about how we got to this place where millions of americans believe a set of big lies or republican elected ee firnls are afraid to combat it and democratic officials are afraid their warnings are falling on dead ears. this is "meet the press daily." d ears this is "meet the press daily. my name is douglas. i'm a writer/director and i'm still working. in the kind of work that i do, you are surrounded by people who are all younger than you. i had to get help somewhere along the line to stay competitive. i discovered prevagen. i started taking it and after a period of time, my memory improved. it was a game-changer for me. prevagen. healthier brain. better life. new year, new start. and now comcast business is making it easy to get going with the ready. set. save. sale. get started with fast and reliable internet and voice for $64.99 a month with a 2-year price guarantee. it's easy... with flexible installation and backing from an expert team, 24/7. and for even more value, ask how to get up to a $500 prepaid card. get a great deal for your business with the ready. set. save. sale today. comcast business. powering possibilities. welcome back. as we mentioned, very few republicans are participating in today's events commemorating the january 6 attack with one big exception, congresswoman liz cheney who as you can see in this tape from moments ago was accompanied to the house floor by a former member of congress who happens to be her father and a former vice president, dick cheney. nbc news actually caught up with the former vice president asking him for his reaction to the way the current gop leadership has responded to january 6. he told our reporter, it's not a leadership that resembles any of the folks i knew when i was here for ten years. two top republicans in capitol hill are not even in washington, d.c. today, house republican leader kevin mccarthy is not expected to participate in any events and many republican senators including mitch mcconnell are in georgia for former senator johnny isaacson's funeral. the most organized republican event we can find on this anniversary is a press conference from matt gaetz and marjorie taylor greene in afternoon which they bill as a republican response to today's events. joining me now is new york republican congressman tom reed. for what it's worse and no offense to congressman reed we asked 60 republican lawmakers could come on to our air and mr. reed was the only one willing to come on. congressman, good to see you. >> good to be with you. >> a year ago -- a year ago and a few days you came on this show and i asked you about january 6 and you said the following, let me play it -- >> i'm going to continue to listen to those 74 million voices that voted for him, but of the 74 million, the small percentage that stormed the capitol and engaged in that insurrection that were trump supporters, i will tell them there's no place in the republican party for you in my opinion. that's not the republican party i believe in. they need to be held to account and we need to isolate and purge them from our republican ranks. >> so here we are nearly a year later, congressman, and the former president put out a release today that said, to watch biden speaking is very hurtful to many people. they're the ones who tried to stop the peaceful transfer with a rigged election. never forget the crime of the 2020 presidential election. never give up. that's the former president. how did it get so off kilter here in your party? >> i will tell you i don't know, other than i continue to be a voice to say if you believe violence and engaging in what happened on january 6 is the way to resolve your dispute with an election, i turn my back on you. i will stand up against you in regards to that extreme position that you take. but what it's going to take, chuck, is it's going to take leadership and it's going to take leadership on both sides of the aisle. to say, do you know what, enough is enough of this extremism and it's time to inspire by leading and that's what i'll try to do as i serve the term out here in congress as well as my post congressional career. >> i have to say i hear the words it's incumbent on both sides of the aisle. there's one party that seems to take what happened on january 6 seriously and there's one party that does not seem to. so in fairness how do you get to that? isn't this incumbent on kevin mccarthy and mitch mcconnell? >> it's incumbent upon all leaders in washington, d.c. to step forward, to condemn rightfully what happened on january 6th like i'm condemning right now. >> what about the run up? what about everything that happened -- >> that's not going to solve the problem. >> what about everything that happened in the run up? i mean, what the former president did. i mean, i look at january 6 and on that day i wanted to believe it was a bunch of misled hooligans who didn't fully appreciate what was going on, and the more we learn it's like, no, there was a little more concerted effort here and a lot more organized effort to try to overturn this election. >> but it's not 74 million people that voted for donald trump as we were talking about a year ago. that is not who stormed -- 74 million people did not storm the u.s. capitol. what happened was a vocal minority of extremists took it into their own thought process and power to do what they did, and to me that is what has to be objected to. and what has to happen is we have to stand up to it on the right and you have to have leaders that will stand up to it on the left. that is how we're going to unite and heal this country and say, do you know what, we are going to remember this day but we are going to bring the best of america forward and that's what's gotten us through crises of the past and that's what will get us through the crises of the future that are coming. >> you were co-chair of trump's presidential campaign. do you regret that position now considering his behavior? >> no. no. >> why? >> i don't, because he brought the disruption to washington, d.c. that needs to be brought. washington, d.c., the establishment and the status quo needs to be disrupted. now, i disagree with some of the actions and words and rhetoric that the president has engaged in, and i will challenge the president when it comes to that. i've been challenged by the president when he's disagreed with me, but i still respect the voice that he brought to washington and the forgotten men and women that he listened to. that's how he was successful. that's how he got elected in the first place. >> would you trust him again with the keys to this democracy? >> you know, i leave that to the american people. the american people are not ones that will make that decision not the arrogant elected officials of washington, d.c. >> you have a vote in that. >> who try to pontificate -- >> you have a vote in that. >> i do. >> are you willing to hand the keys to the democracy to this man again? >> i want -- i want to have an open and -- contest on ideas and inspiration. if president trump is the candidate that's representing the republican party, i will support him, because the republican party that i believe in, that would put him in that position is the party that's going to see us into the future and that's going to save this country because no one else has given a damn. >> so you're willing to -- i want to repeat what the former president said today, congressman. he says, they're the ones who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power with a rigged election. he's calling the 2020 election a crime. do you believe it was a crime? >> and that will be -- and, chuck, that will be part of the process. if he's elected he's going to have to go through the primary process and the republican party will put its standard bearer on to the line. i believe at the end of the day we're going to have enough voices in that conversation that that type of rhetoric will be held to account and i think that will discount the ability for an individual to be the standard bearer for the republican party. >> you know, this sounds like a lot of elected republicans i talk to who are afraid of telling their supporters what they don't want to hear which is that donald trump is lying to them. have you told your supporters that donald trump is lying to them about the 2020 election? >> i will be very clear with you, chuck, i believe the election in 2020 was a duly held election, the results were duly certified and the challenges of fraud were given an opportunity to be vetted and i will tell you that this big lie type of representation i disagree with and i'm saying that right now, but that doesn't mean you go forward and not look at the next election in a way that says we need to learn from 2020 and so in 2024 republicans are just as good at getting their vote to the ballot box as the democrats are so we have a fair shake in 2024 on an even playing field. >> you used the word fair just now but you wouldn't use it in describing the 2020 election, you said duly and not fair, it's a distinction that i notice a lot of elected republicans who are trying to appease trump or trump supporters say. why do you do that? >> in 2020 it was a fair election in the sense that the rules using covid were changed and the democrats -- to their credit -- they were much better at getting their voters to the poll. they used the duly changed rules to do that. we as republicans have to learn from that and we have to make sure that we're deploying those tools as strongly as the democrats were in 2020 and in 2024 be better at the game than the democrats. >> again, it sounds like you're trying to put an asterisk on the 2020 election which only feeds this conspiracy nonsense that is wrecking this country. why did we have what we had here a year ago was this conspiratorial nonsense that leads people to the idea that there was something to this. there was nothing to this. >> it's not conspiracy. they changed the law legally, they control the state legislatures, they changed the rules legally. so it was a legal, fair election, however, that doesn't mean the rules were maximized by one party over the other party. that's what i'm saying going into 2024 we need to make sure that we understand the rules as a republican party and we use them fully to our advantage going forward in 2024 so that we are deploying the same assets in an election equally on each side of the aisle. >> does it bother you at all that the republican party is no longer a conservative party but a cult of personality right now? >> i mean, i disagree with that assessment. i heard your conclusion on that at a point. i still believe in the republican party. the ideology of the republican party is still strong, it's the republican party that i believe in and that philosophy is what's going to see america through, through the future, and i still believe america is a center-right country. >> congressman tom reed, republican from new york who is not seeking reelection, i appreciate you coming on. we invited a lot of folks and you were willing to come on, you are somebody who is always willing to talk to both sides so i appreciate it. >> chuck, appreciate that very much. up next, some of the moments from today as democratic senators took the floor to express their fear, their anger and their frustration. it's "meet the press daily." r f. it's "meet the press daily." welcome back. in the next hour we are going to be hearing from house members speaking on the floor remembering the events from their perspective of last january 6th. here is a live look at the senate floor where more than a could see senators have spoken or plan to speak about the attack on the capitol and the continued threats to our democracy. >> we cannot avoid it. the truth about what happened that day. about what led to the violence. about what it means for our democracy moving forward. >> our country has reached a critical crossroads, either we are going to come together as americans, defend our democracy and look back on january 6th as a painful low point in our nation's history, but we can turn our power to a mob who is willing to do and say anything to dismantle our democracy. >> our democracy is more fragile than it has been in decades. the same bad actors who fueled the violence in the first place, including the defeated former president and his supporters, continue to spread the big lie that the election was stolen. >> the number two democrat in the senate, dick durbin was among those senators who spoke a short time ago and he will join me live right after this break. me live right after this break t. i needed him to be here. your heart isn't just yours. protect it with bayer aspirin. be sure to talk to your doctor before you begin an aspirin regimen. 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♪ liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty ♪ only pay for what you need. ♪ liberty, liberty, liberty, liberty ♪ welcome back. as we just mentioned, 17 senate democrats are speaking today about the events that unfolded one year ago today as well as the threats to our democracy that remain. including senator dick durbin, the number two democrat in the senate and he joins me now. senator, you've been a member of the house, you've been in the senate, you've been in this town a generation, i'm not trying to age you here, but you've seen a lot. i guess i want to go to the uncomfortableness of today and the fact that only one party is marking this, and the other party, at least in leadership, is not. how disjointed is that to you? >> well, let me say in fairness that many of the republican leadership and even democratic senators are in georgia, as you mentioned, for the funeral of johnny isakson, a wonderful republican senator who passed away recently. so i want to be fair and make that point, but i hope that those who haven't spoken on the floor earlier this week and have a chance next week will at least come to the floor and express their feelings about what happened on january 6th. they owe it to history. >> is this about what happened on january 6th now in your mind or is this about everything that made january 6 happen? >> well, it's all of the above. it really goes down to some fundamental questions you've been asking on this program as to who we want to be as a nation, whether we accept violence ever as a part of the democratic process and whether we ought to be honest about what did happen on january 6 and who inspired it. it was donald trump. he called those folks to washington with the express desire to have them march on the capitol the day we were counting the votes in the electoral college. he knew exactly what he was doing and when he was doing it. he had it all timed out. and this crowd showed up and i will tell you i commend to you, chuck, if you ever run across to study done by professor pape at the university of chicago, he took a look at the 725 of those who have been investigated and prosecuted he was looking to see their background, are they unemployed, deranged, part of extreme organizations, do they come from extremely red areas, the answer to all of the above mainly is no. they really are rank and file people, business owners, lawyers, doctors, folks who live in areas that biden carried, and yet they were whipped into a frenzy by the crowd and the circumstances and they were the ones who were crashing through these doors and windows, something they wouldn't find imaginable before then. >> no, i know, i've seen that study and another one that also indicated many of these folks had serious financial problems after the 2008 great recession, too, so you wonder about that. i'm curious about you trying to help us translate lindsey graham. you've known lindsey graham, you have a served with lindsey graham perhaps your entire congressional career and he tweeted this today in response to president biden. he said, what brazen politicization of january 6 by president biden. i wonder if the taliban who now rule afghanistan with al qaeda elements are allowing this speech to be carried. it seems to me if you think the president was politicizing that means you believe the former president's lie. explain lindsey graham here. you know him and i assume you like him, you guys are friendly. >> i do and i work with him and he is a co-sponsor of the dream act bill which i introduced 20 years ago and is really something deep in my heart. he's there. i try to go home to illinois and i get that question more often than others, who is this guy? how can you possibly be doing any business with him? all i can tell you is there are moments what i consider very lucid and very honest where lindsey and i can work together and we have, i hope there will be more in the future, but i cannot even start to explain his relationship with donald trump. >> it is one of those that some days he's more jim jordan than john mccain. it's a bit head scratching. somebody else you have worked with a long time is mitch mcconnell and there's a couple of statements he's made recently that makes me think he will never say he regrets what he didn't do last year, but that he is perhaps, you know, maybe some day he will. the january 6 committee is something he was supposedly against, worried it was going to be politicized and now he's very intrigued to see what they are finding. do you think he wishes there was a do over on the impeachment a year ago? >> i wouldn't go that far. perhaps he's having second thoughts about personally opposing the creation of a bipartisan commission. i was with him in the so-called secret place, the secure place where the leaders were taken on january 6. i watched him standing with nancy and chuck and reaching out to leaders in government to try to get control of the building again and be able to return to it. i could feel the intensity of his feeling because he has given his life to the senate, he's been here longer than i have working as a staffer and as a member of the senate. i knew the intensity of his feelings about getting back that night, finishing the job, and yet when it came to getting down to the bottom of asking the question what caused this, how do we avoid it in the future he decided to filibuster. no, we don't have a bipartisan commission. i hope he's having second thoughts about that. i'm glad that nancy went forward with this bipartisan committee, i commend my colleague from illinois adam kinzinger for stepping up and showing the courage to be part of that effort, but i think mitch mcconnell may be looking at the senate in the long haul and realize he did not serve it well with that decision. >> how much should your time be focused on shoring up the democracy versus the day to day normal agenda that politics deals with? your colleague brian schatz of hawaii acknowledged covid is in front of us, inflation is in front of us, there are a lot of real world every day short-term problems, the american people is feeling. the democracy is not a short-term problem it's a long term. how should the united states senate be spending the next six months? >> well, i can tell you it's a constant as far as i'm concerned. you don't get up in the morning and say what i'm going to do for democracy, you say what am i going to do it today and how can i do it in a fashion that's fair, democratic and i will be proud with when it's over and then tackle the day to day issues that brine mentioned. inflation, getting people back to work and dealing with this covid pandemic, folks expect us to put that as a high priority but the way we do it and how we do it with the other side is an indication of how a democracy can work. >> senator dick durbin, democrat from illinois, didn't mean to keep talking about your resumé and how long it is, but on a day like today people need to understand institutional perspective is something we need a lot more of these days. i appreciate you coming on. >> thanks, chuck. up next, social media helped spread the lies about the legitimacy of joe biden's victory, it amplified calls for violence and remains a place where misinformation catches on like wildfire. can anything be done about it? facebook and what it does with dan bongino is the biggest example of this. you're watching a special edition of "meet the press daily" one year after the capitol attack. meet the press daily" one year after the capitol attack how i feel. ♪ ♪ breeze driftin' on by... ♪ if you've been playing down your copd,... ♪ it's a new dawn, it's a new day,... ♪ ...it's time to make a stand. start a new day with trelegy. ♪...and i'm feelin' good. ♪ no once-daily copd medicine... has the power to treat copd in as many ways as trelegy. with three medicines in one inhaler, trelegy helps people breathe easier and improves lung function. it also helps prevent future flare-ups. trelegy won't replace a rescue inhaler for sudden breathing problems. tell your doctor if you have a heart condition or high blood pressure before taking it. do not take trelegy more than prescribed. trelegy may increase your risk of thrush, pneumonia, and osteoporosis. call your doctor if worsened breathing, chest pain, mouth or tongue swelling, problems urinating, vision changes, or eye pain occur. take a stand and start a new day with trelegy. ask your doctor about once-daily trelegy, and save at trelegy.com. welcome back. former president trump arguably began laying the groundwork for the january 6th insurrection all the way back in 2016 when he accused ted cruz of stealing the iowa caucuses. but after his 2020 loss, his election lies and conspiracy theories became much louder. an investigation by "the washington post" and pro publica shows over 650,000 posts were made on facebook posts attacking joe biden's win and encouraging violence. facebook's spokesman told "the post" that the notion that facebook could have prevented the insurrection was absurd. for more on facebook's role in the insurrection and what they've done, i'm joined by the co-author of "an ugly truth: inside facebook's battle for domination." i've come to the conclusion over the last year that the single biggest problem we have in this country is our broken information ecosystem and i think it's best represented by how it is thanks to facebook, you now have a main line into millions of people, conspiracy theories. you look at a dan bongino who is just one of these infotainment grifters who just rides this algorithm train. and he's made a fortune doing this. and he's not alone. but this seems to be at the core of our inability to have a collective set of facts in this country. >> right, and i really like how you phrase that, because it's not that facebook is the only problem or the only place where this is happening, but facebook lets us study a phenomenon across the united states. with facebook we can look at the raw data through algorithms and programs like crowdstrike and see what types of information are reaching americans. as you said, in the lead-up to january 6th, there was a lot of misinformation and conspiracy theories spread about the election. you can count the sheer number of posts, to see how many facebook took down. you can see how actors like dan bongino but also president trump himself helped fuel those conspiracies. just a week or two before january 6th, "the new york times" did a story about the super spreaders of election misinformation. what we found from facebook at the time is a handful of protected, verified accounts like donald trump and other figures close to him were the source of a lot of this misinformation about voter fraud. >> look, it's the amplification that is the problem, right? and there is only -- this is not a human issue. this is an algorithm issue. so -- and it seems as if facebook just continues to refuse to accept that their business model actually encourages more of this, it does not discourage it. >> right. as we know now from facebook's own research papers, this is something their own employees, their own researchers, academics who have been hired by the company, have said to executives over and over again. if you really want to solve the problem, you have to look at what the algorithm is amplifying. facebook knows it can do this because just around the november elections in 2020, it shifted its algorithm to favor legitimate news sources. i use that word "legitimate" carefully because it was news sources that hadn't been repeatedly docked for sharing misinformation. so it put those sources higher on people's news feeds and it found misinformation went down. when people were shown news sources that didn't spread lies, that fact checked, that verified what they were publishing, they were less likely to see disinformation. they could have kept that change through the inauguration in january but they did not. this is their own researchers, their own academics telling them these kinds of changes are really important. >> the thing that makes me have no empathy at all for this company at all is, what happened in myanmar. they knew their -- the social network was hijacked for genocide. does that not make them at all look in the mirror here? >> as you know, we had a whole chapter in our book about myanmar. for me as well that stood as the starkest example of facebook being shown evidence of what their platform was doing in a country. they were told over and over again that the posts on facebook by people in myanmar was leading to ethnic strife, it was leading to real world violence. yet they did really little and the little they did, they did too late. that stands as a stark example. but you don't even have to go that far back. it's happened in half a dozen countries since then, ranging from india to ethiopa, countries in latin america. we have january 6th in our recent memory, marking the anniversary today of january 6th, all of us remember what happened, but in other countries it's been so much worse. >> unbelievable. and no accountability on this organization. we really appreciate your coming on and sharing your perspective and expertise. we'll be back with more "meet the press daily." up next, we join my colleagues katy tur who was beside me as the insurrectionists were breaching the capitol last year. after the break. year. after the break. one gram of sugar, and nutrients to support immune health. new projects means new project managers. you need to hire. i need indeed. indeed you do. when you sponsor a job, you immediately get your shortlist of quality candidates, whose resumes on indeed match your job criteria. visit indeed.com/hire and get started today. whose resumes on indeed match your job criteria. aleve-x. it's fast, powerful long-lasting relief with a revolutionary, rollerball design. because with the right pain reliever... life opens up. aleve it... and see what's possible. the capitol steps are now jammed with people. >> they moved them fast. >> hang mike pence? >> members of congress are tweeting they've been told to shelter in place. >> there are now protesters inside the capitol building itself. >> they're right outside the senate chamber. >> we're going to walk down to the