PART 4: This explosive episode reveals how senior investigator Candyce Phoenix, who led the Purple team, pushed for a different narrative – one that was ultimately shoved aside. Named the “Book of Purple,” this treasure trove of testimony lays bare the nation’s root causes of white supremacy in explaining former President Trump’s rise to power. Our Body Politic is the first journalism organization to tell this story – why it was sidelined, and what this means for democracy and America’s future.
By now, the story of what happened on January 6 2021 is seared into the public psyche. But there is still an untold story.
Many of the investigators and team leads on the January 6th Committee were people of color. In this podcast, we bring you the story of their leadership, and why their mix of lived experience as descendents of enslaved people; children of immigrants; or immigrants themselves deeply shaped the committee’s quest to protect and uphold a multiracial pluralistic democracy.
The story they tell about the inner workings of the committee also reveal deep rifts over the role of race and Christian Nationalism in the insurrection, and how much of that inquiry should be told while proving former President Trump’s role in the insurrection.
As America winds up with endless court cases over the former President and his alleged co-conspirators, it is also, arguably winding up for an increase in domestic violent extremism. In “January 6th: An American Story,” we show – through the investigators of color and lawmakers helping lead the committee – that January 6th is not over, and the ways we continue to make sense of its reverberations could save – or imperil – us all.
The story of January 6 is an American Story.
It just might be different from the one you thought you knew.
Candyce Phoenix: My first reaction after the committee was over was part of me that just thought about cutting it loose and throwing it all away and going and doing something completely different. I'm going to sell my house. I'm going to buy, like, a shack in the woods somewhere. I'm going to get a 9-to-5 data-entry job where I don't have to think and I don't have to feel, and it's just enough to sustain me, because I can't take this anymore.
I put in my time. I can't be a part of this solution. I stuck it out through a really traumatic experience.
Farai Chideya: For Candyce Phoenix, the role as an investigative team lead for the January 6th Committee tapped into her many strengths and skills, but it also drained her.
In this episode of “January 6th: An American Story,” we are going to focus on the unique work and unique voice of Candyce Phoenix. She has a different view of the final January 6 report.
Candyce: I dealt with a lot of guilt and insecurity and fear that I wasn't doing well enough for all the people who were counting on us to get this right. Because I do think there was an aspect here of racism and white supremacy that people really struggle to center when it comes to January 6th.
Farai: Candyce and her team, the Purple Team, pushed hard for a different version of the report – one that would go far beyond President Trump's culpability for January 6. Instead, the committee's majority won the day about what version of history was being told.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning of the January 6 committee when Candyce and her team dug up testimony, facts and history, wading deep into the origins of America – an America that many white citizens deny and one that Black citizens cannot avoid. The Purple Team laid out how it was far more than President Trump that fomented January 6.
In very specific detail, the Purple Team built a case showing how the rise of domestic violent extremism, the legal deconstruction of civic norms and the diminishment of voting rights led to January 6.
Candyce calls the trail of evidence The Book of Purple.
The Book of Purple is one of the best-kept secrets of the January 6th investigation. Candyce’s team produced hundreds of pages using legal theory to prove how endemic racism spurred January 6. But much of the material was left out of the final report.
Instead, it primarily lives today on a digital site called Just Security, in a corner of the web for national security wonks. There, it is a collection of 52 different testimonies.
And, in this episode we are going to share with you some of the findings – some for the first time – that are presented in behind-closed-door testimonies – testimonies that Candyce calls The Book of Purple.
The January 6 report is one American story, but Candyce has another one to tell: her own and The Book of Purple.
This is “An American Story.”
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Farai: Let’s begin on Election Day in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.
(Newscast sound)
Candyce: the morning after I went to my office, the civil rights division, and we had a regularly scheduled staff meeting, but we sort of had these corners of the room. You know, there was a corner of the room that was in shock. In silence.
Farai: Yeah. Yeah.
Candyce: There was a corner of the room that was angry. There was a corner room that was crying.
Farai: Mm-hmm.
Candyce: And there was a sense of like, this country is taking a dark turn.
Farai: Mm-hmm.
Candyce: When Trump won and took office, we had opposing counsel in some of our cases just tell us a couple of days after the election, "Come on guys, you know we're just going to wait you out. January is coming and none of these cases are going anywhere."
And I remember thinking, “How am I going to survive in this department under a man who is so clearly hostile to the purpose of the Civil Rights Division?” And I stayed there for a couple of years, the first two years of the Trump administration, but I just kept feeling like I was on the bench and, like, I needed to get in the game.
Farai: So she pivoted and became a top aide for Congressman Jamie Raskin, Democrat from Maryland on the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee. This was her first legal encounter with former President Trump. Candyce served on the second impeachment committee led by Congressman Raskin.
By the time Candyce joined the January 6 investigation, she had been deeply entrenched in combating President Trump’s legal maneuverings. But as she and her team delved into the causes of January 6, she began to go deeper into the historical white supremacist roots of this nation.
Candyce: I was one of the very few people in the senior leadership of that committee that were of color. And there were a number of meetings where I was, sometimes, the only woman, the youngest person, the only person of color. And on the times where I thought, “This is too much, I can't do this,” I thought, “But there are a lot of people who are counting on you to be in that room and to keep pushing on these issues in a way that, like, other people just aren't seeing.”
Farai: What she found was stunning. There were many similar instances from the past – many not widely known. The Purple Team began documenting parallels between then and now, including the four horsemen of a failing democracy: polarization, income inequality, conflict over who belongs and consolidation of power within the presidency.
For example, the purple team learned of a coup in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. After Black Americans gained entry into the local government, more than 2,000 white men attacked and murdered Black residents of the town. They ripped through homes and businesses and burned down the offices of The Daily Record, the local Black newspaper.
More than 2,000 Black people fled the city during the massacre. And their attackers installed a white-supremacist government in a coup d’etat.
This became part of The Book of Purple which lays out just how eerily similar those conditions are to 2021.
Candyce: We gathered the evidence and the testimony to talk about what the markers of a decline in democracy look like and how you fix it. None of that really became part of the public conversation.
Farai: Like many Black Americans, Candyce understands what it means when something is unfairly taken away. Take the life of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who became one of the 581 Black people lynched in Mississippi alone. A number of scholars believe this to be a gross undercount.
Candyce: And I remember, I think that Friday was Veterans Day, and I went for the first time to the African-American Museum here in DC and walked through that bottom floor and saw Emmett Till's casket and saw all of that history and just remember thinking, “You don't get to tap out.”
Farai: (chuckles) Wow.
Candyce: “A lot of people have had it much worse than you have to get you and the country to where you are right now, and you don't get to tap out.” And I had to remind myself of that a lot on the committee, and the other thing I also thought of was all those officers on January 6th.
For folks who watch “The West Wing,” there was an episode where the character of Josh is asked whether he ever thinks about quitting his high-stress job. And he says, no, I mean, we're bystanders, basically, and we work around a lot of people who routinely put themselves in harm's way. There's one guy whose job it is to stand in front of the bullet. Not get the shooter, but stand in front of the bullet. And my government salary may not be a lot, but I still make more than the guy whose job it is to stand in front of the bullet, so how do I tell him I'm quitting? And I asked myself, “How do you think about quitting when those folks didn't quit? They put their literal bodies on the line. You can shoulder this burden for a little bit longer.”
Farai: Yeah. I feel you. And where did that come from? Where in your heart, where in your childhood, where in your family, where in history did that come from?
Candyce: All of the above. History, family, childhood, all of that. I think I attribute it mostly to my mom, who I think of as an incredibly principled woman, who will do the right thing regardless, and her thought was, “I am not going to let other people change me and what I believe is the right thing to do. And I'm going to fight for that.”
Farai: Candyce's mom stood up for her children’s right to get a stellar education. But Candyce paid a psychological cost when her mother got her into an academically excellent, largely white private school with a verdant 90-acre campus.
Candyce: I remember going from a pretty well-adjusted happy social kid at my elementary school to being an incredibly insecure, introverted private kid at this other school, because I was very aware of my race and of my social class and status. And I had kids at that school who couldn't find anything in common to talk to me about unless it was asking me how to use a sponge in art class, because they didn't know how to clean or asking me to join their study group, but only for the portion of global studies that was about Africa.
And I didn't realize it at the time, but in retrospect, I was angry and confused about why I couldn't stay in my Black public school.
Farai: Yeah.
Candyce’s transition to the mostly white school casts a long shadow. At school, she struggles with her sense of self while trying to navigate race outside the protective cocoon of a predominantly Black community.
Candyce: I remember having two different Christmas lists. You know, I had one list for my white friends at school that had, like, NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, cause I didn't want to be too Black.
And then I had a different list for my family members who were Black that had like Q-Tip and Talib Kweli because I didn't want to be too white. And having those two different identities constantly in my head. It's something I still struggle with to this day of like, who am I and how do I figure out who I am separate and apart from all of those external forces? Because those questions, you know, “Who am I supposed to be? was often the question I was asking myself instead of “who am I?”
It wasn't until I got into high school and started studying the history of race relations and, socioeconomic status that I really began to understand a lot of those dynamics and that really instilled in me this desire to make the world a place where a kid doesn't have to do that – where they can stay in their community and get that education or if they do go to that school that it's just another school. It's not a culture shock. It's not an identity shock where their racial identity doesn't take over their personhood, which it really did for me.
That sort of led me on this path of wanting to be a civil rights lawyer, wanting to understand issues of inequality and race and racism and history and white nationalism and white supremacy and anti-Semitism, and I was in a program in high school called Operation Understanding D.C., which brings together Jewish and Black students in the 11th and 12th grade and really teaches them, in detail, about civil rights history and civil rights activism. And that's where I learned all about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and how all of those pieces of history continue to reverberate through to the present.
Farai: Candyce brought the ability to understand that history to her role on the January 6th Committee. As the leader of the Purple Team, Candyce knit together how anti-Semitism, militia movements and domestic extremism fueled white supremacy and ultimately the insurrection.
Additional testimony from Department of History professor at the time based at University of Chicago – Kathleen Belew – lays out how attacks on different targets all stem from white supremacy.
From The Book of Purple:
Candyce: “Our inability to register the threat of the white power movement persists into the present. Thus we see stories about the Tree of Life synagogue attack as anti-Semitic violence, the Christchurch shooting as Islamophobic violence, the El Paso shooting as anti-immigrant violence, the attempted assassinations of a Coast Guard officer as political violence, and the militias on our border and parading armed through our capital cities as ‘neutral.’ They are, of course, acts of anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant and political violence. But they are also actions motivated by a common white-power ideology. Understood through a focus on perpetrators, they are part of the same story. Seeing them together, instead of lone-wolf actions, we can begin to see a trend, a wave, a rising tide.”
Farai: But Candyce’s fellow January 6 committee members were not always open to this interpretation.
Candyce: I think that’s the thing that frustrates me most about the January 6th experience. That there is this need to reach for consensus and keep as many people in the boat as possible. But to do that, we decided we’re not gonna talk about this issue. We’re not gonna talk about Christian nationalism because we don’t want it to appear as though we’re anti-Christian. And so we’re not gonna have anybody have to confront the reality of what white Christian nationalism is, which is not the same as Christianity.
Farai: In fact, it’s something quite different. This is according to Philip Gorski, the Frederick and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology and religious studies at Yale University. Here’s part of his contribution to The Book of Purple:
“White Christian nationalism is perhaps best understood as a deep story about American history. That story goes something like this: America was founded as a white Christian nation. Its founding documents are based on Protestant Christian principles. They may even be divinely inspired. America has been blessed by God and entrusted with a special mission. That is the source of its prosperity and power. But its special status is endangered by the presence of racial and religious others on American soil.
Farai: White Christian nationalists exist in a world that often denies the history of Black and brown America.
Candyce: The fear that that gives me is that we’re not operating under a common understanding of history, and we’re not operating under a common understanding of facts or the present day. And when you’re not operating under a common understanding of what the problem is, you’re not gonna come to the right solution.
Farai: During the months-long investigation, behind closed doors, there were arguments over what the January 6 report should be and who the nation should hear from.
Candyce: You're not interviewing queer people. You're not interviewing people who are not Christian. And those are the folks who have the most to lose if our democracy fails. And so you end up in a circumstance where, for the most part, the people who have the mic were the people that helped us get there.
Robin: I think after the Purple Team presented where it was no one necessarily contesting that race is there, but just do we want to go down that route?
Farai: That’s Robin Peguero, who recalls the debate behind closed doors. He paraphrases Vice Chair Liz Cheney's point of view.
Robin: I don't want to put words in Vice Chair Cheney's mouth, but I think at least the thought on that side of the argument was, “You're trying to persuade people like me, and people like me who don't like me very much now, because, I've come out against my party or my party's president. How do we get them to see this for what it is? And do we need to have that argument right now in these pages?”
Farai: Our investigators told us that Vice Chair Cheney insisted that the January 6 report focus on President Trump, his lies about the 2020 presidential election and his efforts to alter the outcome. She declined to speak to us.
Here is Chair Bennie Thompson’s take on the two versions of what the January 6 report could be.
Bennie Thompson: Candyce is absolutely right, you know. As a Black person from the South, I know a majority of that work was something that was absolutely necessary.
Farai: Still, he is a politician.
Bennie: So the person I normally am, I set aside and became the chair to get the product produced.
Farai: Robin ultimately understood Chairman Thompson’s decision.
Robin: It was “we need to keep the eye on the ball,” which is the former president seeking to end American democracy. That's – that’s what this has got to be about.
Farai: We’ll hear more from Chairman Thompson in our next episode. He was sympathetic to the history Candyce wanted to bring to the fore, but Chairman Thompson and the majority of members opted for a precision focus on the former president’s role in the insurrection.
Candyce believes that coming to terms with white supremacy is essential to preserving democracy. The problem? As a nation, we can’t agree on a collective definition or history of American democracy.
Candyce: I think that's, again, what scares me most is that when people talk about democracy and being pro-democracy and saving democracy for America. That's a cause that a lot of folks who have not been in the Civil Rights boat have come to recently. But they have come to it with a very squishy definition of democracy.
Our definition is really elastic. There are lots of folks who like to talk about the United States as one of the oldest democracies in the world, but in order to count us that way, you have to include centuries where women couldn't vote and where Black people couldn't vote, but we still called it a democracy.
Farai: Yeah.
Candyce: And what I'm most afraid of is that the folks who are on our side on this fight for democracy but are sort of new to the cause are not going to do the work to understand the broader implications and carry the weight carry that knowledge. And that means that the solutions that they'll be willing to talk about are just very different.
I don't know how you talk about January 6th and John Eastman and not mention that he was questioning Kamala Harris's eligibility to be vice president because of her parentage, not mention that he was behind the Show Me Your Papers laws in Arizona several years ago, not mention that he was in the camp supporting the census reform that Trump was trying to do in 2020 to not count undocumented people.
Farai: John Eastman is a lawyer who has been indicted along with former President Trump for assisting efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Candyce: So we can talk a lot about Eastman and his legal theories, but if you divorce that from his very detailed history of racializing the law in a really dangerous way, then you don't understand the motivation behind what happened.
Farai: It also makes it difficult to understand the continuing motivation behind the recent uptick in restrictive voting laws. Here's another excerpt from The Book of Purple from Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, that backs up Candyce’s point:
“Since the 2020 election, the country has witnessed two aggressive, anti-democratic developments in state legislatures. First, efforts to suppress voting have soared. In 2021 alone, at least 19 states passed 34 restrictive voting laws, or laws that make it more difficult to vote… overall, legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive voting bills in 49 states in 2021. This trend continues in 2022 … state lawmakers had introduced, pre-filed, or carried over more than 250 restrictive voting bills.”
As of fall 2023, the Brennan Center reports 14 states enacted 17 restrictive voting laws. In the past decade, only one year saw more restrictive laws placed on the books. That year was 2021.
Candyce: And if you don't understand that, then you don't really have a good handle on how to fix the problem.
Farai: Yeah.
Candyce: Or you're fixing a problem that's different from the problem that I see. And the result for that is that you're preserving democracy for your folks and not mine.
Farai: I think very often that some of the people who are insurrectionists or sympathizers believe that they are beginning to be treated the way that you and I have been treated or our ancestors were treated. There are literally videos of people, you know, I'm thinking of a specific video of a white man being arrested and he said, "Don't treat me like an N-word." And it's like, "OK, so let's process that."
Candyce has had years to process this idea as an individual and through her work on civil rights. And she’s become too well-versed in how law enforcement ignores the rapidly rising danger that violent white supremacists pose.
Candyce: We had been talking about these issues of, "Why isn't DHS taking this more seriously? Why isn't the FBI taking this more seriously? Why don't they see the danger and the rise of white supremacy that we see?"
Farai: Research from Michael German, a Brennan Center for Justice fellow, was provided to the Purple Team. It stated:
“Explicit racism also remains a problem in the FBI and the broader intelligence community. An administrator of classified intelligence community chat rooms recently reported that they were a ‘dumpster fire’ of racist hate speech, including support for the January 6th insurrection.”
Farai: Moreover, German wrote:
“As a member of the intelligence community, FBI officials have access to these internal platforms. Though an investigation would be needed to determine if FBI officials were aware of or participated in this misconduct, a group of Black former FBI executives recently went public with complaints of ‘institutionalized racism’ that undermined the recruitment and retention of Black agents.”
Farai: Today, 73 percent of the FBI's workforce is white and 55 percent male.
Candyce: We were trying to convert people to this notion that white supremacy really was at the center of what happened on January 6th. It explains why law enforcement did not take it seriously enough. It explains in some ways why social media did not get their act together and why they didn't take it seriously enough. It explains why we had the rise of violent militias. There were a lot of folks that we talked to, even experts who would tell us, "Well, these militias aren't racist, they're anti-government."
Farai: The Purple Team laid out the uptick of militia movements during the ‘70’s and again during the Obama presidency.
Candyce: The 1970s was right after the Civil Rights Movement and 2010 was right after Barack Obama took office. So maybe they're anti-government or maybe they're anti-progress for some of these marginalized communities. And I had to push back and say, "They're not anti-government when Trump is in office. So, they're pro-authoritarian when Trump is in office, so I don't really think it's the anti-government strain that we're talking about here. It's something much deeper than that."
Farai: The Book of Purple tried to put all the pieces together.
Candyce: And it was really important to us, because defining the problem determines the solution.
Farai: Yes.
Candyce: This very American history of progress, enfranchisement, backlash, disenfranchisement, and to help people see that we were in – we are in – an era of backlash and disenfranchisement. We saw it with the Civil War and enfranchisement, and then Reconstruction gave way to all those Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised people. It was really important to us to connect The Big Lie to the decades of discussion about voter suppression and voter intimidation before that, and the ongoing effort in states to pass more and more restrictive laws to disenfranchise people.
Farai: Mmm-hmm.
Candyce: Because you don't get to a violent insurrection on January 6th if you can disenfranchise the people who wouldn't have voted for Trump. And that is the fear and the danger that we on the Purple Team were constantly trying to inject into the conversation – to understand that the problem is bigger than Trump and will exist after Trump.
Farai: What Candyce was hoping to do with The Book of Purple is make it impossible for white Americans to brush off January 6 as a one-off. Instead, she wanted Americans to see how it was almost inevitable.
Candyce: People very often think about January 6th as being a Trump problem. And there is a need to understand those individual distinct elements that are dangerous on their own.
Farai: One example: the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
(Sound from Unite The Right)
Candyce: Susan Bro, who is Heather Heyer's mother. Heather Heyer was the young woman that was killed in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally. And I remember doing research, and I came across an interview with her where she said, "If you rush to heal, if you rush to everybody grab each other and sing ‘Kumbaya,’ we’ve accomplished nothing, and we'll be back here again in a few years."
We did not really talk about what the symptoms of a democracy at risk look like. There was an opportunity for a civic education to this country to understand not just that democracy was at risk, because we talked a lot about democracy being at risk, but like, what does that mean? What do you look out for in your country to understand what democracy dying on the vine looks like? How do we move forward and protect ourselves from what happened in a way that is not just solely focused on Trump? And understanding that Trump didn't just spring out of nowhere. I think that was a real opportunity for education that we missed as a country.
Farai: It’s not the first time the United States missed an opportunity to reckon with its history of racism. Remember Stephanie Jones from episode 3 whose father helped lead the Kerner Report of 1967? It outlined the ways institutional racism yielded unrest. It mentioned white supremacy … once.
Fifty-five years later, the January 6th report mentions white supremacy … once.
On her final day serving on the January 6th Committee, Candyce sends out a letter to all the investigators and staffers who assisted in the January 6th investigation. It reads in part:
Candyce: “It is by now no secret that not everything various staffers might want in this report will make it into print, but that's the reality of staff work. I am reminded of game stores where they might have a large puzzle out on the table and invite people to wander by and place a few pieces on the board before moving on with their day.
The work of this committee has been to assemble a puzzle to discover not just what happened on January 6th, but why it happened, how we got there and how to never get there again. Quite frankly, we were never going to be able to give a full accounting. There are pieces we cannot possibly know about that only time will reveal, but every piece of the puzzle we put into place gets us closer to a full understanding. And even if you might be disappointed if a few pieces were lost along the way, if you get enough of them in place, people still get the picture.
We're writing for history, and I would encourage each of you, especially those of you who wanted more pieces on the board, to look back on your experience and find the ones that you did place. Do not underestimate the value that those individual pieces bring. And try to see how your part of the picture will help the next person who comes to the puzzle know where to place theirs.
Farai: In our next episode, we’ll hear from three of the congressional members who had the final say in the scope and direction of the January 6th Committee.
Chairman Bennie Thompson: Those people who wore the Make America Great Again caps. You know, as a Black person, I'm trying to see now, when was America great? You know what I'm saying?
Farai: Why did they make the choices they made? Why relegate race and white supremacy to the background? Was this effort enough to protect American democracy and what are their fears if it wasn’t?
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CREDITS
Thanks for listening to "January 6: An American Story,” a special series from Our Body Politic.
I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. For this series, Joanne Levine is our executive producer. Morgan Givens is our senior producer.
The series was written by Joanne Levine, Morgan Givens and Farai Chideya.
Mary Mathis and Nicole Bode are our fact-checkers. The series was sound designed by Rococo Punch. Jordan Greene is our researcher.
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Our technical director is Mike Garth.
Special thanks to the folks at Clean Cuts, including Carter Martin, Emma Shannon, Harry Evans, Archie Moore, Mike Goehler, Adam Rooner, Molly Mountain and Aliza Jafri.
This series is produced with the support of Ruth Ann Harnisch.
This program is produced with support from the Surdna Foundation, Ford Foundation, Katie McGrath and JJ Abrams Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Meadow Fund, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations, The Henry L. Luce Foundation, Compton Foundation, Harnisch Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, the BMe Community, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.