Michael Kirk: This may be the most important presidential election in a century. Certainly, in my lifetime, I think it's been covering presidential politics for more than 50 years and this is the biggest moment between two very different candidates, very close election. And in one of the oddest twists of all, one of the candidates as a former president who at least half the people who are voting think was involved in illegal acts surrounding the January 6th incursion in the Capitol building. His admirers and supporters equally believe it was probably the FBI that started the attack, that it was a false flag effort. So, we thought, all right, at the beginning of this incredibly important, incredibly partisan time in American politics, the central issue seems to be, did the former president of the United States commit criminal acts while he was president and arguing that the election had been rigged. So, the challenge for us was to go find out everything we could about it. At my instructions, talking primarily to conservative Republicans who were either involved in the stop to steal effort or witnesses in the January 6th hearings or potential witnesses in the trial. Believe it or not, I'm going to say these words, the criminal trial of a presidential candidate during an election campaign. So, in the midst of all of that, we thought, well, we better, let's lay it out. Let's lay the story out in the kind of detail we like to do. Unfortunately, for the viewer's perspective, it's two and a half hours long, but you can watch it in pieces streaming if it overwhelms you. It's not been our experience in screening. People get kind of pulled along through this movie. I think they've forgotten many of the details. And that was, of course, our challenge, how to lay it out in a way that was accessible to both sides and where maybe, maybe some people would finally understand what happened.
Patrick Center: How do you lay this out so that those on one side of the aisle can see that the facts do matter, that the facts present themselves?
Michael Kirk: One of the things we were determined to do, as I said, Patrick, was hear from people who were supporters of Donald Trump, who worked in the 2000 campaign, many of them public officials who he then reached out to after he believed, after he came to believe, if he came to believe it, that the election had been rigged. That's one of the ways to get at it is to triangulate the quote unquote truth. So, you do it with prosecutors, you do it with other investigators, you do it with journalists who look deep and hard at it, journalists from different perspectives, long form books, daily news, and you do it by watching and reading and interviewing most of the members of the investigative team for the January 6th committee. The committee that had been charged with being super partisan, yet it still had two very powerful Republicans on the committee talking to all of these people that were involved. And you try to get at, as I say, you try to triangulate the truth and connect the dots for the things that happened. It's all out in plain sight. It became our job to kind of lay it out in a logical order day by day. And you can sit there and watch it and make up your own mind.
Patrick Center: Are there points, are there facts that are indisputable when you put it together that makes the case that yes, Donald Trump did inspire an insurrection?
Michael Kirk: Some of that depends on your appetite for rule of law. If you really do believe that there is a kind of generally agreed upon set of laws in the country growing out of the Constitution of the United States, if you believe that that's the sort of sacred trust. that all politicians, everybody who swears an oath from the president of the United States to military and police and fire personnel to members of Congress and members of state government, they all swear an oath to the constitution of the United States. And that constitution is based, if you're somebody who believes this, that constitution is based on the rule of law. That is that the laws tell you what you can and can't do, even if you're president of the United States, what citizens can and cannot do, and should and should not do. So, from that perspective, it is possible to look at very specific moments that happen, examining in the film and in reality, and in the case that's coming in March, if the trial starts, the former president's intent. What did he mean to do? Did he know that he had lost? Did he come to believe that he had lost after 50 cases where his team did lose? Did he come to believe that or not? What was his intention? If as president of the United States does he have immunity, he can say almost anything? He makes that argument, the so-called freedom of speech argument. Or is it as the prosecutors from the Justice Department would say, and the January 6th committee would say, it was a conspiracy that Donald Trump, yes, he has the right to speak, but he doesn't have the right to cry fire in a crowded theater. Here's what intent is. And here's how it manifests itself over many different things that happen. Whatever it is, we try to trace along those and connect those dots with a defense of Trump very firmly implanted in the film so that viewers can sit there and hear one side say how that is a criminal act and hear attorneys who know and read Trump's filings and hear Trump's own words about it. What he has said over the years so that you do, I hope, get a kind of fuller picture, not only what's at stake, but what happened.
Patrick Center: You mentioned that you reached out specifically to a number of conservatives. Who was the most compelling interview? What did they tell you?
Michael Kirk: There's a lot of really good people in this film and good Americans. And as I say, they are conservative Republicans who cared about and voted for Donald Trump and have a long history of support of the conservative wing of the Republican party. I don't think a former president Trump anymore would call them, he calls them now RINOs, Republicans in name only, or says they are not on the MAGA team. But the best one of all of those was a man named Rusty Bowers from Arizona, the former Speaker of the House of the Republican-dominated legislature in Arizona. And he was just big Trump supporter. You see in the film, Trump call him up on the stage during the campaign and extol his virtues. But after the president decided that the election had been rigged, Arizona was one of the places he and Rudy Giuliani, his attorney, his lead attorney, decided was in play because it's a Republican-dominated state, much like Georgia. So, you see and hear from Mr. Bowers about what happens both between a phone call from the president of the United States and Rudy Giuliani and a visit from Rudy Giuliani to Arizona to try to convince him to throw out the duly elected largely Democrat electors who had been chosen because Trump lost in Arizona. Trump believes that the election was fixed and rigged and there were lots of dead people voting in Arizona. Rusty Bowers talks about that and what it was like to get pressure from the president of the United States and his lead attorney. It's quite a tale. He's quite a guy, a classic American. He'd be a major character in a movie if one was being made about this and is really a fascinating person. And even if you believe Trump didn't have anything to do with the conspiracy. If you watch the film and you're a conservative Republican, you will recognize Rusty Bower, the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, and others in the film. But it's Bauer's and Raffensperger's. It would be a close call between the two, but I thought Bauer's was just a little bit better and certainly a fascinating American character that in literature they would have called a raw-boned man out of the West, you know. So, it's a trip to listen to him, to think about him, and to understand what's at risk for him speaking out on this particular film and on this particular issue.
Patrick Center: As you investigated all of the information available, were there some new items that came to light?
Michael Kirk: It is like all, like if you used to watch Perry Mason on television when you were a kid or any legal story, law and order, the devil, as Ross Perot used to say, is in the details. So, things that I read and things that I thought, and I've made a lot of films about the Trump presidency. And I watched all the events unfold just like so many people did from election night all the way to January 6th, the ultimate culmination. There are inside the details that are in this film, the stories told by, as I say, his Republican supporters. When you watch it, and especially if you've watched Donald Trump as closely as I have over all these years, starting back in 2015, you begin to really recognize his method, his way of thinking, the way that he could go from not wanting to lose. He never wants to lose, and he's had a long history of claiming that elections were rigged all the way back to the Emmy Awards when he was on The Apprentice, when it would always be beaten. by a different show and he claimed it was rigged and made a big stink about it. It's a life pattern for Donald Trump. So, you watch that and when you put all the connections together, you suddenly say, well, this is a really rich telling of the story about, there's a lot to know, a lot to learn, a lot to think about how it all shook out in those months after the November election and leading up to January 6th. It's amazing and as I say, the devil is in the details.
Patrick Center: Tuesday night at nine o'clock on WGVU Public Television, PBS Frontline presents Democracy on Trial, veteran political filmmaker Michael Kirk, thank you so much for your time.
Michael Kirk: My pleasure, Patrick, thank you.