The Daily - What the Jan. 6 Hearings Have Revealed So Far
Episode Date: June 17, 2022This episode contains strong language.The House committee that was tasked with scrutinizing the events surrounding the attack at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 is holding a series of public hearings....Testimony from key figures has explored a campaign by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to subvert American democracy and cling to power by reversing an election. The panel has recounted how Mr. Trump’s actions brought the United States to the brink of a constitutional crisis.Guest: Luke Broadwater, a congressional reporter for The New York Times.Want more from The Daily? For one big idea on the news each week from our team, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: On Thursday, testimony laid out how Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to overturn his election defeat, even after he was told it was illegal. Here are four takeaways from Day 3.Follow a detailed timeline of the key moments, from the buildup to the attack to now.Here are answers to some common questions about the House committee investigating the riot and the proceedings.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.Â
Transcript
Discussion (0)
From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.
This is The Daily.
Today, the January 6th Committee has now held three of its five scheduled hearings,
laying out the case that Donald Trump was at the center of a plot to overturn the election.
Trump was at the center of a plot to overturn the election.
I spoke with my colleague, Luke Broadwater,
about what we're learning from the hearings and whether they're breaking through.
It's Friday, June 17th.
Luke, we've been talking to you about the January 6th Committee since its creation a little less than a year ago.
And we've always understood its mission to be figuring out what caused the events of that day and who's responsible for it.
So how do these televised hearings in particular fit into that mission? In the nearly a year since the January 6th committee began its work,
it started doing dozens and then hundreds and then finally more than a thousand
closed-door interviews. These are secret interviews that no one ever had access to, the press couldn't go into, the public couldn't go into. And they included top Trump White House
officials, they included people that were rioters that day, they included state officials and
Department of Justice officials and the National Guard and everybody in between. And so these
hearings are the committee's chance to begin revealing its findings from all these interviews
and from the more than 140,000 documents it obtained.
And they're going to show
that their investigation has concluded
this all boils down to one man being at the center of it all.
And that man is Donald Trump.
But big picture, Luke, what's the purpose of it all. And that man is Donald Trump. But big picture, Luke,
what's the purpose of doing that?
Because a great deal of this story
and even Trump's role in it
seems to have been told over the past year.
So there are probably a couple of goals
for the committee,
depending on which committee member it is.
I think for the vice chairwoman of the committee,
Liz Cheney, and for Adam Kinz for the vice chairwoman of the committee, Liz Cheney,
and for Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican on the committee, their goal is to try to excise Trump from the party once and for all, to convince both the American people, but also the members of
their own party, that we cannot follow this guy anymore. And we're going to lay out exactly why. That's
the goal from the Republicans on the committee. What about the Democrats, the majority of people
on the committee? Well, they would say their goal is to get to the bottom of the facts.
But there is a political goal here for Democrats writ large, I think. And that is to draw a
contrast with the Republican Party, which, you, which fell under Donald Trump's spell and followed him,
and then contrast that with the things that their party's doing. So yes, there may be problems with
the economy right now, but we didn't try to overthrow an election. And there's potentially
one more goal, which is held by, I think, the majority of the Democrats and the Republicans on the committee.
And that is that they are actually building a case that could be taken by the Justice Department and used for a criminal charge against Donald Trump or his top allies
to hold them accountable for the violence of January 6th.
So basically, they're hoping that a couple people in particular are watching these hearings,
including the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland.
Yes, and we know that Merrick Garland said that he is and that his top prosecutors are.
So they are following this case very closely.
Got it.
Okay, so let's talk about how the committee has constructed these hearings to do all the
things that you just laid out?
Well, they have set up a series of hearings
to try to have maximum impact.
And the first thing they did was they scheduled
their first hearing to be in prime time.
And they negotiated with the networks to carry it live.
And so I was at the Capitol for the first hearing.
And the select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol
will be in order.
The hearing opens with Congressman Benny Thompson, who is the chairman of the committee.
Donald Trump lost the presidential election in 2020. And I know as
a reporter who's covered this very closely, one of the questions we all had in the press gallery
at the time was, would the committee actually discover things that were new, things we had not
heard before? Because we have, I think, uncovered a lot of things that happened in the build up to
January 6th. And some of us were actually skeptical that they would be able to find anything that we didn't.
But right off the bat, it was not because of voter fraud.
Don't believe me?
Hear what his former attorney general had to say about it.
Chairman Thompson plays a clip from an interview with former Attorney General Bill Barr.
I had three discussions with the president that I can recall.
And Bill Barr recounts how he went in three times to tell Donald Trump.
I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen
and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit.
And I remember sitting up in the chair in the hearing room and thinking, oh, wow, they're really going to start bringing the goods here.
He was the attorney general of the United States, the top law enforcement official in the country,
telling the president exactly what he thought about claims of a stolen election.
And then Chairman Thompson turns the microphone over to...
It's my pleasure to recognize Ms. Cheney. The vice chairwoman. Thank you very much,
Mr. Chairman. And let me... Liz Cheney of Wyoming. As you will see in the hearings to come,
President Trump believed his supporters at the Capitol, and I quote,
were doing what they should be doing.
And at a typical congressional hearing, this would be the time when the Republican starts
to undercut what the Democrat has just said, and a fight sort of ensues at the dais. Instead,
President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.
She adopts a stance that's just as tough on Donald Trump, if not even tougher than what Benny Thompson has just said.
And it becomes very clear that the Republicans on the committee and the Democrats on the
committee are in lockstep with condemning what Donald Trump did and detailing all of
the evidence about how he tried to subvert an American election.
Right. This was the moment for me, Luke, where it became clear that this hearing was going to be
totally unlike any other congressional hearing we're used to seeing because it was going to be
uncluttered by all those interruptions and partisan bickerings that define a traditional
congressional hearing and make it almost impossible to tell a single story.
Yes, I think very few people end up watching them. And instead, what we got was a very
streamlined presentation where a really clear narrative could be told.
In our country, we don't swear an oath to an individual or a political party.
We take our oath to defend the United States Constitution.
And that oath must mean something.
And then, as if to underscore that this was not going to be a traditional congressional
hearing, Representative Cheney turned to the Trump wing of her party.
Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible.
There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
And drew a contrast between what she was doing on this committee and between what they had done,
marching in lockstep with Donald Trump, lying about the election,
and attempting to overturn an American election. Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw
and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election
and prevent the transfer of presidential power. And she describes what she calls a sophisticated seven-part
plan to overturn the election, and that each one of these hearings would serve as its own chapter
telling that part of the plan. And it all begins with President Trump spreading the big lie.
In our second hearing, you will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election.
But despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information.
Then he attempts to do different things to stay in power.
In the days before January 6th, President Trump told his top
Justice Department officials, quote, just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me
and the Republican congressman. He tries to interfere with the Justice Department. He tries
to interfere with state officials. As you will hear, President Trump engaged in a relentless effort
to pressure Pence,
both in private and in public.
And then finally,
when everything else fails.
In our final two June hearings,
you will hear
how President Trump
summoned a violent mob
and directed them illegally
to march on the United States Capitol.
And as the crowd morphs into a mob,
begins attacking the building and chanting,
hang Mike Pence, he does nothing for 187 minutes.
Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol,
he placed no call to any element of the United States government
to instruct that the Capitol be defended.
He did not call his Secretary of Defense.
Right. And in a way, she's laying out what starts to feel, because this is, after all, a televised set of hearings, a kind of serialized TV show about January 6th.
Yes. So you can think of that first hearing as almost like a pilot episode of a television show.
The select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol will be in order.
And now they're going to take you to the second episode.
This morning, we'll tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election.
And that is how Trump began lying about the election and start to show you the damage and the havoc those lies caused.
Pay attention to what Donald Trump and his legal team said repeatedly about Dominion voting machines. Far-flung conspiracies with a deceased
Venezuelan communist allegedly pulling the strings. Probably the most important thing we learned
was that some of Donald Trump's top advisors told Donald Trump that what he was saying about
the election was false. Here, for example, is White House lawyer Eric Hirschman.
His view was shared by many of the Trump team whom we interviewed. I thought the Dominion stuff was,
I never saw any evidence whatsoever to sustain those allegations. He is told again and again
that there is no fraud. And I said something to the effect of,
sir, we've done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations
are not supported by the evidence developed. We've looked at Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Nevada. We're doing our job. Much of the info you're getting is false.
Then the committee once again turns to former Attorney General Bill Barr.
There was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days.
And it was like playing whack-a-mole because something would come out one day and then the next day it would be another issue.
And they play another clip of his deposition.
When I walked in, sat down, he went off on a monologue.
In which he describes how he again went into Donald Trump to talk to him about the election results.
And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, he's become detached from reality.
And as Bill Barr is describing the type of things that Donald Trump believes,
or was telling people, to the committee.
There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.
He breaks out into laughter because the allegations that are being made are so absurd.
I mean, they include Hugo Chavez flipping votes.
Hugo Chavez has been dead since 2013.
They involve people in Italy,
defense contractors flipping votes,
using satellites,
and they involve schemes involving China and thermometers
and voting booths. I mean, they become so absurd, they become laughable. But what's not funny is
that hundreds of Donald Trump supporters believe these lies, became so enraged by them and stormed
the Capitol, injuring people in a deadly riot. And so at
that point, it's not funny anymore. It's deadly serious. Luke, why is the committee trying so
hard in this hearing to show that the people around the president are telling him that he's
wrong and then that he contravenes them anyway? Well, it shows that Donald Trump knew or should have known that
what he was saying was a lie. And that gets to intent. And intent is key to fraud. And the
committee has alleged in court papers that there was a conspiracy to commit fraud involving Donald
Trump. And the fraud was perpetrated on the American public. So if a prosecutor is one
day going to take this case, they will want to know that he knew, or at least should have known,
that what he was saying was a lie. So to the extent the committee can document every time,
every person, as the numbers multiply, who told Donald Trump that what he was saying was false,
but Donald Trump kept saying it anyway. It bolsters the case that this was, in fact, fraud.
Mr. Chairman, at this time, I'd ask for unanimous consent to include in the record
a video presentation describing how President Trump used the lies he told to raise millions of dollars from the
American people. And then they use this fraud to take their case to the next step, and that is
fundraising. And so the committee begins laying out towards the end of the second hearing just
how much money Donald Trump and his allies raised from their supporters based on the
lie of a stolen election. And they come up with the figure $250 million. Wow. Yes. And that's an
astonishing number because usually at the end of a campaign for the losing candidate, the money dries
up. Nobody wants to give their money to a loser. There's no point to it.
It doesn't go anywhere.
But what happens here is Donald Trump and his allies realize that by lying about the election, they can keep the money flowing in.
And so after he loses on election day, millions of dollars flow into the Trump campaign. We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors
as to where their funds would go
and what they would be used for.
And what that money is supposed to go to,
they tell voters it will go to a fund
to fight the election results.
I don't believe there is actually a fund
called the Election Defense Fund.
But it was revealed in testimony
at the second
hearing that that fund did not exist. Did they say the Election Defense Fund was another,
I think we called it a marketing tactic? Yes. And so in fact, the money went to a super PAC
created by Donald Trump. And that money was then dispersed to Trump allies. $200,000 went to Trump hotels.
$5 million went to the company that put on the rally that preceded the riot.
So lots of people were getting paid out of this money, but none of it was actually going to a defense fund for the election.
And Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren had a way of saying it.
She said,
So not only was there the big lie,
there was the big ripoff.
Donors deserve to know where their funds are really going.
They deserve better than what President Trump
and his team did.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
So this testimony is showing fraud on various levels.
There's the fraud, in theory,
that Trump is committing in lying to the
public about the election results. And then there's the fraud in asking them to give money
to try to overturn the election, but then that money being used for other purposes.
Yes. And the committee believes that this might be a key way to break through to Republicans about
what Donald Trump did to their party and to the country.
That it's one thing for Republicans to hear him say the election was stolen, but it's another
thing to have him then dupe his donors to break with their hard-earned money and give it to him
when it was all a con.
So look, at this point, how are these two hearings,
the pilot, as you called it,
and this first episode that really delves into the question of the big lie,
how are they starting to land?
Well, the committee set out to establish
that Donald Trump was at the center
of the plot to overturn the election.
That this wasn't the case where the president got misled by a rogue advisor, or he had bad
data that he was reading, or he watched too much of a certain television channel and was
fooled.
He was the origin of saying the election was stolen so he could stay in power.
And he was impervious to advisor after advisor telling him to stop.
And so that brings us to the natural outgrowth of those lies for Donald Trump, which is as he's trying to stay in power,
as he's spreading the big lie, he's running out of options to stay in office. And so finally,
he settles on probably the most audacious strategy yet, and that is to pressure his
own vice president, Mike Pence, to throw out legitimate votes when Congress meets on January
6th and install Donald Trump for a second term.
We'll be right back.
So Luke, what does the committee reveal about this next stage
of what they're calling Trump's conspiracy,
his effort to try to use his vice president to overturn the election?
Well, Michael, that's the focus of the third hearing, which took place Thursday afternoon.
Good afternoon. Today, we'll lay out the facts for the American people.
Today, we'll lay out the facts for the American people.
And what the committee is able to detail is the pressure campaign against Mike Pence.
Donald Trump tried three, four, five different ways to stay in power, pressuring state officials, intervening with the Justice Department.
And he's running out of options. He needs to come up with something. President Trump plotted with a lawyer named John Eastman. And a conservative
attorney named John Eastman comes onto his radar. Eastman was at the time a law professor at Chapman
University Law School. And tells him things that Donald Trump wants to hear. He prepared a memo
outlining the nonsensical theory
that the vice president could decide the outcome of the election
at the joint session of Congress on January 6th.
And that is, he could exploit federal law when Congress meets on January 6th.
Here, Dr. Eastman says the vice president can reject the Biden electors from the states that he calls, quote, disputed.
And invoke powers never before assumed by a vice president to throw out legitimate votes from the states and accept a slate of fake electors for Donald Trump to install him for a second term.
This is something that never before has been tried in modern American history.
It is a plan so audacious that almost everyone who hears it right away rejects it as illegal.
Right. And those are the people who end up testifying before the committee.
That's correct. Mr. Jacob, how did this theory first come to your attention?
One of the committee's main witnesses was Mike Pence's top lawyer, a man named Greg Jacob.
The first time that I had a conversation with the vice president about the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act was in
early December. And he testified that Pence right away knew that this was wrong and un-American.
The vice president's first instinct when he heard this theory was that there was no way that our
framers who had broken away from the tyranny of George III would ever have put one person in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.
But he wanted to leave no stone unturned.
He wanted to prove to Donald Trump and John Eastman and some on the far right in the conservative legal community that they had done
their due diligence. And he asked me mechanically, how does this work at the joint session? What are
the rules? So he assigned Greg Jacob to research, go back through all the history of all the
electoral college certifications and see if there was any there there,
whether there was any argument that could be made
for the vice president assuming these powers
to keep his own ticket in office
after they had lost an election.
We concluded that text, history,
and frankly, just common sense
all confirmed the vice president's first instinct
on that point. There is
no justifiable basis to conclude that the vice president has that kind of authority.
And Jacob says flatly, there is no such power. They can't do it. It's illegal.
When I pressed him on the point, I said, John, if the vice president did what you were asking
him to do, we would lose
nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, wouldn't we? And he says that eventually, through his
discussions with John Eastman, even John Eastman admits that Greg Jacob is right, and what he's
proposing is in fact a violation of federal law. He acknowledged, well, yeah, you're right, we would
lose nine to nothing. And Greg Jacob documents several times when Eastman makes this omission,
both in emails and also in direct conversations.
Did John Eastman ever admit, or as you know, in front of the president,
that his proposal would violate the electoral contract?
I believe he did on the 4th.
And he says one time he recalls Eastman making this admission in front of President Trump two days before January 6th.
Huh.
Nevertheless, Donald Trump keeps pushing this strategy.
Trump keeps pushing this strategy, and he pushes it over a series of days until we get to the morning of January 6th, where White House aides are walking about the Oval Office.
And who do you recall being in the Oval Office?
Don Jr., Eric, Laura, Kimberly, I believe Meadows was there. At some point, Ivanka came in.
And they hear Donald Trump on the phone with Mike Pence,
badgering him, pushing him, pressuring him.
It's also been reported that the president said to the vice president something to the effect that you don't have the courage to make a hard decision.
And I don't remember exactly either, but something like that.
Yeah.
Like being, you're not tough enough to make the call.
It was a different tone than I'd heard him take with the vice president before.
And you see some of the testimony come out at this hearing yesterday.
My memory, I remember hearing the word wimp.
Either he called him a wimp.
I don't remember if he said, you are a wimp.
You'll be a wimp. Wimp is the word I remember.
You hear one aide say that he heard the word wimp being used.
Something to the effect, this is, the wording's wrong. I made the wrong decision four or five years ago.
Do you remember what she said? Her father called him the P word.
You hear another say that they understand the word that was used was pussy.
These are words Donald Trump is using to describe his vice president, Mike Pence,
for not being willing to adopt the Eastman plan.
Yes, absolutely.
So you can see the type of mental warfare that Trump is waging on Pence
as he's pushing for him to go along with this plan.
And as the minutes are literally ticking down to the moment where Pence will be certifying
the election. Yes, and not long thereafter. I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so.
I hope so. Donald Trump travels to the Ellipse to give a speech. All Vice President Pence has to do
is send it back to the states to recertify.
In which he will invoke Mike Pence's name
and fire up the crowd against him.
And even after this crowd he's speaking to
turns into a violent mob
and begins attacking the Capitol,
Donald Trump doesn't back down.
I believe I had sent him a text saying that we may want to put out some sort of statement
because the situation was getting a little hairy over at the Capitol.
We thought that the president needed to tweet something and tweet something immediately.
Aides testify that they're calling on him to call off the violence. And instead...
Then I remember getting a notification on my phone.
He sends out another tweet.
And we looked down and it was a tweet about Mike Pence.
That says Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done.
It was clear that it was escalating and escalating quickly. And the committee placed
video of rioters calling out Mike Pence's name, saying, bring out Pence, hang Mike Pence.
I remember us saying that that was the last thing that needed to be tweeted at that moment.
The situation was already bad. And so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.
And notes that that tweet he sent firing up the crowd against Pence comes as the building is under siege, as he knew the building was under siege.
Rioters already inside the Capitol opened the East Rotunda door
just down the hall. And only two minutes later. Approximately 40 feet. That's all there was
between the vice president and the mob. The rioters themselves will be in 40 feet
distance of Mike Pence. Select committee has obtained never before seen photos from the National Archives that show Vice President Pence sheltering in a secure underground location as rioters overwhelmed the Capitol.
of the Senate and then to a safe room and then ultimately into the loading dock of the Capitol complex where he huddles with Secret Service agents for protecting him. When we got down to
the secure location, Secret Service directed us to get into the cars. And he's told at the time that
for his safety, they should probably take him away from the Capitol. But Pence stands his ground, says he doesn't want to do that.
It was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day.
He wants to go back in and certify the election.
The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol.
And of course, that's exactly what he does.
He goes back into the Capitol once the riot's over,
and he presides over the certification of the election.
Absolutely.
Judge Luttet and Mr. Jacob, you and Vice President Pence
are exactly the people our nation needed at a critical time.
You had the courage to do what was right.
And the Democrats on the January 6th committee hold Mike Pence up as an American hero.
And that is something I don't think any one of them would have done before this tragic day in American history.
And I thank those who sent us evidence for their bravery and patriotism.
Without objection, the committee stands adjourned.
so look for the committee how does this sequence of events involving mike pence help them make the larger case that is the point of these hearings it helps them carry out two of
their strategic goals one establish and document evidence of criminality on the part of Donald Trump, that he knew what he
was doing was false, that he knew the arguments he put forward did not stand legal scrutiny,
and yet he pushes them anyway. And then he almost gets his own vice president killed.
He knows that a mob is storming the Capitol, and he puts out a tweet anyway that encourages more hatred and more vitriol at Mike Pence.
And in doing so, the committee also furthers another strategic goal, and that is to excise Donald Trump from the Republican Party and from American politics altogether.
They hold up Mike Pence, who is a figure of the religious right, who is one of the most
deeply conservative politicians in America, and was Donald Trump's loyal foot soldier
for four years, and point out that when the going got tough, this guy did the right thing.
point out that when the going got tough, this guy did the right thing. Mike Pence stood up for the Constitution, and Donald Trump stood up for preserving his own power. And they draw a very
clear contrast between those two men in a way that they hope will break through to Republican voters
and to the American people more broadly. And the message, especially to Republican voters,
would basically seem to be,
Mike Pence is one of you,
and Mike Pence drew a line in the sand on January 6th
and said, enough, and broke with the president,
and therefore, you should break with the president too.
Absolutely.
And that's why you see the witnesses they brought forward
to tell this story were Republicans. They were respected constitutional conservatives. And I think they did that very intentionally.
for the previous four years had parroted what the president said, sometimes misled the public in the service of Donald Trump. And all of a sudden, yes, they are contravening the president
under oath in front of these hearings. But how are we supposed to reconcile
what they had done before with what they're telling this committee? How do you try to make
sense of that? Well, yes. I mean, when you see Jason Miller
testifying, he's one of Trump's campaign advisors. You see Bill Barr, the former attorney general,
testifying. You see Mark Short, the vice president's chief of staff, testifying.
The committee is trying to show that Donald Trump went too far even for these people,
that his most loyal foot soldiers could not stand with him
any longer. And in that moment, when he's willing to turn on even his own vice president,
he lost many of them. And they want to get that through to the voters, because many of the voters
on the right are still with Donald Trump. And so they're going to make this case, but they're going to make it, for the most part, using Republican voices.
So finally, Luke, there's the question of impact and whether these hearings are succeeding.
And that feels like a fair question to ask as we've now got three of them under our belt.
So I'm curious, how are you trying to gauge that if the January 6th televised hearings are breaking through?
Well, there are a number of ways to look at that.
One, you could look at television ratings.
The very first hearing attracted more than 20 million viewers.
And that is an astonishingly high number for a
congressional hearing. The second is you saw a shift in some of the major media outlets on the
right and how they were going to approach these hearings. Fox News, which refused to carry the
first hearing, changed course and they began airing the second and third hearings.
You saw a couple of the most influential newspapers on the right editorialize after
the first hearing against Donald Trump, which struck me as pretty notable. And then third,
I've noticed a sort of lack of what was promised to be a rapid response from the right.
And I noticed that especially after this last hearing.
And that's because how can you attack Mike Pence if you're on the right?
If you believe in constitutional conservatism, what do you say when it's Mike Pence making the case that what Donald Trump did was wrong?
And so I think big picture, the committee is building an effective case that it wasn't just Democrats who were victims of Donald Trump's pressure campaign to stay in office and overturn the election.
It was Republicans, too.
They're trying to show that Donald Trump turned on his own voters.
He took their money, and then he created a situation
where their own vice president was in danger,
and he didn't seem to care.
And he didn't seem to care.
Well, Luke, thank you very much.
Thank you, Michael.
The next televised hearing of the January 6th committee will be held on Tuesday.
It will focus on another target of Trump's efforts to overturn the election, state officials.
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to know today.
Mortgage rates are skyrocketing to their highest levels since 2008,
making it far more expensive to buy a home.
As of Thursday, the most popular home loan product, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, jumped to 5.78%, up from about 3.5% in January.
For many, that will add tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of buying a home.
It was the latest fallout from the decision by the Federal Reserve to sharply raise interest rates
in order to lower historically high levels of inflation.
Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nowatzki, Rob Zipko, Rachel Quester,
Asta Chaturvedi, and Claire Tesketter, with helm from Will Reed. It was edited by Paige
Cowett and Lisa Chow, contains original music from Marion Lozano, Brad Fisher, and Dan Powell,
and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Landsberg of Wunderlee.
and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly.
That's it for The Daily.
I'm Michael Barbaro.
See you on Tuesday after the holiday.