#358 Storm at the Capitol w/ Mary Clare Jalonick
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In just five years, the story of the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US capitol has already seen more bad faith reinterpretations than most events get over the course of generations. Fortunately, Mary Clare Jalonick has brought a diverse set of voices together in her new book, Storm at the Capitol: An Oral History of January 6th (PublicAffairs, 2026). In this episode, Mary joins us to talk about her experience as a journalist who was on the ground that day covering Congress for the Associated Press, what she learned from talking to others about their experiences, and the core facts about the insurrection that should underpin any serious discussion of that day.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Bob Crawford. I'm Ben Sawyer. And this is The Road to Now. Well, the Road to Now this week, Ben, takes us to the nation's capital. Our nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Our guest today is Mary Claire Jelonic Capitol Hill reporter for the Associated Press. |
| 0:22.8 | And her new book that came out earlier this month is Storm at the Capitol, an oral history of January 6th. |
| 0:30.0 | Mary Claire, welcome to the road to now. |
| 0:32.1 | Thank you for having me. |
| 0:33.8 | Mary Claire, it's great to have you here today. |
| 0:36.5 | You've put together something that I think |
| 0:39.0 | will look familiar to most historians in the sense that when we teach, one of the things we always |
| 0:45.9 | think that's important to do is to put together primary sources, is to there's what we say, |
| 0:51.7 | but then we say to the students, look, here's what I'm saying, |
| 0:54.6 | but I want you to be able to see actually what was going on on the ground, some of the |
| 0:58.3 | evidence that I used to put together this argument. And one of the important things to me is to make |
| 1:04.1 | sure that they see why people disagree, why people see things differently. And I think what |
| 1:10.1 | you've done here is you have put together |
| 1:13.4 | a source reader, I think, for January 6, 2021 that is well ahead of what most document readers are, |
| 1:23.4 | and you've done a pretty fascinating job of getting different perspectives on it. |
| 1:30.4 | So could you just open up by telling us your story? |
| 1:32.1 | How did you come to do this? |
| 1:38.3 | And what drove you to decide here just five years out to put all these voices together into one book? |
| 1:40.3 | I really like that description of it. |
| 1:41.5 | And I'm going to use that. |
| 1:48.2 | But I, so I was there in the Capitol in January 6th. I'm a reporter. |
| 1:55.8 | I cover Capitol Hill and Congress for the Associated Press. And I have been covering January 6th since it happened. And it just, an oral history really seemed to me to be a good way to get the facts out of what happened, according to people who were there and witnessed it, from lawmakers to police, to the rioters themselves, to the workers in the building, staff, journalists. And, you know, I think when you look at it all together as sort of a |
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