No Democrat has been as integrated into the effort to institute accountability for the riot at the Capitol last year as Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.). Raskin led the prosecution during former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial last February, arguing that Trump’s incitement of the riot warranted conviction. He is also a member of the small bipartisan House committee formed to investigate the riot.

Appearing on PBS’s “Amanpour & Co.” on Tuesday, Raskin was asked about the committee’s efforts. In response, Raskin delineated a hierarchy of the day’s actors that provides a useful understanding of what occurred.

“The way that I see the events of Jan. 6,” Raskin said, “are that we had a mass riot that began as a demonstration and became a riot. That surrounded a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist groups that came armed and ready to fight. They were the ones that smashed our windows and began beating up the police officers, 150 of whom ended up with serious injuries or wounds because of the violence.”

“But then that insurrection surrounded a coup on the inside,” Raskin continued, “and that was an attempt essentially to take Joe Biden’s majority of 306 in the electoral college and reduce it below 270 in order to kick the contest into the House of Representatives for a so-called ‘contingent election’ under the 12th Amendment of our Constitution.”

Raskin explained how that would have worked: Each state’s House delegation would get one vote — giving Trump an advantage.

“They had a pathway to try to steal the election, essentially,” Raskin said, “and I think that Donald Trump was prepared at that point to invoke the Insurrection Act and to declare something like martial law.”

You can see how this devolves into unanswerable what-ifs. If Vice President Mike Pence or Republican legislators had tried to reject submitted electoral votes, it’s extremely unlikely that the Democrats would have shrugged. Given the stated reluctance of military leaders to be seen as intervening in the election, it’s not a certainty that Trump’s effort to declare martial law would itself have had any effect. There were lots of ways things could have gone; where they went was, all else aside, one of the less dire conclusions.

But back to Raskin’s described hierarchy. He outlines three tiers of efforts to block Joe Biden’s election on that day: the mob itself, those who came to the Capitol with the goal of inciting violence; and the relatively academic effort to block electoral votes being undertaken inside the building.

Using data on the arrests from The Prosecution Project (TPP), I tried to visualize Raskin’s delineation.

I’ll start by noting that I think it’s more helpful to reverse the first two components — the mob and the people there with the intent to cause violence. In part, that’s because the goal of some of those violent actors was specifically to whip up a riotous mob to provide cover and multiply their own force.

Journalist Marcy Wheeler has written about this plan.

“This discussion and others reveal a key part of the Proud Boy plan for January 6: to incite others — ‘normies’ — to commit violence,” she wrote last week. “And while a number of Proud Boys or close associates engaged in what I’ve called ‘tactical’ violence that day, the vast majority of (and the worst) violence was done by others, mostly by people with either no known or just networking ties to militia groups (such as through anti-mask activism). The Proud Boys weren’t the only militia-linked people attempting to encourage others to engage in violence ... [b]ut a stated goal of at least some of the militia members who implemented the assault on the Capitol was to stoke others to engage in violence.”

We know of a number of groups, including the Proud Boys, that apparently organized for violence that day. The most prominent may be the Oath Keepers, nearly a dozen of whom were charged with seditious conspiracy last week. Using the TPP data, we can pick out the number of people known to have been allied with those prominent organizations. It’s harder to determine which of them might have engaged in violence, so, following Raskin, I’ve included them collectively in that leading-edge of violence.

There were also dozens of other people arrested for acts of violence who are not documented as having links to those groups. Raskin’s hierarchy is overly simplified when it conflates violence with those groups; as Wheeler notes instead, many “normies” also assaulted members of law enforcement.

Most of those arrested, though, didn’t. The total number of arrests is by now well over 700. Among that group, most are charged with nonviolent offenses such as trespassing. And then, of course, there were uncountable hundreds or thousands more who either haven’t been arrested or who entered the Capitol grounds and are unlikely to face any criminal charges.

Then there are the legislators. A majority of Republicans in the House and a handful in the Senate voted to reject electoral votes from states Biden won in the hours after the riot, fulfilling the desired outcome of not only the rioters but the plan endorsed by Trump and his top allies.

We can think of the layers in a different way. The plan for violence occurred in relative darkness, organized online among members of extremist groups. The process for bringing thousands of people to Washington happened transparently, with Trump and outside organizations sponsoring a series of events in Washington on that day. Then there was the congressional effort, which occurred both in the open — with public statements about opposing cast electoral votes — and behind closed doors, as Trump and his allies cajoled legislators.

This hierarchy also helps us organize the subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee. They’ve been issued in clusters, often but not always reflecting shared roles in the events of the day.

Most recently, they subpoenaed members of Trump’s legal team (“Attorneys” on the above graphic) who had worked to amplify false claims about election fraud before Jan. 6. That includes former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, but, given his role in trying to coordinate the response from the Willard hotel during the riot (and calls to senators encouraging them to slow down the electoral-vote count) he warrants inclusion in the group I labeled “Outside allies.” (Subpoena circles are scaled to the number of people or organizations targeted by the subpoenas.)

The other subpoenas issued include those to:

  • House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who spoke with Trump during the riot.
  • A number of outside advisers, including people such as Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who helped advance a plan to overhaul leadership of federal law enforcement in the days before the riot.
  • Other outside allies, such as Michael Flynn, Katrina Pierson and Stephen K. Bannon, who were involved at the Willard hotel or in setting up the planned rallies that day.
  • Congressional allies such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who spoke with Trump regularly or who encouraged attendance at the rallies.
  • Chief of staff Mark Meadows and other members of the White House staff who interacted with Trump and/or were involved with the rally at the Ellipse.
  • The Ellipse event organizers, a number of people who helped plan the rally that Trump attended.
  • Non-Ellipse event organizers, a group that includes people involved in other parts of the day’s planned rallies (several of which were folded with the Ellipse one into a unified package).
  • The fringe organizers, such as Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, who planned rallies but, on the day of the riot, were in the mix in other ways (including Stone being accompanied by Oath Keeper members).
  • The leaders of right-wing organizations that were implicated in violence.

It’s worth noting that those subpoenas often target individuals who might have been moving between the realms delineated by Raskin. A central question the House committee is trying to answer, of course, is where those lines might have blurred. Were people close to Trump aware of the prospect of violence erupting? Were those who stoked that violence in communication with officials understood mostly as having been focused on the electoral-vote count?

Raskin’s framing is primarily useful simply as a framing. There were three aspects to the effort to help Trump retain power that day, including a right-wing fringe and elected leaders hoping to twist the rulebook to their advantage. In the middle was this massive mob of people, incited to violence by the fringe and incited to fury by the leaders’ insistences that the election was stolen.

All largely distinct, but all working together toward the same target.