Post Reports

An inauguration like no other. And how the White House residence staff say goodbye to one first family and hello to another. 
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Joe Biden has been inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States, calling for unity in a speech to a divided nation. White House reporter Sean Sullivan reports. 
Kamala D. Harris is the first woman, and the first woman of color, to become vice president. Producer Jordan-Marie Smith talks to Harris's Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters about how they’re celebrating.
Moving presidents’ families into and out of the White House is a complicated process, expertly coordinated by the chief usher of the residence. Graphics reporter Bonnie Berkowitz describes the delicate dance, usually completed in under five hours. 
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Why the nation’s capital feels like a ghost town. What President-elect Joe Biden wants to get done on his first day in office. And why the Secret Service has been paying $3,000 a month for a bathroom. 
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President-elect Joe Biden has long been eager to undo and reshape policies advanced by the Trump administration over the past four years. Come Wednesday, he’ll make liberal use of his executive powers to do it, Matt Viser reports.
Peter Jamison was reporting on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s potential departure from D.C., and he discovered a bizarre detail: The federal government used $3,000 a month of taxpayer dollars to pay for a bathroom for their Secret Service detail to use. The Trump-Kushner family has half a dozen bathrooms in their household, but according to neighbors and law enforcement officials, the people charged with keeping the family safe were instructed not to use any of them.
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The plight of black entrepreneurs in Tulsa, nearly a century after one of the nation’s worst acts of racial violence. 
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In 1921, a White mob descended on the Greenwood district of Tulsa, killing scores of African Americans, and looting and burning their businesses to the ground. The Tulsa massacre decimated Greenwood, a commercial hub once hailed as the height of Black enterprise. 
But as Tracy Jan reports, Black erasure in Tulsa is hardly a remnant of the past. Today, Black entrepreneurs in historic Greenwood feel threatened yet again, as gentrification drives up property values and Black business owners get priced out of land ownership — and some of them are asking why there still hasn’t been restitution for the past. 
In case you missed it: On Friday’s episode of Post Reports, we went in deep on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. With firsthand accounts from Post journalists, members of Congress and police, we reconstructed the events of that day, and answered some big questions about how it happened, why it happened and what might happen in the future. If you haven’t heard it yet, definitely go back to take a listen. That episode from Friday is called “Four hours of insurrection.”
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Today, we reconstruct the riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 — hearing from the lawmakers, journalists and law enforcement officials who were there, and answering lingering questions about how things went so wrong. 
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The four-hour insurrection: How a mob of Trump supporters tried to disrupt American democracy. 
Reporters Rebecca Tan, Marissa J. Lang, Rhonda Colvin, and photojournalist Bill O’Leary were all witnesses to the violence on Jan. 6. They share their harrowing accounts of what it was like, inside and outside of the Capitol.
Reporter Peter Hermann explains how battered D.C. police made a stand against the Capitol mob. 
And reporter Carol D. Leonnig chronicles the experience of outgoing Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who told her that House and Senate security officials hamstrung his efforts to call in the National Guard.
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Tear gas is a chemical weapon banned in war. So why do police departments still use it on civilians in the United States? Producer Linah Mohammad and reporter Devlin Barrett examine the history of tear gas and the ethical questions about its use.
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Over the summer, tear gas was deployed to disperse peaceful protesters outside of St. John’s Church near the White House before President Trump posed with a Bible in front of the church, raising questions about the use of the chemical agent by law enforcement. 
Listen to the audio documentary KUOW at 65: The Battle in Seattle here.
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President Trump is impeached by the House — again. And, inside a California hospital overwhelmed by the pandemic.  Read more:
On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump for the second time, on the charge of incitement of insurrection. This time, some Republicans supported the move, like Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). Reporter Mike DeBonis reports on what it was like to be there today.
And while we’ve all been transfixed by the attack on the Capitol and its fallout – there's still a pandemic happening. On Tuesday, more than 4,200 Americans died of covid-19. Jon Gerberg is a video journalist for The Post. He got rare access to a hospital in California where a covid-19 surge has completely overwhelmed the health-care system. He talked about it with producer Linah Mohammad. 
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A widening rift in the Republican Party. What FBI officials knew about the siege of the Capitol, and when they knew it. And, why the February Vogue cover of Kamala Harris is causing a stir.
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Political reporter Michael Scherer explains how the Capitol riot is escalating a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, with pro-Trump conspiracy theorists on one side and the party establishment on the other. 
The Washington Post has learned that a day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI report warned of “war” at the Capitol. That information contradicts a senior official’s declaration that the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s rally planned to do harm. National security reporter Matt Zapotosky lays out what we know about why law enforcement didn’t do more with the information. 
The nation’s first female vice president-elect has been photographed for the cover of February’s Vogue magazine, and a vocal chorus on social media is displeased with the images. The Post’s senior critic-at-large, Robin Givhan, explains why. 
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How tech companies are responding to the far-right extremism on their platforms. Why we should have seen the siege on the Capitol coming. And, a brief history of presidential pettiness.
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The planning for last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol happened largely in plain view, with chatters in far-right forums explicitly discussing how to storm the building, handcuff lawmakers with zip ties, and disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s election. Those planners, however, are starting to lose their platforms, says reporter Drew Harwell. 
The scale of the siege was foreshadowed heavily on far-right social media websites, says researcher RazzanNakhlawi. And the groups who organized it – they’ve been around for years, and they’re not going anywhere. 
President Trump says he will not attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. Writer Ronald G. Shafer explains that while this is uncommon in recent history, he’s not the first president to do so.
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Trump’s promise for a smooth transition of power might be too late, amid growing calls to remove him from office. After the attack on the Capitol, lawmakers seemed to come together — but will that last with a 50-50 Senate? And an update from Georgia.
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White House bureau chief Phil Rucker brings us behind the scenes of a week when President Trump incited a mob of his supporters to attack the Capitol, and then, grudgingly, admitted his loss. 
With Democratic victories in Georgia’s runoff elections, the Senate will be equally split, with Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris serving as a tie-breaking vote. David Fahrenthold breaks down what that could look like. 
Last month, our host Martine Powers and producer Ted Muldoon reported from Georgia on the runoff elections, and all the people on the ground who were working to deliver a victory to the Democrats — and the first Black senator from the state. One of those people was Bob Melvin, who we learned after the canvassing trip had contracted the coronavirus. We checked in with him this week after the Democrats’ victory.
Correction: A previous version of this episode mistakenly said that Trump would be the second president to skip his successor’s Inauguration. In fact, there have been at least three others — John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Johnson.
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The public fracturing of the Republican Party. Security failures at the Capitol. And, questions about why predominantly White rioters got kid-glove treatment from police.
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Lawmakers, rattled and angry, reconvened to certify election results after an angry pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol. Seung Min Kim reports on the very public schism laid bare in the Republican Party. 
National security reporter Shane Harris on the massive failure of law enforcement to protect the building. 
Michael Brice-Saddler on the stark contrast between policing of predominantly White rioters at the Capitol and the Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating last year. The comparison reveals a case of privilege, Brice-Saddler says. 
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