Elections

When Colombia chooses its next president on Sunday, the pivotal election will represent a blow to the country’s dominant political force as voters have become increasingly disillusioned by chronic poverty, inequity and growing insecurity.Colombia’s animating political dynamic was born during the popular presidency of Álvaro Uribe, a conservative who led the country from 2002 to 2010.The right-wing leader rapidly gained widespread good will as a result of his heavy-handed tactics in Colombia’s fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, a left-wing insurgency in the country’s decades-long internal conflict.The military, under Mr. Uribe, effectively beat back the rebel group, reducing violence in the lives of many Colombians, especially in cities.It made him one of the country’s most powerful politicians and a kingmaker who could propel candidates into power with his support.But the former president’s political movement has been tarnished by controversy, perhaps most prominently by the false positive scandal in which the Colombian military is accused by a transitional justice court of killing more than 6,400 civilians between 2002 and 2008, and passing them off as enemy combatants to increase its casualty counts.While the scandal was never directly connected to Mr. Uribe, many of his close associates in government have been linked to the case.Now, with two candidates who have both shunned the political establishment facing off in a neck-and-neck campaign for the presidency, Uribismo is once again a key element of the race.But this time, the candidates are trying as hard as they can to distance themselves from the former leader.One candidate, Gustavo Petro, a leftist who was once a member of an urban guerrilla group, has come to represent a sort of polar opposite of Mr. Uribe.His opponent, Rodolfo Hernandez, a wealthy businessman who has used TikTok to help promote his campaign and has the backing of conservative, has issued a list on Twitter detailing 20 “differences I have with Uribe.”Arlene Tickner, a professor at Rosario University in Bogotá, said that “being associated with Uribismo has become a liability in this election.”Mr. Uribe hasn’t endorsed anyone in Sunday’s race, though he has said that a vote for Mr. Petro would be a vote for socialism.Many younger Colombians have little knowledge of Mr. Uribe’s tenure and associate him more with the country’s current challenges.Hilda Robles Camacho, 22, who graduated from college with a degree in health administration and has yet to find a job, said she blames Mr. Duque, and by extension Mr. Uribe, for many of her country’s woes. She said that family members who were once loyal Uribe supporters have now shifted their backing to Mr. Petro.“People are waking up,” Ms. Robles Camacho said. “They are seeing all the bad things that Uribismo has caused.” More

President Emmanuel Macron’s supporters and an alliance of left-wing parties came in neck and neck in the first round of voting. Now they are in a bruising face-off for control of the lower house of Parliament.PALAISEAU, France — Five years ago, Amélie de Montchalin, a politician known more for her quiet technocratic skills than her oratory, easily won election to Parliament from this southern suburb of Paris, and later became one of President Emmanuel Macron’s ministers.But at a small rally last week, at risk of losing her seat to a left-wing opponent in this year’s parliamentary elections, she launched into an uncharacteristically fiery tirade, accusing the left of promoting “a vision of disorder” that would lead France to “submission” to Russia.If the left won, Ms. de Montchalin told the crowd gathered in a sun-drenched square, “in a few weeks or a few months, there will be bankruptcies and unemployed people.”Her outburst reflected the bruising rhetorical battle that Mr. Macron’s centrist forces and a coalition of left-wing candidates are waging ahead of the second round of voting in the parliamentary elections on Sunday. The stakes are high for Mr. Macron given that a defeat could hamper his majority in the National Assembly, France’s more powerful house of Parliament, and hinder his ambitious agenda.Only months ago, Mr. Macron was wooing the left as he sought re-election as president in a bid to keep the country’s rising far right from winning power. Now, a left-wing coalition has become his No. 1 enemy.Amélie de Montchalin, France’s Ecological Transition and Territories’ Cohesion minister, spoke at a campaign rally last week in Palaiseau, near Paris.Alain Jocard/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Macron’s supporters describe a potential victory by the coalition and its leader, the hard-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as a catastrophe that would ruin France. The left says Mr. Macron and his allies are panicking because they are losing their grip on power, and they accuse the president of staging photo ops in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, as he seeks to mediate in the Ukraine war instead of caring for French voters.Both sides are desperately chasing the roughly 52.5 percent of the French electorate who did not vote last Sunday, the lowest level in the first round of a legislative election since 1958.Polls and projections suggest it could be difficult for Mr. Macron’s alliance of centrist parties, known as Ensemble, to retain the absolute majority that it enjoyed during his previous term and that allowed him to push legislation through relatively unimpeded.Instead, the president could be left with a relative majority — more seats than any other political force, but not more than half of the 577 seats in the National Assembly — forcing him to reach across the aisle for certain bills.“Even if he gets a majority, it is likely that he will have to negotiate more,” said Olivier Rozenberg, an associate professor at Sciences Po in Paris. After five years of Mr. Macron’s top-down governing style, which left many lawmakers feeling sidelined, “the logic of governing will probably be a little less vertical,” Mr. Rozenberg said.Weeks ago, Mr. Macron appeared likely to secure an absolute majority after convincingly defeating Marine Le Pen, the far-right leader, in the presidential race. Over the past 20 years, voters have usually given their newly elected president a strong parliamentary backing.Mr. Macron, third left, and other European leaders on Thursday in Irpin, Ukraine. Mr. Macron’s opponents have chastised him for staging photo ops in Ukraine instead of focusing on the concerns of French voters.Pool photo by Ludovic MarinThen, France’s fractious leftist parties unexpectedly agreed to set aside major differences on foreign and economic policies, at least temporarily, and forge an alliance for the parliamentary election called NUPES, for Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale, which includes Mr. Mélenchon’s France Unbowed Party, and the Socialist, Green and Communist parties. In the first round last Sunday, they finished neck and neck with Mr. Macron’s alliance, with roughly 25 percent of the vote.Pointing to the leftist alliance’s proposals, which include overhauling France’s Constitution and raising the monthly minimum wage to $1,580, Mr. Macron’s top lieutenants have compared Mr. Mélenchon with Hugo Chávez, the populist former Venezuelan leader. They have warned that a leftist victory would return France to “Soviet regulation” and bring a “fiscal guillotine at all levels.” They have also castigated Mr. Mélenchon as being too soft on Russia.Jérôme Guedj, a Socialist who is running for the leftist coalition in the Essonne department against Ms. de Montchalin, lamented what he called “demonization, caricature and amalgam” that reflected Mr. Macron’s and his party’s “panic” over possible defeat.“It really reminds me of 1981,” Mr. Guedj said, referring to the year when François Mitterrand, the Socialist leader, won the presidency with support from French Communists. “People were saying, ‘There will be Russian tanks on the Place de la Concorde.’”The left has lobbed accusations of its own. Mr. Mélenchon’s supporters say the government is secretly planning to increase the value-added tax in order to reduce the country’s deficit, an assertion that Mr. Macron’s alliance has called a falsehood.The speed with which Mr. Macron went from courting the left in the presidential election to battling it for the parliamentary vote is partly a result of France’s two-round electoral system. But it is also a testament to Mr. Macron’s shifting political nature, and to the fact that his party has gradually occupied an enlarged center with radical opponents on both sides, Mr. Rozenberg said.Mr. Mélenchon this week in Toulouse, southwestern France. Mr. Macron’s supporters describe a potential victory by the left coalition and Mr. Mélenchon as a catastrophe that would ruin France.Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Macronism developed by eating at its margins, by eating the center left and eating the center right rather than making alliances or negotiating coalitions,” he said.This shapeshifting has not been without confusion. The president’s alliance initially struggled to give clear voting guidance to supporters in districts where Ms. Le Pen’s party was facing off against leftist candidates in runoffs, at times describing both forces as equally threatening. Party leaders eventually stressed that “not one vote” should go to the far right.But some of Mr. Macron’s supporters appear divided on the issue.Michèle Grossi, 74, a retiree from a constituency near Paris where the far right and the left will face off on Sunday, said she would vote for Ms. Le Pen’s candidate in the absence of a Macron candidate because she was “very afraid of Mélenchon.” Another supporter of Mr. Macron, Christophe Karmann, said that presented with the same scenario, he would back the left because it was a “republican force.”Ms. Grossi also echoed concerns among some of the president’s supporters that he had been disengaged from the campaign, saying it was “unfortunate that Macron has not spoken more.”Mr. Macron tried to dispel that notion last week, issuing dire warnings about what was at stake in this election. In a solemn address on Tuesday on the tarmac of Orly airport, south of Paris, he said that “in these troubled times,” the vote was “more crucial than ever.” He urged voters to give him a “solid majority” for the “superior interest of the nation.”“Nothing would be worse than to add a French disorder to the global disorder,” said Mr. Macron, who was about to embark on a trip to Eastern Europe, partly to visit French troops dispatched in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.But Mr. Macron’s comments, made as the presidential aircraft’s engines thrummed in the background, did little to quell accusations from his opponents that he had avoided open confrontation.“His ship is sinking and Macron is taking a plane,” Mr. Mélenchon said mockingly at a rally in Toulouse. In an interview with Le Parisien, Mr. Mélenchon said the French president was disconnected from ordinary citizens’ concerns over rising food and energy costs.A market in Amiens, France, in March. Rising costs for basic items continue to be a talking point for France’s politicians.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times“He doesn’t understand French society,” he said. “He doesn’t realize how people are being suffocated by prices.”In the Essonne department, Ms. de Montchalin, who is currently the minister in charge of France’s green transition, trailed Mr. Guedj by seven percentage points after the first round. She is one of 15 ministers who are running for a seat in Parliament and who have been warned by Mr. Macron that losing would mean leaving his cabinet.To gin up support during the rally last week, Ms. de Montchalin invited a notable guest: Bruno Le Maire, France’s longtime finance minister. He told the crowd that the economy had improved — unemployment has fallen to 7.3 percent, the lowest level in a decade — and that unlike Mr. Mélenchon, Mr. Macron was not promising “a bright future on credit.”But Ms. de Montchalin’s campaign staff acknowledged it would be a tough election.Mr. Karmann said he had bet with friends that should Mr. Macron’s party fail to muster a solid working majority, the president would dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections. France in the next five years, he said, “will be hard to govern.”Constant Méheut More

Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado faces two rivals in the June 28 primary, including Ana María Archila, an activist who won attention during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing.With a little more than a week until Primary Day in New York, the Democratic Party’s left wing is focused on a contentious statewide race shaped by issues of ideology, ethnicity and the influence of money and lobbying in Albany.The contest is not for governor: The incumbent, Kathy Hochul, enjoys a huge advantage in fund-raising and in public polls over the party’s most left-leaning challenger, Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate.But in Mr. Williams’s running mate, Ana María Archila, the far left sees a legitimate opportunity to capture the lieutenant governor’s race and gain a foothold in the State Capitol.Ms. Archila, a seasoned activist and first-time candidate backed by the Working Families Party, gained national attention when she confronted Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona in a Capitol Hill elevator during the hearings over the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexual assault.The viral moment, which she said was unplanned, led to her being invited by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as her guest to the State of the Union address in 2019.Now Ms. Archila is hoping to make her influence felt in Albany.The race for lieutenant governor has set off competing visions for the role of an office with few statutory duties, but which has nonetheless served as a familiar steppingstone for higher office: Two of the last three governors, including Ms. Hochul, ascended from lieutenant governor after their predecessors resigned amid scandal.Indeed, during a televised debate on Wednesday, Ms. Archila vowed to use the office of lieutenant governor — typically a ceremonial role with little power beyond presiding over the State Senate and being next in line to succeed the governor — as an independent bully pulpit that could serve as a counterweight to the governor’s office.“I will not be a lieutenant governor who’s quietly in the background, smiling and cutting ribbons,” Ms. Archila said, an apparent nod to Ms. Hochul, who was largely sidelined by the Cuomo administration when she held the post.Mr. Delgado left his House seat in the Hudson Valley to serve as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s No. 2.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMs. Archila stressed that the office was an elected position and should therefore not be deferential to the governor, saying that she would “stand up to the governor when he or she is veering away” from helping working people.The contest for lieutenant governor was thrown into turmoil in April, after former Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned after he was arrested on federal bribery charges.Ms. Hochul successfully pushed legislation to remove Mr. Benjamin’s name from the ballot and chose Antonio Delgado, then a congressman representing the Hudson Valley, as her new lieutenant governor and running mate.Despite his last-minute entry, Mr. Delgado entered the Democratic primary with the backing of Ms. Hochul’s campaign apparatus and support from the party establishment and key labor unions, as well as a sizable war chest he has swiftly deployed to flood the airwaves with television ads.During Wednesday’s debate, Mr. Delgado said he was chosen by Ms. Hochul as her second-in-command because of his record in Congress and to be an “active partner.”There is much at stake for Ms. Hochul: While the candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run on the same ticket in the general election, they run separately in the June 28 primary. If Mr. Delgado were to lose, Ms. Hochul, who is favored to prevail in the Democratic primary, could potentially be forced to run with a lieutenant governor candidate not of her choosing in November. And if Ms. Archila were to win, Republicans would likely seek to link her left-wing credentials to Ms. Hochul, a more moderate Democrat.The race, which features three Latino candidates, could also mark a momentous milestone for Latinos eager to elevate one of their own to statewide office in New York for the first time, following a dearth in representation despite Latinos accounting for about one-fifth of the state’s population.Mr. Delgado, 45, identifies as Afro-Latino, though Latino leaders have questioned his heritage, while Ms. Archila, 43, was born and raised in Colombia. The third candidate, Diana Reyna, 48, became the first Dominican American woman elected to public office in the state when she represented parts of Brooklyn and Queens in the City Council.“When Latinos are not present at the table, our issues are not hyper-localized,” Ms. Reyna, who also served as Mayor Eric Adams’s deputy when he was borough president of Brooklyn, said in an interview this week. “We don’t represent communities of wealth, we represent the poor, the working class, the single family home that people want to keep and pass down to their children.”Diana Reyna, a former city councilwoman, is sharing a ticket with Representative Tom Suozzi of Long Island, who is running for governor.Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesBoth Ms. Archila and Ms. Reyna face an uphill climb to unseat Mr. Delgado, a moderate Democrat from Schenectady who was the first person of color elected to Congress in upstate New York after flipping a Republican-held House seat in 2018.For one, he has a significant fund-raising edge: Relying on money transferred from his congressional campaign account, he had about $2 million as of May, more than six times the amount that his challengers had combined. Mr. Delgado has so far spent over $4 million on television and digital ads since he was appointed lieutenant governor, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks television ad spending.He has run the ads — which highlight his résumé as a Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard Law School graduate and brief career as a rap artist — while skipping most candidate debates and forums, avoiding potential scrutiny, much to the chagrin of his opponents.Mr. Delgado said he has been busy settling into office, but that he has also been “on the ground connecting with people” at subway stations and with small business owners and clergy members.He has also received outside help from a super PAC funded by the billionaire founder of a cryptocurrency exchange platform that has spent about $1 million in ads supporting him. He insisted during the Wednesday debate that his decision-making would not be influenced by outside money, saying that he did not “know who this crypto billionaire is.”The party’s progressive-activist wing is seeking to build on its partial success from 2018, when Mr. Williams, the New York City public advocate, mounted an insurgent campaign for lieutenant governor and came within six percentage points of defeating Ms. Hochul, beating her in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the Democratic primary.Indeed, Ms. Archila’s campaign is hoping to perform strongly among Latino voters and left-leaning white liberals from New York City, as well as those in progressive hotbeds along the Hudson River and the Capital Region. But Mr. Delgado, who is a more familiar face in the Hudson Valley, could potentially pick away at that wall of support and splinter the Latino vote, while attracting many Black voters, according to political analysts.Strapped for money, Ms. Archila has run a vigorous low-budget campaign grounded on the organizing tactics from her decades-long work as an activist. She has joined unionizing Starbucks workers in Queens; protested alongside activists in the State Capitol; and pulled off publicity stunts, such as showing up at Mr. Delgado’s office in Albany after he refused to participate in a debate.Ms. Archila has spearheaded efforts to organize immigrant communities, most notably through Make the Road New York, a grass-roots organization she co-founded in 2007 that is supporting her campaign.She was taking a break from political organizing earlier this year when the Working Families Party — a progressive third party — asked her in February if she would run for lieutenant governor alongside Mr. Williams, their candidate for governor. Together, the two have proposed far-reaching plans to build affordable housing, enact universal health care and allocate $3 billion in cash payments to immigrant workers who did not qualify for pandemic relief.“New York State is such a rich state,” Ms. Archila said over bubble tea in Flushing, Queens, last week after receiving an endorsement from State Senator John Liu. “Our problem is never that we lack resources, our problem is that we prioritize the interests of those who have already so much and who are able to use their leverage, their money to influence our policies.”In Ana María Archila, who is backed by the Working Families Party, the far left sees a legitimate opportunity to capture the lieutenant governor’s race.Janice Chung for The New York TimesHer campaign appeared to gain some steam following Mr. Benjamin’s arrest, as a group of city and state lawmakers, as well as Representatives Nydia Velázquez and Jamaal Bowman, endorsed her candidacy. As for a possible endorsement from Ms. Ocasio-Cortez: “We’re working on it,” Ms. Archila said.It remains unclear if those endorsements will translate into more votes, especially in a contest that seldom engages voters.During Mr. Liu’s endorsement outside a public library in Flushing, some curious commuters briefly stopped to listen to Ms. Archila as she spoke, her aide holding an iPhone to livestream the event to the two people watching remotely.Maria Estrada, 72, a Bolivian immigrant and registered Democrat, stopped to pick up campaign literature. A frequent voter, she said her largest concerns were helping house people who were homeless.Asked who she would vote for in the race for lieutenant governor, she said:“I don’t know. Whoever is Hispanic.” More

As House hearings highlighted testimony that could create more pressure to pursue a criminal case, the former president tried out a defense that strained credulity.As new questions swirled this past week about former President Donald J. Trump’s potential criminal exposure for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump issued a rambling 12-page statement.It contained his usual mix of outlandish claims, hyperbole and outright falsehoods, but also something that Trump allies and legal experts said was notable and different: the beginnings of a legal defense.On nearly every page, Mr. Trump gave explanations for why he was convinced that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and why he was well within his rights to challenge the results by any means available.What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump wrote, stemmed from an effort by Americans “to hold their elected officials accountable for the obvious signs of criminal activity throughout the election.”His statement, while unfounded, carried a particular significance given the intensifying focus on whether he could face criminal charges. If the Justice Department were to bring a case against him, prosecutors would face the challenge of showing that he knew — or should have known — that his position was based on assertions about widespread election fraud that were false or that his attempt to block the congressional certification of the outcome was illegal.As a potential defense, the tactic suggested by Mr. Trump’s statement is far from a guarantee against prosecution, and it presents obvious problems of credibility. Mr. Trump has a long history of saying whatever suits his purposes without regard for the truth. And some of the actions he took after the 2020 election, like pressing officials in Georgia to flip enough votes to swing the outcome in that state to his column, speak to a determined effort to hold on to power rather than to address some broader perceived vulnerability in the election system.But his continued stream of falsehoods highlights some of the complexities of pursuing any criminal case against him, despite how well established the key facts are at this point.And the statement also reflected steps Mr. Trump is taking behind the scenes to build a new legal team to deal with an array of investigations, including into his pressure campaign to change the outcome of the election in Georgia and his taking classified documents with him when he left office.M. Evan Corcoran, a white-collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor brought on by Mr. Trump, was involved in drafting the document, according to two people briefed on the matter. Mr. Corcoran has also represented Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump ally who has been indicted by the Justice Department for refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Mr. Corcoran and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.The statement came during a week in which the House committee’s hearings drove home Mr. Trump’s potential criminal and civil legal exposure by highlighting testimony from aides and advisers documenting what he had been told, and when, about the validity of his election fraud claims and the legality of his strategy for hanging on to power.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.At its third hearing on Thursday, the committee built a case that Mr. Trump had plunged ahead with a scheme to have Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally overturn the 2020 election even though Mr. Trump had been told it had no legal basis.The Justice Department is investigating a number of elements of the Capitol riot and the broader effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to keep the White House despite Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no public indication that the department is building a case against Mr. Trump, who has long contended that the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack are partisan and unfounded and whose side of the story has not been presented in the House committee’s hearings.But the panel’s investigation has already generated evidence that could increase the pressure on Mr. Garland to move more aggressively, a course of action that would carry extraordinary legal and political implications. After prodding from the Justice Department, the House committee signaled in recent days that it would start sharing some transcripts of its witness interviews with federal prosecutors as early as next month.Greg Jacob, left, who had been chief counsel for Vice President Mike Pence, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge, at a hearing on Thursday held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn a civil case related to the committee’s work, a federal judge concluded in March that Mr. Trump and a lawyer who had advised him, John Eastman, had most likely committed felonies in their effort to overturn the election. “The illegality of the plan was obvious,” Judge David O. Carter of Federal District Court for the Central District of California concluded in that case.Judge Carter cited two crimes that he said the two men were likely guilty of committing: conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing a congressional proceeding. Members of the House committee have made similar suggestions, and some lawyers have contended that Mr. Trump could also be vulnerable to a charge of seditious conspiracy.But successfully prosecuting the potential charges suggested by Judge Carter and others could depend on establishing Mr. Trump’s intent — an issue that his statement this past week appeared to address with the argument that he believed his challenges to the outcome were grounded in legitimate questions about the conduct of the election.Daniel L. Zelenko, a white-collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said that in all of the potential crimes that were being looked at in connection with Mr. Trump’s conduct, the Justice Department would need to show that he had the intent to commit a crime. Mr. Zelenko said that while the new details revealed by the committee would help prosecutors in proving intent, the government still had a range of other issues to overcome in building any prosecution.“The key is having contemporaneous evidence that he was saying that he knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway,” said Mr. Zelenko, a co-chair of the white-collar defense practice at Crowell & Moring. “The problem with Trump is that you have to try and get inside his mind, and he has such a history of lying and pushing falsehoods that it makes it difficult to determine what he really believes.”Aside from the evidence the committee has already revealed, the panel has received other testimony that undermines Mr. Trump’s claim that he thought he really won the election. According to two people briefed on the matter, Alyssa Farah Griffin, the White House communications director in the days after the election, recently testified to the committee that Mr. Trump said to her in November 2020 words along the lines of: Can you believe I lost to Mr. Biden?At its hearing on Thursday, the House committee built a case that Mr. Trump had plunged ahead with a scheme to have Mr. Pence unilaterally overturn the election even though Mr. Trump had been told it had no legal basis.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn a television interview last fall, Ms. Griffin, who did not respond to a request for comment, acknowledged one of the complicating factors in determining what Mr. Trump may have believed. She said Mr. Trump might have changed his mind in the aftermath of the election.“He told me shortly after that he knew he lost, but then, you know, folks got around him,” Ms. Griffin said on CNN, referring to outside advisers who pushed false election-fraud claims. “They got information in front of him, and I think his mind genuinely might have been changed about that, and that’s scary, because he did lose, and the facts are out there.”Samuel W. Buell, a law professor at Duke University and former federal prosecutor, said any criminal case against Mr. Trump would have to start with establishing that he had been aware that what he was doing was improper.“You need to show that he knew what he was doing was wrongful and had no legal basis,” he said. “I’m not saying that he has to think: What I’m doing is a crime. It’s proving: I know I don’t have a legal argument, I know I’ve lost the election, but I’m going ahead with a known-to-be-false claim and a scheme that has no legal basis.”The House committee’s hearings are not a trial. The panel is free to be selective in what testimony it employs to build a case against Mr. Trump, and the former president has no allies on the committee who can question witnesses or provide information helpful to him.But the hearings have highlighted a series of witnesses who said that Mr. Trump had been told directly and repeatedly ahead of Jan. 6 that there was no basis to his claims that election fraud cost him re-election.And the committee presented brief but potentially crucial testimony from Mr. Pence’s chief counsel, Greg Jacob. In a deposition, Mr. Jacob told the panel that Mr. Trump had been told on Jan. 4, 2021, by Mr. Eastman — who was pushing a plan to have Mr. Pence block or delay certification of the Electoral College count — that the scheme would violate the Electoral Count Act, the federal law governing the process.In investigations that are focused almost exclusively on physical action, like assaults, muggings and murders, prosecutors do not need to focus on proving intent since the link between the action and the harm is typically clear.The question of intent, however, can be muddy when the crime under investigation involves an action in which the defendant’s state of mind can be hard to establish. The crimes that legal experts say Mr. Trump may have committed — obstructing Congress, defrauding the American people and seditious conspiracy — fall into that bucket.In those cases, the government faces a series of hurdles it needs to clear to prove intent. The cleanest way is finding evidence that the defendant knew he or she was doing something wrong.In Mr. Trump’s case, lawyers said, that could take the form of direct evidence that he knew his assertions of widespread election fraud were baseless or that he knew the strategy he was pursuing was illegal.If the Justice Department could not establish direct evidence of what Mr. Trump knew, prosecutors would need to turn to circumstantial evidence. To do that, they would typically rely on what experts and people of authority around him were telling him about whether the election had really been stolen or what kinds of strategies for fighting the outcome would be legal.Expert advice is often enough to show a jury what a defendant knew, lawyers said. But that may be more difficult with Mr. Trump because he has such a long history of disregarding experts and his own aides, they said.Given the challenge of showing what Mr. Trump actually knew, there is one other way prosecutors could show he had a corrupt intent: proving what is often called “willful blindness.”Under that principle, the government would need to show that Mr. Trump believed there was a high probability that the experts and his aides were telling him the truth when they said the election had not been stolen, but that he took deliberate actions to avoid learning more about why they believed that.Mr. Zelenko said he understood why many Americans watching the hearings would be convinced that building a criminal case against the former president was a strong possibility. But he cautioned that the standard for using evidence against a defendant is higher in court, where judges almost always insist that prosecutors rely on firsthand testimony, witnesses can be cross-examined and prosecutors need to prove their arguments beyond a reasonable doubt. More

A congressman, an ex-congresswoman, an ex-mayor, a Trump prosecutor and several state and city officials are eyeing an open congressional seat in New York City.Beneath a maple tree by a red brick elementary school in Brooklyn, a lanky, recognizable figure lingered on a recent morning, hoping to catch the attention of moms, dads, the custodial worker mowing the lawn.“Registered Democrat?” asked Bill de Blasio, the former two-term mayor of New York City, as he cajoled potential voters to help him get back in the game.Mr. de Blasio, who once believed he could be elected president, has now set his sights lower, aiming to represent a newly redrawn House district in New York City. But he is far from alone.Others contesting the seat include a Levi Strauss heir who helped impeach Donald J. Trump; rising stars from the City Council and State Assembly; a Chinese American activist involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; and a pathbreaking liberal who was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress — 50 years ago.There is also a sitting congressman currently representing a suburban region, who only recently moved into the district. Exactly when, he couldn’t say.“Time is a blur,” said the congressman, Mondaire Jones, pivoting away from questions about his new residency, “when you’re fighting to end gun violence in America.”Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do politicians. So when New York’s redistricting fiasco last month unexpectedly opened up a House seat in a safely Democratic area, stretching from Lower Manhattan through much of brownstone Brooklyn, the political floodgates opened wide.A total of 15 Democrats, representing a broad range of ages and backgrounds, have taken steps to enter a summertime primary that may prove to be one of the largest and most freewheeling in the nation.“It’s like a sweepstakes contest,” said Steven M. Cohen, a longtime government official and frequent donor from the district who said he has been inundated with fund-raising requests. “Everyone can potentially be a winner, no purchase necessary.”Bill de Blasio hopes his name recognition as the former mayor of New York City will carry him to victory in the race.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesThe candidates only have until Aug. 23 to win the sympathies of primary voters who represent some of New York’s most politically engaged and diverse neighborhoods: Greenwich Village, Wall Street, Chinatown, Park Slope, Sunset Park and even parts of Borough Park, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish stronghold.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent, will face off against Jumaane Williams and Tom Suozzi in a Democratic primary on June 28.Adams’s Endorsement: The New York City mayor gave Ms. Hochul a valuable, if belated, endorsement that could help her shore up support among Black and Latino voters.The Mapmaker: A postdoctoral fellow and former bartender redrew New York’s congressional map, reshaping several House districts and scrambling the future of the state’s political establishment.Maloney vs. Nadler: The new congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.Offensive Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.The result is not so much a contest of ideas — almost every major candidate has condemned threats to abortion rights and bemoaned the lack of strict limits on guns — as of brute force, blunt ambition and identity politics.“Let me start by saying this: I fear no man,” said Mr. Jones, the sitting congressman who decided to try his hand in the reconstituted 10th District, rather than run for re-election in the 17th District or contest the neighboring one to the south. Either option would involve competing against a House incumbent.Mr. Jones did not have to move to Brooklyn to run for the seat; House candidates must live in the state they represent, but not the district. Mr. Jones, who grew up in Rockland County, contended that his status as a newcomer was irrelevant. He suggested that he is sufficiently tied to the district by virtue of his time living elsewhere in the city and socializing in Greenwich Village, as a young gay man of color trying to discover his “authentic self.”In any case, he said, regular voters care more about what a congressional candidate has done and whether he can fight for their interests rather than where he hails from or when he moved. (A spokesman later clarified that the move occurred June 6.)“Harping over the length of someone’s residency in a district and lines that were just drawn a few weeks ago is something that the political class, including many journalists, give outsize weight to,” Mr. Jones said.Jo Anne Simon, a former disability rights lawyer who currently represents parts of the district as a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn, adamantly disagreed as she pitched her own candidacy.State Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon’s district in Brooklyn is part of the newly redrawn 10th Congressional District.Hans Pennink/Associated Press“People vote for people that they know, that they trust and they have reason to know show up,” said Ms. Simon, referencing her decades of activism on local issues like pollution from the Gowanus Expressway. “Nobody here has voted for Mondaire Jones.”Then again, in such a crowded race, there may be no such thing as home-field advantage.Take Carlina Rivera, a city councilwoman who lives just outside of the district, and Yuh-Line Niou, another state assemblywoman. Both are up-and-coming progressive women of color representing parts of Lower Manhattan and could end up cannibalizing each other’s base of support.Ms. Niou said she had more than 600 volunteers eager to carry petitions for her. Ms. Rivera on Friday won the endorsement of Representative Nydia Velázquez, who currently represents much of the new district and is expected to wield substantial sway among voters. She is expected to win re-election in a neighboring redrawn district covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens.Carlina Rivera, a New York City councilwoman.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesYuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman.Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York TimesThey, in turn, will face off against a progressive rising star from another era, Elizabeth Holtzman, spurred to re-enter the arena by the threat to abortion rights.In 1972, Ms. Holtzman became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, when she defeated a 50-year incumbent at age 31. Now, at age 80, she is trying to become the oldest non-incumbent elected to the House of Representatives in history.In between, she had a trailblazing career as the first woman elected district attorney in Brooklyn and as New York City comptroller, racking up experience that she argues positions her to make an immediate impact in Washington. Still, she has not held elected office since 1993, when several of her competitors were in elementary school.“Somebody said to me, your slogan should be something like ‘Google me,’” Ms. Holtzman said.Former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman.David Dee Delgado/Getty ImagesMs. Holtzman, in 1974, with President Gerald Ford.Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesThe Chinese American activist, Yan Xiong, who after his role in Tiananmen went on to become a chaplain for the U.S. Army and now believes he can attract a significant number of votes from large Asian populations in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.Voters can be forgiven for being overwhelmed. There was not even supposed to be a primary race in New York’s 10th District until a court-appointed expert so thoroughly scrambled New York City’s congressional map in May that the technical incumbent, Representative Jerrold Nadler, decided to run in the 12th District in Manhattan instead.That decision set him on a collision course with a longtime ally, Representative Carolyn Maloney, but it also left a rare open seat in Manhattan and Brooklyn — political gold to which no one had a rightful claim.“Anyone who tells you that they know what’s going to happen in this race, or that there is an obvious outcome, is lying to you and themselves,” said Chris Coffey, the chief executive of Tusk Strategies, who is unaffiliated in the race.Mr. de Blasio has his claim. He enters the race with near universal name recognition, years of electoral successes and some policy triumphs too — most notably, universal prekindergarten. But Mr. de Blasio does not have a fund-raising advantage. That belongs to two other candidates.As of March 31, Mr. Jones had $2.9 million on hand — a huge sum in a race so short it will make fund-raising difficult. Last week, he dropped his first in an expected deluge of television advertising, a placement of at least $169,000, according to Ad Impact, an advertising analytics firm.Daniel Goldman, the chief investigator for House Democrats in the first impeachment of Mr. Trump, and a frequent legal analyst for MSNBC, is running on his record fighting for democracy and public safety.He is also a former federal prosecutor who spent a decade working in the Southern District of New York, a lesser-known part of his résumé that may help him stand out with voters as the city confronts what Mr. Goldman called “the biggest public safety crisis in decades.”“The core experiences of my professional career, which has been devoted entirely to public service, happen to be very timely for the circumstances we are in now,” he said in an interview.Daniel Goldman served as the chief investigator for House Democrats in the first impeachment of President Donald J. Trump.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesStill, he is a relative newcomer to electoral politics and starts the abbreviated race with few of the institutional relationships other candidates will draw on. To try to make up the difference, Mr. Goldman, the Levi Strauss heir who rents a Tribeca apartment listed for sale for $22 million, said he was prepared to “put some of my own money into this to level the playing field.”But given the timing of the contest, and its brevity, the race is also widely expected to turn on get-out-the-vote efforts, which may help candidates like Ms. Niou.“Field is the most important thing,” she said. “We’re running against folks with 100 percent name recognition.”Labor unions and outside political groups could also help turn the race. The retail workers union has endorsed Mr. Jones. Aspire PAC, an outgrowth of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Members of Congress, has been reviewing candidates and will make a decision soon, according to Grace Meng, the Queens congresswoman and PAC chair. It remains unclear if other unions will engage.It is also difficult to gauge how many voters will be in the district in late August, when the city gets torrid and all those who can, leave town. Matthew Rey, a prominent Democratic consultant who is unaffiliated with any of the campaigns, estimated voter turnout could be between just 70,000 and 90,000 in a district of 776,000 residents.The other Democratic candidates are Brian Robinson, John Herron, Maud Maron, Peter J. Gleason, Quanda Francis, Laura Thomas and Jimmy Li.Given the overcrowded field and the late summer election date, the race is hard to pin down.Last week, after dropping off his two children at school in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, Nicholas McDermott said he would absolutely consider voting for Mr. de Blasio.“I think it’s great to have someone with experience who’s from the area,” Mr. McDermott said.He was less certain if he would be around in August to vote.“That’s a good question,” he said. More

When political leaders face a constitutional crisis, like that of Jan. 6, the process of collectively deciding how to respond can be messy, arbitrary, and sometimes change the nature of the system itself.If you look for international parallels to the moment last year when Vice President Mike Pence refused to bow to pressure from President Donald J. Trump to help overturn their election defeat, something quickly becomes clear.Such crises, with democracy’s fate left to a handful of officials, rarely resolve purely on legal or constitutional principles, even if those might later be cited as justification.Rather, their outcome is usually determined by whichever political elites happen to form a quick critical mass in favor of one result. And those officials are left to follow whatever motivation — principle, partisan antipathy, self-interest — happens to move them.Taken together, the history of modern constitutional crises underscores some hard truths about democracy. Supposedly bedrock norms, like free elections or rule of law, though portrayed as irreversibly cemented into the national foundation, are in truth only as solid as the commitment of those in power. And while a crisis can be an opportunity for leaders to reinforce democratic norms, it can also be an opportunity to revise or outright revoke them.Amid Yugoslavia’s 2000 election, for example, the opposition declared it had won enough votes to unseat President Slobodan Milosevic, whose government falsely claimed the opposition had fallen short.Both sides appealed to constitutional principles, legal procedures and, with protests raging, public will. Ultimately, a critical mass of government and police officials, including some in positions necessary to certify the outcome, signaled that, for reasons that varied individual to individual, they would treat Mr. Milosevic as the election’s loser. The new government later extradited him to face war crimes charges at The Hague.Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, applauding during a passing-out ceremony of recruits at the military academy in Belgrade, in 2000. Mr. Milosevic was declared the loser of a disputed election, and later extradited to face war crimes charges at The Hague. Agence France-PresseAmericans may see more in common with Peru. There, President Alberto Fujimori in 1992 dissolved the opposition-held Congress, which had been moving to impeach him. Lawmakers across the spectrum quickly voted to replace Mr. Fujimori with his own vice president, who had opposed the presidential power grab.Both sides claimed to be defending democracy from the other. Both appealed to Peru’s military, which had traditionally played a role of ultimate arbiter, almost akin to that of a supreme court. The public, deeply polarized, split. The military was also split.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.At the critical moment, enough political and military elites signaled support for Mr. Fujimori that he prevailed. They came together informally, each reacting to events individually, and many appealing to different ends, such as Mr. Fujimori’s economic agenda, notions of stability, or a chance for their party to prevail under the new order.Peru fell into quasi-authoritarianism, with political rights curtailed and elections still held but under terms that favored Mr. Fujimori, until he was removed from office in 2000 over corruption allegations. Last year, his daughter ran for the presidency as a right-wing populist, losing by less than 50,000 votes.Modern Latin America has repeatedly faced such crises. This is due less to any shared cultural traits, many scholars argue, than to a history of Cold War meddling that weakened democratic norms. It also stems from American-style presidential systems, and deep social polarization that paves the way for extreme political combat.Presidential democracies, by dividing power among competing branches, create more opportunities for rival offices to clash, even to the point of usurping one another’s powers. Such systems also blur questions of who is in charge, forcing their branches to resolve disputes informally, on the fly and at times by force.Venezuela, once the region’s oldest democracy, endured a series of constitutional crises as President Hugo Chávez clashed with judges and other government bodies that blocked his agenda. Each time, Mr. Chávez, and later his successor, Nicolás Maduro, appealed to legal and democratic principles to justify weakening those institutions until, over time, the leaders’ actions, ostensibly to save democracy, had all but gutted it.Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, arriving at the National Assembly for his annual state of the union address in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2012. He and his successor appealed to legal and democratic principles to justify their weakening of democratic institutions.Ariana Cubillos/Associated PressPresidencies are rare in Western democracies. One of the few, in France, saw its own constitutional crisis in 1958, when an attempted military coup was diverted only when the wartime leader Charles de Gaulle handed himself emergency powers to establish a unity government that satisfied both civilian and military leaders.While other systems can fall into major crisis, it is often because, as in a presidential democracy, competing power centers clash to the point of trying to overrun one another.Still, some scholars argue that Americans hoping to understand their country’s trajectory should look not to Europe but to Latin America.Ecuador came near the brink in 2018 over then-President Rafael Correa’s effort to extend his own term limits. But when voters and the political elite alike opposed this, Mr. Correa left office voluntarily.In 2019, Bolivia fell into chaos amid a disputed election. Though the public split, political and military elites signaled that they believed that the incumbent, the left-wing firebrand Evo Morales, should step down, all but forcing him to do so.Still, when Mr. Morales’s right-wing replacement oversaw months of turmoil and then moved to postpone elections, many of those same elites pushed for a quick vote instead, which elevated Mr. Morales’s handpicked successor.Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, speaking to the press on election day in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 2019. The country fell into chaos after the election, which was disputed.Martin Alipaz/EPA, via ShutterstockThe phrase “political elites” can conjure images of cigar-chomping power-brokers, meeting in secret to pull society’s strings. In reality, scholars use the term to describe lawmakers, judges, bureaucrats, police and military officers, local officials, business chiefs and cultural figures, most of whom will never coordinate directly, much less agree on what is best for the country.Still, it is those elites who collectively uphold democracy day-to-day. Much as paper money only has value because we all treat it as valuable, elections and laws only have power because elites wake up every morning and treat them as paramount. It is a kind of compact, in which the powerful voluntarily bind themselves to a system that also constrains them.“A well-functioning, orderly democracy does not require us to actively think about what sustains it,” Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist, told me shortly after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “It’s an equilibrium; everybody is incentivized to participate as if it will continue.”But in a major constitutional crisis, when the norms and rules meant to guide democracy come under doubt, or fall by the wayside entirely, those elites suddenly face the question of how — or whether — to keep up their democratic compact.They will not always agree on what course is best for democracy, or for the country, or for themselves. Sometimes, the shock of seeing democracy’s vulnerability will lead them to redouble their commitment to it, and sometimes to jettison that system in part or whole.The result is often a scramble of elites pressuring one another directly, as many senior Republicans and White House aides did throughout Jan. 6, or through public statements aimed at the thousands of officials operating the machinery of government.Scholars call this a “coordination game,” with all those actors trying to understand and influence how the others will respond until a minimally viable consensus emerges. It can resemble less a well-defined plot than a herd of startled animals, which is why the outcome can be hard to predict.Before Jan. 6, there had been little reason to wonder over lawmakers’ commitment to democracy. “It had not been a question of whether or not they supported democracy in a real internal sense — that had never been the stakes,” Dr. Pepinsky said.Now, a crisis had forced them to decide whether to overturn the election, demonstrating that not all of those lawmakers, if given that choice, would vote to uphold democracy. “I’ve been floored by how much of this really does depend on 535 people,” Dr. Pepinsky said, referring to the number of lawmakers in Congress.. More

WASHINGTON — The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.Two new photos shown at a hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6 tell a shocking story — one of the most incredible in our nation’s history.In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong.Mike Pence in his office in the Capitol on Jan. 6, as his wife, Karen, closes the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in. The Pences, including his brother Greg and his daughter Charlotte, awaited the securing of the building.White HouseWe learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him.In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified.They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy.“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”Trump was still steaming from the contentious morning phone call when he failed to persuade the vice president to reject some of the states’ electors so they could be replaced with fake electors who supported Trump. He had railed at Pence with emasculating epithets.As Trump recalled in a speech on Friday in Nashville, “I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson.’ And then, after it all went down, I looked at him one day and said, ‘I hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’”In the same speech, Trump had another line that was strikingly delusional, even for him. “For the radical left,” he said, “politics has become their religion. It has warped their sense of right and wrong. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”Trump sparked the mob to seek vengeance against Pence the same way Henry II sparked a crew to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. According to legend, after Becket defied Henry by excommunicating bishops supportive of the king, Henry muttered something to the effect of, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights immediately rode to Canterbury Cathedral and sliced up Becket.The line became a famous example of directing loyalists with indirection, cloaking an order as a wish. Who will rid me of this meddlesome vice president?A Times video, showing how the Proud Boys breached the Capitol, underscored that within the confederacy of dunces, there was an actual organized conspiracy. The group began plotting even before the election to take up arms for Trump. When Trump barked “Stand back and stand by” about the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden, the Proud Boys felt as though they had received a directive, like Henry’s knights.With each hearing, it becomes clearer that Trump has no plausible deniability. He put the lives of the vice president and his family at risk, as well as the lives of lawmakers, by sending a crowd, stewing in lies, into a frenzy.Pence did not have the power to do what Trump wanted, and it’s good that he resisted the insane, illegal and unconstitutional plan of the narcissist in the Oval. But Pence still wants it both ways. He has steered clear of the committee. He wants to become president by staying on the good side of Trump supporters, but they’re never going to forgive him.At the end of the day of infamy, John Eastman, the nutty lawyer trying to help Trump overturn the election, sent an email imploring Pence to adjourn the congressional certification so sympathetic state legislators could help with Trump’s fairy tale of a rigged election.When Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, showed the email to the vice president, Pence said, “That’s rubber room stuff.”The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The hearings have demolished the myth of a stolen presidential election, but with the 2022 primary season in full tilt, the revelations have not loosened the grip of the lie on Republicans.WASHINGTON — It was all a lie, the tales of stuffed ballot drop boxes, rigged voting machines, and constitutional “flexibility” that would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the 2020 election results and send them back to Republican state legislatures.The first three hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee have deeply undercut, if not demolished, the postelection myths repeated incessantly by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and embraced and amplified by Republicans in Congress.A parade of Republican witnesses — his attorney general, William P. Barr, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — knew he had lost the election and told him so. Mr. Trump was informed that the demands he was making of Mr. Pence to block his defeat unilaterally were illegal. Even the most active coup plotter, the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman, conceded before Jan. 6 that his scheme was illegal and unconstitutional, then sought a presidential pardon after it led to mob violence.Yet the most striking revelation so far may be how deeply Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth and the rule of law have penetrated into the Republican Party, taking root in the fertile soil of a right-wing electorate stewing in conspiracy theories and well tended by their media of choice. The Republican response to the hearings — a combination of indifference, diversion and doubling down — reflects how central the lie of a stolen election has become to the party’s identity.In Washington, Republicans in Congress have neither broken with Mr. Trump nor expended much energy trying to rebut the investigation’s findings. And from Nevada’s secretary of state race to Michigan’s contest for governor, Republican candidates have embraced the fictional conspiracy in their 2022 campaigns.“I have been fighting for safe, honest and transparent elections since before Jan. 6, and that fight continues,” said Michigan State Representative Steve Carra, whose re-election run has been blessed by Mr. Trump and who said Friday he has watched some but not much of the hearings. “Absentee ballots sent out unsolicited, signature verification relaxed, drop boxes all over the place, especially in Democratic area — it all deserves further scrutiny.”Like mint in the garden, the seeds that the Trump team planted between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, are now growing out of control, aided by the former president’s allies.Jarome Bell, a leading candidate to challenge Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, has been traveling her Republican-leaning district showing voters a film by the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza that pushes the bogus fraud claims. The hearings, he said on Friday, have had “no impact on me. ‘2000 Mules’ has a bigger impact on what truly happened.” He added, “the 1/6 commission is the cover-up.”Despite coverage of the hearings, at least one lawmaker lamented that his constituents were not paying much attention.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJon Rocha, a candidate for state representative in Michigan who has Mr. Trump’s backing, also cited the film and bragged that he had watched none of the hearings, “not even a 30-second clip.”One reason the falsehoods have flourished is the failure of Republicans who do not believe them to push back. Before the Jan. 6 hearings began, Republican leaders promised a robust “rapid response” effort to counter the narratives that would emerge.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.But there has been no such pushback from the Republican National Committee or any other organization to revelations that Mr. Trump continued to pressure Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even after having been told doing so was illegal.No Republican leader offered a response to the testimony of retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a revered conservative, who said on Thursday that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence an order whose execution would have prompted “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”None bothered to counter the panel’s finding, revealed on Monday, that Mr. Trump and his campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters based on the false pretense of massive election fraud, using money collected for an election defense fund that did not exist.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, has chosen not to engage on the issue at all. And to the extent that they are trying to counterprogram the hearings, House Republicans have been prodding voters to look elsewhere — to rising gas prices, inflation and migrants at the southern border.Only Mr. Trump seems particularly irritated by the exercise, appalled by the testimony of his daughter, who shared details of his abusive phone call with Mr. Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 and said she trusted Mr. Barr’s judgment when he said that the 2020 election was not stolen.“It’s a one-way street, it’s a rigged deal, it’s a disgrace,” a thoroughly unrepentant Mr. Trump said on Friday at a speech in Nashville in which he called Jan. 6 “a simple protest that got out of hand” as he continued spinning out false claims and grand conspiracy theories of election fraud.But if his allies in Republican leadership are not countering the message that the attack was fueled by lies, neither are they acknowledging that the election was not stolen.And 50 years to the day after henchmen of Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, the hearings sparked by the two scandals are highlighting just how dramatically the Republican Party has changed. Then, key Republican leaders reacted to increasingly damning revelations about their president by siding with the Democrats and forcing Mr. Nixon from power. Today, Republican leaders are either silent or contemptuous of the committee uncovering a steady stream of misdeeds by Mr. Trump.Representatives Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, and Adam B. Schiff “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Democratic chairman from Mississippi, Republican vice chairwoman from Wyoming and Democratic member from California.Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting Jan. 6, said the hearings have so far been “a reminder of how deeply divided, even from an information consumption standpoint, we are.”Many of his constituents have not even seen the videotaped testimony laying out the case against Mr. Trump — only footage of police removing barricades to let rioters into the Capitol on Jan 6. Some blame nonexistent F.B.I. provocateurs for the violence, in line with a debunked conspiracy theory embraced by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others on the right.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California and other Republican leaders held a news conference in the Capitol on Thursday to attack the committee’s work.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesMr. Meijer said he has heard far more from constituents on the right lamenting the “Jan. 6 political prisoners” than those in the center demanding accountability for the attack.Most voters, though, are not paying attention, said Representative David Valadao of California, another Republican to vote for impeachment.“Talking to voters at home right now — I mean, the fuel prices, food prices, baby formula, you name it,” Mr. Valadao said. “There’s just so many things that people are focused on right now that they’re just not paying attention to the Jan. 6 stuff as much as I know a lot of folks would want them to.”Asked if the hearings might do Republicans a favor by making it easier to find an alternative presidential nominee in 2024 than Mr. Trump, he responded: “I don’t know if enough people are paying attention where it’ll have that big of an impact.”But in a Republican primary season fueled by pro-Trump fervor, many candidates have emerged as their party’s nominees for top offices in large part because they campaigned on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.The Republican nominees for governor in Pennsylvania, secretary of state in Nevada, Senate in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and attorney general in Texas all tried to overturn the 2020 election or embraced false claims of voter fraud.Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican who won a House seat in a special election on Tuesday, has declined to say whether Mr. Biden won in 2020, telling The San Antonio Express-News: “I’m speaking just in general. There is voter fraud.”And there is more to come. State Representative Ron Hanks, vying to challenge Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, in Colorado’s Republican primary June 28, marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and launched his campaign with an ad showing him shooting a fake Dominion voting machine, a device central to a sprawling conspiracy theory about votes purportedly stolen by foreign powers from Mr. Trump.On Monday, the committee showed a videotaped deposition in which Mr. Barr at one point could barely suppress his laughter at the absurdity of such stories and testified that Mr. Trump would have had to be “detached from reality” if he believed them.In Michigan, a wild contest to choose the Republican to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is narrowly led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riot. Mr. Rocha, the state house candidate in Western Michigan, said voters were far more concerned about gas prices and empty store shelves than the Jan. 6 hearings, then offered that voters in fact are still very angry about “election integrity.”“They did it in 2020. Now they’re finding new avenues to remove Republicans from the ballot this year,” he said.In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made her “stolen election” claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. And Blake Masters, who hopes to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, suggested baselessly that “one-third of the people outside of the Capitol complex on Jan. 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”Annie Karni More