Elections

A high-profile ruling about a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack turned on a lower standard of proof than a criminal trial.WASHINGTON — A federal judge’s conclusion this week that former President Donald J. Trump likely committed felonies related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election intensified scrutiny on the question of whether the Justice Department can, should or will try to charge him with the same crimes.But the fact that a judge reached that conclusion does not necessarily mean that a prosecution would arrive at the same outcome. Here is an explanation.What is the case?It is a dispute over a subpoena issued by the House committee that is investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters who were seeking to stop Congress and the vice president at the time, Mike Pence, from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.The subpoena instructs Chapman University to turn over emails from a former professor, John Eastman, who supplied legal arguments to Mr. Trump supporting his attempts to overturn the election. Mr. Eastman filed a lawsuit to block the subpoena, arguing that his messages were covered by attorney-client and attorney work-product privilege.What did the judge say?In his ruling, Judge David O. Carter of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California said the Jan. 6 committee could get certain emails under an exception to attorney-client privilege for communications that sought to further a crime or fraud because it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump unlawfully sought to obstruct a government proceeding.What is the theory that Mr. Trump committed crimes?Mr. Trump, in public and in private, pressured Mr. Pence to reject or delay counting the Electoral College votes of states where Mr. Trump baselessly claimed that his loss to Mr. Biden had been fraudulent. The idea is that there was no legitimate basis for Mr. Pence to do so, so Mr. Trump’s pressure on him amounted to an attempt to unlawfully obstruct a government proceeding and defraud the government.The evidence that Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Pence has been well established. The judge issued his ruling interpreting that evidence as likely amounting to a crime at this moment not because of a breakthrough in the investigation that uncovered new, conclusive evidence, but because of the timing of the subpoena lawsuit: The Jan. 6 committee needed to publicly argue that the crime-fraud exception applied so it could obtain Mr. Eastman’s emails, and the judge agreed.Is the ruling a road map for an indictment?Not necessarily, because the context is very different. As Judge Carter noted: “The court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit.”What is a big challenge to prosecuting Mr. Trump?Proving Mr. Trump’s state of mind — specifically, that he had the requisite criminal intent.The obstruction statute, for example, says that for the defendant’s action impeding an official proceeding to be a crime, he had to act “corruptly.” But what that means is not detailed in the statute, and the Supreme Court has not definitively offered an answer, raising risks and complications for prosecutors evaluating a potential case.One possibility, said Laurie L. Levenson, a criminal law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, is that prosecutors would have to prove that Mr. Trump knew for sure that Mr. Pence had no lawful basis to do what he was asking. Another possibility is that prosecutors would need to prove only that Mr. Trump had at least some reason to believe that his conduct might be unlawful and proceeded anyway, she said.Why is proving Mr. Trump’s mind-set tricky?Because even though senior government officials were telling him there was no factual or legal basis for Mr. Pence to unilaterally reject some states’ electoral votes or otherwise slow down the certification, Mr. Eastman told Mr. Trump that he interpreted the law as giving Mr. Pence legitimate authority to take such a step.Julie O’Sullivan, a Georgetown University criminal law professor, said in any criminal trial, it would ultimately be up to the jury to decide what Mr. Trump truly believed. Unless evidence emerges that he told someone at the time that he knew what he was saying was false, she said, that will be a challenge.“The problem with Trump is defining his state of mind when it is so changeable,” she said. “He believes whatever he wants to think and it doesn’t necessarily have to be grounded in reality. That’s a tough argument to a jury, to say he knew any particular thing.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Trump’s tweet. More

The election to fill the seat of the Alaska congressman, who died last week, promises to be a Yukon adventure. It’s also a fascinating political experiment in the making.How do you replace a man who once willingly put his hand in a steel trap during a congressional hearing until it turned blue? Who waggled an 18-inch walrus penis bone at a top administration official? Who held a knife to the throat of a fellow lawmaker?How, in sum, do you replace Don Young?The death of Representative Young at age 88 last week leaves a void that won’t easily be filled, Alaskan political insiders tell us. Young was the longest-serving Republican in the history of Congress, a living relic who decorated his House office with stuffed animal trophies and larded his speech with profanity. He cultivated the image of a crude frontiersman in Washington while protecting Alaska’s extractive industries and, as our colleague Emily Cochrane writes today, steering billions of federal dollars to pet projects back home.Young flouted ethics rules with abandon. Regulators once forced him to repay nearly $60,000 for trips to hunting lodges that had been financed through campaign money. On another occasion, he was accused of taking bribes, though no formal charges were brought against him. His irascible outbursts often got him into trouble, as when he referred to Latino immigrants with an ethnic slur or when, before an audience of high school students, he used a profane term for anal sex when describing a photography exhibit.In a replacement, Alaskans are looking for “someone who will go to Washington, give the bureaucrats hell and bring home the pork,” said Michael Carey, a columnist for The Anchorage Daily News and a longtime Young observer. “But I don’t think anybody can wrap themselves in his mythos.”Just days after Young’s death, the race to succeed him is well underway. Friday is the deadline to file official paperwork, and potential candidates are already lining up.Al Gross, a former orthopedic surgeon who ran unsuccessfully for Senate in 2020, is running as a “nonpartisan.” He is perhaps best known for a goofy music video promoting his candidacy that includes the line, “He’s killed a bear, caught lots of fish, not swayed by party politics” and ends by describing him as “Alaska’s own bear doctor.”John Coghill, a former state senator with ties to the evangelical community, is running as a Republican. Nick Begich III, the Republican scion of Alaskan political royalty, has also indicated that he will enter the race, as has Christopher Constant, an openly gay Democrat who is a member of the Anchorage Assembly.Few expect Sarah Palin, a former Alaska governor and the Republican nominee for vice president in 2008, to run. She told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, last week that she was weighing whether to “throw my hat in the ring,” but made no commitment.Some in the Republican establishment favor Joshua Revak, an Iraq war veteran who previously worked for Young and is now a state senator. There’s also Tara Sweeney, an Alaska Native whose husband, Kevin Sweeney, is a consultant for Senator Lisa Murkowski’s re-election campaign. Tara Sweeney served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs.Young’s death came as he faced growing doubts about his political longevity, with the prospect of being squeezed from left and right for the first time.“For years, Don was this untouchable Alaskan institution,” said John-Henry Heckendorn, a political consultant in Anchorage. “He had always been able to turn his fire and intensity on one enemy. But he had never really had to fight a war on two fronts.”Alaska’s political experimentWhoever ultimately decides to run, the House special election to replace Young will be watched closely. For the first time, the state will be using its unique “top four” primary system — and Alaskans aren’t sure what to expect.In the first round of the special election, to be held on June 11, every candidate appears on the same ballot. Voters each pick one candidate, and the four top vote-getters move ahead to the special general election, scheduled for Aug. 16. Voters then rank up to four favorites, including a write-in option. If no one earns an outright majority, election officials eliminate the lowest-ranking candidate, repeating the process up to three times until there is a winner.Supporters of the system say it will break the stranglehold political parties have over primary elections, give voters more choices and create incentives for bipartisan cooperation.“We’re already seeing more and different kinds of names, which is great for voters,” said Jason Grenn, the executive director of Alaskans for Better Elections, a nonprofit group that promotes the top-four system.Some confusion might be inevitable. In a quirk of scheduling prompted by Young’s death, the regular open primary for his seat will be held the same day as the special general election for his seat. That means Alaskans will be choosing someone to represent them in Washington for the next two years even as they also choose someone to represent them for the remainder of 2022. It could be the same person — or someone completely different. Senator Lisa Murkowski is defending her seat against Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican challenger.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe Murkowski factorThe top-four system will also be used in Alaska’s Senate election, a fact that has spawned accusations of political intrigue.Former President Donald Trump has made it his mission to oust Murkowski, who is defending her seat against Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican challenger. Murkowski was one of only seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump during the impeachment trial last year, earning her a rebuke from the state’s Republican Party. As an incumbent, she has the backing of Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, pitting the party’s establishment against its Trump wing.Tshibaka’s campaign team claims that the top-four system, which was adopted by ballot initiative in 2020, was devised to aid Murkowski’s re-election.There’s little evidence of that, though Kathryn Murdoch, an independent donor who helped fund the ballot initiative, said in an interview this month that the top-four system “allows Lisa Murkowski to be herself instead of worrying about her extreme right flank.”The claim prompts a chuckle from supporters of the system, who say that it is meant to alleviate the gridlock that often paralyzes Alaskan politics, and that it is not a product of Washington power games.“I haven’t talked to Lisa Murkowski in three or four years,” said Grenn, who is also a former state legislator. “There are no dark shadows behind the scenes.”What to read Republicans in Florida and Ohio are pushing for a greater advantage on their congressional maps.President Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2023 includes about $45 billion to take on climate change, which will be crucial to setting U.S. policy ahead of the midterms.California leaders are drafting legislation to help make the state a sanctuary for transgender youths and for people seeking abortions, as conservative states move forward with anti-abortion and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. laws.Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have found growing evidence that a tweet by Donald Trump in December 2020 urging supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6 was a catalyst for far-right militants.briefing bookJustice Clarence Thomas with his wife, Virginia Thomas, before he spoke at the conservative Heritage Foundation in October.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe ballad of Clarence and GinniCongressional investigators want to know why Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, exchanged conspiracy-theory-tinged texts with Trump administration officials about overturning the 2020 election in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot. Democrats are calling for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any Supreme Court cases about the events of Jan. 6, while they press for more details about her involvement in that day’s drama.To better understand this unorthodox Washington pair, we chatted with Danny Hakim, an investigative reporter for The New York Times who recently wrote, with Jo Becker, a deeply reported Times Magazine article on the Thomases. Here’s our conversation:What first sparked your interest in them as a couple?The court has really moved toward Justice Thomas in the post-Trump era, since the pick of Amy Coney Barrett took place in the waning days of the Trump administration. For years, Justice Thomas was known for solo dissents or sharply written dissenting opinions, but now some of those might become majority opinions as the court’s dynamics have tilted.At the same time, his wife was a hard-line activist on the fringes of the party before she flourished in the Trump era, to the point she had direct access to the president. She has remained an important figure in the Trump wing of the party.There’s a line in your article that mentions that Ginni Thomas was in a group she later denounced as a “cult.” Were you able to learn anything more about her time there?The group was called Lifespring, and it was popular for a while. The best story I read about it was a 1987 piece in The Washington Post by Marc Fisher, who went to some meetings. The group would sort of break you down and get you crying and then try to build you back up, but it was quite controversial. One trainee told Fisher it was “like an enema of your emotions.”Ms. Thomas took part in the group in the early 1980s and then rejected it. And she took Clarence Thomas with her to at least one meeting of an anti-cult group that she attended in the wake of her departure from Lifespring.Ginni Thomas refers to her “best friend” in one of the texts that has emerged. Is it a leap to assume that’s a reference to her husband?We can’t say for sure, but they have used that kind of language when they describe each other. In his memoir, Justice Thomas refers to his wife as his “best friend.” She has called him “the best man walking the face of the Earth,” and friends of theirs whom we talked with told us they referred to each other that way. Justice Thomas has gone even further and called the two of them “one being — an amalgam.”Is your sense that Ginni Thomas is someone whose advice carries weight in the Republican Party, or is she someone who is humored because of her political connections and because of who her husband happens to be?It’s a good question. I think both. Her proximity to Justice Thomas is central to her influence, and it’s the reason she got the access she did to the Trump White House. She does not hesitate to invoke her husband’s name in her interactions with party officials and activists.At the same time, while establishment Republicans are often exasperated by her and see some of her views as outlandish, she does have a following among the hard-line wing of the party that is so prominent now, and she has spent years working in Washington alongside people like Steve Bannon to move the party to the right.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

This month’s nonfiction picks include a surprising look at a World War II veteran and a fresh dive into footage shot during the first year of Putin’s presidency.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On’ (1987)Stream it on the Criterion Channel.Whatever convinced the director Kazuo Hara that it would be wise to trail Kenzo Okuzaki, the subject of “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On,” it’s a rationale that probably shouldn’t be repeated, if it ever could be. Yet it resulted in one of the most jaw-dropping documentaries ever filmed. Screening as part of a collection of movies by Hara (whose wildly voyeuristic “Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974,” another excellent streaming choice, shows his ex-wife giving birth on camera), “Emperor’s Naked Army” has won praise from some of nonfiction filmmaking’s biggest names. Errol Morris put it on a list of his 10 favorite documentaries, saying: “I think it’s every interviewer’s dream that in the middle of an interview, when your subject is not forthcoming, you get up out of your chair and just beat them to a pulp. Of course, that never happens — except in ‘The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.’”The pugnacious interviewer — the man who physically pins men down during interrogations — is not Hara but Okuzaki. A World War II veteran, Okuzaki, at the time of filming, had spent more than a decade in prison for crimes that included murder and firing a slingshot at Emperor Hirohito. Now released, he is on a monomaniacal mission to learn more about the fates of some of his fellow Japanese soldiers who were killed in New Guinea after the war. The circumstances sound increasingly outlandish the more we hear, even as Okuzaki’s quest appears more unhinged (and at times darkly comic) in its single-mindedness. He even recruits people to role-play as relatives of the victims.With Hara tagging along as an observer and, by extension, perhaps an unwitting abettor, the reedy, loquacious Okuzaki, typically dressed in a suit, confronts potential witnesses and perpetrators and matter-of-factly demands that they talk, politely informing one that he came there prepared to beat him up if he does not. “When I committed a murder or when I shot at the emperor, I didn’t try to escape,” Okuzaki barks at another. “I took responsibility. But you didn’t. I hate irresponsible people.”“The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” is a journey alongside madness, an ethical quagmire and a uniquely volatile movie, one that has been difficult to stream stateside until now.‘Enemies of the State’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.It’s difficult to describe this paranoia-suffused documentary directed by Sonia Kennebeck (and executive-produced by Errol Morris) without giving too much away. A second viewing is completely different from a first. “Enemies of the State” tries to untangle the case of Matt DeHart, an American who fled to Canada in 2013 and claimed that the F.B.I. had him physically tortured, ostensibly because he had stumbled on a bombshell revelation after spending time in hacktivist circles. His supporters were inclined to group him with Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, even though he never made his purported findings public. In the movie, only his mother, Leann, claims to have seen the files he found.But at the time DeHart fled to Canada, he had been indicted on charges of producing and transporting child pornography in the United States, in a case that he suggested had been concocted. And while some coverage of DeHart has noted the difficulties of verifying certain details — the story involves minors (on the one hand) and national security (on the other) — by the end of the film, Kennebeck has not only indicated what she thinks is true, but has also raised potent questions about confirmation bias. The movie suggests that the various agendas of DeHart’s supporters inclined them to view him in certain ways. Kennebeck prods viewers to question their own trustingness, pushing them to doubt certain interviewees, then to believe them and vice versa, and even to be skeptical of what they see. (Re-enactments synchronize original audio recordings with the lips of actors.)To say more would reveal too much, but “Enemies of the State” explains the saga with a clarity other accounts have lacked.‘Putin’s Witnesses’ (2018)Stream it on Ovid.Credit goes to the Museum of the Moving Image for introducing me to “Putin’s Witnesses,” which it screened earlier in the month. In this eerie documentary, the director, Vitaly Mansky, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine; studied film in Russia; and now lives in Latvia revisits footage he shot during the first year of Vladimir Putin’s presidency, beginning with Boris Yeltsin’s resignation on Dec. 31, 1999, a decision that elevated Putin to the position of acting president. In narration, Mansky says he started shooting the movie as P.R. for Putin’s campaign in the March 2000 election — although Putin portrays himself as being all-business, above doing the unsubstantive work of advertising or participating in a televised debate. At the same time, Mansky points out, he was always on TV. And part of what can be seen in “Putin’s Witnesses” is how people around him manufactured and softened his image. The director says he himself proposed that Putin pay a cuddly on-camera visit to an old schoolteacher in St. Petersburg.Yet Mansky sees things in the material that didn’t jump out at the time. He reflects on watching Putin with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain in the czar’s box at the Mariinsky Opera House: “It’s hard to picture the feelings of the guy raised in a St. Petersburg communal apartment, having joined the elite of the world at breakneck speed.” Mansky also spends time with Yeltsin and his family on election night and on the subsequent New Year’s Eve. Yeltsin looks increasingly perturbed at how much distance his chosen successor has put between them. Elsewhere, Mansky introduces various movers and shakers at Putin’s campaign headquarters on election night, then notes that the majority eventually either joined Putin’s opposition or were dismissed. (One of them, Anatoly Chubais, left his post as Putin’s climate envoy last week, reportedly over the war in Ukraine.)During his first year as president, Putin continues to act vaguely chummy with Mansky even as the faint rumblings of autocracy begin to be felt. Late in the movie, Putin praises the concept of being an elected leader instead of a monarch because it means a person like him can serve as president, then retreat into civilian life. “Everything you do with the state and the society today you will have to face in a few years as an ordinary citizen,” he tells Mansky. “It is a good thing to remember before taking a decision.” Those are chilling words now. More

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed a map drawn by his fellow Republicans in the Legislature. In Ohio, Republicans closed in on a G.O.P.-friendly map for the midterm elections.With the midterm election cycle fast approaching, Republicans in the key states of Florida and Ohio have made critical progress in their push to add to their dominance on congressional maps by carving new districts that would be easier for G.O.P. candidates to win.In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday vetoed congressional maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature and called for a special session to draw new maps in mid-April, a rare fracture between the Republican governor and state lawmakers. Mr. DeSantis had previously pledged to veto the maps and had pushed his own maps that would have given his party a stronger advantage in the state’s congressional delegation.In Ohio, a new map of congressional districts that is gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans appeared highly likely to be used in the midterm elections after the State Supreme Court indicated on Tuesday that it would not rule on a challenge to the map until after the May 3 primary election.The Republican pressure comes as Democrats have fared better than expected in this year’s redistricting cycle. Democrats have drawn aggressive gerrymanders in states like New York, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland, while Republicans have sought to make their current seats safer in states like Texas and Georgia.The result is an emerging new congressional landscape that will not tilt as heavily toward Republicans as it did after the last redistricting cycle, in 2011. In the first elections after that round of redistricting, in 2012, Democrats won 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans maintained control of the chamber with 33 more seats than Democrats.The realignment in this year’s redistricting has rankled some Republicans across the country, who had called on G.O.P.-led state legislatures to be more aggressive in drawing maps.“Republicans are getting absolutely creamed with the phony redistricting going on all over the Country,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement last month.Mr. DeSantis seemed to share Mr. Trump’s view, taking the rare step of interjecting himself into the redistricting process and proposing his own maps, twice. His most recent proposal would have created 20 seats that would have favored Republicans, and just eight that would have favored Democrats, meaning the G.O.P. would have been likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Mr. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.Legislators in the Florida House of Representatives discussed redistricting at a session in January.Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated PressBut Republicans in the State Legislature, who often acquiesce to Mr. DeSantis’s requests, largely ignored the governor’s proposed maps and passed their own maps that would have most likely given Republicans 18 seats, compared with 10 for Democrats. Mr. DeSantis declared the maps “DOA” on Twitter when they passed.In a news conference on Tuesday announcing his veto, Mr. DeSantis said the map drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature violated U.S. Supreme Court precedent.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“They forgot to make sure what they were doing complied with the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Mr. DeSantis said at the State Capitol.The vetoed map did away with a seat held by a Black Democrat, Representative Al Lawson of Tallahassee, and created a smaller district in Jacksonville where a Black Democrat might get elected. Mr. DeSantis had proposed maps earlier this year that further eroded minority representation, including in Mr. Lawson’s district.Mr. DeSantis acknowledged that the map lawmakers end up drawing in the special session would still be likely to face a court challenge. The state’s current map was drawn by the courts after Florida voters wrote anti-gerrymandering provisions into the State Constitution in 2010.On Tuesday, the governor appeared to take aim at those provisions, calling them far-reaching and inconsistent. He hinted that in the future, the state might argue in federal court that the provisions were unconstitutional, but he said his intent was not necessarily to repeal them.“Our goal in this was just to have a constitutional map,” he said. “We were not trying to necessarily plot any type of litigation strategy.”He added, “We will obviously say it’s unconstitutional to draw a district like that, where race is the only factor,” referring to Mr. Lawson’s heavily Black district in North Florida.Legislative leaders in Florida told lawmakers to plan to be in Tallahassee for the special session April 19-22. Florida has a relatively late primary election, set for Aug. 23, and voting is unlikely to be threatened by the uncertainty over the maps. However, some House races have yet to attract a full field of candidates, in part because the district lines remain unclear.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

Records show long gap in Trump phone logs as January 6 violence unfoldedPanel reportedly investigating ‘possible coverup’ of records, with unexplained gap of seven hours as Capitol insurrection took place The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is reportedly looking at a “possible cover-up” of White House records focusing on Donald Trump’s phone logs from that fateful day, which bear an unexplained gap of seven hours and 37 minutes covering the period when the violence was unfolding.‘Clank, into the hole’: Trump claims hole-in-one at Florida golf club Read moreDocuments obtained by the Washington Post and CBS News put flesh on the bones of one of the great mysteries of January 6: why White House phone logs contain holes in the record despite evidence the then president busily made calls at the height of the insurrection.The documents reveal that Trump’s diary shows an entry at 11.17am when he “talked on a phone call to an unidentified person”. The next entry is not until 6.54pm – 457 minutes later – when Trump asked the White House switchboard to place a call to his communications chief, Dan Scavino.Between those times Trump addressed a rally on the Ellipse, exhorting supporters to “fight like hell”; hundreds of Trump followers overran police barricades and stormed the Capitol building; and Mike Pence, the vice-president, who had been overseeing the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, was forced to go into hiding.A bipartisan Senate report connected seven deaths to the attack. More than 100 law enforcement officers were injured.In an echo of history, the investigation by the January 6 committee of a possible cover-up was revealed by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, who made his name, with Carl Bernstein, by breaking the story of Watergate and bringing down a president, Richard Nixon. Woodward’s journalistic partner on this occasion was Robert Costa, his co-author of Peril, a book on the end of the Trump presidency which was released last year.The pair reported that the long gap between call logs was of “intense interest” to elements of the January 6 committee. They quoted an unnamed member of the panel who said they were investigating a “possible cover-up”.The January 6 committee consists of nine members, seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, participating in defiance of party leadership.According to Woodward and Costa, the committee is looking at possible ways in which Trump skirted normal accountability governing telephone calls for a sitting president. One theory is that he might have used disposable or “burner phones”.In a statement, Trump dismissed such speculation.“I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term,” he said.The disclosure of evidence around the events of January 6 has been a bone of contention between Trump and the House committee. Last month the National Archives disclosed it had found boxes of classified documents the former president had improperly taken from the White House.The phone logs containing the six-hour interlude were only handed over to the committee earlier this year after the US supreme court rejected a call by Trump to block the transfer of the documents.The apparent parallels between Trump’s missing phone logs and Nixon’s Watergate cover-up – both situations enhanced by the presence of Woodward’s reporting – was too enticing for commentators to ignore.Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of the anti-Trump conservative website The Bulwark, compared the two presidents’ remarks, writing: “‘I have never obstructed justice … I am not a crook.’ – Richard M Nixon, Nov 17, 1973. ‘I have no idea what a burner phone is …” – Donald J Trump, March 29 2022.’ ”Several people noted the disparity between the infamous 18-and-a-half minutes that were missing in White House tapes of conversations between Nixon and his chief of staff, HR Haldeman, and the vastly longer gap of more than seven hours in Trump’s phone logs.The missing Nixon tapes were from 20 June 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in.The constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted that Trump’s gap “makes the infamous 18-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes look like nothing in comparison”.Pressure on Trump over his actions on January 6 comes at an intense moment for him. Earlier this month, the committee laid out a case for the former president having violated several federal laws in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and stay in power.This week, a federal judge stated that Trump appeared to have committed multiple felonies in his pursuit of the “big lie” that the election was stolen. The judge, David Carter, ordered John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who advised Trump on how to delay certification of Biden’s victory, to hand over hundreds of emails to the January 6 committee.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators are documenting how the former president’s “Be there, will be wild!” post became a catalyst for militants before the Capitol assault.Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have gathered growing evidence of how a tweet by President Donald J. Trump less than three weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, served as a crucial call to action for extremist groups that played a central role in storming the Capitol.Mr. Trump’s Twitter post in the early hours of Dec. 19, 2020, was the first time he publicly urged supporters to come to Washington on the day Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College results showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner of the presidential vote. His message — which concluded with, “Be there, will be wild!” — has long been seen as instrumental in drawing the crowds that attended a pro-Trump rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and then marched to the Capitol.But the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the riot and the parallel inquiry by the House select committee have increasingly shown how Mr. Trump’s post was a powerful catalyst, particularly for far-right militants who believed he was facing his final chance to reverse defeat and whose role in fomenting the violence has come under intense scrutiny.Extremist groups almost immediately celebrated Mr. Trump’s Twitter message, which they widely interpreted as an invitation to descend on the city in force. Responding to the president’s words, the groups sprang into action, court filings and interviews by the House committee show: Extremists began to set up encrypted communications channels, acquire protective gear and, in one case, prepare heavily armed “quick reaction forces” to be staged outside Washington.They also began to whip up their members with a drumbeat of bellicose language, with their private messaging channels increasingly characterized by what one called an “apocalyptic tone.” Directly after Mr. Trump’s tweet was posted, the Capitol Police began to see a spike in right-wing threats against members of Congress.Prosecutors have included examples in at least five criminal cases of extremists reacting within days — often hours — to Mr. Trump’s post.The mob attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesOne of those who responded to the post was Guy Wesley Reffitt, an oil-field worker from Texas who this month became the first Jan. 6 defendant to be convicted at trial. Within a day of Mr. Trump’s Twitter post, Mr. Reffitt was talking about it on a private group chat with other members of the far-right militia organization the Texas Three Percenters.“Our President will need us. ALL OF US…!!! On January 6th,” Mr. Reffitt wrote. “We the People owe him that debt. He Sacrificed for us and we must pay that debt.”The next day, prosecutors say, Mr. Reffitt began to make arrangements to travel to Washington and arrive in time for “Armageddon all day” on Jan. 6, he wrote in the Three Percenters group chat. He told his compatriots that he planned to drive because flying was impossible with “all the battle rattle” he planned to bring — a reference to his weapons and body armor, prosecutors say.Some in the group appeared to share his anger. On Dec. 22, one member wrote in the chat, “The only way you will be able to do anything in DC is if you get the crowd to drag the traitors out.”Mr. Reffitt responded: “I don’t think anyone going to DC has any other agenda.”The House committee has also sharpened its focus on how the tweet set off a chain reaction that galvanized Mr. Trump’s supporters to begin military-style planning for Jan. 6. As part of the congressional inquiry, investigators are trying to establish whether there was any coordination beyond the post that ties Mr. Trump’s inner circle to the militants and whether the groups plotted together.“That tweet could be viewed as a call to action,” said Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “It’s definitely something we’re asking questions about through our discussions with witnesses. We want to know whether the president’s tweets inflamed and mobilized individuals to take action.”On the day of the post, participants in TheDonald.win, a pro-Trump chat board, began sharing tactics and techniques for attacking the Capitol, the committee noted in a report released on Sunday recommending contempt of Congress charges for Dan Scavino Jr., Mr. Trump’s former deputy chief of staff. In one thread on the chat board related to the tweet, the report pointed out, an anonymous poster wrote that Mr. Trump “can’t exactly openly tell you to revolt. This is the closest he’ll ever get.’’Lawyers for the militants have repeatedly said that the groups were simply acting defensively in preparing for Jan. 6. They had genuine concerns, the lawyers said, that leftist counterprotesters might confront them, as they had at earlier pro-Trump rallies.Mr. Trump’s post came as his efforts to hang onto power were shifting from the courts, where he had little success, to the streets and to challenging the certification process that would play out on Jan. 6.A week before his message, thousands of his supporters had arrived in Washington for the second time in two months for a large-scale rally protesting the election results. The event on Dec. 12, 2020, which Mr. Trump flew over in Marine One, showed his ability to draw huge crowds of ordinary people in support of his baseless assertions that the election had been stolen.But it also brought together at the same time and place extremist and paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the 1st Amendment Praetorian, who would be present on Jan. 6.On Dec. 14, the Electoral College met and officially declared Mr. Biden the winner of the election.An event in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020 showed the former president’s ability to draw huge crowds in support of his lies that the election had been stolen.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut behind closed doors, outside advisers to Mr. Trump were scrambling to pitch him on plans to seize control of voting machines across the country. The debate over doing so came to a head in a contentious Oval Office meeting that lasted well into the evening on Dec. 18, 2020, and ended with the idea being put aside.Hours later, the president pushed send on his tweet.“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19. “Be there, will be wild!”Almost at once, shock waves rippled through the right.At 2:26 a.m., the prominent white nationalist Nicholas J. Fuentes wrote on Twitter that he planned to join Mr. Trump in Washington on Jan. 6. By that afternoon, the post had been mentioned or amplified by other right-wing figures like Ali Alexander, a high-profile “Stop the Steal” organizer.But Mr. Trump’s message arguably landed with the greatest impact among members of the same extremist groups that had been in Washington on Dec. 12.On Dec. 15, Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, posted an open letter to Mr. Trump urging him to invoke the Insurrection Act. The next day, the national council of the Three Percenters Original group issued a statement, saying their members were “standing by to answer the call from our president.”Once the call came, early on Dec. 19, the extremists were ecstatic.Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers, declared a few days after Mr. Trump’s tweet that there would be “a massively bloody revolution” if Joseph R. Biden Jr. ever took office.Susan Walsh/Associated Press“Trump said It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!! It’s gonna be wild!!!!!!!,” Kelly Meggs, a Florida leader of the Oath Keepers, wrote on Facebook on Dec. 22. “He wants us to make it WILD that’s what he’s saying. He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Sir Yes Sir!!! Gentlemen we are heading to DC.”That same day, Mr. Rhodes did an interview with one of his lieutenants and declared that there would be “a massively bloody revolution” if Mr. Biden took office.On Dec. 23, Mr. Rhodes posted another letter saying that “tens of thousands of patriot Americans” would be in Washington on Jan. 6, and that many would have their “mission-critical gear” stowed outside the city.The letter said members of the group — largely composed of former military and law enforcement personnel — might have to “take arms in defense of our God-given liberty.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Trump’s tweet. More

At this point, there’s very little distance between the fringes of the modern Republican Party and the elites who lead it. Superficial differences of affect and emphasis mask shared views and ways of seeing. In fact, members of the Republican elite are very often the fringe figures in question.Take Virginia “Ginni” Thomas. She is an influential and well-connected conservative political activist who has been a fixture of Washington since the late 1980s. A fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, she reportedly urged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to do everything in his power to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election and keep Trump in power. And judging from her text messages to Meadows — which include the hope that the “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators” are awaiting trial before military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay — she is also something of a “Q” believer, one of millions of Americans who embrace the conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a messianic war against the “deep state.”Ginni Thomas is also, notably, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And while Justice Thomas is in no way responsible for the actions of his spouse, it does beggar belief to think he is unaware of her views and actions, including her work to keep Trump in office against the will of the electorate.But that’s something of a separate issue. What matters here is that we have, in Ginni Thomas, a very high-profile Republican activist who holds, and acts on, fringe, conspiratorial beliefs. And she is not alone.Like Thomas, Attorney General William P. Barr is a mainstay of the Republican establishment in Washington, a consummate insider with decades of political and legal experience. His service under President Ronald Reagan in the White House led to his appointment as head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President George H.W. Bush. From there, he was appointed deputy attorney general and then, in 1991, attorney general. He returned to public life in 2019 to serve a second stint as attorney general, this time under Trump.But there’s no reason to think that Barr’s traditional credentials somehow preclude fringe beliefs. As it turns out, they don’t.In a November 2019 speech sponsored by the Federalist Society, Barr spoke at length on his vision of executive power under the Constitution. In his view, the framers “well understood that their prime antagonist was an overweening Parliament,” and that their aim at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was to create a powerful, “unitary” executive with the singular authority of a monarch. “To my mind,” he said, “the real ‘miracle’ in Philadelphia that summer was the creation of a strong Executive, independent of, and coequal with, the other two branches of government.”Barr concedes the fact of “checks and balances” but insists that, properly understood, the executive branch has nearly limitless authority across multiple arenas. In his view, Congress has no right to challenge claims of executive privilege and the courts have no right to limit the president’s power to make war. “The Constitution is designed to maximize the government’s efficiency to achieve victory — even at the cost of ‘collateral damage’ that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm,” Barr said. “The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.”These are extreme views. What Barr describes isn’t a president, but a king. It is a gussied-up version of Trump’s belief that, under Article II of the Constitution, he had “the right to do whatever I want as president.” It may not be QAnon, but it still belongs to the fringe.With that said, and despite his later rejection of Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, Barr does appear to hold somewhat conspiratorial views not unlike those of Ginni Thomas. In an interview he gave to The Chicago Tribune just before the 2020 election, Barr insisted that mail-in voting would lead to “selling and buying votes” and implied that Democrats would manufacture votes to win elections.“Someone will say the president just won Nevada. ‘Oh, wait a minute! We just discovered 100,000 ballots! Every vote will be counted!’ Yeah, but we don’t know where these freaking votes came from,” Barr said.You can play this game with any number of prominent Republicans. Leading figures like Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia regularly give voice to conspiracy theories and other wild accusations. Last month, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator Rick Scott of Florida, released an 11-point agenda that, among other things, denies the existence of transgender people and calls on the government to treat socialism as a “foreign combatant.”And those Republicans who don’t openly hold fringe views are more than willing to pander to them, from Senator Ted Cruz’s enthusiastic embrace of “stop the steal” to Senator Josh Hawley’s QAnon dogwhistle that Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s nominee to the Supreme Court, is soft on (and sympathetic to) child predators.For Democrats, and especially for Democratic leadership, the upshot of all of this is that they should give up whatever hope they had that the Republican Party will somehow return to normal, that the fever will break and American politics will snap back to reality. From its base to its leaders, the modern Republican Party is fully in the grip of an authoritarian movement animated by extreme beliefs and fringe conspiracy theories.Democrats can’t force Republicans onto a different path. But they also can’t act as if they’re above the fray. That appears to have been the plan so far, and if the current political state of the Democratic Party is any indication, it’s not working. The only alternative is to confront the Republican Party as forcefully as possible and show the extent to which that party has descended into conspiracies and corruption.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

In the spring of a new president’s second year in office, political junkies know all too well what to expect from the midterm elections.A president (of whatever party), elected largely thanks to public distaste for his opponent, came in with his party in control of Congress and intent on not wasting an opportunity for transformative policy change. For all his talk of building new coalitions, he focused on the priorities of his party’s core activists, and by now it’s pretty clear that most voters don’t love what they see. The only way his party will avoid losing at least one house of Congress is if the other party somehow makes itself even more obnoxious. The question for November is whom the public will like less.Something like this has been the pattern of our politics for three decades now — long enough that we rarely stop to wonder much at just how strange it is or how we might change it. Neither party does much to expand its appeal or its coalition. Both double down on the voters they can count on, hoping they add up to a slim, temporary majority. If that doesn’t work, they just do it again.For political parties, whose very purpose is to build the broadest possible coalitions, such behavior is malpractice. So why has it persisted for so long? Why is public disaffection not pushing politicians to change their strategies or their agendas and seek durable majorities?The very fact that voters are unhappy with both parties makes it hard for either one to take a hint from its electoral failures. Even more than polarization, it is the closeness of elections that has degraded the capacity of our democracy to respond to voter pressure. In an era of persistent, polarized deadlock, both parties are effectively minorities — but each continues to think it is on the verge of winning big.To see why, it’s worth first noticing how unusual such persistent deadlock is. As the political scientist Morris Fiorina showed in his 2017 book, “Unstable Majorities,” our two-party system has usually produced durable partisan patterns of governance. Realignments have occasionally transformed a longstanding minority into the dominant party of a new era, but long stretches in which power has shifted back and forth have been rare. The only previous one was from 1874 to 1894. Ours has already been longer.Consider the previous hundred years or so. Republicans won seven of the nine presidential elections from 1896 to 1928 and controlled both houses of Congress for most of that stretch. Then from 1932 through 1950, Democrats won five presidential elections in a row and controlled Congress for all but two years. After that came more than four decades of durably divided government: Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections from the 1950s through the 1980s — including a 24-year stretch with only one, single-term, Democratic presidency. But in that time, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for 40 straight years and the Senate for 34 of those years. You might say that was an age of two overlapping majorities, in contrast to our age of two polarized minorities.But since 1992, elections for president and Congress have been consistently up for grabs. Two presidents have been elected while losing the popular vote, which happened only twice in the previous two centuries. Control of Congress has swung back and forth more rapidly than in any previous era.The effects of this flux have been perverse. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand its coalition and become a majority, but actually both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat its own as massive triumphs.This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither of our parties has learned much in a long time, and neither can quite grasp that it just isn’t very popular and could easily lose the next election.This dynamic has many causes — from the advent of party primaries to the evolution of the media and much in between. Polarization doesn’t have to mean deadlock, but a long-term pattern of growing negative polarization, in which each party sees the other as the country’s biggest problem, creates incentives for the parties to seek narrower but ideologically purer wins rather than build broader if less ideologically coherent coalitions.Yet the pattern isn’t inevitable, and it’s crucial to see that the very closeness of elections blinds politicians to potential ways of breaking out of it. As the political scientist Frances Lee has shown, the minority party in Congress now always thinks it’s one election away from power and so sees no reason to change its appeal or to bargain to address the country’s longer-term needs. Younger politicians who have known only this period assume there is no other way — that short-termism is unavoidable and governing means frantically expending rather than patiently amassing political capital.This also intensifies party cohesion. As the political scientist Daniel DiSalvo has argued, internal factions let parties evolve toward new voters and vice versa, but our era has seen fewer and weaker factions. Narrow elections invite strict unity, so the parties now hunt heretics rather than seek converts. Witness, for instance, the Arizona Republican and Democratic Parties censuring Gov. Doug Ducey and Senator Kyrsten Sinema for undermining party unity. Both parties act as if they have too many voters, rather than too few.Breaking this pattern would have to start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if politicians seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded our leaders for a generation because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock.That doesn’t mean reaching for the center in a shallow ideological sense, let alone hoping swing voters catch up with the priorities of party activists. It requires not so much offering different answers to the questions that have long shaped our political divisions but taking up some new questions better rooted in the public’s contemporary concerns — about new sources of financial insecurity and high living costs, threats to parenthood and childhood, dangers of concentrated corporate power, sources of cultural dislocation, perils of internet governance and other challenges that scramble familiar partisan dogmas. Such questions can be answered in right-leaning or left-leaning ways, but they first need to be asked.Some Republicans have long pointed to the need to move beyond the terms of Reaganism, and some even hoped that Donald Trump’s ascent might enable such a move. But Mr. Trump’s vile cult of personality only reinforced the trench-warfare dynamics. He mostly offered a model of how to squander opportunity: He won independents by six percentage points in 2016 and then lost them by 13 in 2020. That Republicans are even contemplating nominating him again shows they are not attuned to the need to break out of the age of deadlock.Some Democrats can see the problem, too. In an important recent paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, two veterans of the Clinton White House, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, raised the alarm about the narrowness of their party’s appeal. “Unless they want to spend their careers in a minority party,” they argued, Democrats “must acknowledge the need to win swing states — and the political implications of this necessity.” But such arguments can barely be heard over the din of party activists who aggressively alienate potential swing voters with heedless cultural radicalism.Each party is therefore left pursuing a losing strategy and saved from disaster only by the fact that the other party is doing the same. The first to realize that this is not working will face a real opportunity. The party that grasps that it has been losing for a generation will have a chance to make itself the next big winner in our politics.Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer and is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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