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      Building a Legal Wall Around Donald Trump

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      The American legal system is on the cusp of a remarkable historical achievement. In real time and under immense pressure, it has responded to an American insurrection in a manner that is both meting out justice to the participants and establishing a series of legal precedents that will stand as enduring deterrents to a future rebellion. In an era when so many American institutions have failed, the success of our legal institutions in responding to a grave crisis should be a source of genuine hope.I’m writing this newsletter days after the Michigan attorney general announced the prosecution of 16 Republicans for falsely presenting themselves as the electors qualified to vote in the Electoral College for Donald Trump following the 2020 election. That news came the same day that the former president announced on Truth Social that he’d received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The target letter signals that the grand jury investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is likely to indict Trump, perhaps any day now.On Monday, a day before this wave of news, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a desperate Trump attempt to disqualify the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump and to quash a special grand jury report about 2020 election misconduct. Trump’s team filed their petition on July 13. The court rejected it a mere four days later. Willis can continue her work, and she’s expected to begin issuing indictments — including potentially her own Trump indictment — in August, if not sooner.Presuming another Trump indictment (or more than one) is imminent — or even if it is not — the legal response to Jan. 6 will continue. But to truly understand where we are now, it’s important to track where we’ve been. If you rewind the clock to the late evening of Jan. 6, 2021, America’s long history of a peaceful transfer of power was over, broken by a demagogue and his mob. To make matters worse, there was no straight-line path to legal accountability.Prosecuting acts of violence against police — or acts of vandalism in the Capitol — was certainly easy enough, especially since much of the violence and destruction was caught on video. But prosecuting Trump’s thugs alone was hardly enough to address the sheer scale of MAGA misconduct. What about those who helped plan and set the stage for the insurrection? What about the failed candidate who set it all in motion, Donald Trump himself?Consider the legal challenges. The stolen election narrative was promulgated by a simply staggering amount of defamation — yet defamation cases are difficult to win in a nation that strongly protects free speech. Trump’s legal campaign was conducted by unethical lawyers raising frivolous arguments — yet attorney discipline, especially stretching across multiple jurisdictions, is notoriously difficult.The list continues. Trump’s team sought to take advantage of ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, a 19th-century statute that might be one of the most poorly written statutes in the entire federal code. In addition, Trump’s team advanced a constitutional argument called the independent state legislature doctrine that would empower legislatures to dictate or distort the outcomes of congressional and presidential elections in their states.There’s more. When we watched insurrectionists storm the Capitol, we were watching the culminating moment of a seditious conspiracy, yet prosecutions for seditious conspiracy are both rare and difficult. And finally, the entire sorry and deadly affair was instigated by an American president — and an American president had never been indicted before, much less for his role in unlawfully attempting to overturn an American election.Now, consider the response. It’s easy to look at Trump’s persistent popularity with G.O.P. voters and the unrepentant boosterism of parts of right-wing media and despair. Does anything make a difference in the fight against Trump’s lawlessness and lies? The answer is yes, and the record is impressive. Let’s go through it.The pro-Trump media ecosphere that repeated and amplified his election lies has paid a price. Fox News agreed to a stunning $787 million defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, and multiple defamation cases continue against multiple right-wing media outlets.Trump’s lawyers and his lawyer allies have paid a price. Last month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the bulk of a sanctions award against Sidney Powell and a Mos Eisley cantina’s worth of Trump-allied lawyers. A New York State appellate court temporarily suspended Rudy Giuliani’s law license in 2021, and earlier this month a Washington, D.C., bar panel recommended that he be disbarred. Jenna Ellis, one of Guiliani’s partners in dangerous dishonesty and frivolous legal arguments, admitted to making multiple misrepresentations in a public censure from the Colorado Bar Association. John Eastman, the former dean of Chapman University’s law school and the author of an infamous legal memo that suggested Mike Pence could overturn the election, is facing his own bar trial in California.Congress has responded to the Jan. 6 crisis, passing bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms that would make a repeat performance of the congressional attempt to overturn the election far more difficult.The Supreme Court has responded, deciding Moore v. Harper, which gutted the independent state legislature doctrine and guaranteed that partisan state legislatures are still subject to review by the courts.The criminal justice system has responded, securing hundreds of criminal convictions of Jan. 6 rioters, including seditious conspiracy convictions for multiple members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And the criminal justice system is still responding, progressing steadily up the command and control chain, with Trump himself apparently the ultimate target.In roughly 30 months — light speed in legal time — the American legal system has built the case law necessary to combat and deter American insurrection. Bar associations are setting precedents. Courts are setting precedents. And these precedents are holding in the face of appeals and legal challenges.Do you wonder why the 2022 election was relatively routine and uneventful, even though the Republicans fielded a host of conspiracy-theorist candidates? Do you wonder why right-wing media was relatively tame after a series of tough G.O.P. losses, especially compared to the deranged hysterics in 2020? Yes, it matters that Trump was not a candidate, but it also matters that the right’s most lawless members have been prosecuted, sued and sanctioned.The consequences for Jan. 6 and the Stop the Steal movement are not exclusively legal. The midterm elections also represented a profound setback for the extreme MAGA right. According to an NBC News report, election-denying candidates “overwhelmingly lost” their races in swing states. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the relentless legal efforts also had a political payoff.And to be clear, this accountability has not come exclusively through the left — though the Biden administration and the Garland Justice Department deserve immense credit for their responses to Trump’s insurrection, which have been firm without overreaching. Multiple Republicans joined with Democrats to pass Electoral Count Act reform. Both conservative and liberal justices rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Conservative and liberal judges, including multiple Trump appointees, likewise rejected Trump’s election challenges. Republican governors and other Republican elected officials in Arizona and Georgia withstood immense pressure from within their own party to uphold Joe Biden’s election win.American legal institutions have passed the Jan. 6 test so far, but the tests aren’t over. Trump is already attempting to substantially delay the trial on his federal indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, and if a second federal indictment arrives soon, he’ll almost certainly attempt to delay it as well. Trump does not want to face a jury, and if he delays his trials long enough, he can run for president free of any felony convictions. And what if he wins?Simply put, the American people can override the rule of law. If they elect Trump in spite of his indictments, they will empower him to end his own federal criminal prosecutions and render state prosecutions a practical impossibility. They will empower him to pardon his allies. The American voters will break through the legal firewall that preserves our democracy from insurrection and rebellion.We can’t ask for too much from any legal system. A code of laws is ultimately no substitute for moral norms. Our constitutional republic cannot last indefinitely in the face of misinformation, conspiracy and violence. It can remove the worst actors from positions of power and influence. But it cannot ultimately save us from ourselves. American legal institutions have responded to a historical crisis, but all its victories could still be temporary. Our nation can choose the law, or it can choose Trump. It cannot choose both. More

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      Giuliani Should Lose His Law License in D.C., Bar Panel Says

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      The recommendation for disbarment of Rudolph W. Giuliani followed a hearing where evidence was presented that he had improperly sought to help Donald J. Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election.A legal ethics committee in Washington that oversaw a disciplinary case late year against Rudolph W. Giuliani recommended on Friday that he be disbarred for his “unparalleled” attempts to overturn the 2020 election in favor of his client at the time, President Donald J. Trump.In its recommendation, the panel from the D.C. Bar’s board on professional responsibility said that Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to “undermine the integrity” of the election had “helped destabilize our democracy” and “done lasting damage” to the oath to support the U.S. Constitution that he had sworn when he was admitted to the bar.While the panel acknowledged a record of public service by Mr. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and U.S. attorney in Manhattan, it also noted that “all of that happened long ago.”“The misconduct here sadly transcends all his past accomplishments,” the panel wrote. “It was unparalleled in its destructive purpose and effect. He sought to disrupt a presidential election and persists in his refusal to acknowledge the wrong he has done.”Mr. Giuliani’s hearing in front of the ethics committee took place in December and focused on the role he had played in bringing a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Philadelphia that sought to delay the certification of the election results in Pennsylvania.The federal judge who heard the Pennsylvania case dismissed it, likening it to a “Frankenstein’s monster” that had been “haphazardly stitched together.” A federal appeals court then upheld the dismissal in a scathing order by a Trump-appointed judge who noted that “calling an election unfair does not make it so.”The legal ethics committee in Washington determined that Mr. Giuliani had filed the suit “when he had no factual basis, and consequently no legitimate legal grounds, to do so.”“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the panel wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the court, forfeited his right to practice law.”A local court of appeals in Washington will ultimately decide whether to revoke his license to practice law in the city. He has already had his license suspended in New York. One of his lawyers, Barry Kamins, said he was disappointed in the committee’s recommendation in Washington and would file “a vigorous appeal.”The ethics committee’s recommendation was the latest example of bar authorities seeking accountability for lawyers who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the results of the election and maintain his grip on power.In March, under a negotiated agreement with state bar officials in Colorado, the lawyer Jenna Ellis acknowledged that she had knowingly misrepresented the facts in several of her public claims that widespread voting fraud led to Mr. Trump’s defeat. Ms. Ellis worked closely with Mr. Giuliani in various attempts to keep Mr. Trump in office.Another lawyer who took part in those attempts, John Eastman, is currently facing a disciplinary hearing by bar officials in California that could lead to the loss of his law license. Mr. Eastman, a law professor, was the architect of a plan to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use his position as president of the Senate to unilaterally throw the election to Mr. Trump during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.Possible disbarment is not the only legal problem confronting Mr. Giuliani. Late last year, he received a grand jury subpoena from federal prosecutors who are mulling criminal charges related to Mr. Trump’s various attempts to stay in power.Last month, Mr. Giuliani sat for an interview with prosecutors working for the special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the election interference inquiry. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump on CNN’s Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump misleadingly and wrongly described his own record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy and the economy.Former President Donald J. Trump almost immediately began citing a litany of falsehoods Wednesday night during a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire broadcast on CNN.After incorrectly characterizing the 2020 presidential election as “rigged,” Mr. Trump repeated a number of other falsehoods that have become staples of his political messaging. He misleadingly and wrongly described his record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy, immigration policy, the economy and a woman whom a jury found he sexually abused.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What WAS Said“We got 12 million more votes than we had — as you know — in 2016.”This is misleading. Mr. Trump received 74 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election. But, of course, President Biden received even more votes in 2020: 81 million.Mr. Trump then repeated his lie that the 2020 election was rigged. As the CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins noted, no evidence has surfaced to support his false claims of an army of people voting multiple times, dead people voting and missing ballots.What WAS Said“I offered them 10,000 soldiers. I said it could be 10, it could be more, but I offered them specifically 10,000 soldiers.”This is false. Mr. Trump was referring to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when his loyalists stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Mr. Biden’s election victory. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that the speaker of the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi, rejected such a demand. The speaker does not control the National Guard.Mr. Trump also claimed that the acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher C. Miller, backed up his account. Vanity Fair reported in 2021 that Mr. Trump had floated the 10,000 figure to Mr. Miller the night of Jan. 5. But in 2022, Mr. Miller told a House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 that he was “never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.”There is no record of Mr. Trump making such a request either. The Pentagon’s timeline of events leading up to the riot notes that the Defense Department reviewed a plan to activate 340 members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, “if asked.” But the timeline makes no mention of a request for 10,000 troops by Mr. Trump. Nor did a Pentagon inspector general report on the breach, which instead referred to suggestions by Mr. Trump that his rally on Jan. 6 had been conducted safely. A Pentagon spokesman also told The Washington Post that it had “no record of such an order being given.”What WAS SaidFormer Vice President Mike Pence “should have put the votes back to the state legislatures, and I think we would have had a different outcome.”This is false. The vice president does not have the power or legal authority to alter the presidential election, as Mr. Pence has repeatedly and correctly noted.A House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol found that John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who was the chief architect of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, had admitted to Mr. Trump two days before Jan. 6 that his plan to have Mr. Pence to halt the vote certification process was illegal.What WAS Said“This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”This is false. A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found that Mr. Trump had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer. Regardless of whether Mr. Trump remembers meeting Ms. Carroll, there is clear evidence that the two have met: a black-and-white photo of the two along with their spouses at the time.What WAS Said“We created the greatest economy in history. A big part of that economy was I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.”This is false. Average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic battered the economy, was lower under Mr. Trump than under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.Nor were the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 the “biggest” ever. According to a report from the Treasury Department, the 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest as a percentage of the economy (2.9 percent of gross domestic product) and by the reduction in federal revenue (a 13.3 percent decrease). The Obama tax cut in 2012 amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut was about $150 billion annually and amounted to about 0.9 percent of gross domestic product.Mr. Trump also claimed to have presided over “zero” inflation. Although some months had zero inflation or even price declines as the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Consumer Price Index increased 1.2 percent overall in 2020, the last full year he was in office, and had risen at a 1.4 percent annual rate in January 2021, his last month as president.What WAS Said“If you look at Chicago, Chicago has the single toughest gun policies in the nation. They are so tough you can’t breathe, New York, too, and other places also. All those places are the worst and most dangerous places so that’s not the answer.”This is misleading. Opponents of firearm restrictions frequently cite Chicago as a case study of how tough gun laws do little to prevent homicides. This argument, however, relies on faulty assumptions about the city’s gun laws and gun violence.There were more gun murders in Chicago than in any other city in the United States in 2020, fueling the perception that it is the gun violence capital of the country. But Chicago is also the third-largest city in the country. Adjusted by population, the gun homicide rate was 25.2 per 100,000, the 26th highest in the country in 2020, according to data compiled by the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety.The three cities with the highest gun homicide rates — Jackson, Miss., Gary, Ind., and St. Louis — had rates double that of Chicago’s. All are in states with more permissive gun laws than Illinois.Chicago’s reputation for having the strictest gun control measures in the country is outdated. The Supreme Court nullified the city’s handgun ban in 2010. An appeals court also struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois in 2012, and the state began allowing possession of concealed guns in 2013, as part of the court decision.Today, Illinois has tougher restrictions than most states, but it does not lead the pack, ranking No. 7 in Everytown’s assessment of the strength of state gun control laws, and No. 8 in a report card released by the Giffords Law Center, another gun control group. Conversely, the state ranked No. 41 in an assessment on gun rights from the libertarian Cato Institute.Gun control proponents have also argued that the patchwork nature of gun laws in the country makes it difficult for a state like Illinois with tough restrictions on the books to enforce those in practice. A 2017 study commissioned by the City of Chicago found, for example, that 60 percent of guns used in crimes and recovered in Chicago came from out of state, with neighboring Indiana as the primary source.What WAS Said“I built the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall and I finished it.”This is false. The Trump administration constructed 453 miles of border wall over four years, and a vast majority of the new barriers reinforced or replaced existing structures. Of that, about 47 miles were new primary barriers. The United States’ southwestern border with Mexico is over 1,900 miles, and during his campaign, Mr. Trump had vowed to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it. Mexico did not pay for the barriers that had been constructed.What WAS Said“I got with NATO — I got them to put up hundreds of millions of dollars that they weren’t paying under Obama and Bush and all these other presidents.”This is misleading. Under guidelines for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, members agreed to commit a minimum of 2 percent of G.D.P. on their own defense, but few nations actually do so. They do not “pay” the alliance directly.NATO members agreed that nations currently not meeting the 2 percent goal would do so in the next decade, and that nations meeting it would continue to do so — but they made this pledge in September 2014, years before Mr. Trump became president.“And the reason for this is not Donald Trump — it’s Vladimir Putin, Russia’s actions in Crimea and aggressive stance,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a NATO ambassador under President Barack Obama, previously told The New York Times.What WAS Said“You know who else took them? Obama took them.”This is false. Mr. Trump has repeatedly and wrongly compared his handling of classified documents with that of his predecessor.After his presidency, Mr. Trump took a trove of classified documents — including some marked top secret — to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.In contrast, the National Archives and Records Administration, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, has said in a statement that Mr. Obama turned over his documents, classified and unclassified, as required by law.The agency has also said it is not aware of any missing boxes of presidential records from the Obama administration.Mr. Trump then falsely claimed that Mr. Biden “took more than anybody,” about 1,800 boxes. But that number refers to a collection of documents Mr. Biden had donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 from his tenure as a senator representing the state from 1973 to 2009. Unlike presidential documents, which must be released to the National Archives once a president leaves office, documents from members of Congress are not covered by the Presidential Records Act. It is not uncommon for senators and representatives to give such items to research or historical facilities.The university agreed not to give the public access to Mr. Biden’s documents from his time as senator until two years after he retired from public life. But the F.B.I. did search the collection in February as part of a special counsel investigation and in cooperation with Mr. Biden’s legal team. The Times reported at the time that the material was still being analyzed but did not appear to contain any classified documents.What WAS Said“I didn’t ask him to find anything. If this call was bad — I said you owe me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged.”This is false. In a taped January 2021 call, Mr. Trump said the words “find 11,780 votes” as he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia to overturn election results in his state.“All I want to do is this,” he said in the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”Mr. Trump also accused Mr. Raffensperger of “not reporting” corrupt ballots and ballot shredding (there is no evidence that this happened in Georgia), and told him that “that’s a criminal offense.” More

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      Pence Testifies Before Grand Jury on Trump’s Efforts to Retain Power

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      The former vice president is a key witness to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to block congressional certification of Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared on Thursday before the grand jury hearing evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, a person briefed on the matter said, testifying in a criminal inquiry that could shape the legal and political fate of his one-time boss and possible 2024 rival.Mr. Pence spent more than five hours behind closed doors at the Federal District Court in Washington in an appearance that came after he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury earlier this year.As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Pence’s advisers had discussions with Justice Department officials last year about providing testimony in their criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and a number of his allies broke federal law in trying to keep Mr. Trump in power. But the talks broke down, leading prosecutors to seek a subpoena for Mr. Pence’s testimony.Both Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump tried to fight the subpoena, with the former vice president claiming it violated the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution given his role overseeing the election results certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump claiming their discussions were covered by executive privilege.Mr. Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony based on executive privilege claims were rebuffed by the courts. Mr. Pence partially won in his effort to forestall or limit his testimony; the chief judge overseeing the grand jury ruled that he would not have to discuss matters connected to his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, but that he would have to testify to any potential criminality by Mr. Trump.A federal appeals court on Wednesday night rejected an emergency attempt by Mr. Trump to stop Mr. Pence’s testimony, allowing the testimony to go forward on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s effort to hold onto the presidency after his defeat at the polls — and how it led to the assault on the Capitol — is the focus of one of the two federal criminal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Mr. Smith is also managing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.Mr. Smith has gathered evidence about a wide range of activities by Mr. Trump and his allies following Election Day in 2020. They include a plan to assemble slates of alternate electors from a number of swing states who could be put forward by Mr. Trump as he disputed the Electoral College results. They also encompass an examination of whether Mr. Trump defrauded donors by soliciting contributions to fight election fraud despite having been repeatedly told that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen from him.A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, has also been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election results in that state, and has signaled that she will announce any indictments this summer.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to block or delay certification of the electoral outcome, infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence subsequently became a target of the pro-Trump mob that swamped the Capitol building that day, with some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the complex. Someone brought a fake gallows that stood outside the building.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided on Thursday. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s accounts of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that they could use the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.That plan relied on Mr. Pence using his role as president of the Senate to hold up the process. But Mr. Pence’s top lawyer and outside advisers concluded that the vice president did not have the legal authority to do so.Mr. Pence described some of his conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoir, “So Help Me God.”Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Some of Mr. Pence’s aides have already appeared before the grand jury, in addition to providing extensive testimony last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and what led to it. More

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      Will Trump Face Criminal Charges in Georgia Election Inquiry?

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      The House Jan. 6 committee report offered fresh evidence that former President Donald J. Trump was at the center of efforts to overturn election results in Georgia.A few weeks after losing the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, with a plan for keeping himself in office. During the call, he asked John C. Eastman, an architect of the strategy, to lay it out: Trump supporters in states that the president had lost would act as if they were official Electoral College delegates, an audacious scheme to circumvent voters.After the plan was put in motion, Ms. McDaniel forwarded an “elector recap” report to Mr. Trump’s executive assistant, who replied soon after, “It’s in front of him!”Such details, from the report released in December by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, offer fresh evidence that Mr. Trump was not on the periphery of the effort to overturn the election results in Georgia but at the center of it.For the last two years, prosecutors in Atlanta have been conducting a criminal investigation into whether the Trump team interfered in the presidential election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. With the wide-ranging inquiry now entering the indictment phase, the central question is whether Mr. Trump himself will face criminal charges.Legal analysts who have followed the case say there are two areas of considerable risk for Mr. Trump. The first are the calls that he made to state officials, including one to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he needed to “find” 11,780 votes. But the recently released Jan. 6 committee transcripts shed new light on the other area of potential legal jeopardy for the former president: his direct involvement in recruiting a slate of bogus presidential electors in the weeks after the 2020 election.The Atlanta prosecutors have moved more quickly than the Department of Justice, where a special counsel, Jack Smith, was recently appointed to oversee Trump-related investigations. This month, the Fulton County Superior Court disbanded a special grand jury after it produced an investigative report on the case, concluding months of private testimony from dozens of Trump allies, state officials and other witnesses.Election personnel count absentee ballots in Atlanta in November 2020.Audra Melton for The New York TimesThe report remains secret, although a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine if any or all of it will be made public. Nearly 20 people known to have been named targets of the investigation could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, will need to make her case to a regular grand jury if she seeks indictments, which would likely come by May. That means the nation could be in for months more waiting and speculating, particularly if a judge decides after this week’s hearing not to make public the report’s recommendations.Mr. Trump’s lawyers said in a statement Monday that they would not be at Tuesday’s hearing, adding that Mr. Trump “was never subpoenaed nor asked to come in voluntarily by this grand jury or anyone in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.”Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      John Eastman Is Defiant as Trump-Related Investigations Proliferate

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      A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss. But in Mr. Eastman’s telling, he was far from a criminal.WASHINGTON — John C. Eastman, a legal architect of Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times under questioning by the House Jan. 6 committee.But in recently released testimony from the committee’s investigation, other witnesses had plenty to say about him.Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world. Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterized Mr. Eastman’s legal advice as “gravely, gravely irresponsible,” calling him the “serpent in the ear” of Mr. Trump. Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted “chewing out” Mr. Eastman. Pat A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas “nutty.”In the coming months, Mr. Eastman will be facing a legal reckoning. He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments. The F.B.I. seized his iPhone. And the Jan. 6 committee, in one of its last acts, asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Eastman on a range of criminal charges, including obstructing a congressional proceeding. For good measure, he faces a disciplinary bar proceeding in California.A once-obscure scholar at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman joined the Trump camp shortly after the election and was soon among a group of lawyers who, with the president’s blessing, largely commandeered decision-making from lawyers at the White House and on the Trump campaign.He championed a two-pronged strategy that the Jan. 6 committee portrayed as a coup plot. The first was enlisting party officials to organize slates of bogus electors in swing states where Mr. Trump lost, even after the results had been certified and recertified, as in Georgia. The second was pressuring Mr. Pence to deviate from the vice president’s traditionally ceremonial role and decline to certify all the electoral votes on Jan. 6.While Mr. Eastman refused to answer most of the committee’s questions, he has hardly been at a loss for words. At the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, held on the Ellipse moments before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder.” Over the last two years he has remained defiant in a string of public appearances and interviews, and painted a picture sharply at odds with other accounts, most notably those of Mr. Pence and two of his aides who cooperated with the House committee.In Mr. Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal. In fact, in a recent interview — a fuller version of one he gave to The New York Times in the fall of 2021 — he says he was helping to head off a potentially more perilous outcome.Mr. Eastman spoke of voter fraud at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, just before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersHe claims that in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4, he helped convince Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence did not have the power to pick whomever he wanted as president. And Mr. Eastman said his advice to the president and vice president was only that Mr. Pence should pause the certification of the election, giving legislatures more time to consider fraud allegations in certain states where Mr. Trump had lost.“I think my greatest contribution to this conversation is to have backed Trump away from the notion that Pence could just simply gavel him as re-elected,” Mr. Eastman said during the interview at his lawyer’s office in Washington, just blocks from the White House. “And, you know, you look at some of his tweets before that Jan. 4 meeting, he’s saying things like that, because that’s what people out there are saying. But if you look at his speech on Jan. 6, after I weigh in at that meeting, he’s saying exactly the opposite.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Few in the White House, however, saw him as anything close to a voice of moderation amid the riot that followed. And Mr. Eastman’s account differs in significant ways from those provided by Mr. Pence and his aides.The former vice president refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee but addressed the issue in a recent opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pence wrote that on Jan. 5, a day after first meeting with Mr. Eastman in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump summoned the vice president for another meeting where “the president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He said that he “later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.”The crux of Mr. Eastman’s defense is that he was simply a lawyer offering advice, and that he was acting in good faith, since he still believes many of the fraud claims that were made. “I’m not backing down on that,” he said. “I mean, the amount of evidence, even if I’m wrong about it, was certainly enough to have warranted further review.”In an email to Mike Pence’s lawyer on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. Eastman urged that the vice president should not certify the electoral vote.House Select Committee, via Associated PressAsked what he based such claims on, he cited a report issued last year by Michael J. Gableman, a former Wisconsin judge who was hired, and later fired, by the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos. The report endorsed a host of debunked claims. He also cited the deeply flawed documentary “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative activist who once pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance fraud. (He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.)In recent weeks, Mr. Eastman has continued to assert himself as a far-right stalwart, signing a letter endorsing dissident Republicans’ ultimately failed efforts to block Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker of the House. Among the other signatories to the letter was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman once clerked. In her own testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Thomas referred to Mr. Eastman as “an active participant with the ‘Thomas clique’ clerks” who keep in touch.Perhaps Mr. Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. One of Mr. Eastman’s lawyers said last year that his client was “probably a target” in the inquiry, but his lawyers said this month that he had received no notification that he is one.Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director of Election Day operations in Georgia, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that he later felt “ashamed” at having taken part in the plan orchestrated by Mr. Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, to assemble bogus slates of Trump electors in Georgia and other states that Mr. Trump had lost.“I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges,” he said. “It was clear to me that he was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the vice president to accept these slates of electors just regardless, without any approval from a governor, without any approval from, you know, the voters or a court, or anything like that.”Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said in an email that “if Sinner’s testimony, or similar testimony, is deemed credible, then John Eastman faces considerable risk of prosecution.”“If Eastman was part of a conspiracy to trick Georgia citizens into signing false election documents, neither his role as an attorney nor a personal belief that election results were tainted by fraud could justify such criminal conduct,” he added.In addition to his central role in the electors plan, Mr. Eastman appeared remotely before a Georgia State Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and made several false claims about the election. Among them was the assertion that “the number of underaged individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”Asked about the claim during the interview last month, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who made an error that was later corrected, and that the actual number was about 2,000 who “were only 16 when they registered.” The new figure, he said, came from the same consultant. In a statement, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said that “the system literally does not allow a person to register if they don’t have a birth date that makes them at least 17.5 years old.”A review of the data used by Mr. Eastman showed that he was referring to any Georgians who were recorded as having registered early going back to the 1920s; data entry errors appeared to be a common culprit, with many people’s registration year listed in place of their birth year. A review by The Times found only about a dozen Georgians who were recorded as having registered in 2020 when they were 16, in what appeared most likely to be another data-entry problem. Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and co-author of a lengthy report on the Fulton County inquiry, said Mr. Eastman “was referred for criminal prosecution by the Jan. 6 committee, with good reason,” adding that if charges are brought in Georgia “it’s hard to imagine that D.A. Fani Willis does not include him.”Jack Begg More

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      A Common Answer to Jan. 6 Panel Questions: The Fifth

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      Transcripts released by the House Jan. 6 committee showed nearly two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination, underscoring the hurdles to the investigation.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released a batch of 34 transcripts on Wednesday that showed witnesses repeatedly stymying parts of the panel’s inquiry by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who advised former President Donald J. Trump on how to try to overturn the 2020 election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times.The political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. did so in response to more than 70 questions, including ones regarding his communications with Mr. Trump and his role in the events of Jan. 6. The activist Charlie Kirk took a similar stance, citing the potential for self-incrimination in response to most of the committee’s questions, even about his age and education (he was willing to divulge the city in which he resides).Time and again, the panel ran into roadblocks as it tried to investigate the effort to overturn the election, the transcripts show.“Trump lawyers and supporters Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Phil Waldron and Michael Flynn all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the select committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen,” the committee wrote in an executive summary of its final report. “Not a single witness — nor any combination of witnesses — provided the select committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any state.”The transcripts released on Wednesday do shine some light on previously unknown aspects of the committee’s investigation. As part of their questioning, the committee’s lawyers referred to emails or text messages they had obtained through subpoenas, quoting aloud in hopes of eliciting more information from the recalcitrant witnesses.During the questioning of Mike Roman, director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign, a committee lawyer revealed communications that investigators said showed that Mr. Roman sent Gary Michael Brown, who served as the deputy director, to deliver documents to the Capitol related to a plan to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.After doing so, Mr. Brown sent a photo of himself wearing a suit and a mask with the U.S. Capitol over his shoulder. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote.Investigators also asked Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena, about a text she sent to a member of the Maricopa County board of supervisors that said: “We need you to stop the counting.”And investigators revealed how disputes broke out among organizers over the financing of the rally that preceded the violence on Jan. 6, including a payment of $60,000 to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., for her brief speech.“You’re done for life with me because I won’t pay you a $60,000 speaking fee for an event you aren’t speaking at?” Caroline Wren, a Trump fund-raiser, wrote, as she implored Ms. Guilfoyle to call and thank Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heir to the Publix supermarket fortune who had donated millions to put on the rally. “This poor woman has donated $1 million to Don’s Senate PAC and $3 million to this rally and you’ll can’t take five minutes out of your day to thank her. It’s so humiliating. And then you have the audacity to ask me why I won’t have her pay you $60,000?”The transcripts also show the combative stance some witnesses and their lawyers took during questioning. For instance, a lawyer for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes repeatedly challenged the committee’s investigators and accused them of grandstanding.“I will note the irony of an accusation of grandstanding in a deposition of Mr. Fuentes,” a lawyer for the committee shot back.Another time, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, asked Mr. Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.”Mr. Stone replied: “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.”The release of the transcripts came a day ahead of the committee’s planned release of its more than 800-page final report, likely the final act of an 18-month investigation during which the lawmakers interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses.Hundreds more transcripts are expected to be released before the end of the year, including those in which witnesses provided extensive testimony used by the committee in reaching its decision to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others involved in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in power after his 2020 election loss.In an attempt to rebut the committee’s final report, five House Republicans led by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana released their own report into the attack on the Capitol. That 141-page document criticizes law enforcement failures, accuses Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her senior team of bungling Capitol security and tries to recast Mr. Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6 as a voice for peace and calm.“Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on Jan. 6, 2021,” the Republican report stated. “The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day.”A bipartisan Senate report last year also detailed Capitol security failures but did not find any blame in the actions of Ms. Pelosi or her staff, who fled from a mob of Trump supporters chanting her name as the speaker tried to get the National Guard to respond to the violence.The Senate report found top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to “storm the Capitol,” infiltrate its tunnel system and “bring guns.”An F.B.I. memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for “war” at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials.The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of Mr. Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss.A spokesman for the House Jan. 6 committee declined to comment.Catie Edmondson More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Accuses Trump of Insurrection and Refers Him to Justice Dept.

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      WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the referrals.Mr. Trump attacked the committee as “highly partisan” ahead of a final meeting the panel held on Monday to release an executive summary of its final report on the Capitol attack and to vote on referring the former president to the Justice Department.“It’s a kangaroo court,” Mr. Trump said Monday on “The Dan Bongino Show.” “The people aren’t going to stand for it.” He elaborated on that theme in a post on Truth Social, his social media network, after the meeting.“These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me,” he said, adding that he “told everyone to go home” on Jan. 6, but leaving out his hours of inaction before that while a mob of his supporters rampaged through the Capitol.Republicans, who have vowed to investigate the committee after they take control of the House in January, mounted a modest response. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, was one of the few to react with a statement, accusing the committee of staging a “partisan charade.” She promised that Republicans “will hold House Democrats accountable for their illegitimate abuse of power.”The executive summary, a 154-page narrative of Mr. Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, identifies co-conspirators who aided Mr. Trump. But it singles out the former president as the primary cause of the mob violence.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary stated. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.The summary closely follows the evidence from the committee’s 10 previous public hearings, but the facts have been assembled into a readable narrative that amounts to an astonishing story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to effectively overthrow the government he led. The committee is expected to release a lengthy final report on Wednesday.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chairwoman of the committee, said at the start of the meeting.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said of Mr. Trump: “Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order.”The action is the culmination of the committee’s intense 18-month investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe summary and referrals have now set up a dynamic without parallel in the annals of American campaigns: Congress asking the Justice Department of an incumbent president to consider criminal charges against the president’s potential opponent in the next election. President Biden has indicated his intent to run in 2024, and Mr. Trump announced his re-election campaign last month.The summary laid out step by step how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power, much as the committee did during its televised hearings in the summer. First, the summary said, Mr. Trump lied about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false. He then organized false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden as he pressured state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. Finally, he amassed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“Even key individuals who worked closely with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6 ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful,” the committee wrote.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe panel also referred four Republican members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee — including the man seeking to become the next speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — because of their refusal to comply with the panel’s subpoenas.Mr. McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.The other Republicans referred were Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona.A spokesman for Mr. Jordan, Russell Dye, said in a statement that the referral was “just another partisan and political stunt.” A spokesman for Mr. Perry, Jay Ostrich, said the committee was engaged in “more games from a petulant and soon-to-be kangaroo court.’’Mr. Biggs said in a tweet that the referral was the committee’s “final political stunt” and that he looked forward to “reviewing their documents, publishing their lies and setting the record straight” in the next Congress.In its summary, the committee did not entirely resolve disputed accounts of what happened inside the presidential S.U.V. when Mr. Trump was told by his Secret Service agents that they could not take him to the Capitol to join the crowd on Jan. 6. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, testified under oath to the committee in public last summer that Anthony M. Ornato, a White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Mr. Trump grew so angry that he lunged at his Secret Service agent and tried to grab the steering wheel. The Secret Service denied that account anonymously.The summary said only that the “committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’” that occurred in the S.U.V. “The vast majority of witnesses who have testified to the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the Secret Service, a member of the Metropolitan Police and national security officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate,’ ‘furious,’ ‘insistent,’ ‘profane’ and ‘heated.’”The committee’s summary also concluded that there was no nefarious reason for why the National Guard was delayed for hours in responding to violence of Jan. 6.“Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard,” the committee wrote. “The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”In its summary, the panel asked the Justice Department to investigate whether anyone had interfered with or obstructed the panel’s investigation, including whether any lawyers paid for by groups connected to Mr. Trump “may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the committee.”Among the committee’s findings, revealed at its meeting on Monday, was that lawmakers became concerned that lawyers who were paid by Trump associates may have tried to interfere with the panel’s investigation. The panel also learned that a client was offered potential employment that would make her “financially very comfortable” as the date of her testimony approached. But then offers were withdrawn or did not materialize as reports of the content of her testimony circulated, the committee said.The committee also chastised certain witnesses that it said had not been forthright with investigators. It said it had “significant concerns about the credibility” of the testimony of Mr. Ornato.The committee also said Kayleigh McEnany, one of Mr. Trump’s former press secretaries, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, had been less than forthcoming.The summary demonstrated, as the committee’s hearings did, how despite being told repeatedly that his claims of election fraud were false, Mr. Trump kept up the lies.Bill Stepien, a former White House political director, told the committee how he and others would investigate the claims, find them to be false, and report back to the president. “It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Mr. Stepien said. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”The summary also contained evidence that certain White House aides had grown concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and urged Mr. Trump to make a pre-emptive statement calling for peace. No such statement was made.Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, said she suggested “several times” on Jan. 4 and 5 that Mr. Trump “publicly state that Jan. 6 must remain peaceful, and that he had refused her advice to do so,” the panel wrote.The panel played new video from Ms. Hicks, who described a conversation with Mr. Trump.“I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy,” Ms. Hicks said she told the president.Mr. Trump’s response? “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose, so that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning,” she recalled him saying.Supporters of Mr. Trump confronting Capitol Police officers outside the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhile the executive summary of the report focused heavily on Mr. Trump, it did conclude some findings about law enforcement failures, a topic not previously addressed at the panel’s hearings. “No analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6,” the committee wrote, although the “intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol.”Over the past year and a half, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, obtained more than one million documents, issued more than 100 subpoenas and held hearings that drew millions of viewers.The House created the Jan. 6 committee after Senate Republicans used a filibuster to defeat a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate the attack.The committee — made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans — consistently broke new ground for a congressional investigation. Staffed with more than a dozen former federal prosecutors, the panel set a new production standard for how to hold a congressional hearing. It also got significantly ahead of a parallel Justice Department investigation into the events of Jan. 6, with federal prosecutors later interviewing many of the same witnesses Congress had spoken to.In recent weeks, federal prosecutors under the supervision of a special counsel have issued subpoenas to officials in seven states in which the Trump campaign organized electors to falsely certify the election for Mr. Trump despite the voters choosing Mr. Biden.Lawmakers on the panel also believe they played a significant role in elevating the issue of threats to democracy to voters, who rejected many election deniers in the November midterms.In terms of legislative recommendations, the panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6 in an attempt to cling to power. Lawmakers have also discussed changes to the Insurrection Act and legislation to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists holding office. Those recommendations are expected to be detailed in the committee’s final report.Katie Benner More