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      Wave of House Democratic retirements stokes fears for party’s election prospects

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      Wave of House Democratic retirements stokes fears for party’s election prospectsThirty-one Democrats, a modern record, are stepping down as the party risks bleak midterms. But leaders say hope remains For the Michigan congresswoman Brenda Lawrence, it was a question from her husband: “When is our time?” For the North Carolina congressman David Price, it was the judgment that “the time has come” to step down.Some retiring Democrats have blamed the gridlock and dysfunction on Capitol Hill while others point to the redrawing of congressional maps. Still, others cite the rise of political extremism and the deteriorating relations between members of Congress, particularly in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Announcing his decision to retire last year, the Wisconsin congressman, Ron Kind, was frank: “The truth is, I’ve run out of gas.” The decision not to seek re-election is both deeply personal and political. But as the party braces for a grueling midterm election in November, a rising number of House Democrats are opting not to return to Congress next year.On Monday, the Florida congressman Ted Deutch announced that he would not seek re-election, bringing the total number of Democratic departures from the House so far this cycle to 31.Biden bids to talk up ailing agenda after State of the Union draws mixed reviewsRead moreAmong them, eight Democrats are seeking other offices next year, like Tim Ryan of Ohio, who is running for the Senate, and Karen Bass of California, who is running to be the mayor of Los Angeles. Some retiring members are powerful veterans,such as Kentucky’s John Yarmuth, chair of the budget committee and Oregon’s Peter DeFazio, chair of the transportation and infrastructure committee. Others represent politically competitive districts, like Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona.It’s a worrying trend for Democrats. Congressional retirements are often an early sign of a wave election – for the other party. In 2018, dozens of House Republicans did not seek re-election, including the then House majority leader, Paul Ryan. The party lost 41 seats that year, and Democrats gained control of the chamber, in an election cycle widely viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump.This year, the political winds are reversed. Republicans are trumpeting each retirement as a sign that Democrats’ hopes of keeping their majority are fading. “Their majority is doomed,” the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman, Mike Berg, said recently. “Retire or lose.”Though many vacancies are in safely Democratic districts, the rush of retirements come as the party faces significant historical headwinds. The president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterm elections. And in the House, Democrats can only afford to lose a handful of seats before surrendering control. With Biden’s sagging approval ratings, Democrats’ agenda stalled, public discontent over the economy and inflation, and Republicans’ strong performance in a series of off-cycle elections, the political landscape looks grim for the party in power. Adding to the uncertainty is the once-a-decade redistricting process when a state’s congressional and legislative districts are redrawn.The House is often a reflection of the national American mood, which public opinion polls show is pessimistic. Voters are frustrated with their political leaders and the party is bracing for a backlash. In polling that asks voters which party they would support on an election day – as opposed to which congressional candidate – Republicans repeatedly hold the edge.In an interview, Price, 81, said his decision leave Congress after three decades was “mainly personal” and not circumstantial. During the Trump years, he said many long-serving Democrats postponed the decision to retire because they believed their experience was needed on Capitol Hill. Now they feel the time is right.Price’s new district is rated safely Democratic, and after a long redistricting battle, the North Carolina state supreme court recently approved congressional maps that are favorable to the party.“I would suggest they don’t bring out the champagne quite yet,” he said of Republicans. “This redistricting in our state and a lot of states is turning out not to be quite the windfall for them that they thought.”Though Democrats have fared far better than expected in the redistricting process, it was still a factor in some decisions to retire or seek another office.“The number of retirements is naturally higher in years that end in ‘two’ because those are redistricting cycles,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.It’s been a brutal experience for some. Congressman Jim Cooper witnessed his reliably Democratic Nashville seat being carved up into three different districts that Trump would have easily won in 2020. He decried the move as “raw politics” and an effort to dilute the electoral power of Black voters.A day after the Tennessee legislature approved the map, Cooper announced his retirement from Congress, where he had served for more than three decades.“I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville,” he said. “There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”John Rogers, a Republican pollster who was the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee during the 2018 midterm elections cycle, says the retirements of powerful and long-serving Democrats is a strong sign that the party is bracing for defeat in November.“There are too many committee chairs retiring for this to be just about redistricting,” he said, adding that the prospect of losing a gavel or ending a lengthy career in the minoritywas unattractive to some politicians.Retirements deprive a party of the advantages that come with incumbency: fundraising, name recognition and a deep understanding of their constituency, factors that are especially critical in competitive seats.“Incumbency is not as valuable as it used to be,” said Kondik, author of The Long Red Thread: How Democratic Dominance Gave Way to Republican Advantage in US House Elections. “But open seats are generally harder to defend, particularly in a wave-style environment.”Clyburn: supreme court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson ‘beyond politics’Read moreNot since 1992 have so many House Democrats opted not to seek re-election. And with states still finalizing their congressional maps and candidate filing deadlines approaching, there might be more retirements to come.“However bad it is to serve in Congress, it’s worse to serve in the minority,” Kondik said, “particularly in the House.” Notably bucking the trend, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has announced her decision to run again, extinguishing speculation that she would retire at the end of the term. Pelosi was re-elected as speaker after agreeing to step down from the role by the end of 2022.The Republican retirements, though far fewer, are also telling.As of this week, 15 House Republicans have said they won’t run for re-election, with seven running for another office. Among them are more moderate members including Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and John Katko of New York, who have faced conservative backlash for voting to impeach Trump.Democrats argue that much could change before the November elections.The Covid-19 pandemic appears to be in retreat, and the economy remains strong, despite inflation. Biden has started to ramp up his travel around the country touting his legislative accomplishments. He has received rare bipartisan praise for his handling of the crisis in Ukraine and Democratic voters are excited about his nominee for the supreme court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is poised to become the first Black woman to serve on the bench after her confirmation hearings later this month. And Republicans, they say, will have to answer for Trump’s enduring control over their party and the fallout from the congressional investigation into the events of January 6, as well as for their efforts to restrict access to abortion and the ballot, issues Democrats believe will rally voters to their side this cycle.“Most midterms by their nature are referenda on a party of power,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist and former national political director with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. But he said that by embracing Trump’s lies about election fraud and refusing to sanction their most extreme members, Republicans are helping frame the election as a choice between “two parties with very different priorities, one of which is going to wind up in charge”.Last month, Lawrence, the Michigan congresswoman, surprised some of her colleagues when she announced that she would retire at the end of the term, after more than three decades in public service.“After four years of Donald Trump’s administration, Covid, January 6, it was a death by a million cuts,” she said in an interview.Lawrence, who represents a heavily Democratic district and is the only Black member of Michigan’s congressional delegation, said she “feels good” about her legacy and would continue to be active in her community in other ways: “I’m not going home to plant flowers.”She hopes her departure will make room for a new generation of Black lawmakers, who will bring fresh urgency to the battles over women’s reproductive rights, voting protections and police reform.“I came into Congress when we were in the minority,” she said. “But I came in with the intent to make a difference, and I hope that that continues to motivate American citizens to step up into public service – because there is work to do.”TopicsDemocratsUS CongressUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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      Take Up Space review: the irresistible rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez The New York congresswoman is the subject of an admiring biographical portrait. Love her or not, her story is impressiveThis book should have been titled Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez But Were Afraid to Ask.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreWhether you love her or loathe her, the former Sandy Ocasio has an irresistible story, told here in a brisk four-chapter narrative followed by brief sections on everything from a make-up video she made for Vogue to her evisceration of Mark Zuckerberg at a congressional hearing.The woman now known everywhere as AOC was born in the Bronx and lived there until her Puerto Rican-American parents moved her to Westchester to make sure she attended a decent public high school. A science nerd whose first ambition was to be a doctor, she dropped her pre-med major at Boston University and majored in economics and international relations. Like Pete Buttigieg, she did a brief stint as an intern for Ted Kennedy, but she didn’t enjoy it as much as he did.She spent her junior year in the African nation of Niger, where she had an unusual reaction to poverty. She decided Niger’s struggling citizens had “a level of enjoyment” that “just does not exist in American life”.In college she met Riley Roberts, a tall, smart, red-haired finance and sociology major who went from coffee house debating partner to boyfriend. Today he is a web developer and still her boyfriend, someone who tiptoes “through the public sphere, leaving little evidence of his presence”, according to the four-page section of Take Up Space which is devoted to him.AOC’s father, an architect, died of cancer while she was in college, leaving her mother struggling to hold on to their house. So after college her daughter came to New York and became a restaurant worker to make money and to be close to her mother.The striking-looking bartender who came out of nowhere to be elected to Congress three weeks after her 29th birthday was launched into politics by her brother Gabriel, who heard a group called Brand New Congress formed by Bernie Sanders supporters was looking for people to nominate anyone they thought should run in 2018.Pulled over to the side of the road in a rainstorm, Gabriel phoned his sister and asked if she wanted to run. Her reaction: “Eff it. Sure. Whatever.” So her brother, still sitting in his car, filled out the web form and hit “send”.Brand New Congress morphed into “Justice Democrats”, who had 10,000 nominations for candidates. Gradually, AOC became their favorite, not only because she was extremely smart but also because she was “really pretty”. That, Corbin Trent explained, is “like 20%, 50% of being on TV”. Trent became her communications director.The rigid leftwing ideology of Lisa Miller, who wrote the longest section of this book, sometimes leads her into statements directly contradicted by AOC’s success. Miller writes that the “facts of Ocasio-Cortez’s life” made her both an “impossible candidate” and “the kind of American whose hopes for any social mobility had been crushed by a rigged system perpetuated by officials elected to represent the people’s interests”.In real life, the facts of AOC’s Cinderella story made her the perfect candidate to take on Joseph Crowley, the Democratic boss who held the House seat she was going after – and AOC turned out to be the least “crushed” person in America.As she learned at a political boot camp organized by Justice Democrats, nothing was more important than “telling an authentic believable personal story”– and no one was better at doing that than she was.As a Black Lives Matter activist, Kim Balderas, noticed in 2017, AOC spoke like an organizer. That made Balderas realize “she’s not coming to play. She is coming to fight”. Outspent in the primary by Crowley, $4.5m to $550,000, AOC still managed to crush him with 57% of the vote.One secret to her success was Twitter. The month she won the primary she had 30,000 followers. Four weeks later she had 500,000. The number now hovers closer to 13 million. A 10-page section of the book describes her “art of the dunk”, including diagrams of her most successful exchanges, including one in which Laura Ingraham accused her of wearing $14,000 worth of clothes for a Vanity Fair photo shoot.“I don’t know if you’ve been in a photo shoot Laura,” AOC replied, “but you don’t keep the clothes.”She added: “The whole ‘she wore clothes in a magazine’, let’s pretend they’re hers’ gimmick is the classic Republican strategy of ‘let’s willfully act stupid, and if the public doesn’t take our performance stupidity seriously then we’ll claim bias’.”But her very best exchange is also the strongest evidence that the now 31-year old two term congresswoman has grown into a national treasure – and an interlocutor who almost always manages to have the last word.In “The Zuckerberg Grilling” section of the book, she interrogates the Facebook founder at a congressional hearing shortly after his company announced it would not fact-check political ads.She asked: “Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal? … I’m just trying to understand the bounds here, what’s fair game.”“I don’t know the answer to that off the top of my head,” said the flustered Zuckerberg. “I think probably …”AOC calls Tucker Carlson ‘trash’ for saying she is not a woman of colourRead moreAOC: “So you don’t know if I’ll be able to do that.”Zuckerberg: “I think probably.”AOC followed up by asking how Facebook had chosen the Daily Caller, “a publication well documented with ties to white supremacists”, as an “official fact-checker for Facebook”.Zuckerberg said the Daily Caller had been chosen by “an independent organization called the Independent Fact-Checking Network”.AOC: “So you would say that white-supremacist-tied publications meet a rigorous standard for fact-checking? Thank you.”
      Take Up Space: the Unprecedented AOC is published in the US by Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksAlexandria Ocasio-CortezUS politicsPolitics booksDemocratsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesreviewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s private schedule reveals no plans for him to join 6 January march

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      Trump’s private schedule reveals no plans for him to join 6 January marchEx-president said he would join crowd to US Capitol but his schedule indicates he deliberately lied to his supporters Donald Trump was aware long before he took the stage at the “Save America” rally on 6 January that he would not march to the Capitol to protest the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, according to his White House private schedule from that day.William Barr’s Trump book: self-serving narratives and tricky truths ignoredRead moreThe former president started his nearly 75-minute long speech at the Ellipse by saying he would go with the crowd to the Capitol, and then repeated that promise when he said he would walk with them down Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol.But Trump’s private schedule – released by the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack in a filing on Wednesday – shows Trump must have known that there were no plans for him to join such a march, and that he was being taken back to the White House.The newly-released private schedule indicates Trump deliberately lied to his supporters, raising the spectre that he made a promise he had no intention of honoring so that they would descend on the Capitol and disrupt Congress from certifying Biden as president.It is a significant revelation that could bolster the select committee’s claim in the filing that Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States by seeking to obstruct a lawful function of the government by deceitful or dishonest means.“Trump telling the crowd that he would join them at the Capitol was incendiary in that they thought that their field marshal would be there,” said Ryan Goodman, a former special counsel at the Department of Defense. “It is further evidence that Trump knew he was inciting an already highly volatile situation.”The former president’s private schedule may also support a parallel civil suit brought by the Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell, a former House impeachment manager, that Trump prompted the Capitol attack through his comments in his speech.“Trump directly incited the violence at the Capitol that followed and then watched approvingly as the building was overrun,” the lawsuit said. “The horrific events of January 6 were a direct and foreseeable consequence of the Defendants’ unlawful actions.”Trump’s private schedule for that day indicated the former president was to travel directly from the White House to the Ellipse, speak at the “Save America” rally there, and then immediately return to the White House once his speech had concluded.The former president was running late on 6 January, but the timestamp on the document reads 11.22am – roughly half an hour before he started to speak at the rally at 11.50am – meaning he must have known before he took to the stage that he was not going to the Capitol.Trump’s promises are significant as they served as one of the primary motivations for his supporters to march to the Capitol alongside militia groups like the Oath Keepers, and were used by far-right activists like Alex Jones to encourage the crowd along the route.Indeed, testimony in federal prosecutions of rioters charged in connection to the Capitol attack suggest Trump’s promises that he would walk with them to the Capitol was the proximate cause for them to also walk up to Congress before the march descended into a riot.An analysis of cellphone data published by the New York Times also reveals that many of Trump’s supporters who marched from the rally to the Capitol went down Pennsylvania Avenue as he had suggested, a more circuitous route than walking up the National Mall.Crucially, Trump made the false promises that led the crowd to go to the Capitol in spite of being told by the Secret Service days before the situation was too volatile for them to guarantee his security if he joined them, according to a source familiar with the matter.That raises the prospect that the former president encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol, on a premise he knew to be false, in the hope that the security situation he had been told was volatile would lead to some event that would stop Biden’s certification.But regardless of what he agreed with the Secret Service, his private schedule from just before the speech indicates Trump deliberately and repeatedly lied to the crowd about his intentions in a way that could leave him vulnerable to criminal or civil charges.The former president’s private schedule came as part of court filings submitted by the select committee seeking to challenge former Trump lawyer John Eastman’s claim that thousands of emails demanded by the panel are protected by attorney-client privilege.The select committee said in its filing that it believed the privilege asserted over the records were not applicable because of the so-called crime-fraud exception, arguing Eastman was involved in potentially illegal efforts by Trump to overturn the 2020 election.TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      National Archives turns over Trump White House logs to January 6 panel

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      National Archives turns over Trump White House logs to January 6 panelSelect committee investigating Capitol attack also receives records from former vice-president Mike Pence The US National Archives has delivered White House visitor logs from Donald Trump’s administration to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol by extremist supporters of the then president, the committee said on Friday.The National Archives also turned over records from former vice-president Mike Pence, meeting a 3 March deadline.Trump strikes deal to evade deposition in New York investigation – for nowRead more“Yesterday, the select committee received additional production of records from the National Archives,” a House of Representatives select committee aide said. “This included records that the former president attempted to keep hidden behind claims of privilege.”Trump had tried to block the release of the visitor logs, but Joe Biden rejected his claim that they were subject to executive privilege “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s work and Congress’s “compelling need”.Several courts, including the US supreme court, have also ruled against the Republican ex-president’s efforts to block the release of various records to the committee.So far, more than 725 people have been charged with playing a role in the attack on the Capitol by mobs of Trump supporters, which left five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured, as, at Trump’s urgings at a rally that morning, they tried to prevent the US Congress certifying Biden’s win for the Democrats in the 2020 presidential election.Another four police officers involved in defending the Capitol later killed themselves.The bipartisan January 6 committee chaired by Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi has been investigating the events surrounding the attack – and the former president’s role in it – for more than seven months, as well as allegations of a political conspiracy by Trump and key allies to get the results overturned.The committee has made more than 80 subpoenas public, including many issued to top Trump aides and allies, and interviewed more than 560 witnesses. It has also gathered records from social media and other telecommunications firms.TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      Pressure on Justice Dept. as Jan. 6 Panel Lays Out Case Against Trump

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      Building a criminal case against the former president is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is facing mounting pressure to prosecute former President Donald J. Trump after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out its argument for a potential criminal case on Wednesday night, placing Attorney General Merrick B. Garland squarely in the middle of a politically charged debate over how to hold Mr. Trump accountable for efforts to overturn the election.Even as Democrats have criticized Mr. Garland for remaining silent on Mr. Trump’s actions, he has sought to insulate the agency from politicization, an effort he sees as a corrective to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaigns to force the department to bend to his agenda.Building a criminal case against Mr. Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, given the high burden of proof they must show, questions about Mr. Trump’s mental state and the likelihood of any decision being appealed, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.The department has never said whether it is exploring a criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump, though Mr. Garland has vowed to pursue wrongdoing “at any level,” keeping alive the possibility that federal prosecutors might someday charge the former president.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.“The Justice Department will have to ask that question: Is there a winning case here?” said Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Mr. Trump. “If there is strong evidence, but prosecutors don’t think they can secure a conviction, they will have to use prosecutorial discretion.”That said, Mr. Eisen said the evidence that the committee produced in support of its argument could be powerful, and “support the idea that Trump and those around him are at risk of federal or state prosecution.”It was far easier for the committee to claim that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by a lawyer — than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction over the same facts, legal specialists said.The filing on Wednesday, which said that the committee had evidence to suggest that Mr. Trump might have engaged in a criminal conspiracy, is the work of three veteran Justice Department lawyers who would be deeply familiar with the complications that such allegations create for the agency.Losing such a case has far-reaching implications. It risks severely undermining the department’s credibility, empowering and emboldening Mr. Trump and his allies, and making it harder for the federal courts to hold future presidents accountable for misdeeds.In publicly sharing its work, the committee has only escalated expectations that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted, regardless of whether its evidence meets the standard that a federal prosecutor must clear to secure a unanimous guilty verdict.In its court filing, the panel suggested it had evidence to support allegations that Mr. Trump committed two crimes: obstructing an official proceeding by working to disrupt the electoral vote count and conspiring with his allies, including the conservative lawyer John Eastman, to defraud the United States by working to overturn the election results.“The evidence supports an inference” that Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and several others “entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing said.However, the filing was not necessarily a path to prosecution. The committee made its claim in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by Mr. Eastman. The standard it must meet to invoke crimes is much lower than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction, legal specialists said.Specifically, Mr. Eastman has invoked attorney-client privilege to block the subpoena, and the committee wants a judge to enforce it anyway under an exception for materials that involve crimes or fraud.It is asking the judge to view the disputed materials privately, and to do so it need only convince the court that it has a “good faith” reason to believe that such a private viewing “may reveal” evidence that the exception applies — a far lower bar than proving something to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.The central theory put forward by the Jan. 6 committee is that Mr. Trump tried to disrupt an official proceeding — Congress’s certification of the election results — by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to illegally reject the electoral votes from certain states.Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said that while the facts of what happened were largely clear, the challenge to convicting Mr. Trump would center on proving that he had a corrupt intent — essentially, that Mr. Trump knew that there was no valid lawful basis for Mr. Pence to do what he was demanding.At a trial, Mr. Trump’s defense team would have a powerful argument about his mental state: Even though government lawyers told him that Mr. Pence did not have that authority, Mr. Eastman told him that the vice president could lawfully do what he wanted. The defense could say this shows that Mr. Trump sincerely thought he was asking Mr. Pence to do something lawful — raising a possible reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about whether his intentions were corrupt.Mr. Buell said that in an ordinary white-collar criminal case, it is not uncommon for corporate defendants to point to something their lawyers had said to maintain that they did not think they were doing anything criminal. Prosecutors sometimes go forward with such cases anyway, he said, knowing it will be an argument in trial they will need to try to defeat.But the “enormous political implications” of charging the immediate past president — and possible 2024 election contender — make that calculus all the more risky for Mr. Garland, he said.Federal charges against a former president would be a first in American history. While President Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid being impeached, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned him, absolving him of any criminal charges and sparing the Justice Department from prosecuting him.A case against a former president would always be mired in politics, a dynamic especially true now given how deeply polarized the nation has become.If the Justice Department were to criminally charge Mr. Trump, his supporters would most likely interpret it as President Biden’s handpicked attorney general deploying the department to attack the de facto leader of a rival party — particularly if they believe Mr. Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.Should the Justice Department not bring charges, Mr. Trump’s opponents could feel that it had blatantly abdicated its duties. After the election, Mr. Trump continued to declare himself the winner, denying evidence compiled by his own administration. He pressured public officials to support his false claims, and he exhorted his followers to stop the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6.If the Justice Department does not respond to such overt acts, it risks fostering the idea that presidents and their allies cannot be held accountable for behavior that undermines democracy.“Here, it’s a totally different situation because there is an enormous political envelope around whether you would charge this guy,” Mr. Buell said. “At some level you can’t analyze this in terms of what a prosecutor would normally do.” More

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      Panel Suggests Trump Knew He Lost the Election, Eyeing Criminal Case

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      At the core of the theory of a possible criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump is the argument that he knew he had lost the election and sought to overturn it anyway.WASHINGTON — Shortly after the 2020 election, as ballots were still being counted, the top data expert in President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign told him bluntly that he was going to lose.In the weeks that followed, as Mr. Trump continued to insist that he had won, a senior Justice Department official told him repeatedly that his claims of widespread voting fraud were meritless, ultimately warning him that they would “hurt the country.”Those concerns were echoed by the top White House lawyer, who told the president that he would be entering into a “murder-suicide pact” if he continued to pursue extreme plans to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.Yet Mr. Trump — time and again — discounted the facts, the data and many of his own advisers as he continued to promote the lie of a stolen election, according to hundreds of pages of exhibits, interview transcripts and email correspondence assembled by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack for a legal filing released late Wednesday.In laying out the account, the panel revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal case against Mr. Trump. At its core is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant about his defeat, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.It is a bold claim that could be difficult to back up in court, but in making it, the House committee has compiled an elaborate narrative of Mr. Trump’s extraordinary efforts to cling to power.In it, Mr. Trump emerges as a man unable — or unwilling — to listen to his advisers even as they explain to him that he has lost the election, and his multiple and varied claims to the contrary are not grounded in fact.At one point, Mr. Trump did not seem to care whether there was any evidence to support his claims of election fraud, and questioned why he should not push for even more extreme steps, such as replacing the acting attorney general, to challenge his loss.“The president said something to the effect of: ‘What do I have to lose? If I do this, what do I have to lose?’” Richard P. Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, told the committee in an interview. “And I said: ‘Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose. Is this really how you want your administration to end? You’re going hurt the country.’”Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, also tried to get Mr. Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He pushed back against a plan from a rogue Justice Department lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results.“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Donoghue. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”The account is part of a court filing in a civil case in California, in which the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the lawyer John Eastman and other allies could be charged with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the American people and common law fraud.The committee’s filing shows how some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers repeatedly — and passionately — tried to get him to back down from his various false claims and plans to try to stay in power.It started almost immediately after the polls closed in November 2020, when members of Mr. Trump’s campaign data team began trying to break through to the president to impress upon him that he had been defeated.During a conversation in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s lead campaign data guru “delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Jason Miller, another top campaign aide, told the panel. The president said he disagreed with the data expert’s analysis, Mr. Miller said, because he thought he could win in court.Mr. Miller also told the committee that he agreed with Attorney General William P. Barr’s analysis that there had not been widespread fraud in the election, and “said that to the president on multiple occasions,” the panel wrote in its filing.In the chaotic postelection period, Mr. Trump’s legal team set up a hotline for fraud allegations and was flooded with unverified accounts from people across the country who claimed they had evidence. A Postal Service truck driver from Pennsylvania asserted without evidence that his 18-wheeler had been filled with phony ballots. Republican voters in Arizona complained that some of their ballots had not been counted because they used Sharpie pens that could not be read by voting machines.Mr. Trump appeared to be aware of many of these reports, and would speak about them often with aides and officials, raising various theories about voting fraud even as they debunked them one by one.“When you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it,” Mr. Donoghue, the Justice Department official, told the committee. “But he would move to another allegation.”Mr. Donoghue recalled, for instance, how he told Mr. Trump that Justice Department investigators had looked into, and ultimately discounted, a claim that election officials in Atlanta had wheeled a suitcase full of phony ballots into their counting room on Election Day.Instead of accepting Mr. Donoghue’s account, Mr. Trump abruptly switched subjects and asked about “double voting” and “dead people” voting, then moved on to a completely different claim about how, he said, “Indians are getting paid” to vote on Native American reservations.Richard P. Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, repeatedly informed Mr. Trump that both his specific and general claims of fraud were false.Richard Drew/Associated PressAfter Mr. Donoghue sought to knock down those complaints as well, he told the committee, Mr. Trump changed topics again and wondered aloud why his numerous legal challenges to the election had not worked.Jeffrey A. Rosen, another top Justice Department lawyer who became the acting attorney general after Mr. Barr left the agency, fielded this question, according to Mr. Donoghue’s account, telling the president that he was “free to bring lawsuits,” but that the department could not be involved.Even though none of Mr. Trump’s persistent claims about election fraud turned out to be true, prosecutors will most likely have to grapple with the question of his state of mind at the time — specifically, the issue of whether he believed the claims were true, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The potential case against Trump. More

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      Democrats Win Early Victory in Court Fight Over District Maps

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      A judge’s stance was good news for Democrats, who drew the maps that Republicans say are gerrymandered, but the case will proceed.A New York State judge indicated on Thursday that he would allow this year’s midterm elections to proceed using the state’s newly drawn district lines that heavily favor Democrats — rebuffing Republican requests to delay the election process while he considers whether the maps are an unconstitutional gerrymander.In a preliminary hearing in Steuben County Supreme Court, Justice Patrick F. McAllister, a Republican, said that even if he ultimately ruled that the maps were unconstitutional, it was “highly unlikely” that replacements could be ratified in a timely manner ahead of primaries in June and Election Day in November. That, in turn, would risk leaving the state without proper representation in Congress.“I do not intend at this time to suspend the election process,” the judge said. “I believe the more prudent course would be to allow the current election process to proceed and then, if necessary, allow an election process next year if new maps need to be drawn.”Justice McAllister’s conclusion delivered a sharp setback to state Republicans, who sued last month to try to stop the new congressional and State Senate lines drafted by the Democrat-controlled State Legislature from taking effect this year. The Republicans believe their party is well positioned to retake control of the House of Representatives in November, but every seat could count.The fresh New York boundaries would make that harder, giving Democrats an advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts, while potentially cutting the current number of Republican House members from New York in half and effectively eating into gains won by redistricting measures in other states. Analysts have suggested the new State Senate lines could be just as favorable to Democrats, helping the party maintain its supermajority in Albany.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.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Legal Battles: A North Carolina court’s ruling to reject a G.O.P.-drawn map and substitute its own version further cemented the rising importance of state courts in redistricting fights.Legal analysts who study redistricting said that Justice McAllister or an appeals court could still conceivably rethink his approach, but a court-ordered delay to this year’s elections was an increasingly unlikely scenario, now that candidates have begun collecting petitions to get on the June primary ballot.“If I were a candidate, I think the smart bet is that the maps we have today are the maps that are going to be used in November,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There doesn’t seem to be the will to change them for this cycle.”Still, Republicans left the hearing room in Bath, N.Y., on Thursday with some reasons for optimism.Justice McAllister rejected motions to dismiss the case and indicated that he was open to arguments that the maps had violated language added to the New York Constitution in 2014 that barred mapmakers from drawing lines to benefit one political party or candidate.The judge also ordered Democrats to hand over a raft of documents by March 12 that might shed light on how the Democratic drafters settled on the lines, and he told both sides to appear a few days later to argue over the merits of the Republicans’ challenge.“The important thing here is that the court rejected all of the efforts by the State Legislature and the attorney general to dismiss the case,” said John J. Faso, a former congressman from New York who is serving as a spokesman for the Republican challengers — a group of New York residents backed by deep-pocketed national Republican groups.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      January 6 panel subpoenas Kimberly Guilfoyle, fiancee of Donald Trump Jr

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      January 6 panel subpoenas Kimberly Guilfoyle, fiancee of Donald Trump JrHouse select committee issues subpoena after Guilfoyle abruptly cut short interview with panel last week The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack has subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump’s eldest son. House investigators issued the subpoena Thursday, after she had abruptly ended a voluntary interview with the panel last week.The committee is investigating the events surrounding the insurrection at the Capitol last year, when a mob of Trump supporters violently attacked the building in a failed attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in the subpoena letter to Guilfoyle that the panel was compelling her testimony because of her proximity to the former president and the rally that preceded the Capitol attack on January 6.Thompson said the panel had been left with no choice but to force her cooperation.“Because Ms Guilfoyle backed out of her original commitment to provide a voluntary interview, we are issuing today’s subpoena that will compel her to testify. We expect her to comply with the law and cooperate,” Thompson said.US Capitol attack committee plans April hearings to show how Trump broke lawRead moreGuilfoyle met virtually with the panel for an interview last week, but cut off questioning when she learned that select committee members Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin – in addition to counsel – had joined the call.After news of her appearance was leaked to news outlets, Guilfoyle refused to continue, and her lawyer accused the select committee of trying to “sandbag” her and not keeping participants limited to committee counsel, according to a source familiar with the interview.Members of the select committee are actively involved in the investigation, and are almost always present at depositions. But Guilfoyle’s lawyer said in a statement that the panel sought to use her cooperation as a “political weapon” against Trump.“Ms Guilfoyle, under threat of subpoena, agreed to meet exclusively with counsel for the select committee in a good-faith effort to provide true and relevant evidence,” Joseph Tacopina, Guilfoyle’s lawyer, said in a statement after she halted her interview.“However, upon Ms Guilfoyle’s attendance, the committee revealed its untrustworthiness, as members notorious for leaking information appeared,” Tacopina said, referring to the two congressmen Schiff and Raskin.The lawyer for Guilfoyle added that after he asked for a break to address the issue with House investigators, the select committee leaked the breakdown in proceedings to reporters. A spokesman for the select committee has denied Tacopina’s claim.The select committee did not address those complaints on Thursday. But the subpoena authorisation suggested the panel does not believe the matter precludes her from testifying about her contacts with Trump and rally organisers on January 6.The panel additionally noted that it had earlier informed her legal team that members would be present in her interview and even offered to reschedule Guilfoyle’s interview, but she declined.Guilfoyle was notably present for an Oval Office meeting that morning when Trump pressed then Vice-President Mike Pence to reject slates of electors for Biden at the joint session of Congress and thus return him to power, the subpoena said.House investigators added in the subpoena that they were also interested in Guilfoyle’s claims that she helped fund the “Save America” rally that preceded the Capitol attack, as well as discussions with Trump about who spoke at the rally.Guilfoyle told at least one rally organizer that she had “raised so much money for this. Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million” – a reference to Julie Fancelli, who did in fact finance the event, the panel said.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesDonald Trump JrUS politicsDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More