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      ‘Taking the Voters Out of the Equation’: How the Parties Are Killing Competition

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      The number of competitive House districts is dropping, as both Republicans and Democrats use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.WASHINGTON — The number of competitive congressional districts is on track to dive near — and possibly below — the lowest level in at least three decades, as Republicans and Democrats draw new political maps designed to ensure that the vast majority of House races are over before the general election starts.With two-thirds of the new boundaries set, mapmakers are on pace to draw fewer than 40 seats — out of 435 — that are considered competitive based on the 2020 presidential election results, according to a New York Times analysis of election data. Ten years ago that number was 73.While the exact size of the battlefield is still emerging, the sharp decline of competition for House seats is the latest worrying sign of dysfunction in the American political system, which is already struggling with a scourge of misinformation and rising distrust in elections. Lack of competition in general elections can widen the ideological gulf between the parties, leading to hardened stalemates on legislation and voters’ alienation from the political process.“The reduction of competitive seats is a tragedy,” said former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “We end up with gridlock, we end up with no progress and we end up with a population looking at our legislatures and having this feeling that nothing gets done.” He added: “This gridlock leads to cynicism about this whole process.”Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for adding to the tally of safe seats. Over decades, the parties have deftly used the redistricting process to create districts dominated by voters from one party or to bolster incumbents.It’s not yet clear which party will ultimately benefit more from this year’s bumper crop of safe seats, or whether President Biden’s sagging approval ratings might endanger Democrats whose districts haven’t been considered competitive. Republicans control the mapmaking for more than twice as many districts as Democrats, leaving many in the G.O.P. to believe that the party can take back the House majority after four years of Democratic control largely by drawing favorable seats.But Democrats have used their power to gerrymander more aggressively than expected. In New York, for example, the Democratic-controlled Legislature on Wednesday approved a map that gives the party a strong chance of flipping as many as three House seats currently held by Republicans.That has left Republicans and Democrats essentially at a draw, with two big outstanding unknowns: Florida’s 28 seats, increasingly the subject of Republican infighting, are still unsettled and several court cases in other states could send lawmakers back to the drawing board.“Democrats in New York are gerrymandering like the House depends on it,” said Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization. “Republican legislators shouldn’t be afraid to legally press their political advantage where they have control.”New York’s new map doesn’t just set Democrats up to win more seats, it also eliminates competitive districts. In 2020, there were four districts where Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump were within five percentage points. There are none in the new map. Even the reconfigured district that stretches from Republican-dominated Staten Island to Democratic neighborhoods in Brooklyn is now, at least on paper, friendly territory for Democrats.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: 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.North Carolina: The State Supreme Court ruled that new political maps were illegally skewed to favor Republicans.Without that competition from outside the party, many politicians are beginning to see the biggest threat to their careers as coming from within.“When I was a member of Congress, most members woke up concerned about a general election,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democrats’ campaign committee during the last redistricting cycle. “Now they wake up worried about a primary opponent.”Mr. Israel, who left Congress in 2017 and now owns a bookstore on Long Island, recalled Republicans telling him they would like to vote for Democratic priorities like gun control but feared a backlash from their party’s base. House Democrats, Mr. Israel said, would like to address issues such as Social Security and Medicare reform, but understand that doing so would draw a robust primary challenge from the party’s left wing.Republicans are expected to win roughly 65 percent of Texas’ 38 congressional seats.Tamir Kalifa/Getty ImagesRepublicans argue that redistricting isn’t destiny: The political climate matters, and more races will become competitive if inflation, the lingering pandemic or other issues continue to sour voters on Democratic leadership.But the far greater number of districts drawn to be overwhelmingly safe for one party is likely to limit how many seats will flip — even in a so-called wave election.“The parties are contributing to more and more single-party districts and taking the voters out of the equation,” said former Representative Tom Davis, who led the House Republicans’ campaign arm during the 2001 redistricting cycle. “November becomes a constitutional formality.”In the 29 states where maps have been completed and not thrown out by courts, there are just 22 districts that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump won by five percentage points or less, according to data from the Brennan Center for Justice, a research institute.By this point in the 2012 redistricting cycle, there were 44 districts defined as competitive based on the previous presidential election results. In the 1992 election, the margin between Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush was within five points in 108 congressional districts.The phenomenon of parties using redistricting to gain an edge is as old as the republic itself, but it has escalated in recent decades with more sophisticated technology and more detailed data about voter behavior. Americans with similar political views have clustered in distinct areas — Republicans in rural and exurban areas, Democrats in cities and inner suburbs. It’s a pattern that can make it difficult to draw cohesive, competitive districts.No state has quashed competition ahead of the midterm elections like Texas. In the 2020 election, there were 12 competitive districts in the state. After redistricting, there is only one.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Adopts Prosecution Tactics for Its Investigation

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      The House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol and what led to it is employing techniques more common in criminal cases than in congressional inquiries.The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol is borrowing techniques from federal prosecutions, employing aggressive tactics typically used against mobsters and terrorists as it seeks to break through stonewalling from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies and develop evidence that could prompt a criminal case.In what its members see as the best opportunity to hold Mr. Trump and his team accountable, the committee — which has no authority to pursue criminal charges — is using what powers it has in expansive ways in hopes of pressuring Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to use the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute them.The panel’s investigation is being run by a former U.S. attorney, and the top investigator brought in to focus on Mr. Trump’s inner circle is also a former U.S. attorney. The panel has hired more than a dozen other former federal prosecutors.The committee has interviewed more than 475 witnesses and issued more than 100 subpoenas, including broad ones to banks as well as telecommunications and social media companies. Some of the subpoenas have swept up the personal data of Trump family members and allies, local politicians and at least one member of Congress, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio. Though no subpoena has been issued for Mr. Jordan, his text messages and calls have shown up in communications with Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.Armed with reams of telephone records and metadata, the committee has used link analysis, a data mapping technique that former F.B.I. agents say was key to identifying terrorist networks in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The F.B.I. said it used a similar tactic last month to identify the seller of a gun to a man in Texas who took hostages at a synagogue.Faced with at least 16 Trump allies who have signaled they will not fully cooperate with the committee, investigators have taken a page out of organized crime prosecutions and quietly turned at least six lower-level Trump staff members into witnesses who have provided information about their bosses’ activities.The committee is also considering granting immunity to key members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as a way of pressuring them to testify.“Having lived through and being a part of every major congressional investigation over the past 50 years from Iran-contra to Whitewater to everything else, this is the mother of all investigations and a quantum leap for Congress in a way I’ve never seen before,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat and the former top lawyer for the House who is now representing Dan Scavino, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, in the investigation.It is a development, Mr. Brand suggested, that Democrats might one day come to regret. “When a frontier is pushed back, it doesn’t recede,” he said. “They think they’re fighting for the survival of the democracy and the ends justify the means. Just wait if the Republicans take over.”The committee’s aggressive approach carries with it another obvious risk: that it could fail to turn up compelling new information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his defeat or to make a persuasive case for a Justice Department prosecution. Mr. Trump survived years of scrutiny by the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and two impeachments. Despite a swirl of new investigations since he left office, the former president remains the dominant force in Republican politics.The committee has no law enforcement role, and its stated goal is to write a comprehensive report and propose recommendations, including for legislation, to try to make sure the events of Jan. 6 are never repeated.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no specific public indication that the Justice Department is investigating former President Donald J. Trump.Al Drago for The New York TimesNevertheless, its members have openly discussed what criminal laws Mr. Trump and his allies may have violated and how they might recommend that the Justice Department investigate him. Such a step could put considerable additional pressure on Mr. Garland, who has not given any specific public indication that the department is investigating Mr. Trump or would support prosecuting him.As the House investigation was gaining momentum late last year, the committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, read from the criminal code to describe a law she believed could be used to prosecute Mr. Trump for obstructing Congress as it sought to certify the Electoral College count of his defeat.Ms. Cheney and the other Republican on the committee, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, were censured by the Republican National Committee on Friday for their participation in the investigation.Mr. Trump’s allies have grown angry not just at the aggressiveness of the committee — for example, in making subpoenas public before they have been served — but also at the expansive list of people questioned, some of whom, these allies maintain, had minimal to no involvement in the events of Jan. 6.The tactics being used by the committee were described by nearly a dozen people, including members of the committee, aides, witnesses and their lawyers, and other people familiar with the panel’s work. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing what the committee says is a confidential investigation.By comparison, the House select committee that spent two and a half years investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack issued just a dozen or so subpoenas — a small fraction of the number issued by the Jan. 6 committee so far — and made no criminal referrals. The Jan. 6 panel has already recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against three witnesses who refused to cooperate, and one, Stephen K. Bannon, has already been indicted by the Justice Department.Members of the Jan. 6 committee say the obstacles thrown up by Mr. Trump and his allies and the high stakes of the investigation have left the panel with no choice but to use every tool at its disposal.“It’s not a criminal investigation, but having experienced former prosecutors who know how to run complex, white-collar investigations working on a plot to overturn the presidential election is a very useful talent among your team,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member.To lead the inquiry, the panel hired Timothy J. Heaphy, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. In that position, he oversaw a number of high-profile prosecutions, including one in which the drugmaker Abbott Laboratories pleaded guilty in a fraud case and paid a $1.5 billion fine.Ms. Cheney and the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, also hired John Wood, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri and a former deputy associate attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. He is a senior investigative counsel for the committee and is focusing on Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Neither Mr. Heaphy nor Mr. Wood had previously worked on a congressional investigation.Some of the Democrats on the committee were concerned that if the panel was too aggressive, Republicans might turn the tables on the Democrats whenever they took back control of the House. But Ms. Cheney insisted that the committee be as aggressive as possible.She said that the panel would face significant resistance from Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and that the committee would be criticized no matter what it did, so there was no reason to hold back in the face of efforts to impede its work.Mr. Trump moved to block the National Archives from handing over documents from his White House, leading to a monthslong court fight that ended with the committee receiving the documents.At least 16 witnesses have sued to try to block the committee’s subpoenas. Four of the panel’s most sought-after targets — the conservative lawyer John Eastman; Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department lawyer deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s plays to try to stay in power; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; and the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. — invoked the Fifth Amendment as a way to avoid answering questions without the threat of a contempt of Congress charge.Three Republican members of Congress — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Jordan — told the committee that they would refuse to sit for questioning.The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that he faced dogged questioning from the committee’s investigators — and that they already had his text messages.Jon Cherry/Getty ImagesDespite those obstacles, the committee turned its attention to lower-level aides, who investigators knew were in the room for many of the key events that occurred in the lead-up to and during the assault, or were told almost immediately about what had occurred. Those witnesses tended to be younger and have far less money to hire high-end white-collar defense lawyers to fend off the committee. So far, the committee has spoken to at least a half-dozen lower-level aides who fall into this category.When Mr. Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, refused to testify, the panel turned to his top aide, Ben Williamson, who complied with a subpoena and sat for hours of questioning. After Mr. Clark, the Justice Department lawyer, refused to cooperate, a former senior counsel who worked for him, Kenneth Klukowski, sat for an interview with the committee.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, said the committee was not trying to “flip” witnesses the way investigators might do in a criminal case. But, he said, “If you drew some kind of social diagrams of who’s testifying and who’s not, pretty much everyone is testifying, except for those who are in the immediate entourage of Donald Trump.”Among the other aides who have testified before the committee are Marc Short, Greg Jacob and Keith Kellogg, all of whom worked for former Vice President Mike Pence. Three former spokeswomen for Mr. Trump have also cooperated: Kayleigh McEnany, Stephanie Grisham and Alyssa Farah Griffin.The committee’s investigative work related to Mr. Trump’s current spokesman illustrates the aggressive steps the panel is taking. The spokesman, Taylor Budowich, turned over more than 1,700 pages of documents and sat for roughly four hours of sworn testimony.Shortly after testifying, Mr. Budowich learned that the committee had requested financial records from his bank related to pro-Trump rallies. A federal judge turned down an emergency request by Mr. Budowich to force congressional investigators to relinquish his banking records, which JPMorgan Chase had already given to the committee.Investigators also sought a broad swath of phone records from Ali Alexander, a right-wing rally organizer who was cooperating with the committee, for two months before Jan. 6, 2021 — well before he claims to have thought of planning an event that day — and for one month after.Late last month, another example of the panel’s investigative approach emerged. Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist, who has sued the committee, was questioned by investigators in a virtual interview. He later said on his radio show that in the interview he had invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination nearly 100 times.“I just had a very intense experience being interrogated by the Jan. 6 committee lawyers,” he said. “They were polite, but they were dogged.”Even though Mr. Jones refused to share information with the committee, he said the investigators seemed to have found ways around his lack of cooperation. He said the committee had already obtained text messages from him.“They have everything that’s already on my phones and things,” he said. “I saw my text messages” with political organizers tied to the Jan. 6 rally.Maggie Haberman More

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      Republicans Who Voted to Impeach Trump Out-Raised Primary Rivals

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      Despite their pariah status in their party, House Republicans who broke with the former president have raised more than their G.O.P. foes.WASHINGTON — All seven House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump and are seeking re-election have out-raised their primary opponents, many of whom have received Mr. Trump’s backing, according to campaign disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission this week.In Wyoming, Representative Liz Cheney, who was all but exiled by her party for bluntly condemning Mr. Trump’s false election claims and has emerged as one of the lead lawmakers on the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, raked in $2 million during the last quarter, entering 2022 with nearly $5 million in cash on hand. Her opponent, Harriet Hageman, who has drawn the vociferous support of Mr. Trump and his family, raised $443,000 last quarter and has about $380,000 cash on hand.Representative Fred Upton, a centrist who has held his seat in southwest Michigan for more than three decades, brought in $726,000 and has about $1.5 million cash on hand, well ahead of the challenger Mr. Trump has endorsed, Steve Carra, a state representative who raised $134,000 last quarter and has $200,000 cash on hand.Joe Kent, a Trump-backed Army Special Forces veteran prolific on social media and conservative talk shows, appeared to come closer to matching the fund-raising totals of his opponent, Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, but still trailed her in both quarterly hauls and cash on hand.The disclosures illustrate the foothold that establishment conservatives and well-funded political action committees still hold among the party’s donor class, despite Mr. Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican base. They also reflect how the former president’s endorsements, which he has dangled as threats over Republican lawmakers he deems insufficiently loyal to him, have yet to translate into significant donations for the candidates he backs.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Trump vs. DeSantis: Tensions between the ex-president and Florida governor show the challenge confronting the G.O.P. in 2022.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.By contrast, Mr. Trump’s political operation is doing far better than his party in raking in money, having raised more than $51 million in the second half of 2021 and entering 2022 with more than double the cash on hand of the Republican National Committee.“The massive fund-raising hauls of some of these incumbents reflects a lot of people’s support for the positions they took,” said Alex Conant, a veteran Republican political strategist. “There’s only a handful of them, but they have a huge donor pool to draw from. And Trump has always struggled to translate his political capital to others.”Even with their hulking war chests, the Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump last year for his role in inciting the Capitol riot are expected to face grueling primary battles after inflaming the wrath of conservative voters. Some may still opt to retire, joining three of their colleagues who also voted to impeach Mr. Trump and already said they would not run for re-election in 2022.Mr. Upton said in a statement on Wednesday that he saw his fund-raising numbers as evidence of a “hunger for restoring civility and solving pressing problems” that was “resonating with people across America,” but added that he was still deliberating over whether he would run for re-election.Some of the financial disparities reflect straggling primary fields that have yet to be narrowed or candidates who only decided recently to enter their races. In South Carolina, for example, Mr. Trump endorsed a primary challenger to Representative Tom Rice on Tuesday, elevating Russell Fry, a state representative, over Graham Allen, a conservative media personality who had raised the most money in a crowded primary. Mr. Rice’s latest disclosure showed him with five times as much cash on hand as Mr. Allen.“Congressman Tom Rice of South Carolina, the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the radical left, and who actually voted against me on impeachment hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP,” Mr. Trump wrote in his endorsement.Mr. Rice shot back with a retort of his own: “I’m glad he’s chosen someone. All the pleading to Mar-a-Lago was getting a little embarrassing. I’m all about Trump’s policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power, is more than I can stomach.”For Trump-backed candidates, more help from the boldfaced names of the party’s right flank is likely on the way. On Tuesday evening, a day after campaigns were required to file their latest Federal Election Commission disclosures, Mr. Kent held a fund-raiser with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., at which couples that donated or raised $25,000 were invited to attend a private reception and take a picture with the former president.Mr. Kent has previously complained on Twitter that Ms. Herrera Beutler was “running on America Last PACs not grass roots donations,” referring to big-money political action committees that once dominated campaign fund-raising, rather than the small-dollar contributions that are a growing source of financing for Republican campaigns.But as Ms. Hageman’s fund-raising totals illustrate, Mr. Trump’s backing alone does not guarantee an immediate financial windfall. Mr. Trump has targeted Ms. Cheney as one of his most high-profile detractors in Congress, hammering away at her for months and vowing to depose her. Last month, his son, Donald Trump Jr., joined an elite fund-raiser for Ms. Hageman hosted by tech billionaire Peter Thiel at his Miami compound. The donations raised there were not reflected on the report her campaign submitted this week.Ms. Hageman has chalked up Ms. Cheney’s fund-raising prowess to support from Democrats and out-of-state Republicans. A spokesman for Ms. Hageman’s campaign said she had raised more than half of her funds from within Wyoming.Establishment Republicans have rallied to Ms. Cheney’s side. Former President George W. Bush gave her the maximum donation of $5,800, while Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, and former Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have each helped raise money for her.Mr. Bush also gave to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his impeachment trial and is also facing a Trump-backed primary challenger. Ms. Murkowski out-raised that challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, raising $1.2 million last quarter, while Ms. Tshibaka raised about $600,000.“If you’d seen 100 Republicans voting to impeach Trump, the donor pool would have been more diluted,” Mr. Conant said. “They’re in a unique position to raise a lot of money.”Rachel Shorey More

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      Who Are the Key Figures of Interest in the Jan. 6 Inquiry?

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      The list of names being scrutinized by the House committee for their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol keeps growing.A House select committee has been formed to scrutinize the causes of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The riot occurred as Congress met to formalize Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory amid efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the results.Here are some of the key people and groups included so far in the panel’s investigation:President Donald J. Trump spoke at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the riot at the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTrump, His Family and His Inner CircleDonald J. TrumpThe former president’s White House records related to the attack have been a focus of the inquiry. Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep these documents from the committee by claiming executive privilege. The panel is also scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s role in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.Ivanka TrumpThe daughter of the former president, who served as one of his senior advisers, has been asked to cooperate. The panel said that it had gathered evidence that she had implored her father to call off the violence that occurred when his supporters stormed the Capitol.Rudolph W. GiulianiMr. Trump’s personal lawyer and three members of his legal team — Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Boris Epshteyn — pursued conspiracy-filled lawsuits that made claims of voter fraud and played central roles in the effort to use courts, state legislatures and Congress to overturn the results.Stephen K. BannonThe former Trump aide is under scrutiny by the committee for comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5, 2021. The committee points to this as evidence that he had “some foreknowledge” of the attack. Mr. Bannon has been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena; he claimed protection under executive privilege even though he was an outside adviser.Michael T. FlynnMr. Trump’s former national security adviser attended an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in which participants discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers. Mr. Flynn has filed a lawsuit to block the panel’s subpoenas.Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, arrived in the East Room for an election night address by Mr. Trump.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhite House OfficialsMark MeadowsMr. Trump’s chief of staff, who initially provided the panel with a trove of documents that showed the extent of his role in the efforts to overturn the election, is now refusing to cooperate. The House voted to recommend holding Mr. Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for defying the panel’s subpoena.Mike PenceThe former vice president could be a key witness as the committee focuses on Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and considers criminal referrals, but Mr. Pence has not decided whether to cooperate, according to people briefed on his discussions with the panel.Marc ShortMr. Pence’s chief of staff, who has firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on the vice president to throw out the election results, testified before the panel under subpoena. He is the most senior person on Mr. Pence’s staff who is known to have cooperated with the committee.Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader. He has refused to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesMembers of CongressKevin McCarthyThe panel has requested an interview with Mr. McCarthy, the House Republican leader, about his contact with Mr. Trump during the riot. A California representative who could become speaker of the House after the midterms in November, Mr. McCarthy has refused to cooperate.Scott Perry and Jim JordanThe representatives from Pennsylvania and Ohio are among a group of Republican congressmen who were deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election. Both Mr. Perry and Mr. Jordan have refused to cooperate with the panel.Roger Stone in December 2021, after a meeting with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Al Drago for The New York TimesOutside Advisers and GroupsRoger J. Stone Jr.The longtime political operative, who promoted his attendance at rallies on Jan. 5 and 6 and solicited support to pay for his security, has become a focus of the panel as it digs further into the planning and financing of rallies before the attack.Phil WaldronThe retired Army colonel has been under scrutiny since Mr. Meadows turned over a 38-page PowerPoint document that Mr. Waldron had circulated on Capitol Hill. The document contained plans that detailed how to overturn the election.Jeffrey ClarkThe Justice Department official repeatedly pushed his colleagues to help Mr. Trump undo his loss. The panel has recommended that Mr. Clark be held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena.John EastmanThe little-known academic and conservative lawyer has become the subject of intense scrutiny since writing a memo that laid out how Mr. Trump could stay in power.Fake Trump electorsFourteen people falsely claimed to be electors for Mr. Trump in the 2020 election in states that Mr. Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Members of the Proud Boys burned a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a church in Washington, D.C., in December 2020.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesFar-Right FiguresExtremist groupsThe panel is scrutinizing some white nationalist leaders and militia groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It is intensifying its focus on the rallies that led up to the mob violence and how extremists worked with pro-Trump forces to undermine the election.Alex JonesThe conspiracy theorist helped organize the rally that occurred before the riot, and said that White House officials told him that he was to lead a march to the Capitol, where Mr. Trump would speak, according to the committee.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host.Frank Franklin II/Associated PressMedia EntitiesFox News anchorsSean Hannity sent text messages to Trump officials in the days surrounding the riot that illustrate his unusually elevated role as an outside adviser. Mr. Hannity, along with Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, also texted Mr. Meadows as the riot unfolded.Big Tech firmsThe committee has criticized Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms. The panel has said that the four social media companies have failed to adequately cooperate with the inquiry.The Willard Hotel in Washington, where several Trump allies met on the day before the riot.Drew Angerer for The New York TimesAnd a Key EventWillard Hotel meetingSeveral Trump advisers and allies — including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Stone, Mr. Jones and Mr. Eastman — gathered at the Willard Hotel near the White House the day before the riot. The events that unfolded there have become a prime focus of the committee. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Examining Trump’s Role in Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      The House committee is looking into efforts by the former president’s outside advisers to create a legal basis for national security agencies to help reverse his defeat in 2020.WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee is scrutinizing former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, including efforts to create a legal basis for directing national security agencies to take such an extreme action, according to three people with knowledge of the committee’s activities.It is not clear what evidence the committee is examining as it looks at any role Mr. Trump might have played in encouraging or facilitating the drafting of a so-called national security finding, a type of document more typically used as the basis for a presidential order to an intelligence agency to take covert action. But the committee recently received documents from the Trump White House including what court filings described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions,” along with related notes.A document fitting that description circulated among Mr. Trump’s formal and informal advisers in the weeks following the election. It reflected baseless assertions about foreign interference in American voting systems that had been promoted most prominently by one of his outside lawyers, Sidney Powell.That document, dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” was published last month by Politico. It used the groundless assertions about foreign interference in the vote tally to conclude that Mr. Trump had “probable cause” to direct the military to begin seizing voting machines.“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals championed by outside advisers to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.Those attempts included directing his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states — Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary, said no — and raising with Attorney General William P. Barr the question of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a query that Mr. Barr rejected, according to people familiar with the episodes.Mr. Cuccinelli, who had told Mr. Giuliani that the Homeland Security Department did not have the authority to audit or impound the machines, later encountered Mr. Trump at a meeting on another topic. Mr. Trump again raised with him, in passing, the idea of the department seizing the machines, and Mr. Cuccinelli reiterated that there was no legal authority for doing so, according to a person familiar with the exchange.The outside advisers had earlier pushed a plan under which Mr. Trump would direct the Pentagon to seize the voting machines, an idea that was killed by White House officials and Mr. Giuliani.“It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee.The panel for weeks has been studying the actions of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who investigators say was involved in discussions about seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers, including during a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18.Mr. Flynn also gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax a day earlier in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.At the Dec. 18 meeting, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, said he, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell decided they would get into the White House without an appointment “by hook or by crook” to present their plans to Mr. Trump. He said a junior staffer let them in the building, and eventually they got close enough to the Oval Office that Mr. Trump saw them and called them in.Once inside, the group pitched Mr. Trump on their plans for him to sign an executive order for the National Guard to take control of voting machines and for Ms. Powell to be appointed a special counsel overseeing election integrity.“We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas,” Mr. Byrne wrote of the episode in a book, referring to portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost.Mr. Byrne wrote that Mr. Flynn had drafted a “beautiful operational plan” that just needed “one signature from the president.” He described various versions of the plan, including an option for the U.S. Marshals to intervene and another for Mr. Trump to “have the National Guard rerun the elections in those six states.”He described White House lawyers and officials as fighting the plans in the meeting, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who thundered, “He does not have the authority to do this!”Representative Jaime Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said the panel is trying to understand the “whole picture” of the plan to seize voting machines and how it relates to other efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, such as the former president’s pressure campaign on Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states won by President Biden.“His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend,” Mr. Raskin said of Mr. Trump. “He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said outsider advisers’ proposals to Mr. Trump to use federal agencies to seize voting machines were “the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Raskin added: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”The extraordinary plan to mobilize the country’s national security agencies to take control of voting machines required an equally extraordinary first step. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was an ally of Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell, revealed in a podcast interview last year that the gambit initially hinged on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present to lawmakers by Dec. 18, 2020.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      Trump tore up records turned over to House Capitol attack committee

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      Trump tore up records turned over to House Capitol attack committeeNational Archives says it received ripped-up documents from White House before turning them over to Congress Some of the White House records turned over to the House committee investigating the January 6 attack were ripped up by Donald Trump.Quiet part loud: Trump says Pence ‘could have overturned the election’Read moreThe documents include diaries, schedules, handwritten notes, speeches and remarks. The supreme court rejected Trump’s attempt to stop the National Archives turning them over to Congress.In a statement, the Archives said: “Some of the Trump presidential records received by the National Archives and Records Administration included paper records that had been torn up by former president Trump.“These were turned over to the National Archives at the end of the Trump administration, along with a number of torn-up records that had not been reconstructed by the White House. The Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over to the National Archives at the end of their administrations.”The Archives did not say how it knew Trump had torn the records but his habit of tearing up documents has been widely reported.In 2018, Politico spoke to Solomon Lartey, a records management analyst who spent time “armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape … sft[ing] through large piles of paper and put[ting] them back together … ‘like a jigsaw puzzle’.”Lartey and another staffer who taped records were fired by the White House that year, they said summarily.Lartey said: “They told [Trump] to stop doing it. He didn’t want to stop.”After a process that reached the supreme court, the Archives gave more than 700 documents concerning the Capitol attack to the House committee last month.More than 700 people have been charged over the riot, in which Trump supporters tried to stop certification of his election defeat. Eleven members of a far-right militia are charged with seditious conspiracy. More than 100 police officers were injured. Seven people died.The committee has recommended criminal charges for two Trump associates, former White House strategist Steve Bannon and chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bannon refused co-operation and pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress. Meadows co-operated, then withdrew. He has not been charged.Speaking to the Washington Post, Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor, said destroying White House documents “could be a crime under several statutes that make it a crime to destroy government property if that was the intent of the defendant.“A president does not own the records generated by his own administration. The definition of presidential records is broad. Trump’s own notes to himself could qualify and destroying them could be the criminal destruction of government property.”Trump did not comment. Nor did the House committee.It was also reported on Tuesday that text messages were turned over to the committee by Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s last press secretary.ABC News reported that McEnany appeared before investigators on 13 January.Kamala Harris drove within yards of pipe bomb on January 6 – reportRead moreIt also said the texts were the source for conversations with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, which were quoted by the committee in a request for information from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and adviser.“1 – no more stolen election talk,” Hannity texted McEnany after the Capitol attack.Referring to possible attempts to remove Trump from power, he added: “2- Yes, impeachment and the 25th amendment are real and many people will quit.”McEnany replied: “Love that. Thank you. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce.”Trump was impeached but acquitted. The 25th amendment, which provides for the removal of a president incapable of fulfilling his or her duties, was not invoked. Trump continues to claim the election was stolen.McEnany is now a Fox News host. She and her employer did not comment. One former Trump White House insider told the Guardian: “She’s an honest woman.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackTrump administrationUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      Former Pence Chief of Staff Has Testified to the Jan. 6 Committee

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      Marc Short, who has firsthand knowledge of former President Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to throw out the election results, appeared under subpoena.WASHINGTON — Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, testified privately last week before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the latest turn in weeks of negotiations between the panel’s investigators and Mr. Pence’s team.Mr. Short appeared in response to a subpoena from the committee, according to three people with knowledge of the developments, making him the most senior person around Mr. Pence who is known to have cooperated in the inquiry.Investigators believe that participation by the former vice president and his inner circle is critical, because Mr. Pence resisted a pressure campaign by former President Donald J. Trump to use his role in presiding over Congress’s official count of electoral votes to try to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Short was with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, and has firsthand knowledge of the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to persuade the former vice president to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of fake slates of pro-Trump electors.The people spoke on condition of anonymity about Mr. Short’s testimony, which was earlier reported by CNN.Investigators have been in high-stakes negotiations for months with Mr. Pence’s team about whether he would cooperate with the inquiry. In recent weeks, they have sought the cooperation of Mr. Short and Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s former lawyer.Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were both closely involved in Mr. Pence’s consideration of whether to go along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he try to block the official count of Electoral College results by a joint session of Congress. Three days before the proceeding, the two men met with John Eastman, a lawyer then advising Mr. Trump, about a memo Mr. Eastman had written setting out a case for why Mr. Pence had the power to hold off the certification.As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Eastman sent a hostile email to Mr. Jacob, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence.“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” the lawyer, Mr. Eastman, wrote to Mr. Jacob.Mr. Eastman has since invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to defy the committee’s subpoena.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to task

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      Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRo Khanna represents Silicon Valley and the best of Capitol Hill and wants to help. His aims are ambitious, his book necessary Just on the evidence of his new book, Ro Khanna is one of the broadest, brightest and best-educated legislators on Capitol Hill. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School who represents Silicon Valley, he is by far the most tech-savvy member of Congress.Silicon Holler: Ro Khanna says big tech can help heal the US heartlandRead moreAt this very dark moment for American democracy, this remarkable son of Indian immigrants writes with the optimism and idealism of a first-generation American who still marvels at the opportunities he has had.Even more remarkable for a congressman whose district includes Apple, Google, Intel and Yahoo, Khanna is one of the few who refuses to take campaign money from political action committees.Once or twice in a “heated basketball game” in high school, he writes, someone may have shouted “go back to India!” But what Khanna mostly remembers about his childhood are neighbors in Pennsylvania’s Bucks county who taught him “to believe that dreams are worth pursuing in America, regardless of one’s name or heritage”.His book is bulging with ideas about how to transform big tech from a huge threat to liberty into a genuine engine of democracy. What he is asking for is almost impossibly ambitious, but he never sounds daunted.“Instead of passively allowing tech royalty and their legions to lead the digital revolution and serve narrow financial ends before all others,” he writes, “we need to put it in service of our broader democratic aspirations. We need to steer the ship [and] call the shots.”The story of tech is emblematic of our time of singular inequality, a handful of big winners on top and a vast population untouched by the riches of the silicon revolution. Khanna begins his book with a barrage of statistics. Ninety percent of “innovation job growth” in recent decades has been in five cities while 50% of digital service jobs are in just 10 major metro centers.Most Americans “are disconnected from the wealth generation of the digital economy”, he writes, “despite having their industries and … lives transformed by it”.A central thesis is that no person should be forced to leave their hometown to find a decent job. There is one big reason for optimism about this huge aspiration: the impact of Covid. Practically overnight, the pandemic “shattered” conventional wisdom “about tech concentration”. Suddenly it was obvious that high-speed broadband allowed “millions of jobs to be done anywhere in the nation”.The willingness of millions of Americans to leave big city life is confirmed by red-hot real estate markets in far flung towns and villages – and a Harris poll that showed nearly 40% of city dwellers were willing to live elsewhere.“The promise is of new jobs without sudden cultural displacement,” Khanna writes.He suggests a range of incentives to spread tech jobs into rural areas, including big federal investment to bring high-speed connections to the millions still without them. This is turn would make it possible to require federal contractors to have at least 10% of their workforces in rural communities.The congressman imagines nothing less than a “recentering” of “human values in a culture that prizes the pursuit of technological progress and market valuations”. A vital step in that direction would be a $5bn investment for laptops for 11 million students who don’t have them.The problems of inequality begin at the tech giants themselves. Almost 20% of computer science graduates are black or Latino but only 10% of employees of big tech companies are. Less than 3% of venture capital lands in the hands of Black or Latino entrepreneurs.If redistributing some of big tech’s gigantic wealth is one way to regain some dignity in the digital age, the other is to rein in some of the industry’s gigantic abuses. Data mining and the promotion of hate for profit are the two biggest problems. Khanna has drafted an Internet Bill of Rights to improve the situation.Throughout his book, he drops bits of evidence to suggest just how urgent it is to find a way to make the biggest companies behave better.“Algorithmic amplification” turns out to be one of the greatest evils of the modern age. After extracting huge amounts of data about users, Facebook and the other big platforms “push sensational and divisive content to susceptible users based on their profiles”.An internal discussion at Facebook revealed that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendations”. The explosion of the bizarre QAnon is one of Facebook’s most dubious accomplishments. In the three years before it finally banned it in 2020, “QAnon groups developed millions of followers as Facebook’s algorithm encouraged people to join based on their profiles. Twitter also recommended Qanon tweets”. The conspiracy theory was “actively recommended” on YouTube until 2019.And then there is the single greatest big tech crime against humanity. According to Muslim Advocates, a Washington-based civil rights group, the Buddhist junta in Myanmar used Facebook and WhatsApp to plan the mass murder of Rohingya Muslims. The United Nations found that Facebook played a “determining role” in events that led to the murder of at least 25,000 and the displacement of 700,000.The world would indeed be a much better place if it adopted Khanna’s recommendations. But the question Khanna is too optimistic to ask may also be the most important one.Have these companies already purchased too much control of the American government for any fundamental change to be possible?
      Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work For All Of Us is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
      TopicsBooksSilicon ValleyDemocratsUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesUS domestic policyreviewsReuse this content More