House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

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    Trump Picks Ed Martin, ‘Stop the Steal’ Promoter, for Management and Budget Staff Chief

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    Ed Martin, who has been chosen by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be the chief of staff for his Office of Management and Budget, is an anti-abortion activist who helped to organize the “Stop the Steal” movement to overturn the 2020 election for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin, a longtime Republican operative in Missouri, served as chief of staff to former Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri nearly two decades ago and ran the state party 10 years ago. But it was his alignment with the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly in the last few years of her life that amplified his national profile as a conservative hard-liner.In saying on Tuesday that he had selected Mr. Martin to serve at the O.M.B., Mr. Trump noted that Mr. Martin had co-written a book with Ms. Schlafly — published a few days after she died in September 2016 — which urged conservatives to vote for Mr. Trump.Mr. Martin has continued to promote his alignment with Ms. Schlafly through an organization he runs bearing her name, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles.Mr. Martin will work under Russell Vought, a close ally of Mr. Trump’s who ran O.M.B. for part of his first administration. Mr. Trump also on Tuesday named Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who recently lost the attorney general race in North Carolina, as deputy director of O.M.B.The office is expected to play a crucial role within the Trump administration in helping Mr. Trump to wield power across federal agencies. Mr. Vought was one of the influential figures behind Project 2025, the blueprint that the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have mapped for the Trump administration. Mr. Trump during the election distanced himself from the project but has since been plucking people affiliated with it to serve under him.Mr. Martin did not respond to immediate requests for comment.Mr. Martin worked with Mr. Vought on the Republican National Committee’s new policy platform, which pulled back some of the party’s hard-line language on abortion. Yet Mr. Martin has backed anti-abortion policies that include a national ban, and has expressed openness to the idea that women and doctors should be prosecuted for abortion.He also served as an organizer and financier in the “Stop the Steal” movement trying to promote efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Congressional Committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a speech outside the building a day earlier, Mr. Martin spoke of “die-hard true Americans,” and said he would work until “we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.” After that he helped usher a small right-wing organization once associated with Ms. Schlafly, America’s Future, over to retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, a major promoter of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Flynn and other family members who work at the organization have turned the group into a backer of far-right conspiratorial ideology. More

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      Trump Refuses to Commit to Accepting Election Outcome in Milwaukee Interview

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      Former President Donald J. Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, as he again repeated his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Mr. Trump said, according to The Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”In an interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, he also dismissed questions about political violence in November by suggesting that his victory was inevitable.When pressed about what might happen should he lose, he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”Mr. Trump’s insistent and fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was unfair were at the heart of his efforts to overturn his loss to President Biden, and to the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters who believed his claims. Mr. Trump now faces dozens of felony charges in connection with those events.Mr. Trump’s vow to “fight for the right of the country” also echoes his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, where he told his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” before urging his supporters to march to the Capitol.As he campaigns in battleground states this year, Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to sow doubt about the integrity of the fall election, while repeating many of the same lies that he used to assail the integrity of the 2020 election. Months before any voting has taken place, Mr. Trump has regularly made the baseless claim that Democrats are likely to cheat to win.“Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, but we’re not going to allow them to rig the presidential election — the most important day of our lives — in 2024,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Freeland, Mich.The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Mr. Trump has for years promoted the lie that he won Wisconsin in 2020, and he did so again in the Journal Sentinel interview. Even after Jan. 6, 2021, and years after his exit from office, he has repeatedly pressured Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the top Republican in the State Legislature, to help overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the state and to impeach the state’s nonpartisan chief of elections.More than 1,250 people have been charged with crimes in connection to the Jan. 6 attack — and hundreds of people have been convicted. Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every person convicted on charges related to the storming of the Capitol. A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with that attack.The former president and his allies have also installed election deniers in influential positions in his campaign and in Republican Party institutions. In March, Trump allies newly installed to the leadership of the Republican National Committee appointed Christina Bobb, a former host at the far-right One America News Network, as senior counsel for election integrity. A self-described conspiracy theorist, she has relentlessly promoted false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.Ms. Bobb was indicted in Arizona last week, along with all of the fake electors who acted on Mr. Trump’s behalf in that state and others, on charges related to what the authorities say were attempts by the defendants to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona.The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have made an aggressive approach to “election integrity” — a broad term often used by Republicans to cast doubt on elections that the party lost — central to their efforts heading toward November.Last month, the committee announced a plan to train and dispatch more than 100,000 volunteers and lawyers to monitor the electoral process in each battleground state and to mount aggressive challenges.On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said at the rally in Freeland that his campaign and national and state Republican parties would put together “a team of the most highly qualified lawyers and other professionals in the country to ensure that what happened in 2020 will never happen again.”“I will secure our elections because you know what happened in 2020,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Waukesha, Wis., on Wednesday.Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes. More

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      Trump Acknowledges He Wanted to Go to the Capitol on Jan. 6

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      Former President Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he asked his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol after his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, acknowledging a key detail of his actions that were central to the findings of the House committee established to investigate the attack.During a campaign rally in Waukesha, Wis., Mr. Trump brought up a sensational but disputed element of testimony given to the House Jan. 6 committee by a Trump White House aide: that Mr. Trump had lunged for the wheel and physically struggled with Secret Service agents when they refused to take him to join the large crowd of supporters who were marching toward the Capitol.“I sat in the back,” Mr. Trump said, giving his version of events. “And you know what I did say? I said, ‘I’d like to go down there because I see a lot of people walking down.’ They said, ‘Sir, it’s better if you don’t.’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like to.’”“It’s better if you don’t,” Mr. Trump recounted an agent saying. The former president said he replied, “All right, whatever you guys think is fine,” and added, “That was the whole tone of the conversation.”President Biden’s campaign immediately highlighted Mr. Trump’s comments, amplifying that the former president had intended to participate in what would become an attack by his supporters on the Capitol in an effort to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.It is not the first time that Mr. Trump has spoken of his effort to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He has said in several interviews that he regretted not marching on the Capitol with his supporters that day, and that his Secret Service detail prevented him from doing so.“Secret Service said I couldn’t go,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post in April 2022. “I would have gone there in a minute.”Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, later testified to Mr. Trump’s conversation with Secret Service agents during televised hearings held by the House Jan. 6 committee. Ms. Hutchinson was not in the car with Mr. Trump, and said that her testimony to those events came secondhand or thirdhand from what other people had told her that day.In an interview with the same committee, Mr. Trump’s driver, whose name was not disclosed, said: “The president was insistent on going to the Capitol. It was clear to me he wanted to go to the Capitol.”Mr. Trump at the rally on Wednesday portrayed his requests to his Secret Service detail as casual ones.In the interview with investigators for the House panel, the driver said that while he did not see Mr. Trump accost agents or reach for the steering wheel, “what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”After Mr. Trump was driven back to the White House by his Secret Service detail, the former president sat and watched the ensuing violence play out on television, according to testimony by an array of former administration officials. After Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse where he repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him and urged attendees to march on the Capitol, a mob of his supporters overran police barricades to storm the building, temporarily disrupting the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.In a lengthy interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he would “absolutely” consider pardoning every person who had been convicted on, or pleaded guilty to, charges related to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6. He also would not rule out the possibility of political violence after this year’s election.“I think we’re going to win,” he said. “And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.” More

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      Inside Donald Trump’s Embrace of the Jan. 6 Rioters

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      Two days before former President Donald J. Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail on his fourth indictment, he held an event at his golf club in New Jersey for another group of people facing criminal charges: rioters accused of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Standing next to a portrait of himself portrayed as James Bond, Mr. Trump told the defendants and their families that they had suffered greatly, but that all of that would change if he won another term.“People who have been treated unfairly are going to be treated extremely, extremely fairly,” he said to a round of applause at the event last August in Bedminster, N.J. “What you’ve suffered is just ridiculous,” he added. “But it’s going to be OK.”That private event was emblematic of how Mr. Trump has embraced dozens of Jan. 6 defendants and their relatives and highlights how he has sought to undermine law enforcement when it suits him, while he also puts forth a law-and-order campaign.Recently, however, his celebrations of the Capitol riot and those who took part in it have become more public as he has promoted a revisionist history of the attack and placed it at the heart of his 2024 presidential campaign.Despite the nearly 1,000 guilty pleas and convictions that have been secured in criminal cases stemming from Jan. 6, Mr. Trump has repeatedly described the rioters who broke into the Capitol as “hostages” and has started to open his campaign events with a recording of riot defendants singing the national anthem from their jail cells.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Seeks to Delay Jan. 6 Civil Cases

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      The former president’s lawyers told the judge overseeing the proceedings it would be unfair to put on a defense now because it might reveal his strategy for the criminal case on related charges.Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump asked a judge on Tuesday night to pause a group of civil lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, until after his federal criminal trial connected to the same events was over.The request by the lawyers to pause the civil cases was the latest example of Mr. Trump trying to pit his multiple legal matters against one another in an effort to delay them. In the past several weeks, the former president and his lawyers have managed to gum up each of the four criminal cases he is facing, sometimes by persuading judges that the timing of the various proceedings were in conflict with one another.In their request for a pause in the civil cases, Mr. Trump’s lawyers told Judge Amit P. Mehta, who is overseeing the proceedings, that it would be unfair to the former president to be forced to defend himself against the suits at this point. They said that in so doing, he might reveal his strategy for defending himself against related criminal charges brought against him by the special counsel Jack Smith.“Given the substantial overlap in factual and legal allegations between these cases and the D.C. criminal case,” the lawyers wrote, there is “a substantial risk that proceeding in this matter now will expose the defense’s theory to the prosecution in advance of trial.”The lawyers added, “This would prejudice President Trump’s ability to effectively defend himself in both these civil cases and the special counsel criminal matter.”In the months after Jan. 6, a half-dozen lawsuits were filed against Mr. Trump by members of Congress and police officers who served at the Capitol that day, accusing him of inciting the mob that stormed the building. The lawsuits, which all are being heard in Federal District Court in Washington, have sought unspecified financial damages from Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Trump Colorado Ballot Case, Outsider’s Theory Takes Center Stage

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      When the Supreme Court considers whether Donald J. Trump is barred from appearing on Colorado’s ballot, a professor’s scholarship, long relegated to the fringes, will take center stage.In the world of American legal scholarship, Seth Barrett Tillman is an outsider in more ways than one. An associate professor at a university in Ireland, he has put forward unusual interpretations of the meaning of the U.S. Constitution that for years have largely gone ignored — if not outright dismissed as crackpot.But at 60, Professor Tillman is enjoying some level of vindication. When the U.S. Supreme Court considers on Thursday whether former President Donald J. Trump is barred from Colorado’s primary ballot, a seemingly counterintuitive theory that Professor Tillman has championed for more than 15 years will take center stage and could shape the presidential election.The Constitution uses various terms to refer to government officers or offices. The conventional view is that they all share the same meaning. But by his account, each is distinct — and that, crucially for the case before the court, the particular phrase “officer of the United States” refers only to appointed positions, not the presidency.If a majority of the court accepts Professor Tillman’s rationale, then Mr. Trump would be allowed to appear on the ballot. At issue is the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, which bars people from holding office if they participated in an insurrection after having sworn to uphold the Constitution as an “officer of the United States.”Professor Tillman, heavily bearded with black-rimmed glasses and a bookish demeanor, flew to the United States this week to watch the arguments. With Josh Blackman, who teaches at South Texas College of Law Houston, Professor Tillman submitted a friend-of-the-court brief and asked to participate in arguments, but the court declined.Still, his hobbyhorse will be on the Supreme Court’s agenda, and it has drawn as much zealous backing as it has ferocious pushback.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Peter Navarro’s Prosecutors Ask for 6-Month Sentence

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      Mr. Navarro would be the second Trump official to be sentenced for stonewalling Congress in its Jan. 6 investigation.Federal prosecutors asked on Thursday night for a sentence of six months in prison for Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump, for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence at the top end of the guidelines because of his “bad-faith strategy” of “sustained, deliberate contempt of Congress.”“The defendant, like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation,” they wrote in their sentencing memo. “The defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”The memo echoed the sentence recommendation for Stephen K. Bannon, who was ultimately given four months in prison for defying his own subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. The sentencing would make Mr. Navarro the second Trump official to be sentenced for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas.Sentencing is set for Jan. 25 in Federal District Court in Washington.Mr. Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in September, and this week the judge presiding over the case, Amit P. Mehta, turned down a request from his lawyers to dismiss the verdict and convene a new trial. Mr. Navarro had argued that jurors were exposed to political bias while lunching outside the courthouse where demonstrators were protesting.“The evidence establishes that the jurors only interacted with each other” and a court security officer, Judge Mehta wrote in a ruling on Tuesday.Mr. Navarro’s lawyers argued that the subpoena flew in the face of the notion that a president could direct his subordinates to refuse to testify before Congress, citing executive immunity.In their own memo, they wrote that “history is replete” with people who “have refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a vocal critic of China, helped devise some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies and played a role in the U.S. pandemic response. But after the 2020 presidential election, he became more focused on efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro frequently made television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud. He also documented those assertions in a report, as well as in a memoir he published after leaving the White House in which he described a strategy known as the Green Bay Sweep aimed at overturning the election results.When the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify, he repeatedly asserted executive privilege, insisting that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. But Judge Mehta ruled that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense at trial, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee. More

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      Majorie Taylor Greene Book-Signing on Jan. 6 Stirs Backlash in Florida

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      A Florida venue canceled an event on Saturday featuring Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman and acolyte of Donald J. Trump, after materials promoting the event advertised it, in part, as an occasion marking the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The gathering was being organized by the Osceola County Republican Party in central Florida as a book-signing event for Ms. Greene. It was supposed to take place on Saturday at the Westgate Resorts in Kissimmee, Fla. But backlash ensued after State Representative Anna V. Eskamani, a Democrat, posted on social media a screenshot of a text that advertised the event as being on the “3rd Anniversary of Jan 6.”Ms. Greene has repeatedly downplayed, and at times defended, the deadly insurrection at the Capitol three years ago. She has elevated popular right-wing claims, which have been refuted, that the attack was orchestrated by F.B.I. agents. In November, she called on House Speaker Mike Johnson to create a new Jan. 6 select committee to investigate the original committee’s members.Ms. Greene addressed the change in venue on Friday night, writing on the social media platform X that she won’t be backing down to Democrats who she claimed “tried to shut down my book-signing, but the show must go on!!”Mark Cross, the chairman of the Osceola County Republican Party, said he had first received notice that the venue had pulled out on Thursday evening. He attributed the cancellation to a “combination of disinformation that was put out and a lot of miscommunication between parties.”The theme of the event was meant to honor Republican women, Mr. Cross said, and the event “just happened to be on Jan. 6.” He added, “We’re not going out of the way to celebrate Jan. 6 — it’s something that happened. It was a negative thing for everyone involved.” He noted that the group “didn’t pick the day.”A representative for the resort confirmed that the event was no longer taking place there but declined to elaborate. “Please be advised that Westgate was not made aware of the purpose of this event when we were approached to host a book-signing,” Westgate Resorts said in a statement to NBC News, which first reported on the event. The party’s book-signing for Ms. Greene will now take place on Saturday at a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in St. Cloud, Fla., Mr. Cross said.The event was originally advertised as an opportunity for attendees to hear from Ms. Greene and receive signed copies of her book, “M.T.G.” Prices to attend started at $45 for general admission and went up to $1,000 for “super V.I.P.s,” who would be allowed to attend a “special private briefing on J6 and DC.”Ms. Eskamani said in an interview that she was sent screenshots of the text by two friends. She praised Floridians who had “created the backlash” that preceded the cancellation of the event at the resort.“When I saw that text message, my first reaction was, ‘Is this a joke?’” she said. “No one should be commemorating, in a celebratory fashion or even with a book-signing, Jan. 6.” More