House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

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      The House Jan. 6 Panel Has Set a High Bar: Showing Criminality

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      The committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has yet to decide on making criminal referrals. But its decision to subpoena Donald Trump is in keeping with its prosecutorial style.In the final moments of what will most likely be the last hearing for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, returned to a theme that has run through the committee’s work: criminality.Without naming names or providing any specifics, Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, asserted that the committee now has “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals” to the Justice Department for prosecution.It is not clear whether the committee will follow through and take the largely symbolic step of issuing a criminal referral for former President Donald J. Trump or anyone who worked with him to overturn the election and encourage the mob of his supporters who entered the Capitol seeking to block or delay certification of his defeat.But throughout its investigation and hearings, the committee has operated with a prosecutorial style, using the possibility of criminality like a cudgel in extraordinary ways. It has penetrated Mr. Trump’s inner circle, surfaced considerable new evidence and laid out a detailed narrative that could be useful to the Justice Department in deciding whether to bring charges.The panel is expected to issue a subpoena as soon as Tuesday seeking to compel Mr. Trump to testify before it wraps up its investigation and issues a final report.The committee’s effects on related criminal investigations are clear to see. Federal prosecutors and authorities conducting a local investigation in Georgia have found themselves interviewing some of the same witnesses already interviewed by the committee and issuing subpoenas for some of the same evidence already obtained by Congress.But in suggesting that its goal is to spur criminal charges, the committee is setting a standard for success that is beyond its power to carry out — and one that could risk overshadowing the work it has done in documenting Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power and marshal his supporters to help him.“People frequently walk up to me in the grocery store and they’re like, ‘Are you going to hold him accountable?’ That’s not Congress,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, said in a recent interview. “However, the Department of Justice can take the facts that we’ve outlined in our investigation and use them.”For all the focus that Ms. Cheney has put on producing criminal referrals, the committee has not been entirely cooperative with the Justice Department, slow-walking requests from the department for transcripts of the interviews it has conducted.The task of determining whether anyone broke the law is never mentioned in the resolution that led to the creation of the committee in June 2021. Its chief mission, according to a House resolution, is coming up with an authoritative account of what occurred, identifying failures by law enforcement and other causes of the violence, and providing recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But the committee has turned itself into an adjunct front loader to the Justice Department, developing new evidence, coming up with theories for laws that Mr. Trump and his aides might have broken and educating the public about them at nationally televised hearings that unfolded like an episodic running drama.Committee staff members — many of whom are former prosecutors — employed a strategy of highlighting a range of potential crimes or lanes for investigators to pursue at each of the panel’s public hearings.One hearing focused on how donors had been defrauded by being targeted for donations to help fight specious election fraud claims..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Other hearings focused on whether Mr. Trump and his aides committed the crimes of defrauding the American people or obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. At another, members raised the question of whether Mr. Trump or his aides committed witness tampering.“The purpose of this committee is to ensure that we tell the full truth, allow government officials to make changes to the system, to improve our guardrails, allow the American people to make better decisions about who they elect, and also to encourage D.O.J. to do their job,” Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.The committee’s work has already yielded two contempt of Congress prosecutions for failure to comply with subpoenas issued by the panel. The Justice Department has prosecuted two former aides to Mr. Trump — Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro — on contempt charges.A jury convicted Mr. Bannon, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump in an unrelated crime and is now scheduled to be sentenced on Friday. The Justice Department recommended on Monday that he serve six months for the two misdemeanor contempt charges and pay a $200,000 fine.Mr. Navarro is scheduled to go on trial on the contempt charges next month.“Congress has always been a stalking horse for the Justice Department’s investigations, but this was done expressly, blatantly and without mincing words and without hiding their motives, in a magnitude greater than what I’ve ever seen,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat who once served as the top lawyer in the House.Mr. Brand has strongly criticized the committee and now represents Mr. Navarro.In forming its staff, the committee took a different approach than previous congressional investigations, hiring several former federal prosecutors and putting a former United States attorney in charge of overseeing its day-to-day work.Some of the first public signs that the committee would be taking a different approach emerged last December when Ms. Cheney said the question of Mr. Trump’s criminality was one that the panel was investigating. She then began reading directly from the federal criminal code a law she believed he may have broken.“Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?” Ms. Cheney said.In March, in a civil court fight with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who helped advise Mr. Trump on how to overturn the election, the committee filed what amounted to a de facto indictment against Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman. Although the document held no criminal weight, the committee asserted that both men had engaged in criminal conduct in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack.“The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the filing said.The federal judge overseeing the case largely agreed, saying that it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had broken the law.Armed with the court’s ruling, Ms. Cheney took the lead in continuing to raise questions publicly about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. But it was the committee’s approach to its string of hearings that began in the late spring that provided a stark contrast to the Justice Department’s slow, methodical approach under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Speaking like prosecutors, members of the committee treated the American public at the hearings like it was a jury at a criminal trial as they methodically built a case that showed Mr. Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election, lied repeatedly to the public about it, amassed a crowd of his supporters who then stormed the Capitol and did nothing for hours to stop them.When a former West Wing aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, provided electrifying testimony in late June, she made a series of damaging disclosures that were new to the Justice Department and grabbed senior officials’ attention. The mounting public questions about the potential criminality of Mr. Trump and his allies raised questions about whether Mr. Garland was willing to take them on.As those questions crescendoed in the summer, reports emerged that federal prosecutors were indeed investigating them. Relying on the blueprint laid out by the committee, prosecutors in the months that followed subpoenaed many of the same witnesses who had testified before the committee.But the threshold for charging a former president or his top advisers is higher than for setting out a case at a congressional hearing with no one on hand to argue in Mr. Trump’s defense. Legal experts have a range of opinions about whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a case and whether Mr. Garland, who has the ultimate say, would make such a move, knowing how it could further divide the country, particularly if Mr. Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024. More

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      The Fall of Liz Cheney and the Rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      The Jan. 6 committee, which held its ninth and likely final hearing last Thursday, has lionized the figure of the Decent Republican.Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee, was its obvious star, imbued with moral authority by the fact that she’d sacrificed her position in Republican leadership, and possibly her political career, to stand up to Donald Trump. But there were many others.Rusty Bowers, the Trump-supporting speaker of the Arizona House who refused to help the former president subvert his state’s election results, was a portrait of rectitude, reading from his journal, “I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.” Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s chief of staff, defied attempts at intimidation to describe a president at once calculating and berserk.“When you look back at what has come out through this committee’s work, the most striking fact is that all this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” the committee’s Democratic chairman, Bennie Thompson, said on Thursday.This attempt to separate Trump from the Republican Party made political sense. The committee was trying to reach beyond committed Democratic voters who were already appalled by Trump, and the Republicans who testified had the credibility that comes with acting against their own political interest. But the emphasis on Republican valor meant that the story the committee told, while compelling, was incomplete. Going forward, the threat to the American experiment comes not just from Trump but from the Republican base, which is making the figure of the Decent Republican a quaint curiosity.The problem for Decent Republicans is that their party’s internal democracy makes a commitment to democracy writ large impossible. For decades, prominent right-wing politicians, pastors and pundits — Cheney very much included — cultivated in their base the belief that Democrats represent totalitarian evil. Not surprisingly, the base came to see Democratic victories as intolerable, and rejected candidates who would respect the results of general elections. As The Washington Post reported, a majority of Republican nominees for House, Senate and important statewide offices either doubt or deny that Joe Biden won in 2020.Liz CheneyMark Peterson for The New York TimesQueen of the election deniers is Marjorie Taylor Greene. In his engrossing new book “Weapons of Mass Delusion,” Robert Draper chronicles Greene’s rise in parallel with Cheney’s fall. (An adapted excerpt was just published by The Times Magazine.)Plenty of Republican officials, and ex-officials, wish it were the reverse. Draper has a detailed re-creation of the Feb. 3, 2021, meeting where House Republicans first voted on removing Cheney from her position as Republican conference chair, a vote she survived. “How is it going to look if we kick out Liz Cheney and keep Marjorie Taylor Greene?” asked Tom Reed, a moderate Republican from upstate New York.Initially, Kevin McCarthy, House minority leader, persuaded the party to close ranks behind both Cheney and Greene. “I’m not letting Dems pick us off one by one,” he said, adding: “You elected me leader. Let. Me. Lead.”But McCarthy is, fundamentally, a follower. By May, Draper writes, House Republicans were telling him that “Cheney was becoming a major distraction and a problem for their voters back home.” Greene, meanwhile, had a deep connection to those voters, who considered Democrats demonic and the elections they win fake. This gave her power that McCarthy deferred to.According to Draper, McCarthy invited Greene “to high-level conferences in his office, making a show of sitting next to her and soliciting her opinions.” Last year Democrats stripped Greene of her committee assignments for promoting conspiracy theories and suggesting that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, should be executed. If Republicans win the House, McCarthy has promised to put Greene on more powerful committees than she was on before. A source told Draper that McCarthy even offered Greene a leadership position.The truth is, if Republicans win — a recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows them ahead by three points among likely voters — Greene will be a leader no matter what McCarthy does. Chances are she’ll be at the forefront of an expanding MAGA squad, with at least one Republican who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and maybe more. A Georgia Republican who has promised to be a “great teammate” for Greene, Mike Collins, has a campaign video in which he shoots a gun at what looks like a garbage can full of explosives marked “Voting Machine.”It goes without saying that these Republicans will disband the Jan. 6 committee and impeach Joe Biden. They’ll probably seek vengeance for Greene — and Paul Gosar, who lost his committee assignments for tweeting an anime video altered to show him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — by stripping Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives of their committee assignments. Expect them to shut down the government more than once and to launch investigations into the Department of Justice over its investigation of Trump. If the 2024 election is disputed, they’ll do all they can to swing it to Republicans. It’s what their voters are sending them to Congress to do.“Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost,” Cheney said at the most recent Jan. 6 hearing. “We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” Indeed, we have a guarantee that many of them won’t be.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Donald Trump Has Told Americans Exactly Who He Is

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      The biggest news to come out of the ninth and (for now) final hearing of the Jan. 6 committee, on Thursday afternoon, was obvious: A subpoena requiring a former president to testify about his role in a deadly insurrection that he incited in order to prevent the transfer of power to his lawful successor is, to put it mildly, not something you see every day.It was the right thing to do, although even in the drama of the moment (Mr. Schiff? Aye. Ms. Cheney? Aye.) it felt somewhat obligatory. After more than a year of dogged investigation involving hundreds of witnesses; thousands of texts, emails and other documents; countless sickening videos and photographs; and breathtaking testimony about the events leading up to that horrific day — all pointing directly at Donald Trump — how else could the committee have wrapped things up?“We want to hear from him,” Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said in justifying the extraordinary motion, which he and the other members proceeded to authorize by a 9-to-0 vote.Whether we actually hear from Mr. Trump is another matter. Immediately after the hearing, he mocked the committee on his social media site, asking why it had not called him to testify months ago. Anyone who hasn’t been in a coma for the past seven years could tell you this is classic Trumpian misdirection. The man doesn’t take any oath he isn’t prepared to violate, and he goes to lengths to avoid appearing anywhere that he can be criminally charged for lying.On the other hand, Mr. Trump craves the spotlight. If the committee were to agree to his reported demand that his testimony be aired on live TV, he might actually go through with it. After all, it would be free prepublicity for his likely presidential run — even if he did nothing but invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself, as he did more than 400 times during a deposition last summer, part of a New York State investigation into whether he fraudulently inflated his real estate assets. (The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, determined that he had, suing Mr. Trump, his family business and three of his adult children for lying to lenders and insurers to the tune of billions of dollars.)However the subpoena negotiations play out, it’s important to remember one thing: We already have heard from him. Again and again and again and again, Mr. Trump has told the American people who he is, what he wants and exactly how he plans to get it — the law, the Constitution and the Republic be damned.Sometimes he says it directly; sometimes it comes through the remarks of his closest allies or administration officials. Consider just a sampling of quotations that the Jan. 6 committee summarized in Thursday’s hearing:‘We want all voting to stop.’Mr. Trump said this on national television, in the early morning hours of Nov. 4, after initial vote counts that showed him in the lead began to move toward Joe Biden as more votes rolled in. The phenomenon was so predictable that it already had a name: the blue shift. In fact, Mr. Trump was warned repeatedly that this was very likely to happen, in part because of his own actions. Throughout the summer of 2020, he discouraged his supporters from voting by mail, meaning that mail-in ballots, which some states don’t start counting until polls close, would skew toward Democrats. Rather than accept what he must have known to be true, Mr. Trump effectively called for the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of Americans. But it was worse than that.‘What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s going to declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s a winner.’That was Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a former top White House adviser, speaking with a group of associates shortly before Election Day 2020. He was laying out in plain view the plan he knew was in the works. And it had been in the works for months. As the committee revealed on Thursday, Brad Parscale, who managed Mr. Trump’s 2020 bid, testified that the former president “planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost.”‘There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.’Bill Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, said this in his testimony to the committee, describing his frustration with trying to bat away the unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud that Mr. Trump kept bringing to him — claims that were rejected by every federal and state court to consider them in the months after Election Day. When Mr. Barr resigned in December 2020, Mr. Trump attempted to replace him with Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer in the Justice Department who had expressed a willingness to help Mr. Trump subvert the election. The plan failed only when top department officials threatened to resign if Mr. Clark got the job.‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost, but we’re going to keep trying.’According to testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff, Mr. Meadows said this to her soon after Mr. Trump called Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and tried in vain to shake him down for 11,780 votes, exactly one more than Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. That was on Jan. 2, four days before Mr. Trump stood before tens of thousands of his supporters at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., and repeated many of the claims of voting fraud that he had been repeatedly told were false. He knew that many of those supporters were armed, because they had refused to pass through the magnetometers that had been set up for Mr. Trump’s safety. But he didn’t care. As he said, according to Ms. Hutchinson, “They’re not here to hurt me.”As the committee revealed on Thursday, the Secret Service was aware of the threat of violence and specifically of an armed attack on the Capitol more than a week before Jan. 6. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” one tipster wrote. Mr. Trump was informed of the threats, too, before he whipped the mob into a frenzy and urged them to march on the Capitol.These are only a few examples pulled from the immense body of evidence that the Jan. 6 committee has compiled for the American people and the world to see. Together they paint a clear and damning picture of the man who sat in the Oval Office for four years and will almost certainly try to again. Before that happens, Mr. Trump must be “required to answer for his actions,” as Mr. Thompson rightly said. It sounds so basic and yet, with Mr. Trump, it has remained so elusive.That may be on the verge of changing. In addition to a criminal prosecution for the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Trump could well be charged with federal offenses over the removal from the White House of hundreds of documents, some highly classified. He also faces a potential prosecution in Georgia for his efforts to subvert the election there.These prosecutions would not by themselves solve all our problems. They would not neutralize the danger of the Republican Party, which is now infected from coast to coast with proudly ignorant conspiracymongers, wild-eyed election deniers and gun-toting maniacs. Led by Mr. Trump, the party has morphed into the greatest threat to the Republic since the Confederacy: a revanchist cult that refuses to accept electoral defeat. The Times reported on Thursday that a vast majority of the Republican candidates for top federal and state offices around the country either question or deny the 2020 presidential outcome, despite the lack of any supporting evidence.Still, prosecutions would send a critical message to those who have put their careers and even lives on the line for American democracy or are considering doing so in the future: that their sacrifices are worth it. That when they come forward and speak the truth, the system responds with accountability. That when other people, especially the most powerful people, don’t play by the rules, they face consequences.As Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, put it on Thursday, “Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost. We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” She’s right, but we can make it more likely that they will be in place by holding Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators to account. If we don’t, the message we are sending is that in America, elections can be subverted and political violence is acceptable.The Jan. 6 committee’s great legacy is helping to thwart that future by laying a path to true accountability. It is up to us — and to the Department of Justice — to walk it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Jan. 6 Hearings Are Over. These 3 Things Must Happen Now.

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      On Thursday, in what was probably its final public hearing before the election, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol revealed new details about former President Donald Trump. Those details included Secret Service records documenting his determination to join a mob he knew was armed and headed for violence.The hearings have provided an indispensable record of an attempted coup that failed but that, as Representative Liz Cheney pointed out, threatens to recur. As the committee waits for the (unlikely) testimony of Mr. Trump, the torch now passes to other actors who hold the power to achieve accountability for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and to prevent another one from happening.This task fits into three key areas.Potential DisqualificationThe added proof of Mr. Trump’s involvement in the events of Jan. 6 renews the question of whether elections officials and courts can disqualify him from holding public office under the Constitution. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment provides for the disqualification from office of any person who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States or who has “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”The prospect of Mr. Trump being disqualified may sound unlikely, but it is not fanciful — a New Mexico county commissioner who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection was recently removed on just this basis.On the question of whether Mr. Trump engaged in insurrection, the evidence presented throughout the hearings suggests that he knew the mob was armed when he riled them up on Jan. 6, wanted the magnetometers (metal detectors) to be taken down, expressed a wish to join the mob at the Capitol and then cheered the insurrectionists on while watching the violence on television. It also includes evidence referenced on Thursday that he singled out Vice President Mike Pence in a tweet after knowing of the violence underway.It is also fair to ask whether Mr. Trump’s actions provided “aid and comfort” to insurrectionists. That prospect is reinforced by his failure to act for 187 minutes, despite pleas from advisers, while the mob ran rampant. Indeed, he offered repeated words of support that day to the mob, tweeting, when the mob finally began dispersing, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”For disqualification, voters would start the process by filing petitions to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot; elected officials and courts would then act on them.Disqualification under Section 3 involves several legal and factual challenges. For example, some say it would be better (or even necessary) to have enabling legislation passed by Congress. We strongly disagree, both because that’s not what the Constitution says and because courts have acted without such legislation over a period of more than 150 years. The committee should brush aside any legal misconceptions in its final report.In its report, the committee also should highlight the proof supporting Mr. Trump’s disqualification, scouring its now vast archive of over 1,000 interviews and millions of pages of documents and data to lay out the evidence about Mr. Trump and anyone else who may face consequences under the 14th Amendment (including members of Congress).A Road MapThe report could be modeled after the Watergate Road Map. That document laid out in painstaking detail the evidence of wrongdoing that an investigative body (there, a grand jury) had collected. It consisted of an inventory listing the evidence and then attached pieces of proof — whether it was a document, witness transcript or something else.In that case a grand jury was sending evidence to the House. In this case, it is the House that would be making evidence available to others. But the principle is the same: The committee should compile all the relevant evidence upon which 14th Amendment decision makers can rely.A similar road map may also be helpful to federal and state prosecutors. A formal criminal referral is less essential than laying out the relevant evidence for federal prosecutors to draw upon in their various investigations and for local ones like Fani Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga.The committee’s evidence on Thursday suggesting potential obstruction of justice by members of the Secret Service and White House staff will also be in the hands of federal prosecutors to resolve. In one of the more notable moments of the hearing, Representative Adam Schiff stated that evidence strongly suggested “certain White House and Secret Service witnesses” had falsely testified that they were not aware of the risk of violence.The committee’s report should also inform another group of regulators: bar officials. This was an attempted coup that utilized not tanks and guns but statutes and regulations, with lawyers playing a central role. Some bar associations have a practice of not opening investigations based on public complaints based on media reports. To break through that barrier, the committee should make formal disciplinary referrals accompanied by presentations of evidence.The American PeopleOne final handoff is perhaps most important of all: to voters. Well over 300 midterm candidates have embraced “the Big Lie” about the 2020 election being stolen. The committee has repeatedly warned of the danger this election-denial movement poses. As Ms. Cheney said on Thursday, “another Jan. 6 could happen again if we do not take necessary action to prevent it.”But the test of the committee’s work and its political impact will not end with the midterms. Some “stop the steal” candidates will win their races, and the postelection season will quickly pivot to the 2024 election.The baton is passing from the committee to others who have the power to take action on its work. That handoff is not only to election officials, prosecutors and judges. It is to all of us. Our democracy may well depend on what we do with it.Norman Eisen served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Danielle Brian is the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. E. Danya Perry is a former federal prosecutor and a New York State corruption investigator.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Jan. 6 Committee Has Been Almost Wholly Ineffective

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      The House Jan. 6 committee, which reconvenes on Thursday for its ninth and likely final hearing, has been assiduous in its research, artful in its cinematography and almost wholly ineffective in shifting views about the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 by a pro-Trump crowd.A Monmouth University poll taken this summer during the committee’s hiatus found public opinion largely unchanged — even calcified, to use a word that has lately come into vogue among American political scientists. The 65 percent of Americans who in late June remembered Jan. 6 as a “riot” had become 64 percent a month later when the summer hearings ended. Twenty-nine percent thought Joe Biden had been fraudulently elected before, and 29 percent did after.It is easy to see why minds have been so hard to change. Why would Democrats budge? There is incontrovertible evidence of Donald Trump’s misbehavior after Election Day 2020, and the committee members — wholly Democrat except for two Republicans hostile to Mr. Trump — are patiently laying it out.On the other hand, the committee members are pursuing their case in a grandiose and ideological manner, tarring Mr. Trump’s voting base as a bunch of authoritarians and election deniers. Mr. Trump’s machinations and protesters’ misdeeds, it appears, are being used as a pretext for self-appointed guardians of democracy to reorient American politics to their liking. So why would Republicans budge?There are two parties to Jan. 6 that the committee has had a hard time keeping distinct: the crowd and Mr. Trump. What the crowd did — to obstruct, through physical intimidation, the counting of votes — was a constitutional trespass of maximum gravity, for which the instigators deserve punishment.But who were the instigators? The committee has focused on extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that played an outsize role in storming the Capitol. But their violence, coordination and resolution were not typical of the broader crowd. No firearms were found on those who invaded the Capitol.It was not a coup attempt. And even if you believe it was, Mr. Trump was not leading it.For someone supposedly bent on overthrowing the government, Mr. Trump did an awful lot of television-watching and surprisingly little seizing of broadcast centers, mobilizing of commando units and issuing of emergency decrees. He certainly demeaned the office, embarrassed the country and behaved irresponsibly on Jan. 6. But to focus on that day distracts from his less dramatic but more consequential misdeeds.Elections require of candidates a never-say-die optimism that can lead even levelheaded people to make bold claims. After the German national election of 2002, the conservative candidate Edmund Stoiber walked onstage as his prospects of winning dwindled, and announced, with a thrilled smile, “We have won the election.” In 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico City’s head of government, refused to accept the official tally showing him the loser in a national presidential race, camped out in the city’s central square and drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to the city, where they battled the police.Mr. Trump’s loss was razor thin: A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin would have given him the victory. But his loss is different from the near misses to which it is sometimes compared. For one thing, Mr. Trump was an incumbent. While Samuel Tilden in 1876, Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000 each lost the presidency by a whisker, they weren’t in the Oval Office and suffered no demotion in dignity.Mr. Trump, by contrast, faced what the New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, the author of a new book on Mr. Trump, called “the worst predicament he could imagine: being turned into a loser by the entire country.” He took extraordinary measures, including a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, four days before the storming of the Capitol, in which Mr. Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” This was an unambiguous act of constitutional wrongdoing.But the Jan. 6 committee’s members are focused on something else. They have set themselves up less as investigators than as defenders of America’s democracy. This is the wrong venue for such a mission. The committee has wound up too partisan to carry it out. You can blame Republicans for nominating Trump defenders to the committee or Democrats for freezing them out, but the fact is the committee has seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both in open rebellion against their Trumpified party (and both now on their way out of Congress).The almost complete removal of oppositional checks leaves the committee ill suited to what is really a very delicate task. The Jan. 6 march on the Capitol was both a protest questioning the integrity of the 2020 election (protected by the First Amendment) and a violent assault on the integrity of the 2020 election (punishable by law).On top of that, there are two different contexts for understanding the event: judicial and civic. In the judicial context, those judges who ruled against more than 60 Trump-initiated and Trump-linked lawsuits to reopen vote counts and reverse election results did exactly the right thing. A courtroom is the wrong place to reward doubts about the legitimacy of elections. Overruling elections from the bench would undermine democracy and provide tomorrow’s lawyers with incentives to undermine it further.But in a civic context, matters are different. Citizens have a right to examine the matter as freely and doggedly as they wish.The committee jumbles all these contexts together. Ms. Cheney recently complained that Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, “is, right now, campaigning for election deniers.” She went on: “Either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.” But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and a person who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.In June the committee chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, opened the hearings by mentioning that he had taken an oath “to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” He added that “that oath was put to the test on Jan. 6.”Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War. The investigation into possible Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign — an investigation that on essential matters came up empty — reflected similar suspicions. Mr. Biden’s recent speech in Philadelphia, in which he described “MAGA Republicans” as part of an ideological threat to democracy and “the very soul of this country,” is evidence that he, too, views matters in this light.This is to misunderstand the nature of the challenge to American democracy posed by Donald Trump. Any reader of Michael Wolff’s book “Landslide,” about the final days of the Trump presidency, will see that his unsuitability is a matter of psychology, not ideology — of character, not politics. He’s George III, not Hitler. We haven’t given enough thought to flawed personalities in recent years. Modern government structures may have seemed too complex to be run on gut reactions and private whims. For several generations politicians with Mr. Trump’s personality profile were incapable of going far.That this is no longer the case ought to preoccupy us. After his defeat in November 2020, Mr. Trump began working the last available pressure point in the system — the Electoral College, as it turned out — to see if he could somehow lawyer and cajole his way to an alternative outcome. That a president would try such a thing required not just effrontery but also a colossal collapse in standards, integrity and public trust. But the requisite collapse had already taken place, by 2016 at the latest.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Jan. 6 Defendant Coordinated Volunteers to Help Glenn Youngkin

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      In the election last fall that sent Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s office and propelled him to G.O.P. stardom, the state and local Republican Party tasked Joseph Brody with coordinating volunteers to knock on doors of potential Youngkin voters in the state’s strategically crucial northern suburbs.But eight months earlier, Mr. Brody had been immersed in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, according to the F.B.I., which said that he assaulted a police officer with a metal barricade and breached several restricted areas, including the Senate floor and the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Now, Mr. Brody, 23, who the F.B.I. said was associated with the white nationalist group America First, is facing felony and misdemeanor charges for his role. The candidate he would go on to help, Mr. Youngkin, tried during his campaign to keep himself at arm’s length from former President Donald J. Trump, and he called the Jan. 6 riot a “blight on our democracy.”Shortly after Mr. Brody’s arrest last month, an image scraped from the internet by online sleuths who call themselves “Sedition Hunters” showed a man in a MAGA hat holding a high-powered rifle in front of a Nazi flag, with a bandanna concealing his face. The group, which has provided information that has helped law enforcement officials make hundreds of arrests related to Jan. 6, said the man in the photo was Mr. Brody.A public defender listed for Mr. Brody did not respond to several requests for comment. Messages sent to an email account for Mr. Brody went unanswered. There was no answer at a phone number listed for him.Mr. Youngkin’s office referred questions about Mr. Brody to Kristin Davison, a political consultant for the governor, who said in an email on Friday that Mr. Brody “did not work for or with the Youngkin campaign.”The Fairfax County Republican Committee twice listed Mr. Brody, who is from Springfield, Va., in Fairfax, as helping to coordinate a volunteer effort to knock on doors for “Team Youngkin.” When asked about those online listings, Ms. Davison said, “Those are not posts from the Youngkin campaign.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Youngkin’s campaign logo appeared on both pages, which included an official email address associated with the Republican Party of Virginia for Mr. Brody.“Mr. Brody was employed by the party as a door-knocker for one month last fall,” Ellie Sorensen, a state G.O.P. spokeswoman, said in an email on Monday. “He has not been employed by the Republican Party of Virginia for over a year.”Ms. Sorensen did not comment further about the charges against Mr. Brody or what had led to the end of his employment with the party.The Fairfax Republicans did not respond to multiple requests for comment.According to a criminal affidavit, Mr. Brody recorded and photographed senators’ desks during the Capitol attack, in which he wore a neck gaiter with an American flag pattern. Later, he “assisted another rioter in using a metal barricade against a Capitol Police officer, knocking the officer back as he attempted to secure the north door,” an F.B.I. agent said in the affidavit.Federal investigators said Mr. Brody had previously met four other men who were recently charged in the attack at an event held by America First, whose followers are known as Groypers. The movement’s leader, Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white supremacist who has been denounced by conservative organizations as a Holocaust denier and a racist, was issued a subpoena by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.In one photograph that a group of Sedition Hunters said it had obtained of Mr. Brody, a young political canvasser holds a campaign sign for Mr. Youngkin. The group contrasted that image with other postings it said were from Mr. Brody’s social media accounts, some of which showed Nazi symbols and diatribes against women.Luke Broadwater More

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      Ginni Thomas Repeats False 2020 Election Claim in Jan. 6 Interview

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      In a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Thomas reiterated her false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a conservative activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election, told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that she never discussed those efforts with her husband, during a closed-door interview in which she continued to perpetuate the false claim that the election was stolen.Leaving the interview, which took place at an office building near the Capitol and lasted about four hours, Ms. Thomas smiled in response to reporters’ questions, but declined to answer any publicly.She did, however, answer questions behind closed doors, said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, who added that her testimony could be included in an upcoming hearing.“If there’s something of merit, it will be,” he said.During her interview, Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Thompson said, a belief she insisted upon in late 2020 as she pressured state legislators and the White House chief of staff to do more to try to invalidate the results.In a statement she read at the beginning of her testimony, Ms. Thomas denied having discussed her postelection activities with her husband.In her statement, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Thomas called it “an ironclad rule” that she and Justice Thomas never speak about cases pending before the Supreme Court. “It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence — the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” she added.The interview ended months of negotiations between the committee and Ms. Thomas over her testimony. The committee’s investigators had grown particularly interested in her communications with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who was in close contact with Mr. Trump and wrote a memo that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.“At this point, we’re glad she came,” Mr. Thompson said.After Ms. Thomas’s appearance on Thursday, her lawyer Mark Paoletta said she had been “happy to cooperate with the committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections.”“She answered all the committee’s questions,” Mr. Paoletta said in a statement. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated. Beyond that, she played no role in any events after the 2020 election results. As she wrote in a text to Mark Meadows at the time, she also condemned the violence on Jan. 6, as she abhors violence on any side of the aisle.”A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.Ms. Thomas exchanged text messages with Mr. Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in which she urged him to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she had reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the courts to keep himself in power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Ms. Thomas also pressed lawmakers in several states to fight the results of the election.But it was Ms. Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Eastman, a conservative lawyer who pushed Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, that have most interested investigators.“She’s a witness,” Mr. Thompson said Thursday. “We didn’t accuse her of anything.”The panel obtained at least one email between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman after a federal judge ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over documents to the panel from the period after the November 2020 election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.That same judge has said it is “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman committed two felonies as part of the effort, including conspiracy to defraud the American people.Mr. Paoletta has argued that the communications between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman contain little of value to the panel’s investigation.Ms. Thomas’s cooperation comes as the Jan. 6 committee is entering its final months of work after a summer of high-profile hearings and preparing an extensive report, which is expected to include recommendations for how to confront the threats to democracy highlighted by the riot and Mr. Trump’s drive to overturn the election.The interview came just days after the panel abruptly postponed a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, citing the hurricane bearing down on Florida. The hearing has yet to be rescheduled.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said Ms. Thomas’s interview showed that “people continue to cooperate with the committee and understand the importance of our investigation.”The panel has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and has received hundreds of thousands of documents and more than 10,000 submissions to its tip line since June.“There’s a lot more information coming in all the time,” Mr. Raskin said.He said the committee members have viewed thousands of hours’ worth of video images and tape but want to be “disciplined” about how they present them in the next hearing.“There are certain people who are going to denounce whatever we do, no matter what,” he said. “We just want to be able to complete the narrative and then deliver our recommendations about what needs to be done in order to insulate American democracy against coups, insurrection, political violence and electoral sabotage in the future.”Maggie Haberman More