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      Trump Urged Legislator to Overturn His 2020 Defeat in Wisconsin

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      Donald J. Trump called Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, on July 9 and pushed him to support a resolution to retract the state’s 10 electoral votes for President Biden.Donald J. Trump called a top Republican in the State Legislature in Wisconsin in recent days to lobby for a measure that would overturn his 2020 loss in the state to President Biden, the latest signal that the former president remains undaunted by congressional and criminal investigations into his election meddling.Mr. Trump’s advisers said the former president saw an opening to press the Republican official, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, after a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots.Since drop boxes were used during the 2020 election, Mr. Trump argued, the state should be able to invalidate the results of that election. He pushed Mr. Vos to support a resolution that would retract the state’s 10 electoral votes cast for Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump’s advisers said the phone call took place on July 9 — the day after the court issued its opinion.There is no mechanism in Wisconsin law to rescind the state’s electoral votes, nor does the United States Constitution allow for a state’s presidential election to be overturned after Congress has accepted the results. Still, Mr. Trump has persisted.Mr. Vos has repeatedly told Mr. Trump and his allies that decertifying the former president’s loss would violate the state’s Constitution.Mr. Trump “has a different opinion,” Mr. Vos told a television station in Milwaukee, WISN-TV, which first reported the phone call on Tuesday. Mr. Vos did not respond to messages on Wednesday.The call is only the latest indication that Mr. Trump remains fixated on nullifying the 2020 presidential contest 18 months after Mr. Biden replaced him in the White House. He has continued to prioritize his lies that he won the last election as he aims to influence the next one, signaling to his supporters that undermining the 2020 election should be the predominant issue for the party.His actions come as a prosecutor in Georgia is gathering evidence into whether Mr. Trump violated laws in his attempt to overturn results in the state. Mr. Trump’s own team was already concerned about potential legal consequences from the deluge of devastating testimony revealed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.And Mr. Trump may have created more legal headaches for himself when he phoned a witness in the House committee’s investigation after a hearing on June 29. Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican serving as the panel’s vice chairwoman, has said information about Mr. Trump’s call to the witness has been turned over to the Justice Department.In the past 10 days, Mr. Trump has endorsed candidates in Arizona and Oklahoma based in part on their support for his attempts to overturn the election or his criticisms of the House investigation.Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump rallied at the Wisconsin State Capitol shortly after the 2020 election.Lauren Justice for The New York Times“We won in 2020,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Tuesday reiterating his endorsement of David Farnsworth for a State Senate seat in Arizona. Mr. Farnsworth is running against Rusty Bowers, who is the Republican speaker of the Arizona House and who has been critical of the former president’s attempts to overturn the election. In the statement, Mr. Trump called Mr. Bowers a “weak and pathetic” Republican who “didn’t have the guts to do anything about the rigged and stolen election.”Mr. Trump has never stopped looking for ways to undo the results of the 2020 election, and his desire to keep talking about his false claims of widespread fraud has intensified as investigations into his conduct have become more focused.In Arizona, a review of the 2020 vote failed to change the outcome and instead affirmed the result. Mr. Trump’s allies have come up empty in their bid to overturn the results in Georgia. In recent months, his allies have instead focused their attention on Wisconsin, where Mr. Vos has tried to accommodate Mr. Trump’s increasing demands about the 2020 election for more than a year.When Mr. Trump called for an audit of the state’s votes days ahead of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s 2021 state convention, Mr. Vos used the gathering to announce he would appoint a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Michael Gableman, to investigate the election.Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, was appointed to investigate the 2020 election results in the state. Daniel Brenner for The New York TimesIn February, Mr. Trump released a statement asking “who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent Election?” Weeks later, Mr. Gableman’s report suggested that state legislators consider decertification.Mr. Vos repeatedly blocked efforts to hold a vote on decertification. Still, Mr. Vos met with leading proponents of decertification, something they held up as significant progress in their effort to undo the 2020 results.Mr. Trump and his allies have since turned on Mr. Vos. The former president has used his social media website to press Mr. Vos to act, and he released a statement on Tuesday suggesting that his supporters back Mr. Vos’s primary opponent if he fails to act.Mr. Vos is facing a spirited but underfunded primary challenger, Adam Steen, whose campaign hinges on the notion that Mr. Vos is not sufficiently loyal to Mr. Trump because he has blocked the decertification effort.And while Mr. Vos has not seen eye to eye with Mr. Trump on the election, his allies know the former president still holds a powerful grip on the party.An outside group supporting Mr. Vos in the primary recently mailed a flyer to Wisconsin Republicans with a picture of Mr. Vos and Mr. Trump sitting next to each other on a plane and smiling.“Leading the fight for election integrity!” the flyer reads.Maggie Haberman More

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      Pence Backs Trump Loyalists and Skeptics in House Elections

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      WASHINGTON — As Representative Darin LaHood, Republican of Illinois, prepared to campaign with Mike Pence, the former vice president, in his district last month, he braced for a backlash from his party’s right-wing base.Just days before, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had re-created in chilling detail how Mr. Pence had resisted President Donald J. Trump’s orders to overturn his defeat in Congress — and how Mr. Trump’s demands had put the vice president’s life at risk.Mr. LaHood’s fears of MAGA protesters and hostility to Mr. Pence never materialized; the former vice president received a warm welcome from the crowd at a Lincoln Day dinner in Peoria and at a closed-door fund-raising lunch with the congressman in Chicago, according to people who attended. But the concerns about how Mr. Pence would be received highlighted the awkward dynamic that has taken hold as the former vice president quietly campaigns for Republican members of Congress ahead of the midterm elections.House Republicans helped Mr. Trump spread the election lies that brought Mr. Pence within 40 feet of a mob that stormed the Capitol clamoring for his execution, and the vast majority of them remain publicly loyal to Mr. Trump, still the biggest draw and the most coveted endorsement on the campaign trail.But privately, many of them hope their party might soon return to some version of its pre-2016 identity — when Mr. Pence was regarded on the right as a symbol of conservative strength, not cowardice — and want to preserve a relationship with him in that case.Mr. Pence, who served six terms as a congressman from Indiana, has been eager to campaign for congressional candidates, particularly in the Midwest. He is seeking to carve out a viable lane of his own for a potential presidential run in 2024, even if it means helping some lawmakers who continue to spout the election lies that imperiled him.Mr. Pence spoke at an event for Representative Darin LaHood, right, in Peoria, Ill., last month.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesOver the past year, Mr. Pence has appeared at campaign events for more than a dozen members of Congress, happily attending steak fries, picnics and fund-raisers that have at times brought in half a million dollars apiece for candidates.Overall, his aides said, he has helped to raise millions of dollars for House Republicans, many of whom still see him as a well-liked former colleague who often played the role of Trump administration emissary to Congress. On Wednesday, his alliance with congressional Republicans will be on display when he speaks on Capitol Hill as a guest of the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus.That followed an appearance Tuesday night at a “Young Guns” fund-raising dinner hosted by Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, at Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse in Washington. Mr. Pence’s appearance there was described by an attendee as akin to a homecoming for him. Mr. Trump was mentioned only in the context of discussing the “Trump-Pence accomplishments.”Key Themes From the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarCard 1 of 5The state of the midterms. More

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      Trump Electors Targeted in Georgia Criminal Inquiry

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      A prosecutor in Atlanta is investigating interference in the 2020 presidential election, an inquiry that has engulfed Donald J. Trump and many of his allies.Prosecutors in Atlanta have informed 16 Trump supporters who formed an alternate slate of 2020 presidential electors from Georgia that they could face charges in an ongoing criminal investigation into election interference, underscoring the risk of criminal charges that Donald J. Trump and many of his allies may be facing in the state.The revelations were included in court filings released on Tuesday in an investigation being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County. They showed that while much attention has been focused on the House hearings in Washington into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the extent to which the Justice Department will investigate, it is a local prosecutor in Atlanta who may put Mr. Trump and his circle of allies in the most immediate legal peril.“This is a sign of a dramatic acceleration of her work,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment. He added that prosecutors typically work their way “up the food chain, so usually the first wave of target letters is not the last.”A special grand jury is looking into a range of potential issues, including the creation of a slate of 16 pro-Trump electors in the weeks after the election in an attempt to circumvent President Biden’s victory in the state. The district attorney is seeking testimony from a number of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has emerged as a central figure in the case, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whose lawyers agreed on Tuesday to have their objections heard in a court in Georgia instead of South Carolina or Washington.Some legal observers have argued that Mr. Trump’s actions put him at risk of being indicted on charges of violating relatively straightforward Georgia criminal statutes, including criminal solicitation to commit election fraud — most notably his postelection phone calls to Georgia officials like Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, whom he pressured “to find 11,780 votes,” enough to reverse the election results. A 114-page Brookings Institution analysis of the case, co-authored by Mr. Eisen, found Mr. Trump “at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes.”Ms. Willis, in court filings, has indicated that a number of other charges are being considered, including racketeering and conspiracy, which could take in a broad roster of Trump associates both inside and outside of Georgia. Ms. Willis is also weighing whether to subpoena Mr. Trump himself and seek his testimony, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, as she has recently sought the testimony of seven of his allies and advisers before the special grand jury.Lawyers for 11 of the electors reacted strongly to the designation of their clients as targets, saying that a local prosecutor had no jurisdiction to determine which federal electors were fake and which were real. The lawyers, Holly A. Pierson and Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass, and attempt to intimidate the nominee electors, not to investigate their conduct.”Ms. Willis’s office did not immediately comment, but she has said that “anything that is relevant to attempts to interfere with the Georgia election will be subject to review.”President Biden won Georgia and all 16 of its electoral votes. But after the election, some of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers came up with a plan to create slates of alternate electors in swings states like Georgia, falsely claiming that widespread fraud had disrupted the election in those states. Many of Mr. Trump’s White House advisers rejected the plan — and efforts to get Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6 — and viewed it as dangerous and illegal, testimony in the House hearings have shown.Two of the Georgia electors had already been identified as targets of Ms. Willis’s investigation: David Shafer, a Trump ally who chairs the state Republican Party, and Burt Jones, a Georgia state lawmaker who is running for lieutenant governor.David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressState Senator Burt Jones, a candidate for lieutenant governor.Pool photo by Brynn AndersonThe lawyers for 11 of the electors, including Mr. Shafer, accused Ms. Willis of politicizing the investigation and said that many “of the nominee electors are prominent figures in the Georgia G.O.P.” The electors include Mark Amick, who serves on the board of the Georgia Republican Foundation, a group of the party’s large donors; Vikki Consiglio, the party’s assistant treasurer; Shawn Still, who won a primary for a State Senate seat earlier this year; Brad Carver, an Atlanta lawyer; and Kay Godwin, the co-founder of a group called Georgia Conservatives in Action.Most of the electors were supposed to testify before the special grand jury next week. But in late June, Ms. Pierson and Ms. Debrow wrote in their filing that they were told by a special prosecutor that their 11 clients were considered targets — not just witnesses — in the investigation, after new evidence had come to light.“There is no legal or factual basis to label the nominee electors as targets of this or any grand jury,” the lawyers said. “Nonetheless, the D.A. has rashly elevated them from witnesses to targets, and the nominee electors have informed her of their intention to follow our legal counsel to invoke their state and federal constitutional and statutory rights not to provide substantive testimony.”“It’s bizarre,” said Clark D. Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta. “They’re arguing their case now, even though none of their clients have been indicted. The purpose of this motion appears to be to ask a judge to decide in advance of a grand jury decision that a grand jury can’t even indict them.”But the lawyers asserted that “states (and their local governments) have no authority to interfere (through attempted criminalization or otherwise) with the process of sending potential elector slates to Congress for it to adjudicate.” They also pointed to the 1960 presidential election in Hawaii, where both the Nixon and Kennedy campaigns submitted electors, in asserting that there was precedent for more than one slate of electors.Mr. Jones, in a motion earlier this week, called for Ms. Willis to recuse herself, because she has headlined fund-raisers for Charlie Bailey, a Democrat who is running against Mr. Jones.Ms. Willis rejected that idea in a filing on Tuesday.“The subject of the grand jury investigation that has ensnared Jones has no factual connection to the ongoing campaign for lieutenant governor,” she wrote, adding that “support for a political opponent” is “not among the extremely rare instances where a prosecutor is shown to have a personal interest in a prosecution.”The filing also said that Mr. Jones had “been treated identically to each of the 15 other unofficial ‘electors’ who represented themselves as properly certified electors for the 2020 presidential election and who received similar target status notification.”The potential legal exposure of the Republican officials could complicate Georgia’s November elections, starting with the lieutenant governor’s race. Last week, Mr. Bailey accused Mr. Jones of being “anti-American and unpatriotic” for taking part in a “failed attempted overthrow of the American government.”The investigation has also highlighted divisions within Republican ranks. Mr. Shafer has been a stalwart supporter of Mr. Trump and his baseless claims of a stolen election, which have put him at odds with Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, as well as Mr. Raffensperger. Both Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger easily defeated Trump-backed primary challengers this year.Representative Jody Hice, who lost in a May primary to Mr. Raffensperger, revealed this week that he had been subpoenaed in the investigation. A loyal Trump ally, he led a January 2021 challenge in the House of Representatives to the certification of Georgia’s electors. He is seeking to challenge the subpoena in federal court.The biggest question looming over the investigation, of course, is the potential exposure of Mr. Trump himself.“She’s made clear that she has a sharp eye on Trump,” Mr. Eisen said of Ms. Willis, adding that there were indications “that this first salvo of target letters will be followed by additional possible targets, culminating in the former president himself.” More

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      How Lawyer William Olson Pitched Trump on a 2020 Election Plot

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      The role of William J. Olson in advising the president in late 2020, which has not previously been disclosed, shows how fringe figures were influencing him at a critical time.Around 5 in the afternoon on Christmas Day in 2020, as many Americans were celebrating with family, President Donald J. Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., on the phone with a little-known conservative lawyer who was encouraging his attempts to overturn the election, according to a memo the lawyer later wrote documenting the call.The lawyer, William J. Olson, was promoting several extreme ideas to the president that Mr. Olson later conceded could be regarded as tantamount to declaring “martial law” and could even invite comparisons with Watergate. They included tampering with the Justice Department and firing the acting attorney general, according to the Dec. 28 memo by Mr. Olson, titled “Preserving Constitutional Order,” describing their discussions.“Our little band of lawyers is working on a memorandum that explains exactly what you can do,” Mr. Olson wrote in his memo, obtained by The New York Times, which he marked “privileged and confidential” and sent to the president. “The media will call this martial law,” he wrote, adding that “that is ‘fake news.’”The document highlights the previously unreported role of Mr. Olson in advising Mr. Trump as the president was increasingly turning to extreme, far-right figures outside the White House to pursue options that many of his official advisers had told him were impossible or unlawful, in an effort to cling to power.The involvement of a person like Mr. Olson, who now represents the conspiracy theorist and MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, underscores how the system that would normally insulate a president from rogue actors operating outside of official channels had broken down within weeks after the 2020 election.Read William J. Olson’s Memo to TrumpA memorandum sent in December 2020 to President Donald J. Trump by the right-wing lawyer William J. Olson on how to seek to overturn the election.Read DocumentThat left Mr. Trump in direct contact with people who promoted conspiracy theories or questionable legal ideas, telling him not only what he wanted to hear, but also that they — not the public servants advising him — were the only ones he could trust.“In our long conversation earlier this week, I could hear the shameful and dismissive attitude of the lawyer from White House Counsel’s Office toward you personally — but more importantly toward the Office of the President of the United States itself,” Mr. Olson wrote to Mr. Trump. “This is unacceptable.”The memo was written 10 days after one of the most dramatic meetings ever held in the Trump White House, during which three of the president’s White House advisers vied — at one point almost physically — with outside actors to influence Mr. Trump. In that meeting, the lawyer Sidney Powell and Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, pushed for Mr. Trump to seize voting machines and appoint Ms. Powell special counsel to investigate wild and groundless claims of voter fraud, even as White House lawyers fought back.But the memo suggests that, even after his aides had won that skirmish in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to seek extreme legal advice that ran counter to the recommendations of the Justice Department and the counsel’s office.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Issues Subpoena to Secret Service in Hunt for Text Messages

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      The House committee is seeking messages that an inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said had been erased.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the attack on the United States Capitol issued a subpoena to the Secret Service late Friday seeking text messages from Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, that were said to have been erased, as well as any after-action reports.In a statement, the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said the panel was seeking records from “any and all divisions” of the Secret Service “pertaining or relating in any way to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.”The development came after the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, met with the panel and told lawmakers that many of the texts were erased as part of a device replacement program even after the inspector general had requested them as part of his inquiry into the events of Jan. 6.The Secret Service has disputed parts of the inspector general’s findings, saying that data on some phones had been “lost” as part of a planned three-month “system migration” in January 2021, but none pertinent to the inquiry.The agency said that the project was underway before it received notice from the inspector general to preserve its data and that it did not “maliciously” delete text messages.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

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      Lo que sabemos sobre la reunión para que Trump siguiera en el poder

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      Incluso para los estándares de la Casa Blanca de Trump, la reunión celebrada el 18 de diciembre de 2020, que fue analizada en detalle esta semana por el comité que investiga los hechos del 6 de enero, fue extrema.In taped interviews, witnesses described a meeting in which President Donald J. Trump’s outside advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLa reunión duró más de seis horas, pasada la medianoche, y terminó en gritos que se escuchaban afuera de la sala. Los participantes lanzaban insultos y casi llegaron a los golpes. Algunas personas se fueron llorando.Incluso para los estándares de la Casa Blanca de Trump, donde las personas solían gritarse y el presidente Donald Trump también les gritaba, la reunión del 18 de diciembre de 2020 es considerada como un evento “desquiciado” y un punto de inflexión en los esfuerzos desesperados de Trump por permanecer en el poder después de haber perdido las elecciones.Los detalles de la reunión han sido reportados previamente, incluso por The New York Times y Axios, pero en una audiencia pública del comité del 6 de enero que se celebró el martes, los participantes en el caos ofrecieron una serie de nuevos detalles impactantes de la reunión entre Trump y las facciones rivales de asesores.“Llegó un punto en el que los gritos se escuchaban afuera”, le dijo Eric Herschmann, un abogado de la Casa Blanca, al comité en un testimonio grabado en video. “Había gente entrando, era tarde en la noche, y fue un día largo. Y pensé que lo que estaban proponiendo era una locura”.La propuesta era que el presidente le ordenara al secretario de Defensa que incautara las máquinas de votación para examinarlas en busca de fraude y que también designara a un abogado especial para acusar potencialmente a las personas de delitos y fue urdida por tres asesores externos: Sidney Powell, una abogada que trabajó en la campaña de Trump y promovió teorías de conspiración sobre un supuesto complot venezolano para manipular las máquinas de votación; Michael T. Flynn, el asesor de seguridad nacional que Trump despidió durante sus primeras semanas en el cargo; y Patrick Byrne, ex director ejecutivo de Overstock.com.Del otro lado estaban Pat A. Cipollone, el abogado de la Casa Blanca; Herschmann; y Derek Lyons, el secretario de personal de la Casa Blanca.La discusión comenzó poco después de que Powell y sus dos acompañantes fueran admitidos en la Casa Blanca por un asistente subalterno y se dirigieron a la Oficina Oval sin tener cita.Estuvieron a solas con Trump, durante unos 15 minutos, antes de que otros funcionarios fueron alertados de su presencia. Cipollone contó que recibió una llamada urgente de un miembro del personal para que fuese a la Oficina Oval.“Abrí la puerta y entré. Vi al general Flynn”, dijo en una entrevista grabada en video que el comité divulgó en la audiencia del martes. “Vi a Sidney Powell sentada ahí. No estaba feliz de ver a las personas que estaban en la Oficina Oval”.Cuando se le pidió que explicara por qué, Cipollone dijo: “En primer lugar, la persona de Overstock, nunca la conocí, nunca supe quién era ese tipo”. Lo primero que hizo, dijo Cipollone, fue decirle a Byrne: “¿Quién es usted?”. “Y me contestó”, dijo Cipollone. “No creo que ninguna de esas personas le estuvieran dando buenos consejos al presidente”.Lyons y Herschmann se unieron al grupo. “No fue una reunión casual”, dijo Lyons al comité en un testimonio grabado en video. “A veces, había gente gritándose, insultándose unos a otros. No eran personas que estaban sentadas en un sofá charlando”.El testimonio en video de Sidney Powell, en el que dijo que los asesores de la Casa Blanca sentían “desprecio y desdén por el presidente”, fue presentado durante la audiencia del martes.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPowell, en su entrevista grabada en video, describió a Trump como “muy interesado en escuchar” lo que ella y sus dos compañeros tenían que decir, cosas que “aparentemente nadie más se había molestado en informarle”.Herschmann dijo que estaba estupefacto por lo que estaba escuchando.“Y yo le preguntaba, ¿estás afirmando que los demócratas están trabajando con Hugo Chávez, los venezolanos y otras personas? Y, en un momento, el general Flynn sacó un diagrama que supuestamente mostraba las direcciones IP de todo el mundo y las comunicaciones a través de las máquinas. Y algunos comentarios sobre, por ejemplo, que los termostatos Nest están conectados a internet”.Cuando los funcionarios de la Casa Blanca le dijeron a Powell que había perdido decenas de juicios que cuestionaban los resultados de las elecciones de 2020, ella respondió: “Bueno, los jueces son corruptos”.“Y le pregunté: ¿Todos?”, dijo Herschmann. “¿Cada uno de los casos que ha perdido en este país? ¿Cada uno de esos jueces es corrupto? ¿Incluso los que nombramos?”.Powell testificó que los asesores de la Casa Blanca de Trump “no mostraron más que desprecio y desdén por el presidente”.El plan, según supieron los asesores de la Casa Blanca, era que Powell se convirtiera en la fiscala especial. Eso no salió bien.“No creo que Sidney Powell diría que pensé que era una buena idea nombrarla como abogada especial”, testificó Cipollone. “No pensé que ella debería ser nombrada en ningún cargo”.Cipollone también testificó que estaba alarmado por la insistencia de Powell y los demás de que hubo fraude electoral sin tener ninguna prueba que lo demostrara. “Cuando otras personas seguían sugiriendo que sí, la respuesta es, ¿a qué se refieren? En algún momento, tienes que demostrar lo que dices o callarte. Esa es mi opinión”.Herschmann describió un momento particularmente intenso. “Flynn me gritó que yo era un desertor y todo, caminaba mientras me gritaba. En cierto momento, también le grité: ‘O te calmas o te sientas’”.Cassidy Hutchinson, una de las principales asistentes de Mark Meadows, el jefe de gabinete de la Casa Blanca, podía escuchar los gritos desde afuera de la Oficina Oval. Le envió un mensaje de texto a un subjefe de personal, Anthony M. Ornato, diciendo que el ala oeste estaba “TRASTORNADA”.Después de que comenzó la reunión, los asesores de la Casa Blanca llamaron a Rudolph Giuliani, el abogado personal de Trump, para argumentar en contra de Powell. Eventualmente, la reunión migró a la Sala Roosevelt y la Sala del Gabinete, donde Giuliani estuvo solo por unos momentos, lo que, según lo que le dijo al comité, le pareció “algo genial”.Finalmente, el grupo recaló en la residencia de la Casa Blanca.Powell creía que había sido nombrada fiscala especial, algo que Trump declaró que quería hacer, por lo que debería tener una autorización de seguridad. Pero el resto de los asistentes se opusieron. Ella testificó que otros dijeron que incluso si eso sucedía, la ignorarían. Ella dijo que los habría “despedido” en el acto por esa insubordinación.Powell aseguró que Trump le dijo algo como: “¿Ves con lo que tengo que lidiar? Tengo que lidiar con esto todo el tiempo”.Eventualmente, Trump se retractó y rechazó la propuesta de los asesores externos. Pero a la mañana siguiente, el 19 de diciembre, escribió en Twitter instando a sus partidarios para que fuesen al Capitolio el 6 de enero, el día en que se fijó la sesión conjunta del Congreso para certificar los resultados del Colegio Electoral.“¡Estar allí, será salvaje!”, escribió.Maggie Haberman es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca. Se unió al Times en 2015 como corresponsal de campaña y formó parte de un equipo que ganó un Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores de Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. @maggieNYT More

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      Trump: A Brat, but Not a Child

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      “President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”Those were the words of Representative Liz Cheney on Tuesday in her opening statement at the Jan. 6 House select committee’s seventh hearing, as she swatted away what she said was a new strategy among Donald Trump’s defenders: claiming that he was manipulated by outside advisers and therefore “incapable of telling right from wrong.”Basically, Trump lied about the election because he was lied to about the election.But, as Cheney pointed out, Trump actively chose the counsel of “the crazies” over that of authorities, and therefore cannot, or at least should not, “escape responsibility by being willfully blind.”Willful blindness is a self-imposed ignorance, but as Thomas Jefferson put it: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect because it can always be pretended.”If Trump is a pro at anything, it is pretending. He is a brat, but he’s not a child.Cheney’s argument immediately recalled for me the case of Pamela Moses, a Black woman and activist in Memphis.In 2019, Moses wanted to register to vote. A judge told her that she couldn’t because she was still on felony probation.So Moses turned to another, lower authority — a probation officer — for a second opinion. The probation officer calculated (incorrectly, as it turns out) that her probation had ended and signed a certificate to that effect. Moses submitted the certificate with her voter registration form.The local district attorney later pressed criminal charges against Moses, arguing that she should have known she was ineligible to vote because the judge, the person with the most authority in the equation, had told her so.Moses was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to six years and a day in prison, with the judge saying, “You tricked the probation department into giving you documents saying you were off probation.”How is this materially different from what Trump did as he attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election? All the authorities — Bill Barr, head of the Department of Justice; White House lawyers; and state election officials — told him he had lost the election, but he sought other opinions, ones that confirmed his own view.This is not to say that the prosecution and conviction of Moses were justified, but rather to illustrate that we live in two different criminal justice realities: People without power, particularly minorities and those unable to pay expensive lawyers, are trapped in a ruthless and unyielding system, while the rich and powerful encounter an entirely different system, one cautious to the point of cowardice.Earlier this year, Moses’ conviction was thrown out because a judge ruled that the Tennessee Department of Correction had withheld evidence, and the prosecutor dropped all criminal charges against her.Still, by the time the ordeal was over, Moses had spent 82 days in custody, time she couldn’t get back, and she is now permanently barred from registering to vote or voting in the state.This is the least of the consequences Trump ought to face: He should be prohibited from participating in the electoral process henceforth.Some of the laws Trump may have broken in his crusade to overturn the election — like conspiracy to defraud the government — are more complicated than an illegal voter registration, but that is par for the course in a system that tilts in favor of the rich and powerful. Petty crime is always easier to prosecute than white-collar crime.This is a country in which the Internal Revenue Service audits poor families — households with less than $25,000 in annual income — at a rate five times higher than it audits everybody else, a Syracuse University analysis found.The way we target people for punishment in this country is rarely about a pursuit of justice and fairness; it simply reflects the reality that the vise squeezes hardest at the points of least resistance.The fact that Trump has thus far faced few legal repercussions for his many transgressions eats away at people’s faith.I believe this has contributed to our cratering confidence in American institutions, as measured by a recent Gallup poll. There are many factors undermining the faith Americans once had in their institutions, to be sure, but I believe a justice system rife with injustice is one of the main ones. In the poll, only 4 percent of Americans had a great deal of confidence in the criminal justice system.The only institution that did worse on that metric was Congress, with just 2 percent.We have a criminal justice crisis in this country, and people are portraying Trump’s behavior like that of a child in hopes of keeping him from facing consequences in a country that jails actual children.According to the Child Crime Prevention and Safety Center, “Approximately 10,000 minors under the age of 18 are housed in jails and prisons intended for adult offenders, and juveniles make up 1,200 of the 1.5 million people imprisoned in state and federal detention facilities.”There is no excuse for what Trump has done, and if he is not held accountable for it, even more faith in the United States as a “country of laws” will be lost.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      Jan. 6 and the Search for Direct Trump Links

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      The House panel investigating the Capitol riot has yet to find a proverbial smoking gun directly connecting the former president to the extremist groups that led the storming of the building. Is there one?The House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol held another blockbuster hearing on Tuesday, which featured previously unseen texts and draft social media posts suggesting that Donald Trump and his aides tried to make the march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even though they knew they were guiding a mob that was likely to turn violent.To better understand the state of the House inquiry and the related Justice Department investigations, I spoke with Alan Feuer, who has been leading The New York Times’s coverage of the prosecutions of the Jan. 6 rioters and has reported extensively on extremist groups and movements. Few journalists know this world better, or have spent more time delving into obscure figures and rank-and-file members of organizations like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.Alan wrote most recently about Ray Epps, a lifelong Arizonan who recently left the state, and whose participation in the protest outside the Capitol helped spark a conspiracy theory arguing that the entire day’s events were a black operation by the F.B.I.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:Have we learned anything significant or new about extremist groups tied to the Capitol riot in these hearings?The short answer is: Not really.In the run-up to Tuesday’s hearing, the committee teased the fact that it was going to show links between extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and people in Donald Trump’s orbit.But what actually emerged at the hearings was something a little different.The committee didn’t break new ground but instead used public court filings and news articles to trace connections between far-right groups and Trump-adjacent figures like Roger Stone, the political adviser, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. The fact that Stone and Flynn have maintained those connections is fairly well known.Moreover, there is no direct evidence — at least not yet — that their ties to extremist groups were put to use in any planning for the violence on Jan. 6.And what are we learning about ties between extremists and Trump or his aides?Well, see above for the committee’s answer to that question — with a single caveat.At a previous committee hearing, there was a brief reference made by Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. According to her, on the night before the Capitol attack, Trump asked Meadows to reach out to Stone and Flynn.We don’t know if that outreach ever occurred or, if it did, what was communicated. But it remains a tantalizing question: Why, apparently, did the president seek to open a channel to two people with ties to far-right groups on the eve of the Capitol attack?Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony drew the attention of the Justice Department.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesHutchinson’s testimony seems to have been a turning point in the investigation, and our colleagues have reported that it got the attention of Justice Department prosecutors. Can you help us understand why they might have been taken by surprise? I think most readers would assume that the Justice Department has more resources and a greater ability to compel cooperation than this committee does.While the House committee’s investigation into the events surrounding Jan. 6 and the Justice Department’s inquiry are covering much of the same ground, they operate by different rules.The committee has the power to issue subpoenas to pretty much anyone it wants. Federal prosecutors, however, are bound by rules of evidence that require pointing to some signs that a crime may have been committed before they use invasive techniques to gather evidence.Prosecutors may not have known that Hutchinson had valuable information before she testified in front of the committee because they did not necessarily have a way to compel those around her to give them a sense of what she knew. After her testimony, however, things look significantly different.Based on what we know now, how much can we say that the riot at the Capitol was planned, versus spontaneous?I’ll quibble slightly with the idea of planned vs. spontaneous and substitute a different pair of words: organized vs. spontaneous.What I mean is this: We know through the grueling work of open-source intelligence researchers and members of The New York Times’s stellar visual investigations team — who have pored over thousands and thousands of hours of video from Jan. 6 — that the Proud Boys, for example, were clearly moving in an organized and tactical manner on the ground that day.It’s clear that leaders and members of the group were instrumental in several advances on, and breaches of, the Capitol that were seemingly conducted in a way to make it appear as if other, more ordinary rioters took the lead.That said, we don’t know much about the planning surrounding the use of these tactics yet — or if anyone other than the Proud Boys helped contribute to any plans.We know that the group’s members arranged in advance to avoid wearing their typical uniforms in order to blend into the crowd, and we know that as late as Dec. 30, 2020, dozens of members took part in a virtual meeting where leaders ordered them to avoid antagonizing the police.But at least so far, there is no smoking gun laying out a detailed plot to storm the Capitol.The Justice Department has focused its prosecutions on those who committed violence or vandalism as they breached the Capitol. The narrative of critics of the investigations, including the Republican National Committee, is that the administration is pursuing a “witch hunt” of ordinary citizens who were just swept up in the moment. Is there anything to that critique?While it’s certainly true that the Justice Department’s most prominent cases concern those who had some role in violence or vandalism, many, many, many of the 850 or so people charged so far have been accused solely of petty offenses like trespassing and disorderly conduct.Those, of course, are federal crimes, and the evidence against even these low-level offenders is quite strong, given the incredible amount of video that was taken that day.So is it a “witch hunt” to charge people with clearly definable crimes for which there is abundant evidence?I’ll say this: The large majority of cases in which people merely walked into the Capitol, took a selfie and walked out — and did not brag about their conduct on social media or lie to investigators when they were being interviewed — have not resulted in any jail time whatsoever.What to readFifty-eight percent of American voters — cutting across nearly all demographics and ideologies — believe their system of government needs major reforms or a complete overhaul, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Reid Epstein explores the findings.David Sanger and Peter Baker preview President Biden’s trip to the Middle East, a journey freighted with both policy import and political peril for the White House. Follow our live coverage here.Prices rose 9.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier, according to the latest Consumer Price Index. Jeanna Smialek breaks down what it means.For Opinion, Jesse Wegman, a writer, and Damon Winter, a photographer, teamed up to produce “Gerrymander U.S.A.,” a stunning look at how partisan redistricting has shaped and, they would argue, distorted Texas politics. They visited the 13th Congressional District, which is represented by Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who has campaigned and governed as a hard-line Republican.In case you missed it: Read Jason Zengerle’s New York Times Magazine article on “The Vanishing Moderate Democrat.”— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More