House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

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      No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts With Donald Trump

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      In a 2019 ruling requiring the former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify at a congressional hearing about former President Donald Trump’s alleged abuses of power, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared that “presidents are not kings.” If we take that admonition from our next Supreme Court justice seriously and look at the evidence amassed so far by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, we can — and in fact must — conclude that the prosecution of Mr. Trump is not only permissible but required for the sake of American democracy.This week’s hearings showed us that Mr. Trump acted as if he thought he was a king, not a president subject to the same rules as the rest of us. The hearings featured extraordinary testimony about the relentless pressure to subvert the 2020 election that the former president and his allies brought against at least 31 state and local officials in states he lost, like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. He or his allies twisted the arm of everyone from top personnel at the U.S. Department of Justice to lower-level election workers.The evidence and the testimony offered demonstrates why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department should convene a grand jury now, if it hasn’t already, to consider indicting Mr. Trump for crimes related to his attempt to overturn the results of the election, before he declares his candidacy for president in 2024, perhaps as early as this summer.Although a Trump prosecution is far from certain to succeed, too much focus has been put on the risks of prosecuting him and too little on the risks of not doing so. The consequences of a failure to act for the future of democratic elections are enormous.There’s no denying that prosecuting Mr. Trump is fraught with legal difficulties. To the extent that charges like obstructing an official proceeding or conspiring to defraud the United States turn on Mr. Trump’s state of mind — an issue on which there is significant debate — it may be tough to get to the bottom of what he actually believed, given his history of lying and doubling down when confronted with contrary facts. And Mr. Trump could try to shift blame by claiming that he was relying on his lawyers — including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — who amplified the phony claims of fraud and who concocted faulty legal arguments to overturn the results of the election. Mr. Trump could avoid conviction if there’s even one juror who believes his repeated lies about the 2020 election.And yes, there are political difficulties too. The “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton at 2016 Trump rallies for her use of a personal email server while she was secretary of state were so pernicious because threatening to jail political enemies can lead to a deterioration of democratic values. If each presidential administration is investigating and prosecuting the last, respect for both the electoral process and the legal process may be undermined.That concern is real, but if there has ever been a case extreme enough to warrant indicting a president, then this is the case, and Mr. Trump is the person. This is not just because of what he will do if he is elected again after not being indicted (and after not being convicted following a pair of impeachments, one for the very conduct under discussion), but also because of the message it sends for the future.Leaving Mr. Trump unprosecuted would be saying it was fine to call federal, state and local officials, including many who have sworn constitutional oaths, and ask or even demand of them that they do his personal and political bidding.The testimony from the hearings reveals a coordinated and extensive plot to overturn the will of the people and install Mr. Trump as president despite Joe Biden winning the election by 74 Electoral College votes (not to mention a margin of about seven million in the popular vote). There was political pressure, and sometimes threats of violence, across the board. Mr. Trump and his cronies hounded poll workers and election officials to admit to nonexistent fraud or to recount votes and change vote totals.Wandrea Moss, known as Shaye, a former Georgia election worker, testified Tuesday about the harassment and violent threats she faced after Trump allies accused her and her mother of election fraud. As The Associated Press reported, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Giuliani, pointed to surveillance video of the two women working on ballot counting and “said the footage showed the women ‘surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.’” The “USB ports” turned out to be ginger mints.It is no wonder that election workers and election officials are leaving their offices in fear of violence and harassment.Former top Department of Justice officials in the Trump administration testified on Thursday about pressure from Mr. Trump, in collusion with a lower-level department official named Jeffrey Clark, to issue a letter falsely claiming evidence of significant fraud in the elections. We heard in Thursday’s hearing that Mr. Trump, in a meeting that echoed his earlier role as boss on the television show “The Apprentice,” almost fired the attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to replace him with Mr. Clark, who had no experience in either criminal law or election law.The confirmation by the Department of Justice under Mr. Clark of this “fraud” would have served as a predicate for state legislators, also pressured by Mr. Trump and his allies, to “decertify” Biden electors and conjure up a new slate of electors supporting Mr. Trump.The pressure did not stop there. An earlier committee hearing recounted severe pressure from Mr. Trump on Vice President Mike Pence to manipulate the rules for Congress to count electoral votes, a plan that depended on members of Congress supporting spurious objections to the Electoral College votes in states that Mr. Biden won.Mr. Trump also whipped up the Jan. 6 crowd for “wild” protests and encouraged it to join him in pressuring Mr. Pence to violate his constitutional oath and manipulate the Electoral College count.In his testimony on Tuesday before the Jan. 6 committee, the speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, described the intense barrage coming at him from calls from Mr. Trump and his allies, and from Trump supporters who protested outside his house and threatened his neighbor with violence. But Mr. Bowers compared the Trump crew to the book “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” because they failed to come forward with a plausible plan to overturn the election results in Arizona or elsewhere.Seeing the group as bumbling, though, minimizes the danger of what Mr. Trump and his allies attempted and downplays how deadly serious this was: As Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, noted, the country “barely” survived Mr. Trump’s attempt at election subversion, which could have worked despite the legal and factual weaknesses in the fraud claims.What if people of less fortitude than Mr. Bowers and others caved? Consider Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, who also testified on Tuesday about pressure from the Trump team. He described a direct phone call from a man who was then the sitting president prodding him to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Georgia from Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump. What if, instead of rebuffing Mr. Trump, Mr. Raffensperger declared that he felt there were enough questions about the vote count in Democratic counties in Georgia to warrant the legislature’s appointment of new electors, as Mr. Trump had urged?If even one of these officials had cooperated, the dikes could have broken, and claims in state after state could have proliferated.There’s no question that Mr. Trump tried to steal the election. Richard Donoghue, a top official at the Department of Justice serving during the postelection period, testified on Thursday that he knocked down with extensive evidence every cockamamie theory of voter fraud that Mr. Trump and his allies raised, but to no avail. He testified that there were nothing but “isolated” instances of fraud, the same conclusion reached by the former attorney general, Bill Barr.Mr. Bowers testified that when he demanded evidence from Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Giuliani said he had theories, but no evidence. The president appears to have known it too. According to Mr. Donoghue’s handwritten notes of his conversation with Mr. Trump, when confronted with the lack of evidence of fraud, the former president said, “Just say the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me” and the Republican congressmen. The president even talked about having the federal government seize voting machines, perhaps in an attempt to rerun the election.The longer Mr. Garland waits to bring charges against Mr. Trump, the harder it will be, especially if Mr. Trump has already declared for president and can say that the prosecution is politically motivated to help Democrats win in 2024. The fact that federal investigators conducted a search for evidence at the home of Mr. Clark shows that the department is working its way ever closer to the former president.What Mr. Trump did in its totality and in many individual instances was criminal. If Mr. Garland fails to act, it will only embolden Mr. Trump or someone like him to try again if he loses, this time aided by a brainwashed and cowered army of elected and election officials who stand ready to steal the election next time.Mr. Trump was the 45th president, not the first American king, but if we don’t deter conduct like this, the next head of state may come closer to claiming the kind of absolute power that is antithetical to everything the United States stands for.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen), who will join the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor of law in July, is the author of “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.” In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.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 Have Been So Much Better Than I Expected

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      I felt a nauseating dread as the Jan. 6 hearings approached, fearing that all they would do is demonstrate Donald Trump’s impunity. That the former president attempted a coup has been obvious since his mob descended on the Capitol, if not before. With Trump, however, the question has never been whether he’s committed outrageous misdeeds, but whether those misdeeds can be made to matter. Over and over again, the answer to that question has been no.It might still be no. But the hearings are having more of an impact than I expected. The decision by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to keep pro-Trump Republicans off the Jan. 6 committee has eliminated the back-and-forth bloviating that typically plague congressional inquiries, allowing investigators to present their findings with the narrative cohesion of a good true-crime series. Trump, who understands television, appears to be aware of how bad the hearings are for him; The Washington Post reported that he’s watching all of them and is furious at McCarthy for not putting anyone on the dais to defend him.There are signs that public opinion is moving, at least a little. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, compared to 52 percent in late April. Sixty percent think the committee’s investigation has been “fair and impartial.” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, has been conducting focus groups of Trump voters since Jan. 6. In her last two, none of the participants wanted Trump to run again — something that hadn’t happened before.Longwell emphasizes that these people aren’t watching the hearings, which they dismiss as partisan. But some of the news emerging from them is still sinking in. The Republicans in her focus groups aren’t mad at Trump, but they seem to be growing weary of him. “It is plausible that part of what the Jan. 6 hearings are doing is just creating more of that reminder that Trump is a lot to have to defend, a lot to deal with,” Longwell said.For some, the hearings are doing more than that. Dustin Stockton helped organize the pro-Trump bus tour that culminated in the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House. Politico once called him and his fiancée, Jennifer Lawrence, the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA world.” On Tuesday, after a hearing that included testimony by Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House, and the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Stockton tweeted, “This has been the most impactful of the January 6th Committee hearings. Embarrassed that I was fooled by the Fulton County ‘suitcases of ballots’ hoax.”He was referring to the conspiracy theory, pushed by Trump and his allies, that election workers smuggled fraudulent ballots into the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and ran them through the voting machines multiple times. Tuesday, he said, was the first time he realized the tale was a complete fabrication.This wasn’t a total about-face; as Hunter Walker reported in Rolling Stone, Stockton and Lawrence had already grown disillusioned with Trump. They claim they were appalled by the attack on the Capitol and blamed Trump for propping up what Stockton called “the worst chaos agents” in their milieu. Figuring that they couldn’t afford to fight subpoenas, they were cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee.Still, Stockton has been publicly skeptical of the congressional investigation, and he remains a hater of Joe Biden and a fan of right-wing trolling. The hearing on Tuesday, however, got to him, especially the testimony from Freeman and Moss about how their lives were upended by the lie Stockton helped spread.“To see the just absolute turmoil it caused in her life, and the human impact of that accusation, especially, was incredibly jarring,” Stockton said of Freeman.Very few on the right, of course, are watching these hearings as closely at Stockton, but he said he’s hearing from some people who are following them. “I think the loudest voices are doing their best to divert attention and not focus on it all,” he said. “There are tons of conservatives who private message me, who don’t have large voices, who are paying attention to some degree.” Some of them, he said, are deeply disappointed by what they’re hearing.Perhaps this makes sense. Elite conservatives mostly understood that Trump’s stories about a stolen election were absurd; as one senior Republican official asked The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” But his rank-and-file devotees weren’t all in on the con. Instead, they were the marks.“If there are parts of the population that are totally captive to Trump’s propaganda and cannot be reached by facts and truth, that part of the population will begin to shrink over time,” said Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan. 6 committee and an incorrigible optimist. “It’s certainly not going to grow.”There’s not going to be a big moment when the scales fall from Republican eyes. Too many already see Trump clearly and simply prefer autocrats to Democrats. Even Bowers, who at one hearing described Trump’s acolytes terrorizing his family while his daughter was dying, said he’d vote for Trump again if he’s the nominee. But as the Jan. 6 committee methodically lays out what was, for all its squalor and absurdity, a systematic plan to subvert the 2020 election, it will get marginally harder for Trump to present himself as a defrauded winner rather than the flailing loser he is.That might, in turn, make the prosecution of Trump and his enablers a tiny bit less politically fraught. Getting the truth out won’t guarantee justice. It’s at least a step toward making justice possible.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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      Panel Provides New Evidence That G.O.P. Members of Congress Sought Pardons

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      At least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons from President Donald J. Trump as he fought to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election, witnesses have told the House Jan. 6 committee, the panel disclosed on Thursday.Mr. Trump “had hinted at a blanket pardon for the Jan. 6 thing for anybody,” Mr. Trump’s former head of presidential personnel, Johnny McEntee, testified.Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, appeared to ask for a broad pardon, not limited to his role in Mr. Trump’s effort to reverse the outcome of the election. Mr. Gaetz even invoked the pardoned former President Richard M. Nixon as he did so, Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer for Mr. Trump, testified.“He mentioned Nixon, and I said, ‘Nixon’s pardon was never nearly that broad,’” Mr. Herschmann recounted.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama sent an email seeking a pre-emptive pardon for all 147 members of Congress who objected to the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College win.A former adviser to Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified that Mr. Gaetz, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona all expressed interest in pardons.She also testified that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio “talked about” pardons but did not directly ask for one, and that she heard of newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia also expressing interest to the White House Counsel’s Office.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida arriving at the Capitol in May.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesTaken together, the former White House aides portrayed members of Congress concerned about potential exposure to prosecution in the wake of their support for Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power. And the accounts provided an extraordinary, under-penalty-of-perjury portrait of efforts to use a president’s broad clemency powers for nakedly political purposes.In a statement, Mr. Perry denied seeking a pardon. “I stand by my statement that I never sought a presidential pardon for myself or other members of Congress,” he said. “At no time did I speak with Miss Hutchinson, a White House scheduler, nor any White House staff about a pardon for myself or any other member of Congress — this never happened.”Ms. Greene posted a clip of Ms. Hutchinson on Twitter and added: “Saying ‘I heard’ means you don’t know. Spreading gossip and lies is exactly what the January 6th Witch Hunt Committee is all about.” Mr. Gohmert also denied making such a request, and condemned the committee for how it has comported itself. Mr. Biggs similarly said that Ms. Hutchinson was “mistaken,” and that her testimony was edited “deceptively.”Mr. Gaetz did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Brooks confirmed seeking a pardon, but said it was because he believed the Justice Department would be “abused” by the Biden administration. He released the letter he sent the White House, in which he said he was putting the request in writing at the instruction of Mr. Trump.The fact that it had evidence that pardons were under discussion was previewed by the committee at an earlier hearing. And the panel previously revealed that a key figure in Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the election, the conservative lawyer John Eastman, had emailed another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, after the Capitol riot, asking to be “on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”Mr. Eastman appeared before the committee and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination repeatedly.It is unclear whether Mr. Gaetz’s reported request for a blanket pardon was driven by concerns about his attempts to overturn the election or other potential criminality. At the time Mr. Gaetz made the request, he had just come under Justice Department investigation for sex-trafficking a minor. He has not been charged.The question of who was getting pardons, and for what, was a source of enormous consternation in the final days of the Trump White House. The House select committee is using the information about the pardons to describe a broader effort to protect people who carried out Mr. Trump’s desires.In his final weeks, Mr. Trump randomly offered pardons to former aides who were jarred because they were not sure what he thought they had done that was criminal, two former officials have said. Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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      5 Takeaways From Thursday’s Jan. 6 Hearing

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      The House committee’s fifth hearing focused on President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to harness the powers of the Justice Department to remain in office. Relying on testimony of three former top Justice Department officials who played central roles in the episode, the committee laid out in detail how Mr. Trump and his allies in the department and on Capitol Hill sought to install a loyalist atop the Justice Department and reverse the election results from a key swing state.Here are five key takeaways.It was the most blatant attempt to use the Justice Department for political ends at least since Watergate.Mr. Trump aggressively pursued a plan to install as acting attorney general a little-known Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who was prepared to take actions to reverse the election results. As they fought to head off the move, a group of White House lawyers and the leadership of the Justice Department feared that the plan was so ill-conceived and dishonest that it would have spiraled the country into a constitutional crisis if it had succeeded.The president came so close to appointing Mr. Clark that the White House had already begun referring to him as the acting attorney general in call logs from Jan. 3, 2021. Later that day, Mr. Trump had a dramatic Oval Office showdown with top Justice Department officials and White House lawyers, who told Mr. Trump that there would be a “graveyard” at the Justice Department if he appointed Mr. Clark because so many top officials would resign.In the meeting, Mr. Trump chastised the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, for refusing to do more to help him find election fraud. Only after hours of argument — partly about the lack of substance behind Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud but also about the political ramifications for him if he took action that led to the exodus of top Justice Department officials — did Mr. Trump relent and back off his plan to replace Mr. Rosen with Mr. Clark.The heart of the scheme was a draft letter to officials in Georgia.At the center of the plan was a letter drafted by Mr. Clark and another Trump loyalist that they hoped to send to state officials in Georgia. The letter falsely asserted that the department had evidence of election fraud that could lead the state to rethink its certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory there. The letter recommended that the state call its legislature into session to study allegations of election fraud and consider naming an alternate slate of electors pledged to Mr. Trump.The department’s top officials and Mr. Trump’s legal team in the White House were all appalled by the letter because it would be giving the imprimatur of the nation’s top law enforcement agencies to claims of election fraud that the department had repeatedly investigated and found baseless. The letter was so outrageous that a top White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, testified that he told Mr. Clark that if he became attorney general and sent the letter he would be committing a felony.The Justice Department’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, testified at the hearing that sending it would have been tantamount to the Justice Department intervening in the outcome of the election.“For the department to insert itself into the political process this way, I think would have had grave consequences for the country,” Mr. Donoghue said. “It may have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”Trump would not give up on his claims of fraud.Time after time, the White House brought baseless and sometimes preposterous claims of election fraud — including internet conspiracy theories — to Justice Department officials so that they could use the nation’s law enforcement powers to investigate them. And time after time, the department and the F.B.I. found the claims had no validity.The pattern became so extraordinary that at one point the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, sent a YouTube video to department officials from Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, that claimed an Italian defense contractor uploaded software to a satellite that switched votes from Mr. Trump.A top Defense Department official, Kashyap Patel, followed up with Mr. Donoghue about the claim, and the acting defense secretary, Christopher C. Miller, reached out to a defense attaché in Italy to discuss the claim, which was never substantiated.About 90 minutes after Mr. Donoghue had helped persuade Mr. Trump not to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump would still not let go, calling Mr. Donoghue on his cellphone with another request: to look into a report that an immigration and customs agent in Georgia had seized a truck full of shredded ballots. There turned out to be nothing to it, Mr. Donoghue testified.Trump considered naming a loyalist lawyer as a special counsel.As Mr. Trump searched for any way to substantiate the false fraud claims, he tried to install a loyalist as a special counsel to investigate them. One of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Sidney Powell — who had become a public face of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election — said in testimony played by the committee that Mr. Trump discussed with her the possibility of taking on that position in December.The committee also played testimony of William P. Barr, who was attorney general until the middle of December 2020, saying that there was no basis to appoint a special counsel. And the committee suggested that the idea was part of the larger effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s victory and open the door to Congress considering alternate slates of Trump electors from swing states.“So let’s think here, what would a special counsel do?” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, who led the day’s questioning. “With only days to go until election certification, it wasn’t to investigate anything. An investigation, led by a special counsel, would just create an illusion of legitimacy and provide fake cover for those who would want to object, including those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.”Mr. Kinzinger added: “All of President Trump’s plans for the Justice Department were being rebuffed.”Members of Congress sought pardons — and Trump considered the requests.In the days after Jan. 6, several of Mr. Trump’s political allies on Capitol Hill, who had helped stoke the false election claims and efforts to overturn the results, sought pardons from Mr. Trump, who considered granting them, according to testimony on Thursday.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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      Abandoned by Trump, Mo Brooks Is Now Open to Testifying About Jan. 6

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      Stinging from his resounding defeat in Alabama’s Republican runoff for the Senate on Tuesday and a snub from former President Donald J. Trump, Representative Mo Brooks now appears to be willing to testify as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.Mr. Brooks signaled on Wednesday that he would comply with an impending subpoena from the bipartisan House committee that is leading the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol — but only under certain conditions.His comments to the media, reported by CNN on Wednesday, came one day after he lost a bitter primary runoff to Katie Britt. Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in March when he began slipping in the polls, and gave his support to Ms. Britt in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Brooks bemoaned his loss, telling a Politico reporter that the “bad guys won.”He hinged his willingness to testify before the House committee on being able to do so “in public so the public can see it — so they don’t get bits and pieces dribbled out,” Mr. Brooks said, according to CNN.The congressman added that he would only testify about matters related to Jan. 6, 2021, and that he wanted to see copies of documents that he might be asked about beforehand, the network reported.Mr. Brooks was not available for an interview on Thursday, and his office declined to elaborate on his comments.Mr. Brooks, a hard-right Republican and a once-fierce ally of Mr. Trump’s whom the former president has accused of becoming “woke,” has drawn intense scrutiny for his actions preceding the violence on Jan. 6.Outfitted in body armor at a rally before the siege, Mr. Brooks exhorted Mr. Trump’s election-denying supporters to start “kicking ass.”Investigators have also sought to question Mr. Brooks about his interactions with Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the attack. They zeroed in on Mr. Brooks’s comments in March, when he said that Mr. Trump had, since leaving office, repeatedly asked him to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.But as of Wednesday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the head of the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that Mr. Brooks still had not been served with a subpoena. Mr. Thompson said that process servers in Washington had been unable to track down Mr. Brooks because he had been campaigning in Alabama.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More

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      Who Is Richard Donoghue?

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      Richard P. Donoghue, who served as acting deputy attorney general in the Trump administration, was a crucial witness to President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election results, and one of several officials there who pumped the brakes on the plan.Mr. Donoghue repeatedly pushed back on Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, and he refused to go along when Mr. Trump insisted that the department simply “say that the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me,” according to notes Mr. Donoghue took of a Dec. 27, 2020, call with Mr. Trump and Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general.On Thursday, Mr. Donoghue was appearing in person before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in a hearing at which aides said the panel would reveal new evidence of Mr. Trump’s bid to use the nation’s law enforcement apparatus to invalidate his defeat and stay in power.Much is already known about Mr. Trump’s efforts and the resistance by Mr. Donoghue and his colleagues, including that the president asked the Justice Department to send letters to state election officials warning them that there had been widespread fraud in the election and to file lawsuits to help his campaign.During a hearing on Tuesday, the House committee played audio of an interview with Mr. Donoghue in which he recounted telling Mr. Trump that there was no suitcase containing fraudulent ballots in Georgia, a popular conspiracy theory that was based on a video selectively edited and shared by Mr. Trump’s allies.Mr. Trump “kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots,” Mr. Donoghue said in the interview. “I said, ‘No, sir, there is no suitcase.’”Mr. Trump, in his final weeks in office, had also planned to oust Mr. Rosen, when it was clear that he did not have his support to send Georgia state legislators a letter wrongly stating that the department was seriously investigating accusations of voter fraud.Mr. Donoghue convened the department’s senior leaders over the phone, making a plan that the group would resign en masse should Mr. Rosen be fired.Mr. Trump ultimately allowed Mr. Rosen to stay. More

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      Will Merrick Garland Prosecute Trump? Should He?

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      Readers discuss a guest essay weighing factors such as the likelihood of conviction and the political repercussions.Attorney General Merrick Garland.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated PressDrew Angerer/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “What Garland Needs to Decide Before Charging Trump,” by Jack Goldsmith (Opinion guest essay, June 22):If Professor Goldsmith is right, American democracy has already lost. In spelling out the difficulties that Attorney General Merrick Garland must overcome in order to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mr. Goldsmith all but concludes that the task is impossible. Prosecution will be portrayed as a political vendetta. Proving Mr. Trump’s guilty intent will be exceedingly hard, making an acquittal likely. And an acquittal will be seen by Mr. Trump and his supporters as a vindication.At the same time, Mr. Goldsmith concedes that a decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump will effectively place the president above the law. This bodes ill should Mr. Trump or someone like him again occupy the Oval Office.Is this really Mr. Garland’s only choice: a trial that threatens to tear an already divided nation apart, or allowing Mr. Trump to get away scot-free at the cost of undermining the rule of law? For the sake of democracy, there must be another option.Stephen NewmanTorontoThe writer is an associate professor of politics at York University.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith is right to praise Attorney General Merrick Garland for “gathering as much information as possible” before deciding whether to prosecute former President Donald Trump for defrauding the American people and interfering with the work of Congress.Professor Goldsmith is wrong, however, to suggest that Mr. Garland’s decision to indict Mr. Trump would be “a cataclysmic event from which the nation would not soon recover.” The cataclysm is already here, and it is of Mr. Trump’s making, not Mr. Garland’s.Once and for all, we must stop Donald Trump’s big lies, his intimidation of anyone who opposes him and his thinly veiled calls to violence. The only solution is to impose the forceful countermeasures of the law.Mr. Trump rode the whirlwind, and he must now reap the consequences if our democracy is to survive.Eric W. OrtsPhiladelphiaThe writer is a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.To the Editor:I’m so tired of hearing about the damage we may inflict on the nation and the presidency by holding Donald Trump to the same standard as any other citizen. Such concerns must be weighed against the very real damage caused by future presidents following the precedent he has established, operating the White House like a mob boss and pardoning his cronies when they do his bidding.This is a crossroads for America. We can have only one standard for justice. Afford Donald Trump the same justice as any other citizen and let the chips fall where they may. When in doubt, perhaps it’s time to just default to doing the right thing.Lawrence LobertGrosse Pointe Park, Mich.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith suggests that, in weighing whether to indict Donald Trump, Attorney General Merrick Garland must consider “whether the national interest would be served by prosecuting Mr. Trump.” It is, he argues, “a judgment call about the nature, and fate, of our democracy.”Quite so. And that is why Mr. Goldsmith errs in suggesting that the judgment should be made by Mr. Garland. Rather, it should be made by President Biden in deciding whether to pardon Mr. Trump. That is how the issue was resolved when President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, a compelling precedent for the current situation.Douglas M. ParkerOjai, Calif.The writer served in the White House Counsel’s Office during the Watergate investigations.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith’s masterful exposition of the problems arising from seeking to hold Donald Trump criminally liable highlights the tragedy of the failure to remove him through the impeachment process. History will judge craven senators like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton as the villains responsible for an American tragedy. They knew better but refused to risk their personal political ambitions.How sad for America that the lessons of “Macbeth” elude so many United States senators.Allan RothAuburndale, Mass.The writer is a lawyer and a retired professor from Rutgers law and business schools.To the Editor:Jack Goldsmith identifies very legitimate concerns facing Attorney General Merrick Garland as he wades through the complexities of indicting, charging and prosecuting Donald Trump. And yet, it seems to me unconscionable and immoral to let Mr. Trump slither away from accountability given the mountain of evidence proving beyond any doubt that he very intentionally attempted to subvert the 2020 election.A possible Plan B? The district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, must move forward immediately and indict and prosecute Mr. Trump under that state’s laws. With the addition of the fruits of the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, there is now more than enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with state felony offenses that would likely land him behind bars and prevent him from ever running for public office again, which is the very least of what he deserves and this country needs.Laurie KorenbaumBrooklynThe writer is a former federal prosecutor.To the Editor:The nation is being held hostage by a sore loser. If Donald Trump is not held accountable for the events of Jan. 6, the precedent is set for every future election when the loser doesn’t agree with the outcome. We would invite anarchy in every election.I think it’s a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation, but the lack of consequences to bad behavior encourages more of the same.Fran HochmanGreat Neck, N.Y. More