House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

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      For Mike Pence, Jan. 6 Began Like Many Days. It Ended Like No Other.

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      An angry mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of the vice president. He spent nearly five hours in an underground loading dock. And the president called him a “wimp” and worse.Former Vice President Mike Pence spent almost five hours on Jan. 6 in a loading dock beneath the Capitol. At one point, an angry mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of him.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — He started the day with a prayer.Vice President Mike Pence, preparing to withstand the final stage of a relentless campaign by President Donald J. Trump to force him to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, began Jan. 6, 2021, surrounded by aides at his official residence at the Naval Observatory, asking God for guidance.The group was expecting a difficult day. But what followed over the next 12 hours was more harrowing than they imagined.An angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray chanting “hang Mike Pence” came within 40 feet of the vice president. Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail had to hustle him to safety and hold him for nearly five hours in the bowels of the Capitol. Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence a “wimp” and worse in a coarse and abusive call that morning from the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s daughter and former White House aides testified.And a confidential witness who traveled to Washington with the Proud Boys, the most prominent of the far-right groups that helped lead the assault on the Capitol, later told investigators the group would have killed Mr. Pence — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — if they got the chance.Those were among the extraordinary new details that emerged during the third public hearing held Thursday by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.Mr. Pence’s day dawned as it often did. The vice president, whose evangelical faith was a selling point for adding him to the presidential ticket in 2016 but often a source of skepticism for Mr. Trump, was joined by three people in prayer: his chief counsel, Greg Jacob; his chief of staff, Marc Short; and his director of legislative affairs, Chris Hodgson.Mr. Pence and the team had been subjected to a barrage of demands from Mr. Trump that the vice president refuse to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory in a joint session of Congress — an unconstitutional action never before taken in the two and a half centuries since the nation’s founding.“We just asked for guidance and wisdom, knowing the day was going to be a challenging one,” Mr. Short said in videotaped testimony played by the committee.While Mr. Pence was at the Naval Observatory, Mr. Trump was in the Oval Office with aides and family members trickling in and out, including Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Ivanka Trump. He had already sent two Twitter posts further pressuring Mr. Pence, the first at 1 a.m. The second, at 8 a.m., concluded, “Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”At 11:20 a.m., Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence, who stepped away from his aides to take the call.The group in the Oval Office could hear Mr. Trump’s side of the call but paid little attention to what seemed to start as a routine conversation. But as Mr. Trump became increasingly heated that Mr. Pence was holding firm in his refusal to give in, the call became hard to ignore.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.“I remember hearing the word ‘wimp,’” Nick Luna, an aide to Mr. Trump, said in videotaped testimony. “‘Wimp’ is the word I remember.”Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter and a former top White House adviser, said in her videotaped testimony that “it was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice president before.”Ms. Trump’s chief of staff, Julie Radford, appeared in videotaped testimony to say that Ms. Trump told her shortly after the call that Mr. Trump had an “upsetting” conversation with Mr. Pence. The president, Ms. Radford said, used “the P word.” (The New York Times reported previously that Mr. Trump had told Mr. Pence, “You can either go down in history as a patriot or you can go down in history as a pussy,” according to two people briefed on the conversation.)Over at the Naval Observatory, Mr. Pence returned to the room after taking the call looking “steely,” “determined” and “grim,” Mr. Jacob told the committee.Mr. Trump in the meantime revised a speech that he delivered later that day to throngs of supporters on the Ellipse. An early draft of the speech, the committee said, included no mention of Mr. Pence. But after the call, the president included language that video footage showed riled up the mob.“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing,” Mr. Trump said in his speech. “I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win.”“All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people,” Mr. Trump continued, referring to one of his demands that Mr. Pence send the election results back to the states, a delaying tactic that he hoped would ultimately keep him in office. If Mr. Pence failed to comply, Mr. Trump told the crowd, “that will be a sad day for our country.’’He added, “So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. And I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to,” using the term for “Republicans in name only.”Mr. Trump directed his supporters to march to the Capitol and make themselves heard.By the time Mr. Pence arrived at the Capitol with his wife, Karen Pence, and their daughter Charlotte, an angry mob was already massing outside.Inside, as the joint session began, Mr. Pence’s aides released a memo to the public laying out the vice president’s view that he did not have the power over the certification that Mr. Trump and his lawyer, John Eastman, insisted he did.Shortly after 2:10 p.m., the proceedings were interrupted by loud noises. The mob was swarming into the building. At 2:24 p.m. — when Democrats on the committee said Mr. Trump was aware that the Capitol had been breached — the president posted to Twitter that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what was necessary.”At that point, the Secret Service had moved Mr. Pence from the Senate chamber to his office across the hall. His advisers said the noise from the rioters had become audible, leading them to assume they had entered the building. Yet there was not yet a pervasive sense of alarm.Mr. Pence in his office in the Capitol on Jan. 6 shortly after leaving the Senate chamber.White HouseOnce in his office, Mr. Pence sat with his family, including his brother, Representative Greg Pence and top aides as Mr. Short ducked downstairs to grab some food. Mrs. Pence drew the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in.Mr. Short made his way back to the office. By then, Tim Giebels, the lead Secret Service agent for Mr. Pence, had made a few attempts to nudge Mr. Pence and his family to move to a different location. But soon he was no longer making a suggestion. Mr. Pence, he said, had to get to safety.The entourage began to make its way down a stairway toward an underground loading dock — the point at which they came within 40 feet of the rioters. Mr. Pence and his aides did not know at the time just how close they were to the mob, some of whom were threatening to kill him.“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building,” Mr. Jacob said Thursday at the hearing. “I don’t think I was aware they were as close as that.”From the loading dock, Mr. Pence handled calls to congressional leaders who had been evacuated from the Capitol complex and ordered the Pentagon to send in the National Guard. The Secret Service directed him to get into a car and evacuate, but he refused to leave the building.“The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the vice president of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol,” Mr. Jacob said Thursday, noting that Mr. Pence did not want to give the rioters the satisfaction of disrupting the proceedings more than they had already done. “He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day.”One person he never spoke with again that day was Mr. Trump, who did not call to check on Mr. Pence’s safety. Neither did the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Just after 8 p.m., the Senate chamber opened again, after the rioters had been cleared from the complex.“Today was a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol,” Mr. Pence said as the proceedings began again. He was greeted with applause when he said, “Let’s get back to work.”Back at the White House, egged on by some of his advisers, Mr. Trump told aides he wanted to bar Mr. Short from entering the West Wing from then on.At 3:42 in the morning, it was all over. Mr. Biden’s victory had been certified.At 3:50 a.m., as Mr. Pence and Mr. Short went their separate ways, Mr. Short texted his boss a passage from the Bible.“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” the message read. More

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      4 Takeaways From Today’s Jan. 6 Hearing

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      The Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Thursday, which documented the relentless but unsuccessful campaign by President Donald J. Trump to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into helping him to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, swerved wildly at times between wonky discussions of constitutional law and unsettling images of the threats and violence that Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Pence inspired.But at the heart of the committee’s presentation was a straightforward narrative.Weeks before the mob attack on the Capitol, Mr. Trump joined forces with a law professor named John Eastman, who was espousing a theory that Mr. Pence, in his role as president of the Senate, had the power to alter the outcome of the election — or at least to delay certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.Armed with this dubious legal cudgel, and with his other avenues for retaining power closing off, Mr. Trump pushed and pushed at Mr. Pence, including publicly on Jan. 6, helping to rile up his supporters and trigger the riot at the Capitol.Mr. Pence — backed by his own advisers and other legal experts — resisted Mr. Trump from the moment the idea came up.Here are four takeaways from Thursday’s hearing.Even Eastman doubted his plan’s legality, and he let Trump know that.The panel displayed on Thursday an image of the handwritten notes of Greg Jacob, attorney for Vice President Mike Pence, from a meeting with John Eastman.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump went ahead with the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence even though Mr. Eastman, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and a law professor at Chapman University, was less than certain at times about the legality and political viability of his own plan.The committee, for example, introduced an email that Mr. Eastman had written in the early stages of the scheme, in which he said that the idea of having lawmakers in pro-Trump states draft alternate slates of electors to give Mr. Pence a reason for disputing the results was “dead on arrival in Congress.”Mr. Eastman also admitted in a private conversation with Mr. Pence’s top lawyer, Greg Jacob, that if the Supreme Court ever had to rule on the legality of a vice president deciding the results of an election on his own, the court would unanimously vote to toss the matter, Mr. Jacob testified.But more important, Mr. Jacob told the committee in a videotaped deposition — snippets of which were played during the hearing — that Mr. Eastman had admitted in Mr. Trump’s presence that the plan to pressure Mr. Pence violated an 1887 law known as the Electoral Count Act. According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Eastman acknowledged the illegality of the scheme in front of Mr. Trump on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days before Mr. Pence was to oversee the certification of the election.That crucial admission by Mr. Eastman was highlighted by Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, who has long suggested that Mr. Trump could be charged with a federal crime for the role he played in obstructing the certification of the vote count on Jan. 6.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee assembled an account of how Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him not to declare victory on election night in 2020, but instead he listened to Rudolph W. Giuliani.A Striking Contrast: Many Trump officials have told the committee that they tried to dissuade the former president from his bid to overturn the election. But at the time, their words were far different in public.Fund-Raising Tactics: The Jan. 6 panel has raised questions about Mr. Trump’s aggressive solicitations, accusing him of misleading donors with election fraud claims.If prosecutors can prove that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman were aware in advance that the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence would violate the law, it could be an important piece of evidence suggesting intent, should the Justice Department decide to pursue a criminal case against either of them.Both Ms. Cheney and a colleague on the committee, Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, mentioned that a federal judge had already ruled in a related civil suit that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely conspired together to obstruct the certification of the election and to commit fraud against the United States.In his ruling from March, Judge David O. Carter wrote that “the illegality of the plan was obvious,” calling it a “coup in search of a legal theory.”Mr. Eastman was apparently sufficiently worried about being prosecuted for his role that he inquired a few days after Jan. 6 about getting a pardon before Mr. Trump left office.Pence never wavered on rebuffing Trump.Vice President Mike Pence, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, certifying the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf there was one thing the committee’s hearing made clear, it was that Mr. Pence, despite his history of loyalty to Mr. Trump, never believed he had the power to decide the election — and almost no one else in Mr. Trump’s orbit did, either.According to Mr. Jacob, Mr. Pence’s “first instinct” was to reject the notion out of hand, undercutting assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies at the time that he was open to the idea. Mr. Jacob told the committee that even during his first meeting with Mr. Pence about Mr. Eastman’s plan, the vice president was horrified, saying he did not believe that the founders who “abhorred concentrated power” would have ever agreed that one person — especially one who had an interest in the outcome — could have exercised sole discretion over an election.Mr. Pence, it turned out, had wide support both inside and outside the White House. The committee, in its presentation, offered up a lengthy list of aides and advisers who seemed to disagree with Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman.In a recorded deposition, Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, said that Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s own chief of staff, agreed that the vice president did not have a broad or decisive role to play in determining election results.Another top Trump aide, Jason Miller, in his own recorded deposition, told the committee that Pat Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, thought Mr. Eastman’s plan was “nutty.” He added that Sean Hannity, the very pro-Trump Fox News host, felt that Mr. Pence had done the “right thing” by rebuffing it.Even Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, seemed to doubt Mr. Eastman’s legal theory, according to Eric Herschmann, a former top White House lawyer. But, as Mr. Herschmann noted in a recorded deposition, that did not stop Mr. Giuliani from publicly promoting Mr. Eastman’s plan on Jan. 6.There was no legal underpinning to the Eastman plan.J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, speaking during Thursday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt times, the hearing sounded not unlike like a law school seminar on election procedure, with highly technical discussions of how the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 fit into the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act.Leading those discussions was J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, revered by conservatives. On the morning before the Capitol attack, Judge Luttig posted a thread of messages on Twitter asserting that Mr. Pence had no power to use his own discretion in deciding the election.“The only responsibility and power of the Vice President under the Constitution is to faithfully count the electoral college votes as they have been cast,” Judge Luttig wrote.He added: “The Constitution does not empower the vice president to alter in any way the votes that have been cast, either by rejecting certain of them or otherwise.”In his testimony on Thursday, Judge Luttig denounced Mr. Eastman’s plan as “constitutional mischief,” adding that if Mr. Pence had gone along with it, it would have “plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis in America.”The pressure campaign helped trigger the violence.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s public calls for Mr. Pence to carry out Mr. Eastman’s plan raised expectations among his supporters that the vice president would do so — and ignited fury when he did not.Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, had grown sufficiently concerned about the potential for Trump supporters to turn against the vice president that he alerted the Secret Service on Jan. 5.Mr. Pence continued to rebuff Mr. Trump even after a call from the president on the morning of Jan. 6 in which Mr. Trump called him a “wimp” and worse, according to testimony gathered by the committee.At 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, Mr. Trump sent out a tweet that said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”One Trump aide told the committee that it felt at the time like Mr. Trump was “pouring gasoline on the fire.” Immediately, the committee said, there was a noticeable surge in the crowds both inside and outside the Capitol, some of whom began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence!”Mr. Pence was evacuated from his ceremonial office in the Senate and taken to a secure location, barely escaping the angry mob that breached the building. When Mr. Aguilar told Mr. Jacob, who had been with Mr. Pence in the Capitol that day, that members of the crowd had been only 40 feet from them, he seemed unnerved.“I could hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved,” Mr. Jacob said. “But I don’t think I was aware that they were as close as that.” More

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      YouTube Deletes Jan. 6 Video That Included Clip of Trump Sharing Election Lies

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      The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot has been trying to draw more eyes to its televised hearings by uploading clips of the proceedings online. But YouTube has removed one of those videos from its platform, saying the committee was advancing election misinformation.The excerpt, which was uploaded June 14, included recorded testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr. But the problem for YouTube was that the video also included a clip of former President Donald J. Trump sharing lies about the election on the Fox Business channel.A screenshot of the committee’s website showing the video removal notification. The message initially said the video had been removed.Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol“We had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account,” Mr. Trump said falsely, before suggesting the F.B.I. and Department of Justice may have been involved.The excerpt of the hearing did not include Mr. Barr’s perspective, stated numerous times elsewhere in the hearing, that Mr. Trump’s assertion that the election was stolen was wrong. The video initially was replaced with a black box stating that the clip had been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.“Our election integrity policy prohibits content advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors or glitches changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, if it does not provide sufficient context,” YouTube spokeswoman Ivy Choi said in a statement. “We enforce our policies equally for everyone, and have removed the video uploaded by the Jan. 6 committee channel.”The message on the video page has since been changed to “This video is private,” which may mean that YouTube would allow the committee to upload a version of the clip that makes clear that Trump’s claims are false. More

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      Democrats’ Risky Bet: Aid G.O.P. Extremists in Spring, Hoping to Beat Them in Fall

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      Even as national Democrats set off alarms over the threats posed by far-right Republican candidates, their campaign partners are pursuing an enormously risky strategy: promoting some of those same far-right candidates in G.O.P. primaries in hopes that extremists will be easier for Democrats to beat in November.These efforts — starkest in the Central Valley of California, where a Democratic campaign ad lashed Representative David Valadao, a Republican, for voting to impeach Donald J. Trump — have prompted angry finger-pointing and a debate within the party over the perils and wisdom of the strategy, especially in the middle of the Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings on the Capitol attack.The concern is obvious: In a year when soaring gasoline prices and disorienting inflation have crushed President Biden’s approval ratings, Republican candidates whom Democrats may deem unelectable could well win on the basis of their party affiliation alone.“I realize that this type of political gamesmanship has existed forever, but our country is in a very different place now than we were in previous cycles,” said Representative Kathleen Rice, Democrat of New York. “For these Democratic groups to throw money at raising up a person who they know wants to tear down this democracy is outrageous.”Republican targets asked how they were supposed to buck their leadership and take difficult votes if their erstwhile allies in the Democratic Party are lying in wait.“I voted the way I voted because I thought it was important,” Mr. Valadao said of his impeachment vote. “But to put us in a spot where we’re voting for these things and then try to use it as ammo against us in the campaigns, and put people that they potentially see as a threat to democracy in a position where they can become members of Congress, it tells me that they’re not serious about governing.”The Democratic effort extends well beyond Mr. Valadao’s race. Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party singled out State Senator Doug Mastriano during his successful quest for the Republican nomination for governor, despite his propagation of false claims about the 2020 election and his attendance at the Jan. 6 protest behind the White House that immediately preceded the Capitol riot.An advertisment from Asif Mahmood’s campaign includes a reference to the Republican candidate Greg Raths, who lost to the more moderate Republican Young Kim in the primary.Asif Mahmood for CongressIn Southern California, a Democratic candidate for the House, Asif Mahmood, flooded Orange County airwaves with advertisements that framed his run as a contest between him and an anti-abortion conservative, Greg Raths, aiding Mr. Raths by never mentioning the leading Republican in the race, Representative Young Kim, the incumbent and a much more moderate candidate. Instead, it highlighted Mr. Raths’ support for overturning Roe v. Wade and banning abortion and his affinity for “pro-Trump Republicans” — stances as likely to appeal to Republican primary voters as to rile up Democrats in a general election. (The effort did not succeed: Ms. Kim held off Mr. Raths and advanced to the November election against Mr. Mahmood.)And in Colorado, a shadowy new group called Democratic Colorado is spending nearly $1.5 million ahead of the state’s June 28 primary to broadcast the conservative views of State Representative Ron Hanks, who hopes to challenge Senator Michael Bennet, an incumbent Democrat. Mr. Hanks’s views would be widely shared by Republican primary voters. Left unmentioned — for now — were Mr. Hanks’s bragging about marching to the Capitol on Jan. 6, his false claim that those who attacked the Capitol were left-wing “antifa” and his baseless insistence that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.Understand the June 14 Primary ElectionsTakeaways: Republicans who embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies did well in Nevada, while his allies had a mixed night in South Carolina. Here’s what else we learned.Winners and Losers: Here is a rundown of some of the most notable wins and losses.Election Deniers Prevail: Republicans who deny the 2020 election’s result are edging closer to wielding power over the next one.Nevada Races: Trump-inspired candidates captured key wins in the swing state, setting the stage for a number of tossup contests against embattled Democrats.Texas Special Election: Mayra Flores, a Republican, flipped a House seat in the Democratic stronghold of South Texas. Her win may only be temporary, however.Alvina Vasquez, a spokeswoman for Democratic Colorado, would not say who was funding the group and insisted there was nothing untoward about the ads.“It’s important to highlight who is running on the Republican side,” she said, adding, “The general election is around the corner.”State Representative Ron Hanks, a Republican running for Senate in Colorado, is being aided in the G.O.P. primary by a shadowy Democratic group.David Zalubowski/Associated PressBut Ms. Vasquez conceded that the group had only one target: Mr. Hanks, not the more moderate Republican in the primary, the businessman Joe O’Dea. The Bennet campaign declined to comment.Democrats involved acknowledge the game they are playing, but insist that they have one job — to preserve their party’s slender majority in the House — and that they are targeting only those races where extremist candidates cannot prevail in November.“House Majority PAC was founded on the mission of doing whatever it takes to secure a Democratic House Majority and in 2022, that’s what we will continue to do,” said Abby Curran Horrell, executive director of the committee, which is affiliated with Democratic leadership.The Pennsylvania attorney general, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, defended his campaign’s advertisement declaring a win for Mr. Mastriano in the Republican governor’s primary as “a win for what Donald Trump stands for.”“What we did was start the general election campaign and demonstrate the clear contrast, the stark differences between he and I,” Mr. Shapiro said on CNN.But it is not clear that Democrats will be able to maintain control over what they may unleash, especially in a year when their party’s president is suffering through record low approval ratings and inflation has hit rates not seen in 40 years. A Suffolk University poll released on Wednesday found Mr. Shapiro running only 4 percentage points ahead of Mr. Mastriano in the state’s crucial governor’s race.No matter how self-assured Democratic insiders sound about their chances against extremist Republicans, the inherent danger of the playing-with-fire approach revives stomach-churning memories for some Democrats.After all, they also thought Mr. Trump’s nomination in 2016 was a surefire ticket to a Hillary Clinton presidency.Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, arguably created the modern genre of meddling in the other party’s nominating process, by running an ad in 2012 lifting the far-right congressman Todd Akin in the Republican Senate primary.But Ms. McCaskill said the intervening years had raised the stakes too high in all but a few races.“No one believed — including Donald Trump — that he would be elected president,” Ms. McCaskill said. “Campaigns need to be very sober about their decision-making. They need to be confident that they can prevail if the most extreme candidate is elevated to the nomination.”An ad paid for by House Democrats’ main political action committee compares the right-wing candidate Chris Mathys to David Valadao, who voted for impeachment.House Majority PACRepresentative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, was especially incensed that the Democrats’ House Majority PAC had spent nearly $40,000 in the Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif., media markets airing an advertisement castigating Mr. Valadao for his impeachment vote, while promoting his opponent as “a true conservative.”Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterm races so important? More

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      Trump Lawyer Cited ‘Heated Fight’ Among Justices Over Election Suits

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      In an email weeks after the election, another lawyer advising the Trump campaign responded that the prospect of “‘wild’ chaos” on Jan. 6 could lead the Supreme Court to take up a case.WASHINGTON — A lawyer advising President Donald J. Trump claimed in an email after Election Day 2020 to have insight into a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices over whether to hear arguments about the president’s efforts to overturn his defeat at the polls, two people briefed on the email said.The lawyer, John Eastman, made the statement in a Dec. 24, 2020, exchange with a pro-Trump lawyer and Trump campaign officials over whether to file legal papers that they hoped might prompt four justices to agree to hear an election case from Wisconsin.“So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” Mr. Eastman wrote, according to the people briefed on the contents of the email. Referring to the process by which at least four justices are needed to take up a case, he added, “For those willing to do their duty, we should help them by giving them a Wisconsin cert petition to add into the mix.”The pro-Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”Their exchange took place five days after Mr. Trump issued a call for his supporters to attend a “protest” at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, the day Congress would certify the electoral vote count confirming Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. “Be there. Will be wild!” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.The previously unreported exchange is part of a group of emails obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters.Mr. Chesebro’s comment about the justices being more open to hearing a case if they fear chaos was striking for its link to the potential for the kind of mob scene that materialized at the Capitol weeks later.And Mr. Eastman’s email, if taken at face value, raised the question of how he would have known about internal tension among the justices about dealing with election cases. Mr. Eastman had been a clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.The committee is also reviewing emails between Mr. Eastman and Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas. Ms. Thomas was an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump and in the period after Election Day sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to reverse the outcome and supported a variety of efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office.It was not immediately clear when the communications took place between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman or what they discussed. The existence of the emails between Mr. Eastman and Ms. Thomas was reported earlier by The Washington Post.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee assembled an account of how Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him not to declare victory on election night in 2020, but instead he listened to Rudolph W. Giuliani.A Striking Contrast: Many Trump officials have told the committee that they tried to dissuade the former president from his bid to overturn the election. But at the time, their words were far different in public.Fund-Raising Tactics: The Jan. 6 panel has raised questions about Mr. Trump’s aggressive solicitations, accusing him of misleading donors with election fraud claims.A federal judge recently 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.After debating internally about whether to seek an interview with Ms. Thomas, members of the committee have said in recent weeks that they do not see her actions as central to the plans to overturn the election.Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, told NBC News last weekend that Ms. Thomas was “not the focus of this investigation.”But her contact with Mr. Eastman could add a new dimension to the inquiry.A federal judge has already concluded in a civil case that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman “more likely than not” had committed two felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the American people, in their attempts to overturn the election.Mr. Chesebro, and lawyers for Mr. Eastman and Ms. Thomas, did not respond to requests for comment.Word of the exchanges between Mr. Eastman, Mr. Chesebro and the campaign lawyers emerged as the House committee prepared for a public hearing on Thursday to present new details of the intense pressure campaign Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman waged against Vice President Mike Pence, which the panel says directly contributed to the violent siege of Congress.The public hearing, the panel’s third this month as it lays out the steps Mr. Trump took to try to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled for 1 p.m. The committee plans to release materials detailing the threats of violence against Mr. Pence, and the ways the vice president’s security team scrambled to try to keep him safe from the mob.The email exchange involving Mr. Eastman and Mr. Chesebro included a request, which appears to have been denied, that the Trump campaign pay for the effort to get another case in front of the Supreme Court. In the emails, Mr. Chesebro made clear that he did not consider the odds of success to be good, but he pressed to try, laying out why he claimed the election was invalid.Mr. Eastman said that he and Mr. Chesebro “are of similar” minds and that the legal arguments “are rock solid,” before going on to describe what he said were the divisions among the justices and the benefits of giving them another chance to take up an election case.In the previous several weeks, the court had turned aside two other efforts to consider election-related suits brought by allies of Mr. Trump.Mr. Chesebro then replied, according to the people briefed on the exchange: “I don’t have the personal insight that John has into the four justices likely to be most upset about what is happening in the various states, who might want to intervene, so I should make it clear that I don’t discount John’s estimate.”He went on that he agreed that “getting this on file gives more ammo to the justices fighting for the court to intervene.”“I think the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way,” he said. “Though that factor could go against us on the merits. Easiest way to quell chaos would be to rule against us — our side would accept that result as legitimate.”Mr. Chesebro concluded: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take. A campaign that believes it really won the election would file a petition as long as it’s plausible and the resource constraints aren’t too great.”In the weeks after the election, Mr. Chesebro wrote a string of memos supporting a plan to send so-called alternate electors to Congress for the certification. A little more than two weeks after Election Day, Mr. Chesebro sent a memo to James Troupis, another lawyer for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, laying out a plan to name pro-Trump electors in the state, which was won by Mr. Biden.Mr. Chesebro also sent a Dec. 13, 2020, email to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who was by then leading the legal efforts to overturn the election results. In it, he encouraged Mr. Pence to “firmly take the position that he, and he alone, is charged with the constitutional responsibility not just to open the votes, but to count them — including making judgments about what to do if there are conflicting votes.”That idea took root with Mr. Trump, who engaged in a lengthy effort to convince Mr. Pence that he could block or delay the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6.The House committee’s hearing on Thursday is set to feature testimony from J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who advised Mr. Pence that Mr. Trump’s push for the vice president to unilaterally decide to invalidate election results was unconstitutional, and that he should not go along with the plan.Also scheduled to appear is Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s top White House lawyer, who has provided the committee with crucial evidence about the role played by Mr. Eastman, who conceded during an email exchange with Mr. Jacob that his plan to overturn the election was in “violation” of federal law.The Jan. 6 committee is reviewing emails between Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mr. Eastman.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe committee is also expected to play video from an interview it recorded with Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short. A day before the mob violence, Mr. Short grew so concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.The committee is not expected to display any of the new emails it received involving Ms. Thomas on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the presentation.Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, is a conservative political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency. After he lost the election, she sent a series of messages to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, Arizona lawmakers and others pushing for the election to be overturned.The Jan. 6 committee has been presenting the televised hearings as a series of movie-length chapters laying out the different ways Mr. Trump tried to cling to power. After an initial prime-time hearing that drew more than 20 million viewers, in which the panel sought to establish that the former president was at the center of the plot, investigators focused their second hearing on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election.The committee is expected to detail on Thursday some of its findings about the plot involving pro-Trump electors. The panel will present evidence that the White House counsel also concluded that the vice president had no legal power to throw out legitimate electoral votes for the fake electors Mr. Trump’s team put forward.Investigators will show how Mr. Trump was advised that his plans were unlawful but he pressed forward with them anyway, committee aides said. More

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      Ginni Thomas Was in Contact With John Eastman as He Pushed to Overturn Election

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      The Jan. 6 committee has received emails showing the contact between the wife of the Supreme Court justice and the conservative lawyer who created a blueprint for Donald J. Trump’s postelection fight.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has received emails that show Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, was in contact with the conservative lawyer John Eastman as he pushed to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the panel’s work.The emails show Ms. Thomas, who had advocated widely for conservatives to fight the results of the election, expressed those views to Mr. Eastman, according to one person familiar with the messages. The existence of the emails was reported earlier by The Washington Post.While it was not immediately clear when the emails involving Ms. Thomas were sent, a federal judge recently ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over additional documents to the panel from the period after the November election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.The committee received the emails as it prepares on Thursday to present new details of the intense pressure campaign President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Eastman waged against Vice President Mike Pence, which the panel says directly contributed to the violent siege of Congress.The public hearing, the panel’s third this month as it lays out the steps Mr. Trump took to try to overturn the 2020 election, is scheduled for 1 p.m. The committee plans to release materials detailing the threats of violence against Mr. Pence, and the ways the vice president’s security team scrambled to try to keep him safe from the mob.The hearing is set to feature testimony from J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge who advised Mr. Pence that Mr. Trump’s push for the vice president to unilaterally decide to invalidate election results was unconstitutional, and that he should not go along with the plan.Also scheduled to appear is Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s top White House lawyer, who has provided the committee with crucial evidence about the role played by Mr. Eastman, who wrote a memo that members of both parties have described as a blueprint for a coup.Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, is expected to lead a presentation of the evidence. A committee senior investigative counsel, John Wood, whom President George W. Bush hired as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, is expected to conduct some of the questioning of witnesses.Mr. Eastman, left, and Rudolph W. Giuliani at a rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Eastman’s plan to overturn the election is expected to feature prominently in a Jan. 6 committee hearing on Thursday.Jim Bourg/ReutersThe committee is also expected to play video from an interview it recorded with Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short. A day before the mob violence, Mr. Short grew so concerned about Mr. Trump’s actions that he presented a warning to a Secret Service agent: The president was going to publicly turn against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.The committee is not expected to display any of the new emails it received involving Ms. Thomas on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the presentation.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee assembled an account of how Mr. Trump’s advisers urged him not to declare victory on election night in 2020, but instead he listened to Rudolph W. Giuliani.A Striking Contrast: Many Trump officials have told the committee that they tried to dissuade the former president from his bid to overturn the election. But at the time, their words were far different in public.Fund-Raising Tactics: The Jan. 6 panel has raised questions about Mr. Trump’s aggressive solicitations, accusing him of misleading donors with election fraud claims.Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, is a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency. After he lost the election, she sent a series of messages to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows, Arizona lawmakers and others pushing for the election to be overturned.In one of her texts to Mr. Meadows, she said to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a web of conspiracy theories that Trump supporters believed would overturn the election.“Do your constitutional duty,” Ms. Thomas wrote to Arizona lawmakers on Nov. 9. On Dec. 13, with Mr. Trump still refusing to concede on the eve of the Electoral College vote, she contacted the lawmakers again.After debating internally about whether to seek an interview with Ms. Thomas, members of the committee have said in recent weeks that they do not see her actions as central to the plans to overturn the election.Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, this weekend told NBC that Ms. Thomas was “not the focus of this investigation.”But her contact with Mr. Eastman, who was her husband’s former law clerk, is likely to raise new questions for the panel. Mr. Eastman was central to effort to the overturn the 2020 election and put pressure on Mr. Pence.A federal judge has already concluded in a civil case that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had “more likely than not” committed two felonies, including conspiracy to defraud the American people, in their attempts to overturn the election.The Jan. 6 committee has been presenting the televised hearings as a series of movie-length chapters laying out the different ways Mr. Trump tried to cling to power. After an initial prime-time hearing that drew more than 20 million viewers, in which the panel sought to establish that the former president was at the center of the plot, investigators focused their second hearing on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election.Future hearings are expected to focus on how Mr. Trump and his allies pressured state officials to overturn the election; attempted to interfere with the Justice Department; created slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.; and amassed a mob that marched on the Capitol, while the president did nothing to stop the violence for 187 minutes.Through the hearings, the committee is drawing upon the more than 1,000 interviews it conducted and the more than 140,000 documents it obtained.The committee is expected to detail on Thursday some of its findings about the plot involving pro-Trump electors. The panel will present evidence that the White House counsel also concluded that the vice president had no legal power to throw out legitimate electoral votes for the fake electors Mr. Trump’s team put forward.Investigators will show how Mr. Trump was advised that his plans were unlawful but he pressed forward with them anyway, committee aides said.The panel also plans to demonstrate that the threat to American democracy is ongoing, committee aides said.To build public anticipation, the committee has begun releasing teaser clips to preview its hearings. On Tuesday, the panel released a clip of Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, telling Mr. Eastman the day after the Capitol riot that he believed Mr. Eastman had committed a crime.“I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life,” Mr. Herschmann recalls telling Mr. Eastman before recommending that he find a criminal defense lawyer, and adding, “You’re going to need it.”Mr. Jacob has provided the committee with important evidence about Mr. Eastman’s role in the events that led to the attack on the Capitol.Mr. Eastman conceded during an email exchange with Mr. Jacob that his plan to overturn the election was in “violation” of federal law.As the mob attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 — some of its members chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” — Mr. Jacob sent an email to Mr. Eastman blaming him for the violence.“Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Mr. Jacob wrote that day at 12:14 p.m.“It was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability,” Mr. Jacob wrote in a subsequent email to Mr. Eastman.The committee could also hear testimony about Mr. Trump’s state of mind during the violence.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, said last week that the panel had received testimony that when Mr. Trump learned of the mob’s threats to hang Mr. Pence, he said, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” and added that Mr. Pence “deserves it.”The committee has scheduled two more hearings, for June 21 and June 23, at 1 p.m. More

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      Who Is Financing Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ Caucus? Corporations You Know.

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      Immediately after the Jan. 6 attack, hundreds of corporations announced freezes on donating money to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying Joe Biden’s victory. “Given recent events and the horrific attack on the U.S. Capitol, we are assessing our future PAC criteria,” a spokesperson for Toyota said a week after the attack.For many corporations, that pause was short-lived.“By April 1, 2021, Toyota had donated $62,000 to 39 Republican objectors,” the journalist Judd Legum wrote in his newsletter, Popular Information. That included a donation of $1,000 that Toyota gave to Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona who is a close ally of Donald Trump and a fervent devotee of the “big lie.”In July 2021, Toyota reversed course and announced another hiatus from donating to lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results. Six months later, the money started to flow again. The company, in a statement to The Times, said it donates equally to both parties and “will not support those who, by their words and actions, create an atmosphere that incites violence.” (Corporations aren’t allowed to give directly to campaigns but instead form political action committees that donate in the name of the company.)Giving equally to both parties sounds good. But what if a growing faction of one political party isn’t committed to the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power?In the year and a half since the attack, rivers of cash from once skittish donors have resumed flowing to election deniers. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes just a thousand. But it adds up. In the month of April alone, the last month for which data is available, Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results, according to an analysis by the transparency group Accountable.US. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.Of all the revelations so far from the hearings on the Jan. 6 attack, the most important is that the effort to undermine democratic elections in the United States is continuing. More than a dozen men and women who participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection or the rallies leading up to it have run for elected office this year. Supporters of Mr. Trump have also run for public offices that oversee elections. And according to an investigation by The Times, at least 357 Republican legislators in nine states have used the power of their offices to attack the results of the 2020 election.This isn’t a hypothetical threat. On Tuesday, New Mexico’s secretary of state was forced to ask the State Supreme Court to compel a Republican-led county election commission to certify primary election results. The commission had refused to do so, citing its distrust of its own voting machines.There is also an active effort underway to frustrate the Jan. 6 committee’s work, including refusing to comply with subpoenas. Mr. Biggs, for instance, has refused to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify, as have other Republican members of Congress, including Jim Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Mo Brooks and Scott Perry. (Mr. Perry, among other congressmen, asked for a presidential pardon for efforts to challenge and overturn the 2020 election, according to Representative Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. He has denied that charge.) Representatives Barry Loudermilk and Ronny Jackson have yet to agree to interview requests from the committee. Six of these congressmen alone have brought in more than $826,000 from corporate donors since Jan. 6, according to Accountable.US. (Mr. Brooks didn’t receive any money from the Fortune 500 companies and trade groups tracked in the report.)We tend to think of the past and future threat to elections as coming from voters for Donald Trump and those whom they’d elect to office. But the success of these politicians also depends on money. And a lot of money from corporations like Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, UPS and General Dynamics has gone to politicians who reject the 2020 election results based on lies told by the former president, according to a tally kept by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW.All told, as of this week, corporations and industry groups gave almost $32 million to the House and Senate members who voted to overturn the election and to the G.O.P. committees focused on the party’s congressional campaigns. The top 10 companies that gave money to those members, according to CREW’s analysis of campaign finance disclosures, are Koch Industries, Boeing, Home Depot, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. All of those companies, with the exception of Koch Industries and FedEx, once said they’d refrain from donating to politicians who voted to reject the election results.Of the 249 companies that promised not to fund the 147 senators and representatives who voted against any of the results, fewer than half have stuck to their promise, according to CREW.Kudos aplenty to the 85 corporations that stuck to their guns and still refuse to fund the seditious, including Nike, PepsiCo, Lyft, Cisco, Prudential, Marriott, Target and Zillow. That’s what responsible corporate citizenship looks like. It’s also patriotic.We’re going to need more patriotic companies for what’s coming. Not only are Republican lawmakers who refused to certify the election results still in office; their party is poised to make gains during the midterm elections. Their electoral fortunes represent not only an endorsement from voters who support their efforts to undermine our democracy; they also represent the explicit financial support of hundreds of corporations that pour money into their campaign coffers.Money in politics is the way of the world, especially in this country. But as the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation has made clear, Mr. Trump’s attempted coup was orders of magnitude different from the normal rough-and-tumble of politics. Returning to the status quo where corporate money flowed to nearly every politician elected to office isn’t just unseemly; it is helping to fund a continuing attack on our democracy.Many Americans say they’ve moved on from the attack on Jan. 6. For those who haven’t, a good place to focus their attention is on the continuing threat to the Republic posed by politicians who are actively undermining it, and the money that helps them do so.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