House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack

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      This Is What Happened When the Authorities Put Trump Under a Microscope

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      In retrospect, the Mueller report was a cry for help.“The Office,” as the special counsel so self-effacingly called itself in its report, knew its limits, or at least chose them. It could not indict a sitting president. It was generous with the benefit of the doubt when evaluating a potential “obstructive act” or gauging criminal intent by President Donald Trump. It considered mitigating, and sometimes dubious, explanations for his behavior, and was as restrained in interpreting the president’s misdeeds as it was zealous in listing them.Its conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice became a Washington classic of needle-threading ambiguity: “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” The Office declined to call Trump a criminal, however much it might have wanted to.Instead, scattered throughout its 448 pages, the Mueller report includes some not-so-subtle instructions and warnings that future investigators, less inhibited, could heed when facing fresh misdeeds.The two highest-profile congressional investigations of Trump that followed — the 2019 report by the House Intelligence Committee on Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine as well as the recently released report by the select committee on the Jan. 6 attack — read like deliberate contrasts to the document produced by Robert Mueller and his team. Their presentation is dramatic, not dense; their conclusions are blunt, not oblique; their arguments are political as much as legal. And yet, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports seem to follow the cues, explicit or implied, that the Mueller report left behind.Read together, these three major investigations of the Trump presidency appear in conversation with one another, ever more detailed drafts of a most unorthodox historical record — a history in which these documents are characters as much as chroniclers.The documents try to explain the former president, and they also strain to contain him. The Mueller report inspects the guardrails that Trump bent and sometimes broke. The Ukraine report lays out the case that led to his first impeachment. The Jan. 6 report now declares him “unfit” to return to the nation’s highest office — the very office Trump is again pursuing — or to any office below it.The effect is cumulative. While the Mueller report evaluates Trump’s behavior as a series of individual, unrelated actions, it knows better, stating near the end that the president’s “pattern of conduct as a whole” was vital to grasping his intentions. The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports took up that task, establishing links among Trump’s varied transgressions.While the Mueller report wonders whether Trump and his advisers committed certain acts “willfully” — that is, “with general knowledge of the illegality of their conduct” — the investigations into his strong-arming of Ukraine and the Capitol assault seek to show that Trump knew that his actions violated the law and that his statements ran counter to the truth.And while the Mueller report grudgingly posits that some of the president’s questionable actions might have been taken with the public, rather than the private, interest in mind, the Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports contend that with Trump, the distinction between public and private always collapsed in favor of the latter.The Mueller report would not declare that the president deserved impeachment or had committed crimes, but it didn’t mind if someone else reached those conclusions. It states plainly that accusing Trump of a crime could “pre-empt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct,” that is, the constitutional process of impeachment, which the Ukraine investigation would soon deliver.The Mueller report also notes in its final pages that “only a successor Administration would be able to prosecute a former President,” which is what the Jan. 6 special committee, with its multiple criminal referrals, has urged the Biden administration’s Justice Department to do.The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports did their best to answer Mueller’s call.ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.When the Jan. 6 report shows Trump haranguing Mike Pence, telling the vice president that Pence would be known as a “patriot” if Pence helped overturn the 2020 election, it’s hard not to recall the scene in the Mueller report when the president tells Jeff Sessions that the attorney general would go down as a “hero” if he reversed his recusal from the Russia investigation.All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain. Less than four months into his term, Trump relies on a Department of Justice memo as cover to fire the F.B.I. director; he uses the Office of Management and Budget to delay the disbursal of military aid to Ukraine in 2019; and he attempts to use fake state electoral certificates to upend the results of the 2020 vote.Perhaps no moment is more believable than the Ukraine report’s description of Trump’s April 2019 conversation with the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump makes a point of mentioning that Ukraine is “always very well represented” in the Miss Universe pageants.Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight. When Michael Flynn resigns from the White House after admitting to lying about his contacts with Russian officials, Trump consoles him with the assurance, “We’ll give you a good recommendation,” as if Flynn were a departing mailroom intern rather than a disgraced ex-national security adviser.When the Trump campaign tried to conceal details surrounding its infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016, the Mueller report suggests that the effort “may reflect an intention to avoid political consequences rather than any prior knowledge of illegality,” that is, that the Trump team might have felt just shame, not guilt.The Mueller report rebuts the Trumpian notion that the president can employ his legitimate authority regardless of the illegitimacy of his purpose. “An improper motive can render an actor’s conduct criminal even when the conduct would otherwise be lawful and within the actor’s authority,” the report states, in the patient tone of a parent explaining household rules to a child. But even in the damning sections on Trump’s potential obstruction of justice (in which “the Office” all but states that it would have charged Trump if it could have), the report theorizes that the president may have been attacking the inquiries against him out of concern that they hindered his ability to govern, not because he was hiding some nefarious activity.The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The President placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,” Representative Adam Schiff declares in the report’s preface.The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential. The president’s effort to squeeze Zelensky’s government into investigating the Biden family (ironically, under the guise of Trump’s anti-corruption concerns) was an attempt to manipulate the 2020 election, while his desire for Ukraine to investigate its own supposed U.S. election interference (on behalf of the Democrats, naturally) was part of Trump’s ongoing battle to defend the glorious memory of his 2016 victory. “We were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president,” Schiff writes. Indeed, several weeks before Trump’s famous phone conversation with Zelensky on July 25, 2019, Trump had already ordered a hold on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, which it would dangle as leverage. And the purely political nature of the enterprise was made plain when the report notes that Trump did not care if Ukraine in fact conducted any investigations. It simply had to announce them.The Mueller report argues that “Viewing the [president’s] acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just like the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.The Jan. 6 report is the most dramatic — and certainly the most readable — of the three documents. It is vaguely journalistic in style, even adopting the narrative convention of turning memorable quotes into chapter titles, like “I Just Want to Find 11,780 Votes” and “Be There, Will Be Wild!” (Contrast this with the Mueller report’s “Background Legal and Evidentiary Principles” or “Legal Defenses to the Application of Obstruction-of-Justice Statutes to the President,” among its other sexy teasers.) At times, the Jan. 6 report applies too much writerly gloss. When it points out that Trump and his campaign used bogus claims of election fraud after the 2020 vote to raise more than $250 million from supporters, the report says that the Big Lie enabled “the Big Rip-off.” I’m sure someone was proud of that wording, but in this case it is more than enough just to state the facts.The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect. Several observers of the Trump era have described how the president learned to maneuver his way through the executive branch and grew bolder in his abuses of it; in the Jan. 6 report, that transition is complete. No longer the bumbling, reactive and instinctual occupant of the Oval Office, here Trump is fully in charge — purposely spreading false information about election fraud, pressuring Pence to refuse to certify the Electoral College count, leaning on state and local electoral officials to change the vote totals, summoning tens of thousands of supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and urging them to march to the Capitol, then standing by for hours as the violent attack was underway. “The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report concludes.Trump told America that he alone could fix it; the Jan. 6 report tells us that he alone could break it.Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything. “Donald Trump’s own campaign officials told him early on that his claims of fraud were false,” Liz Cheney, the committee vice chair, writes in her introduction. “Donald Trump’s senior Justice Department officials — each appointed by Donald Trump himself — investigated the allegations and told him repeatedly that his fraud claims were false. Donald Trump’s White House lawyers also told him his fraud claims were false.”There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.The Jan. 6 report devotes a chapter to explaining how the president purposely mustered a mob to Washington, how his “will be wild!” call-out on social media united rival extremist groups in a common cause, and how he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to obstruct the affirmation of a legitimate vote.Two days before his speech, Trump had already floated the idea to advisers that he would join the protesters at the Capitol, and he even briefly considered deploying 10,000 members of the National Guard “to protect him and his supporters from any supposed threats by left-wing counterprotesters,” the report states.This is among the most remarkable moments in the Jan. 6 chronicle. Rather than worry about violence against lawmakers and the Capitol itself, Trump was focused on protecting his supporters. They interpreted the president’s call to join him in Washington that day as a command to save their country, violently if necessary, and they stood down only when he issued a video instructing them to do so. The Jan. 6 report, in a dramatic but not inaccurate flourish, affirms that, during the assault on the Capitol, Trump “was not only the commander in chief of the U.S. military, but also of the rioters.”On that day, he chose to lead the rioters. Jan. 6 was the closest Trump would get to holding that military parade he so longed to see in Washington. Instead of parading in front of the Capitol, his troops marched against it.AFTER MAKING THE CASE that Trump incited the assault, the Jan. 6 report expresses shock at how little Trump did to stop it, an act of omission it labels a “dereliction of duty.” Yet, by the report’s own logic, why would Trump have stopped the insurrectionists? “President Trump had summoned a mob, including armed extremists and conspiracy theorists, to Washington, D.C. on the day the joint session of Congress was to meet,” the report states. “He then told that same mob to march on the U.S. Capitol and ‘fight.’ They clearly got the message.” (Some variation of the word “fight” appeared only twice in Trump’s prepared speech for his Jan. 6 speech, but the president would utter the word 20 times throughout his remarks, the report notes.) If the rioters were in fact doing his bidding, the president would have no reason to call them off once the mayhem began.That Trump would rile people up and then sit back and watch the outcome on television was the least surprising part of the day. It was how he spent his presidency. In calling out Trump’s failure to act, the Jan. 6 report was imagining that Trump, in that moment, might have become presidential at last, shocked by what his own actions wrought into being something other than himself. In its condemnation of Trump, the report still longed for his transformation. After so many pages, so much testimony, so much analysis, it still struggled to understand him.The challenges of interpreting and describing what another person was thinking, doing or intending at a particular moment — even a person as overanalyzed as Donald J. Trump — comes alive in one passage, or rather, one word, of the Jan. 6 report. The issue is not even the word itself, but the form in which it is rendered.The report cites the testimony of a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who explained how, on the morning of Jan. 6, the president was incensed that the presence of magnetometers (used to detect weapons) was inhibiting some armed supporters from entering the Ellipse, where the president was to deliver his speech.As always, Trump wanted a bigger crowd. Hutchinson said she heard him say something like, “I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in.”They’re not here to hurt me. Which word should one emphasize when uttering that sentence aloud? If it is the verb hurt,” the sentiment would be somewhat benign. They are not here to hurt me, the president might have meant, but to praise or cheer or support me. If the emphasis falls on “me,” however, the meaning is more sinister. They’re not here to hurt me, the implication would be, but to hurt someone else. That someone else could be Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, an officer of the Capitol Police or any of the lawmakers gathering to fulfill their duty and certify Joe Biden as president.So, which was it? The Jan. 6 report confuses matters by italicizing “me” in the document’s final chapter but leaving it unitalicized in the executive summary. The video of Hutchinson’s testimony shows her reciting the line quickly and neutrally, with perhaps a slight emphasis on “hurt” rather than “me.” (You can watch and listen for yourself.)Of course, the less ambiguous interpretation of Trump’s words is that either inflection — whether “hurt” or “me” — still means the president was unconcerned of anyone’s safety but his own. Perhaps “I don’t F’ing care” is the most relevant phrase.With a document surpassing 800 pages, it may seem too much to linger on the typeface of a single two-letter pronoun. But for accounts that can serve as both historical records and briefs for the prosecution, every word and every quote — every framing and every implication — is a choice that deserves scrutiny.The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties. Even its copious redactions, justified by the opaque phrase “Harm to Ongoing Matter” appearing over a sea of blotted out text, seemed designed to frustrate. Yet, for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion, and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are likely inherent to the form, to the challenge of recording on paper and by committee the impulses not just of a man but of an era with which he became synonymous.Expectations are heaped upon these reports, not only for what they might reveal, but for what those revelations might unleash, or what they might help repair. Such demands are excessive and probably counterproductive. It is hard enough to determine the true meaning of a lone word, to reconstruct a fleeting moment in history. It is harder still to reconstruct a nation’s political life, that other ongoing matter to which so much harm has been done.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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      Fact-Checking Biden’s State of the Union Address

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      The president’s speech contained no outright falsehoods, but at times omitted crucial context or exaggerated the facts.WASHINGTON — President Biden praised the economy as well as his legislative accomplishments and record on the world stage in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night.Mr. Biden’s speech contained no outright falsehoods, but at times omitted crucial context or exaggerated the facts. Here’s a fact check.What WAS Said“I stand here tonight, after we’ve created, with the help of many people in this room, 12 million new jobs — more jobs created in two years than any president has created in four years.”This needs context. The economy added 12.1 million jobs‌ ‌between January 2021, the month‌ when‌ Mr. Biden took office, and this January. By raw numbers, that is indeed a larger increase in new jobs over two years than the number added over other presidents’ full four-year terms since at least 1945. But by percentage, the job growth in Mr. Biden’s first two years still lags behind that of his predecessors’ full terms.Under Mr. Biden, jobs have increased by 8.5 percent since his term began. That jump is less than that in President Barack Obama’s first term (8.6 percent), President Bill Clinton’s first term (10.5 percent), President Ronald Reagan’s second term (11.2 percent) and President Jimmy Carter’s four years in office (12.8 percent).Mr. Biden is, of course, comparing his first two years in office with the entire term or presidencies of his predecessors, so the comparison is not equivalent. Moreover, Mr. Biden’s first two years in office followed historic job losses wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. Most important, presidents are not singularly responsible for the state of the economy. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“For too many decades, we imported products and exported jobs. Now, thanks to what you’ve all done, we’re exporting American products and creating American jobs.”This is misleading. Mr. Biden’s statement gives the impression that a decades-old trend has reversed, but the data tells a different story. American exports reached a new high in 2022, with exports of goods alone topping $2 trillion. But the United States also imported a record high last year, $3.3 trillion in goods — countering the notion that imports have slowed. As a result, the United States also recorded the highest ever trade deficit since 1970 of $950 billion, and a trade deficit in goods of $1.1 trillion. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Inflation has been a global problem because the pandemic disrupted our supply chains and Putin’s unfair and brutal war in Ukraine disrupted energy supplies as well as food supplies.”This needs context. It is accurate that inflation has been global, and that supply chain issues tied to the pandemic have been a major driver of price increases. It is also true that food and energy disruptions tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated it. But those factors did not spur inflation on their own: Supply chains became clogged in the first place partly because American demand for goods was abnormally strong during the pandemic.Biden’s State of the Union AddressChallenging the G.O.P.: In the first State of the Union speech of a new era of divided government, President Biden called on Republicans to work with him to “finish the job” of repairing the unsettled economy.State of Uncertainty: Mr. Biden used his speech to portray the United States as a country in recovery. But what he did not emphasize was that America also faces a lot of uncertainty in 2023.Foreign Policy: Mr. Biden spends his days confronting Russia and China. So it was especially striking that in his address, he chose to spend relatively little time on America’s global role.A Tense Exchange: Before the speech, Senator Mitt Romney admonished Representative George Santos, a fellow Republican, telling him he “shouldn’t have been there.”That surge in demand came as stuck-at-home consumers shifted their spending away from services and toward things like new furniture. Their spending was also fueled partly by stimulus checks and other pandemic aid. Several studies by economists at the Federal Reserve have found that government spending contributed to some, but far from all, of the inflation. — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“Food inflation is coming down.”True. Food inflation is beginning to slow, though it remains very rapid. Compared with a year ago, food prices are 10.4 percent higher. But monthly food price increases have been slowing steadily in recent months, coming down from a very swift rate in May 2022.Of course, the current situation does not feel great to many consumers: Food prices are still climbing from already-high levels. And some specific food products are much more expensive than last year. Eggs, in particular, have been a pain point for consumers in recent months. — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“Inflation has fallen every month for the last six months, while take-home pay has gone up.”This needs context. It is true that inflation has slowed for the past six months: That means that prices are still increasing, but they are doing so more gradually. The Consumer Price Index ticked up by 6.5 percent in the year through December, which is notably slower than the 9 percent peak in June. That pace is still much more rapid than the roughly 2 percent that was typical before the pandemic.It is also true that wages are climbing sharply compared with the pace that would be normal. But for much of 2021 and 2022, wage gains struggled to keep up with rapid price increases. That has recently begun to change: Average hourly earnings increases exceeded consumer price increases on a monthly basis in both November and December 2022. — Jeanna Smialek.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.What WAS Said“We’re finally giving Medicare the power to negotiate drug prices.”This needs context. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Mr. Biden signed into law in August, does fulfill Democrats’ long-held goal of empowering Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical makers. But the law has limits. The negotiation provisions do not kick in until 2026, when the federal government may begin negotiating the price of up to 10 medicines. The number of drugs subject to negotiation will rise over time. — Sheryl Gay StolbergWhat WAS Said“In the last two years, my administration has cut the deficit by more than $1.7 trillion — the largest deficit reduction in American history.”This needs context. The federal deficit did decrease by $1.7 trillion, from $3.1 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year to $1.4 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, though Mr. Biden’s fiscal policies are not the sole factor.In fact, much of that decline can be attributed to the expiration of pandemic-era spending, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates lower levels of spending. In February 2021, before the Biden administration enacted any fiscal legislation, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the deficit would have reached $1.1 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, less than what ended up happening.Coronavirus stimulus funding from 2021 added nearly $1.9 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, the budget office estimated. The budget agency also estimated that the infrastructure package added $256 billion to the deficit, though supporters disagreed with the analysis. The Inflation Reduction Act, which was the only significant piece of legislation to reduce the deficit, trimmed it by $238 billion over the next 10 years. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Nearly 25 percent of the entire national debt that took over 200 years to accumulate was added by just one administration alone, the last one.”This needs context. Mr. Biden is correct that a quarter of the national debt was accumulated over the four years Mr. Trump was in office. But the former president did not unilaterally add to that amount. In fact, two major factors driving that increase were mandatory spending levels set long before Mr. Trump took office and bipartisan spending bills that were passed to address the pandemic.From the 2018 to 2021 fiscal years, the government collected $14.3 trillion in revenue, and spent $21.9 trillion, according to data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office. In that time, mandatory spending on programs such as Social Security and Medicare totaled $14.7 trillion alone. Discretionary spending totaled about $5.8 trillion.The budget estimated that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts — which passed in December 2017 with no Democrats in support — added roughly another $1 trillion to the federal deficit from 2018 to 2021, even after factoring in economic growth spurred by the tax cuts.But other drivers of the deficit include several sweeping measures that had bipartisan approval. The first coronavirus stimulus package, which received near unanimous support in Congress, added $2 trillion to the deficit over the next two fiscal years. Three additional spending measures contending with Covid-19 and its economic ramifications added another $1.4 trillion. — Linda QiuWhat WAS Said“Some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s a majority.”This needs context. President Biden implied that the Republicans who wanted to allow Social Security and Medicare to sunset were tying those demands to the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.It is true that a couple of Republicans have suggested allowing those entitlement programs to sunset as mandatory spending, instead bringing them up for regular renewal. But Republicans have recently distanced themselves from such efforts. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, has said that cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in talks over raising the debt ceiling, which Congress must vote to do in the coming month or risk a default on the government’s bills. Likewise, President Donald J. Trump has warned Republicans to leave the programs alone in the negotiations. Mr. Biden, nodding to lawmakers responding to his speech, acknowledged that it seemed that cuts to the programs were “off the books now.” — Jeanna SmialekWhat WAS Said“While the virus is not gone, thanks to the resilience of the American people and the ingenuity of medicine, we have broken the Covid grip on us. Covid deaths are down by 90 percent.”This needs context. On average, about 450 people in the United States are dying each day of Covid-19, according to a New York Times database. That number is way down from the roughly 3,200 Americans who were dying each day in early 2021, when the Omicron variant was ripping through the country. But the current daily average of Covid-19 deaths is higher than it was in December 2022, when roughly 250 Americans were losing their lives each day to the virus. — Sheryl Gay StolbergWhat WAS Said“We united NATO. We built a global coalition.”True. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Biden led a huge political, economic and military response that has involved dozens of countries. Surprising many experts who predicted that the United States’ European allies would argue over strategy and lose their resolve, the 30-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown a unity unseen since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and, a year after the Russian invasion, continues to supply vast amounts of weapons to Ukraine.That unity has not been perfect: NATO leaders have argued at times, including their recent tussle over whether and how to supply modern tanks to Ukraine. But many analysts believe it has surprised President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who did not anticipate such a strong degree of Western resolve.President Biden also successfully rallied dozens of nations beyond NATO to join in economic sanctions against Moscow, including Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. That coalition excludes major nations like India and China, which are supporting the Kremlin’s war machine through major purchases of Russian oil. But it remains among the broadest coalitions the United States has led against an adversary. — Michael CrowleyWhat WAS Said“But in the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracy has grown weaker, not stronger.”This lacks evidence. Experts say that President Biden took office after years of global gains for autocracy and deep problems for democracies — as illustrated by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. According to the nonprofit group Freedom House, in every region of the world “democracy is under attack by populist leaders and groups that reject pluralism and demand unchecked power.”It is hard to say whether Mr. Biden has changed the situation. He has made the defense of democracies a core theme of his presidency and held a White House democracy summit in December 2021. He has worked to contain two major autocratic powers, building a coalition against Russia in defense of Ukraine — which has weakened its economy and isolated it diplomatically — and rallied allies to contest China’s political influence and technological gains. American voters rejected many election conspiracy theorists in the midterm elections last year.But Russia and, especially, China retain considerable foreign political influence. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, had a far-right riot in the heart of its government last month. Italy elected a prime minister whose party has fascist roots. Huge crowds in Israel are protesting new right-wing government policies that opponents call an assault on democracy itself. Last February, The Economist magazine’s annual democracy index found that “global democracy continued its precipitous decline in 2021.” Mr. Biden’s rosier view is difficult to substantiate. — Michael Crowley More

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      Donald Trump Isn’t the Only One to Blame for the Capitol Riot. I’d Know.

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      I spent 12 months holed up in a windowless cubical den or locked in my home office investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol and working on a report that my fellow investigators and I thought would blow open the story. When it was released, the press described it as “monumental.” This paper called it “damning.” And it was — for former President Donald Trump, since he bears primary responsibility for the attempted insurrection. But the report could only tell part of the story.Other political, social, economic and technological forces beyond the former president had a hand, whether intentionally or not, in radicalizing thousands of people into thinking they needed to attack the seat of American democracy. Only by understanding how those people lost faith in our governing institutions can we as a country figure out how to protect our democracy from threats like the attack on the Capitol.As an investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 Committee’s “Red” Team, which investigated the people who planned and attended the riot, as well as the domestic extremist groups responsible for much of the violence, I tracked more than 900 individuals charged by the Department of Justice with everything from parading in the Capitol to seditious conspiracy. We interviewed roughly 30 of those defendants about their motives. What my team and I learned, and what we did not have the capacity to detail with specificity in the report, is how distrust of the political establishment led many of the rioters to believe that only revolution could save America.It wasn’t just that they wanted to contest a supposedly stolen election as Mr. Trump called them to do, they wanted to punish the judges, members of Congress, and law enforcement agencies — the so-called political elites — who had discredited Mr. Trump’s claims. One rioter wondered why he should trust anything the F.B.I., D.O.J., or any other federal entity said about the results. The federal government had worked against everyday Americans for years, the rioters told us, favoring entrenched elites with its policies. For many defendants — both those awash in conspiracy theories, as well as some of the more reasonable Trump supporters at the Capitol that day — a stolen election was simply the logical conclusion of years of federal malfeasance.With the legitimacy of democracy so degraded, revolution appeared logical. As Russell James Peterson, a rioter who pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in the Capitol, said on Dec. 4, 2020, “the only way to restore balance and peace is through war. Too much trust has been lost in our great nation.” Guy Reffitt, who earned seven years in prison for leading the charge up the Capitol steps while carrying a firearm, made a similar case later that month: “The government has spent decades committing treason.” The following week, he drove 20 hours to “do what needs to be done” because there were “bad people,” “disgusting people,” in the Capitol. Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy and other crimes, like their leader Stewart Rhodes, had long believed that a corrupt group of left-wing elites were preparing to upend American freedoms and that only militias like themselves could save the Constitution. Their loss of faith in the federal government had led them to the delusion that their seditious behavior to keep Mr. Trump in power was patriotic.Strikingly, these comments came not only from domestic violent extremists; some came from people who appeared to be ordinary Americans. Dona Sue Bissey, a grandmother and hair salon owner from Indiana, said shortly after the attack that she was “very glad” to have been a part of the insurrection; Anthony Robert Williams, a painter from Michigan, called Jan. 6 the “proudest day of my life.”Since the 1960s, political scientists have surveyed Americans and measured the steady decline of public faith in the federal government. Again and again, they have described the predictable consequences of people believing that the deliberative system has lost its legitimacy; almost always, they will turn to alternative means to get what they want, even if it means destroying their government in the process. The attack on the Capitol was a perfect example. William Dunfee, an Ohio pastor facing felony and misdemeanor charges, told his congregation on Dec. 27, 2020, that settling “your differences at the ballot” did not work, so they should make the “government, the tyrants, the socialists, the Marxists, the progressives, the RINOs” in Washington “fear” them.Some have criticized our report because it focused on Mr. Trump and his Big Lie instead of diving more deeply into other causes, such as declining faith in government or racial resentment or economic inequality, which pushed people to believe patriotism required storming the Capitol. Far from ignoring those concepts, we have released many of our documents publicly and archived the rest so that historians, political scientists, sociologists and many others can scrutinize our findings in ways we could not, examining the causes and consequences of Jan. 6 with a longer time horizon than we had.Our report proposed several straightforward fixes to prevent another sitting president from contesting a fair election. But solving the core problem — lost faith in government — will take more time, and a battery of far more complex remedies.The most important step elected officials can take — aside from choosing not to undermine our institutions for their own political gain — is to advance a comprehensive set of election and campaign finance reforms to make politicians more responsive to their constituents than to the money and voices of the few. Congress could also create universal election rules that encourage all citizens to vote while reassuring a skeptical public that the elections are secure. But beyond that, our leaders need to build trust broadly by tackling economic inequality and reinvesting in communities devastated by globalization and technological changes. At the most basic level, politicians should refocus locally on building roads, lowering crime and revitalizing small business districts, instead of looking for votes by harping on divisive national topics.Such reforms would not be a silver bullet. A few of the defendants we interviewed complained of being misled by social media, which seems to have pushed them into conspiracy theory rabbit holes like QAnon. Many also had not-quite-veiled racial resentments that drove their lack of faith in government. But at the very least, these reforms might begin to convince citizens that their government works for them, not just the rich and powerful. Once we can restore that baseline trust, we can better avoid future attacks, both physical and intangible, on our democracy.Mr. Trump did not appear out of a vacuum to upend democracy. His presidency was the culmination of years of political degradation during which voters watched our political institutions rust to the point of breaking. Like any good liar, Mr. Trump succeeded by building his lies off a truth; people no longer trust the federal government because they see its corroded institutions as corrupted for the few against the many. Until we fix that problem, we will not free ourselves from the threat of future political violence and upheaval worse than Jan. 6.James Sasso served as senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee.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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      John Eastman Is Defiant as Trump-Related Investigations Proliferate

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      A legal reckoning awaits a chief architect of Donald Trump’s effort to reverse his election loss. But in Mr. Eastman’s telling, he was far from a criminal.WASHINGTON — John C. Eastman, a legal architect of Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times under questioning by the House Jan. 6 committee.But in recently released testimony from the committee’s investigation, other witnesses had plenty to say about him.Many White House lawyers expressed contempt for Mr. Eastman, portraying him as an academic with little grasp of the real world. Greg Jacob, the legal counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, characterized Mr. Eastman’s legal advice as “gravely, gravely irresponsible,” calling him the “serpent in the ear” of Mr. Trump. Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, recounted “chewing out” Mr. Eastman. Pat A. Cipollone, the chief White House counsel, is described calling Mr. Eastman’s ideas “nutty.”In the coming months, Mr. Eastman will be facing a legal reckoning. He has been drawn into the criminal investigation into election interference in Atlanta, which is nearing a decision on potential indictments. The F.B.I. seized his iPhone. And the Jan. 6 committee, in one of its last acts, asked the Justice Department to investigate Mr. Eastman on a range of criminal charges, including obstructing a congressional proceeding. For good measure, he faces a disciplinary bar proceeding in California.A once-obscure scholar at the right-wing Claremont Institute, Mr. Eastman joined the Trump camp shortly after the election and was soon among a group of lawyers who, with the president’s blessing, largely commandeered decision-making from lawyers at the White House and on the Trump campaign.He championed a two-pronged strategy that the Jan. 6 committee portrayed as a coup plot. The first was enlisting party officials to organize slates of bogus electors in swing states where Mr. Trump lost, even after the results had been certified and recertified, as in Georgia. The second was pressuring Mr. Pence to deviate from the vice president’s traditionally ceremonial role and decline to certify all the electoral votes on Jan. 6.While Mr. Eastman refused to answer most of the committee’s questions, he has hardly been at a loss for words. At the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, held on the Ellipse moments before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol, he spoke ominously of stolen elections, voting machine chicanery and ballots stuffed in a “secret folder.” Over the last two years he has remained defiant in a string of public appearances and interviews, and painted a picture sharply at odds with other accounts, most notably those of Mr. Pence and two of his aides who cooperated with the House committee.In Mr. Eastman’s telling of the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he was far from a criminal. In fact, in a recent interview — a fuller version of one he gave to The New York Times in the fall of 2021 — he says he was helping to head off a potentially more perilous outcome.Mr. Eastman spoke of voter fraud at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, just before Trump supporters marched toward the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersHe claims that in an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 4, he helped convince Mr. Trump that Mr. Pence did not have the power to pick whomever he wanted as president. And Mr. Eastman said his advice to the president and vice president was only that Mr. Pence should pause the certification of the election, giving legislatures more time to consider fraud allegations in certain states where Mr. Trump had lost.“I think my greatest contribution to this conversation is to have backed Trump away from the notion that Pence could just simply gavel him as re-elected,” Mr. Eastman said during the interview at his lawyer’s office in Washington, just blocks from the White House. “And, you know, you look at some of his tweets before that Jan. 4 meeting, he’s saying things like that, because that’s what people out there are saying. But if you look at his speech on Jan. 6, after I weigh in at that meeting, he’s saying exactly the opposite.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Few in the White House, however, saw him as anything close to a voice of moderation amid the riot that followed. And Mr. Eastman’s account differs in significant ways from those provided by Mr. Pence and his aides.The former vice president refused to cooperate with the Jan. 6 committee but addressed the issue in a recent opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Pence wrote that on Jan. 5, a day after first meeting with Mr. Eastman in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump summoned the vice president for another meeting where “the president’s lawyers, including Mr. Eastman, were now requesting that I simply reject the electors.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.He said that he “later learned that Mr. Eastman had conceded to my general counsel that rejecting electoral votes was a bad idea and any attempt to do so would be quickly overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court. This guy didn’t even believe what he was telling the president.”The crux of Mr. Eastman’s defense is that he was simply a lawyer offering advice, and that he was acting in good faith, since he still believes many of the fraud claims that were made. “I’m not backing down on that,” he said. “I mean, the amount of evidence, even if I’m wrong about it, was certainly enough to have warranted further review.”In an email to Mike Pence’s lawyer on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. Eastman urged that the vice president should not certify the electoral vote.House Select Committee, via Associated PressAsked what he based such claims on, he cited a report issued last year by Michael J. Gableman, a former Wisconsin judge who was hired, and later fired, by the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, Robin Vos. The report endorsed a host of debunked claims. He also cited the deeply flawed documentary “2000 Mules,” directed by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative activist who once pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance fraud. (He was later pardoned by Mr. Trump.)In recent weeks, Mr. Eastman has continued to assert himself as a far-right stalwart, signing a letter endorsing dissident Republicans’ ultimately failed efforts to block Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from becoming speaker of the House. Among the other signatories to the letter was Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Mr. Eastman once clerked. In her own testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Thomas referred to Mr. Eastman as “an active participant with the ‘Thomas clique’ clerks” who keep in touch.Perhaps Mr. Eastman’s most immediate potential exposure comes in the criminal investigation into election interference in Fulton County, Ga., which encompasses most of Atlanta. One of Mr. Eastman’s lawyers said last year that his client was “probably a target” in the inquiry, but his lawyers said this month that he had received no notification that he is one.Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s state director of Election Day operations in Georgia, testified to the Jan. 6 committee that he later felt “ashamed” at having taken part in the plan orchestrated by Mr. Eastman and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, to assemble bogus slates of Trump electors in Georgia and other states that Mr. Trump had lost.“I don’t think Rudy Giuliani’s intent was ever about legal challenges,” he said. “It was clear to me that he was working with folks like John Eastman and wanted to put pressure on the vice president to accept these slates of electors just regardless, without any approval from a governor, without any approval from, you know, the voters or a court, or anything like that.”Clark D. Cunningham, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said in an email that “if Sinner’s testimony, or similar testimony, is deemed credible, then John Eastman faces considerable risk of prosecution.”“If Eastman was part of a conspiracy to trick Georgia citizens into signing false election documents, neither his role as an attorney nor a personal belief that election results were tainted by fraud could justify such criminal conduct,” he added.In addition to his central role in the electors plan, Mr. Eastman appeared remotely before a Georgia State Senate panel on Dec. 3, 2020, and made several false claims about the election. Among them was the assertion that “the number of underaged individuals who were allowed to register” in the state “amounts allegedly up to approximately 66,000 people.”Asked about the claim during the interview last month, Mr. Eastman said that he had relied on a consultant who made an error that was later corrected, and that the actual number was about 2,000 who “were only 16 when they registered.” The new figure, he said, came from the same consultant. In a statement, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office said that “the system literally does not allow a person to register if they don’t have a birth date that makes them at least 17.5 years old.”A review of the data used by Mr. Eastman showed that he was referring to any Georgians who were recorded as having registered early going back to the 1920s; data entry errors appeared to be a common culprit, with many people’s registration year listed in place of their birth year. A review by The Times found only about a dozen Georgians who were recorded as having registered in 2020 when they were 16, in what appeared most likely to be another data-entry problem. Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment and co-author of a lengthy report on the Fulton County inquiry, said Mr. Eastman “was referred for criminal prosecution by the Jan. 6 committee, with good reason,” adding that if charges are brought in Georgia “it’s hard to imagine that D.A. Fani Willis does not include him.”Jack Begg More

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      Many Republicans Against McCarthy Sought to Overturn 2020 Election

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      WASHINGTON — They helped lead the efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election. They refused to certify that President Biden was the rightful winner. They spread lies that helped ignite a mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On Friday, the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, many of the same hard-right lawmakers who served as top lieutenants to Mr. Trump during the buildup to the assault spent the day blocking the bid of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be speaker and extracting major concessions from him. While some had received subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigations and were later referred to the House Ethics Committee, their power showed they were far from outcasts and had paid little price for their actions. Among the ringleaders in both the effort to block Mr. McCarthy and the push to overturn the 2020 election were Representative Scott Perry, the leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona. (On Friday, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Perry swung behind Mr. McCarthy after he caved to their demands to dilute the power of the post he is seeking and to give their faction more sway in the House.)Other hard-right holdouts who for days have refused to vote for Mr. McCarthy were Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Harris of Maryland. All three met with Mr. Trump or White House officials as they discussed how to fight the election results, according to evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.(Mr. Harris flipped his vote to support Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, but Ms. Boebert and Mr. Gaetz remained against him.) Democrats made sure to single out the group.“This January 6th anniversary should serve as a wake-up call to the G.O.P. to reject M.A.G.A. radicalism — which keeps leading to G.O.P. failures,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. “But the pandemonium wrought by House Republicans this week is one more example of how M.A.G.A. radicalism is making it impossible for them to govern.” No one in the hard-right group attended what was billed as a bipartisan ceremony on Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary. Only one Republican of any stripe turned up: Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former F.B.I. agent who is the co-chairman of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. The ceremony opened with a moment of silence for House members on the steps of the Capitol to honor the Capitol Police officers who died in the year after the attack.“We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, as tears welled up in some House members’ eyes. Witnesses who testified before the House investigative committee, including police officers who defended the Capitol, were honored at the White House, including Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, and Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, and Eugene Goodman of the U.S. Capitol Police. Mr. Perry, who was one of the main architects behind a plan to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud, said Friday that he fought Mr. McCarthy’s nomination for speaker until he could extract concessions from him to give the House Freedom Caucus and rank-and-file Republicans more influence over leadership. “This place is broken,” Mr. Perry said. “We weren’t going to move from that position until the change is made.” Mr. Biggs, who was still holding out against Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, was involved in a range of organizational efforts in 2020, including meetings aimed at attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6, according to the House Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to support him on Friday, spread numerous lies about the 2020 election and spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies arranged by Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. The House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack has referred Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs to the Ethics Committee for refusing to comply with its subpoenas. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules.“We believe that there ought to be fundamental changes about and limits on spending after the massive bloated omnibus spending bill in December,” Mr. Roy said, referring to the $1.7 trillion government funding package passed by Congress last month. “And so we’ve talked about those. We’ve put a lot of those things in place.” More

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      Trying to Trademark ‘Rigged Election,’ and Other Revelations From the Jan. 6 Transcripts

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      The Jan. 6 committee released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday.WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer saw the Jan. 6 attack as similar to the “Reichstag moment” that led to Nazi dictatorship. Aides for former President Donald J. Trump saw their future job opportunities slipping away, and predicted being “perpetually unemployed.” Mr. Trump himself saw the push to overturn the 2020 election as a financial opportunity, moving to trademark the phrase “Rigged Election.”These were among the latest revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee, which released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday. Since Friday night, the panel has released several troves of evidence, including about 120 previously unseen transcripts along with emails and text messages obtained during its 18-month inquiry, totaling tens of thousands of pages.The evidence touched on nearly every aspect of Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. It provided new details about how some of his top allies lobbied for aggressive plans to keep him in power, while others lamented how the dark day of Jan. 6, 2021, had negatively affected their employment prospects.The panel said it has now turned over an “enormous volume of material” to the Justice Department as Jack Smith, the special counsel, conducts a parallel investigation into the events of Jan. 6.“Accountability is now critical to thwart any other future scheme to overturn an election,” the committee’s leaders, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, said in a statement.In the end, the committee released about 280 transcripts of interviews. Though the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, only a few hundred sessions took the form of formal depositions or transcribed interviews. Lawmakers said they withheld certain transcripts that contained sensitive information.Here are some takeaways from the recently released evidence:A senior military adviser said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge his defeat.In a 302-page transcript of his interview with the committee, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the voluble chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel about a meeting in the Oval Office a few weeks after Election Day, in which he said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge he was not going to be sworn in again.General Milley described Mr. Trump saying “words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy. Meaning President Biden.”That statement built on other evidence the committee spent significant time documenting: That Mr. Trump was aware he had lost but continued to falsely claim otherwise. At one point General Milley suggested it might have been another adviser who said it, but stated when asked again that it was Mr. Trump.General Milley also recalled seeing the Nazi imagery in the crowd on Jan. 6 and saying to his staff: “These guys look like the brown shirts to me. This looks like a Reichstag moment.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Aides saw their futures damaged.Some of the most striking exchanges in the committee’s text messages were between Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Hope Hicks and Julie Radford, the chief of staff to Mr. Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka.In them, both women lamented that Mr. Trump had caused irreparable harm to his own staff as the violence played out.“In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local Proud Boys chapter,” Ms. Hicks fumed in a message. “All of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed.”More evidence emerged that Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol.Several Trump advisers made clear that Mr. Trump had intended for days to join a crowd of his supporters marching on the Capitol.“POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the ellipse, and call on everyone to march to the capitol,” Katrina Pierson, a Trump spokeswoman, wrote in a Jan. 2, 2021, email.Kayleigh McEnany, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, also wrote in a note on Jan. 6 that Mr. Trump had wanted to walk alongside the crowd as it descended on the Congress: “POTUS wanted to walk to capital. Physically walk. He said fine ride beast.”Bannon continued to agitate.Stephen K. Bannon, an outside adviser to Mr. Trump, continued to endorse extreme tactics even after the violence of Jan. 6.On Jan. 8, 2021, he wrote in a text message to his spokeswoman, Alexandra Preate, that he wanted one million people to surround the Capitol after Mr. Biden was seated in the White House.“I’d surround the Capitol in total silence,” Mr. Bannon wrote, according to a transcript of Ms. Preate’s interview.Mr. Bannon also advised that Mr. Trump should have nothing to do with Patrick Byrne, the wealthy businessman who financed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “Steve Bannon once told me, he said, Patrick Byrne’s crazy, and he should not be on the stage with Donald Trump,” Ms. Preate testified.Trump lawyers investigated fraud claims and couldn’t prove them.Joshua Findlay, a Trump campaign lawyer, told the panel he was tasked with looking into fraud allegations in Georgia, but came up empty.“The big complaints that you would hear about, you know, massive vote flips and things like that, we just didn’t ever — at least in Georgia — we did not ever find any evidence of that,” he testified.Nevertheless, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, joined forces with another lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro, who devised ways to challenge the 2020 election through the use of alternative slates of electors.Mr. Findlay said Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Giuliani teamed up “promoting these theories and being aggressive, you know, aggressively promoting them,” Mr. Findlay recalled.“Rudy Giuliani was making a lot of the decisions about litigation strategy,” he testified. “He really bought into Ken’s theory on this.”Kash Patel was a recurring figure.Mr. Smith, the special counsel, is also investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive documents.A figure in both the documents investigations and the committee’s inquiry was Kash Patel, currently one of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the National Archives. Several witnesses testified about a push to install Mr. Patel, a Trump loyalist, in a high-ranking C.I.A. post, something that the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, along with Vice President Mike Pence and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, moved to stop. But not everyone found Mr. Patel objectionable.Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s final national security adviser, called Mr. Patel a “good guy” in his testimony.General Milley took a different view, describing the elevation of Mr. Patel as concerning.He recalled confronting Mr. Patel and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while in a V.I.P. box at the Army-Navy game.“To Kash Patel, I said: ‘So, Kash, which one are you going to get, C.I.A. or F.B.I.?’ And Patel’s face, you know, he looks down and he comes back and says: ‘Chairman, Chairman.’ And I looked at White House Chief of Staff Meadows and said: ‘What are you guys trying to do?’”Trump wanted to trademark ‘Rigged Election.’During the tumultuous post-election period, Mr. Trump and his team worked intensely at raising money — bringing in hundreds of millions — while trying to register trademarks about fighting election results, the transcripts show.In one recent transcript, the committee revealed an email from Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy White House chief of staff, to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, titled “POTUS requests.”“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see — or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email states, before providing two bolded terms: “Save America PAC!” with an exclamation mark and “Rigged Election!”“Guys — can we do ASAP please?” Mr. Kushner then wrote, forwarding the request.‘I don’t recall.’The transcripts also, once again, show the difficulties for investigators.Mr. Chesebro repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, while Molly Michael, an assistant to Mr. Trump, told the committee more than 100 times that she couldn’t recall events from Jan. 6.The committee ran into a similar problem with Anthony Ornato, a former deputy chief of staff at the White House who had also been the special agent in charge of Mr. Trump’s Secret Service detail. He said he did not remember significant moments that multiple witnesses recounted to the panel. “I don’t recall any conversation taking place about the possible movement of the president to the Capitol,” Mr. Ornato testified.The committee published excerpts from text messages between Mr. Ornato and a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson — whose statements have at times been in conflict — that appeared to support her memory of some events on Jan. 6 that she has spoken of. In the messages, she relayed that Mr. Trump was talking, as he had previously, about going to the Capitol himself, with Mr. Ornato replying to her comment.Trump was directly involved in the false elector scheme.Mr. Trump personally involved himself in the false elector scheme, according to Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Ms. McDaniel recounted a call after the election in which Mr. Trump introduced her to John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote a now-infamous memo that laid out a path for the former president to remain in power.Mr. Eastman, she said, then spoke about how he believed it was important for the committee to help the Trump campaign “gather these contingent electors,” she said.Stephanie Lai More

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      Jan. 6 Transcripts Reveal Disagreements That Divided Trump Camp

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      Interviews revealed that people in President Donald J. Trump’s orbit had very different views on seizing voting machines, the Proud Boys and each other’s roles.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Friday released more than 40 additional transcripts of its interviews, bringing the total number of transcripts published to more than 160.So far, the transcripts have added details to the public’s understanding of how police intelligence failures contributed to the Capitol attack, how former President Donald J. Trump considered “blanket pardons” for those charged, and how Trump-aligned lawyers allegedly tried to steer witness testimony.The committee is rushing to publish more interviews before Jan. 3, when Republicans will take control of the House. Though the committee conducted more than 1,000 interviews, many of them were informal; only a few hundred were transcribed sessions.Here are some takeaways from the thousands of pages released this week.Giuliani thought seizing voting machines could be an impeachable offense.At a chaotic meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020, outside advisers urged Mr. Trump to use the military to seize voting machines in a bid to rerun the election.That was too much for even Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who had encouraged baseless election fraud claims but told Mr. Trump that the plan could be impeachable behavior.“This may be the only thing that I know of that you ever did that could merit impeachment,” Mr. Giuliani recalled telling the president.In his interview with the committee, Mr. Giuliani refused to discuss his role in many aspects of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, though he said he had rejected Mr. Trump’s idea of granting him a pardon.“The president asked me what I thought of it,” he said of the pardon. “And I said I thought it would be a terrible mistake for him.”Mr. Giuliani was less forthcoming when asked if Mr. Trump had ever thought of pardoning himself. “That would be privileged, actually, if he raised that with me,” he said.The Secret Service was concerned about the Proud Boys leader’s White House visit.On Dec. 12, 2020, hours before hundreds of members of his far-right group took part in a pro-Trump protest, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted a photo of the White House steps on social media.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“Last minute invite to an undisclosed location,” Mr. Tarrio wrote on Parler, a right-wing social media app.Newly released emails and testimony suggest that some Secret Service agents were concerned about how a prominent far-right extremist had so easily gained access to the White House.Committee investigators later determined that the White House visit had been a public event that was likely arranged by a friend of Mr. Tarrio, Bianca Gracia, the founder of a group called Latinos for Trump.In an email obtained by the committee, Ron Rowe, the chief of staff to the Secret Service’s director, asked Bobby Engel, a Secret Service agent: “Can we get some specifics on who submitted him for the tour? Why didn’t we pick up on his role/membership in the Proud Boys?”Anthony Ornato, a former Secret Service agent who was Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, told the panel that he did not recall if he knew who the Proud Boys were at the time of Mr. Tarrio’s visit. The group’s name notably came up during a 2020 presidential debate.Mr. Tarrio is one of five members of the Proud Boys who are now on trial in Washington, where they are facing charges of seditious conspiracy. Opening arguments are expected to begin next month.Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, denied that she had discussed her political activities with her husband.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressVirginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas tried to play down her role in contesting the election.In a wide-ranging interview, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who is known as Ginni, sought to play down her role in attempts to challenge election results.Ms. Thomas acknowledged that she had exchanged text messages after the election with Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, in which she recommended that he support Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who was pushing false accusations that foreign governments had hacked into the country’s voting machines.Ms. Thomas denied that she had discussed her activities with her husband. But she did acknowledge that she had been referring to Justice Thomas as her “best friend” in texts with Mr. Meadows, in which she said a talk with her “best friend” had cheered her up while she was distraught over Mr. Trump’s loss.“My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset,” she told investigators.Ms. Thomas also acknowledged taking part in a project called FreeRoots that had sent mass emails to state lawmakers in key swing states saying they had “power to decide if there were problems in their election.”In a tense exchange with Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and vice chairwoman of the panel, Ms. Thomas said that she still believed that the election had been marred by fraud. When questioned further, Ms. Thomas could not come up with any specific instances of fraud.C.I.A. staff had a ‘suicide pact’ to resign if Trump fired the director.New details also arose this week about plans to replace the director of the Central Intelligence Agency with a Trump loyalist in the final stages of the administration. The committee received testimony about a mass resignation plan at the C.I.A. in opposition to Mr. Trump’s attempt to replace Gina Haspel as director with Kashyap P. Patel, a lawyer and staunch supporter of the president.According to Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House communications director, Ms. Haspel had a “suicide pact” in place, in which the entire intelligence community would resign if she were removed from her post.“Allegedly, for about 14 minutes, Kash was actually the C.I.A. director,” Ms. Griffin said.Trump’s White House was marked by constant infighting.One theme throughout the transcripts is the intense infighting that was a constant feature of the Trump White House. Lawyers fought with lawyers. Communications staff fought among themselves. The president berated aides of all ranks.Some examples: Ms. Griffin provided a scathing assessment of Kayleigh McEnany, the former White House press secretary: “I am a Christian woman, so I will say this. Kayleigh is a liar and an — She’s a opportunist.”The Trump adviser Jason Miller told investigators he was “pissed off” when he learned that Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer, listed his name as the official to contact on a document she circulated denying that President Biden had won the election. “I called Cleta and said, ‘What the hell?’” Mr. Miller said. “And she said, ‘Yeah, you guys weren’t moving fast enough, so I just put your name on it and sent it out.’”Trump didn’t want to do ‘a big PR push’ for a Capitol Police officer who died after Jan. 6.The transcripts also show the conditional nature of the former president’s support for law enforcement. Mr. Trump agreed at the urging of his staff to lower the flag over the White House to honor a Capitol Police officer who died after Jan. 6, but “was adamant that we not do a press release or a big PR push,” Mr. Miller wrote in a text message.“We want to make it clear nobody is a stronger supporter of law enforcement than President Trump but we don’t want to blast it out,” Mr. Miller wrote.A furniture executive bankrolled private jets for Trump’s circle.Testimony released Friday detailed how Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of the furniture retail company Overstock, took on the role of a financier who chartered private jets for people in Mr. Trump’s circle as they fought election results.Trips included bringing Trump supporters and members of the Proud Boys to attend rallies in Washington before Jan. 6, taking lawyers and cyberexperts to investigate voting machines and transporting people who signed affidavits about election fraud.Mr. Byrne also attended a White House meeting in which participants urged Mr. Trump to seize voting machines. In his deposition, Mr. Byrne said he had called for the meeting and asked the president to “put us in, coach.”Senator Mike Lee initially supported Mr. Trump, but ultimately voted to certify the election for Mr. Biden.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn one telling, the fake electors scheme originated from a senator.According to Ms. Mitchell, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, came up with the idea to submit alternate electors to cast their ballots for the former president instead of Mr. Biden.“It was actually Mike Lee’s idea,” she told investigators.Mr. Lee has said he was eager to fight alongside Mr. Trump, but backed off when evidence of a stolen election did not appear. Mr. Lee ultimately voted to certify the election for Mr. Biden. More

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      For Trump, the Legal Shoes Finally Drop

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      Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNext up, a special grand jury report in Fulton County, Ga. At issue is whether Trump or his allies broke Georgia laws trying to overturn the state’s 2020 results. Indictments would be up to the district attorney, Fani Willis, but the grand jury report, due within weeks, could recommend criminal prosecution. More