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      Why Trump’s Indictments Don’t Feel Like Part of the Finale

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      It looks as though Donald Trump will be indicted — again.Federal prosecutors have informed him that he’s a target of their investigation into the Jan. 6 riot and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.This would be Trump’s third criminal indictment and counting. Prosecutors in Georgia are still considering charges.It should feel like the fulfillment of America’s commitment to justice that Trump is finally facing some accountability for his recklessness and ruthlessness, for his disavowal of constitutional concerns and apparent contempt for the law.So why does it feel so anticlimactic? Why does the feeling of foreboding remain? Why is there no sense of finality in the air?It feels that way because there’s no guarantee that we’re reaching the end of Trump’s era of menace. On the contrary, there’s every indication that he has no intention of bending or breaking — that he’d rather destroy our democracy than be accountable to it.America is undergoing an extreme stress test, and no one truly knows how it will emerge.There are the chronic optimists who hold to the hubristic view that America can defy history and not be subject to the well-recorded and almost universal rise and fall of empires. Not me: I recognize America’s precariousness. I see the soft, fleshy spots where a shiv could be plunged and do the most damage. And I’m not alone.For too many Americans, though, hearing someone say that our democracy is in danger sounds like a partisan exaggeration, a sky-is-falling attempt to sway public opinion. They doubt that Trump will fundamentally and permanently change what our country says that it stands for.But Trump keeps indicating that an unraveling democracy is precisely his plan. Just this week, The Times reported that should Trump be re-elected, he plans on “reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.”And many of the people who follow and support Trump either know this and enthusiastically support it or turn a blind eye to it. Either way, they’re all in.Some political observers naïvely believed that a critical mass of Trump’s supporters could be released from his spell when they were confronted with his corruption.They failed to recognize that Trump has infected his followers’ faith. They believe in nothing more than they believe in him. They wanted their biases confirmed rather than challenged, and Trump filled the need. He’s become a symbol, an inspiration and an aspiration. He’s become an idea, which is far more dangerous than an individual.Trump achieved this by capitalizing, to an almost unprecedented degree, on Americans’ addiction to celebrity culture. He’s not the first president to accrue and employ celebrity: John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did so, too.But each of those men married his celebrity to our politics; Trump has used his celebrity to pervert our politics. He sensed the fragility of our political system, its overreliance on precedent, norms and decorum and its inability to anticipate chaos — chaos that he was able to weaponize.Trump recognized that for many Americans, celebrity was more powerful than character or civics. That celebrity allowed for a curated reality, one that acknowledged the flower but hid the thorns.In this environment, some people’s desire to belong and be affirmed and validated transcended truth and reality. And in that space, he could be the captain of their team, the leader of their band and the minister of their church.For them, Trumpism became a form of identity entertainment, a carnival for the like-minded guided by an impresario who mixes amusement with anger, fear and grievance.In this environment, it’s also easy for Trump to fend off challengers who appeal more to the mind than to the soul.His closest rival for the Republican nomination is Ron DeSantis, whose campaign is struggling as Republicans continue to rally around Trump. DeSantis possesses no magic. Never has. He’s dull and boring, a beta male cosplaying bravado.DeSantis thought his provincial pettiness would scale to a national level without alteration or adjustment. He thought he could unseat the MAGA oracle with his state-level report card.But Trump needs the nomination more than DeSantis wants it. For Trump, re-election would be the most effective protection from prosecution and possible imprisonment.Trump understands that the political calendar and the legal one can be played against each other.Unless the country denies Trump re-election — an outcome still too early to predict — the country courts its own undoing.Trump has three things working for him: the fact that America’s systems of accountability still haven’t adjusted to his novelty, a die-hard flock of supporters and time.Time may prove to be the most important of the three because time is the thing that the country itself is running out of.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Potential Trump Jan. 6 Charges Include a Civil Rights Law Violation

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      A target letter sent by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss cited three statutes that could be the basis for a prosecution.Federal prosecutors have introduced a new twist in the Jan. 6 investigation by suggesting in a target letter that they could charge former President Donald J. Trump with violating a civil rights statute that dates back to the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, according to three people familiar with the matter.The letter to Mr. Trump from the special counsel, Jack Smith, referred to three criminal statutes as part of the grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss, according to two people with knowledge of its contents. Two of the statutes were familiar from the criminal referral by the House Jan. 6 committee and months of discussion by legal experts: conspiracy to defraud the government and obstruction of an official proceeding.But the third criminal law cited in the letter was a surprise: Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”Congress enacted that statute after the Civil War to provide a tool for federal agents to go after Southern whites, including Ku Klux Klan members, who engaged in terrorism to prevent formerly enslaved African Americans from voting. But in the modern era, it has been used more broadly, including in cases of voting fraud conspiracies.A Justice Department spokesman declined to discuss the target letter and Mr. Smith’s theory for bringing the Section 241 statute into the Jan. 6 investigation. But the modern usage of the law raised the possibility that Mr. Trump, who baselessly declared the election he lost to have been rigged, could face prosecution on accusations of trying to rig the election himself.A series of 20th-century cases upheld application of the law in cases involving alleged tampering with ballot boxes by casting false votes or falsely tabulating votes after the election was over, even if no specific voter could be considered the victim.In a 1950 opinion by the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, for example, Judge Charles C. Simons wrote of applying Section 241 in a ballot box-stuffing case that the right to an honest count “is a right possessed by each voting elector, and to the extent that the importance of his vote is nullified, wholly or in part, he has been injured in the free exercise of a right or privilege secured to him by the laws and Constitution of the United States.”In a 1974 Supreme Court opinion upholding the use of Section 241 to charge West Virginians who cast fake votes on a voting machine, Justice Thurgood Marshall cited Judge Simons and added that every voter “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”The line of 20th-century cases raised the prospect that Mr. Smith and his team could be weighing using that law to cover efforts by Mr. Trump and his associates to flip the outcome of states he lost. Those efforts included the recorded phone conversation in which Mr. Trump tried to bully Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough additional votes to overcome Mr. Biden’s win in that state and promoting a plan to use so-called fake electors — self-appointed slates of pro-Trump electors from states won by Mr. Biden — to help block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Trump’s defeat.“It seems like under 241 there’s at least a right to an honest counting of the votes,” said Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “Submitting an alternate electoral certificate to Congress (as opposed to casting false votes or counting wrong) is a novel scenario, but it seems like it would violate this right.”The prospect of charging Mr. Trump under the other two statutes cited in the target letter is less novel, if not without hurdles. Among other things, in its final report last year, the House committee that investigated the events that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol had recommended that the Justice Department charge the former president under both of them.One, Section 371 of Title 18, makes it a crime to conspire to defraud the United States. The other, Section 1512, includes a provision that makes it a crime to corruptly obstruct an official proceeding.A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined requests to clarify what was in the letter.Citing the statutes in the letter, which Mr. Trump has said he received on Sunday, does not necessarily mean that any charges brought by Mr. Smith would have to be based on them. But the letter’s contents provide a road map to investigators’ thinking.The conspiracy to defraud the United States statute, if used, raises the question of who Mr. Trump’s co-conspirators would be.Some of those who worked most closely with Mr. Trump in promoting the lie that Mr. Trump had been robbed of a victory by widespread fraud, including lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman, had not received target letters, their lawyers said on Tuesday.The corrupt obstruction of a proceeding charge has been used against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters and has served as the Justice Department’s go-to count in describing the central event that day: the disruption of the Electoral College certification process that was taking place inside the Capitol during a joint session of Congress.The law was originally passed as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a measure meant to curb corporate malfeasance. Defense lawyers for several rioters have challenged its use against their client, saying it was meant to stop crimes like witness tampering or document destruction and had been unfairly stretched to include the chaos at the Capitol.But in April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge to participants in the Capitol attack. Still, unlike ordinary rioters, Mr. Trump did not physically participate in the storming of the Capitol, although he had summoned supporters to Washington that day and railed about the unwillingness of Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the proceedings in Congress, to stop them.A second attempt to invalidate the obstruction count in the federal appeals court in Washington has focused specifically on a provision of the law dictating that defendants must act “corruptly” in committing the obstructive act.Defense lawyers have argued that this provision does not apply to many ordinary Jan. 6 rioters who did not act corruptly because they stood to gain nothing personally by entering the Capitol. It could, however, be applied more easily to Mr. Trump, who stood to gain an election victory by obstructing the certification process.William K. Rashbaum More

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      Trump’s Conspirators Are Facing the Music, Finally

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      We’ve reached a turning point in the effort to ensure there are consequences for those who deliberately attempt to undermine our democracy: Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, charged 16 Republican leaders in her state on Tuesday for their role as fake electors working to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The charges, coming on the heels of news that the special counsel Jack Smith has informed Donald Trump that he’s a target of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the Capitol riot, mean we are witnessing a new and necessary phase in this quest for accountability, one in which the federal and state wheels of justice work to hold people accountable not only for the violence on Jan. 6, but also for what got us there: the alleged scheme to interfere with the transfer of power.The charges in Michigan will surely meet criticism on all sides. Some will say the case is not broad or bold enough, that Mr. Trump and the other alleged national ringleaders should have been charged as well. Others will say Ms. Nessel cast too wide a net, pulling in low-level party functionaries who did not know better. We think those critiques are misconceived. Ms. Nessel got it just right, prosecuting crimes firmly within her jurisdiction, while opening the way for federal authorities to net even bigger fish.Ms. Nessel brought the same eight counts against all 16 defendants. The offenses include conspiracy to commit forgery, since the defendants are accused of signing documents stating they were the qualified electors (they were not), and publishing forged documents by circulating these materials to federal and state authorities. On paper, the penalties for the offenses range from five to 14 years, but sentencing in this case would presumably be lower than that maximum.Until now there have been no charges centered on the fake electors plot. For that reason alone, Michigan’s action brings a sense of needed accountability for those who fanned the rioters’ passions leading up to Jan. 6 by spinning a false narrative about a stolen election.Michigan saw some of the most outrageous fake electoral certificates to emerge during the period leading up to the Capitol riot. Unlike the fake certificates in Pennsylvania and New Mexico, the Michigan documents did not include a disclaimer that they were to be used only in the case of litigation. What’s more, the documents contained more outright false statements than simply declaring that the signers were the lawful electors of the winning candidate.For example, they state that the electors “convened and organized in the State Capitol,” when, according to the attorney general, they were hidden away in the basement of the state Republican headquarters. (It seems likely that the fake electors included this lie because Michigan law requires presidential electors to meet in the Capitol — a requirement and legal problem that a Trump campaign legal adviser, Kenneth Chesebro, had flagged in his confidential memorandum setting out the scheme.)In proving these cases, establishing intent will be key. Here, there are several indicators that the defendants may have been aware of the illicit nature of their gathering. According to congressional testimony from the state Republican Party’s chairwoman at the time, Laura Cox, the group originally planned to meet inside the Capitol and hide overnight, so they could vote in the building the following day. Ms. Cox said she told a lawyer working with the Trump campaign and supposedly organizing the fake electors “in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate,” and “a very, very bad idea and potentially illegal.”As she put it, Ms. Cox was “very uncomfortable” with facilitating a meeting of the fake elector group, and said so at the time in accord with her lawyers’ opinion. Ms. Cox even urged the group to draft a significantly more measured document simply “stating that if perhaps something were to happen in the courts, they were willing and able to serve as electors from Michigan for Donald Trump.” Her advice was not followed.At the time the fake electors met to allegedly forge their documents, they should have been aware that state officials had certified the election results for Joe Biden — it was national and state news. By that point, there was no prospect of changing that outcome through either litigation or legislative action. On the day prosecutors say the fake electors met, two of the most powerful Republicans in the state acknowledged as much. Mike Shirkey, the majority leader in the State Senate, and Lee Chatfield, the House speaker, both issued statements declaring the presidential race over. Mr. Shirkey said that Michigan’s “Democratic slate of electors should be able to proceed with their duty” without the threat of harassment or violence.The fake electors were told they were not allowed to bring their phones into the meeting at the Republican headquarters that day, according to testimony one of them gave congressional investigators. They were instructed to maintain secrecy and not to share any details about what was occurring. That secrecy suggests that they knew what they were doing was wrong.Michigan’s former secretary of state, Terri Lynn Land, who had been designated a Trump elector, declined to participate in the proceedings, saying, according to Ms. Cox’s testimony, she was not comfortable doing so.With these facts, it would have been unthinkable for the state attorney general to choose not to prosecute the Michigan 16. Ms. Nessel’s office has regularly brought prosecutions, some of them against her fellow Democrats, centered on false documents in connection with elections. The case of the fake electors is far more egregious than most of those other cases: The defendants here were politically engaged individuals who should have been aware of the election results, as well as the flat rejection by the courts and Michigan Legislature of the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud.To be sure, some critics of the case may still think that the Michigan attorney general should have gone after Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants, who helped organize the false electors. But prosecutors have a responsibility first to pursue those individuals within their jurisdiction. By focusing solely on the figures who undertook their acts in Michigan, Ms. Nessel is wisely insulating her case against charges that she overreached, exceeding her jurisdiction.Of course, broader prosecutions may still be justified. Reporting indicates that the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., Fani Willis, may be considering a different kind of wide-ranging case, involving state RICO crimes. Unlike the Michigan prosecution, her case may focus on Mr. Trump’s direct efforts to pressure state election officials — efforts that were caught on tape — and Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to provide false statements of election fraud to state officials.If broad-based indictments ultimately emerge out of Georgia, and are supported by the facts and appropriate law, then we would welcome it. That is part of the genius of American democracy: The states, which are responsible for running our elections, are laboratories of both democracy and of accountability.Ms. Nessel’s case also leaves a clear lane for Mr. Smith, the special counsel. She has avoided charging high-level national individuals whom Mr. Smith is apparently investigating. If anything, her case provides greater foundation for Mr. Smith to act, and he now seems to be following through. If Ms. Nessel can move against these individuals in Michigan, Mr. Smith can and should do the same against the ringleaders. Together, they can hold both the foot soldiers and their organizers accountable for their actions leading up to the Capitol riot.Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment and trial of Donald Trump. Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University, is a co-editor in chief of the Just Security website.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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      Target Letter to Trump Raises Possibility of Obstruction and Fraud Charges

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      In the two and a half years since a mob laid siege to the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, a wealth of evidence has emerged about Donald J. Trump’s bid to stay in power after the 2020 election.Mr. Trump and his allies peddled spurious claims of voter fraud, pressured officials in states he narrowly lost and recruited false slates of electors in those states. He urged Vice President Mike Pence to delay certification of Mr. Biden’s win. And he called on a huge crowd of his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.”Now, Mr. Trump appears almost certain to face criminal charges for some of his efforts to remain in office. On Tuesday, he disclosed on social media that federal prosecutors had sent him a so-called target letter, suggesting that he could soon be indicted in the investigation into the events that culminated in the riot.Mr. Trump did not say what criminal charges, if any, the special counsel, Jack Smith, had specified in issuing the letter.But since the Capitol attack — in part because of revelations by a House committee investigation and news reports — many legal specialists and commentators have converged on several charges that are particularly likely, especially obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the government.A person briefed on the matter said the target letter cited three statutes that could be applied in a prosecution of Mr. Trump by the special counsel, Jack Smith, including a potential charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and contributed to a prosecution memo modeling potential Jan. 6-related charges, said that the target letter suggested the special counsel “has more than enough evidence” to bring a case against the former president.“By leading the effort to procure fraudulent electoral certificates across the nation, Trump helmed a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.,” Mr. Eisen said. “And by using those false documents to press Mike Pence to disrupt the Jan. 6 meeting of Congress, Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding.”There have also been signs that prosecutors have explored potential charges involving wire or mail fraud related to Mr. Trump’s fund-raising efforts in the name of overturning the election results.Any charges in the District of Columbia — where federal grand juries have been hearing evidence — would raise additional legal peril for Mr. Trump. Already, the Justice Department has won guilty pleas or convictions in hundreds of cases related to the riot, suggesting that a pool of jurors may be less receptive toward him than in Palm Beach County, Fla., where he faces charges over his hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.These are some of the charges Mr. Trump could face in the Jan. 6 case.Corruptly Obstructing an Official ProceedingBoth the House committee that scrutinized Jan. 6 and a federal judge in California who intervened in its inquiry have said that there is evidence that Mr. Trump tried to corruptly obstruct Congress’s session to certify Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. Under Section 1512(c) of Title 18 of the United States Code, such a crime would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison.Prosecutors have already used that law to charge hundreds of ordinary defendants in Jan. 6 cases, and in April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge to the Capitol attack. Still, unlike ordinary rioters, Mr. Trump did not physically participate in the storming of the Capitol.The House committee investigating the Capitol riot at a hearing in December.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesIn issuing criminal referrals as it ended its investigation, the Jan. 6 committee argued that Mr. Trump should be charged under the statute based on two sets of actions. By summoning supporters to Washington and stoking them to march on the Capitol, lawmakers argued, Mr. Trump had violated that law. Mr. Trump’s lawyers would likely raise doubts over whether he intended for his supporters to riot in part because he also told them to protest “peacefully.”The committee also cited Mr. Trump’s participation in the fake electors scheme as a reason to issue charges, pointing to his effort to strong-arm Mr. Pence to cite the existence of slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in seven states that Mr. Biden had actually won as a basis to delay certifying the election. The panel stressed how Mr. Trump had been told that there was no truth to his claims of a stolen election, which it said showed his intentions were corrupt.Conspiring to Defraud the Government and to Make False StatementsBoth the federal judge in California and the Jan. 6 committee also said there was evidence that Mr. Trump violated Section 371 of Title 18, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to conspire with another person to defraud the government.The basis for such a charge would be similar: Mr. Trump’s interactions with various lawyers and aides in his effort to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral victory, even though Mr. Trump was repeatedly told that his allegations of widespread voter fraud were baseless.In his ruling last year in a civil lawsuit over whether the Jan. 6 committee could obtain the emails of John Eastman, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump in his fight to overturn the election results, Judge David O. Carter ruled that it was more likely than not that the communications involved crimes, so qualified for an exception to attorney-client privilege.“The illegality of the plan was obvious,” he wrote. “Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the vice president to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election.”A conspiracy to submit false electors to Congress could also implicate Section 1001, which makes false statements a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. In the documents case, Mr. Trump is charged under this statute, accused of having caused his lawyer to lie to the Justice Department.Wire and Mail FraudA constellation of other potential crimes has also surrounded the Jan. 6 investigation. One is wire fraud. Section 1343 of Title 18 makes it a crime, punishable by 20 years in prison, to cause money to be transferred by wire across state lines as part of a scheme to obtain money by means of false or fraudulent representations. A similar fraud statute, Section 1341, covers schemes that use the Postal Service.Subpoenas issued by Mr. Smith suggest that he has been scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s political action committee, Save America PAC. It raised as much as $250 million, telling donors the money was needed to fight election fraud even as Mr. Trump had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those claims.The House Jan. 6 committee had also suggested that Mr. Trump and his associates had defrauded his own supporters. It described how after the election, they appealed to donors as many as 25 times a day to help fight the results in court and contribute to a defense fund. But no such fund existed, and they used the money for other purposes, including spending more than $200,000 at Trump hotel properties.“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said during one hearing. “So not only was there the big lie. There was the big rip-off.”The Jan. 6 committee and some legal commentators have also suggested Mr. Trump could be charged under Section 2383 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to incite, assist, “aid or comfort” an insurrection against the authority and laws of the federal government. That offense, however, is rarely charged and has not been leveled against any Jan. 6 defendant to date.In its final report, the committee singled out five of Mr. Trump’s other allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff; and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation.Luke Broadwater More

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      What Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Are Saying About a Third Potential Indictment

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      As news broke Tuesday morning that former President Donald J. Trump was likely to be indicted in a third criminal case, the reaction from his rivals in the 2024 Republican primary was notably muted.Mr. Trump still had defenders — including his top competitor in polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who cast him as a victim of “politicization” of the Justice Department. But the tenor was subtly different. Some candidates seemed visibly tired of having to continually respond to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles at the expense of talking about anything else, and some did not say anything at all.Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump and is now running against him, sounded exasperated when asked on Fox News about the investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She called it a “distraction” from important issues like foreign policy, border security and the national debt.“The rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump: it’s going to be about lawsuits; it’s going to be about legal fees; it’s going to be about judges; and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction,” Ms. Haley said. “And that’s why I am running, is because we need a new generational leader. We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”She notably did not repeat what she said when Mr. Trump was indicted last month for his retention of classified documents: that the charges were evidence of “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”Mr. DeSantis, for his part, said that any indictment would be part of “an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” while also saying that Mr. Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking before a campaign event in New Hampshire, denounced what he described as “the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political enemies,” he quickly turned to naming non-Trump-related examples. Pressed further on Mr. Trump, he said, “The voters will decide the next president of the United States.”In other corners, silence reigned. The campaigns of Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota did not respond to requests for comment. And a spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence — who, by certifying the election results on Jan. 6, made an enemy of his former boss — said that Mr. Pence had nothing to say Tuesday morning.But, in a nod to the political inescapability of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the spokesman, Devin O’Malley, added that Mr. Pence would be making television appearances later in the day and would probably be asked about it then.The restraint was not universal.A candidate who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most forceful defenders, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, went so far last month as to urge every 2024 contender to pledge to pardon him if elected. On Tuesday, he initially took a less fiery tack, saying he “would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime.” But not long after, he issued a conspiratorial statement, suggesting without evidence that the possible indictment was part of a plot to disqualify Mr. Trump from office under the 14th Amendment.“It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its chief political rivals,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. He added that he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence for his belief that President Biden ordered the Justice Department and the special counsel to indict Mr. Trump. He ended the statement by promoting an upcoming campaign event.Three other low-polling candidates who, unlike Mr. Ramaswamy, have sought out the anti- Trump lane of the primary field reacted predictably.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Twitter that he would not comment on the potential legal case until an indictment was released, but that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 proved “he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.” And former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas reiterated his call for Mr. Trump to suspend his campaign.“I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a statement. He added, “Anyone who truly loves this country and is willing to put the country over themselves would suspend their campaign for president of the United States immediately.”The third candidate, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, was scathing: “Losing to Joe Biden was so humiliating to Donald Trump that he was willing to let people die for his lies about a stolen election,” he said in a statement. He added, “Trump’s inaction then, and now being a target in the investigation, proves he’s not fit for office.” More

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      Trump Plans to Expand Presidential Power Over Agencies in 2025

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      Donald J. Trump and his allies are planning a sweeping expansion of presidential power over the machinery of government if voters return him to the White House in 2025, reshaping the structure of the executive branch to concentrate far greater authority directly in his hands.Their plans to centralize more power in the Oval Office stretch far beyond the former president’s recent remarks that he would order a criminal investigation into his political rival, President Biden, signaling his intent to end the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from White House political control.Mr. Trump and his associates have a broader goal: to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House, according to a review of his campaign policy proposals and interviews with people close to him.Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.He wants to revive the practice of “impounding” funds, refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for programs a president doesn’t like — a tactic that lawmakers banned under President Richard Nixon.He intends to strip employment protections from tens of thousands of career civil servants, making it easier to replace them if they are deemed obstacles to his agenda. And he plans to scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.”Mr. Trump and his advisers are openly discussing their plans to reshape the federal government if he wins the election in 2024.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal,” said John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.“Our current executive branch,” Mr. McEntee added, “was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”Mr. Trump and his advisers are making no secret of their intentions — proclaiming them in rallies and on his campaign website, describing them in white papers and openly discussing them.“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.The strategy in talking openly about such “paradigm-shifting ideas” before the election, Mr. Vought said, is to “plant a flag” — both to shift the debate and to later be able to claim a mandate. He said he was delighted to see few of Mr. Trump’s Republican primary rivals defend the norm of Justice Department independence after the former president openly attacked it.Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.” He added, “Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”The agenda being pursued by Mr. Trump and his associates has deep roots in a longstanding effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut the so-called administrative state.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe two driving forces of this effort to reshape the executive branch are Mr. Trump’s own campaign policy shop and a well-funded network of conservative groups, many of which are populated by former senior Trump administration officials who would most likely play key roles in any second term.Mr. Vought and Mr. McEntee are involved in Project 2025, a $22 million presidential transition operation that is preparing policies, personnel lists and transition plans to recommend to any Republican who may win the 2024 election. The transition project, the scale of which is unprecedented in conservative politics, is led by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has shaped the personnel and policies of Republican administrations since the Reagan presidency.That work at Heritage dovetails with plans on the Trump campaign website to expand presidential power that were drafted primarily by two of Mr. Trump’s advisers, Vincent Haley and Ross Worthington, with input from other advisers, including Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.Some elements of the plans had been floated when Mr. Trump was in office but were impeded by internal concerns that they would be unworkable and could lead to setbacks. And for some veterans of Mr. Trump’s turbulent White House who came to question his fitness for leadership, the prospect of removing guardrails and centralizing even greater power over government directly in his hands sounded like a recipe for mayhem.“It would be chaotic,” said John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s second White House chief of staff. “It just simply would be chaotic, because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority but the sycophants would go along with it. It would be a nonstop gunfight with the Congress and the courts.”The agenda being pursued has deep roots in the decades-long effort by conservative legal thinkers to undercut what has become known as the administrative state — agencies that enact regulations aimed at keeping the air and water clean and food, drugs and consumer products safe, but that cut into business profits.Its legal underpinning is a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory.The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other. Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them. Reagan administration lawyers developed the theory as they sought to advance a deregulatory agenda.Mr. Trump and his allies have been laying out an expansive vision of power for a potential second term.Christopher Lee for The New York Times“The notion of independent federal agencies or federal employees who don’t answer to the president violates the very foundation of our democratic republic,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, adding that the contributors to Project 2025 are committed to “dismantling this rogue administrative state.”Personal power has always been a driving force for Mr. Trump. He often gestures toward it in a more simplistic manner, such as in 2019, when he declared to a cheering crowd, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”Mr. Trump made the remark in reference to his claimed ability to directly fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia inquiry, which primed his hostility toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He also tried to get a subordinate to have Mr. Mueller ousted, but was defied.Early in Mr. Trump’s presidency, his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” But Mr. Trump installed people in other key roles who ended up telling him that more radical ideas were unworkable or illegal. In the final year of his presidency, he told aides he was fed up with being constrained by subordinates.Now, Mr. Trump is laying out a far more expansive vision of power in any second term. And, in contrast with his disorganized transition after his surprise 2016 victory, he now benefits from a well-funded policymaking infrastructure, led by former officials who did not break with him after his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.One idea the people around Mr. Trump have developed centers on bringing independent agencies under his thumb.Congress created these specialized technocratic agencies inside the executive branch and delegated to them some of its power to make rules for society. But it did so on the condition that it was not simply handing off that power to presidents to wield like kings — putting commissioners atop them whom presidents appoint but generally cannot fire before their terms end, while using its control of their budgets to keep them partly accountable to lawmakers as well. (Agency actions are also subject to court review.)Presidents of both parties have chafed at the agencies’ independence. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created many of them, endorsed a proposal in 1937 to fold them all into cabinet departments under his control, but Congress did not enact it.Later presidents sought to impose greater control over nonindependent agencies Congress created, like the Environmental Protection Agency, which is run by an administrator whom a president can remove at will. For example, President Ronald Reagan issued executive orders requiring nonindependent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. But overall, presidents have largely left the independent agencies alone.Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to change that, drafting an executive order requiring independent agencies to submit actions to the White House for review. Mr. Trump endorsed the idea on his campaign website, vowing to bring them “under presidential authority.”Such an order was drafted in Mr. Trump’s first term — and blessed by the Justice Department — but never issued amid internal concerns. Some of the concerns were over how to carry out reviews for agencies that are headed by multiple commissioners and subject to administrative procedures and open-meetings laws, as well as over how the market would react if the order chipped away at the Federal Reserve’s independence, people familiar with the matter said.The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn in the White House.John Tully for The New York TimesThe Federal Reserve was ultimately exempted in the draft executive order, but Mr. Trump did not sign it before his presidency ended. If Mr. Trump and his allies get another shot at power, the independence of the Federal Reserve — an institution Mr. Trump publicly railed at as president — could be up for debate. Notably, the Trump campaign website’s discussion of bringing independent agencies under presidential control is silent on whether that includes the Fed.Asked whether presidents should be able to order interest rates lowered before elections, even if experts think that would hurt the long-term health of the economy, Mr. Vought said that would have to be worked out with Congress. But “at the bare minimum,” he said, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory functions should be subject to White House review.“It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution,” Mr. Vought said.Other former Trump administration officials involved in the planning said there would also probably be a legal challenge to the limits on a president’s power to fire heads of independent agencies. Mr. Trump could remove an agency head, teeing up the question for the Supreme Court.The Supreme Court in 1935 and 1988 upheld the power of Congress to shield some executive branch officials from being fired without cause. But after justices appointed by Republicans since Reagan took control, it has started to erode those precedents.Peter L. Strauss, professor emeritus of law at Columbia University and a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, argued that it is constitutional and desirable for Congress, in creating and empowering an agency to perform some task, to also include some checks on the president’s control over officials “because we don’t want autocracy” and to prevent abuses.“The regrettable fact is that the judiciary at the moment seems inclined to recognize that the president does have this kind of authority,” he said. “They are clawing away agency independence in ways that I find quite unfortunate and disrespectful of congressional choice.”Mr. Trump has also vowed to impound funds, or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. After Nixon used the practice to aggressively block agency spending he was opposed to, on water pollution control, housing construction and other issues, Congress banned the tactic.On his campaign website, Mr. Trump declared that presidents have a constitutional right to impound funds and said he would restore the practice — though he acknowledged it could result in a legal battle.Mr. Trump and his allies also want to transform the civil service — government employees who are supposed to be nonpartisan professionals and experts with protections against being fired for political reasons.The former president views the civil service as a den of “deep staters” who were trying to thwart him at every turn, including by raising legal or pragmatic objections to his immigration policies, among many other examples. Toward the end of his term, his aides drafted an executive order, “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service,” that removed employment protections from career officials whose jobs were deemed linked to policymaking.Mr. Trump signed the order, which became known as Schedule F, near the end of his presidency, but President Biden rescinded it. Mr. Trump has vowed to immediately reinstitute it in a second term.Critics say he could use it for a partisan purge. But James Sherk, a former Trump administration official who came up with the idea and now works at the America First Policy Institute — a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials — argued it would only be used against poor performers and people who actively impeded the elected president’s agenda.“Schedule F expressly forbids hiring or firing based on political loyalty,” Mr. Sherk said. “Schedule F employees would keep their jobs if they served effectively and impartially.”Mr. Trump himself has characterized his intentions rather differently — promising on his campaign website to “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education” and listing a litany of targets at a rally last month.“We will demolish the deep state,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Michigan. “We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” More

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      Prosecutors Push Back on Trump’s Request to Delay Documents Trial

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      The office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, said there “is no basis in law or fact” for granting a motion from former President Donald J. Trump that could push the start of the trial until after Election Day.Federal prosecutors on Thursday asked the judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case to reject a motion by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to have his trial indefinitely postponed, a move that could serve to delay the proceeding until after the 2024 election.The filing by the prosecutors came three days after Mr. Trump’s legal team made an unusual request to the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, asking her to set aside the government’s initial suggestion to hold the trial in December and delay it until all “substantive motions” in the case were presented and resolved.The timing of a trial is crucial in all criminal matters. But it is especially important in this case, in which Mr. Trump has been charged with illegally holding on to 31 classified documents after leaving the White House and conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government’s efforts to reclaim them.Mr. Trump is now both a federal criminal defendant and the Republican Party’s leading candidate in the presidential campaign. There could be untold complications if his trial seeps into the final stages of the race. Moreover, if the trial is pushed back until after the election and Mr. Trump wins, he could try to pardon himself after taking office or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.Apparently recognizing these high stakes, prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, told Judge Cannon that she should not allow Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta to let the case drag on without a foreseeable ending.“There is no basis in law or fact for proceeding in such an indeterminate and open-ended fashion,” they wrote, “and the defendants provide none.”Mr. Trump’s lawyers based their motion for a delay — which was filed on Monday in the Southern District of Florida — on several assertions.They said that as the case moved forward, they intended to make novel — and presumably time-consuming — arguments that the Presidential Records Act permitted Mr. Trump to take documents with him from the White House. That interpretation of the Watergate-era law is at odds with how legal experts interpret it.Prosecutors responded by saying this potential defense “borders on frivolous.” They also reminded Judge Cannon that it was not new at all, but in fact was central to an extended legal battle last year that she oversaw, in which an outside arbiter was put in place to review a trove of materials seized by the F.B.I. from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.Mr. Trump’s lawyers also complained that a first trove of discovery evidence provided by the government was expansive — including more than 800,000 pages of material — and would take a significant amount of time to sort through.Prosecutors shot back, saying about a third of those pages contained unimportant “email header and footer information” and that a set of “key” documents that would guide the defense toward the crucial sections of discovery was only about 4,500 pages.The prosecutors also told Judge Cannon that they intended to provide Mr. Trump’s lawyers with a second batch of unclassified discovery evidence as early as next week, including interviews conducted with witnesses as recently as June 23 — a few weeks after Mr. Trump was indicted. That suggests, as The New York Times has reported, that the investigation of the classified documents case continued even after charges were filed.As for the classified discovery evidence, prosecutors said they planned to take the bulk of the classified materials seized from Mar-a-Lago to a sensitive compartmented information facility inside Miami’s federal courthouse next week for review by Mr. Trump’s lawyers — even though some of them only have interim security clearances.Once the lawyers have their final security clearances, the prosecutors said, they will be able to look at the remaining classified records, including some “pertaining to the declassification of various materials during the Trump administration.”In asking for a delay, Mr. Trump’s lawyers had said that his campaign schedule “requires a tremendous amount of time and energy” and that these efforts would continue until the election. They argued that Mr. Nauta had a similar problem since his job requires him to accompany Mr. Trump on “most campaign trips around the country.”But prosecutors seemed to have no patience for this argument, saying the two men’s “professional schedules do not provide a basis to delay.”“Many indicted defendants have demanding jobs that require a considerable amount of their time and energy, or a significant amount of travel,” they wrote. “The Speedy Trial Act contemplates no such factor as a basis for a continuance, and the court should not indulge it here.” More

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      Prosecutors Ask Witnesses Whether Trump Acknowledged He Lost 2020 Race

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      Jared Kushner was questioned before a federal grand jury as prosecutors appeared to be trying to establish if the former president knew his efforts to stay in power were built on a lie.Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have questioned multiple witnesses in recent weeks — including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — about whether Mr. Trump had privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had lost, according to four people briefed on the matter.The line of questioning suggests prosecutors are trying to establish whether Mr. Trump was acting with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power — essentially that his efforts were knowingly based on a lie — evidence that could substantially bolster any case they might decide to bring against him. Mr. Kushner testified before a grand jury at the federal courthouse in Washington last month, where he is said to have maintained that it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen, according to a person briefed on the matter.The questioning of Mr. Kushner shows that the federal investigation being led by the special counsel Jack Smith continues to pierce the layers closest to Mr. Trump as prosecutors weigh whether to bring charges against the former president in connection with the efforts to promote baseless assertions of widespread voter fraud and block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.A spokesman for Mr. Kushner and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Trump is already facing federal charges brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel, in connection with classified documents taken from the White House. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBut others in Mr. Trump’s orbit who interacted with him in the weeks after the 2020 election, who have potentially more damaging accounts of Mr. Trump’s behavior, have been questioned by the special counsel’s office recently.Among them is Alyssa Farah Griffin, the White House communications director in the days after the 2020 election. Repeating an account she provided last year to the House select committee on Jan. 6, she told prosecutors this spring that Mr. Trump had said to her in the days after the election: Can you believe I lost to Joe Biden?“In that moment I think he knew he lost,” Ms. Griffin told the House committee.Ms. Griffin’s lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, declined to comment.Still other witnesses have been asked whether aides told Mr. Trump that he had lost, according to people familiar with some of the testimony, another topic explored by the House committee. Witnesses have also been asked about things the former president was telling people in the summer months leading up to Election Day and even as far back as the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began.The question of Mr. Trump’s intent could be important in strengthening the hand of prosecutors if they decide to charge Mr. Trump in the case. It is not known what charges they might be considering, but the House select committee, controlled by Democrats, referred a number of possible charges to the Justice Department last year, including inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing an act of Congress.Prosecutors may be trying to establish whether Mr. Trump was acting with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power after the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump is already facing federal charges brought by Mr. Smith in connection with classified documents taken from the White House, and he is under indictment in New York on charges related to hush-money payments to a pornographic film actress before the 2016 election. A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has been investigating efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Legal experts and former federal prosecutors say that establishing Mr. Trump’s mind-set to show he knew that what he was doing was wrong would give prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s election-focused inquiry a more robust case to put in front of a jury if they choose to bring charges.Prosecutors do not need hard evidence of a defendant saying: I know that I am breaking the law. But their cases are made stronger when they can produce evidence that the defendant knows there is no legal or factual basis for a claim but goes ahead with making it anyway.Daniel Zelenko, a partner at the firm Crowell & Moring and a former federal prosecutor, said that being able to cite a defendant’s own words can go a long way in helping prosecutors convince a jury that the defendant should be convicted.“Words are incredibly powerful in white-collar cases because in a lot of them you’re not going to hear from a defendant, as they are seldom going to take the stand,” he said. “So, having those words put in front of a jury gives them more importance and makes them more consequential.”Andrew Goldstein, the lead prosecutor in the investigation into Mr. Trump for obstruction during the Russia investigation and a partner at the law firm Cooley, said there were other benefits to having Mr. Trump’s own statements that were critical in such a potentially weighty case.“Just as important, if the Department of Justice has this kind of evidence, it could help justify to the public why charges in this case would be necessary to bring,” Mr. Goldstein said.Some aides and allies who interacted with Mr. Trump in the days after the election have previously disclosed that Mr. Trump indicated that he knew he lost the election. In testimony before the House select committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, said that in an Oval Office meeting in late November or early December 2020, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had lost the election.“He says words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy,” Mr. Milley said, adding: “Meaning President Biden.”“And the entire gist of the conversation was — and it lasted — that meeting lasted maybe an hour or something like that — very rational,” General Milley said. “He was calm. There wasn’t anything — the subject we were talking about was a very serious subject, but everything looked very normal to me. But I do remember him saying that.”General Milley said, though, that in subsequent meetings Mr. Trump had increasingly discussed how the election was stolen from him.“It wasn’t there in the first session, but then all of a sudden it starts appearing,” General Milley said. A text message from early December 2020 between some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, disclosed on Tuesday night, shows Mr. Trump searching at that time for reports of how the election was stolen, if they had not been substantiated. The text was sent by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, to other members of the legal team, including Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Epshteyn said that he was relaying a direct message from Mr. Trump’s communications aide Jason Miller.Rudolph W. Giuliani urged Mr. Trump to follow through with a plan to simply declare victory in the 2020 election.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“Urgent POTUS request need best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain,” the text message said. “Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand.”He continued, “Is there any sort of ‘greatest hits’ clearinghouse that anyone has for best examples? Thank you!!!”That same day, Mr. Giuliani replied: “The security camera in Atlanta alone captures theft of a minimum of 30,000 votes which alone would change result in Georgia.” He continued, “Remember it will live in history as the theft of a state if it is not corrected by State Legislature.”The text messages were made public in connection with a defamation lawsuit being brought by two Georgia election workers against Mr. Giuliani.Mr. Trump has continued to maintain publicly, without any credible evidence, that he lost his re-election bid because of fraud and has defended the motivations of the mob that sought to disrupt the certification of his loss on Jan. 6, 2021. Even if Mr. Kushner, a key White House adviser to Mr. Trump, did not provide prosecutors with evidence to bolster any charge they might bring, his testimony gives them a sense of what he might say if called by the defense to testify in any trial.The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Smith’s office had subpoenaed Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to testify before the grand jury. The special counsel’s office has yet to question her before the grand jury. Ms. Trump testified before the House committee last year.The House Jan. 6 committee determined that Mr. Trump’s decision to declare victory on election night even though the votes had not been fully counted yet was not spontaneous, but rather a “premeditated” plan promoted by a small group of his advisers.The panel found evidence, for instance, that Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, was in direct communication with Mr. Trump even before Election Day and understood that he “would falsely declare victory on election night and call for the vote counting to stop.”Similarly, congressional investigators unearthed an audio recording made on Oct. 31, 2020, of Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, who told associates that the president was going to summarily declare he had won the election.“But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Mr. Bannon said in the recording. “He’s just going to say he’s a winner.”Mr. Bannon was issued a subpoena last month to appear before the grand jury in Washington investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.In the last two years, reported accounts of Mr. Trump’s final months in office included his former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, describing to a friend how Mr. Trump had acted out a script the month before the election that he planned to deliver on election night, saying he had won if he was ahead in the early returns. Mr. Trump at the White House on election night. The House Jan. 6 committee determined that Mr. Trump’s decision to declare victory was a “premeditated” plan.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn election night, Mr. Giuliani — who, witnesses testified to the House committee, appeared inebriated — wanted Mr. Trump to follow through with the plan to simply declare victory. Mr. Giuliani was the sole adviser encouraging Mr. Trump to pursue that course, the committee found.Among those telling Mr. Trump on election night that it was too early to know if he had won or lost were his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and Mr. Miller, the communications adviser. In the weeks that followed, several other aides and advisers told Mr. Trump there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the results of the election, including William P. Barr, his former attorney general.Alan Feuer More