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      Justice Dept. Offers Immunity to Kash Patel for Testimony in Documents Case

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      The adviser, Kash Patel, had previously declined to answer questions from prosecutors in front of a federal grand jury, citing his Fifth Amendment rights.The Justice Department offered on Wednesday to allow Kash Patel, a close adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, to testify to a federal grand jury under a grant of immunity about Mr. Trump’s handling of highly sensitive presidential records, two people familiar with the matter said.The offer of immunity came about a month after Mr. Patel invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination in front of the grand jury and refused to answer questions from prosecutors investigating whether Mr. Trump improperly took national security documents with him when he left the White House and subsequently obstructed attempts by the government to retrieve them.During Mr. Patel’s initial grand jury appearance, one of the people familiar with the matter said, Judge Beryl A. Howell of Federal District Court in Washington acknowledged Mr. Patel’s Fifth Amendment claims and said the only way he could be forced to testify was if the government offered him immunity.The decision by the Justice Department to grant immunity in the case, the person said, effectively cleared the way for the grand jury to hear Mr. Patel’s testimony.A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.The disclosure that Mr. Patel has received immunity for his testimony comes as prosecutors have increased their pressure on recalcitrant witnesses who have declined to answer investigators’ questions or have provided them with potentially misleading accounts about Mr. Trump’s handling of documents.What to Know About the Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Justice Dept. Questions Drop Box Monitoring in Arizona

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      The Justice Department has weighed in on the debate over election activists who have been stationing themselves — at times with guns — near ballot boxes in Arizona, saying that their activity may not be constitutionally protected if it has the potential to intimidate voters.“The First Amendment does not protect individuals’ right to assemble to engage in voter intimidation or coercion,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, wrote in a brief filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in Phoenix. “Nor does it transform an unlawful activity for one individual — voter intimidation — into a permissible activity simply because multiple individuals have assembled to engage in it.”The filing was made in a case that the League of Women Voters of Arizona brought last week against two groups that have been organizing ballot box monitoring, the Lions of Liberty and Clean Elections USA, as well as some of their principals. On Friday, the plaintiff asked the court for an injunction against those groups to stop the activity. That petition is still pending.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.A Pivotal Test in Pennsylvania: A battle for blue-collar white voters is raging in President Biden’s birthplace, where Democrats have the furthest to fall and the most to gain.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Biden’s Agenda at Risk: If Republicans capture one or both chambers of Congress, the president’s opportunities on several issues will shrink. Here are some major areas where the two sides would clash.Ohio Senate Race: Polls show Representative Tim Ryan competing within the margin of error against his G.O.P. opponent, J.D. Vance. Mr. Ryan said the race would be “the upset of the night,” but there is still a cold reality tilting against Democrats.The judge overseeing the case, Michael T. Liburdi, on Friday refused to issue an injunction in a parallel lawsuit against Clean Elections USA, claiming that the Constitution protected the activities of citizens who wish to gather near ballot boxes.The Justice Department’s intervention represents a rebuke to that ruling by Judge Liburdi, a longtime member of the Federalist Society who was appointed in 2019 by President Donald J. Trump.The Justice Department’s brief addresses numerous points made by the judge, including the idea that taking pictures of voters and their car license plates is equivalent to filming police officers in the line of duty. The brief also draws comparisons to numerous past instances of apparent attempts to intimidate or deter voters. In one example from 2004, involving operatives in South Dakota who followed Native American voters and recorded their license plate numbers, a federal judge issued an injunction.The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is weighing an emergency appeal to Judge Liburdi’s ruling filed by the plaintiffs in that case, the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino, on Saturday; a lawyer for Clean Elections USA said the group was rushing to file a response later on Monday.And in a hearing on Monday on the League of Women Voters’ case, Judge Liburdi dismissed the Lions of Liberty and its parent organization, the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, from the suit after its leaders pledged in court not to engage in any more election monitoring activities. “We are standing down,” a board member, Jim Arroyo, told the judge. An evidentiary hearing on the injunction petition is scheduled for midday on Tuesday.The founder of Clean Elections USA, Melody Jennings, has not appeared in court. In a Saturday appearance on “War Room,” a podcast hosted by the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, she said that her group was changing its name to the Drop Box Initiative in Arizona, but would retain the Clean Elections USA moniker in the rest of the country.“We are going to rebrand a little bit,” Ms. Jennings said, adding that while she was still looking for volunteers in most places, “I don’t need any more people in Arizona, honestly.”In a second “War Room” interview, on Monday, she asked listeners to consider donating money to True the Vote, a right-wing group focused on voter fraud, to support her legal defense. More

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      Justice Dept. Seeks to Force Trump White House Lawyers to Testify in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The move is part of an effort by prosecutors to punch through the claims of privilege the former president is using to hamper the investigation of his push to overturn the election.The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to force the two top lawyers in Donald J. Trump’s White House to provide additional grand jury testimony as prosecutors seek to break through the former president’s attempts to shield his efforts to overturn the 2020 election from investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter.Prosecutors filed a motion to compel testimony from the two lawyers, Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, last week. They told Beryl A. Howell, a judge in Federal District Court in Washington who oversees grand jury matters, that their need for the evidence the men could provide should overcome Mr. Trump’s claims that the information is protected by attorney-client and executive privilege, the people said.The filing was the latest skirmish in a behind-the-scenes legal struggle between the government and Mr. Trump’s lawyers to determine how much testimony witnesses close to the former president can provide to the grand jury, which is examining Mr. Trump’s role in numerous schemes to reverse his election defeat, culminating in the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel, and Mr. Philbin, who served as his deputy, initially appeared before the grand jury last month after receiving subpoenas, but declined to answer some of the questions prosecutors had about advice they gave to Mr. Trump or interactions they had with him in the chaotic post-election period, one of the people familiar with the matter said.The government’s filing, which was reported earlier by CNN, asked Judge Howell to force the men to return to the grand jury and respond to at least some of the questions they had declined to answer.If compelled to testify fully, Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin could provide the grand jury with firsthand accounts of the advice they gave Mr. Trump about his efforts to derail the results of the election with a variety of schemes, including one to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. They could also tell the grand jury about Mr. Trump’s activities and mind-set on Jan. 6 and the tumultuous weeks leading up to it.Judge Howell has already ruled in favor of the government in a similar privilege dispute concerning testimony from two top aides to former Vice President Mike Pence, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, according to several people familiar with the matter. Both Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob returned to the grand jury this month and answered questions that Mr. Trump’s lawyers had sought to block as being privileged during their original appearances.Prosecutors are also seeking to force Patrick F. Philbin, the former deputy White House counsel, to provide additional testimony.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe closed-door battle over how much evidence the grand jury should hear about Mr. Trump’s role in reversing his defeat and how much should be kept away as privileged is almost certain to continue as more witnesses close to the former president are called in for testimony.Last month, about 40 subpoenas were issued to a large group of former Trump aides — among them, Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff; Dan Scavino, his onetime deputy chief of staff for communications; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top speechwriter and a senior policy adviser.It is likely that Mr. Trump will try to assert some form of privilege over the testimony of each of those potential witnesses in a bid to narrow what the grand jury can hear about him.Even as the Justice Department presses forward in seeking evidence about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the events leading up to the Capitol attack, the House committee investigating Jan. 6 is also continuing to hear from witnesses.On Tuesday, Hope Hicks, a former top aide to Mr. Trump, testified for about four hours in front of the panel, according to two people familiar with the matter.The interview of Ms. Hicks, which was conducted virtually, came late in the committee’s 16-month investigation and after it has most likely concluded holding public hearings. Still, the members of the panel have kept pushing for more information about Mr. Trump’s state of mind in the final weeks of his administration and how often he was told there was no evidence of a stolen election.During a meeting with Mr. Trump, Ms. Hicks told the former president that she had seen no evidence of widespread fraud that could overturn the results of the election, according to the book “Confidence Man” by Maggie Haberman, a reporter for The New York Times.“You’re wrong,” Mr. Trump replied, hoping to scare others out of agreeing with her.Throughout August, the panel interviewed top administration officials, including Robert O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser; Elaine Chao, the former transportation secretary; and Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state. Investigators asked questions regarding reports of discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office, among other topics.Ms. Hicks served as the White House communications director in 2017 and 2018 and then returned to the White House as a counselor to Mr. Trump during his final 10 months in office.It was not immediately clear exactly what Ms. Hicks told the committee, but investigators went over certain text messages with her, according to a person familiar with the matter.A spokesman for the committee and a lawyer for Ms. Hicks declined to comment.Maggie Haberman More

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      Justice Dept. Charges 2 Chinese Citizens With Spying for Huawei

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      Huawei has been a persistent target of the United States government since the administration of President Donald J. Trump.The Justice Department announced charges against two Chinese intelligence operatives who are accused of attempting to obtain inside information about the ongoing federal investigation into Huawei, a China-based telecommunications company.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced on Monday that it had indicted two Chinese intelligence officials who are believed to have unsuccessfully tried to obtain inside information about a federal investigation into a Chinese telecommunications company accused of stealing trade secrets, which people familiar with the situation later identified as Huawei Technologies.The Chinese intelligence officials, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, paid bribes to an official with access to sensitive details of the investigation into Huawei by the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, according to charging documents unsealed on Monday. The person turned out to be an agent working for the F.B.I. who handed over phony documents.The indictment was part of three unrelated legal actions against Chinese operatives in the United States that senior law enforcement officials announced on Monday, a day after President Xi Jinping of China solidified his grip on power as the Communist Party congress in Beijing closed.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., issued blunt denunciations of China during a news conference, accusing the country’s leaders of meddling in the American judicial system, stealing technology and bullying Chinese citizens who emigrate to the United States.“The government of China sought to interfere with the rights and freedoms of individuals in the United States and to undermine our judicial system that protects those rights,” Mr. Garland told reporters. “We will continue to fiercely protect the rights guaranteed to everyone in our country.”Mr. Wray said the cases, which total 13 indictments and two arrests, “highlight the threat” that China’s intelligence services pose to “rights of people in the United States.”The bureau has identified 10 of the 13 people charged as intelligence agents, and will continue to focus on rooting out other Chinese agents, he said.More on the Relations Between Asia and the U.S.Seoul Gets Squeezed: The United States is South Korea’s main security ally. China is its biggest trading partner. As the rivalry between the two powers intensifies, South Korea is increasingly feeling the heat.Tech Crackdown: The Biden administration is waging a new global campaign against China, using U.S. influence to try to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology.Bolstering Taiwan: U.S. officials are said to be intensifying efforts to build a giant stockpile of weapons in Taiwan in case China blockades the island as a prelude to an attempted invasion.The cases could cast a shadow over an effort by the Biden administration and TikTok to resolve national security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned video app. A draft agreement between the two parties has faced some skepticism among some administration officials, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco — who said the new allegations involving Huawei should serve as a warning to U.S. officials.“This case exposes the interconnection between intelligence officers and Chinese companies, and it demonstrates once again why such companies especially in the telecommunications industry shouldn’t be trusted to securely handle our sensitive personal data and communications,” Ms. Monaco said on Monday.In the Huawei case unsealed in Brooklyn federal court, the two Chinese intelligence operatives contacted an official with knowledge of the department’s investigation into Huawei in 2019, asking for documents, including trial evidence and witness lists, as well as summaries of confidential strategy meetings. Neither operative is in custody.They did not know the official was working with the F.B.I.Since that time, they have paid the official $41,000 in Bitcoin in exchange for what they believed to be inside information on the case. Instead, the F.B.I.’s double agent sent them a phony document, marked “Secret,” which contained publicly available information.Mr. He responded by telling the official, who was not identified, that the company was “obviously interested” in receiving more stolen material, according to court documents.A Huawei representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Huawei has been a persistent target of the United States government since the administration of President Donald J. Trump, which worried that the company could give Beijing access to sensitive information that travels over telecommunications networks. And the government’s efforts are part of a larger push to limit China’s influence over American consumers.In February 2020, the Justice Department indicted Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, and two U.S. subsidiaries, over the company’s use of “fraud and deception” to obtain sophisticated technology from U.S. companies.Top American officials told allies around the world that they should exclude the Chinese company’s equipment from their next-generation wireless networks. The Commerce Department blacklisted the company in a bid to cut off its access to key American supplies for its products.Congress has provided money to reimburse American telecom operators who stop using equipment made by Chinese companies like Huawei. The Federal Communications Commission is also expected to vote soon on a measure to ban new Huawei products from being sold in the United States. It already blocks companies from spending federal subsidies on the gear.The government has also sought to rein in the influence of other Chinese companies.The Trump administration forced a Chinese company to sell Grindr, the dating app. It also tried to ban the viral video app TikTok unless its Chinese parent company sold a share of the app to an American company.Also on Monday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment in Brooklyn charging seven people with engaging in a multiyear harassment campaign to force an unnamed U.S. resident to return to China as part of a repatriation effort known as Operation Fox Hunt.Two of those charged, Quanzhong An, 55, and Guangyang An, 34, both of Roslyn, N.Y., were arrested; the others remain at large, according to the department.In another case unsealed on Monday, the U.S. attorney in the District of New Jersey charged four people, including three Chinese intelligence officers, with recruiting agents while working under the cover of an academic institute, according to the charging documents.None of them are in U.S. custody. 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      Arizona Sends Report of Voter Intimidation to Justice Dept. for Investigation

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      A voter in Arizona who tried to use a ballot drop box this week was “approached and followed” by a group of people, according to a complaint that the Arizona secretary of state’s office said on Thursday it had referred to the U.S. Justice Department and the state attorney general for investigation.The voter was dropping off their ballot at a box at the Maricopa County Juvenile Court in Mesa, according to the secretary of state’s office, which did not identify the voter.“The S.O.S. has talked to the voter, informed Maricopa County, and referred the report to the D.O.J. and A.G.’s offices for further investigation,” said Sophia Solis, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office, which is led by Katie Hobbs, who is also the Democratic nominee for governor. No other details about the complaint were provided.A spokeswoman for the Justice Department confirmed that the department had received the referral but declined to comment further. A spokeswoman for the Arizona attorney general’s office — led by Mark Brnovich, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for his party’s Senate nomination this year — also confirmed receipt and said: “Everyone should feel safe exercising their voting rights. If someone feels threatened, please contact local law enforcement right away.”Arizona has been a center of the national efforts by right-wing activists and some Republican officials that disrupt voting in the name of election integrity, a campaign fueled by former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.Kari Lake, the Republican running for governor against Ms. Hobbs, has promoted those false claims and refused to commit to accepting the results of next month’s election; Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, has also promoted false election fraud claims. On Wednesday, Ms. Lake told CNN that she had not heard about the voter intimidation complaint but said: “It just shows you how concerned people are, though. People are so concerned about the integrity of our election.” (Ms. Lake’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.)The incident reported by the secretary of state’s office is not isolated. On Wednesday, a group of people from Clean Elections USA, an organization that promotes debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud, photographed election workers and voters outside the Maricopa County election headquarters, drawing a rebuke from the chairman of the county board of supervisors, according to the Arizona Republic.Such activities are also not confined to Arizona. Right-wing activists across the country have been trying aggressively to monitor or disrupt voting, though officials have said they are prepared to handle the challenges and to administer the Nov. 8 election and count votes securely and accurately.Ballot drop boxes have been a particular focus for election deniers, many of whom falsely claim that the boxes are insecure. More

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      Judge Says Trump Signed Statement With Data His Lawyers Told Him Was False

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      The determination came in a decision by a federal judge that John Eastman, a lawyer for the former president, had to turn more of his emails over to the House Jan. 6 committee.Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Mr. Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a “crime-fraud exception” pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients.The emails in question, which were dated between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, came from Mr. Eastman’s account at Chapman University, where he once served as a law school dean.Judge Carter wrote on Wednesday that the crime-fraud exception applied to a number of the emails related to Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman’s “efforts to delay or disrupt the Jan. 6 vote” and “their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”Judge Carter found four emails that “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the Jan. 6 vote.”In one of them, Mr. Trump’s lawyers advised him that simply having a challenge to the election pending in front of the Supreme Court could be enough to delay the final tally of Electoral College votes from Georgia.“This email,” Judge Carter wrote, “read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings through the courts.”Another email was related to the lawsuit Mr. Trump and his lawyers filed in Fulton County, Ga., in December 2020, contending that thousands of votes had been improperly counted and citing specific numbers of dead people, felons and unregistered voters who had cast ballots.In one email ordered for release, Mr. Eastman made plain his view that Mr. Trump should not sign a document making specific claims about voter fraud in the county because his legal team had learned they were inaccurate.“Although the president signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”But Mr. Trump did sign a new verification, on Dec. 31, 2020, after the suit was moved to federal court. The suit included a caveat that the voter fraud figures it used were to be relied upon “only to the extent” that “such information has been provided” to Mr. Trump’s legal team; the suit also stated that such data was subject to “amendment” or “adjustment.”The episode was the latest example of how Mr. Trump was repeatedly told that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false and often pressed forward with them anyway. His attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, informed him at least three times that his accusations about fraud were unfounded, as did other top officials at the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office and the Trump campaign.Judge Carter’s ruling came as part of a federal lawsuit Mr. Eastman filed at the beginning of the year, seeking to bar the committee from obtaining his emails as part of its inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.In a previous ruling, issued in March, Judge Carter offered a sweeping analysis of how Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress on Jan. 6 and conspiring to defraud the United States.Mr. Eastman has also been a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation into Jan. 6 and the months leading up to it.In June, federal agents seized Mr. Eastman’s phone as part of what appears to be a broad grand jury inquiry into Mr. Trump’s role in intersecting schemes to stay in power, including a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. A flurry of subpoenas issued by the grand jury, sitting in Washington, named Mr. Eastman and several other lawyers close to Mr. Trump as subjects of interest. More

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      The House Jan. 6 Panel Has Set a High Bar: Showing Criminality

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      The committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has yet to decide on making criminal referrals. But its decision to subpoena Donald Trump is in keeping with its prosecutorial style.In the final moments of what will most likely be the last hearing for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, returned to a theme that has run through the committee’s work: criminality.Without naming names or providing any specifics, Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, asserted that the committee now has “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals” to the Justice Department for prosecution.It is not clear whether the committee will follow through and take the largely symbolic step of issuing a criminal referral for former President Donald J. Trump or anyone who worked with him to overturn the election and encourage the mob of his supporters who entered the Capitol seeking to block or delay certification of his defeat.But throughout its investigation and hearings, the committee has operated with a prosecutorial style, using the possibility of criminality like a cudgel in extraordinary ways. It has penetrated Mr. Trump’s inner circle, surfaced considerable new evidence and laid out a detailed narrative that could be useful to the Justice Department in deciding whether to bring charges.The panel is expected to issue a subpoena as soon as Tuesday seeking to compel Mr. Trump to testify before it wraps up its investigation and issues a final report.The committee’s effects on related criminal investigations are clear to see. Federal prosecutors and authorities conducting a local investigation in Georgia have found themselves interviewing some of the same witnesses already interviewed by the committee and issuing subpoenas for some of the same evidence already obtained by Congress.But in suggesting that its goal is to spur criminal charges, the committee is setting a standard for success that is beyond its power to carry out — and one that could risk overshadowing the work it has done in documenting Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power and marshal his supporters to help him.“People frequently walk up to me in the grocery store and they’re like, ‘Are you going to hold him accountable?’ That’s not Congress,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, said in a recent interview. “However, the Department of Justice can take the facts that we’ve outlined in our investigation and use them.”For all the focus that Ms. Cheney has put on producing criminal referrals, the committee has not been entirely cooperative with the Justice Department, slow-walking requests from the department for transcripts of the interviews it has conducted.The task of determining whether anyone broke the law is never mentioned in the resolution that led to the creation of the committee in June 2021. Its chief mission, according to a House resolution, is coming up with an authoritative account of what occurred, identifying failures by law enforcement and other causes of the violence, and providing recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But the committee has turned itself into an adjunct front loader to the Justice Department, developing new evidence, coming up with theories for laws that Mr. Trump and his aides might have broken and educating the public about them at nationally televised hearings that unfolded like an episodic running drama.Committee staff members — many of whom are former prosecutors — employed a strategy of highlighting a range of potential crimes or lanes for investigators to pursue at each of the panel’s public hearings.One hearing focused on how donors had been defrauded by being targeted for donations to help fight specious election fraud claims..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.Other hearings focused on whether Mr. Trump and his aides committed the crimes of defrauding the American people or obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. At another, members raised the question of whether Mr. Trump or his aides committed witness tampering.“The purpose of this committee is to ensure that we tell the full truth, allow government officials to make changes to the system, to improve our guardrails, allow the American people to make better decisions about who they elect, and also to encourage D.O.J. to do their job,” Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.The committee’s work has already yielded two contempt of Congress prosecutions for failure to comply with subpoenas issued by the panel. The Justice Department has prosecuted two former aides to Mr. Trump — Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro — on contempt charges.A jury convicted Mr. Bannon, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump in an unrelated crime and is now scheduled to be sentenced on Friday. The Justice Department recommended on Monday that he serve six months for the two misdemeanor contempt charges and pay a $200,000 fine.Mr. Navarro is scheduled to go on trial on the contempt charges next month.“Congress has always been a stalking horse for the Justice Department’s investigations, but this was done expressly, blatantly and without mincing words and without hiding their motives, in a magnitude greater than what I’ve ever seen,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat who once served as the top lawyer in the House.Mr. Brand has strongly criticized the committee and now represents Mr. Navarro.In forming its staff, the committee took a different approach than previous congressional investigations, hiring several former federal prosecutors and putting a former United States attorney in charge of overseeing its day-to-day work.Some of the first public signs that the committee would be taking a different approach emerged last December when Ms. Cheney said the question of Mr. Trump’s criminality was one that the panel was investigating. She then began reading directly from the federal criminal code a law she believed he may have broken.“Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?” Ms. Cheney said.In March, in a civil court fight with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who helped advise Mr. Trump on how to overturn the election, the committee filed what amounted to a de facto indictment against Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman. Although the document held no criminal weight, the committee asserted that both men had engaged in criminal conduct in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack.“The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the filing said.The federal judge overseeing the case largely agreed, saying that it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had broken the law.Armed with the court’s ruling, Ms. Cheney took the lead in continuing to raise questions publicly about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. But it was the committee’s approach to its string of hearings that began in the late spring that provided a stark contrast to the Justice Department’s slow, methodical approach under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Speaking like prosecutors, members of the committee treated the American public at the hearings like it was a jury at a criminal trial as they methodically built a case that showed Mr. Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election, lied repeatedly to the public about it, amassed a crowd of his supporters who then stormed the Capitol and did nothing for hours to stop them.When a former West Wing aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, provided electrifying testimony in late June, she made a series of damaging disclosures that were new to the Justice Department and grabbed senior officials’ attention. The mounting public questions about the potential criminality of Mr. Trump and his allies raised questions about whether Mr. Garland was willing to take them on.As those questions crescendoed in the summer, reports emerged that federal prosecutors were indeed investigating them. Relying on the blueprint laid out by the committee, prosecutors in the months that followed subpoenaed many of the same witnesses who had testified before the committee.But the threshold for charging a former president or his top advisers is higher than for setting out a case at a congressional hearing with no one on hand to argue in Mr. Trump’s defense. Legal experts have a range of opinions about whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a case and whether Mr. Garland, who has the ultimate say, would make such a move, knowing how it could further divide the country, particularly if Mr. Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024. More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Bought Arsenal of Weapons Ahead of Jan. 6

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      The prosecution in the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes and other members of the militia introduced evidence that he spent as much as $20,000 on rifles, ammunition and other equipment.In the days before a pro-Trump mob — including members of his own organization — broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, went on a cross-country weapon-buying spree.Setting out for Washington from Texas, his home state, Mr. Rhodes stopped at least six times, bank records show, purchasing items like assault-style rifles, ammunition and scopes. Sometimes he dropped into gun shops and sometimes he conducted the transactions in parking lots with private sellers he met online.By the time he reached his destination, prosecutors said on Monday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates on seditious conspiracy charges, the Oath Keepers leader had spent as much as $20,000 on what amounted to a small arsenal that included at least three rifles and an Israeli-made semiautomatic shotgun.Prosecutors have not yet told the jury precisely what Mr. Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed as he and a lawyer for the Oath Keepers, Kellye SoRelle, made their way from Texas, through Mississippi and Tennessee, to the Hilton Garden Inn in Vienna, Va., where they stayed on Jan. 6.But the purchases took place as Mr. Rhodes was overseeing the creation of what he has called an armed “quick reaction force” that was staged in other hotel rooms in Virginia, ready to rush to the aid of Oath Keepers stationed at the Capitol if they found themselves in need.The armed contingent is central to the Justice Department’s case that Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — committed seditious conspiracy by plotting to use violence to stop the transfer of power from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.While the “quick reaction force” — often referred to as the Q.R.F. — was never deployed to Washington and its weapons remained in Virginia, prosecutors opened the trial two weeks ago by telling the jury that Mr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy.”“The point of the Q.R.F. was to prevent Biden from taking power in whatever form that took,” an F.B.I. agent, Sylvia Hilgeman, testified on Monday. “I think the Q.R.F. was meant to occupy D.C.”The government has already described how several Oath Keepers stashed their weapons in rooms at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va., six miles from downtown Washington, leaving them in the care of compatriots who were prepared to ferry them across the Potomac River into the city.On Monday, prosecutors showed the jury surveillance camera footage from the Comfort Inn of various Oath Keepers wheeling rifle cases and duffel bags on luggage carts down the hotel’s hallways. The carts were at times so full that one member of the group, Edward Vallejo, had to get a running start to push a cart out of an elevator and move it around a corner.The prosecutors also showed the jury a map put together from cellphone data and credit card records that plotted the movements of more than two dozen Oath Keepers arriving in the Washington area from states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.“There were a lot of firearms cases,” a former Oath Keeper testified last week about the quick reaction force. “I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military.”The armed group is also key to the Oath Keepers’ defense.Phillip Linder, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers, has told the jury that the force was never meant to be used as part of an offensive assault against the Capitol. Rather, Mr. Linder has said, the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, he claimed, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Mr. Rhodes did not enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, and none of the Oath Keepers defendants who went into the building that day were believed to have brought weapons.Prosecutors revealed on Monday that one day before the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes sent several night-vision devices he had bought to a woman named Marsha Lessard, who ran an organization called the Virginia Freedom Keepers.Ms. Lessard, an associate of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, had a permit with other organizers for a protest on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Members of her group also took part in a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020, during which Jason Sullivan, Mr. Stone’s onetime social adviser, urged listeners to “descend on the Capitol” on Jan. 6 and ensure that lawmakers inside “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”Earlier in the day, prosecutors showed the jury some sexually explicit text messages that Mr. Rhodes had swapped with Ms. SoRelle, the lawyer, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, suggesting that the two had more than the usual lawyer-client relationship.The messages were apparently introduced to chip away at one of the Oath Keepers’ possible defenses: that members of the group had been acting on Ms. SoRelle’s professional advice when they believed the “quick reaction force” could have been legally called up by Mr. Trump.Even after fleeing Washington on Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes continued buying stockpiles of guns and ammunition, the government has said in court papers filed before the trial began. As Mr. Biden’s inauguration neared, Mr. Rhodes — accompanied by Joshua James, an Oath Keepers member from Alabama — made multiple trips to purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of weapons, scopes, magazines, holsters and firearm maintenance equipment.Mr. James pleaded guilty in March to seditious conspiracy and has been cooperating with the government’s prosecution. The jury could soon hear from him and other Oath Keepers who have entered guilty pleas.If Mr. James does appear as a witness, he could tell the jury what he told prosecutors as part of his plea deal: that in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes told him and his fellow Oath Keepers to be prepared to secure the perimeter of the White House and use “lethal force” to stop anyone, including members of the National Guard, from removing Mr. Trump from the building.Mr. James could also testify that he stored some of Mr. Rhodes’s arsenal in a storage shed in Alabama after Mr. Rhodes instructed him that he should “be prepared for violence in the event of a civil war.”Under cross-examination by James Lee Bright, a lawyer for Mr. Rhodes, Ms. Hilgeman, the F.B.I. agent, acknowledged that as Jan. 6 came to an end, the Oath Keepers took the weapons that they had stashed with the quick reaction force home with them.“So the armed rebellion was unarmed?” Mr. Bright asked.“The armed rebellion wasn’t over,” Ms. Hilgeman said. 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