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      Project Veritas Says Justice Dept. Secretly Seized Its Emails

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      In a court filing, the conservative group assailed prosecutors for concealing the action in a proceeding from the investigation of how it acquired Ashley Biden’s diary.The conservative group Project Veritas said on Tuesday that the Justice Department began secretly seizing a trove of its internal communications in late 2020, just weeks after learning that the group had obtained a copy of President Biden’s daughter’s diary.In a court filing, a lawyer for Project Veritas assailed the Justice Department’s actions, which involved subpoenas, search warrants and court production orders that had not been previously disclosed and gag orders imposed on Microsoft, whose servers housed the group’s emails.The disclosure underscored the scope and intensity of the legal battle surrounding the Justice Department’s investigation into how Project Veritas, in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, came into possession of a diary kept by Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, and other possessions she had stored at a house in Florida.And it highlighted how the Justice Department has resisted demands by the conservative group — which regularly engages in sting operations and ambush interviews against news organizations and liberal groups and has targeted perceived political opponents — to be treated as a news organization entitled to First Amendment protections.It is highly unusual for the Justice Department to obtain the internal communications of journalists, as federal prosecutors are supposed to follow special guidelines to ensure they do not infringe on First Amendment rights.Since the investigation was disclosed last fall, federal prosecutors have repeatedly said that because they have evidence that the group may have committed a crime in obtaining Ms. Biden’s belongings, Project Veritas is not entitled to First Amendment protections.But Project Veritas, in its filing on Tuesday, said that prosecutors had failed to be forthcoming with a federal judge about the nature of their inquiry by choosing not to disclose the secret subpoenas and warrants.“This is a fundamental, intolerable abridgment of the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” James O’Keefe, the group’s founder and leader, said in a video.In its court filing, Project Veritas asked a federal judge to intervene to stop the Justice Department from using the materials it had obtained from Microsoft in the investigation. The group said that federal prosecutors had obtained “voluminous materials” — which in many cases included the contents of emails — from Microsoft for eight of its employees, including Mr. O’Keefe.The group also disclosed that Uber had told two of its operatives who are under investigation — Spencer Meads and Eric Cochran — that it had handed over information from their accounts in March of last year in response to demands from the government.Microsoft said in response to questions about the matter that it had initially challenged the government’s demands for Project Veritas’s information, but the company declined to describe what that entailed.“We’ve believed for a long time that secrecy should be the exception and used only when truly necessary,” said Frank X. Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft. “We always push back when the government is seeking the data of an enterprise customer under a secrecy order and always tell the customer as soon as we’re legally able.”According to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, Microsoft had pushed back on the Justice Department’s subpoenas and warrants when the company was served with them in late 2020 and early 2021. But the government refused to drop its demands and Microsoft handed over the information that prosecutors were seeking, the person said.Because of gag orders that had been imposed, Microsoft was barred from telling Project Veritas about the requests, the person said.Shortly after the existence of the investigation was revealed publicly last fall, Microsoft asked the Justice Department whether it could tell Project Veritas about the requests, the person said. The department refused to lift the gag orders, the person said.In response, Microsoft drafted a lawsuit against the Justice Department to try to get the gag orders lifted and told department officials that the company was prepared to file it. Soon afterward, the department went to court and had the gag orders lifted.A little more than a week ago, Microsoft told Project Veritas about the warrants and subpoenas, the person said.Project Veritas paid $40,000 for Ms. Biden’s diary to a man and a woman from Florida who said that it had been obtained from a home where Ms. Biden had been staying until a few months earlier. Project Veritas also had possession of other items left at the house by Ms. Biden, and at the heart of the investigation is whether the group played a role in the removal of those items from the home.Project Veritas has denied any wrongdoing and maintained that Ms. Biden’s belongings had been abandoned. The group never published the diary.Search warrants used in raids last fall on the homes of Mr. O’Keefe and two other Project Veritas operatives showed that the Justice Department was investigating conspiracy to transport stolen property and possession of stolen goods, among other crimes.In response to the searches, a federal judge, at the urging of Project Veritas, appointed a special master to oversee what evidence federal prosecutors could keep from the dozens of cellphones and electronic devices the authorities had obtained.Project Veritas said in its filing on Tuesday that at the time the special master was appointed the government should have revealed that it had conducted other searches that could have infringed on the group’s First Amendment rights or could have been protected by attorney-client privilege.In the final year of the Trump administration, prosecutors in Washington, who were investigating a leak of classified information, secretly obtained court orders demanding that Google, which houses The New York Times’s email accounts, hand over information from four Times reporters’ accounts. In response to requests from Google, the Justice Department allowed it to alert The Times to the demands so the newspaper could fight the orders. A lawyer for The Times, David McCraw, secretly fought the demands, which the government ultimately dropped. More

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      Pressure on Justice Dept. as Jan. 6 Panel Lays Out Case Against Trump

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      Building a criminal case against the former president is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is facing mounting pressure to prosecute former President Donald J. Trump after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out its argument for a potential criminal case on Wednesday night, placing Attorney General Merrick B. Garland squarely in the middle of a politically charged debate over how to hold Mr. Trump accountable for efforts to overturn the election.Even as Democrats have criticized Mr. Garland for remaining silent on Mr. Trump’s actions, he has sought to insulate the agency from politicization, an effort he sees as a corrective to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaigns to force the department to bend to his agenda.Building a criminal case against Mr. Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, given the high burden of proof they must show, questions about Mr. Trump’s mental state and the likelihood of any decision being appealed, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.The department has never said whether it is exploring a criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump, though Mr. Garland has vowed to pursue wrongdoing “at any level,” keeping alive the possibility that federal prosecutors might someday charge the former president.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.“The Justice Department will have to ask that question: Is there a winning case here?” said Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Mr. Trump. “If there is strong evidence, but prosecutors don’t think they can secure a conviction, they will have to use prosecutorial discretion.”That said, Mr. Eisen said the evidence that the committee produced in support of its argument could be powerful, and “support the idea that Trump and those around him are at risk of federal or state prosecution.”It was far easier for the committee to claim that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by a lawyer — than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction over the same facts, legal specialists said.The filing on Wednesday, which said that the committee had evidence to suggest that Mr. Trump might have engaged in a criminal conspiracy, is the work of three veteran Justice Department lawyers who would be deeply familiar with the complications that such allegations create for the agency.Losing such a case has far-reaching implications. It risks severely undermining the department’s credibility, empowering and emboldening Mr. Trump and his allies, and making it harder for the federal courts to hold future presidents accountable for misdeeds.In publicly sharing its work, the committee has only escalated expectations that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted, regardless of whether its evidence meets the standard that a federal prosecutor must clear to secure a unanimous guilty verdict.In its court filing, the panel suggested it had evidence to support allegations that Mr. Trump committed two crimes: obstructing an official proceeding by working to disrupt the electoral vote count and conspiring with his allies, including the conservative lawyer John Eastman, to defraud the United States by working to overturn the election results.“The evidence supports an inference” that Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and several others “entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing said.However, the filing was not necessarily a path to prosecution. The committee made its claim in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by Mr. Eastman. The standard it must meet to invoke crimes is much lower than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction, legal specialists said.Specifically, Mr. Eastman has invoked attorney-client privilege to block the subpoena, and the committee wants a judge to enforce it anyway under an exception for materials that involve crimes or fraud.It is asking the judge to view the disputed materials privately, and to do so it need only convince the court that it has a “good faith” reason to believe that such a private viewing “may reveal” evidence that the exception applies — a far lower bar than proving something to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.The central theory put forward by the Jan. 6 committee is that Mr. Trump tried to disrupt an official proceeding — Congress’s certification of the election results — by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to illegally reject the electoral votes from certain states.Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said that while the facts of what happened were largely clear, the challenge to convicting Mr. Trump would center on proving that he had a corrupt intent — essentially, that Mr. Trump knew that there was no valid lawful basis for Mr. Pence to do what he was demanding.At a trial, Mr. Trump’s defense team would have a powerful argument about his mental state: Even though government lawyers told him that Mr. Pence did not have that authority, Mr. Eastman told him that the vice president could lawfully do what he wanted. The defense could say this shows that Mr. Trump sincerely thought he was asking Mr. Pence to do something lawful — raising a possible reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about whether his intentions were corrupt.Mr. Buell said that in an ordinary white-collar criminal case, it is not uncommon for corporate defendants to point to something their lawyers had said to maintain that they did not think they were doing anything criminal. Prosecutors sometimes go forward with such cases anyway, he said, knowing it will be an argument in trial they will need to try to defeat.But the “enormous political implications” of charging the immediate past president — and possible 2024 election contender — make that calculus all the more risky for Mr. Garland, he said.Federal charges against a former president would be a first in American history. While President Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid being impeached, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned him, absolving him of any criminal charges and sparing the Justice Department from prosecuting him.A case against a former president would always be mired in politics, a dynamic especially true now given how deeply polarized the nation has become.If the Justice Department were to criminally charge Mr. Trump, his supporters would most likely interpret it as President Biden’s handpicked attorney general deploying the department to attack the de facto leader of a rival party — particularly if they believe Mr. Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.Should the Justice Department not bring charges, Mr. Trump’s opponents could feel that it had blatantly abdicated its duties. After the election, Mr. Trump continued to declare himself the winner, denying evidence compiled by his own administration. He pressured public officials to support his false claims, and he exhorted his followers to stop the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6.If the Justice Department does not respond to such overt acts, it risks fostering the idea that presidents and their allies cannot be held accountable for behavior that undermines democracy.“Here, it’s a totally different situation because there is an enormous political envelope around whether you would charge this guy,” Mr. Buell said. “At some level you can’t analyze this in terms of what a prosecutor would normally do.” More

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      Barr Rebukes Trump as ‘Off the Rails’ in New Memoir

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      William P. Barr’s memoir of his time as attorney general under George H.W. Bush and then again under Donald J. Trump defends his more recent leadership of the Justice Department.WASHINGTON — Former Attorney General William P. Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald J. Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self-control” cost him the 2020 election and says “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”In the book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” Mr. Barr also urges his fellow Republicans to pick someone else as the party’s nominee for the 2024 election, calling the prospect of another presidential run by Mr. Trump “dismaying.”“Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” Mr. Barr writes.The memoir — an account of Mr. Barr’s time as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and then again under Mr. Trump — defends his own actions in the Trump administration that led to sharp criticism of a Justice Department setting aside its independence to bend to White House pressure.Mr. Barr was long considered a close ally of Mr. Trump. But the two fell out toward the end of the Trump administration, when Mr. Barr refused to go along with Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.In a statement last June, Mr. Trump denounced his former attorney general, calling him a “swamp creature” and a “RINO” — meaning Republican in Name Only — who “was afraid, weak and frankly, now that I see what he is saying, pathetic.”For his part, Mr. Barr portrays Mr. Trump as a president who — despite sometimes displaying “the menacing mannerisms” of a strongman ruler as a “schtick” to project an image of strength — had operated within guardrails set up by his advisers and achieved many conservative policy goals. But Mr. Trump “lost his grip” after the election, he writes.“He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Mr. Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.”Throughout the book, Mr. Barr scorns the news media, accusing them of “corruption” and “active support for progressive ideology.” The political left, he writes, became radicalized during President Barack Obama’s second term. He compares its support for social justice issues to “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution and the fascists of 20th-century Europe.”Mr. Barr also denounces the inquiry by the F.B.I. and then the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into links between Russia and Trump campaign aides in 2016. He writes that “the matter that really required investigation” was “how did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?”Mr. Barr rejects as “drivel” the criticism that his summary of the special counsel’s report that he issued before the report became public was distorted in a way that favored Mr. Trump. Mr. Barr insists that his description — including his declaration that Mr. Trump did not commit obstruction of justice — was “entirely accurate.”In defending that conclusion, Mr. Barr writes that it was a “simple fact that the president never did anything to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation.”But his book does not address any of the specific incidents that Mr. Mueller’s report laid out as raising potential obstruction-of-justice concerns, such as the fact that Mr. Trump dangled a pardon at his former campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, while urging Mr. Manafort not to cooperate with the inquiry.In a chapter titled “Upholding Fairness, Even for Rascals,” Mr. Barr defends his handling of two other cases arising from the Mueller investigation. Mr. Barr writes that it was “reasonable” for him to overrule line prosecutors and seek a more lenient sentence for Mr. Trump’s ally Roger J. Stone Jr.And addressing his decision to drop the prosecution of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, for lying to the F.B.I. — even though Mr. Flynn had already pleaded guilty — he writes that the evidence was insufficient, the F.B.I.’s handling of the case had been “an abuse of power” and Mr. Mueller’s charges against him were not “fair.”As he did while in office, Mr. Barr laments that Mr. Trump’s public comments about the Justice Department undermined his ability to do his job.“Even though I was basing decisions on what I thought was right under the law and facts, if my decisions ended up the same as the president’s expressed opinion, it made it easier to attack my actions as politically motivated,” he writes.Mr. Barr also describes resisting Mr. Trump’s bidding in some cases. He declined to charge the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. for allegedly leaking classified information; insisted that the administration had run out of time to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census; and rejected Mr. Trump’s “bad” idea that he could use an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.Lawyers at the White House and the Justice Department had to talk Mr. Trump out of those ideas, which could be “bruising” and amounted to “eating grenades,” Mr. Barr writes.On the scandal that led to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, in which Mr. Trump withheld aid to Ukraine as leverage to try to get Ukraine’s president to announce an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Barr was scathing.He calls it “another mess — this one self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” a “harebrained gambit” and “idiotic beyond belief.” But while Mr. Barr describes the conversation Mr. Trump had with Ukraine’s president on the topic as “unseemly and injudicious,” he maintains that it did not rise to a “criminal offense.”Similarly, Mr. Barr writes that he did not think Mr. Trump’s actions before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — which he had condemned in a statement the day after as “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress” and “a betrayal of his office and his supporters” — met the legal standard for the crime of incitement, even though they were “wrong.”The book opens with a Dec. 1, 2020, meeting with Mr. Trump hours after Mr. Barr gave an interview contradicting the president’s claims of a stolen election, saying the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Trump was furious, he writes, accusing Mr. Barr of “pulling the rug out from under me” and saying he must “hate Trump.” After Mr. Barr says he explained why claims of various fraud were unfounded, he offered to resign and Mr. Trump slammed the table and yelled “accepted!” Mr. Trump reversed himself as Mr. Barr left the White House, but Mr. Barr stepped down before the end of the month.His book expands on that theme, going through specific “fact-free claims of fraud” that Mr. Trump has put forward and explaining why the Justice Department found them baseless. He lists several reasons, for example, that claims about purportedly hacked Dominion voting machines were “absolute nonsense” and “meaningless twaddle.”“The election was not ‘stolen,’” Mr. Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” More

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      Archives Found Possible Classified Material in Boxes Returned by Trump

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      The National Archives consulted with the Justice Department about the discovery after the former president sent back documents that he had improperly taken from the White House when he left office.The National Archives and Records Administration discovered what it believed was classified information in documents Donald J. Trump had taken with him from the White House as he left office, according to a person briefed on the matter.The discovery, which occurred after Mr. Trump returned 15 boxes of documents to the government last month, prompted the National Archives to reach out to the Justice Department for guidance, the person said. The department told the National Archives to have its inspector general examine the matter, the person said.It is unclear what the inspector general has done since then, in particular, whether the inspector general has referred the matter to the Justice Department.An inspector general is required to alert the Justice Department to the discovery of any classified materials that were found outside authorized government channels.Making a referral to the Justice Department would put senior officials in the position of having to decide whether to open an investigation, a scenario that would thrust the department into a highly contentious political matter.The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the National Archives had asked the Justice Department to examine Mr. Trump’s handling of White House records.Officials with the National Archives did not respond to messages seeking comment.In January, after a lengthy back and forth between Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the National Archives, Mr. Trump handed over more than a dozen boxes of materials, including documents, mementos, gifts and letters. Among the documents were the original versions of a letter that former President Barack Obama had left for Mr. Trump when he was first sworn in, and letters written to Mr. Trump by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.Also included in the boxes was a map Mr. Trump famously drew on with a black Sharpie to demonstrate the track of Hurricane Dorian heading toward Alabama in 2019 to back up a declaration he had made on Twitter that contradicted weather forecasts.Mr. Trump in the Oval Office in September 2019. The map of a storm appears to have been altered with a marker to show Hurricane Dorian headed for Alabama.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe boxes had originally been sent to Mar-a-Lago from the White House residence, where a range of items — including clothes — were hastily packed up in Mr. Trump’s final days in office. Legally, Mr. Trump was required to leave the documents, letters and gifts in the custody of the federal government so the National Archives could store them.After the F.B.I., during the 2016 presidential campaign, investigated Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material while she was secretary of state, Mr. Trump assailed her, helping make the issue pivotal in the outcome of that race. In that case, the intelligence community’s inspector general had made a national security referral to the F.B.I., prompting the investigation of Mrs. Clinton.But during Mr. Trump’s administration, top White House officials were deeply concerned about how little regard Mr. Trump showed for sensitive national security materials. John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, tried to stop classified documents from being taken out of the Oval Office and brought up to the residence because he was concerned about what Mr. Trump may do with them and how that may jeopardize national security.Similar to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka used personal email accounts for work purposes. And even after being warned by aides, Mr. Trump repeatedly ripped up government documents that had to be taped back together to prevent him from being accused of destroying federal property.Now Mr. Trump faces questions about his handling of classified information — a question that is complicated because as president he had the authority to declassify any government information. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump had declassified materials the National Archives discovered in the boxes before he left office. Under federal law, he no longer maintains the ability to declassify documents after leaving office.He invoked the power to declassify information several times as his administration publicly released materials that helped him politically, particularly on issues like the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.Toward the end of the administration, Mr. Trump ripped pictures that intrigued him out of the President’s Daily Brief — a compendium of often classified information about potential national security threats — but it is unclear whether he took them to the residence with him. In one prominent example of how he dealt with classified material, Mr. Trump in 2019 took a highly classified spy satellite image of an Iranian missile launch site, declassified it and then released the photo on Twitter.If Mr. Trump was found to have taken materials with him that were still classified at the time he left the White House, prosecuting him would be extremely difficult and it would pit the Justice Department against Mr. Trump at a time when Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is trying to depoliticize the department.The department and the F.B.I. also still have significant scars from its investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information, as the bureau was accused of unfairly tarnishing her and interfering in the 2016 election.Katie Benner More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Adopts Prosecution Tactics for Its Investigation

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      The House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol and what led to it is employing techniques more common in criminal cases than in congressional inquiries.The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol is borrowing techniques from federal prosecutions, employing aggressive tactics typically used against mobsters and terrorists as it seeks to break through stonewalling from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies and develop evidence that could prompt a criminal case.In what its members see as the best opportunity to hold Mr. Trump and his team accountable, the committee — which has no authority to pursue criminal charges — is using what powers it has in expansive ways in hopes of pressuring Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to use the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute them.The panel’s investigation is being run by a former U.S. attorney, and the top investigator brought in to focus on Mr. Trump’s inner circle is also a former U.S. attorney. The panel has hired more than a dozen other former federal prosecutors.The committee has interviewed more than 475 witnesses and issued more than 100 subpoenas, including broad ones to banks as well as telecommunications and social media companies. Some of the subpoenas have swept up the personal data of Trump family members and allies, local politicians and at least one member of Congress, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio. Though no subpoena has been issued for Mr. Jordan, his text messages and calls have shown up in communications with Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.Armed with reams of telephone records and metadata, the committee has used link analysis, a data mapping technique that former F.B.I. agents say was key to identifying terrorist networks in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The F.B.I. said it used a similar tactic last month to identify the seller of a gun to a man in Texas who took hostages at a synagogue.Faced with at least 16 Trump allies who have signaled they will not fully cooperate with the committee, investigators have taken a page out of organized crime prosecutions and quietly turned at least six lower-level Trump staff members into witnesses who have provided information about their bosses’ activities.The committee is also considering granting immunity to key members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as a way of pressuring them to testify.“Having lived through and being a part of every major congressional investigation over the past 50 years from Iran-contra to Whitewater to everything else, this is the mother of all investigations and a quantum leap for Congress in a way I’ve never seen before,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat and the former top lawyer for the House who is now representing Dan Scavino, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, in the investigation.It is a development, Mr. Brand suggested, that Democrats might one day come to regret. “When a frontier is pushed back, it doesn’t recede,” he said. “They think they’re fighting for the survival of the democracy and the ends justify the means. Just wait if the Republicans take over.”The committee’s aggressive approach carries with it another obvious risk: that it could fail to turn up compelling new information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his defeat or to make a persuasive case for a Justice Department prosecution. Mr. Trump survived years of scrutiny by the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and two impeachments. Despite a swirl of new investigations since he left office, the former president remains the dominant force in Republican politics.The committee has no law enforcement role, and its stated goal is to write a comprehensive report and propose recommendations, including for legislation, to try to make sure the events of Jan. 6 are never repeated.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no specific public indication that the Justice Department is investigating former President Donald J. Trump.Al Drago for The New York TimesNevertheless, its members have openly discussed what criminal laws Mr. Trump and his allies may have violated and how they might recommend that the Justice Department investigate him. Such a step could put considerable additional pressure on Mr. Garland, who has not given any specific public indication that the department is investigating Mr. Trump or would support prosecuting him.As the House investigation was gaining momentum late last year, the committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, read from the criminal code to describe a law she believed could be used to prosecute Mr. Trump for obstructing Congress as it sought to certify the Electoral College count of his defeat.Ms. Cheney and the other Republican on the committee, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, were censured by the Republican National Committee on Friday for their participation in the investigation.Mr. Trump’s allies have grown angry not just at the aggressiveness of the committee — for example, in making subpoenas public before they have been served — but also at the expansive list of people questioned, some of whom, these allies maintain, had minimal to no involvement in the events of Jan. 6.The tactics being used by the committee were described by nearly a dozen people, including members of the committee, aides, witnesses and their lawyers, and other people familiar with the panel’s work. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing what the committee says is a confidential investigation.By comparison, the House select committee that spent two and a half years investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack issued just a dozen or so subpoenas — a small fraction of the number issued by the Jan. 6 committee so far — and made no criminal referrals. The Jan. 6 panel has already recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against three witnesses who refused to cooperate, and one, Stephen K. Bannon, has already been indicted by the Justice Department.Members of the Jan. 6 committee say the obstacles thrown up by Mr. Trump and his allies and the high stakes of the investigation have left the panel with no choice but to use every tool at its disposal.“It’s not a criminal investigation, but having experienced former prosecutors who know how to run complex, white-collar investigations working on a plot to overturn the presidential election is a very useful talent among your team,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member.To lead the inquiry, the panel hired Timothy J. Heaphy, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. In that position, he oversaw a number of high-profile prosecutions, including one in which the drugmaker Abbott Laboratories pleaded guilty in a fraud case and paid a $1.5 billion fine.Ms. Cheney and the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, also hired John Wood, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri and a former deputy associate attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. He is a senior investigative counsel for the committee and is focusing on Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Neither Mr. Heaphy nor Mr. Wood had previously worked on a congressional investigation.Some of the Democrats on the committee were concerned that if the panel was too aggressive, Republicans might turn the tables on the Democrats whenever they took back control of the House. But Ms. Cheney insisted that the committee be as aggressive as possible.She said that the panel would face significant resistance from Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and that the committee would be criticized no matter what it did, so there was no reason to hold back in the face of efforts to impede its work.Mr. Trump moved to block the National Archives from handing over documents from his White House, leading to a monthslong court fight that ended with the committee receiving the documents.At least 16 witnesses have sued to try to block the committee’s subpoenas. Four of the panel’s most sought-after targets — the conservative lawyer John Eastman; Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department lawyer deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s plays to try to stay in power; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; and the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. — invoked the Fifth Amendment as a way to avoid answering questions without the threat of a contempt of Congress charge.Three Republican members of Congress — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Jordan — told the committee that they would refuse to sit for questioning.The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that he faced dogged questioning from the committee’s investigators — and that they already had his text messages.Jon Cherry/Getty ImagesDespite those obstacles, the committee turned its attention to lower-level aides, who investigators knew were in the room for many of the key events that occurred in the lead-up to and during the assault, or were told almost immediately about what had occurred. Those witnesses tended to be younger and have far less money to hire high-end white-collar defense lawyers to fend off the committee. So far, the committee has spoken to at least a half-dozen lower-level aides who fall into this category.When Mr. Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, refused to testify, the panel turned to his top aide, Ben Williamson, who complied with a subpoena and sat for hours of questioning. After Mr. Clark, the Justice Department lawyer, refused to cooperate, a former senior counsel who worked for him, Kenneth Klukowski, sat for an interview with the committee.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, said the committee was not trying to “flip” witnesses the way investigators might do in a criminal case. But, he said, “If you drew some kind of social diagrams of who’s testifying and who’s not, pretty much everyone is testifying, except for those who are in the immediate entourage of Donald Trump.”Among the other aides who have testified before the committee are Marc Short, Greg Jacob and Keith Kellogg, all of whom worked for former Vice President Mike Pence. Three former spokeswomen for Mr. Trump have also cooperated: Kayleigh McEnany, Stephanie Grisham and Alyssa Farah Griffin.The committee’s investigative work related to Mr. Trump’s current spokesman illustrates the aggressive steps the panel is taking. The spokesman, Taylor Budowich, turned over more than 1,700 pages of documents and sat for roughly four hours of sworn testimony.Shortly after testifying, Mr. Budowich learned that the committee had requested financial records from his bank related to pro-Trump rallies. A federal judge turned down an emergency request by Mr. Budowich to force congressional investigators to relinquish his banking records, which JPMorgan Chase had already given to the committee.Investigators also sought a broad swath of phone records from Ali Alexander, a right-wing rally organizer who was cooperating with the committee, for two months before Jan. 6, 2021 — well before he claims to have thought of planning an event that day — and for one month after.Late last month, another example of the panel’s investigative approach emerged. Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist, who has sued the committee, was questioned by investigators in a virtual interview. He later said on his radio show that in the interview he had invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination nearly 100 times.“I just had a very intense experience being interrogated by the Jan. 6 committee lawyers,” he said. “They were polite, but they were dogged.”Even though Mr. Jones refused to share information with the committee, he said the investigators seemed to have found ways around his lack of cooperation. He said the committee had already obtained text messages from him.“They have everything that’s already on my phones and things,” he said. “I saw my text messages” with political organizers tied to the Jan. 6 rally.Maggie Haberman More

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      Jan. 6 Defendant Seeks to Subpoena Trump as Witness at Trial

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      The request to have the former president testify faces an uphill fight, but it illustrates efforts by defendants to place him at the center of their cases.Almost from the moment that the first rioters were arrested in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol last January, defendants have tried in various ways to blame former President Donald J. Trump for their behavior.Some have attempted to get out of jail on bail by claiming that they stormed the building because Mr. Trump said they should. Others have sought reduced sentences by arguing that they only joined the riot because they believed Mr. Trump had authorized them to do so.On Friday, however, one Jan. 6 defendant took a different and much bolder step in seeking to pull Mr. Trump into the center of his case: He and his lawyer asked a federal judge for permission to subpoena the former president and several of his allies to testify as witnesses at his trial.“It is anticipated that, when called as a witness, Donald J. Trump will testify that he and others orchestrated a carefully crafted plot to call into question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and the validity of President Biden’s victory,” the lawyer, Samuel H. Shamansky, said in court papers filed on behalf of his client, Dustin Thompson.“Moreover, it will be established at trial that Mr. Trump and his conspirators engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, including defendant, into believing that American democracy was at stake if Congress was permitted to certify the election results,” the papers said.It will most likely be an uphill climb for Mr. Shamansky to get permission to subpoena Mr. Trump and force him to appear in court, a process that could also be time-consuming and involve extensive litigation.At a hearing last month, the judge in Mr. Thompson’s case, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, expressed skepticism about the notion of a former president and members of his inner circle being placed by force on the witness stand. He suggested that Mr. Shamansky could just as easily make his point by playing for the jury video or audio recordings of them speaking on Jan. 6 or in the days leading up to it.The request for the subpoenas came in conjunction with a separate motion in which Mr. Shamansky notified Judge Walton that he intended to mount what is known as a public authority defense when Mr. Thompson goes on trial in April. The strategy involves defendants arguing that they were authorized to commit crimes on the advice of a federal official.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the proposed subpoena.At the hearing last month, Mr. Shamansky told Judge Walton that he wanted to subpoena not only Mr. Trump, but also several of his former aides and advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and John Eastman.Acknowledging that he would have a hard time disputing that Mr. Thompson had committed a crime on Jan. 6, Mr. Shamansky told the judge that he wanted testimony from Mr. Trump and the others in order to establish Mr. Thompson’s mind-set that day and to prove that his client had effectively been duped into breaking the law.As for the recordings Judge Walton suggested, Mr. Shamansky argued that live witnesses always played better in front of juries. He also insisted that he had a right — even a duty — to mount the strongest defense of Mr. Thompson that he could.If Mr. Shamansky gets his way, it is almost certain that the famously litigious Mr. Trump would oppose the subpoena in a bruising legal fight, which could drag out the proceedings for months.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Shamansky said if he succeeded in obtaining the subpoenas, he would not only ask Mr. Trump about his speech that day, but also seek to get his hands on private notes or messages that were used in drafting the address. He added that he knew of no legal prohibition against trying to get testimony from a former president as a material witness in a criminal case.“I’m unaware of any authority that undermines our position,” he said. “The Constitution guarantees and demands Trump’s appearance at trial.”Some legal experts seemed to agree, pointing to President Richard M. Nixon’s failed attempts in 1974 to quash a subpoena by the Watergate special prosecutor for tapes and other documents related to his case. Others noted that, in 1990, former President Ronald Reagan gave videotaped testimony during the trial of John M. Poindexter, his onetime national security adviser, who was charged with obstructing a congressional inquiry into the Iran-contra affair.“Based on the precedent of United States v. Nixon, as well as President Reagan’s testimony in the Poindexter trial, I think there is a plausible case that Trump could be required to produce documents or otherwise testify, at least in some form, in some of the Jan. 6 trials,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Dustin Thompson, right, with his lawyer, Samuel H. Shamansky, in Columbus, Ohio, last year. Mr. Thompson was charged shortly after the Capitol attack.Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Thompson, 37, of Columbus, Ohio, was charged soon after the Capitol attack with stealing a coat rack from inside the building and for being in a restricted area of the Capitol grounds with a onetime college classmate, Robert Lyon, who was also charged.Prosecutors later brought an additional charge against both men, accusing them of obstructing an official proceeding before Congress in which lawmakers were certifying the final count of the Electoral College vote.In an interview with The Columbus Dispatch shortly after the initial charges were filed, Mr. Shamansky said Mr. Thompson and others who went to the Capitol “got brainwashed to the point they felt duty bound to follow the encouragement of their commander in chief.” More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Examining Trump’s Role in Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      The House committee is looking into efforts by the former president’s outside advisers to create a legal basis for national security agencies to help reverse his defeat in 2020.WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee is scrutinizing former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, including efforts to create a legal basis for directing national security agencies to take such an extreme action, according to three people with knowledge of the committee’s activities.It is not clear what evidence the committee is examining as it looks at any role Mr. Trump might have played in encouraging or facilitating the drafting of a so-called national security finding, a type of document more typically used as the basis for a presidential order to an intelligence agency to take covert action. But the committee recently received documents from the Trump White House including what court filings described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions,” along with related notes.A document fitting that description circulated among Mr. Trump’s formal and informal advisers in the weeks following the election. It reflected baseless assertions about foreign interference in American voting systems that had been promoted most prominently by one of his outside lawyers, Sidney Powell.That document, dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” was published last month by Politico. It used the groundless assertions about foreign interference in the vote tally to conclude that Mr. Trump had “probable cause” to direct the military to begin seizing voting machines.“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals championed by outside advisers to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.Those attempts included directing his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states — Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary, said no — and raising with Attorney General William P. Barr the question of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a query that Mr. Barr rejected, according to people familiar with the episodes.Mr. Cuccinelli, who had told Mr. Giuliani that the Homeland Security Department did not have the authority to audit or impound the machines, later encountered Mr. Trump at a meeting on another topic. Mr. Trump again raised with him, in passing, the idea of the department seizing the machines, and Mr. Cuccinelli reiterated that there was no legal authority for doing so, according to a person familiar with the exchange.The outside advisers had earlier pushed a plan under which Mr. Trump would direct the Pentagon to seize the voting machines, an idea that was killed by White House officials and Mr. Giuliani.“It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee.The panel for weeks has been studying the actions of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who investigators say was involved in discussions about seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers, including during a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18.Mr. Flynn also gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax a day earlier in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.At the Dec. 18 meeting, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, said he, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell decided they would get into the White House without an appointment “by hook or by crook” to present their plans to Mr. Trump. He said a junior staffer let them in the building, and eventually they got close enough to the Oval Office that Mr. Trump saw them and called them in.Once inside, the group pitched Mr. Trump on their plans for him to sign an executive order for the National Guard to take control of voting machines and for Ms. Powell to be appointed a special counsel overseeing election integrity.“We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas,” Mr. Byrne wrote of the episode in a book, referring to portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost.Mr. Byrne wrote that Mr. Flynn had drafted a “beautiful operational plan” that just needed “one signature from the president.” He described various versions of the plan, including an option for the U.S. Marshals to intervene and another for Mr. Trump to “have the National Guard rerun the elections in those six states.”He described White House lawyers and officials as fighting the plans in the meeting, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who thundered, “He does not have the authority to do this!”Representative Jaime Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said the panel is trying to understand the “whole picture” of the plan to seize voting machines and how it relates to other efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, such as the former president’s pressure campaign on Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states won by President Biden.“His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend,” Mr. Raskin said of Mr. Trump. “He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said outsider advisers’ proposals to Mr. Trump to use federal agencies to seize voting machines were “the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Raskin added: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”The extraordinary plan to mobilize the country’s national security agencies to take control of voting machines required an equally extraordinary first step. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was an ally of Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell, revealed in a podcast interview last year that the gambit initially hinged on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present to lawmakers by Dec. 18, 2020.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      Justice Dept. Is Reviewing Role of Fake Trump Electors, Top Official Says

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      Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”Luke Broadwater More