Kushner, Jared

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      Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks

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      In stark videotaped interviews, Ivanka Trump accepted the notion that there had been no fraud in the 2020 election. Jared Kushner complained that a White House counsel had been “whining.”WASHINGTON — They were stripped of their White House backdrop, their power and their masks.In brief video clips, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared in the first of a half-dozen public hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.First up was Ms. Trump. Speaking in a soft voice and seemingly aware that the video might be made public someday, she said she believed the words of the former attorney general, William P. Barr, who on Dec. 1, 2020, said that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election that had taken place three weeks earlier.“It affected my perspective,” Ms. Trump said quietly, peering into a camera for a recorded interview that did not take place in person. “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying.”That was despite what her father, President Donald J. Trump, was claiming, and despite the fact that, according to several White House aides working alongside her, she did little to try to temper his false claims that he had won the 2020 election. She continued to travel with him as he vented his claims in public.Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible. Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”Mr. Kushner’s words enraged Mr. Cipollone’s former colleagues, many of whom traded messages as they complained to reporters and one another as the hearing went on that the former president’s son-in-law was “arrogant.”No two people had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White House as his daughter and his son-in-law, who came on as official advisers despite anti-nepotism laws and warnings from other aides that hiring family members can be fraught. Over four years, the two tended carefully to their images.Aides feared getting on the wrong side of the couple, who lived in Washington’s expensive Kalorama neighborhood and hosted dinners for the city’s political elite.The videos made clear that both were aware that things were going awry within the White House. But according to more than a half-dozen former Trump advisers, although both have attempted to distance themselves from that period, neither made much of an effort to pull Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in power.Instead, they left that task to the paid staff, who in turn kept waiting for the family to intervene more aggressively. Shortly after Election Day, most aides tried to avoid the Oval Office, fearful of having to listen to Mr. Trump vent. They were also eager to avoid the worst- case scenario: a directive from Mr. Trump that might have been illegal, and could have ensnared them in an investigation. More

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      How Jared Kushner Washed His Hands of Donald Trump Before Jan. 6

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      Mr. Kushner’s role in the final months of the Trump White House could come into sharp relief once the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol opens hearings.WASHINGTON — On Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, barely 24 hours after President Donald J. Trump claimed in the middle of the night that “frankly, we did win this election,” Jared Kushner woke up in his Kalorama mansion and announced to his wife that it was time to leave Washington. “We’re moving to Miami,” he said.The election had not even been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., but as Mr. Kushner later told the story to aides and associates, the White House’s young power couple felt no need to wait for the official results. They saw which way the votes were going and understood that, barring some unforeseen surprise, the president had lost his bid for a second term. Even if he refused to accept it himself.No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen, according to people close to them. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency.Their decision to move on opened a vacuum around the president that was filled by conspiracy theorists like Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who relayed to Mr. Trump farcically false stories of dead voters, stuffed ballot boxes, corrupted voting machines and foreign plots. Concluding that the president would not listen even to family members urging him to accept the results, Mr. Kushner told Mr. Trump that he would not be involved if Mr. Giuliani were in charge, according to people he confided in, effectively ceding the field to those who would try to overturn the election.Mr. Kushner’s decision to withdraw from the most consequential moment of the Trump presidency left few effective counterweights to the plotters seeking to subvert the will of the voters to hang on to power. While the president’s son-in-law had arguably been the most influential adviser to the president through four years, weighing in at times and carefully cultivating his reputation, he chose at that pivotal moment to focus instead on his personal project of Middle East diplomacy. He returned to the region to meet with figures who would also be helpful to him later in making money after leaving the White House. It was the final act in the myth that Mr. Kushner would be the moderating force on a president who resisted moderation.The role Mr. Kushner played could come into sharp relief once the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol opens public hearings this week. The committee interviewed Mr. Kushner, who otherwise has not spoken at length publicly about the events after the 2020 election, and plans to show video excerpts from his testimony along with Ivanka Trump’s.Mr. Kushner’s activities in his final months in the White House are now also coming under the scrutiny of another Democratic-run House committee investigating whether he used his position to secure a $2 billion investment in his new private equity firm from a prominent Saudi Arabian wealth fund. Mr. Kushner has said he abided by all legal and ethical guidelines while in public service.This account of Mr. Kushner’s postelection activities is based on interviews with a wide array of figures close to him and the former president for a forthcoming book by this reporter and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker magazine called “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021,” to be published by Doubleday on Sept. 20. Nearly all of those who spoke requested anonymity to discuss private conversations and meetings.One of the most striking realizations that emerged from the book research was how many people around Mr. Trump did not believe the election had been stolen but kept quiet or checked out, including White House officials and campaign aides. Hope Hicks, long one of his closest advisers, told him it was time to move on. “Well, Hope doesn’t believe in me,” Mr. Trump responded bitterly. “No, I don’t,” she replied. “Nobody’s convinced me otherwise.” She disappeared in the final weeks of the administration.Kellyanne Conway, the former White House counselor and fierce Trump loyalist, reported in her new book that she told Mr. Trump to accept his loss, something she did not say publicly at the time; even this much-delayed acknowledgment of reality drew a rebuke from Mr. Trump, who said she should “go back to her crazy husband.”The Two-to-One FormulaDuring his four years in the White House, Mr. Kushner positioned himself as the measured alter ego to a volatile president, the one who others turned to for help in calming down or reasoning with Mr. Trump when he headed down one erratic path or another. But in fact, Mr. Kushner became strategic in his interventions, having been burned by early efforts that blew up in his face. He focused on personal priorities like criminal justice reform, and he jousted with rivals in a factionalized West Wing while absenting himself at key moments, to the frustration of colleagues.Mr. Kushner developed his own techniques for handling Mr. Trump. One key, he told others, was feeding the president good news, even if it was in short supply. In fact, Mr. Kushner came up with a specific mathematical formula for his peculiar brand of Trump management: two to one. Any phone call, any meeting should include this good-news-to-bad-news ratio. He would give twice as much upbeat information as grim updates. He similarly made a habit of telling Mr. Trump to add five points to any bad poll, rationalizing that traditional surveys missed many Trump voters anyway, part of a common White House practice of telling the president what he wanted to hear regardless of the facts.Jared Kushner would give President Trump twice as much upbeat information as grim updates.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesEven for his son-in-law, though, the president was a demanding boss, not given to showing appreciation. Mr. Kushner understood that Mr. Trump was never going to call him and say, “You’re doing a great job. I just want to thank you for this.” Instead, Mr. Kushner once explained to an associate, his dealings with Trump invariably began with the president saying, “What the hell is going on with this?” albeit with an earthier expletive, often in a phone call at 1 or 2 in the morning.Having watched dozens of senior officials come and go, Mr. Kushner realized the essential element of survival: never forgetting it was Mr. Trump’s show, Mr. Trump’s party, Mr. Trump’s way. “You have to realize you don’t make the waves,” Mr. Kushner regularly advised other officials. “He makes the waves. And then you have to do your best to kind of stay on the surfboard.”Mr. Kushner the surfer had come to recognize when the waves were too rough — as they were after Election Day 2020. He understood that his father-in-law would not concede right away and would ask for recounts and file lawsuits, but he believed that even if there were some irregularities, it was mainly a way of soothing a wounded ego and explaining defeat. Mr. Trump would lash out and make outlandish claims but eventually accept reality and move out of the White House — an assumption many Republicans in Washington made, only to discover how far the president was really willing to go.To Mr. Kushner, his father-in-law’s decision to turn once again to Mr. Giuliani was a red flag. As far as Mr. Kushner was concerned, Mr. Giuliani was an erratic schemer who had already gotten Mr. Trump impeached once because of his political intriguing in Ukraine, and nothing good would come of the former mayor’s involvement in fighting the election results. But instead of fighting Mr. Giuliani for Mr. Trump’s attention, Mr. Kushner opted out entirely, deciding it was time to focus on his own future, one that would no longer involve the White House.He and Ms. Trump began making plans. They quickly ruled out returning to New York. Like Mr. Trump, who had officially become a Florida resident in 2019, they had soured on their former home just as it had soured on them. Miami, on the other hand, seemed exciting and new.While Mr. Trump huddled with Mr. Giuliani and others telling him that he could still win, Mr. Kushner and his wife began thinking about where they would live, what schools they could send their three children to and what business ventures they would pursue. They had to be discreet about it. The last thing they wanted to do was make it look as if they were moving on because that would produce headlines embarrassing to Mr. Trump. Indeed, Ivanka Trump would text her father’s top advisers that same day just after the election and prod them to “Keep the faith and the fight!”But she and Mr. Kushner were soon scouting properties in Florida, and within weeks they were buying a $32 million lot formerly owned by the Spanish singer Julio Iglesias on the private island of Indian Creek near Miami, an exclusive haven for a couple dozen wealthy families that tabloids called the “Billionaire’s Bunker.”In what remaining time he had in the White House, Mr. Kushner wanted to focus on expanding the Abraham Accords, the agreement establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and several Arab states, an achievement that he felt validated his whole time in Washington. Two other countries, Morocco and Sudan, signed on to the accords during the period between the election and Mr. Biden’s inauguration.As his father-in-law refused to authorize transition cooperation with Mr. Biden’s incoming team, Mr. Kushner quietly began working with aides to the president-elect like Jake Sullivan and Jeffrey Zients to prepare for their takeover. And although Mr. Trump might not have been thinking about his legacy yet, Mr. Kushner was.While still in the White House, he began writing a memoir focused on Middle East peacemaking. In the weeks to come, as Mr. Trump would continue to insist that he would remain for a second term, Mr. Kushner set about chronicling the first. He even took an online MasterClass on how to write a book, taught by the prolific best-selling novelist James Patterson. In the course of a two-week stretch after the election, he secretly batted out 40,000 words of a first draft. The final version is set to be published in August.While Mr. Kushner was often called a shadow chief of staff, the man who held the actual title, Mr. Meadows, was encouraging the conspiracy theorists seeking to overturn the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA Coming CollisionThe postelection fraud claims quickly exposed a rift within the Trump family. On the same day Mr. Kushner woke up to declare it was time to move to Miami, his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. was already pushing the president’s team to fight to stay in power. He sent a text to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, outlining a plan to override the verdict of the voters by having Republican legislatures in states won by Mr. Biden invalidate the results and send Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump when Congress counted them on Jan. 6.How much Mr. Kushner knew about that at the time remains unclear, but he did not express serious concern about how far the effort to hang on to power would go. He sent word to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, that Mr. Trump would eventually accept the reality that he lost.“We’ll get through it, bear with us,” Mr. Kushner told Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff and campaign manager for Mr. McConnell who would pass along the message. “We’ve got a couple of challenges that have some merit, we’ll see how they go, but there’s a pretty good chance we come up short.” And once the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, he suggested, that would be the end of it. Mr. Trump just needed time to come to terms with his defeat.While Mr. Kushner was often called the president’s shadow chief of staff, the man who held the actual title, Mr. Meadows, was actively encouraging the conspiracy theorists seeking to overturn the election, acting less as a gatekeeper than a door opener, letting practically anybody who wanted to come into the Oval Office.Among them were lawyers and others arguing that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally stop Mr. Biden from being formally recognized as the winner in his role overseeing the counting of the Electoral College votes in Congress. Mr. Pence concluded he had no such power and it would be unconstitutional for him to do so, but that did not stop Mr. Trump from keeping up the pressure.Finally, seeing the collision that was coming, Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, tried to enlist help from Mr. Kushner, calling him over the holidays to ask him to get his father-in-law to stand down. “Look, can you help us with this?” Mr. Short asked.Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Jared Kushner in Doha, Qatar, in December 2020. Leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Kushner was in the Middle East brokering a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.Qatar News Agency/EPA, via ShutterstockBut Mr. Kushner brushed him off. “Look, when Rudy got involved, I stopped being involved,” he told Mr. Short. The vice president “is a big boy,” and if he disagreed with the president on a legal issue, he should bring in his lawyers. “I’m too busy working on Middle East peace right now, Marc.”Indeed, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Kushner was in the Middle East brokering a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Qatar to end a three-year blockade of the small Gulf state. He was on a plane back to Washington when Mr. Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol.After arriving home in the afternoon, Mr. Kushner was in the bathroom with the shower already running and about to jump in when his phone rang. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican minority leader, was on the line asking Mr. Kushner to persuade the president to do something. “We need help!” Mr. McCarthy insisted. Mr. Kushner turned off the shower and rushed to the White House.Ivanka Trump had spent much of the day trying to keep her father from going too far. She had refused to address the rally on the Ellipse but at the last minute was so concerned by her father’s anger toward Mr. Pence that she decided to accompany him there in hopes of avoiding a worse clash. Over the following hours, as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, she ran up and down the stairs in the West Wing from her office to the Oval Office hoping to persuade her father to issue stronger statements calling off the attackers.By the time Mr. Kushner finally arrived at the White House, his wife had gotten her father to release a video telling supporters to go home. But even then, he repeated his lies about the “fraudulent election” and expressed solidarity with the rioters, telling them, “We love you, you’re very special.” Mr. Kushner quickly concluded there was little more he could do at that point.In the days that followed, Mr. Kushner tried to broker peace between the president and vice president. On Jan. 11, he asked Mr. Short to come to his office. Would the vice president be willing to get together with the president?“He’s always willing,” Mr. Short replied. “But that’s not his responsibility to reconcile this relationship. That invitation should come from the other end of the hall.”“That’s what I’m doing, Marc,” Mr. Kushner said.At Kushner’s arrangement, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence sat down that afternoon with no staff for an hour and a half. Mr. Pence reported back to aides that it was somewhat warm. But it was only a bandage over a gaping wound.Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended a farewell ceremony for the outgoing president on January 20, 2021, and were moving out of Washington the next day.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesOn Jan. 20, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump attended the farewell ceremony for the outgoing president at Joint Base Andrews and accompanied him on Air Force One to Florida. Mr. Trump was heading into exile, prepared to keep waging war on Mr. Biden and the system, insisting he really won.Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump would have nothing to do with that. The next day, two moving trucks showed up at their Kalorama house to load up the furniture and a Peloton bike for the journey south to a luxury multilevel condo they had rented to live in while waiting for their new mansion to be built.They were moving on to their new life. More

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      Kushner’s and Mnuchin’s Quick Pivots to Business With the Gulf

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      Weeks before the Trump administration ended, Jared Kushner and Steven Mnuchin met with future investors on official trips to the Middle East.Shortly before the 2020 election, Trump administration officials unveiled a U.S. government-sponsored program called the Abraham Fund that they said would raise $3 billion for projects around the Middle East.Spearheaded by President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, the fund promised to capitalize on diplomatic agreements he had championed between Israel and some Arab states — pacts known as the Abraham Accords. Steven Mnuchin, then Treasury secretary, helped inaugurate the fund on a trip to the United Arab Emirates and Israel, hailing the accords as “a tremendous foundation for economic growth.”It was little more than talk: With no accounts, employees, income or projects, the fund vanished when Mr. Trump left office. Yet after Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin crisscrossed the Middle East in the final months of the administration on trips that included trying to raise money for the project, each quickly launched a private fund that in some ways picked up where the Abraham Fund had ended.Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin brought along top aides who had helped court Gulf rulers while promoting the Abraham Fund, and soon, both were back in the same royal courts asking for investments, although for purely commercial endeavors.Within three months, Mr. Mnuchin’s new firm had circulated detailed investment plans and received $500 million commitments from the Emiratis, Kuwaitis and Qataris, according to previously unreported documents prepared by the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which itself soon committed $1 billion. Mr. Kushner’s new firm reached an agreement for a $2 billion investment from the Saudis six months after he left government.A New York Times report last month revealing the Saudi investments in the Kushner and Mnuchin funds raised alarms from ethics experts and Democratic lawmakers about the appearance of potential payoffs for official acts during the Trump administration.But an examination of the two men’s travels toward the end of the Trump presidency raises other questions about whether they sought to exploit official relationships with foreign leaders for private business interests.In the weeks after the election, Mr. Kushner made three trips to the Middle East, the last for a Jan. 5 summit in Saudi Arabia with leaders of the Gulf monarchies. Mr. Mnuchin that day began a tour through the region that was planned to include private meetings with the heads of the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait — all future investors. (He cut it short after the Capitol riot, dropping the Kuwait stop and, in Saudi Arabia, meeting only with the finance minister.)Mr. Kushner and his aides have sometimes cast his private firm, Affinity Partners, as something like a continuation of the Abraham Fund. On a four-day trip to Israel in March to meet companies seeking investments, Mr. Kushner’s team portrayed the firm as a chance to invest in the peacemaking potential of the Abraham Accords, people who heard the pitch said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.Both Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin hired several aides who were deeply involved in the accords: A top executive at Affinity, retired Maj. Gen. Miguel Correa, is a former military attaché in the Emirates who later worked in the White House. Top executives at Mr. Mnuchin’s fund, Liberty Strategic Capital, include a former ambassador to Israel and a former Treasury aide who helped arrange meetings with Gulf leaders.The transition from government work for one Liberty Strategic executive was so fast that his jobs appeared to overlap. A roster of 11 top executives and advisers provided to the Saudis by April 2021 included the managing director Michael D’Ambrosio, even though he was still an assistant director at the Secret Service through the end of May. (A Secret Service spokesman said that Mr. D’Ambrosio had disclosed his new employment to the agency and spent his last weeks there on paid leave.)An organizational chart for Liberty Strategic Capital, Mr. Mnuchin’s new investment fund, that the Saudis were reviewing by April.A former Treasury aide known as a close confidant had resigned in 2019 and was waiting for Mr. Mnuchin in the private sector. That confidant, Eli Miller, had been working with Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds at Blackstone, another investment firm, and immediately rejoined the secretary at his new firm’s founding.The path from public service to private investing is well trod by members of both parties. The two Treasury secretaries under President Barack Obama later went to Wall Street.But Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin stand out, ethics experts said, for the speed of their pivots and for the sums they raised from foreign rulers they had recently dealt with on behalf of the United States.The Saudi investment with Mr. Kushner was made despite an advisory panel’s objections about his lack of relevant experience, the absence of other big investors, a high fee and the “public relations risk” of his ties to the former president, according to the minutes of a Saudi Public Investment Fund meeting last June that were obtained by The Times. Ethics experts suggested that the payment could be seen as a bid for influence if his father-in-law returned to office.Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has urged the Justice Department to “take a really hard look” at whether Mr. Kushner violated any criminal laws.Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies government ethics, said each fund raised different issues. For Mr. Kushner, she said, “the reason this smells so bad is that there is all sorts of evidence he did not receive this on the merits.”But for Mr. Mnuchin, who was a successful investor before entering government, the biggest question is whether he was burnishing relationships as Treasury secretary that he knew would be useful to him in the near future, Ms. Clark said.“If he was, that is an abuse of his office,” she said. “I don’t know if it is criminal, but it is certainly corrupt.”Through a spokesman, Mr. Kushner declined to comment.In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Mnuchin denied that he had sought investments while in office and said without providing specifics that some of the details in the Saudi documents were inaccurate. The former secretary was returning to a decades-long career as a professional investor, the spokesman added, and the firm has diverse backers, “including U.S. insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, family offices and other institutional investors.”The Adviser and the SecretaryBefore vying for Persian Gulf investments, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Mnuchin sometimes competed for influence in the White House. During the transition to the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner sought to install his own candidates as Treasury secretary, until Mr. Mnuchin caught wind of it and launched a countercampaign, recalled several people familiar with the efforts.The two men had come from very different business backgrounds. Mr. Kushner had previously run his family’s real estate empire and owned a weekly newspaper, both with mixed results; Mr. Mnuchin had followed his father into a career at Goldman Sachs and made a fortune investing in Hollywood films and a California bank. They kept a cordial distance in the administration. But both took strong and sometimes overlapping interests in the Persian Gulf.President Donald J. Trump with Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Mr. Mnuchin at a diplomatic meeting involving Israel and the United Arab Emirates.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Mnuchin had few business dealings in the region before the Trump administration. Yet he spent far more time there as Treasury secretary — and met far more often with the heads of sovereign wealth funds — than his immediate predecessors: He made at least 18 visits over four years to the Persian Gulf monarchies, compared with a total of eight made by his three predecessors over the previous decade.Former Treasury officials who worked with Mr. Mnuchin said that his time there reflected the priorities of the White House, including Iran sanctions, combating terrorist financing and the Abraham Accords. They noted that fund chiefs could be useful conduits to the rulers of the region.“He was a business guy who really knew how to do personal diplomacy, and they liked him,” said Michael Greenwald, a former Treasury attaché in Kuwait and Qatar who served in the Obama and Trump administrations. “So that was an effective tool.”Many of Mr. Mnuchin’s contacts appear to have been informal. One of his first meetings with Yasir al-Rumayyan, chief of the Saudi fund, was a September 2017 breakfast at the home of Stephen A. Schwarzman, Blackstone’s chief executive and Mr. Mnuchin’s neighbor. Mr. Miller, the secretary’s chief of staff at the time and now a senior managing director at Liberty Strategic, also attended.Mr. Mnuchin met with Mr. al-Rumayyan at least nine more times during the Trump presidency, including in Bahrain, Switzerland and a Treasury conference room, according to department emails that the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and shared with The Times.In addition to multiple meetings with the Qatari emir and other officials, Mr. Mnuchin met at least 10 times with the head of the Qatar Investment Authority.“I will just do one-on-one with Mansoor,” he emailed an aide in 2019, referring to Mansoor bin Ibrahim al-Mahmoud, the fund’s chief executive. “We have communicated direct.”Mr. Mnuchin also met five times with the heads of the two main Emirati funds, once at a Washington dinner hosted by the co-founder of the Carlyle investment group.And he met repeatedly with the rulers of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. That included a private meeting with the Saudi crown prince in Riyadh in 2018 shortly after the kingdom’s agents killed Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident and columnist for The Washington Post. And the documents suggest Mr. Mnuchin built a rapport with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, known by the initials M.B.Z., who recently became the Emirates’ president.Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, president of the United Arab Emirates.Frank Augstein/Associated Press“I am available anytime to see you and His royal highness M.B.Z.,” Mr. Mnuchin wrote to an unidentified recipient in February 2020, planning a visit. “If possible it would be great for us to have a bike ride and dinner as we had discussed.”Suggesting a blurring of the lines between government and business, he wrote to a top Treasury aide in December 2020, apparently about a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund scheduled to take place after he stepped down.“Do we have any more info on PIF late January?” he wrote to the aide, Zachary McEntee, who accompanied him on Gulf trips that involved the Abraham Fund and later joined Mr. Mnuchin’s firm. A spokesman said Mr. Mnuchin was asking about a conference sponsored by the Saudi fund that he attended as a private citizen.Two weeks before he left office, Mr. Mnuchin flew to the region for official meetings with leaders across the Persian Gulf, with the stated purpose of discussing sanctions, terrorist financing and other national security matters. The visit included a private lunch on Jan. 8 at the National Museum of Qatar with the head of the country’s main investment fund.As for Mr. Kushner, he had made his highest goal in the White House the brokering of a Middle East peace plan centered on funding from Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. The core of the plan was to solicit investments from the Gulf that might persuade Palestinians to relinquish some of their demands for a future state. As the culmination of those efforts, he and Mr. Mnuchin organized a “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Bahrain that no Palestinian officials attended.To court Gulf rulers, Mr. Kushner helped persuade Mr. Trump to make the first foreign trip of his administration a 2017 visit to Saudi Arabia. Shortly after a meeting there with Mr. Kushner, the rulers of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates led a blockade of Qatar, accusing it of supporting extremism. Qatar hosts a major American military base, and the secretaries of defense and state pushed for an end to the blockade, but Mr. Trump initially backed it.Mr. Kushner returned repeatedly to the Persian Gulf — making at least 10 trips during the Trump administration, often to visit multiple countries — and formed a close alliance with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. After American intelligence agencies concluded that the Saudi leader had approved the brutal murder of Mr. Khashoggi, Mr. Kushner defended the prince in the White House.Mr. Kushner at a meeting in September 2020 with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.SPA handout/AFP, via Getty ImagesIn December 2020, Mr. Kushner visited Saudi Arabia and Qatar on a trip billed as an effort to end their three-year feud, returning to the kingdom on Jan. 5 for a Gulf summit where they formally reopened relations.“Jared led the diplomatic effort to heal the Gulf rift,” Mr. Kushner’s firm declared in a recent investor presentation.Allies of Mr. Mnuchin, though, said he also played a leading role, in part by working closely with Qatar to police terrorist financing and improve relations with Mr. Trump.In reality, diplomats said, the resolution was driven by the Saudis’ desire to end the rift before the start of a new American administration. But credit for ending the blockade may be valuable in courting investments.Exit StrategiesMr. Mnuchin wasted no time getting back to business. Three weeks after the Trump administration ended, he said in an interview that he had a plan but wasn’t ready to discuss it.By April 2021, his firm was showing potential investors a detailed list of target industries, according to documents obtained from the Saudi fund. The firm had arranged a legal structure that enabled foreign sovereign wealth funds to invest in strategically sensitive American industries, the documents show, and had already hired several former Treasury and State Department officials as top executives.Mr. Kushner got off to a slower start. Even by the time he reached his $2 billion agreement with the Saudi fund last July, he had not hired any executives with relevant investing experience.From left: Maj. Gen. Miguel Correa, Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone and Avi Berkowitz, whom Mr. Kushner hired for his fund.From Left: Bob Collet/Alamy Stock Photo; Steve Mack/Alamy Stock Photo; Mark Lennihan/Associated PressHe brought on his closest aide, Avi Berkowitz, and General Correa, the former military attaché. The general had left the U.S. embassy in the Emirates after clashing with senior diplomats who believed he had held unauthorized private meetings with the country’s leaders about arms sales and other matters. He had nonetheless been elevated to the White House, where he worked closely with Mr. Kushner. Career diplomats said that by the end of the administration, General Correa and Mr. Berkowitz were sometimes the only Americans accompanying Mr. Kushner to meet with Persian Gulf officials.Mr. Kushner also hired Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, a former diplomat in Jerusalem who had worked on the Abraham Accords and been named a director of the Abraham Fund.A December 2021 presentation Mr. Kushner’s firm shared with potential investors, reported last month by The Intercept, suggests his firm’s focus may be blurring. As investment targets, the presentation listed a grab bag of high-growth industries including media, technology, health care, finance, consumer services and sustainable energy.But the presentation also touted Mr. Kushner’s “geopolitical experience” and role in Middle Eastern diplomacy.Mr. Kushner has continued to link his private firm to the Abraham Accords. “If we can get Israelis and Muslims in the region to do business together it will focus people on shared interests and shared values,” he recently told The Wall Street Journal, apparently referring to Muslims in neighboring countries (though about 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Muslim). The fund has so far invested in two Israeli companies.Adam Boehler, a finance official and Mr. Kushner’s college roommate, oversaw the Abraham Fund.Ali Haider/EPA, via ShutterstockThe Abraham Fund was overseen by Adam Boehler, at the time the head of a newly formed development finance agency and a college roommate of Mr. Kushner’s. Mr. Boehler joined Mr. Mnuchin on his Gulf visit in October and accompanied Mr. Kushner to Qatar and Saudi Arabia in December.Officials said the fund would invest in poorer countries that joined the accords, and its first projects were said to include upgrading checkpoints into Israel from the Palestinian territories and building a gas pipeline between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.Neither project went anywhere. Nor did the efforts to enlist Gulf money.In January last year, Mr. Boehler announced the only publicly disclosed investment in the Abraham Fund: a “commitment of up to $50 million” from Uzbekistan, a relatively low-income country. Uzbek officials said at the time that they sought to reduce poverty and foster regional cooperation. Long criticized for human rights abuses, Uzbekistan had begun a lobbying push in Washington to improve its image after a leadership change; its new president also gave Mr. Trump a $2,950 silver replica of a historic building and his wife a $4,200 bed cover.But no money for the short-lived Abraham Fund was ever delivered.Ben Hubbard More

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      Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election

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      The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote to legislators in a crucial swing state after the Trump campaign’s loss in 2020.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, twice lobbied the speaker of the Arizona House and another lawmaker to effectively reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s popular-vote victory and deliver the crucial swing state to Donald J. Trump.Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency, made the entreaties in emails to Russell Bowers, the Republican speaker, and Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative. Ms. Bolick’s husband, Clint, once worked with Justice Thomas and now sits on the Arizona Supreme Court.The emails came as Mr. Trump and his allies were engaged in a legal effort to overturn his defeats in several battleground states. While the Arizona emails did not mention either presidential candidate by name, they echoed the former president’s false claims of voter fraud and his legal team’s dubious contention that the power to choose electors therefore rested not with the voters but with state legislatures.“Do your constitutional duty,” Ms. Thomas wrote the lawmakers on Nov. 9. On Dec. 13, with Mr. Trump still refusing to concede on the eve of the Electoral College vote, she contacted the lawmakers again.“The nation’s eyes are on you now,” she warned, adding, “Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”After she sent her first round of emails, but before the second round, Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, more directly pressured Mr. Bowers. They called him and urged him to have the state legislature step in and choose Arizona’s electors.Mr. Bowers could not be reached for comment on Friday. In a statement to The Arizona Republic, a spokesman said that Mr. Bowers never saw Ms. Thomas’s email. He ended up rebuffing all the requests to intervene, even in the face of protests outside his house.Ms. Bolick, who did not return requests for comment and is now running to become Arizona’s next secretary of state on a platform to “restore election integrity,” proved more of an ally. She thanked Ms. Thomas for reaching out, writing that she hoped “you and Clarence are doing great!” Among other things, she would go on to urge Congress to throw out Arizona’s presidential election results and award the state’s Electoral College votes to Mr. Trump.The emails, reported earlier by The Washington Post and obtained by The New York Times, were part of a letter-writing campaign hosted on FreeRoots, a political advocacy platform. On Friday, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer and close friend of the Thomases, said on Twitter that Ms. Thomas “did not write the letter and had no input in the content,” but rather merely “signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens.”“How disturbing, what a threat!” he wrote, dismissing the revelations as a “lame story.” He added: “A private citizen joining a letter writing campaign, hosted by a platform that served both conservative and liberal causes. Welcome to America.”In fact, the emails are a reflection of the far broader and more integral role that Justice Thomas’s wife played in efforts to delegitimize the election and install Mr. Trump for a second term — efforts that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, with a protest called the “March to Save America” that turned into a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.As a string of revelations by The Times and other outlets in recent months has demonstrated, Ms. Thomas actively supported and participated at the highest levels in schemes to overturn the election. Those efforts have, in turn, cast a spotlight on her husband, who from his lifetime perch on the Supreme Court has issued opinions favoring Mr. Trump’s efforts to both reverse his loss and stymie a congressional investigation into the events of Jan. 6.This February, The New York Times Magazine reported on Ms. Thomas’s role on the board of C.N.P. Action, a conservative group that had instructed members to adopt letter-writing tactics — of the kind she personally used in Arizona — to pressure Republican lawmakers in swing states to circumvent voters by appointing alternate electors.C.N.P. Action had also circulated a newsletter in December 2020 that included a report targeting five swing states, including Arizona, where Mr. Trump and his allies were pressing litigation. It warned that time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void.” The report was co-written by one of Mr. Trump’s leading election lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, a friend of Ms. Thomas.And in the lead-up to the rally on Jan. 6, Ms. Thomas played a mediating role, uniting feuding factions of planners so that there “wouldn’t be any division,” one of the organizers, Dustin Stockton, later told The Times.Ms. Thomas declined to speak to The Times for that article, but a few weeks later, in an interview with a friendly conservative outlet, she denied playing any role in the organization of the rally, even as she acknowledged attending it. (She said she left before Mr. Trump addressed the crowd.)But she has adamantly opposed a fuller inquiry into the insurrection. Last December, she co-signed a letter calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the committee investigating the Capitol riot, saying it brought “disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong.”And in late March, The Post and CBS reported that she had sent a series of text messages to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, imploring him to take steps to reverse the election. Ms. Thomas urged him to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a set of conspiratorial claims that Trump supporters believed would overturn the vote. In the text messages, she also indicated that she had been in contact with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about a post-election legal strategy.Democrats expressed outrage. In a letter after the text messages were reported, two dozen Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, wrote: “Given the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements.”Still, it remains an open question whether the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack will seek an interview with Ms. Thomas. In March, people familiar with the committee’s work signaled a desire to ask Ms. Thomas to voluntarily sit for an interview. But the committee has yet to do so, and its chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, told reporters that Ms. Thomas had not come up recently in the panel’s discussions.Justice Thomas has remained defiant amid questions about his own impartiality, resisting calls that he recuse himself from matters that overlap with his wife’s activism. Earlier this year, when the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to Jan. 6, Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter. In February last year, he sharply dissented when the court declined to hear a case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to disqualify certain mail-in ballots.The latest revelations about his wife follow a speech last week in which he lambasted protests in front of the houses of justices after a draft opinion was leaked that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he told a conference of fellow conservatives. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”And he flashed at his own partisanship in claiming that the left’s protests lacked the decorum of the right — while failing to mention last year’s attack on the Capitol, or protests like those in front of Mr. Bowers’s house.“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” he said. “We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not to repay tit for tat.”Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife have frequently appeared at political events despite longstanding customs of the Supreme Court.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe Thomases have long defied norms of the high court, where justices often avoid political events and entanglements and their spouses often keep low profiles. No spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has ever been as overt a political activist as Ms. Thomas. C.N.P. Action, where she sits on the board, is a branch of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative organization that includes leaders from the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group. Ms. Thomas also founded an organization called Groundswell that holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the Supreme Court.Justice Thomas, for his part, has frequently appeared at political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.“It’s very exciting,” Ms. Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, “the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.”Luke Broadwater More

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      House Votes to Find Scavino and Navarro in Contempt in Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The vote was mostly along party lines to recommend that the Justice Department charge Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino Jr. with criminal contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas.The House of Representatives voted to recommend that the Justice Department charge Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino Jr. with criminal contempt of Congress for defying subpoenas issued by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday voted to recommend criminal contempt of Congress charges against Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino Jr., two close allies of former President Donald J. Trump, after the pair defied subpoenas from the special committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The mostly party-line vote of 220 to 203 referred contempt charges to the Justice Department, calling for prosecutions of Mr. Navarro, a former top White House adviser, and Mr. Scavino Jr., a former deputy chief of staff. It came as congressional investigators have grown increasingly frustrated with some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters who have refused to meet with the panel or turn over a single page of evidence to the committee as it digs into the worst assault on the Capitol since the War of 1812.“We have two people who are flagrantly, brazenly defying the authority of the House of Representatives of the United States,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee. He said the men had “nothing but excuses for their noncompliance — excuses you would not accept from a teenage child.”Only two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both members of the investigative committee, voted for the charges. The rest of their party refused to support the move.Dozens of Republicans lined up on the floor of the House on Wednesday to demand a change of topic, trying to force a vote on immigration legislation in line with their efforts to use problems at the border as a political weapon against Democrats ahead of midterm congressional elections.After that failed, Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, attacked the investigation in a floor speech as a “political show trial” and accused the panel of bullying the men and trampling on their civil rights.“Let me be clear: The riot on Jan. 6 was wrong. But make no mistake: the Democrats’ response is also wrong,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “Democrats are using the power of the federal government to jail their political opponents.”Mr. Raskin shot back that Republicans were using “circus antics” to try to slow down the vote with a “conga line” of lawmakers queued up on the floor while they skipped out on their committee assignments.Dan Scavino Jr., a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Trump, addressed the Republican National Convention in 2020.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe accused the Republicans of “slavishly” following Mr. Trump like “sycophants,” instead of joining efforts to investigate the deadly attack on the Capitol that left more than 150 police officers injured.A contempt of Congress charge carries a penalty of up to a year in jail and a maximum fine of $100,000. The House vote steered the matter to the Justice Department, which now must decide whether to charge the two men.Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, said the stakes of potential jail time were too high, and noted the vote would mean that four Trump White House aides would face criminal referrals from the committee.“Mr. Scavino has two boys. He’s a good dad,” Mr. Banks said.Ms. Cheney called the vote “sad” and “tragic,” but said the committee was left with no other choice after some in her own party had abandoned the truth for fealty to Mr. Trump.“So many in my own party are refusing to address the constitutional crisis and the challenge we face,” she said.The Jan. 6 committee laid out its arguments against Mr. Navarro and Mr. Scavino in a 34-page report that detailed how closely they were involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power even after he lost decisively at the polls.Mr. Navarro and Mr. Scavino are among a handful of Mr. Trump’s closest allies who have refused to sit for interviews or turn over documents, even as more than 800 witnesses — including other top White House officials — have complied with the committee’s requests.In the past week, the panel has interviewed both Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, and her husband Jared Kushner, both of whom were high-ranking White House advisers to Mr. Trump. Each sat for lengthy interviews with the committee. Neither asserted executive privilege to avoid answering the committee’s questions.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, contrasted their approach to the hard-line stance adopted by Mr. Scavino and Mr. Navarro.“The president’s own daughter complied with the wishes of the committee,” Mr. Thompson said. “If his daughter complied with the wishes of the committee, everyone else should.”The committee said Mr. Navarro had worked with Stephen K. Bannon, another Trump ally, to carry out a plan to delay Congress’s certification of the election on Jan. 6, 2021, and ultimately to try to change the election’s outcome. Mr. Navarro has previously described this plan as the “Green Bay Sweep” and has said more than 100 members of Congress had signed on to it.Mr. Navarro also wrote a report alleging a stolen election, which was widely shared with others working to overturn the election. Mr. Navarro claimed that Mr. Trump “himself had distributed Volume 1 of the report to every member of the House and Senate” before Jan. 6.The Jan. 6 committee laid out its arguments against Mr. Navarro and Mr. Scavino in a 34-page report.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe committee issued a subpoena in February to Mr. Navarro, but he said he would not comply, citing Mr. Trump’s invocation of executive privilege over White House materials from his time in office.In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Navarro insisted that the committee should have negotiated the matter with Mr. Trump, saying that “it is not my privilege to waive.”“Instead, the committee has colluded with the Biden White House in a futile effort to strip Donald Trump of executive privilege so it can coerce me into cooperating with their witch hunt,” he said. “This dog of a witch hunt won’t hunt at the Supreme Court, and I look forward to arguing the case there.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Contempt charges. More

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      Call Logs Underscore Trump’s Efforts to Sway Lawmakers on Jan. 6

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      New details from White House documents provided to the House panel investigating the Capitol assault show a 7-hour gap in records of calls made by the former president on the day of the riot.WASHINGTON — As part of his frenzied attempt to cling to power, President Donald J. Trump reached out repeatedly to members of Congress on Jan. 6 both before and during the siege of the Capitol, according to White House call logs and evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the attack.The logs, reported earlier by The Washington Post and CBS and authenticated by The New York Times, indicated that Mr. Trump had called Republican members of Congress, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, as he sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from several states.But the logs also have a large gap with no record of calls by Mr. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them. The call logs were among documents turned over by the National Archives to the House committee examining the Jan. 6 attack last year on the Capitol.The New York Times reported last month that the committee had discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot. The Washington Post and CBS reported Tuesday that a gap in the phone logs amounted to seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being assaulted.Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any of the call logs were tampered with or deleted. It is well known that Mr. Trump routinely used his personal cellphone, and those of his aides, to talk with other aides, congressional allies and outside confidants, bypassing the normal channels of presidential communication and possibly explaining why the calls were not logged.The logs appear to have captured calls that were routed through the White House switchboard. Three former officials who worked under Mr. Trump said that he mostly used the switchboard operator for outgoing calls when he was in the residence. He would occasionally use it from the Oval Office, the former officials said, but more often he would make calls through the assistants sitting outside the office, as well as from his cellphone or an aide’s cellphone. The assistants were supposed to keep records of the calls, but officials said the record-keeping was not thorough.People trying to reach Mr. Trump sometimes called the cellphone of Dan Scavino Jr., the former deputy chief of staff and omnipresent aide, one of the former officials said. (The House committee investigating the attack recommended Monday evening that Mr. Scavino be charged with criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena from the panel.)But the call logs nevertheless show how personally involved Mr. Trump was in his last-ditch attempt to stay in office.One of the calls made by Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, 2021 — at 9:16 a.m. — was to Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s top Republican, who refused to go along with Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign. Mr. Trump checked with the White House switchboard operator at 10:40 a.m. to make sure a message had been left for Mr. McConnell.Mr. McConnell declined to return the president’s calls, he told reporters on Tuesday.“The last time I spoke to the president was the day after the Electoral College declared President Biden the winner,” Mr. McConnell said. “I publicly congratulated President Biden on his victory and received a phone call after that from President Trump and that’s the last time we’ve spoke.”The logs also show Mr. Trump reached out on the morning of Jan. 6 to Mr. Jordan, who had been among those members of Congress organizing objections to Mr. Biden’s election on the House floor.The logs show Mr. Trump and Mr. Jordan spoke from 9:24 a.m. to 9:34 a.m. Mr. Jordan has acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, though he has said he cannot remember how many times they spoke that day or when the calls occurred.Mr. Trump called Mr. Hawley at 9:39 a.m., and Mr. Hawley returned his phone call. A spokesman for Mr. Hawley said Tuesday that the two men did not connect and did not speak until March. Mr. Hawley had been the first senator to announce he would object to President Biden’s victory, and continued his objections even after rioters stormed the building and other senators backed off the plan.The logs also show that Mr. Trump spoke from 11:04 a.m. to 11:06 a.m. with former Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, who had recently lost his re-election campaign to Senator Jon Ossoff.A spokesman for Senator Bill Hagerty, Republican of Tennessee, confirmed he had called Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 but said they did not connect. Mr. Hagerty declined to comment.Despite the lack of call records from the White House, the committee has learned that Mr. Trump spoke on the phone with other Republican lawmakers on the morning of Jan. 6.For instance, Mr. Trump mistakenly called the phone of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, thinking it was the number of Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama. Mr. Lee then passed the phone to Mr. Tuberville, who said he had spoken to Mr. Trump for less than 10 minutes as rioters were breaking into the building.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4Trump’s tweet. More

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      Trump Officials Illegally Campaigned While in Office, Watchdog Finds

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      Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and his chief of staff are among those accused of violating a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing their power.WASHINGTON — Thirteen of President Donald J. Trump’s most senior aides — including his son-in-law and his chief of staff — campaigned illegally for Mr. Trump’s re-election in violation of a law designed to prevent federal employees from abusing the power of their offices on behalf of candidates, a government watchdog agency said Tuesday.Henry Kerner, who heads the Office of Special Counsel, made the assertion in a withering report that followed a nearly yearlong investigation into “myriad” violations of the law, known as the Hatch Act.“Senior Trump administration officials chose to use their official authority not for the legitimate functions of the government, but to promote the re-election of President Trump in violation of the law,” the report concluded.Investigators in Mr. Kerner’s office said Trump administration officials purposely violated the law prohibiting political activity during the final few weeks of the administration, when they knew that the Office of Special Counsel would not have time to investigate and issue findings before Election Day.“The administration’s willful disregard for the law was especially pernicious considering the timing of when many of these violations took place,” the report said.Violations of the Hatch Act are not uncommon for any presidential administration. In October, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, apologized after an outside group accused her of violating the law by commenting in the White House press room on the pending governor’s race in Virginia.But the Kerner report describes something more rare: a concerted, willful effort to violate the law by the most senior officials in the White House. The Washington Post disclosed the report’s release earlier on Tuesday.The people accused of breaking the law are a who’s who of Trump officials: Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette; Kellyanne Conway, counselor; Alyssa Farah, White House communications director; David Friedman, ambassador to Israel; Jared Kushner, senior adviser; Kayleigh McEnany, press secretary; Mark Meadows, chief of staff; Stephen Miller, senior adviser; Brian Morgenstern, deputy press secretary; Robert C. O’Brien, national security adviser; Marc Short, chief of staff to the vice president; Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.The report said that Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Wolf violated the law through their actions during the Republican National Convention, which took place at the White House because of the pandemic.It said Mr. Pompeo campaigned illegally “by changing U.S. Department of State (State Department) policy to allow himself to speak at the convention and then, when engaging in political activity by delivering that speech, using his official authority by repeatedly referencing the work of the State Department.”Mr. Wolf “violated the Hatch Act by presiding over a naturalization ceremony that was orchestrated for the purpose of creating content for the convention,” the report said.The rest of the officials broke the law by overtly campaigning “during official interviews or media appearances.”“The administration’s attitude toward Hatch Act compliance was succinctly captured by then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who said during an interview that ‘nobody outside of the Beltway really cares’ about Trump administration officials violating the Hatch Act,” the report said in its executive summary.Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington, which filed complaints about the actions of Trump administration officials, on Tuesday praised the report from the Office of Special Counsel.“This report confirms that there was nothing less than a systematic co-opting of the powers of the federal government to keep Donald Trump in office,” Mr. Bookbinder said in a statement. “Senior Trump administration officials showed an open contempt for the law meant to protect the American people from the use of taxpayer resources and government power for partisan politics.”Mr. Bookbinder called on Congress to toughen the laws prohibiting political activity by federal employees.The Office of Special Counsel report notes that none of the people named will face any punishment for their violations because it is up to the incumbent president to discipline his top employees.“President Trump not only failed to do so, but he publicly defended an employee OSC found to have repeatedly violated the Hatch Act,” the report said. “This failure to impose discipline created the conditions for what appeared to be a taxpayer-funded campaign apparatus within the upper echelons of the executive branch.”Emails to several representatives of Mr. Trump were not answered. More

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      Stephanie Grisham’s Book Details Trump’s ‘Terrifying’ Temper

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      The former press secretary is reflective in her tell-all: “I should have spoken up more.”WASHINGTON — Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary perhaps best known for never holding a televised briefing with reporters, plans to release a tell-all book next week that accuses President Donald J. Trump of abusing his staff, placating dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia, and making sexual comments about a young White House aide.In her book, titled “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” Ms. Grisham recalls her time working for a president she said constantly berated her and made outlandish requests, including a demand that she appear before the press corps and re-enact a certain call with the Ukrainian president that led to Mr. Trump’s (first) impeachment, an assignment she managed to avoid.“I knew that sooner or later the president would want me to tell the public something that was not true or that would make me sound like a lunatic,” Ms. Grisham writes, offering a reason for why she never held a briefing.After serving as press secretary, Ms. Grisham worked in Melania Trump’s office. She resigned on Jan. 6 as a horde of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. Her book was kept a secret from her closest allies in the White House, though by the time she departed Washington that number had dwindled. (She writes that, months before the election, she had moved to Kansas.) Her publisher, HarperCollins, calls the book “The most frank and intimate portrait of the Trump White House yet.”The former president and his advisers have already moved to discredit Ms. Grisham’s account, and have used increasingly personal terms to disparage her.“Stephanie didn’t have what it takes and that was obvious from the beginning,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Tuesday. He said she had become “very angry and bitter” after a breakup. “She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things.”In her book, Ms. Grisham offered a pre-emptive response to the criticism: “This is not, by the way, a book where you need to like me.”Here are some highlights from the manuscript obtained by The New York Times:A (fleetingly) tough stance toward Putin is just for showMs. Grisham lands on a well-documented theme when she explores Mr. Trump’s love of dictators. But she says Mr. Trump went out of his way to please one in particular: Mr. Putin, whose cold reception of Mr. Trump, she writes, seemed to make the president want to impress him even more.“With all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election and for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, ‘Okay, I’m going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes. But it’s for the cameras, and after they leave we’ll talk. You understand,’” Ms. Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019.During that meeting, Ms. Grisham listened to Fiona Hill, Mr. Trump’s top adviser on Russia who later became an impeachment witness, who observed what she said were Mr. Putin’s subtle efforts to throw Mr. Trump off guard.“As the meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I had noticed Putin’s translator, who was a very attractive brunette woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure,” Ms. Grisham writes. “She proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president.”Sexist language toward womenWhile he was in the White House, Mr. Trump’s targets included a young press aide whom Ms. Grisham says the president repeatedly invited up to his Air Force One cabin, including once to “look at her,” using an expletive to describe her rear end. Mr. Trump, she writes, instructed her to promote the woman and “keep her happy.” Instead, Ms. Grisham tried to keep her away from the president.During an Oval Office rant about E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Mr. Trump of raping her in the 1990s, Mr. Trump first insults Ms. Carroll’s looks. Then he gazes into Ms. Grisham eyes and says something that unnerves her.“‘You just deny it,’” he told Ms. Grisham. ‘That’s what you do in every situation. Right, Stephanie? You just deny it,’ he repeated, emphasizing the words.”Melania Trump’s quiet rebellionMs. Grisham also confirms what she and Melania Trump had long denied: That the first lady was angry after several reports of her husband’s infidelities — and hush money payments — surfaced in the news media.To the contrary: “After the Stormy Daniels story broke and all the allegations that followed from other women,” Ms. Grisham writes, “I felt that Mrs. Trump was basically unleashed.”The first lady, she says, found ways to omit her husband from photos and tweets, and made it a point to show up on the arm of a handsome military aide. Mrs. Trump, who is closed off to even her closest aides, begins to open up to Ms. Grisham, telling her that she doesn’t believe her husband’s denials or those from his former fixer, Michael Cohen — “Oh, please, are you kidding me?” she asks at one point. “I don’t believe any of that,” the first lady adds, using an expletive. (This book, it should be said, contains a lot of expletives.)Ms. Grisham also attempts to illuminate why Mrs. Trump wore a jacket inscribed with the phrase “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” to visit a Texas camp for child migrants, but focuses more on the president’s reaction: “What the hell were you thinking?” he asked Ms. Grisham and his wife in the Oval Office, before instructing an aide to tweet out a cover story: “You just tell them you were talking to the” news media, he told the group.The first lady grew more disengaged over time, Ms. Grisham writes, to the point where she was asleep on election night. She was overseeing a photo shoot of a rug on Jan. 6 and declined to comment publicly on what has happening at the Capitol. (For Ms. Grisham, this was the last straw. She resigned later that day.)In the end, the first lady sided with her husband, doubting the election results — “Something bad happened,” she told Ms. Grisham — and declined to invite Jill Biden, the incoming first lady, to the White House for tea.“She would always say, ‘Let me think about it’ or ‘Let’s see what the West Wing will do,’” Ms. Grisham writes, “Which meant no. And when exactly did she decide to start following the West Wing’s lead?”Demands to evict the press from the White HouseMs. Grisham says that a trip to North Korea inspired Mr. Trump to ask her to research ways the press could be permanently evicted from the James S. Brady Briefing Room.“I researched different places we could put them other than the press briefing room. Each time the president asked me about my progress on the matter, I let him know I was still working on options,” Ms. Grisham writes.As she tries to please Mr. Trump, whose press coverage was relentlessly negative, she describes his anger toward her and others as “terrifying”: “When I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras,” she writes, “I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.”She says one frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire was Pat Cipollone, who served as White House counsel: “He didn’t like them telling him that things he wanted to do were unethical or illegal. So he’d scream at them. But then he’d usually listen. And then yell at them again later.”(There were other indignities: Ms. Grisham writes that Mr. Trump called her while aboard Air Force One to defend the size of his penis after Ms. Daniels insulted it in an interview. “Uh, yes sir,” Ms. Grisham replied.)At one point, she writes, Mr. Trump’s handlers designated an unnamed White House official known as the “Music Man” to play him his favorite show tunes, including “Memory” from “Cats,” to pull him from the brink of rage. (The aide, it is revealed later, is Ms. Grisham’s ex-boyfriend. She does not identify him, but it is Max Miller, a former White House official now running for Congress with Mr. Trump’s support.)She was a close-up observer of Mr. Trump’s obsession with control, and details a scene in which the president undergoes a colonoscopy without anesthesia — though she doesn’t name the procedure — because, she reasons, even temporarily assigning power to the vice president would have been “showing weakness.”In the end, Ms. Grisham stood by as three chiefs of staff, two press secretaries, and countless other aides resigned. She notes that Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, seemed to grow more powerful.Ms. Trump, she said, made it a point to insert herself into meetings where she did not belong, including when she demanded that her father address the nation from the Oval Office during the early days of the pandemic. But Ms. Grisham reserves special ire for Mr. Kushner, whom she calls “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.” (At one point, Mr. Trump warns her not to get on Mr. Kushner’s bad side.)“The truth was that pretty much everyone eventually wore out their welcome with the president,” Ms. Grisham writes. “We were bottles of milk with expiration dates.”The former press secretary adds, “I should have spoken up more.” More