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    Trump, Jay Powell and a Potential Fight over the Fed’s Future

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    As Trump allies including Elon Musk endorse ending the Federal Reserve’s independence, the central bank’s chair is reportedly ready to go to court to fight back.Jay Powell appears ready to defend Fed independence, and his job.Kent Nishimura/Getty ImagesA battle over the Fed’s future Donald Trump’s threat to exert more say over the Fed or even fire Jay Powell, the chair of the central bank, has alarmed some on Wall Street. But the president-elect’s effort took on added weight in recent days, after Elon Musk endorsed a push to erode the Fed’s independence.The fight shows how the future of the Fed could remain high on the agenda, and how far Musk’s influence — and the role of X as place for announcing policy positions — could extend across government.The Fed has its foes. Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill in June to abolish the central bank, accusing it of being an “economic manipulator that has directly contributed to the financial instability many Americans face today.”Lee said on X that he wants to see the Fed under the president’s control — a view that Musk backed.Powell could turn to the courts to challenge any White House attempt to exert more control, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos. Trump appointed Powell in 2017 but flirted with removing him shortly afterward. Powell held onto his job, but was ready for a fight if Trump made a move, Timiraos writes:Powell told then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that he would fight his removal if sought by the president, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump was upset the Fed was raising interest rates against his wishes.For Powell, the unsavory prospect of a legal showdown — one he might have to pay for out of his own pocket — was imperative to preserve the ability of future Fed chairs to serve without the threat of being removed over a policy dispute.Powell has made it clear that the president doesn’t have the authority to remove a Fed chair. Last week, he said he wouldn’t step down if Trump asked him to do so after the central bank lowered borrowing costs by a quarter point. Removing him, he added, was “not permitted under the law.”A 1977 law gave Congress more oversight of the Fed, but enshrined the institution’s independence on policy.The central bank’s ability to set monetary policy without political influence is a core tenet for markets and the economy. The Fed also has an outsized influence through its freedom to buy and sell securities, like Treasury notes and bonds, as it looks to bring more liquidity to trading.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eyeing Super Tuesday, Trump Is Eager to Dispatch Rivals Sooner Than Later

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      The former president is looking to lock up the nomination by Super Tuesday on March 5, but Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis insist they plan to compete deep into March.With five days left until the New Hampshire primary, Donald J. Trump and his allies are stepping up their efforts to muscle Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis out of the Republican presidential race by casting Mr. Trump’s nomination as inevitable.The strategy reflects an urgent desire to end the race quickly and avoid an extended and expensive battle for delegates heading into Super Tuesday on March 5.Mr. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, as well as two costly civil trials, where he has used voluntary appearances at New York courthouses this month as public relations and fund-raising vehicles. But February offers him few such opportunities, meaning he would need to rely on his political strength alone to generate momentum for Super Tuesday, when voters in 16 states and territories will cast ballots for the nomination.In New Hampshire, Mr. Trump began attacking Ms. Haley with paid advertising weeks ago, and intensified the onslaught more recently with sharper personal criticisms and campaign statements portraying her as a China-loving globalist. On Tuesday, he went after Ms. Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, on his social media website, using her birth name — Nimarata, which he misspelled as “Nimrada” — as a dog whistle, much like his exaggerated enunciation of former President Barack Obama’s middle name, “Hussein.”And he has grown more aggressive on the campaign trail. In Portsmouth, N.H., on Wednesday night, he said of Ms. Haley, “I don’t know that she’s a Democrat, but she’s very close. She’s far too close for you.”Mr. Trump is facing 91 criminal charges in four jurisdictions, as well as two costly civil trials, which he has turned into public relations and fund-raising vehicles.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut his team is looking ahead to the South Carolina primary on Feb. 24 as a “Waterloo” for his primary rivals, according to one Trump adviser, likening the state to the battlefield where Napoleon met his final defeat. Their aim is to humiliate her in her home state.“South Carolina is where Nikki Haley’s dreams go to die,” another senior Trump adviser, Chris LaCivita, said in a brief interview.Mr. Trump has been privately courting Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, hoping to win his endorsement before the primary. Trump allies who have relationships with Mr. Scott, including Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have been assisting the effort.Republicans across the country, including senators who were previously skeptical of Mr. Trump, are assisting his strategy by consolidating their support, rushing to declare the race over, rolling out endorsements and demanding that his rivals quit immediately to “unify” the party against President Biden.Their efforts are being aided by the conservative news media, which has turned sharply against Mr. DeSantis after giving his candidacy favorable coverage early on.The inevitability strategy also appears to be bearing fruit within the business community. On Wednesday morning, one of Wall Street’s most powerful chief executives, Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase — who as recently as November urged donors to “help Nikki Haley” — praised aspects of Mr. Trump’s record and scolded Democrats for vilifying the former president’s Make America Great Again movement.Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis both insist their campaigns are alive and well, with plans to compete deep into March. But the reality is that a comeback victory would represent one of the greatest upsets in modern American political history. That would be especially true if Mr. Trump wins New Hampshire, since no Republican who has won two of the first three traditional early states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — has ever lost the party’s nomination.Ms. Haley finished a disappointing third in Monday’s Iowa caucuses but is facing what polls suggest is more favorable terrain in New Hampshire, where unaffiliated voters can cast ballots in the primary and where her allies argue even a close second could provide a rationale to stay in the race. Even there, however, she needs a large turnout of unaffiliated voters to overcome Mr. Trump’s overwhelming backing from Republicans.“She basically has to turn the Republican primary into the unaffiliated primary,” Mr. LaCivita, the senior Trump adviser, said of the state.Nikki Haley campaigned on Wednesday night in Rochester, N.H. She is expected to fare better in New Hampshire than she did in Iowa.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMs. Haley’s path to a competitive race seems more visible than Mr. DeSantis’s, but only barely: She must win the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday or come in a very close second, and ride a wave of media momentum for a month before tackling Mr. Trump head-on in the state she used to govern, South Carolina, where he has a huge lead and endorsements from powerful politicians there, including the governor.In New Hampshire, the Trump campaign is trying to engage what one adviser called a “pincer” — squeezing Ms. Haley from both ends of the ideological spectrum. An advertising campaign began lacing into her on immigration (hitting her from the right) before criticizing her for wanting to raise the retirement age for Social Security (hitting her from the left).Ms. Haley is trying to portray Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden as two of the same: Disliked elderly politicians who are exacerbating chaos and division in America. It’s a message tailored for independent voters who have tired of Mr. Trump, but the message will most likely have far less purchase among Republican voters.While Ms. Haley is courting independent voters in New Hampshire, it’s harder to see how a Republican candidate can win a Republican nomination without much stronger support from Republicans.On Wednesday, Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, rejected the notion that Ms. Haley’s strategy was to rely on independent and crossover Democratic voters to make up for softer support among Republicans.Ms. Ankney said the strategy has always been to do well in New Hampshire, roll out with momentum into South Carolina and then go head-to-head against Mr. Trump on Super Tuesday, when independents have historically made a difference in open or semi-open primaries, including in 2016 for Mr. Trump.Polls showing Mr. Trump far ahead in Texas and other Super Tuesday states should not be taken seriously, Ms. Ankney insisted, because “people have not started to pay attention” in those states and “there has been zero advertising.” The Haley campaign is optimistic that she can perform especially strongly in March states that have larger populations of college-educated voters, including Virginia.Mr. Trump’s team is far less worried about Mr. DeSantis, who finished in second place in Iowa just two points ahead of Ms. Haley, but who is far behind in New Hampshire. The Trump team suspects Mr. DeSantis will struggle to keep his candidacy financially afloat long enough to compete seriously on Super Tuesday.Ron DeSantis at a campaign event in Hampton, N.H., on Wednesday. He is largely leaving the state to focus on South Carolina.John Tully for The New York TimesThe DeSantis path beyond February is murky — a fact reflected by the pro-DeSantis super PAC’s decision on Wednesday to lay off staff in some of its March 5 states. But the DeSantis team insists the candidate has no plans to drop out before South Carolina.“There is no mathematical pathway for Nikki Haley to win the nomination,” said David Polyansky, the DeSantis deputy campaign manager. “And even if she makes it to South Carolina, no amount of Wall Street money will bail her out from losing her home state, and then it will be a two-person race between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.”A majority of Mr. DeSantis’s staff is moving to South Carolina, and he will mostly stop campaigning in New Hampshire after his events on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with his plans, who insisted on anonymity.The fact that South Carolina was his first stop after Iowa was described as an intentional signal about his electoral calculations.On a staff call after Iowa, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, James Uthmeier, described Mr. DeSantis’s view: The caucuses showed that Mr. Trump doesn’t have the standing he once did after getting just over 50 percent, and that Republicans want an alternative, according to people familiar with what was said.Mr. DeSantis’s advisers remain furious at the Haley camp’s decision to spend more than $20 million attacking Mr. DeSantis on television ads before Iowa, which a top aide publicly described as “greed” ahead of the caucuses and insisted was meant to help Mr. Trump. The DeSantis team has openly accused Ms. Haley of campaigning to become Mr. Trump’s running mate and not to win, a claim that she has denied.In a late November phone call, days before the political network founded by the billionaire Koch brothers endorsed Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis had warned a Koch network operative that any money they spent aiding Ms. Haley and attacking Mr. DeSantis would only help Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with the conversation. That’s because many DeSantis voters still liked the former president and would sooner peel off and support him than back Ms. Haley, who is viewed as more moderate. Mr. DeSantis told the operative that the money should be spent going after Mr. Trump, the people familiar with the call said.The Koch network went ahead with its endorsement of Ms. Haley and put its expensive ground operation into her service, sweeping out across Iowa and New Hampshire in a last-minute sprint of door knocking.Another element of Mr. Trump’s inevitability messaging is his growing discussion of possible personnel for a second term. Mr. Trump, who out of superstition has long avoided discussing who might serve in his administration, has begun indulging discussions of who might serve alongside him.At his Iowa victory party on Monday night, Mr. Trump brought onstage Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, who had ended his own presidential campaign and endorsed the front-runner. Mr. Trump told the audience that he had Mr. Burgum pegged for an important role in his administration.A Trump supporter near his rally in Portsmouth, N.H., on Wednesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnother former rival, Vivek Ramaswamy, immediately dropped out after the caucuses, endorsed Mr. Trump and urged all other candidates to do the same. As he appeared onstage with Mr. Trump at a rally in Atkinson, N.H., on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump grinned broadly as the crowd chanted, “V.P., V.P., V.P.”“He’ll be working with us for a long time,” said Mr. Trump. It was a whiplash reversal that’s typical of Mr. Trump. Two days earlier, he had attacked Mr. Ramaswamy as “not MAGA.”Such rapid consolidation of the party behind Mr. Trump has visibly frustrated Mr. DeSantis and his allies, given that less than a year ago there was a moment when it seemed as if Republicans might be ready to move on and coalesce around the Florida governor.No defection was more emblematic of the shift than that of Senator Mike Lee of Utah. Mr. Lee was an early booster of Mr. DeSantis’s presidential run and had met with the governor to discuss policy, according to a person with direct knowledge, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private meetings.Mr. Lee did not give Mr. DeSantis a heads up before he announced that he was endorsing Mr. Trump just three days before the Iowa caucuses, that person said. The DeSantis team saw the timing as a knife in the back.Dan Hauser, a campaign adviser to Mr. Lee, said in a statement that the senator didn’t call any candidate in the race before he endorsed Mr. Trump.In another personal twist, Mr. Lee’s wife, Sharon, had worked for the DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down. She left the group “a couple of months ago on her own terms,” according to Mr. Hauser.Michael Gold More

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      Jan. 6 Transcripts Reveal Disagreements That Divided Trump Camp

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

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      Pelosi and Sanders Press Democrats’ Case, and More News From the Sunday Talk Shows

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      Democratic Party leaders turned toward inflation and the economy after a summer focus on abortion. Representative Nancy Mace, a Republican, said the G.O.P. would seek spending cuts.With less than three weeks to go before Election Day and polls showing Republicans gaining ground, Democrats dispatched surrogates to the Sunday morning talk shows to make their case for control of Congress. They focused on inflation and wages, a notable shift after months in which they leaned on abortion rights.Widespread anger at the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade fueled Democrats through the summer, lifting them in special House races and raising their hopes of defying the historical pattern of midterm elections, in which the party in power usually loses seats. But polls suggest voters are prioritizing other issues.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont emphasized Social Security and Medicare on Sunday, pointing to Republicans’ calls for spending cuts, while adding that they still considered abortion an important issue that would motivate many voters.“The Republicans have said that if they win, they want to subject Medicare, Social Security — health blackmail — to lifting the debt ceiling,” Ms. Pelosi said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “They have said they would like to review Medicare and Social Security every five years. They have said that they would like to make it a discretionary spending that Congress could decide to do it or not, rather than mandatory. So Social Security and Medicare are on the line.”Mr. Sanders, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” rejected the argument that Democrats were to blame for inflation, noting that the inflation rate was also very high in Britain and the European Union. He argued that Republicans had put forward no workable plans to combat it.“They want to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at a time when millions of seniors are struggling to pay their bills,” he said. “Do you think that’s what we should be doing? Democrats should take that to them.” More

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      5 Takeaways From the Utah Senate Debate

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      Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, and his independent challenger, Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. officer, met Monday evening for their only debate, a largely genteel affair that showed flashes of tension mainly around Mr. Lee’s role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and keep Donald J. Trump in the presidency.Here are five takeaways from an unusual debate in an unusual Senate race.Jan. 6 remains center stage.No race in the country has spotlighted the events after the 2020 election quite so much as the Senate contest in Utah. In part, that’s because Mr. McMullin and Mr. Lee agree on so many other issues. But it’s primarily because of the prominent role Mr. Lee played in cheerleading various efforts to use legal battles to keep Mr. Trump in power. Much of that cheerleading surfaced in text messages the senator sent to to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.Mr. McMullin called Mr. Lee’s actions “the most egregious betrayal of our nation’s constitution in its history by a U.S. senator,” adding: “It will be your legacy.”Mr. Lee did ultimately vote to affirm President Biden’s election, and he fell back on the language that many Republicans have used when asked if the president was fairly elected. “Joe Biden is our president,” he said. “He was chosen in the only election that matters, the election held by the Electoral College.”But he strongly denied any wrongdoing before his vote to certify the election, saying his discussions about a search for “alternative” electors who would deny the election result was merely an exploration of rumors of such electors — rumors, he said, that proved to be untrue. He accused Mr. McMullin of “a cavalier, reckless disregard for the truth” and demanded an apology.The advantage of independence.Mr. McMullin took full advantage of his status as an independent running in a conservative state, agreeing with his Republican opponent on limiting abortion, castigating Mr. Biden for stoking inflation and saying the White House’s student debt relief program would only worsen inflation. And he vowed that he would not be a “bootlicker” for Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump.That caught Mr. Lee’s ear: “The suggestion that I’m beholden to either party, that I’ve been a bootlicker for either party, is folly,” he protested.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With elections next month, a Times/Siena poll shows that independents, especially women, are swinging toward the G.O.P. despite Democrats’ focus on abortion rights as voters worry about the economy.Questioning 2020: Hundreds of Republicans on the ballot this November have cast doubt on the 2020 election, a Times analysis found. Many of these candidates are favored to win their races.Georgia Senate Race: The contest, which could determine whether Democrats keep control of the Senate, has become increasingly focused on the private life and alleged hypocrisy of Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee.Jill Biden: The first lady, who has become a lifeline for Democratic candidates trying to draw attention and money in the midterms, is the most popular surrogate in the Biden administration.Mr. McMullin was also free to embrace the most popular elements of the Democrats’ achievements, like allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.He portrayed Mr. Lee — largely accurately — as an outlier in the Senate for his consistent votes against bills, even those with broad bipartisan support, and put himself forward as a problem-solver in the mold of the Utahn he hopes to join in the Senate, Mitt Romney.“If we prevail, it will make Utah the most influential state in the nation, because nothing will get through the Senate without Utah’s support,” Mr. McMullin said..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But there is a problem with his vow to be a true independent who would not caucus with either party: Without choosing sides at all, he might not be able to get any committee assignments, severely limiting his ability to wield influence.Mr. Lee was cutting in his dismissal of his opponent’s independent bid: “Supporting an opportunistic gadfly who is supported by the Democrat Party might make for interesting dinner party conversation,” he argued, but in such trying times, it made no sense for the people of Utah.Searching for distinctions on abortion.In virtually every other contested race this year, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has elevated abortion to the top of the agenda, especially for the Democrat in the race. The Senate contest in Utah has no Democrat, and no abortion-rights candidate.In conservative Utah, that allowed Mr. Lee to openly proclaim his joy over the end of Roe v. Wade and his support for allowing the states to decide whether abortion should be legal. “Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Lee said, “was a legal fiction.”Mr. McMullin said he, too, was “pro-life” and struggled to distinguish himself from his opponent, saying he opposed politicians at the extremes of both parties on the issue, those who would ban all abortions without exceptions and those who oppose all restrictions. But he did not say when he thought abortion should be legal or at what point in a pregnancy his opposition to abortion would kick in.Russia, Russia, Russia.Given Mr. McMullin’s C.I.A. background, Russia seemed like a fruitful avenue to pursue his prosecution of Mr. Lee as an extremist outlier, even in right-leaning Utah. He said the senator was the only member of Utah’s all-Republican congressional delegation not to be blacklisted by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and he castigated Mr. Lee for going to Moscow in 2019 to discuss relaxing some sanctions on the Putin regime.But Mr. Lee deftly eluded the attack, saying he had gone to Russia at the invitation of the nation’s ambassador to Moscow at the time, Jon Huntsman Jr. — a popular former Utah governor.Closing the gap? Not likely.Mr. McMullin has waged a surprisingly effective campaign against Mr. Lee in a state that gave Mr. Trump 58 percent of the vote in 2020. But to beat Mr. Lee, he must win over the state’s Democrats, most of its independents and every disaffected Republican he can find. And no one is sure such a coalition will add up to 50 percent of the vote.It is also not clear Monday night’s debate will advance Mr. McMullin’s cause. The audience was stacked with supporters of Mr. Lee, who booed Mr. McMullin’s jabs, especially about Jan. 6 and the 2020 election, and cheered on the incumbent. At times, Mr. McMullin seemed flustered that he was not getting traction with his most practiced lines of attack, especially his appeals to the Mormon faithful whose ancestors “trekked across the plains and the Rockies to achieve freedom here.”“I think about all the men and women, the 14 generations of Americans who have sacrificed for this grand experiment in freedom,” he said. “They trusted you, we trusted you, and with that trust and with your knowledge of the Constitution, Senator Lee, you sought to find a weakness in our system” to “overturn the will of the people.”But the Utahns who Hillary Clinton thought would recoil in 2016 from Mr. Trump’s immoralities did not come to her aid. And they were even less in evidence for Mr. Biden in 2020.Ultimately, Mr. Lee may have had the most effective attack line, one he used often: Mr. McMullin voted for Mr. Biden. More

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      In Utah, a Trump Loyalist Sends an S.O.S. to Romney

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      The appeal carried the unmistakable whiff of desperation. That it was delivered on live television only heightened the dramatic tension.A Utah Republican, Senator Mike Lee, was publicly begging a fellow Utah Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, for a simple act of solidarity: an endorsement in his campaign for re-election. One that, in Mr. Lee’s telling, could amount to no less than an act of salvation, as he battles for political survival against an unexpectedly fierce challenger, the independent candidate Evan McMullin.“Please, get on board,” Mr. Lee said, looking into the camera and addressing Mr. Romney by name on Tuesday night. “Help me win re-election. Help us do that. You can get your entire family to donate to me.”But Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney are not merely fellow Utah Republicans. And this was not just any television show.Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney were — and evidently remain — antagonists in the lingering drama of Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Lee played a key role in support of President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and cling to power. Mr. Romney was a stalwart opponent of it.And Mr. Lee was making his appeal to Mr. Romney on Tuesday night on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program — a venue in which Mr. Romney has been routinely roasted, for years, before audiences of millions of conservative viewers.The irony of the moment seemed lost on both Mr. Lee and the show’s host, though that may have been a bit of a shared ruse.Either way, audacity was in abundant supply.Mr. Lee’s plea for Mr. Romney’s assistance, after all, came after Mr. Lee’s votes in opposition to three bipartisan bills that Mr. Romney helped to pass, on infrastructure, gun safety and semiconductor manufacturing. Mr. Lee denounced the infrastructure bill, for one, as “an orgiastic convulsion of federal spending.”The S.O.S. to his fellow senator also appeared to ignore Mr. Lee’s own actions of intraparty sabotage, dating back a dozen years: Mr. Lee refused to endorse Mr. Romney’s 2018 Senate campaign. He declined in 2012 to endorse the senior senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, even as his own chief of staff openly predicted Mr. Hatch’s defeat. And Mr. Lee first won his own seat in 2010 by orchestrating the defeat of a popular Republican senator, Robert F. Bennett, during the state’s Republican convention.What Mr. Lee was not ignoring, however, was a new poll published in Utah’s Deseret News this week showing Mr. Lee leading Mr. McMullin 41 percent to 37 percent, with 12 percent undecided. Self-described moderates made up a plurality of those undecided voters, as the center of Utah’s political spectrum seems to be agonizing over which candidate to coalesce behind.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“We are winning this race, and Mike Lee is panicked,” Mr. McMullin said in an interview on Wednesday.Evan McMullin is not far behind Mr. Lee according to a Deseret News poll that also shows a high number of undecided voters.Rick Bowmer/Associated PressIn fact, Mr. McMullin’s task of uniting independents, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans remains daunting in Utah, a state that gave Mr. Trump 58 percent of the vote in 2020. When Mr. McMullin ran for president in 2016 as an independent, he netted 21.5 percent in his home state. (One of those voters was Mr. Lee.)Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, which conducted the poll, stressed that Mr. Lee “is still in the driver’s seat,” but, he said, with so many centrist voters still undecided, “this is one still to watch.”The FiveThirtyEight polling average still has Mr. Lee up by 7.6 percent.“Let’s be clear, Mike Lee is leading this race,” said Matt Lusty, an adviser to the Lee campaign. “Every reliable poll shows Senator Lee with a significant lead, and our internal polling gives us even greater confidence in the strong support he has across the state.” Mr. Lee himself declined to comment.But no contest in the country is as closely tied to the failed efforts to deny President Biden’s victory as the Utah Senate race. And no other race is as squarely centered on the fate of representative democracy.Mr. Lee appears particularly spooked by the $6.3 million in campaign contributions — a small portion of that through ActBlue, an online Democratic fund-raising tool — that have flowed to Mr. McMullin, who has vowed to caucus with neither party if he wins..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Lee was exaggerating a little when he told Mr. Carlson, “Evan McMullin is raising millions of dollars off of ActBlue, the Democratic donor database, based on this idea that he’s going to defeat me and help perpetuate the Democratic majority.” But his fears were clear.Mr. Romney, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has explained his decision not to endorse Mr. Lee or Mr. McMullin by saying “both are good friends.”But the personal divide between him and Mr. Lee over the events surrounding the 2020 election remains deep, and is playing a role now, according to Stuart Stevens, a senior official in Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential run who is also an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Romney became the first senator from a president’s party ever to vote to convict him after Mr. Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial, when he sided with Democrats to try to throw Mr. Trump out of office for abuse of power, for conditioning military aid to Ukraine on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s launching an investigation into Mr. Biden.Mr. Romney again voted to convict Mr. Trump in 2021 for inciting the attack on the Capitol.Mr. Lee, in contrast, was an active participant in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office. He cheered Mr. Trump on for weeks in late 2020, and privately offered in a text to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”Mr. Lee also endorsed a plan to have legislatures in “a very small handful of states” carried by Mr. Biden put forward pro-Trump electors, as part of a scheme to allow Vice President Mike Pence to reject Mr. Biden’s victory.Ultimately, Mr. Lee backed away from those plans and voted to certify Mr. Biden’s election, unlike eight of his Senate colleagues, a point that the Lee campaign stresses.But turning against a plan as it was failing does not exonerate him, Mr. McMullin argues.“Senator Lee, who called himself a constitutional conservative and who swore an oath to the Constitution, betrayed the Constitution in an effort to overturn the will of the people by recruiting fake electors to topple American democracy,” Mr. McMullin said in the interview. “It was one of the most egregious betrayals of the American republic in its history.”Senators Mike Lee, left, and Mitt Romney during former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment hearings in January 2020. Mr. Romney voted to convict.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIt is, in some sense, that inconstancy that has gotten Mr. Lee in trouble: his willingness to challenge the powers in his own party, then tack back when his base demands it.“Reaping what he sowed is a good way to put it,” quipped Christopher F. Karpowitz, co-director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.Mr. Lee led the floor fight to stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, called for Mr. Trump to exit the race after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, and voted for Mr. McMullin in protest. Then he became one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters.“Politics is an ongoing character test, and the people of Utah are going to have to ask themselves if he’s passed,” said Mr. Stevens, the former Romney aide.How real a threat Mr. McMullin poses to Mr. Lee’s re-election remains to be seen. Both sides produce internal polls that serve their purposes, Mr. Lee’s showing him with a double-digit lead, Mr. McMullin’s showing him barely overtaking the incumbent.It’s entirely possible that Mr. Lee’s dire-sounding appearance on Fox News proves a reprise of the pleas that Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, made toward the end of his 2020 re-election run as he watched his Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, rake in a record $57 million in a single quarter, $132 million in total, for his challenge: All panic aside, Mr. Graham ultimately won by more than 10 percentage points.Still, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of two Republicans serving on the House Jan. 6 Committee, will campaign with Mr. McMullin next week in Salt Lake City, trying to rally disaffected Republicans, a crucial bloc after Utah Democrats decided not to field their own candidate. The state’s most important Democrats, Mayor Jenny Wilson of Salt Lake County and former Representative Ben McAdams, are backing Mr. McMullin.Though Mr. McMullin says the preservation of democracy is the organizing theme of his campaign, he has branched out to tar Mr. Lee as “the most ineffective member of the Senate,” contrasting his ideological stands with Mr. Romney’s productivity.And, as Mr. Lee’s campaign tries to project an air of confidence, his appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show projected anything but.Pressing Mr. Romney to do the right thing as a Republican, he repeatedly warned Fox viewers that Mr. Romney’s mere neutrality could give Mr. McMullin — “a closeted Democrat,” as he put it — a victory, and ensure continued Democratic control of the Senate.On Wednesday, Mr. Lusty, the Lee campaign adviser, said his boss still hoped that Mr. Romney would come around. “Senator Lee sees it as important for all members of the party to stand together,” he said.But if Mr. Lee had truly hoped to change Mr. Romney’s mind, there were few avenues likely to be less persuasive than Mr. Carlson’s show.As Mr. Lee spoke, Mr. Romney’s picture was shown with a beret and handlebar mustache crudely superimposed, over the caption “Pierre Delecto Strikes Again” — the nom de plume Mr. Romney once got caught using on Twitter.“Mitt Romney has stood up to withering criticism from Trump and others,” said Mr. Karpowitz, the B.Y.U. professor. “I’m not sure Tucker Carlson is going to move him.” More

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      Utah U.S. Senate Primary Election Results 2022

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      Source: Election results and race calls from The Associated Press. The Times estimates the number of remaining votes based on historic turnout data and reporting from The Associated Press. These are only estimates and they may not be informed by official reports from election officials.The New York Times’s results team is a group of graphics editors, engineers and reporters who build and maintain software to publish election results in real-time as they are reported by results providers. To learn more about how election results work, read this article.The Times’s election results pages are produced by Michael Andre, Aliza Aufrichtig, Neil Berg, Matthew Bloch, Sean Catangui, Andrew Chavez, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Asmaa Elkeurti, Tiffany Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Will Houp, Josh Katz, Aaron Krolik, Jasmine C. Lee, Rebecca Lieberman, Ilana Marcus, Jaymin Patel, Rachel Shorey, Charlie Smart, Umi Syam, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang. Reporting by Grace Ashford, Alana Celii, Reid Epstein, Nicholas Fandos, Lalena Fisher, Alyce McFadden, Azi Paybarah, Jazmine Ulloa and Jonathan Weisman; production by Amanda Cordero and Jessica White; editing by Wilson Andrews, Kenan Davis, Amy Hughes and Ben Koski. More

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      Mike Lee and Ted Cruz Fought So That One Man Wouldn’t Have to Face the Pain of Defeat

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      Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah are two of the most prominent “constitutional conservatives” in the Senate. They built their political careers on their supposed fidelity to the Constitution and the original intent of the founding fathers. Cruz made his constitutional conservatism the centerpiece of his 2016 campaign for president, while Lee has written three books on the founding era and presents himself, to the public, as a constitutional scholar rather than a mere politician.It is interesting, then, that Lee and Cruz were among the Republican senators most involved in Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the Constitution and install himself in office against the will of the voters.As The Washington Post reported last month, Cruz worked “directly with Trump to concoct a plan that came closer than widely realized to keeping him in power.” According to this plan, Cruz would object to and delay the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 in favor of a 10-day election audit that would give Trump-friendly state legislatures time to overturn the result and send new electors to Congress.And as CNN reported last week, Lee was in close contact with Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, in the months, weeks and days before the Jan. 6 attack. Lee supported and encouraged the president’s effort to overturn the election, with both ideas and political assistance. “I have an additional idea for the campaign,” he wrote to Meadows on Nov. 23, 2020. “Something is not right in a few states. I think it could be proven or disproven easily with an audit (a physical counting of all ballots cast) in PA, WI, GA, and MI.”Two weeks later, Lee would tell Meadows, “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.” And on Jan. 4, 2021, Lee told Meadows that he had been “calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow” in hopes of finding “something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning.”Lee eventually voted to certify the results of the presidential election and had previously told journalists, and the public, that he was dismayed by the events of Jan. 6. In their book covering the insurrection, “Peril,” Bob Woodward and Robert Costa report that Lee “was shocked” by the conservative legal scholar John Eastman’s plan to delay final certification of the election and “had heard nothing about alternative slates of electors.”But the truth is that Lee was with the president from the start. His only real objection — the only thing that gave him pause — was that Trump and his allies had not crossed their “T’s” or dotted their “I’s.” Which is to say that they had not done the work necessary to give their attempted self-coup a veneer of legality and constitutional fidelity. Or, as Lee wrote to Meadows, “I know only that this will end badly for the president unless we have the Constitution on our side.”Cruz and Lee were not the only “constitutional conservatives” to support Trump’s attempt to keep himself in office after losing the Electoral College vote (to say nothing of the popular vote). Their participation in the plot, however, tells us something important about what it actually means to be a “constitutional conservative.”The term is supposed to convey a principled commitment to both the Constitution and the institutions of the American republic it helped bring into being. But if Cruz, Lee and other “constitutional conservatives” have any commitment to the Constitution, it is only to the letter of the document, not its spirit.The spirit of the Constitution, of the Philadelphia Convention and everything that followed, is embodied in self-government. The point of the deliberation and experimentation of the founding moment was to find some ground on which the American people, however narrowly defined, could live out the principles of the Revolutionary War they had just fought and pursue their common interests.Whatever the specifics of the governing charter, the essential idea was that this government would be one that, as James Madison wrote, “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.”The people have, for now, agreed to elect the president through a process that gives a good deal of discretion to a broad range of officials, some elected, some appointed, but all working with legitimate authority. In the main, they used that authority to allow as many people to vote as possible, in accordance with our laws and our norms.If, under those conditions, Donald Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, neither Cruz nor Lee nor anyone else in the Republican Party would have disputed the outcome or contested the process. It would have been a shining example of the strength of our republic.But he did not win, and so our “constitutional conservatives” fought to undermine and overturn our institutions so that one man would not have to face the pain of defeat. Which gets to the truth of what that “constitutional conservatism” really seems to be: not a principled attempt — however flawed in conception — to live up to the values of the founding, but a thin mask for the will to power.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mike Lee’s Texts Show Encouragement, Then Alarm, Before Jan. 6

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      Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chip Roy, once backers of President Donald J. Trump’s claims of a stolen election, eventually urged his top aide to change course.WASHINGTON — For weeks in late 2020, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, cheered on President Donald J. Trump’s effort to fight his election defeat, privately offering up “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”In text messages to Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, Mr. Lee encouraged the Trump campaign to embrace Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer whom the senator described as a “straight shooter,” and said the president should “hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”But when Ms. Powell put forth wild claims of foreign rigging of election machines at a widely derided news conference in November, Mr. Lee was chagrined and quietly began to question what Mr. Trump was up to.“I’m worried about the Powell press conference,” Mr. Lee wrote in another text message to Mr. Meadows. “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here.”That message and several others from Mr. Lee, as well as a separate set of exchanges between Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Mr. Meadows, trace an about-face by the two Republican lawmakers. The pair started out as enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about his push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed his bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.The text messages, which are in the possession of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, were obtained by CNN and authenticated by The New York Times.They provide a window into the eagerness of Republicans — even some who ended up voting on Jan. 6 to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory — to believe Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud and their willingness to go to great lengths, including attempts at exploiting the nation’s election laws, to keep him in power. They also illustrate how rapidly those efforts spiraled out of control, and they show a keen awareness on the part of at least some Republicans involved that the endeavor had become untenable to the point of being dangerous.The text messages were sent to and from Mr. Meadows, who turned them over to the House committee while he was cooperating with the panel. Mr. Meadows later refused to sit for an interview with the committee, and the House voted to recommend that the Justice Department prosecute him for criminal contempt of Congress.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.The text messages with Mr. Meadows show that Mr. Lee tried several times to offer advice and support for the effort to overturn the election, using multiple strategies.Mr. Lee suggested that Mr. Trump should “disassociate himself” from Ms. Powell’s false claims after her performance at the November news conference, but even after that, the senator vouched for the conservative lawyer John Eastman, who wrote a memo outlining plans for overturning the election that members of both parties have likened to a blueprint for a coup.Mr. Lee then endorsed a plan to have legislatures in “a very small handful of states” that Mr. Biden had won put forth pro-Trump electors, as part of a scheme proposed by Mr. Eastman to allow Vice President Mike Pence to reject Mr. Biden’s victory.But Mr. Lee backed off the effort after no state legislature convened to certify so-called alternate electors, and he began criticizing plans by Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, to use Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6 to challenge the election outcome.“I have grave concerns with the way my friend Ted is going about this effort,” Mr. Lee wrote to Mr. Meadows.Mr. Lee ultimately voted to confirm Mr. Biden’s victory. More than half of the Republicans in Congress — eight senators and 139 House members — voted to invalidate it, after a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, enraged by the lie of a stolen election, stormed the Capitol demanding that it be overturned.A spokesman for Mr. Lee confirmed the authenticity of the text messages and said they told “the same story Senator Lee told from the floor of the Senate the day he voted to certify the election results of each and every state in the nation.”“They tell the story of a U.S. senator fulfilling his duty to Utah and the American people by following the Constitution,” the spokesman, Lee Lonsberry, said, citing the senator’s remarks after the deadly riot, which injured more than 150 police officers.“The President should call everyone off,” Representative Chip Roy wrote to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, on Dec. 31, 2020. “It’s the only path.”Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Roy’s text messages with Mr. Meadows tell a similar tale of a lawmaker who appeared eager to fight alongside Mr. Trump but ultimately backed off when evidence of a stolen election did not appear.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More