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    What the Trump Documents Might Tell the Jan. 6 Committee

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    Following last week’s Supreme Court ruling, the House panel has received material that it hopes could flesh out how the attack on the Capitol came about.The National Archives has turned over to the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol last Jan. 6 a large batch of documents that former President Donald J. Trump had sought to keep out of the panel’s hands, citing executive privilege.The committee has yet to make the documents public or disclose how far along it is in scrutinizing them for any new information about the roles played by Mr. Trump and his inner circle in the effort to delay certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.But in court filings, Mr. Trump, his legal team and the archives identified the documents that he was seeking to shield through claims of executive privilege, an argument that the Supreme Court rejected last week.It remains unclear how valuable the documents — at least 770 pages — will be to the investigation. But here is a list of them as identified in the court filings, what is known about them and how they might fit into the larger narrative being assembled by the committee:Proposed talking points for Mr. Trump’s press secretary and documents related to allegations of voter fraud (629 pages)Even before Election Day, Republicans and the Trump White House were pushing the notion — not backed by any evidence — that there could be widespread election fraud because of changes states enacted in response to the pandemic that made it easier for people to vote.Mr. Trump refused to concede on election night, saying publicly: “This is a fraud on the American public.” In the weeks that followed, the White House — through Kayleigh McEnany, the press secretary at the time — amplified Mr. Trump’s messaging from the briefing room and on television and social media.The materials could help the committee document the extent and intensity of the effort inside the White House to promote the baseless claims, along with more details about which members of the administration were most involved in the false claims.Presidential activity calendars and a handwritten note concerning Jan. 6 (11 pages)In a typical White House, a president’s calendar can provide an intimate picture of who the president meets with and the topics he may be discussing. Though Mr. Trump had a far less regimented schedule, there were still some meetings and events on his calendar, and aides kept track of where he was and what he was planning to do. The committee has indicated that it is especially interested in any communications that Mr. Trump had around Jan. 6 with top aides like Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, or with Vice President Mike Pence. A detailed calendar or notes could also help shed light on Mr. Trump’s activities as the riot unfolded on Capitol Hill.Mr. Trump’s supporters before his rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesA draft of Mr. Trump’s speech for the “Save America” rally that preceded the mob attack (10 pages)On Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies spoke at a rally on the Ellipse before his supporters marched more than a mile to the Capitol. The draft speech — which Mr. Trump’s longtime aide, Stephen Miller, helped write — would show whether Mr. Trump’s incendiary language that encouraged the protesters was ad-libbed by him or whether it was included by his speechwriters, who may have been coordinating the president’s messaging with others. In his book, Mr. Meadows claimed Mr. Trump had ad-libbed his remarks telling the crowd to march on the Capitol.A note from Mr. Meadows about briefings and calls about the certification of the election and related issues (2 pages)In the days leading up to Jan. 6, there was a flurry of meetings in the Oval Office. Among the most dramatic was one on Jan. 4, when Mr. Trump had a lawyer named John Eastman — who had written a memo essentially saying that the vice president had immense powers to decide who won the election — make the argument directly to Mr. Pence that he could delay the certification of the election on Jan. 6. (Mr. Pence later rejected the advice.) On Jan. 2, three of Mr. Trump’s advisers — Rudolph W. Giuliani, Peter Navarro and Mr. Eastman — held a conference call with about 300 state lawmakers about election fraud. On Jan. 4, Phil Waldron, a former U.S. Army colonel who rose to prominence in Mr. Trump’s inner circle after the election, said members of his team briefed some senators on foreign interference in the election. Mr. Waldron said he personally gave the same briefing the next day to members of the House.Details of meetings like those, and the planning for them, could help the committee assess whether Mr. Trump’s efforts justify a criminal referral to the Justice Department on a charge like obstructing an official proceeding in Congress.A draft executive order on the topic of election integrity (4 pages)A range of outside advisers were pushing for Mr. Trump to sign executive orders to help him block or slow certification of the election. Among the most audacious was one that said Mr. Trump could use the Defense Department to seize voting machines based on false claims that there had been foreign interference in the election. Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and a lawyer advising him, Sidney Powell, were urging Mr. Trump to take this action. A copy of a draft executive order about seizing election machines was posted on Politico’s website on Friday.But that memo is three pages, and the National Archives described a memo that is four pages. There is another memo, mentioned in a recent disclosure to the committee by the Trump ally Bernard Kerik, that could also fit this description. It was withheld by Mr. Kerik under the theory of executive privilege but was described in a log of documents that Mr. Kerik refused to turn over as, “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS.”Handwritten notes from the files of Mr. Meadows (3 pages)As chief of staff, Mr. Meadows served both as a top aide and as a conduit for outside advisers, including members of Congress, to contact Mr. Trump and visit him at the White House. Mr. Meadows has provided investigators with hundreds of pages of documents that he had on his personal phone but has refused to sit for questioning, leading the committee to ask the Justice Department to prosecute him. His notes could potentially shed light on what Mr. Trump was hearing and saying at key moments.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Sean Hannity Told Trump After Jan. 6: ‘No More Stolen Election Talk’

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      The Fox News host Sean Hannity had some blunt advice for President Donald J. Trump on Jan. 7, 2021: “No more stolen election talk.”His guidance did not take. But documents disclosed on Thursday showed in vivid detail just how closely Mr. Hannity had worked with White House aides in a fervent, if brief, effort to persuade Mr. Trump to abandon his false claims about voter fraud after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.One day after the attack, Mr. Hannity sent a text message to Kayleigh McEnany, then the White House press secretary, describing a five-point plan for approaching conversations with the president, according to documents released by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.After urging Ms. McEnany to avoid discussion of a “stolen election,” Mr. Hannity proffered another talking point to use with Mr. Trump: “Yes, impeachment and 25th amendment are real, and many people will quit …”Mr. Hannity appeared to be referring to the possibilities that Mr. Trump could be impeached, face mass resignations from his staff or be temporarily removed from office by a group of his cabinet secretaries invoking the 25th Amendment.Ms. McEnany replied: “Love that. Thank you. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce.”Fox News, where Ms. McEnany is now a commentator and a co-host of a weekday program, declined to comment on Thursday.In public, Mr. Hannity and Ms. McEnany remain lock-step supporters of Mr. Trump and his worldview. But their private exchanges show the level of alarm among even the president’s closest allies after the Jan. 6 riot, as Mr. Trump persisted in his false claims that the election had been stolen from him and his political future appeared deeply precarious.The exchanges were included in a letter sent by the House committee to Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter and one of his senior advisers. The committee is seeking Ms. Trump’s cooperation as it tries to piece together a scramble inside the White House to persuade Mr. Trump to denounce the attackers at the Capitol.In another exchange included in the letter, Mr. Hannity urged Ms. McEnany to keep the president away from certain advisers. “Key now. No more crazy people,” Mr. Hannity wrote. Ms. McEnany replied: “Yes 100%.”This month, the House committee asked Mr. Hannity to cooperate and answer questions about his communications with Mr. Trump and his aides in the days surrounding the riot. At the time, the committee disclosed messages in which Mr. Hannity advised Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, on the president’s political future. “He can’t mention the election again. Ever,” Mr. Hannity wrote on Jan. 10, 2021, to Mr. Meadows and Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.A lawyer for Mr. Hannity, Jay Sekulow, has said the committee’s request to interview Mr. Hannity raises “First Amendment concerns regarding freedom of the press.”Luke Broadwater 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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      Court Filing Lists Documents Trump Seeks to Withhold From Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The National Archives says the former president is asserting executive privilege over phone logs, notes and other records concerning the attack on the Capitol.WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump is seeking to block from release a wide range of documents related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the National Archives said Saturday in an early-morning federal court filing detailing what Mr. Trump is fighting to keep secret.In the filing, in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, John Laster, the director of the National Archives’ presidential materials division, laid out for the first time exactly which documents Mr. Trump was asserting executive privilege over. The former president is hoping to prevent the documents from being reviewed by the House committee empowered to investigate the mob violence at the Capitol.According to the filing, Mr. Trump has asserted executive privilege specifically over 770 pages of documents, including 46 pages of records from the files of Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff; Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser; and Patrick Philbin, his former deputy counsel. Mr. Trump is also objecting to the release of the White House Daily Diary — a record of the president’s movements, phone calls, trips, briefings, meetings and activities — as well as logs showing phone calls to the president and to Vice President Mike Pence concerning Jan. 6, Mr. Laster wrote.Mr. Trump has also asserted executive privilege over 656 pages that include proposed talking points for Kayleigh McEnany, his former press secretary; a handwritten note concerning Jan. 6; a draft text of a presidential speech for the “Save America” rally that preceded the mob attack; and a draft executive order on the topic of election integrity, the filing states.Finally, Mr. Trump asserted executive privilege over 68 additional pages, including a draft proclamation honoring the Capitol Police and two officers who died after the riot, Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, as well as related emails; a memo about a potential lawsuit against several states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won in the November election; an email chain from a state official regarding election-related issues; and talking points on alleged election irregularities in one Michigan county.The filing comes in response to a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed this month against the National Archives seeking to block the disclosure of White House files related to his actions and communications surrounding the Jan. 6 riot.In that lawsuit, in a 26-page complaint, a lawyer for Mr. Trump argued that the materials must remain secret as a matter of executive privilege. The lawyer said the Constitution gave the former president the right to demand their confidentiality even though he was no longer in office — and even though President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over them.The lawsuit touched off what is likely to be a major legal battle between Mr. Trump and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, in which a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes to formalize Mr. Biden’s victory. Its outcome will carry consequences for how much the panel can uncover about Mr. Trump’s role in the riot, pose thorny questions for the Biden administration and potentially forge new precedents about presidential prerogatives and the separation of powers.The leaders of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, have condemned Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as “nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe.”“It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election,” Mr. Thompson, the committee’s chairman, and Ms. Cheney, the vice chairwoman, wrote in a statement after the suit’s filing.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      What We Know About Trump Allies Like Sarah Huckabee Sanders Running for Office

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySarah Huckabee Sanders Is Running for Office. Will Other Trump Allies Follow?The names of Lara Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and others have been floated as potential political candidates. Here’s what we know about the chances they could run and their considerations.Sarah Huckabee Sanders has already started to build a statewide operation in her campaign for governor of Arkansas.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021, 8:22 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as White House press secretary under former President Donald J. Trump, announced Monday that she was running for governor in Arkansas, her home state, competing for a seat once held by her father.“I took on the media, the radical left and their cancel culture, and I won,” Ms. Sanders, 38, said in a nearly eight-minute video, signaling that she planned to frame herself not as a policy-driven candidate but as a vessel for Republican rage, in a test of the endurance of Mr. Trump’s grievance politics.Ms. Sanders, who was encouraged by Mr. Trump to run when she left the White House in 2019 and had long planned her announcement, is one of several former Trump officials and family members whose names have been floated for political races of their own. But as of now, she appears to be alone in hatching firm plans for a campaign after Mr. Trump’s defeat.Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, is in the process of moving to Florida, where there had been talk of a potential primary challenge to Senator Marco Rubio, her onetime partner on a child care tax credit. While she is not ruling anything out, she is unlikely to seek office.While her sister-in-law, Lara Trump, had been eyeing an open Senate seat in North Carolina, her home state, in 2022, it is now less clear if she will enter the race.Vice President Mike Pence is still wondering if he can carry the Trump mantle in a Republican presidential primary in 2024, a gambit that would depend on Mr. Trump’s choosing not to run or being convicted in the coming Senate impeachment trial.Ms. Sanders may be a unique case study. She is stepping over both the Arkansas lieutenant governor and the state attorney general, who waited their turn and supported Mr. Trump but who can’t claim as close a connection to him as Ms. Sanders can. Mr. Trump was expected to endorse her on Monday night, an adviser to the former president said. She also has powerful family connections in the deep-red state, where the only race that really matters is the Republican primary.“The Republican base is not interested in serious governing candidates,” said Tim Miller, who served as an adviser to former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida. “They want people who will ‘own the libs,’ and Sarah is perfect for that.”While a grievance-first strategy may be ruinous to the party’s chances in swing states like Pennsylvania and Virginia, it resonates in a conservative state like Arkansas. “Pro-coup Trumpism is a meal ticket to success in a Republican primary,” Mr. Miller said.Ms. Sanders has already started to build a statewide operation, and because of her father, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, she has high name recognition and a political identity in Arkansas beyond an association with Mr. Trump.Here are other Trump officials and family members who have been seen as possible contenders for higher office, but who may face a more difficult path.Lara Trump is married to former President Donald J. Trump’s son Eric.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesLara TrumpMs. Trump, 38, the president’s daughter-in-law, who emerged during the 2020 presidential campaign as a fierce defender of Mr. Trump, has been eyeing an electoral future of her own in North Carolina, her home state. She and her husband, Eric Trump, have yet to relocate their family from New York, but in the months leading up to the presidential election, she had been actively considering a rare Senate seat that will open there in 2022, when Senator Richard Burr retires at the end of his term, people familiar with her plans said.Ms. Trump’s combativeness was seen as potentially appealing to Republican primary voters. During the 2020 campaign, she went where Ivanka Trump would not: repeating Mr. Trump’s ad hominem attacks on Hunter Biden and casting doubt on the integrity of the election. Political strategists have compared her to Kelly Loeffler, the recently defeated Georgia senator, but say that she has more skill on the campaign trail.The upsides of a Lara Trump candidacy were that she would immediately have more name recognition and an ability to raise cash online that would most likely dwarf that of the more experienced Republicans in the race. Her last name already prompted Mark Meadows, a former congressman from North Carolina who served as Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, to say publicly that he would not run for Senate in the state, a race that his advisers had expected him to consider.But since Mr. Trump’s defeat, it is less clear whether his daughter-in-law will enter the race, perhaps a concession to the fact that simply aligning herself with the former president to win the Republican primary would not gird her for the potential backlash in a general election in a swing state.Ivanka Trump, the former president’s elder daughter, served as a senior aide in his White House.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesIvanka TrumpIn October, when Ivanka Trump described herself as “pro-life, and unapologetically so,” her comment was seen as the surest sign to date that the ambitious, spotlight-seeking Trump daughter was serious about a career of her own in Republican politics.Over the past four years, Ms. Trump, 39, has undergone a political transformation, from a registered New York Democrat to what she has described as a “proud Trump Republican.” During the 2020 campaign, she was considered by Trump campaign officials to be the top surrogate for her father, often speaking on his behalf to suburban women. For years, she has promoted articles and had her staff pitch stories about how she rivaled top Democratic presidential candidates in her fund-raising abilities.She is still packing up her mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, but will relocate in the coming weeks to Florida, where her advisers say she is weighing her options when it comes to elected office. That includes not popping a trial balloon about a potential primary challenge next year to Mr. Rubio, who Republican critics note could be vulnerable because he did not vote to sustain any objections to the state’s electors.Other observers have dismissed that scenario as a difficult way to begin a political career and said Mr. Rubio needed to take it less seriously after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. Running for state office is off the table for Ms. Trump because Florida law requires seven years of residency. Some people who know her say that her ambitions are higher, that she likes the ring of “first female president” and that there’s simply no downside to keeping her name afloat.She has surprising allies promoting it for her. “Ivanka would be a terrific candidate, with her presence, grace and beauty,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist who received a pardon from Mr. Trump. Once an enemy of Ms. Trump’s in the White House, he is now intent on propping her up. “She’s also the most populist because she’s fully focused on working families,” he said.“From Huckabee to Lara Trump to Don Jr. to Kayleigh McEnany, this is the new vanguard of the MAGA movement,” Mr. Bannon added. “I anticipate these people will be either running in 2022 or 2024.”Ms. McEnany, for her part, has already relocated to her home state, Florida, and there was briefly some talk of her mounting her own bid for the Senate, a person familiar with those conversations said. But it’s not clear how serious it was.Donald Trump Jr. has spent time campaigning for Republicans around the country in recent years.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesDonald Trump Jr.Over the past four years, Donald Trump Jr., 43, the president’s eldest son, has carved out a political lane for himself as a top surrogate and fund-raiser who can channel the emotional center of the MAGA movement. With 11 million followers on his various social media streams, he has been seen as a key player in the Republican messaging ecosystem, someone with a strong connection to his father’s supporters and to conservative voters who are passionate about the Second Amendment.His advisers insist that he’s not interested in being a candidate anytime in the near future — partly because there is not a clear office for him to run for right now. That hasn’t stopped strategists from floating his name as a potential candidate in states including Montana and Florida. For now, the advisers said, he wants to stay engaged and relevant politically, along with his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, helping to elect conservatives he likes and to take down the ones he doesn’t.On Monday he tweeted an article from The Federalist, a right-wing publication, that called for Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming to “Step Away From Leadership For GOP Voters.” He also vowed to help Ms. Sanders win her race.Before serving as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows was a congressman from North Carolina.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMark MeadowsMr. Meadows, 61, has told people he has ruled out running for office again. But his friends and his own wife don’t believe him, or don’t want to. Others say they haven’t been able to get a straight answer out of him about his future plans. During his tenure in the White House, Mr. Meadows, the former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, competed with Vice President Mike Pence to be seen as the heir to the president’s agenda and as Mr. Trump’s right hand. He even slept at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when the president was being treated there for the coronavirus.Mr. Meadows still lives in Washington and has no immediate plans to move back to North Carolina, his home state. His wife has speculated that he should run for president in 2024, according to people familiar with those conversations. But his friends have not ruled out a future run for Senate or governor in North Carolina, and Ms. Trump’s fading interest in the North Carolina Senate race could give him back an opening.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More