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      Donald Trump 'Is Wrong' on Authority to Overturn Election, Says Pence

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      Former Vice President Mike Pence said in a speech on Friday that he had no right to overturn the 2020 election, as the former president has falsely claimed.Former Vice President Mike Pence said he had no legal authority to change the outcome of the 2020 election, offering his most forceful rejection of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.Jacob Langston for The New York TimesFormer Vice President Mike Pence on Friday offered his most forceful rebuke of Donald J. Trump, saying the former president is “wrong” that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to change the results of the 2020 election and that the Republican Party must accept the outcome and look toward the future.Speaking to a gathering of conservatives near Orlando, Fla., the former vice president said he understands “the disappointment so many feel about the last election” but repudiated Mr. Trump’s false claims that Mr. Pence could reject the Electoral College results and alter the outcome last year.“President Trump is wrong,” said Mr. Pence, in his remarks before the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization. “I had no right to overturn the election.”The comments marked the strongest rejection of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election by his former vice president. Mr. Pence refused to give in on Jan. 6 to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to change the results. Since then, he has remained relatively quiet about that decision, largely declining to directly attack Mr. Trump or assign him any blame for inciting the deadly siege on the Capitol. In public appearances last year, Mr. Pence defended his role in resisting Mr. Trump but did not go further than saying that the two men will never “see eye to eye about that day.”But tensions between them have been rising in recent days. As Mr. Pence positions himself for a possible presidential bid in 2024, Mr. Trump has pushed more intensely a false narrative aimed at blaming his former vice president for failing to stop President Biden from taking office.Mr. Pence cast his opposition on Friday as larger than the immediate political moment, implying that the false claims pushed by Mr. Trump and his followers threatened to undermine American democracy.“The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes,” he said. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”In a speech that largely focused on attacking the policies and record of the Biden administration, Mr. Pence described Jan. 6 as a “dark day” in Washington. Such a description runs counter to an attempt by some on the right to rewrite history by describing the siege as a peaceful rally and by calling the rioters “political prisoners.” And he urged Mr. Trump and his party to accept the results of the last election.“Whatever the future holds, I know we did our duty that day,” Mr. Pence said. “I believe the time has come to focus on the future.”But Mr. Pence stopped short of completely breaking with the right-wing base that remains deeply influenced by Mr. Trump.Mr. Pence did not explicitly say that Mr. Trump lost the election and he declined to address the false claims of election fraud still being pushed by the former president and his supporters. The carefully constructed wording of his rebuke shows an effort by Mr. Pence to defend his own actions on Jan. 6, while not completely alienating a Republican base that remains animated by conspiracy theories of a stolen election. Their support could be crucial in any 2024 primary contest.His comments came just hours after the Republican Party voted to censure two Republican lawmakers for taking part in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 attack. The lawmakers, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, were censured for participating in what the party’s resolution described as the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”Legal scholars and officials from both parties say the vice president does not have the power to overturn elections. Mr. Pence agrees with that interpretation of the law: In a letter to Congress sent the morning of the Capitol attack, Mr. Pence rejected the president’s claims, writing that the Constitution “constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”On Sunday, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Pence could have “overturned the election” in a statement denouncing a bipartisan push to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887. The former president and his allies misinterpreted that century-old law in their failed bid to persuade Mr. Pence to throw out legitimate election results. And on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that the congressional committee investigating the role of his administration in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should instead examine “why Mike Pence did not send back the votes for recertification or approval.”Mr. Trump’s attempts to influence his vice president have become a focus of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, with some members seeing the participation of Mr. Pence’s team as vital to deciding whether it has sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Mr. Trump to the Justice Department. Two of Mr. Pence’s aides testified privately before the committee this week and Mr. Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether the former vice president would be willing to speak to investigators.The Justice Department has also been examining the ways in which Mr. Trump’s attacks on Mr. Pence influenced the mob. In recent plea negotiations in some Jan. 6 cases, prosecutors have asked defense lawyers whether their clients would admit in sworn statements that they stormed the Capitol believing that Mr. Trump wanted them to stop Mr. Pence from certifying the election.As the attackers raided the Capitol that day, some chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Mr. Trump initially brushed aside calls from aides and allies to call them off. Since then, Mr. Trump has defended the chants as understandable because, as he said in an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, “the people were very angry” about the election. More

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      Who Are the Key Figures of Interest in the Jan. 6 Inquiry?

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      The list of names being scrutinized by the House committee for their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol keeps growing.A House select committee has been formed to scrutinize the causes of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. The riot occurred as Congress met to formalize Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s election victory amid efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the results.Here are some of the key people and groups included so far in the panel’s investigation:President Donald J. Trump spoke at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before the riot at the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesTrump, His Family and His Inner CircleDonald J. TrumpThe former president’s White House records related to the attack have been a focus of the inquiry. Mr. Trump unsuccessfully tried to keep these documents from the committee by claiming executive privilege. The panel is also scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s role in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.Ivanka TrumpThe daughter of the former president, who served as one of his senior advisers, has been asked to cooperate. The panel said that it had gathered evidence that she had implored her father to call off the violence that occurred when his supporters stormed the Capitol.Rudolph W. GiulianiMr. Trump’s personal lawyer and three members of his legal team — Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Boris Epshteyn — pursued conspiracy-filled lawsuits that made claims of voter fraud and played central roles in the effort to use courts, state legislatures and Congress to overturn the results.Stephen K. BannonThe former Trump aide is under scrutiny by the committee for comments he made on his radio show on Jan. 5, 2021. The committee points to this as evidence that he had “some foreknowledge” of the attack. Mr. Bannon has been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena; he claimed protection under executive privilege even though he was an outside adviser.Michael T. FlynnMr. Trump’s former national security adviser attended an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in which participants discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers. Mr. Flynn has filed a lawsuit to block the panel’s subpoenas.Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, arrived in the East Room for an election night address by Mr. Trump.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhite House OfficialsMark MeadowsMr. Trump’s chief of staff, who initially provided the panel with a trove of documents that showed the extent of his role in the efforts to overturn the election, is now refusing to cooperate. The House voted to recommend holding Mr. Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress for defying the panel’s subpoena.Mike PenceThe former vice president could be a key witness as the committee focuses on Mr. Trump’s responsibility for the riot and considers criminal referrals, but Mr. Pence has not decided whether to cooperate, according to people briefed on his discussions with the panel.Marc ShortMr. Pence’s chief of staff, who has firsthand knowledge of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on the vice president to throw out the election results, testified before the panel under subpoena. He is the most senior person on Mr. Pence’s staff who is known to have cooperated with the committee.Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader. He has refused to cooperate with the congressional inquiry into the Jan. 6 riot.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesMembers of CongressKevin McCarthyThe panel has requested an interview with Mr. McCarthy, the House Republican leader, about his contact with Mr. Trump during the riot. A California representative who could become speaker of the House after the midterms in November, Mr. McCarthy has refused to cooperate.Scott Perry and Jim JordanThe representatives from Pennsylvania and Ohio are among a group of Republican congressmen who were deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election. Both Mr. Perry and Mr. Jordan have refused to cooperate with the panel.Roger Stone in December 2021, after a meeting with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Al Drago for The New York TimesOutside Advisers and GroupsRoger J. Stone Jr.The longtime political operative, who promoted his attendance at rallies on Jan. 5 and 6 and solicited support to pay for his security, has become a focus of the panel as it digs further into the planning and financing of rallies before the attack.Phil WaldronThe retired Army colonel has been under scrutiny since Mr. Meadows turned over a 38-page PowerPoint document that Mr. Waldron had circulated on Capitol Hill. The document contained plans that detailed how to overturn the election.Jeffrey ClarkThe Justice Department official repeatedly pushed his colleagues to help Mr. Trump undo his loss. The panel has recommended that Mr. Clark be held in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena.John EastmanThe little-known academic and conservative lawyer has become the subject of intense scrutiny since writing a memo that laid out how Mr. Trump could stay in power.Fake Trump electorsFourteen people falsely claimed to be electors for Mr. Trump in the 2020 election in states that Mr. Biden had won: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Members of the Proud Boys burned a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a church in Washington, D.C., in December 2020.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesFar-Right FiguresExtremist groupsThe panel is scrutinizing some white nationalist leaders and militia groups, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. It is intensifying its focus on the rallies that led up to the mob violence and how extremists worked with pro-Trump forces to undermine the election.Alex JonesThe conspiracy theorist helped organize the rally that occurred before the riot, and said that White House officials told him that he was to lead a march to the Capitol, where Mr. Trump would speak, according to the committee.Sean Hannity, the Fox News host.Frank Franklin II/Associated PressMedia EntitiesFox News anchorsSean Hannity sent text messages to Trump officials in the days surrounding the riot that illustrate his unusually elevated role as an outside adviser. Mr. Hannity, along with Laura Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade, also texted Mr. Meadows as the riot unfolded.Big Tech firmsThe committee has criticized Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms. The panel has said that the four social media companies have failed to adequately cooperate with the inquiry.The Willard Hotel in Washington, where several Trump allies met on the day before the riot.Drew Angerer for The New York TimesAnd a Key EventWillard Hotel meetingSeveral Trump advisers and allies — including Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Bannon, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Stone, Mr. Jones and Mr. Eastman — gathered at the Willard Hotel near the White House the day before the riot. The events that unfolded there have become a prime focus of the committee. More

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      Former Pence Chief of Staff Has Testified to the Jan. 6 Committee

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      Marc Short, who has firsthand knowledge of former President Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to throw out the election results, appeared under subpoena.WASHINGTON — Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, testified privately last week before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the latest turn in weeks of negotiations between the panel’s investigators and Mr. Pence’s team.Mr. Short appeared in response to a subpoena from the committee, according to three people with knowledge of the developments, making him the most senior person around Mr. Pence who is known to have cooperated in the inquiry.Investigators believe that participation by the former vice president and his inner circle is critical, because Mr. Pence resisted a pressure campaign by former President Donald J. Trump to use his role in presiding over Congress’s official count of electoral votes to try to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Short was with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, and has firsthand knowledge of the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to persuade the former vice president to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of fake slates of pro-Trump electors.The people spoke on condition of anonymity about Mr. Short’s testimony, which was earlier reported by CNN.Investigators have been in high-stakes negotiations for months with Mr. Pence’s team about whether he would cooperate with the inquiry. In recent weeks, they have sought the cooperation of Mr. Short and Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s former lawyer.Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were both closely involved in Mr. Pence’s consideration of whether to go along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he try to block the official count of Electoral College results by a joint session of Congress. Three days before the proceeding, the two men met with John Eastman, a lawyer then advising Mr. Trump, about a memo Mr. Eastman had written setting out a case for why Mr. Pence had the power to hold off the certification.As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Eastman sent a hostile email to Mr. Jacob, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence.“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” the lawyer, Mr. Eastman, wrote to Mr. Jacob.Mr. Eastman has since invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to defy the committee’s subpoena.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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

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

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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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      Jan. 6 Panel and State Officials Seek Answers on Fake Trump Electors

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      Pressure is mounting on the Justice Department to investigate bogus electors who claimed that Donald J. Trump defeated Joseph R. Biden Jr. in their states.WASHINGTON — Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election.In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state.And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election.“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill.“There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.The false slates, put forth in seven contested swing states, appear to have been part of a strategy by Mr. Trump’s allies to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College. After election officials in those states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed that Mr. Trump had won.“I’ve had people in my district ask me what’s being done with these folks,” said Mr. Pocan, who forwarded the names of the 10 fake pro-Trump electors from his state to Mr. Garland in his letter demanding an investigation. “Enough people kept bringing it up. If people think they can get away with some scam, they’ll try another and another.”Attorney General Dana Nessel of Michigan said this week that she believed there was enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state for submitting false certificates claiming Mr. Trump won her state’s electoral votes in 2020. She said she had handed over to federal prosecutors the results of a yearlong investigation into Republicans who signed documents in December 2020 falsely identifying themselves as Michigan’s electors. New Mexico’s attorney general, Hector Balderas Jr., referred similar allegations to federal law enforcement. And a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also recommended that state or federal prosecutors investigate fake electors in that state.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, called the fake electors a “concern.” They could also play a role as the committee considers making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.If investigators determine that the fake slates were meant to improperly influence the election, those who created them could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.Mr. Thompson’s committee this week received more than 700 pages of documents from the Trump White House related to various attempts to challenge the election, according to a National Archives log, including a draft of an executive order calling for extreme measures.The draft executive order, which was obtained by Politico and called for the military to seize voting machines and deploy the National Guard, was the subject of heated debate inside the White House in December, as the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn promoted wild conspiracies about voting machines. Others in the room, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, repeatedly and aggressively pushed back on the ideas being proposed.Mr. Raskin described the executive order as “right out of a dictator’s playbook in a banana republic.”“Slightly cooler heads may have prevailed in the moment,” he said, “but we are in the process of trying to reconstruct the history of all these events.”The flurry of interest around the actions of the fake electors comes after reports in The Washington Post, CNN and Politico revealed new details about the Trump campaign’s efforts to organize the slates. Ultimately, the efforts were rejected by Vice President Mike Pence.Though he did not directly acknowledge the existence of alternate electors as he presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, Mr. Pence did amend the traditional script read by a vice president during such proceedings, adding language making clear that alternate slates of electors offered up by states were not considered legitimate.As he ticked through the states, Mr. Pence said repeatedly that the result certified by the Electoral College, “the parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that state that purports to be a return from the state, and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the state purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.”It is not clear who first proposed that Republican-led state legislatures in key states that Mr. Biden won could replace the electors chosen by the voters with a different slate. But John Eastman, a lawyer who would later present Mr. Trump with an elaborate plan for overturning the election, was one of the first to bring the idea up publicly when he addressed Georgia lawmakers by video on Dec. 3, 2020, and advised them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”At the time, the notion was roundly ridiculed by legal scholars who dismissed it as a futile attempt to subvert the will of the voters.But a review of the steps taken by Mr. Trump’s allies to push the plan suggests that the effort was widespread and that it caught on among influential players, including those in conservative law and media circles and with White House aides.At the heart of the plan was an effort to empower Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress to hand him the election. Under the Constitution, if the Electoral College deadlocks or if no candidate receives a majority of its votes, the House of Representatives decides the victor. Each state delegation casts a single vote in these so-called “contingent elections.” Under that scenario, Mr. Trump would almost certainly have won.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Republicans Think There Is a ‘Takeover’ Happening. They Have Some Reading to Do.

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      Much of what’s in the Constitution is vague, imprecise or downright unclear. But some parts are very straightforward.For example, Article 1, Section 4 states that “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”Or, as Justice Antonin Scalia — quoting a previous ruling — argued in 2013 in his opinion for the court in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, “The power of Congress over the ‘Times, Places and Manner’ of congressional elections ‘is paramount, and may be exercised at any time, and to any extent which it deems expedient; and so far as it is exercised, and no farther, the regulations effected supersede those of the State which are inconsistent therewith.’”The legal scholar Pamela S. Karlan put it this way in a 2006 report on the Voting Rights Act: “The Supreme Court’s recent decisions under the elections clause have confirmed the longstanding interpretation of the clause as a grant of essentially plenary authority.” In other words, Congress has absolute, unbending power to regulate federal elections as it sees fit.For this reason among many, it has been strange to see Republican politicians — including some self-described “constitutional conservatives” — denounce the Democrats’ proposed new voting rights legislation as an illegitimate “federal takeover” of federal elections.In an op-ed for The Washington Post, former Vice President Mike Pence denounced the bills and the effort to pass them as a “federal power grab over our state elections” that would “offend the Founders’ intention that states conduct elections just as much as what some of our most ardent supporters would have had me do one year ago.”On Twitter, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, called the bill — which would allow for same-day voter registration, establish Election Day as a national holiday and expand mail-in voting — “an unconstitutional federal takeover of our elections” that would “make it easier to cheat.”Not to be outdone, Mitch McConnell slammed the bill as a “sweeping, partisan, federal takeover of our nation’s elections.”“We will not be letting Washington Democrats abuse their razor-thin majorities in both chambers to overrule state and local governments and appoint themselves a national Board of Elections on steroids,” the Senate Republican leader declared.Although Reeves is the only lawmaker in this group to have called the Democratic election bill “unconstitutional,” the clear implication of the Republican argument is that any federal regulation of state elections is constitutionally suspect. We already know that this is wrong — again, the Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate state elections for federal office — but it’s worth emphasizing just how wrong it is.In addition to the Supreme Court, which has affirmed — again and again — the power of Congress to set “the Times, Places and Manner” of federal elections, there are the framers of the Constitution themselves, who were clear on the broad scope of the clause in question.Alexander Hamilton defends it in Federalist 59 as a necessary bulwark against the interests of individual states, which may undermine the federal union. “Nothing can be more evident than that an exclusive power of regulating elections for the national government, in the hands of the State legislatures, would leave the existence of the Union entirely at their mercy,” Hamilton writes.“If the State legislatures were to be invested with an exclusive power of regulating these elections,” he continues, “every period of making them would be a delicate crisis in the national situation, which might issue in a dissolution of the Union.”“Every government,” he says with emphasis, “ought to contain in itself the means of its own preservation.”Similarly, as the historian Pauline Maier recounted in “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” James Madison saw the Election Clause as a measure that would “allow Congress to use its power over elections against state electoral rules that were ‘subversive of the rights of the People to a free & equal representation in Congress agreeably to the Constitution.’”The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, expanded and reaffirmed the power of Congress to regulate federal elections, stating, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and “The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”Both the Enforcement Act of 1870, which established criminal penalties for interfering with the right to vote, and the Enforcement Act of 1871, which created a system of federal oversight for congressional elections, were passed under the authority granted by the Elections Clause and the 15th Amendment. The proposed Federal Elections Bill of 1890, which would have allowed voters to request direct federal supervision of congressional elections, was also written pursuant with the government’s expressly detailed power under the Constitution.It is one thing to say that a new election bill is unnecessary and that it attempts to solve a problem that does not exist. In large part because of the efforts of voting rights activists trying to overcome the obstacles in question, voter suppression laws do not appear to have a substantial impact on rates of voting, and overall voter turnout has increased significantly since the Supreme Court undermined the Voting Rights Act in 2013.But there is no question, historically or constitutionally, that Congress has the authority to regulate federal elections and impose its rules over those adopted by the states. Nor does this have to be bipartisan. Nothing in Congress does.The 1960s were one of the few times in American history when support for voting rights — or at least the voting rights of Black Americans — did not fall along strictly partisan lines. For a part of the 19th century, Republicans took the lead as the party of expanding the vote. Today, it is the Democratic Party that hopes to secure the right to vote against a political movement whose clear ability to win votes in fair elections has not tempered its suspicion of easy and unrestricted access to the ballot.There are times when the federal government needs to take election rules out of the hands of the states. Looking at the restrictions and power grabs passed by state Republican lawmakers in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, I’d say now is one of those times. It may not happen anytime soon — the voting rights legislation in question went down in defeat this week — but it should remain a priority. The right to vote is fundamental, and any attempt to curtail it should be fought as fiercely and as aggressively as we know how.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