Perry, Scott G (1962- )

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    Republicans Who Led 2020 Election Denial Now Sowing Doubt in 2024 Votes

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    The efforts could help lay the groundwork for what could become another push to undermine the results if former President Donald J. Trump loses again.Starting in late 2020, Representative Scott Perry was one of the ringleaders of the Republican plot to use the House’s constitutional role in certifying the electoral count to delegitimize the results in a bid to help Donald J. Trump overturn the outcome.Now, Mr. Perry and a handful of his Republican colleagues are taking action to also call into question an aspect of this year’s election, helping to lay the groundwork for what could become another effort to undermine the results should Mr. Trump lose again.Mr. Perry and five other Republican members of Congress from Pennsylvania are plaintiffs in a lawsuit against their state’s government that seeks to set aside ballots from members of the military and Americans living overseas, charging that the system for verifying them is insufficient.Mr. Trump has encouraged the notion. He posted on Truth Social last month: “The Democrats are talking about how they’re working so hard to get millions of votes from Americans living overseas. Actually, they are getting ready to CHEAT!”Election officials and other experts say that the claims from Mr. Trump are meritless and that the overseas voting system is safe from fraud. Yet the case is one of about 100 filed this year by Republican allies of Mr. Trump — about 30 have been lodged so far in the two months before Election Day — many of which make unfounded claims about voter rolls and noncitizen voters.They coincide with widespread claims by Mr. Trump and others that the election will be rigged. Together they could help pave the way for yet another challenge to the results if the former president is defeated.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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      Pennsylvania Holds Its Primaries Today. Here’s What to Watch.

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      Pennsylvanians are heading to the polls on Tuesday, with a handful of House primary races in the spotlight.The contest getting the most attention is the Democratic primary in the Pittsburgh-based 12th District, where Representative Summer Lee, who has been outspoken in support of a cease-fire in Gaza, is facing Bhavini Patel, who has attacked Ms. Lee as anti-Israel and outside the political mainstream.Ms. Lee, a first-term representative who is part of the progressive “Squad” and narrowly won her primary in 2022 over a more centrist candidate, was one of the first members of Congress to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza and call for an immediate cease-fire. That angered some Jewish voters in her district, though national pro-Israel groups like AIPAC have not gotten involved in her race, as they have in others. Ms. Patel has been vastly outraised in the contest, and the once-expected ideological battle over Israel has fizzled in much of the district.On the other side of the aisle and the state — in the First District, in the suburbs north of Philadelphia — Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the most moderate Republicans in the House, is facing a primary challenge from an anti-abortion activist, Mark Houck.Mr. Fitzpatrick is one of a small number of Republicans representing districts that Joseph R. Biden Jr. carried in 2020. He won his last two general elections with relative ease. But if Republican voters nominate Mr. Houck — who was acquitted last year of charges that involved assaulting a Planned Parenthood volunteer outside an abortion clinic — it could make the district more competitive for Democrats, given the political potency of abortion.Two other primaries may also set up competitive general-election contests.In the Seventh District, three Republicans are vying to face Representative Susan Wild, a Democrat who won by just two points in 2022. And in the 10th District, six Democrats are running to face Representative Scott Perry, a Republican who was closely involved with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The presidential and Senate races are also on the ballot, but are not competitive. Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump clinched their respective nominations last month, and Senator Bob Casey and his Republican challenger, David McCormick, are running unopposed in their primaries.The polls are open until 8 p.m. Eastern time. More

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      Judge Gives Prosecutors Access to G.O.P. Lawmaker’s Messages in Jan. 6 Case

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      The roughly 1,700 messages are from the cellphone of Representative Scott Perry, who was involved in discussions with Trump administration officials about overturning the election.A federal judge has allowed the special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election access to about 1,700 messages from the seized phone of Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.Mr. Perry, the chairman of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus who played a role in attempts to overturn the election, had sought to keep the messages from prosecutors. But in an order late Tuesday, James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, prohibited federal prosecutors from retrieving just 396 messages from more than 2,000.Judge Boasberg wrote that those messages were covered by the Constitution’s speech or debate clause, which provides protections for lawmakers’ legislative discussions, while also ordering that a majority be turned over.The messages could offer additional evidence for Jack Smith, the special counsel leading the federal election case against Mr. Trump. Judge Boasberg said they concerned Mr. Perry’s attempts to get information about possible voter fraud; influence people outside the federal government; discuss Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory; and communicate about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.A lawyer for Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.As federal officials investigated the effort to overturn the 2020 election, the F.B.I. seized Mr. Perry’s personal cellphone in the summer of 2022 and created a forensic copy of its contents. The F.B.I. later returned the phone and told Mr. Perry he was not the target of the investigation, his lawyer said at the time.“The Justice Department informed us that Representative Perry is not a target of its investigation,” the lawyer, John Irving, said in a statement. “Representative Perry has directed us to cooperate with the Justice Department in order to ensure that it gets the information it is entitled to, but to also protect information that it is not entitled to.”Mr. Perry then filed a motion to prohibit investigators from getting the messages, arguing that they were protected under the Constitution. He lost that motion, but an appellate court ordered a judge to review the communications on a document-by-document basis.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry was among at least 11 Republican members of Congress involved in discussions with Trump administration officials about overturning the results, according to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack. Those included plans to pressure Mr. Pence to throw out electoral votes from states won by Mr. Biden. Mr. Perry also endorsed the idea of encouraging supporters to march to the Capitol, the committee said.He played an active role in the attempt to replace Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, with a more compliant official, Jeffrey Clark. More

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      The People Who Broke the House

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      When it comes to Congress, Americans have come to expect a certain baseline of dysfunction. But I think most of us can agree that the current House Republican majority is something special. Overthrowing a speaker for the first time in history. Rejecting multiple nominees to replace him. Members publicly trashing one another. One faction’s supporters threatening opposing members.And so here we languish, with the government’s most basic functions held hostage by a conference divided over everything from ideological differences to petty personal slights: Candidate X broke his promise! Candidate Y ignores me! Candidate Z never votes for my bills! It’s like watching a pack of middle-schoolers hopped up on hormones and Skittles.To help make sense of this dark farce, it is useful to dig into the warring factions that have already destroyed the speaker dreams of multiple colleagues. Boiling down the action so far: A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy. Then a larger group of hard-liners quashed the candidacy of Steve Scalise, the majority leader, before it even came up for a floor vote, with an eye toward elevating one of their own, the chronically belligerent Jim Jordan. But a coalition of moderates, institutionalists and members who just can’t stomach Mr. Jordan struck back, voting him down again and again and again — and again, if you count Friday’s closed-conference ballot effectively stripping him of the nomination.The Republicans Who Blocked Jordan and McCarthy From the SpeakershipAcross four votes in the House, both conservative and moderate Republican holdouts ousted Kevin McCarthy and denied Jim Jordan the speaker’s gavel. The colored dots show where those holdouts fall on the ideological spectrum, based on their voting records. More

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      Many Republicans Against McCarthy Sought to Overturn 2020 Election

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      WASHINGTON — They helped lead the efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election. They refused to certify that President Biden was the rightful winner. They spread lies that helped ignite a mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On Friday, the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, many of the same hard-right lawmakers who served as top lieutenants to Mr. Trump during the buildup to the assault spent the day blocking the bid of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be speaker and extracting major concessions from him. While some had received subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigations and were later referred to the House Ethics Committee, their power showed they were far from outcasts and had paid little price for their actions. Among the ringleaders in both the effort to block Mr. McCarthy and the push to overturn the 2020 election were Representative Scott Perry, the leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona. (On Friday, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Perry swung behind Mr. McCarthy after he caved to their demands to dilute the power of the post he is seeking and to give their faction more sway in the House.)Other hard-right holdouts who for days have refused to vote for Mr. McCarthy were Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Harris of Maryland. All three met with Mr. Trump or White House officials as they discussed how to fight the election results, according to evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. 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.(Mr. Harris flipped his vote to support Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, but Ms. Boebert and Mr. Gaetz remained against him.) Democrats made sure to single out the group.“This January 6th anniversary should serve as a wake-up call to the G.O.P. to reject M.A.G.A. radicalism — which keeps leading to G.O.P. failures,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. “But the pandemonium wrought by House Republicans this week is one more example of how M.A.G.A. radicalism is making it impossible for them to govern.” No one in the hard-right group attended what was billed as a bipartisan ceremony on Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary. Only one Republican of any stripe turned up: Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former F.B.I. agent who is the co-chairman of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. The ceremony opened with a moment of silence for House members on the steps of the Capitol to honor the Capitol Police officers who died in the year after the attack.“We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, as tears welled up in some House members’ eyes. Witnesses who testified before the House investigative committee, including police officers who defended the Capitol, were honored at the White House, including Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, and Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, and Eugene Goodman of the U.S. Capitol Police. Mr. Perry, who was one of the main architects behind a plan to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud, said Friday that he fought Mr. McCarthy’s nomination for speaker until he could extract concessions from him to give the House Freedom Caucus and rank-and-file Republicans more influence over leadership. “This place is broken,” Mr. Perry said. “We weren’t going to move from that position until the change is made.” Mr. Biggs, who was still holding out against Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, was involved in a range of organizational efforts in 2020, including meetings aimed at attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6, according to the House Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to support him on Friday, spread numerous lies about the 2020 election and spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies arranged by Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. The House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack has referred Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs to the Ethics Committee for refusing to comply with its subpoenas. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules.“We believe that there ought to be fundamental changes about and limits on spending after the massive bloated omnibus spending bill in December,” Mr. Roy said, referring to the $1.7 trillion government funding package passed by Congress last month. “And so we’ve talked about those. We’ve put a lot of those things in place.” More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Accuses Trump of Insurrection and Refers Him to Justice Dept.

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      WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the referrals.Mr. Trump attacked the committee as “highly partisan” ahead of a final meeting the panel held on Monday to release an executive summary of its final report on the Capitol attack and to vote on referring the former president to the Justice Department.“It’s a kangaroo court,” Mr. Trump said Monday on “The Dan Bongino Show.” “The people aren’t going to stand for it.” He elaborated on that theme in a post on Truth Social, his social media network, after the meeting.“These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me,” he said, adding that he “told everyone to go home” on Jan. 6, but leaving out his hours of inaction before that while a mob of his supporters rampaged through the Capitol.Republicans, who have vowed to investigate the committee after they take control of the House in January, mounted a modest response. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, was one of the few to react with a statement, accusing the committee of staging a “partisan charade.” She promised that Republicans “will hold House Democrats accountable for their illegitimate abuse of power.”The executive summary, a 154-page narrative of Mr. Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, identifies co-conspirators who aided Mr. Trump. But it singles out the former president as the primary cause of the mob violence.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary stated. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”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.The summary closely follows the evidence from the committee’s 10 previous public hearings, but the facts have been assembled into a readable narrative that amounts to an astonishing story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to effectively overthrow the government he led. The committee is expected to release a lengthy final report on Wednesday.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chairwoman of the committee, said at the start of the meeting.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said of Mr. Trump: “Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order.”The action is the culmination of the committee’s intense 18-month investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe summary and referrals have now set up a dynamic without parallel in the annals of American campaigns: Congress asking the Justice Department of an incumbent president to consider criminal charges against the president’s potential opponent in the next election. President Biden has indicated his intent to run in 2024, and Mr. Trump announced his re-election campaign last month.The summary laid out step by step how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power, much as the committee did during its televised hearings in the summer. First, the summary said, Mr. Trump lied about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false. He then organized false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden as he pressured state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. Finally, he amassed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“Even key individuals who worked closely with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6 ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful,” the committee wrote.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe panel also referred four Republican members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee — including the man seeking to become the next speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — because of their refusal to comply with the panel’s subpoenas.Mr. McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.The other Republicans referred were Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona.A spokesman for Mr. Jordan, Russell Dye, said in a statement that the referral was “just another partisan and political stunt.” A spokesman for Mr. Perry, Jay Ostrich, said the committee was engaged in “more games from a petulant and soon-to-be kangaroo court.’’Mr. Biggs said in a tweet that the referral was the committee’s “final political stunt” and that he looked forward to “reviewing their documents, publishing their lies and setting the record straight” in the next Congress.In its summary, the committee did not entirely resolve disputed accounts of what happened inside the presidential S.U.V. when Mr. Trump was told by his Secret Service agents that they could not take him to the Capitol to join the crowd on Jan. 6. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, testified under oath to the committee in public last summer that Anthony M. Ornato, a White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Mr. Trump grew so angry that he lunged at his Secret Service agent and tried to grab the steering wheel. The Secret Service denied that account anonymously.The summary said only that the “committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’” that occurred in the S.U.V. “The vast majority of witnesses who have testified to the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the Secret Service, a member of the Metropolitan Police and national security officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate,’ ‘furious,’ ‘insistent,’ ‘profane’ and ‘heated.’”The committee’s summary also concluded that there was no nefarious reason for why the National Guard was delayed for hours in responding to violence of Jan. 6.“Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard,” the committee wrote. “The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”In its summary, the panel asked the Justice Department to investigate whether anyone had interfered with or obstructed the panel’s investigation, including whether any lawyers paid for by groups connected to Mr. Trump “may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the committee.”Among the committee’s findings, revealed at its meeting on Monday, was that lawmakers became concerned that lawyers who were paid by Trump associates may have tried to interfere with the panel’s investigation. The panel also learned that a client was offered potential employment that would make her “financially very comfortable” as the date of her testimony approached. But then offers were withdrawn or did not materialize as reports of the content of her testimony circulated, the committee said.The committee also chastised certain witnesses that it said had not been forthright with investigators. It said it had “significant concerns about the credibility” of the testimony of Mr. Ornato.The committee also said Kayleigh McEnany, one of Mr. Trump’s former press secretaries, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, had been less than forthcoming.The summary demonstrated, as the committee’s hearings did, how despite being told repeatedly that his claims of election fraud were false, Mr. Trump kept up the lies.Bill Stepien, a former White House political director, told the committee how he and others would investigate the claims, find them to be false, and report back to the president. “It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Mr. Stepien said. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”The summary also contained evidence that certain White House aides had grown concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and urged Mr. Trump to make a pre-emptive statement calling for peace. No such statement was made.Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, said she suggested “several times” on Jan. 4 and 5 that Mr. Trump “publicly state that Jan. 6 must remain peaceful, and that he had refused her advice to do so,” the panel wrote.The panel played new video from Ms. Hicks, who described a conversation with Mr. Trump.“I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy,” Ms. Hicks said she told the president.Mr. Trump’s response? “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose, so that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning,” she recalled him saying.Supporters of Mr. Trump confronting Capitol Police officers outside the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhile the executive summary of the report focused heavily on Mr. Trump, it did conclude some findings about law enforcement failures, a topic not previously addressed at the panel’s hearings. “No analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6,” the committee wrote, although the “intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol.”Over the past year and a half, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, obtained more than one million documents, issued more than 100 subpoenas and held hearings that drew millions of viewers.The House created the Jan. 6 committee after Senate Republicans used a filibuster to defeat a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate the attack.The committee — made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans — consistently broke new ground for a congressional investigation. Staffed with more than a dozen former federal prosecutors, the panel set a new production standard for how to hold a congressional hearing. It also got significantly ahead of a parallel Justice Department investigation into the events of Jan. 6, with federal prosecutors later interviewing many of the same witnesses Congress had spoken to.In recent weeks, federal prosecutors under the supervision of a special counsel have issued subpoenas to officials in seven states in which the Trump campaign organized electors to falsely certify the election for Mr. Trump despite the voters choosing Mr. Biden.Lawmakers on the panel also believe they played a significant role in elevating the issue of threats to democracy to voters, who rejected many election deniers in the November midterms.In terms of legislative recommendations, the panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6 in an attempt to cling to power. Lawmakers have also discussed changes to the Insurrection Act and legislation to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists holding office. Those recommendations are expected to be detailed in the committee’s final report.Katie Benner More

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      F.B.I. Seizure of Scott Perry’s Phone Is Sign of Escalating Election Inquiry

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      Representative Scott Perry’s lawyer said he was told he is not a target of the Justice Department’s expanding inquiry into one element of the effort to keep Donald J. Trump in power after his loss in 2020.The F.B.I.’s seizure of Representative Scott Perry’s phone this week was at least the third major action in recent months taken in connection with an escalating federal investigation into efforts by several close allies of former President Donald J. Trump to overturn the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.The inquiry, which was begun last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office, has already ensnared Jeffrey Clark, a former department official whom Mr. Trump wanted to install atop the agency to help him press his baseless claims of election fraud, and John Eastman, an outside lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on brazen proposals to overturn the vote result.In June, federal agents acting on search warrants from the inspector general’s office seized phones and other electronic devices from Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman. That same tactic was used on Tuesday to seize the phone of Mr. Perry, a Republican of Pennsylvania.While the inspector general’s office had initial jurisdiction in the probe because Mr. Clark was an employee of the department, there have been signs in recent days that the investigation is increasingly being run by prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. One of those prosecutors, Thomas P. Windom, is in charge of a broad investigation of a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to create fake slates of electors to the Electoral College in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.It remains unclear exactly how — or even if — the inquiry into Mr. Perry, Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman is entwined with the broader investigation. In that inquiry, prosecutors are seeking to determine whether a group of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and several of his allies in state legislatures and state Republican parties broke the law by creating pro-Trump slates of electors in states he did not win and later by using them to disrupt a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, where the final results of the election were certified.Mr. Clark, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Perry all played roles in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office, according to extensive evidence gathered by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House select committee that is looking into the events of Jan. 6. The men also each had direct dealings with Mr. Trump, meaning the inquiry could ultimately lead to the former president.At a series of public hearings, the House committee showed, for instance, how Mr. Eastman, a constitutional scholar, was one of the chief architects of the fake elector plan, advising Mr. Trump on its viability and encouraging lawmakers in some key swing states to go along with it.Mr. Eastman also took part in a campaign to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to use the fake slates of electors to disrupt or delay the normal counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 in the effort to hand Mr. Trump the election.A video clip of John Eastman speaking at a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, with Rudolph W. Giuliani. The House committee showed Mr. Eastman, a constitutional scholar, was one of the chief architects of the fake elector plan seeking to overturn the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Jan. 6 panel have further documented how, in December 2020, Mr. Clark helped to draft a letter to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia falsely claiming that the Justice Department had evidence that the vote results in the state might have been marred by fraud. The letter, which was never sent, advised Mr. Kemp, a Republican, to rectify the problem by calling a special session of his state’s General Assembly to create “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump.”Mr. Perry was instrumental in pushing Mr. Trump to appoint Mr. Clark as his acting attorney general over the objections of several other top officials at the Justice Department. At one of its presentations, the House committee released text messages in which Mr. Perry repeatedly pressured Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, to reach out to Mr. Clark.The House committee issued a subpoena to Mr. Perry in May, but he declined to comply with it. Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman were also subpoenaed by the committee and repeatedly invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.On Wednesday, after Mr. Perry received his phone back from investigators, prosecutors told him that he was a witness in, not a subject of, their inquiry, according to one of his lawyers, John Irving. More

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      What the Jan. 6 Panel Wants to Learn From 5 G.O.P. Lawmakers

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      The committee’s subpoenas to five House Republicans underscore the potential importance of their testimony to producing a full account of the effort to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — In deciding to take the highly unusual step of issuing subpoenas to five Republican members of Congress, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack concluded that trying to compel their testimony was important enough to justify an escalatory step involving their colleagues.All five of the Republicans subpoenaed on Thursday have previously refused to appear voluntarily before the committee. The most prominent of them, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, is his party’s leader in the House and in line to become speaker if Republicans win control of the chamber in November. He has sought legal advice in recent months on how to fight a subpoena, though he has yet to say how he will respond to the panel’s action.But the committee has made clear that it believes all five may have information that is important to its efforts to document efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a pro-Trump mob.Here are the subjects that the committee could be interested in hearing about from each of the five Republicans.Representative Kevin McCarthyThe committee is seeking to question Mr. McCarthy about conversations he had with Mr. Trump during and after the attack about his culpability in the assault and what should be done to address it. The committee has also suggested that Mr. Trump, whose political support is vital to Mr. McCarthy, may have influenced the congressman’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation.Mr. McCarthy has acknowledged getting into a heated argument with Mr. Trump during the Capitol attack, in which the president appeared to side with the rioters as they were tearing through the grounds.According to Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican who has said that Mr. McCarthy recounted the exchange to her, Mr. Trump ignored Mr. McCarthy’s pleas to call off the rioters and sided with them instead, saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”Interest in the details of those conversations has only increased in light of leaked audio in which Mr. McCarthy told colleagues that Mr. Trump had expressed feeling partly responsible for the attack.The audio, obtained by The New York Times and released in April, showed Mr. McCarthy recounting an exchange with the former president, in which he claimed Mr. Trump had been relatively contrite about how his language concerning the election might have contributed to the riot.“Does he feel bad about what happened? He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened, and he’d need to acknowledge that,” Mr. McCarthy said in the recording.Earlier, Mr. McCarthy had told colleagues that he was going to push Mr. Trump to resign.Representative Scott PerryThe committee first publicly approached Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania in December with a letter requesting information, in the panel’s first formal attempt to interview a sitting member of Congress.Committee members have argued that Mr. Perry, who leads the deeply conservative House Freedom Caucus, was one of main architects behind a plan to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud.Mr. Clark appeared eager to pursue various conspiracy theories about hacked voting booths and other forms of election fraud, as well as to pressure state elections officials to overturn results in Georgia.Committee members and investigators have said that Mr. Perry introduced Mr. Clark and the former president. They have also found evidence that Mr. Perry was frequently in touch with Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, over encrypted messaging services in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6.After the election, Mr. Perry helped assemble a dossier of purported instances of voter fraud and also encouraged Mr. Trump’s supporters to take part in the march on the Capitol that resulted in the riot.Mr. Perry, a former Army helicopter pilot who is close to Mr. Meadows and another of the Republicans now under subpoena, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, coordinated many of the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in office. His colleagues referred to him as General Perry; he retired from the Pennsylvania National Guard in 2019.Representative Mo BrooksMembers of the committee have expressed interest in testimony from Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama after he broke with Mr. Trump and accused the former president of pressing him to find a way to remove President Biden from power.While Mr. Brooks was initially among Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies in questioning the election outcome, their relationship soured after the former president withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in the Republican primary for Alabama’s Senate seat in March.Before then, Mr. Brooks had campaigned on false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. He had been one of the speakers alongside Mr. Trump at the rally in Washington that preceded the riot.But after the former president withdrew his endorsement, Mr. Brooks came forward with startling claims that Mr. Trump had repeatedly called on him to find a way to invalidate the election and somehow remove Mr. Biden. If the assertions are true, they would show that Mr. Trump continued his efforts to overturn the outcome long after leaving office. Mr. Trump has not denied making the statements.“President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” Mr. Brooks said in a statement in March.His account of the conversations was the first time a lawmaker close to Mr. Trump had suggested that the former president had encouraged steps that, if taken, would have violated federal law.Representative Andy BiggsIn a letter to Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona in May, the committee’s leaders described evidence linking the congressman to a range of organizational efforts including “planning meetings” aimed at attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6.The letter also described a scheme by several House Republicans to seek presidential pardons for “activities taken in connection with President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”“Your name was identified as a potential participant in that effort,” it said.It is unclear whether Mr. Biggs or other House Republicans formally approached Mr. Trump about what would amount to a pre-emptive pardon, or what crime those pardons would have been for. Mr. Biggs declined this week to answer questions about the potential pardons.A former leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, Mr. Biggs also tried to persuade state legislators to join Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election.Representative Jim JordanAs one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest defenders in Congress, Mr. Jordan stood by him through several ordeals during his presidency, including operating as his chief defender during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment proceeding.In the weeks after the election, Mr. Jordan met regularly with White House advisers to coordinate messaging about the outcome, often following up with false claims of fraud during media appearances.Members and investigators on the House panel have pushed aggressively for details surrounding conversations between Mr. Jordan and Mr. Trump on the day of the riot, after call records indicated that the two spoke over the phone that morning.Mr. Jordan was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to fight the election results, including participating in planning meetings in November 2020 at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., and a meeting at the White House in December 2020.On Jan. 5, 2021, Mr. Jordan forwarded to Mr. Meadows a text message he had received from a lawyer and former Pentagon inspector general outlining a legal strategy to overturn the election.“On Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence,” the text read.Mr. Jordan has acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, though he has said that he cannot remember how many times they spoke that day or when the calls occurred. One of Mr. Jordan’s conversations with Mr. Trump that day, a 10-minute phone call, was included in the official White House call log. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas 5 Republicans, Including McCarthy

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      The leaders of the House committee investigating the Capitol attack demanded testimony from Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, and four of his colleagues.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to five Republican members of Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, a significant escalation as it digs deeper into the role Republicans played in attempts to overturn the 2020 election.The panel’s move was an extraordinary step in the annals of congressional investigations — a committee targeting sitting lawmakers, including a top party leader, who have refused to cooperate in a major inquiry into the largest attack on the Capitol in centuries.It reflected the belief among investigators that a group of Republican members of Congress loyal to former President Donald J. Trump had played crucial roles in the events that led to the assault on their own institution, and may have hidden what they know about Mr. Trump’s intentions and actions before, during and after the attack.Mr. McCarthy, the Californian who is in line to be speaker if his party wins the House majority in November, had a heated phone call with Mr. Trump during the riot, in which he implored the president to call off the mob invading the Capitol in his name. When Mr. Trump declined, according to Representative Jaime Herrera Buetler, a Washington Republican who has said Mr. McCarthy recounted the exchange to her, Mr. Trump sided with the rioters, saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”Mr. McCarthy also told fellow Republican leaders privately days later that Mr. Trump had conceded in another phone call that he bore “some responsibility” for the attack.The panel also issued subpoenas for other Republicans who it said played central roles in the former president’s scheme to use Congress to help him overturn the 2020 election. Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general after he resisted Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voting fraud. Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Mr. Trump’s most outspoken defenders, was deeply involved in the effort to invalidate the election results.Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama was a ringleader of the Republican effort to lodge formal challenges to the counting of electoral votes from battleground states on Jan. 6, 2021, and has said Mr. Trump has pressured him in the months since to help reinstate him to the presidency. The committee also summoned Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the former leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus who tried to persuade state legislators to join Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election.All five have refused requests for voluntary interviews about the roles they played in the buildup to the attack by supporters of the former president who believed his lie of widespread election fraud, and most continued to denigrate the committee after the subpoenas were issued.Mr. McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday that he had not yet seen the subpoena.The panel wants to question Representative Andy Biggs about evidence it had obtained on efforts by certain House Republicans to seek a presidential pardon after Jan. 6.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“My view on the committee has not changed,” he said. “They’re not conducting a legitimate investigation. It seems as though they just want to go after their political opponents.”Mr. Perry called the investigation “a charade” and a “political witch hunt” by Democrats that is “about fabricating headlines and distracting the Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground.”The subpoenas come as the committee is preparing for a series of public hearings next month to reveal its findings. The eight hearings are scheduled to take place over several weeks beginning on June 9, some during prime time in an effort to attract a large television audience.“The select committee has learned that several of our colleagues have information relevant to our investigation into the attack on Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “Before we hold our hearings next month, we wished to provide members the opportunity to discuss these matters with the committee voluntarily. Regrettably, the individuals receiving subpoenas today have refused, and we’re forced to take this step to help ensure the committee uncovers facts concerning Jan. 6.”The committee’s leaders had been reluctant to issue subpoenas to their fellow lawmakers. It is a rare step for a congressional panel, other than the House Ethics Committee, which is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by members.For weeks, members and investigators on the special House panel have privately agonized over how aggressively to pursue sitting members of Congress, weighing their desire for information about lawmakers’ direct interactions with Mr. Trump against the potential legal difficulty and political consequences of doing so.Behind closed doors, committee and staff members researched the law, parliamentary rules and past precedents before deciding to proceed, people familiar with the inquiry said.In letters to the lawmakers sent on Thursday, Mr. Thompson wrote that their refusal to cooperate had left the panel with “no choice” but to issue subpoenas.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, said the decision was not made lightly. “It’s a reflection of how important and serious the investigation is, and how grave the attack on the Capitol was,” she said.The subpoena to Mr. McCarthy is particularly noteworthy given his position at the top of his party. Should he refuse to comply, it could set in motion a process that could lead to a Democratic-controlled House holding him in contempt of Congress as the midterm elections loom.The committee has thus far recommended four criminal contempt of Congress charges against witnesses who have refused to cooperate. That charge carries up to a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.Panel members declined to comment on Thursday about whether they would recommend a charge against the sitting Republican lawmakers should they refuse to comply.Representative Liz Cheney said the decision to issue subpoenas was not made lightly.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesMr. McCarthy has long feared being subpoenaed in the investigation. In recent months, he has been in discussions with William A. Burck, a longtime Washington lawyer, about how to fight a subpoena.Congressional Republicans were deeply involved in several aspects of the plans to keep Mr. Trump in office: They joined baseless lawsuits, spread the lie of widespread election fraud and objected on Jan. 6 to certifying President Biden’s victory in multiple states.The committee wants to question Mr. McCarthy about conversations he had after the attack about the president’s culpability in the assault and what should be done to address it. The committee has also suggested that Mr. Trump may have influenced Mr. McCarthy’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation.Mr. McCarthy issued a blistering statement in January condemning the committee as illegitimate and saying he would not cooperate with its inquiry. He has argued that the panel was violating the privacy of Republicans through subpoenas for bank and phone records. Mr. McCarthy also denounced Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California for having rejected two of his five choices to sit on the panel, one of whom was Mr. Jordan, and boycotted the inquiry.Ms. Pelosi added two Republicans of her choosing — Ms. Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both outspoken critics of Mr. Trump — to the panel.The committee informed Mr. Jordan by letter in December that its investigators wanted to question him about his communications in the run-up to the Capitol riot. Those include Mr. Jordan’s messages with Mr. Trump and his legal team as well as others involved in planning rallies on Jan. 6 and congressional objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry, a member of Congress since 2013 who is close to Mr. Jordan, compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations and coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general, who was resisting Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, with a more compliant official. Mr. Perry also endorsed the idea of encouraging Mr. Trump’s supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6.In a letter to Mr. Biggs, the committee’s leaders wrote that they wanted to question him about evidence they had obtained about efforts by certain House Republicans to seek a presidential pardon after Jan. 6 in connection with Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.And the panel said it wanted to question Mr. Brooks about statements he made in March claiming that Mr. Trump had asked him repeatedly in the months since the election to illegally “rescind” the results, remove Mr. Biden and force a special election so that Mr. Trump could return to the presidency.The panel has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with witnesses, but needed to hear from members of Congress who were involved in the president’s plans, said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, who called the subpoenas a “big step” for the inquiry.“What I’m most concerned about is that if Republicans should ever get near the gavel, that they will overturn the next election if Trump loses again,” Mr. Schiff said, adding that more subpoenas for members of Congress were “possible.”The Republicans could argue that their official actions — such as objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory on the floor of the House on Jan. 6 — are protected by the so-called speech or debate clause of the Constitution, intended to preserve the independence of the legislative branch.The clause says that senators and representatives “shall not be questioned in any other place” about any speech or debate in either chamber. It has been broadly interpreted to cover all legislative actions, not just words. On its face, however, that clause is limited to questioning them in “other” places, like courtrooms.The committee has also sought an interview with Representative Ronny Jackson of Texas, Mr. Trump’s former White House doctor, about why he was mentioned in encrypted messages from the Oath Keepers militia group, some of whose members have been charged criminally in connection with the attack.Mr. Jackson has also refused to voluntarily cooperate, but he was not among those issued a subpoena on Thursday.Ms. Pelosi declined to comment on the action. Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, said he was not worried about whether Republicans would try to seek revenge by issuing their own subpoenas of Democratic lawmakers if they won the House.“We ought to all be subject to being asked to tell the truth before a committee that is seeking information that is important to our country and our democracy,” Mr. Hoyer said.Michael S. Schmidt More