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      Tears, Screaming and Insults: Inside an ‘Unhinged’ Meeting to Keep Trump in Power

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      Even by the standards of the Trump White House, a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, that was highlighted Tuesday by the Jan. 6 committee was extreme.In taped interviews, witnesses described a meeting in which President Donald J. Trump’s outside advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe meeting lasted for more than six hours, past midnight, and devolved into shouting that could be heard outside the room. Participants hurled insults and nearly came to blows. Some people left in tears.Even by the standards of the Trump White House, where people screamed at one another and President Donald J. Trump screamed at them, the Dec. 18, 2020, meeting became known as an “unhinged” event — and an inflection point in Mr. Trump’s desperate efforts to remain in power after he had lost the election.Details of the meeting have been reported before, including by The New York Times and Axios, but at a public hearing on Tuesday of the Jan. 6 committee, participants in the mayhem offered a series of jolting new details of the meeting between Mr. Trump and rival factions of advisers.“It got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there,” Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, told the committee in videotaped testimony. “I mean, you got people walking in — it was late at night, it had been a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”The proposal, to have the president direct the secretary of defense to seize voting machines to examine for fraud and also to appoint a special counsel to potentially charge people with crimes, had been hatched by three outside advisers: Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign who promoted conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig the voting machines; Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser Mr. Trump fired in his first weeks in office; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com.On the other side were Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel; Mr. Herschmann; and Derek Lyons, the White House staff secretary.The arguing began soon after Ms. Powell and her two companions were let into the White House by a junior aide and wandered to the Oval Office without an appointment.They were there alone with Mr. Trump for about 15 minutes before other officials were alerted to their presence. Mr. Cipollone recounted receiving an urgent call from a staff member to get to the Oval Office.“I opened the door and I walked in. I saw General Flynn,” he said in a videotaped interview the committee played at the hearing on Tuesday. “I saw Sidney Powell sitting there. I was not happy to see the people who were in the Oval Office.”Asked to explain why, Mr. Cipollone said, “First of all, the Overstock person, I’ve never met, I never knew who this guy was.” The first thing he did, Mr. Cipollone said, was say to Mr. Byrne, “Who are you?” “And he told me,” Mr. Cipollone said. “I don’t think any of these people were providing the president with good advice.”Mr. Lyons and Mr. Herschmann joined the group. “It was not a casual meeting,” Mr. Lyons told the committee in videotaped testimony. “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other. It wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chitchatting.”Sidney Powell’s videotaped testimony, in which she said White House advisers had “contempt and disdain for the president,” was shown during Tuesday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Powell, in her videotaped interview, described Mr. Trump as “very interested in hearing” what she and her two cohorts had to say, things that “apparently nobody else had bothered to inform him of.”Mr. Herschmann said he was flabbergasted by what he was hearing.“And I was asking, like, are you claiming the Democrats were working with Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans and whomever else? And at one point, General Flynn took out a diagram that supposedly showed IP addresses all over the world and who was communicating with whom via the machines. And some comment about, like, Nest thermostats being hooked up to the internet.”When the White House officials pointed out to Ms. Powell that she had lost dozens of lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, she replied, “Well, the judges are corrupt.”“I’m like, everyone?” Mr. Herschmann testified. “Every single case that you’ve done in the country that you guys lost? Every one of them is corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?”Ms. Powell testified that Mr. Trump’s White House advisers “showed nothing but contempt and disdain for the president.”The plan, the White House advisers learned, was for Ms. Powell to become the special counsel. This did not go over well.“I don’t think Sidney Powell would say that I thought it was a good idea to appoint her special counsel,” Mr. Cipollone testified. “I didn’t think she should be appointed anything.”Mr. Cipollone also testified that he was alarmed by the insistence of Ms. Powell and the others that there had been election fraud when there was no evidence. “When other people kept suggesting that there was, the answer is, what is it? At some point, you have to put up or shut up. That was my view.”Mr. Herschmann described a particularly intense moment. “Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything, kept on standing up and standing around and screaming at me. At a certain point, I had it with him, so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your f-ing ass back down.’”Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, could hear the shouting from outside the Oval Office. She texted a deputy chief of staff, Anthony M. Ornato, that the West Wing was “UNHINGED.”After the meeting had started, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, was called in by the White House advisers to argue against Ms. Powell. Eventually the meeting migrated to the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, where Mr. Giuliani found himself alone at one point, something he told the committee he found “kind of cool.”Finally, the group ended up in the White House residence.Ms. Powell believed that she had been appointed special counsel, something that Mr. Trump declared he wanted, including that she should have a security clearance, which other aides opposed. She testified that others said that even if that happened, they would ignore her. She said she would have “fired” them on the spot for such insubordination.Mr. Trump, she said, told her something to the effect of: “You see what I deal with? I deal with this all the time.”Eventually Mr. Trump backed down and rejected the outside advisers’ proposal. But early the next morning, Dec. 19, he posted to Twitter urging his supporters to arrive at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the day that a joint session of Congress was set to certify the Electoral College results.“Be there, will be wild!” he wrote. More

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      What Happened on Dec. 18 at ‘the Craziest Meeting of the Trump Presidency’?

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      Digging into the aftermath of the 2020 election, members of the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday focused on a meeting between former President Donald J. Trump and outside advisers that devolved into what they described as a chaotic confrontation over a desperate attempt to overturn the election.Drawing from testimony from former Attorney General William P. Barr and others, the committee described in detail a hastily organized meeting in which advisers proposed an executive order to have the military seize voting machines in crucial states Mr. Trump had lost.“On Friday, Dec. 18, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland. “The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal, and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”According to the panel, in the weeks before the meeting in December, several of Mr. Trump’s advisers including Mr. Barr and Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel, had publicly and privately dismissed the possibility of wide-scale voter fraud, and urged Mr. Trump to concede. Mr. Barr made a public announcement on Dec. 1 to affirm that he had not found significant evidence of fraud.Just four days before the meeting, on Dec. 14, the Electoral College met to certify the election results, which in a taped interview Mr. Barr told the committee “should have been the end of the matter.”But on the evening of Dec. 18, several of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers, including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, came to Mr. Trump to urge him to consider the plan to seize voting machines.As the meeting grew heated, Mr. Cipollone told the committee that other plans were discussed, including to grant Ms. Powell a security clearance and name her special counsel, putting her in charge of Mr. Trump’s legal effort to contest the election results.The meeting lasted hours, moving from the Oval Office to other areas of the West Wing before ending in the presidential residence, according to the committee. And arguments broke out throughout the evening, including “challenges to physically fight,” Mr. Raskin said.In a taped interview presented on Tuesday, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary, said, “At times, there were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other — it wasn’t just sort of people sitting around on a couch like chit-chatting.”The panel showed evidence suggesting that the meeting ended around midnight, without agreement among participants on how to proceed.But committee members used the hearing on Tuesday to suggest that as Mr. Trump apparently grew frustrated with the lack of options to contest the election results during the meeting in December, it was in that moment that he turned to his supporters, encouraging them to come to Washington on Jan 6.Just over an hour after the meeting was said to have ended, Mr. Trump tweeted at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19 that it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost the election. In the tweet, he also urged supporters to gather in Washington to demonstrate, drawing dozens of responses from people sharing plans to occupy the Capitol building and photos of weapons they said they planned to bring.“Be there, will be wild,” the tweet said. More

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      How Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House Counsel, Could Help the Jan. 6 Panel

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      Pat A. Cipollone, President Donald J. Trump’s second and final White House counsel, appeared for a videotaped, transcribed interview with the House Jan. 6 committee last week after being subpoenaed, and his testimony could help the panel flesh out episodes at the heart of its investigation.Mr. Cipollone — who also sat for an informal interview with the committee in April — was present for several key meetings related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power and subvert the results of the 2020 election. Several witnesses have described Mr. Cipollone as opposing those efforts at critical moments.In particular, Mr. Cipollone was at a meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in the Oval Office. During that meeting, Mr. Trump entertained proposals from his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn; a lawyer, Sidney Powell; and Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, to use the military or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines to look for electoral fraud.Since Mr. Cipollone’s informal appearance in April, the committee has heard from many additional witnesses. One of them — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff in the final year of the Trump administration — provided the committee with extensive testimony about Mr. Trump’s actions and statements ahead of the Capitol riot and during it, as well as about conversations she said she had with senior advisers.Ms. Hutchinson described a conversation with Mr. Cipollone in which he cautioned against Mr. Trump traveling to the Capitol with his supporters after his planned speech at a rally at the Ellipse, near the White House.In Ms. Hutchinson’s telling, Mr. Cipollone warned that “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.”Two people close to Mr. Cipollone said he did not recall that conversation, and that the committee had been alerted before his testimony last week that he would not confirm it had taken place.Instead, the committee focused on soliciting testimony from Mr. Cipollone that could support information they had gathered from other witnesses.According to two people familiar with his appearance, Mr. Cipollone was asked about discussions related to presidential pardons in the final weeks of the presidency. He was also asked his opinion of Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud, as well as Mr. Trump’s attacks on Vice President Mike Pence. More

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      Trump Loses Support of Half of GOP Voters, Poll Finds

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      As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.”Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination.Republican Voters on Their Preferred Candidate for PresidentIf the Republican 2024 presidential primary were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were: More

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      Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry

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      The Democrat from Maryland has been delving into the rising threat of white nationalism and white supremacy for five years. He will lead the inquiry’s hearing on the subject on Tuesday.WASHINGTON — When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.“Charlottesville was a rude awakening for the country,” Mr. Raskin, 59, said in an interview, rattling off a list of deadly hate crimes that had taken place in the years before the siege on the Capitol. “There is a real pattern of young, white men getting hyped up on racist provocation and incitement.”Tuesday’s session, set for 1 p.m., is expected to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies turned to violent far-right extremist groups whose support Mr. Trump had long cultivated, who in turn began assembling a mob to pressure Congress to reject the will of the voters.Supporters of President Donald J. Trump at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York Times“There were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, Boogaloo Boys, militia men and other assorted extremist and religious cults that assembled under the banner of ‘Stop The Steal,’ ” Mr. Raskin said, referring to the movement that spread Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. “This was quite a coming-out party for a lot of extremist, antigovernment groups and white nationalist groups that had never worked together before.”It has long been known that the mob was energized by Mr. Trump’s Twitter post on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he called for his supporters to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that would “be wild.” Mr. Raskin and Ms. Murphy plan to detail a clear “call and response” between the president and his extreme supporters.“There’s no doubt that Donald Trump’s tweet urging everyone to descend upon Washington for a wild protest on Jan. 6 succeeded in galvanizing and unifying the dangerous extremists of the country,” Mr. Raskin said.Mr. Raskin has hinted at disclosing evidence of more direct ties between Mr. Trump and far-right groups, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, the former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and the extremist groups.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

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      An Anti-Trump Republican Group Is Back for the Midterms

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      Prominent conservatives who worked to oust Donald Trump in 2020 are back — with a plan to spend at least $10 million to defeat candidates who embraced the former president’s conspiracy theories about that election.The group of conservatives, the Republican Accountability PAC, has identified G.O.P. candidates whose extreme views its leaders deem dangerous to the future of American democracy.In 14 races across six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the group has decided to throw its weight behind those candidates’ Democratic opponents.The PAC has already claimed a hand in several victories in Republican primaries — notably, the incumbent Brad Raffensperger’s win against Jody Hice, the Trump-backed candidate in the Georgia secretary of state race.In the remaining major primaries, it plans to spend heavily to bolster Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose leading role in the House investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol has made her a villain and a turncoat to many on the right.Donald Trump, Post-PresidencyThe former president remains a potent force in Republican politics.Grip on G.O.P.: Donald J. Trump is still a powerful figure in his party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.2024 Campaign?: Republicans are bracing for Mr. Trump to announce an unusually early bid for the White House, a move intended in part to shield him from the damaging revelations emerging from Jan. 6 investigations.Endorsement Record: While Mr. Trump has helped propel some G.O.P. candidates to primary victories, he’s also had notable defeats. Here’s where his record stands so far in 2022.A Modern-Day Party Boss: Hoarding cash, doling out favors and seeking to crush rivals, Mr. Trump is behaving like the head of a 19th-century political machine.Elsewhere, the group expects to focus on portraying Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor of Pennsylvania, as well outside the mainstream of G.O.P. politics.And it will do so by finding what Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican strategist and a leading organizer of various anti-Trump initiatives including the Republican Accountability PAC, called “credible messengers” — voters who resemble the college-educated, suburban moderates who are without a home in either major party.Longwell, who runs a podcast for The Bulwark called “The Focus Group,” has drawn on her team’s research on what motivates this constituency in particular, which has little appetite for the often crude, aggressive form of campaigning that Trump has fostered across the Republican Party.Longwell’s barometer for who qualifies as an anti-democracy Republican isn’t just whether Trump has issued an endorsement, but whether they echo the former president’s conspiratorial views on elections. She has little interest in parsing whether Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, for instance, has a more nuanced position on the integrity of the 2020 election than, say, Blake Masters in Arizona.“There are not people in these races who are, you know, running as post-Trump candidates,” she said.Watching for Trump’s roleLongwell acknowledges the difficulty of the task at hand, given President Biden’s unpopularity and Americans’ widespread public anger over the price of gas and groceries. But she said the political environment could shift if Trump jumps into the 2024 fray before the midterms — a move that would instantly “put Trump on the ballot” and perhaps push a significant fraction of Republican voters to shun the most-Trump-leaning candidates.One important criterion for Longwell for jumping into a race is the quality of the Democratic nominee — Republicans will find it easier to support moderate candidates, in the mold of Biden’s 2020 run, than it is to back Bernie Sanders-style progressives.With a little over four months to go before Election Day, Longwell’s team has raised $6 million so far. It plans to run ads targeting potentially persuadable Republicans on digital platforms, as well as via direct mail, billboards, TV and radio.Longwell is prioritizing many of the same areas a previous version of the group, Republican Voters Against Trump, homed in on in 2020: places like Bucks and Dauphin counties in Pennsylvania and Pima County in Arizona, which are teeming with frustrated Republicans who may have voted in past elections for John McCain or Mitt Romney.Part of the challenge, Longwell acknowledged, is to create a “permission structure” for these voters to break with their party.“People are very tribal, they’re very partisan,” Longwell said. “And they’re frustrated, nationally, with Democrats, right?”What to read tonightCassidy Hutchinson’s electrifying testimony last month before the House committee investigating the Capitol riot has jolted top Justice Department officials into discussing the politically sensitive topic of Donald Trump more directly, at times in the presence of Attorney General Merrick Garland, Katie Benner and Glenn Thrush report.Democrats in Congress, under pressure to act after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, are planning to hold doomed votes this week on legislation seeking to preserve access to abortions.Can states that ban abortions also forbid residents to travel to get the procedure? Adam Liptak explores the newly urgent question of a constitutional right to travel.The chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, said she would step down next month, which will allow Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to appoint a replacement who could be friendlier to the party as lawmakers in Albany continue to codify and consider stronger laws on guns and abortion.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Dueling Weaknesses

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      The Times has released its first poll of the 2022 midterm cycle.In 2016, when The New York Times’s pollsters asked Americans whether they planned to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, more than 10 percent said they would not support either one. They said that they would instead vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all.Four years later, the situation was different. Joe Biden was a more popular nominee than Clinton had been, while some of Trump’s skeptics had come around to supporting him. Less than 5 percent of voters told pollsters that they didn’t plan to vote for either major party nominee.This morning, The Times is releasing its first poll of the 2022 midterm campaign. And one of the main messages is that Americans again seem to be as dissatisfied with the leading candidates as they were in 2016. “This felt like a poll from 2016, not from 2020,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me.Voters on the Direction of the CountryDo you think the United States is on the right track, or is it headed in the wrong direction?

      Note: Polls prior to 2020 are Times/CBS surveys of U.S. adults, with the wording “Do you feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction or do you feel things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?”

      Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 849 registered voters in the United States from July 5-7, 2022.By Marco HernandezThe poll included a question about whether people would vote for Biden or Trump in 2024 if the two ended up being the nominees again. The question did not present any options other than Biden and Trump — yet 10 percent of respondents volunteered that they did not plan to support either one. The share was even higher among voters under 35 and lower among older voters.Similarly unpopularThis level of dissatisfaction is a reflection of the huge, dueling weaknesses of the two parties.The Democratic Party has two core problems. First, Biden’s job approval rating is only 33 percent (similar to Trump’s worst ratings during his presidency), partly because of frustration over inflation and the continuing disruptions to daily life stemming from the pandemic. Second, Democrats’ priorities appear out of step with those of most Americans.Congressional Democrats have spent much of the past year bickering, with a small number of moderates blocking legislation that would reduce drug prices, address climate change and take other popular steps. Many Democrats — both politicians and voters, especially on the party’s left flank — also seem more focused on divisive cultural issues than on most Americans’ everyday concerns, like inflation.“The left has a set of priorities that is just different from the rest of the country’s,” Nate said. “Liberals care more about abortion and guns than about the economy. Conservative concerns are much more in line with the rest of the country.”On the other hand, Nate points out, “Republicans have serious problems of their own.”Trump remains the party’s dominant figure — and he is roughly as unpopular as Biden. The two men’s personal favorability ratings are identical in the Times poll: 39 percent. Many voters, including independents and a noticeable minority of Republicans, are offended by the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in them.Republicans also face some vulnerabilities from the recent Supreme Court decisions. The court has issued aggressive rulings, including overturning Roe v. Wade, that take policy to the right of public opinion on some of the same issues where many Democrats are to the left of it.If not Biden …All of this leads to a remarkable combination of findings from the poll. Biden looks like the weakest incumbent president in decades; 61 percent of Democrats said they hoped somebody else would be the party’s 2024 nominee, with most of them citing either Biden’s age or performance. Yet, when all voters were asked to choose between Biden and Trump in a hypothetical matchup, Biden nonetheless held a small lead over Trump, 44 percent to 41 percent.Democrats’ Reasons for a Different CandidateWhat’s the most important reason you would prefer someone other than Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee?

      Asked of 191 respondents who said they planned to vote in the 2024 Democratic primary and who preferred a candidate other than Joe Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll from July 5-7, 2022.By The New York TimesOther polls — by YouGov and Harris, for example — suggest Biden would fare better against Trump than Vice President Kamala Harris would. These comparisons are a reminder that Biden won the nomination in 2020 for a reason: He is one of the few nationally prominent Democrats who doesn’t seem too liberal to many swing voters. Biden, in short, is a wounded incumbent in a party without obviously stronger alternatives.There is still a long time between now and the 2024 election, of course. Perhaps Biden’s standing will improve, or another Democrat — one who wins a tough race this year, for instance, like Stacey Abrams or Senator Raphael Warnock in Georgia — will emerge as a possibility. Perhaps Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence or another Republican will defeat Trump for the nomination. Perhaps Biden or Trump (or both) will choose not to run.The level of voter dissatisfaction also raises the possibility that a third-party candidate could attract enough support to influence the outcome, Nate adds.For now, though, each party’s biggest strength appears to be the weakness of its opponent.Related: My colleague Shane Goldmacher has more details and analysis on Biden’s approval rating. In the coming days, The Times will be releasing other results from the poll, including on the Republican Party, the midterm races and more.More on politicsSteve Bannon agreed to testify before the Jan. 6 panel, days before his trial for contempt of Congress is set to begin.Pressure from Trump allies and a fear of leaks: Here’s why the Jan. 6 committee rushed Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony.In a small town in New Hampshire, one man tried to impose a change so drastic it jolted a community out of political indifference.THE LATEST NEWSWar in UkraineRussia needs more soldiers, but isn’t resorting to a national draft. Instead, the Kremlin is offering cash and employing strong-arm tactics.Fellow players of Brittney Griner, who is detained in Russia on drug charges, honored her at the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game.Other Big Stories“I kept waiting for someone to come,” said Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher at Robb Elementary School.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesA taunting gunman and 78 minutes of terror: A teacher who survived the Uvalde shooting recounted the desperate wait for a rescue.An American firm said U.S. spies quietly backed its plans to buy NSO, a blacklisted Israeli company that makes spyware.A wildfire in Yosemite National Park that has spread over 2,000 acres is threatening centuries-old giant sequoia trees.Get ready for astronomical records to be broken: NASA will unveil the first pictures from the new James Webb Space Telescope tomorrow.Novak Djokovic won his 21st major trophy, beating Nick Kyrgios in the Wimbledon men’s singles final.OpinionsThe history of Prohibition suggests Americans will rebel against abortion bans, Michael Kazin argues.We need more male contraceptives, Stephanie Page and John Amory write.Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss election season, Elon Musk and more.MORNING READSMany millennials feel behind, indebted and unable to live up to expectations.From left; Tracy Nguyen, Lila Barth and Christina Rateau for The New York TimesEconomic anxiety: Thirty millennials discuss their real fears about money.Where is Pete Panto? A union leader on the Brooklyn docks disappeared 81 years ago.Cilantrophilia: A love affair with cilantro, told through illustrations.Metropolitan Diary: A pizza lesson in Brooklyn and other tales from the city.Quiz time: The average score on our latest news quiz was 8.9. Try to beat it.A Times classic: Perfume, cologne, parfum … what’s the difference?Advice from Wirecutter: Beautiful rugs to hide an ugly floor.Lives Lived: Susie Steiner, the author of the Manon Bradshaw detective novels, was declared legally blind from a rare disease months before she sold her first book. She died at 51.SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETICWayne Rooney’s stunning return: England’s all-time leading soccer scorer will become the head coach of Major League Soccer’s D.C. United. He has significant work ahead.How TV dictates the future of college football: The question is simple enough, which college football teams really drive the biggest TV audiences? That calculation tells us plenty about the future of a sport in disarray.Russian soccer’s dramatic demise: Russia hosted a World Cup as recently as 2018. Now? Their domestic league has been gutted, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Who won the 2022 N.H.L. Draft? The grades are in for every team.ARTS AND IDEAS Vanessa Braganza’s decoding process.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesA decoded cipherA scholar claims she has uncovered a hidden message from Catherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VIII’s eight wives, Jennifer Schuessler writes in The Times.The scholar, Vanessa Braganza, became fascinated with the sketch of a pendant that featured a dense tangle of letters. Using a process akin to “early modern Wordle,” Braganza says, she deciphered the image, which spells out the names of Henry and Catherine.What makes it particularly interesting, Braganza argues, is that the pendant was likely commissioned not by the king, but by Catherine herself, as a way of asserting her place in history as Henry was preparing to divorce her. “It really helps us understand Catherine as a really defiant figure,” she says.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookChristopher Simpson for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews. Prop Stylist: Paige Hicks.Gazpacho is perfect when it is too hot to eat but you need cold, salt and lunch.What to Watch“Thor: Love and Thunder,” the fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, is sillier than its predecessors, Manohla Dargis writes.What to ReadThree new memoirs that cover addiction, fatherhood and transgender identity.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was obedience. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Not for kids (five letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidP.S. Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s first freely elected president, The Times reported 31 years ago today.Here’s today’s front page.“The Daily” is about abortion laws. On “Popcast,” what’s next for Jack Harlow?Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More