Presidential Election of 2020

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      Still Feeling the Bern

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      WASHINGTON — Ari Rabin-Havt could not stop smiling in the winter of 2020.When a reporter asked the deputy campaign manager for Bernie Sanders why he was so happy, he replied, “Simple. I work for a 78-year-old Jewish socialist, who had a heart attack a few months ago and has won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.” With an expletive, he added, “That’s remarkable.”In “The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders,” the former adviser offers an intimate portrait of his cranky boss, writing about everything from Sanders’s famous mittens, to his love of picket lines and Motown songs, to his distaste for “the inane droning of cable news commentators,” to his prescient fear that Donald Trump was “nuts” and would upend democracy.I relish hearing about what Rabin-Havt calls “Bernie’s natural impatience” with the frivolous — pretty much everything except the sweeping changes he wants in the country.Once, in Bloomington, Ind., the Vermont senator got grouchy because the advance staff left four big bottles of water in his hotel room.“Ari,” he told his aide, “I’m not the president of the United States. I don’t need four bottles of water in my room.”When staffers at Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry in South Carolina insisted that all the candidates go onstage in matching Clyburn T-shirts for their speeches, Bernie balked at the goofy suck-up idea.Before the first debate in Miami during the Democratic primaries in 2019, Joe Biden was standing right behind Bernie as the candidates were having their makeup touched up.“As they were about to go onstage, Biden rubbed Bernie down the full length of his back with his hands,” Rabin-Havt writes. “Barely paying attention, Bernie used his right hand to swat Biden away.”In L.A. for the second debate, Bernie was stopped on the street by Jeff Katzenberg. The former Disney chairman and DreamWorks C.E.O., and a prolific fund-raiser and donor, introduced himself. Sanders kept strolling, unimpressed. “Bernie would have been more likely to stop for a teacher, a nurse, or a mechanic,” Rabin-Havt writes.I had my own Bernie swatting moment when I interviewed him during the 2020 primaries on Feb. 14 and asked him what he had gotten his wife, Jane, for Valentine’s Day. He informed me in no uncertain terms that romance with Jane was beside the point; Medicare for All was the point!During that run, Bernie was game for anything as long as it promoted his causes. Rabin-Havt tells about the time the candidate happily Facetimed with Cardi B., who was wearing a white bathrobe. The rapper had also endorsed him in 2016, sending out an Instagram video in which she instructed her followers to “Vote for daddy Bernie, bitch.”When Sanders met with Barack Obama at his Georgetown office in 2018 to tell him he was thinking about running for president again, Obama offered this advice: “Bernie, you are an Old Testament prophet — a moral voice for our party giving us guidance. Here is the thing, though. Prophets don’t get to be king. Kings have to make choices prophets don’t. Are you willing to make those choices?”Rabin-Havt (whose brother, Raphi, worked with me at The Times for a spell) writes: “Obama continued, making the point that to win the Democratic nomination, Bernie would have to widen his appeal and convince the party to back him — which would mean being a different type of politician and a different type of candidate than he wanted to be. Bernie listened to Obama, but it was clear to me he never accepted that premise. He has a fundamental belief that he could lead an uncompromising movement that would challenge those who ran the Democratic Party while also leading that same institution, one he steadfastly refused to join.”The author sums up with a trenchant point: Bernie may never see “the promised land,” but he did win.“While Bernie Sanders will never be president, his two campaigns have transformed the Democratic Party and this country. Old orthodoxies about government spending and foreign policy have crumbled as a result of the unceasing efforts by an old socialist.”Since it turned out that Bernie’s ideas were more popular than many realized, he got Democrats out of their deficit-hawk mode and convinced them that it was OK to spend money to help people. During the early days of the pandemic, even Republican members of Congress realized they needed to shovel money out the door to keep things going. He’s been the champion of the $15 minimum wage that his party now almost universally embraces.As the Prince of Darkness, Mitch McConnell, said last year of Sanders’s influence:“Bernie Sanders is really happy, He may have lost a nomination, but he won the argument over what today’s Democratic Party is: more taxes, more spending, more borrowing.”That victory may have come at a cost. Republicans, and a shrinking but influential number of moderate Democrats, are attributing the surge of inflation to aggressive government spending. That’s driven down poll numbers for Biden and the Democrats.If Republicans win in November, as seems likely, Democratic ambitions will shrink, but Bernie’s imprint on the party is going to be long-lasting.As much as he acted unfazed by the Berniemania of the campaign, he secretly liked it. Once, driving in front of the Capitol, he stopped at a red light and a bunch of shrieking high school students ran up to the car to take selfies.Bernie chuckled and said to Rabin-Havt, “I’m like Mick Jagger.” If Mick Jagger wore mittens.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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

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

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      Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, met separately with the panel after the former president authorized them to do so.Two of former President Donald J. Trump’s top White House lawyers met on Wednesday with the House committee investigating the Capitol attack, after Mr. Trump authorized them to engage with the panel, according to a person familiar with the matter.Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and Patrick F. Philbin, who was his deputy, met separately with the panel, two people familiar with the sessions said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the meetings.It was not immediately clear how much information Mr. Cipollone and Mr. Philbin had provided to the committee or what they said, but they were present for key moments in the buildup to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including pivotal conversations and meetings in which Mr. Trump discussed using the powers of his office to try to overturn the election.Their cooperation, which was reported earlier by Politico, added to the more than two dozen White House officials who agreed to take the committee’s questions.The two were not under oath and their interviews were not transcribed, but the men could return for formal interviews or deposition later, one of the people said, describing it as a typical process as investigators determine who they want to question.The interviews came as the committee learned from the National Archives that lawmakers would receive additional documents from the Trump White House after President Biden declined to assert executive privilege over them.In a letter on Wednesday, David S. Ferriero, the national archivist, told Mr. Trump that he would turn over a new set of records to the committee within 15 days “unless prohibited by court order.” Mr. Trump wrote to the archives in February to say he asserted executive privilege over more than 1,000 documents in its possession.In recent days, the committee has questioned Mr. Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, both former White House advisers. In transcribed interviews, they provided testimony that lawmakers described as “helpful.”Mr. Trump told The Washington Post that he had offered his daughter and son-in-law “privilege,” but they declined it. Courts have rejected Mr. Trump’s claims of executive privilege, and the Biden White House has declined to invoke it for material and witnesses sought by the Jan. 6 inquiry, including for Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner’s testimony.The panel has also heard from John McEntee, who served as Mr. Trump’s chief of presidential personnel; Anthony M. Ornato, the former White House chief of operations; and Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer. Another top adviser, Stephen Miller, was slated to testify on Thursday, according to another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.Mr. Miller was subpoenaed late last year and had lengthy negotiations to appear.Mr. Cipollone, who defended Mr. Trump during his first impeachment trial, pushed back against some of the most extreme plans the president considered for overturning the election. He participated in meetings with Trump allies who were pressing for the military to seize voting machines and in which Attorney General William P. Barr offered his resignation after making clear that the Justice Department had found no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.Patrick F. Philbin, who was Mr. Cipollone’s deputy, also met with the House committee investigating the Capitol attack.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Cipollone also tried to persuade Mr. Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He balked at pursuing a plan proposed by Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer, who had wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election might have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified results.“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to testimony the panel has received. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”Mr. Philbin, who was a senior Justice Department lawyer under President George W. Bush, was also present for the meeting in which Mr. Barr offered his resignation.The Supreme Court has ordered the National Archives to turn over to the committee Mr. Philbin’s White House records, which include a memo about a potential lawsuit against several states that Mr. Biden won in the 2020 election. They also contain a series of emails from a state official regarding election-related issues and talking points on alleged election irregularities in a county in Michigan.And they include a plan pushed by Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, and the lawyer Sidney Powell to declare that there was foreign influence in the election, with the goal of allowing Mr. Trump to use the powers of the Defense Department to seize voting machines and have the votes recounted. More

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      Jan. 6 Suspect Blames Trump for Spurring Him to Capitol Riot

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      Dustin Thompson, an unemployed exterminator from Ohio, was the first defendant tried in the Capitol attack to offer a Trump-made-me-do-it defense before a jury.WASHINGTON — Dustin Thompson’s trip down what he called “the rabbit hole” of election misinformation began eight months before a single vote was cast in 2020. It ended inside the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he was part of the mob of Trump supporters that stormed inside during Congress’s counting of electoral votes in the worst attack on the building since the War of 1812.An exterminator from Columbus, Ohio, Mr. Thompson, 38, was laid off in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Alone at home with his new wife, he began spending long days on the internet, steeping himself in conspiracy theories about the upcoming vote.As the election approached, he said, he fully believed that if Donald J. Trump ended up losing, it would only be because the voting had been rigged, as the president had been warning publicly for months. Even after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was declared the winner, Mr. Thompson could not accept that it was true.All of this, he told a jury at his criminal trial on Wednesday, led him to Washington on Jan. 6 for a Stop the Steal rally, where he and a friend listened to Mr. Trump give an incendiary speech near the White House.In an hour on the witness stand, Mr. Thompson blamed Mr. Trump for what eventually occurred, saying that he had been answering the president’s call to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” when he joined the throng swarming into the building and made off with a bottle of bourbon and a coat rack.“If the president’s giving you almost an order to do something,” he said, “I felt obligated to do that.”Mr. Thompson’s story is not unusual. At several points during the Justice Department’s vast investigation of the Capitol attack, many people charged with crimes have sought to blame Mr. Trump in various ways for their actions, mostly at pretrial bail hearings or at sentencings after pleading guilty.But Mr. Thompson is the first defendant to attempt the argument at trial in front of a jury. In making his case, he offered a window into the toxic and relentless flood of conspiracy theories and lies, stoked by Mr. Trump, that helped give rise to the riot.The move comes with considerable risk, and its success or failure could determine not only Mr. Thompson’s fate, but that of other defendants accused of taking part in the violence of Jan. 6.Before the trial began, Mr. Thompson admitted to prosecutors that he had gone into the Capitol and stolen government property, agreeing in advance to nearly every element of the six charges he faces. His defense will rest almost entirely on the question of his state of mind during the riot.Mr. Thompson has claimed that he did not knowingly or corruptly break the law, but rather, as his lawyer said on Tuesday, was “so influenced — so used and abused” by Mr. Trump that he could not be held accountable for his behavior.The Trump-made-me-do-it defense has not fared well with judges. While it could work better on a jury, Mr. Thompson seemed to stumble on Wednesday during cross-examination, undercutting key elements of his argument.William Dreher, a prosecutor, got him to admit several times that Mr. Trump had not been at his side, offering him step-by-step instructions, when he walked into the Senate parliamentarian’s office and walked out with the whiskey and the coat rack. Mr. Thompson acknowledged that he was a married adult with a college degree who could make his own decisions.Mr. Thompson also conceded under questioning by Mr. Dreher that he had known it was unlawful to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 while lawmakers were finalizing the results of the election. That appeared to contradict a central pillar of his own defense.While Mr. Thompson’s claims that he was under Mr. Trump’s spell do not carry any legal weight as evidence, they echo similar allegations the government has made in other cases connected to Jan. 6. In those cases, prosecutors have gone to great lengths to describe how rioters at the Capitol were motivated by Mr. Trump’s statements, including his speech at the Ellipse and a tweet he posted on Dec. 19, 2020 calling on his followers to attend a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Mark Meadows Is Taken Off North Carolina Voter Roll Amid Fraud Inquiry

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      The state is investigating whether Mr. Meadows cast a legal vote in 2020, after reports questioned if he lived at the address listed on his voter registration.Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff in the Trump White House, has been removed from the voter rolls in North Carolina as officials investigate whether he fraudulently registered to vote and cast a ballot in the state during the 2020 presidential election, according to a local election official.Mr. Meadows, who helped amplify former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was “administratively removed” from the poll book by the Macon County Board of Elections on Monday “after documentation indicated he lived in Virginia and last voted in the 2021 election there,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina Board of Elections, said in a statement.Mr. Meadows represented North Carolina in Congress until March 2020, when he went to work in the White House. Months later, Mr. Meadows and his wife, Debra, registered to vote using the address of a modest, three-bedroom mobile home with a rusted roof in Scaly Mountain, N.C.On the voter registration application that Mr. Meadows submitted on Sept. 19, 2020, he stated that he intended to move into the home the following day.And in November, he voted absentee by mail from that address, according to state records.Last month, a report in The New Yorker cast doubt on whether Mr. Meadows had ever lived — or even spent the night — at the home.Mr. Meadows did not immediately respond to telephone and text messages on Wednesday afternoon. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, declined to comment.In 2021, Mr. Meadows registered to vote in Virginia, where he and his wife own a condominium in the Washington suburbs, ahead of that state’s contentious election for governor. Property records show that Mr. and Ms. Meadows bought the unit in July 2017.The inquiry into Mr. Meadows’s voting activity in North Carolina remains open, according to Anjanette Grube, public information officer for the state’s Bureau of Investigation.Though documented cases of voter fraud are rare, Mr. Meadows and other Republicans have seized on the concept in order to claim, without evidence, that the results of last presidential election are illegitimate.During an August 2020 interview on CNN, Mr. Meadows warned of fraud in voting by mail. “Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with just people just moving around, let alone the people that die off?” he told the host, Jake Tapper.When Mr. Tapper said there was no evidence of widespread vote fraud, Mr. Meadows replied, “There’s no evidence that there’s not, either. That’s the definition of fraud, Jake.”Reid J. Epstein More

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      Mark Zuckerberg Ends Election Grants

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      Mark Zuckerberg, who donated nearly half a billion dollars to election offices across the nation in 2020 and drew criticism from conservatives suspicious of his influence on the presidential election, won’t be making additional grants this year, a spokesman for the Facebook founder confirmed on Tuesday.The spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said the donations by Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were never intended to be a stream of funding for the administration of elections.The couple gave $419 million to two nonprofit organizations that disbursed grants in 2020 to more than 2,500 election departments, which were grappling with a shortfall of government funding as they adopted new procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.The infusion of private donations helped to pay for new ballot-counting equipment, efforts to expand mail-in voting, personal protective equipment and the training of poll workers.It also sowed seeds of mistrust among supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. Critics referred to the grants as “Zuckerbucks” and some frequently claimed, without evidence, that the money was used to help secure Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Several states controlled by Republicans banned private donations to election offices in response.“As Mark and Priscilla made clear previously, their election infrastructure donation to help ensure that Americans could vote during the height of the pandemic was a one-time donation given the unprecedented nature of the crisis,” Mr. LaBolt said in an email on Tuesday. “They have no plans to repeat that donation.”The Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit group with liberal ties that became a vessel for $350 million of the contributions from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan in 2020, announced on Monday that it was shifting to a different model for supporting the work of local election administrators.During an appearance on Monday at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Tiana Epps-Johnson, the center’s executive director, said that the organization would begin a five-year, $80 million program to help meet the needs of election departments across the country.Called the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, the program will draw funding through the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collective housed at the TED organization, the center said. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan are not involved in the new initiative, Mr. LaBolt said.At the event on Monday, Ms. Epps-Johnson said the grants distributed by the center in 2020 helped fill a substantial void of resources for those overseeing elections in the United States. One town in New England, she said without specifying, was able to replace voting equipment from the early 1900s that was held together with duct tape.“The United States election infrastructure is crumbling,” Ms. Epps-Johnson said.In addition to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan gave $69.6 million to the Center for Election Innovation & Research in 2020. At the time, that nonprofit group said that the top election officials in 23 states had applied for grants.Republicans have been unrelenting in their criticism of the social media mogul and his donations.While campaigning for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday in Perrysburg, Ohio, J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author who has undergone a conversion to Trumpism, continued to accuse Mr. Zuckerberg of tipping the election in 2020 to Mr. Biden.Mr. Vance, a venture capitalist, hasn’t exactly sworn off help from big tech. He counts Peter Thiel, a departing board member of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, and a major donor to Mr. Trump, as a top fund-raiser. Mr. Thiel has also supported Blake Masters, a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona.In an opinion piece for The New York Post last October, Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters called for Facebook’s influence to be curbed, writing that Mr. Zuckerberg had spent half a billion dollars to “buy the presidency for Joe Biden.”In Colorado, Tina Peters, the top vote-getter for secretary of state at the state Republican Party’s assembly last weekend, has been a fierce critic of Mr. Zuckerberg, even after her arrest this year on charges stemming from an election security breach. Ms. Peters, the Mesa County clerk, is facing several felonies amid accusations that she allowed an unauthorized person to copy voting machine hard drive information. More

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      In Call Before Jan. 6 Riot, a Plea to ‘Descend on the Capitol’

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      Days before Jan. 6, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr. told Trump backers to make lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results feel that “people are breathing down their necks.”One week before an angry mob stormed the Capitol, a communications expert named Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., joined a conference call with a group of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters and made an urgent plea.After assuring his listeners that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Sullivan told them that they had to go to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day that Congress was to meet to finalize the electoral count — and “descend on the Capitol,” according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.While Mr. Sullivan claimed that he was “not inciting violence or any kind of riots,” he urged those on the call to make their presence felt at the Capitol in a way that would intimidate members of Congress, telling the group that they had to ensure that lawmakers inside the building “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”He also pledged that Mr. Trump was going to take action on his own; the president, he said, was going to impose a form of martial law on Jan. 6 and would not be leaving office.“Biden will never be in that White House,” Mr. Sullivan declared. “That’s my promise to each and every one of you.”Before Riot, Operative Urged Trump Supporters to ‘Descend on the Capitol’ on Jan. 6In a conference call days before the Jan. 6 attack, Jason Sullivan, a onetime aide to Roger J. Stone Jr., exhorted supporters of President Donald J. Trump to go to the Capitol that day and pressure lawmakers meeting to finalize the 2020 election results.The recording of the call, which took place on Dec. 30, 2020, emerged as the Justice Department has expanded its criminal investigation of the Capitol attack. It offers a glimpse of the planning that went on in the run-up to the storming of the Capitol and the mind-set of some of those who zeroed in on Jan. 6 as a kind of last stand for keeping Mr. Trump in office.It also reflects the complexities that federal prosecutors are likely to face as they begin the task of figuring out how much — or even whether — people involved in the political rallies that preceded the assault can be held accountable for the violence that erupted.After more than a year of focusing exclusively on rioters who took part in the storming of the Capitol, prosecutors have widened their gaze in recent weeks and have started to question whether those involved in encouraging protests — like the one that Mr. Sullivan was describing — can be held culpable for disrupting the work of Congress.Mr. Sullivan’s remarks during the call appeared to be an effort to motivate a group of people aggrieved by the election to take direct action against members of Congress on Jan. 6, presaging what Mr. Trump himself would say in a speech that day. While it remains unclear whether anyone on Mr. Sullivan’s call went on to join the mob that breached the Capitol, he seemed to be exhorting his listeners to apply unusual pressure on lawmakers just as they were overseeing the final count of Electoral College votes.In a statement provided by his lawyer, Mr. Sullivan played down the nature of the call, saying he had merely “shared some encouragement” with what he described as “people who all felt their votes had been disenfranchised in the 2020 elections.” Mr. Sullivan said he had been asked to participate in the call by a group of anti-vaccine activists — or what he called “health freedom advocate moms” — who were hosting “a small, permitted event” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.“I only promoted peaceful solutions where Americans could raise their voices and be heard as expressed in our First Amendment,” Mr. Sullivan said in the statement. “I in no way condone the violence of any protesters.”Still, in the recording of the call, Mr. Sullivan can be heard telling his listeners that the lawmakers inside the Capitol “need to feel pressure.”“If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” he said. “We have to put that pressure there.”As the Justice Department widens its inquiry, federal prosecutors are using a grand jury in Washington to gather information on political organizers, speakers and so-called V.I.P.s connected to a series of pro-Trump rallies after the 2020 election. One prominent planner of those rallies, Ali Alexander, received a subpoena from the grand jury and said last week that he intended to comply with its requests.In the run-up to Jan. 6, Mr. Alexander publicly discussed a pressure campaign against lawmakers that was meant to stop the final electoral count, saying he was working with Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, all Republicans.“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Mr. Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”It is unclear if the Justice Department is aware of Mr. Sullivan’s conference call; the department declined to comment. The House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 was provided with a copy of the recording some months ago by the woman who made it, Staci Burk, a law student and Republican activist from Arizona.Shortly after the election, Ms. Burk became convinced that phony ballots had been flown in bulk into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She eventually submitted an anonymous affidavit concerning the ballots in an election fraud case filed in Federal District Court in Phoenix by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: New DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Is Trump the Democrats’ Secret Weapon?

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was moved by Ketanji Brown Jackson’s remarks last week after her Senate confirmation: “In my family, it took just one generation to go from segregation to the Supreme Court.” What a ringing affirmation of what’s possible in the United States. And how depressing that only three Republican senators could bring themselves to vote for her, if only on the principle that every president deserves to get qualified nominees confirmed. Whatever happened to acknowledging the possibility that we can respect and admire people with whom we also disagree?Gail Collins: Bret, every time we converse, I get to experience that.Bret: Ditto.Gail: But you know what our politics have become. There are a lot of people to blame for the death of bipartisanship in judicial selection, but I’ll never forget Mitch McConnell refusing to bring multiple Barack Obama nominees up for a vote.Bret: I’ll resist the urge to dwell on Harry Reid’s filibustering of George W. Bush’s nominees. The larger question is how we go forward. I don’t think we can endure as a republic if no president of either party can even appoint judges or staff the executive branch unless he has a Senate majority, too. Your thoughts?Gail: I tend to resist the we-can’t-survive-this predictions — we’ve survived a heck of a lot, after all.Bret: Fair point. We defeated Germany twice. What’s one Ted Cruz, more or less?Gail: But this kind of perpetual partisanship certainly isn’t good for the country. I guess the world will be looking toward Alaska to see how the regular public is reacting — of the three Senate Republicans who voted to confirm Judge Jackson, Lisa Murkowski is the only one up for re-election this year.Bret: Murkowski also faces a primary challenge from a Donald Trump-endorsed Republican opponent, meaning that she showed real political courage in voting for Jackson. More than can be said for a bunch of G.O.P. senators who are retiring at the end of the year and could have usefully demonstrated some principle and independence.Gail: Murkowski aside, I suspect the Republican candidates this fall are going to be running on a generally Trumpist line, which will make things worse. Do you disagree?Bret: Not clear yet. Our news-side colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Martin reported last month that some of the primary candidates Trump originally preferred — like the Senate candidate Mo Brooks in Alabama and the gubernatorial candidate David Perdue in Georgia — aren’t doing well in the polls. Trump is also getting crosswise with Republican incumbents in the governor’s office like Doug Ducey in Arizona and Pete Ricketts in Nebraska by opposing their favored candidates, or at least favoring ones they don’t like. If anything, Trump may turn out to be the Democrats’ secret weapon this fall by dividing the party or backing candidates who can’t win in the general election. That’s how Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were able to win their Georgia Senate races the last time around.Gail: I noticed Trump went ahead and withdrew his support for Brooks, claiming he was outraged that Brooks said it was time to stop obsessing about the 2020 election and move on.Bret: Trump is like John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty character from “Fawlty Towers,” except in reverse: You must mention the war. Or at least the “stolen election.”Gail: Still, I bet Trump could have managed to overlook it if Brooks wasn’t also running way behind in the polls.Bret: We’ll see. Right now, the generic polling leans Republican, but it could change if the Supreme Court votes to overturn Roe v. Wade. It could change even further if Ukraine manages to defeat Russia with American help. What else do the Democrats need?Gail: The Democrats need to run on ways to make the country better. One is reducing health care costs, which would include cracking down on waste and government funding for expensive drugs like insulin. Another is reducing the deficit with a tax on the very rich.Bret: The administration seems to be taking your advice on both points, though I’m not sure it will help them all that much by November. I’d like to see them get ahead of a couple of looming surges that will play into G.O.P. hands: the expected migrant surge at the border; the big cost-of-living surge; and the next Covid surge. The last one is actually tied to the first: The administration can help moderate Democrats by extending something called Title 42 to expedite migrant expulsions as a health-emergency measure. As for inflation, how about a sales-tax holiday for necessities and other basic goods for the next 12 months?Gail: Here’s a proposed deal: a sales tax holiday for basics combined with a tax increase for the rich.Bret: I always oppose tax hikes, but that isn’t the worst bargain. How about the immigration issue? The administration doesn’t seem to know its own mind, according to a fascinating piece last weekend in The Times.Gail: Well, another way to think about it is that the administration knows there’s no good answer. Any immigration policy is going to be unpopular with one side or the other — except Biden’s very, very much appreciated halt to building that stupid Trump wall.Bret: A wall I have reluctantly come around to concluding should be built, even as we do more to increase legal immigration.Gail: Oh wow, Bret, you’ve gone over to the wall! Better than going over the wall, I guess, but still …Bret: Bet some of our readers are thinking, “Both things are possible.”A wall won’t stop people from coming here legally and then overstaying their visas. But it will save some of the most vulnerable migrants from taking terrible risks to cross the border while denying right-wing nativists one of their most potent political issues.Gail: And serve as a great symbol to the rest of the world that the days we celebrated our country as a nation of immigrants are long gone. Sigh.Bret: We are and should remain a nation of immigrants. Just lawfully arrived.Gail: It’s certainly important not to encourage illegal immigration. But it’s equally important — actually more important — to raise the number of immigrants we’re bringing into the country. Given the very low birthrate in America, we’ve got to attract all the willing workers we can.Bret: Totally agree on this. Countries that stagnate demographically will eventually stagnate economically. Our Hispanic population is incredibly talented, energetic and diverse, we’ve got plenty of room to grow, and we’re blessed to have Mexico — the country where I grew up — as a neighbor. Anyone who doubts me on this score should consider what it’s like for Ukraine to have Russia as a neighbor.The case I’d make to the administration is to set out three principles for immigration: that it should be lawful, that it should be safe and that it should be compassionate. They need to take care of the first point to guarantee the other two.Gail: No problem there, but there’s a long leap from a commitment to lawful, compassionate immigration and — oh, Lord, that wall. Sorry, still flummoxed. Let’s move on.Bret: The other big domestic story last week was the failure of the Justice Department to win its case against four men accused of conspiring to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. What do you make of it?Gail: Basically you’ve got a bunch of dopey right-wing guys venting about Governor Whitmer’s Covid restrictions and talking about kidnapping her. And some genuine question as to whether they’d have done anything more than posture over lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings if an F.B.I. informant hadn’t become one of their leaders.Bret: It’s a thin line between, um, entrapment and hate, to adapt an old lyric.Gail: This kind of case always poses the question of how far our investigators can go in exposing anti-government nut jobs. Imagine what it’s like to spend months — sometimes years! — pretending to be best pals with paranoid idiots.Bret: My wife and kids know the feeling.Gail: Sooner or later you may be tempted to push things along — and then maybe create a crime that would never have happened otherwise.I’m not an expert in this case, but I do appreciate how very careful the country needs to be in overseeing law enforcement.Any final thoughts on your end?Bret: Given how high-profile this case was, it’s a real black eye for the government and particularly the F.B.I. Bamboozling foolish people into potentially criminal behavior and then prosecuting them for it in a highly politicized way is the sort of thing that fuels precisely the kind of conspiracy thinking that these people were prey to in the first place.Gail: Meanwhile, I’ve been sort of obsessing about what would happen if Russian psycho-hackers managed to figure out a way to take our power grid offline. Imagining what that’d be like gives me the kind of chills I got as a kid in Catholic school when the nuns would spend hours warning us that the end of the world could arrive any day. Then we were supposed to go home and practice hiding in the basement with our parents.Bret: The good news is the Russians haven’t even been able to manage taking out the power grid in Ukraine, so they might have a harder time against us. Perhaps the end of the world isn’t nigh, after all?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More