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      Pressing for Evidence, Jan. 6 Panel Argues That Trump Committed Fraud

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      The argument was a response to a lawsuit filed by John Eastman, who is seeking to shield his communications with former President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday laid out its theory for potential criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump, arguing before a federal judge that he and the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman were involved in a conspiracy to perpetrate a fraud on the American public as part of a plan to overturn the 2020 election.The allegations, which the committee first leveled against the men last week in response to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Eastman, could determine just how deeply the panel can dig into emails, correspondence and other documents of lawyers close to Mr. Trump who have argued that such material should be shielded from scrutiny because of attorney-client privilege.They also form the core of the panel’s strategy for potentially holding Mr. Trump and his allies criminally liable for what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, one that turns on the notion that they knowingly sought to invalidate legitimate election results.“We’re talking about an insurrection that sadly came very close to succeeding to overturn a presidential election,” Douglas N. Letter, the general counsel of the House, told Judge David O. Carter of the United States District Court for the Central District of California, during arguments in Mr. Eastman’s case.The House committee’s argument is a risky one. If Judge Carter were to reject its claims, the inquiry’s legal team would be less likely to win support for a criminal prosecution unless investigators unearthed new evidence.In court on Tuesday, Mr. Letter repeatedly chastised Mr. Eastman for writing a memo that some in both parties have likened to a blueprint for a coup. The document encouraged Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from swing states won by President Biden, even as Mr. Eastman conceded that the maneuver was likely illegal.“Violate the law — and let them sue,” Mr. Letter said, characterizing Mr. Eastman’s counsel. “Boy, that’s not legal advice that I’ve ever given.”The committee in recent weeks has issued subpoenas to lawyers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who worked closely with Mr. Trump as they pursued various efforts to keep the former president in power despite losing the election. They offered up false slates of electors claiming Mr. Trump had won politically competitive states that he had lost, and explored the seizure of voting machines.Among them was Mr. Eastman, whom the committee says could potentially be charged with criminal violations including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the American people.Charles Burnham, Mr. Eastman’s lawyer, said the committee’s accusations against the former president are “groundbreaking criminal allegations,” but he argued that both Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump genuinely believed the claims of a stolen election — despite being told repeatedly that such statements were false.“Dr. Eastman and others absolutely believed that what they were doing was well-grounded in law and fact, and was necessary for what they believed was the best interest of the country,” Mr. Burnham said.In a filing in Mr. Eastman’s case last week, the committee first revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal referral to the Justice Department against Mr. Trump. Central to the case is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.The panel turned over to the court hundreds of pages of arguments, exhibits and court transcripts from Trump advisers telling him there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. But Mr. Burnham also said that Mr. Trump was given conflicting legal advice.“Multiple presidential advisers were counseling the president that there were issues with the 2020 election — fraud, illegality, and so forth,” he said.Mr. Burnham cited a book recently published by former Attorney General William P. Barr, who recounted how he tried to break through to Mr. Trump to tell him his wild fantasies about election fraud weren’t true, even as others informed the president he was right.“After the election,” Mr. Barr wrote, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”The arguments in court were prompted by Mr. Eastman’s attempt to shield from release documents he said were covered by attorney-client privilege. The committee responded that under the legal theory known as the crime-fraud exception, the privilege does not cover information conveyed from a client to a lawyer if it was part of furthering or concealing a crime.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The first trial. More

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      How to Keep the Rising Tide of Fake News From Drowning Our Democracy

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      The same information revolution that brought us Netflix, podcasts and the knowledge of the world in our smartphone-gripping hands has also undermined American democracy. There can be no doubt that virally spread political disinformation and delusional invective about stolen, rigged elections are threatening the foundation of our Republic. It’s going to take both legal and political change to bolster that foundation, and it might not be enough.Today we live in an era of “cheap speech.” Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at U.C.L.A., coined the term in 1995 to refer to a new period marked by changes in communications technology that would allow readers, viewers and listeners to receive speech from a practically infinite variety of sources unmediated by traditional media institutions, like newspapers, that had served as curators and gatekeepers. Professor Volokh was correct back in 1995 that the amount of speech flowing to us in formats like video would move from a trickle to a flood.What Professor Volokh did not foresee in his largely optimistic prognostication was that our information environment would become increasingly “cheap” in a second sense of the word, favoring speech of little value over speech that is more valuable to voters.It is expensive to produce quality journalism but cheap to produce polarizing political “takes” and easily shareable disinformation. The economic model for local newspapers and news gathering has collapsed over the past two decades; from 2000 to 2018, journalists lost jobs faster than coal miners.While some false claims spread inadvertently, the greater problem is not this misinformation but deliberately spread disinformation, which can be both politically and financially profitable. Feeding people reassuring lies on social media or cable television that provide simple answers to complex social and economic problems increases demand for more soothing falsities, creating a vicious cycle. False information about Covid-19 vaccines meant to undermine confidence in government or the Biden presidency has had deadly consequences.The rise of cheap speech poses special dangers for American democracy and for faith and confidence in American elections. To put the matter bluntly, if we had the polarized politics of today but the information technology of the 1950s, we almost certainly would not have seen the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol. Millions of Republican voters would probably not have believed the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and demanded from state legislatures new restrictive voting rules and fake election “audits” to counter phantom voter fraud.According to reporting in The Times, President Donald Trump took to Twitter more than 400 times in the almost three weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, to attack the legitimacy of the election, often making false claims that it had been stolen or rigged to millions and millions of people. In an earlier era, the three major television networks, The Times and local newspaper and television stations would most likely have been more active in mediating and curtailing the rhetoric of a president spewing dangerous nonsense. Over at Facebook, in the days after the 2020 election, politically oriented “groups” became rife with stolen-election talk and plans to “stop the steal.” Cheap speech lowered the costs for like-minded conspiracy theorists to find one another, to convert people to believing the false claims and to organize for dangerous political action at the U.S. Capitol.A democracy cannot function without “losers’ consent,” the idea that those on the wrong side of an election face disappointment but agree that there was a fair vote count. Those who believe the last election was stolen will have fewer compunctions about attempting to steal the next one. They are more likely to threaten election officials, triggering an exodus of competent election officials. They are more likely to see the current government as illegitimate and to refuse to follow government guidance on public health, the environment and other issues crucial to health and safety. They are comparatively likely to see violence as a means of resolving political grievances.But cheap speech has already done damage to our democracy and has the potential to do even more. The demise of local newspapers — and their replacement in some cases with partisan or even foreign sources of information masquerading as legitimate journalism — fosters a loss of voter competence, as voters have a harder time getting objective information about candidates’ records and positions. Cheap speech also decreases officeholder accountability; studies show that corruption rises when journalists are not there to hold politicians accountable. And as technology makes it easier to spread “deep fakes” — false video or audio clips showing politicians or others saying or doing things they did not in fact say or do — voters will increasingly come to mistrust everything they see and hear, even when it is true.The rise of anonymous speech facilitated by the information revolution, particularly on social media, increases the opportunities for foreign interference to influence American electoral choices, as we saw with Russian efforts in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Domestic copycats have followed suit: In the 2017 Doug Jones-Roy Moore U.S. Senate race in Alabama, Mr. Jones’s supporters — acting without his knowledge — posed on social media as Russian bots and Baptist alcohol abolitionists supporting Roy Moore in an effort to depress moderate Republican support for Mr. Moore. Mr. Jones, a Democrat, narrowly won that election, though we cannot say that the disinformation campaign swung the result.The cheap speech environment increases polarization and the risk of demagogy by individual candidates. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who before entering Congress embraced dangerous QAnon conspiracy theories and supported the execution of Democratic politicians, need not depend upon party leaders for funding; by being outrageous, she can go right to social media to cheaply raise funds for her campaigns and political activities.We now live in an era of high partisanship but weak political parties, which can no longer serve as the moderating influence on extremists within their ranks. Cheap speech accelerates this trend.We cannot — and would not want to — go back to a time when media gatekeepers deprived voters of valuable information. Cheap speech helped fuel Black Lives Matters protests and the racial justice movement both before and after the murder of George Floyd, and virally spread videos of police misconduct can help catalyze meaningful change. But the cheap speech era requires new legal tools to shore up our democracy.Among the legal changes that could help are an updating of campaign finance laws to cover what is now mostly unregulated political advertising disseminated over the internet, labeling deep fakes as “altered” to help voters separate fact from fiction and a tightening of the ban on foreign campaign expenditures. Congress should also make it a crime to lie about when, where and how people vote. A Trump supporter has been charged with targeting voters in 2016 with false messages suggesting that they could vote by text or social media post, but it is not clear if existing law makes such conduct illegal. We also need new laws aimed at limiting microtargeting, the use by campaigns or interest groups of intrusive data collected by social media companies to send political ads, including some misleading ones, sometimes to vulnerable populations.Unfortunately, the current Supreme Court would very likely view many of these proposed legal changes as violating the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. Much of the court’s jurisprudence depends upon faith in an outmoded “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, which assumes that the truth will emerge through counterspeech. If that was ever true in the past, it is not true in the cheap speech era. Today, the clearest danger to American democracy is not government censorship but the loss of voter confidence and competence that arises from the sea of disinformation and vitriol.What’s worse, some justices on the court who otherwise fashion themselves as free speech libertarians have lately espoused positions that could exacerbate our problems. Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, has indicated that he would most likely treat social media companies like telephone companies and allow states to pass laws requiring them not to deplatform politicians who violate the companies’ terms of use (as Facebook and Twitter did to Mr. Trump), even those who constantly spread election disinformation and encourage political violence. Justice Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch have also signaled an interest in loosening up libel laws, as Mr. Trump has urged, making it harder for legitimate journalists to expose or criticize the actions of politicians.Even if Congress adopted all the changes I have proposed and the Supreme Court upheld them — two quite unlikely propositions — it would hardly be enough to sustain American democracy in the cheap speech era. For example, the First Amendment would surely bar a law that would require social media companies to remove demagogic candidates who undermine election integrity from social media platforms; we would not want a government bureaucrat (under the control of a partisan president) to make such a call. But such speech is among the greatest dangers we face today.That’s why efforts to deal with the costs of cheap speech require political action as well. As consumers and voters, we need to pressure social media companies and other platforms to protect our democracy by taking strong steps, including deplatforming political figures in extreme circumstances, when they consistently undermine election integrity and foment or threaten violence. Twitter’s recent decision to no longer remove false speech about the integrity of the 2020 election is a step in the wrong direction. And if the social media companies are unresponsive to consumer pressure or become too powerful in controlling the political speech environment, the solution is to use antitrust laws to create more competition.Society needs to figure out ways to subsidize real investigative journalism efforts, especially locally, like the excellent journalism of The Texas Tribune and The Nevada Independent, two relatively new news-gathering organizations that depend on donors and a nonprofit model.Journalistic bodies should use accreditation methods to send signals to voters and social media companies about which content is reliable and which is counterfeit. Over time and with a lot of effort, we can reestablish greater faith in real journalism, at least for a significant part of the population.The most important steps to counter cheap speech are the hardest to take. We need to rebuild civil society to strengthen reliable intermediaries and institutions that engage in truth telling. As a starting point, think of all the institutions Mr. Trump tried to undermine: the free press, the opposition party, his own party, the judiciary and the F.B.I., to name just a few. And we need an educational effort — including among older Americans, who are actually the most likely to spread political misinformation — to inculcate the values of truth, respect for science and the rule of law.This is easier said than done. It will require an all-hands-on-deck mobilization and not just the government: civics groups, bar and professional associations, religious institutions, labor unions and businesses all have a role to play.The future of American democracy in the cheap speech era is hardly ensured. We don’t have all the solutions and can’t even foresee political problems that will come with the next technological shift. But legal and political action taken now has the best chance of giving voters the tools to make competent decisions and reject election lies that will continue to spew forth on every platform that can be built to threaten the foundation of our democracy.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen) is a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.” In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.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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      Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny

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      The Infowars host tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect President Donald J. Trump. His role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack is now of growing interest to congressional investigators.The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.It is part of a reckoning Mr. Jones faces on multiple fronts. He is still fighting a half-dozen defamation lawsuits filed by the targets of his false claims, including the relatives of 10 Sandy Hook victims. Late last year the Sandy Hook families won four default judgments against him after he for years resisted court orders, and in upcoming trials, juries will decide how much he must pay them.For Jan. 6, Mr. Jones helped secure at least $650,000 from a Publix grocery-store heiress, Julie Fancelli, an Infowars fan, to underwrite Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse the morning of the attack, $200,000 of which was deposited into one of Mr. Jones’s business accounts, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack said. The night before the riot Mr. Jones was at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, where Trump aides and allies had set up an outpost. He has longtime ties to at least a half-dozen people arrested after the riot, including the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, still a regular guest on Infowars, and Joseph Biggs, a former Infowars employee and Proud Boys leader.The House committee has subpoenaed Mr. Jones, and included a three-page list seeking his related communications and financial records. The panel is also seeking Mr. Jones’s communications with Mr. Trump, his family and anyone from the White House or Congress in the days before the riot. Questioned by the panel this year, Mr. Jones invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, and is trying to block the committee’s demand for records in court.Whatever the outcome of the Jan. 6 investigation, Mr. Jones’s journey from Sandy Hook to the assault on the Capitol is a reflection of how conspiracy theories in the United States have metastasized and corroded public discourse in the digital age. A defender of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a former regular on RT, the Kremlin-funded international television outlet, Mr. Jones espoused such extreme views of American democratic society — he has cast airport security screenings as a plot to usurp Americans’ freedoms — that in 2011 RT stopped inviting him on air.But after Mr. Trump appeared live in an interview on Infowars’ website in December 2015, Mr. Jones traveled from the fringes to become part of a newly radicalized Republican Party. Infowars grossed more than $50 million annually during the Trump presidency by selling diet supplements, body armor and other products on its website, records filed in court indicate. During and after the Jan. 6 riot, Infowars promoted its merchandise alongside graphic videos, including footage by an Infowars cameraman of the shooting death of a pro-Trump rioter, Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol Police officer during the attack.Mr. Jones did not respond to messages seeking comment. His lawyer, Norm Pattis, said his client had done nothing wrong on Jan. 6. Video footage from the Capitol that day shows Mr. Jones using a bullhorn to try to discourage people from rioting.“Over many years Infowars has become a go-to source for people deeply suspicious of the government, so it should come as no surprise that many of the attendees at the rally had passed through Infowars’ doors,” Mr. Pattis said. “But that doesn’t mean any of them are guilty of criminal conspiracy or misconduct.”Dan Friesen, whose podcast, “Knowledge Fight,” explores Mr. Jones’s place in America’s conspiracist tradition, said that people should not be shocked by what happened on Jan. 6, given Mr. Jones’s history. “This kind of flare-up just seemed inevitable,” he said.A Trump campaign rally in Dallas in 2019.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressMr. Jones owes some of his core conspiracy themes to Gary Allen, a speechwriter for the former Alabama governor George Wallace who in the 1960s and 1970s was one of the far-right John Birch Society’s most revered writers and thinkers. As a teenager, Mr. Jones found Mr. Allen’s 1971 “None Dare Call It Conspiracy” on his father’s bookshelf, and came to share Mr. Allen’s view that a cabal of global bankers and power brokers, not elected officials, controlled American policy. Mr. Allen, who died in 1986, sold his theories by mail order in books, filmstrips and cassettes, a marketing model later adopted by Infowars.Mr. Jones got his start in broadcasting in the early 1990s with simultaneous shows on the Austin radio station KJFK and on Austin community access TV. In 1993, a siege by federal law enforcement ended in an inferno at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, killing about 80 Davidians and four law enforcement officers. Mr. Jones asserted, evidence to the contrary, that the sect and its leader, David Koresh, were a peaceful religious community marked by the government for murder. He raised $93,000 from his listeners to rebuild the compound’s church.The deed made Mr. Jones a celebrity among “patriot” militia members, including some involved in armed standoffs with the federal government. In 1995, Mr. Jones pushed bogus claims that the government plotted the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including 19 children. The perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, had also expressed rage at the Branch Davidian compound’s destruction.Mr. Jones and his wife at the time, Kelly Jones, founded Infowars around 1999, when they began producing feature-length, conspiracy-themed videos that they sold by mail or gave away, urging people to pass them around and spread the word.After December 2012, when Mr. Jones falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a government pretext for draconian gun control measures, traffic to his website surged. In 2013, at a gathering in Dallas marking the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Jones met Roger J. Stone Jr., a Trump friend and adviser shunned by mainstream Republicans.Mr. Stone, who saw a valuable new constituency for Mr. Trump in Infowars’ disaffected audience, joined the show as a host and brokered Mr. Trump’s December 2015 interview with Mr. Jones. In that interview, broadcast on the Infowars website, Mr. Trump joined Mr. Jones in casting America as a nation besieged by “radical Muslims” and immigrants, and predicted he would “get along very well” with Mr. Putin. He ended by praising Mr. Jones’s “amazing reputation.”The next year Mr. Jones was a V.I.P. invitee to Mr. Trump’s speech accepting the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, where the Infowars broadcaster stood on the convention floor with tears streaming down his face as Mr. Trump spoke.Mr. Jones on the first day of the Republican National Convention in 2016.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe Trump era also brought Mr. Jones new scrutiny. In 2017, he dodged a lawsuit by publicly apologizing and removing from Infowars his shows promoting Pizzagate, the lie that top Democrats were trafficking children from Comet Ping Pong, a Washington pizzeria. The conspiracy theory inspired a gunman to enter the restaurant and fire a rifle inside. No one was hurt, but the episode shocked the capital and many Americans. By 2019, Mr. Jones had been barred from all major social media platforms for violating rules banning hate speech.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The potential case against Trump. More

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      Indicted. Under F.B.I. Investigation. And Still Popular With Texas Republicans.

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      Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, earned the most votes in Tuesday’s G.O.P. primary. His embrace of Trumpism has helped him weather a series of allegations.SAN ANTONIO — The race for Texas attorney general is asking Republicans to determine how many indictments and allegations of corruption are too many. The answer may be there is no limit — so long as the candidate has an endorsement from former President Donald J. Trump.Ken Paxton, the Trump-backed attorney general, was indicted and arrested on criminal securities-fraud charges that are still pending. He has faced calls for his resignation after several of his top aides claimed he abused his office by helping a wealthy donor. And he has been serving as the state’s top lawyer while under threat of a possible new indictment, as the F.B.I. investigates the abuse-of-office and bribery accusations.“The voters of Texas will tolerate a great deal,” said State Senator Kel Seliger, a moderate Republican who is a former mayor of Amarillo. “They think if somebody is ideologically in sync with them, that’s what matters. I would have thought in Texas that moral example is more important, but apparently it’s not.”In the pre-Trump era, indictments and investigations by federal law enforcement could have been fatal to a Republican campaign. But Mr. Trump has instilled a deep mistrust in government institutions like the F.B.I. Mr. Paxton took the unusual step of authorizing an investigation of an F.B.I. investigation — he appointed a special prosecutor to look into the federal probe of the wealthy donor, an Austin real estate investor named Nate Paul whose home and offices were raided by federal agents.The litany of allegations against Mr. Trump has allowed acolytes like Mr. Paxton to claim that they, too, are victims of a government conspiracy.“That’s the Biden F.B.I., the Biden D.O.J.,” Mr. Paxton said in a recent interview with a Fox News reporter. “They were under investigation by my office. I don’t know what they are going to do. All I can tell you is that we were doing the right thing. We are going to continue to do the right thing. I don’t control what the Biden White House does.”Since the 2020 election, Mr. Paxton has made himself among the nation’s foremost Trump defenders, filing an audacious lawsuit with the Supreme Court seeking to delay certification of the results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He spoke at the Jan. 6 rally in Washington that preceded the attack on the United States Capitol, won an endorsement from Mr. Trump and earned praise from him at the former president’s rally outside Houston. And he has overlooked the fact that, although he has claimed otherwise, the federal abuse-of-power investigation began under Mr. Trump’s F.B.I., not Biden’s.In the Republican primary on Tuesday in Texas, Mr. Paxton won 43 percent of the vote, a soft showing for an incumbent but one indicative of the three well-funded challengers who saw him as politically vulnerable. Since Texas requires primary candidates to win a majority of the vote to advance to the general election, Mr. Paxton faces a May 24 runoff against the scion of the most famous family in modern Texas politics: George P. Bush, the state’s land commissioner who is the nephew of one president and the grandson of another.The Paxton-Bush runoff crystallized immediately as a contest between an incumbent with ethical and legal issues and a challenger who cannot escape the establishment brand of his family name. In Texas Republican circles, some operatives cast the race as prison stripes versus pinstripes.Mr. Paxton has withstood his legal woes by delivering on the issues that drive Texas conservatives. He’s used his office as the state’s chief culture-war litigator — defending the new Texas abortion law, suing the Biden administration to force the federal government to continue building the border wall and joining a right-wing push to criminalize medical care for transgender youth. Days before the primary, he issued an opinion stating that certain medical treatments for transgender children could be considered child abuse, treatments that doctors describe as gender-affirming care.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Mr. Paxton did not take long to attack Mr. Bush as a symbol of the moderate conservative politics that Mr. Trump has all but excised from the Republican Party.“What has happened with performance by the Bushes over the last decade, it’s been disappointing,” Mr. Paxton said Wednesday during an interview on a conservative talk radio show in Lubbock. “I think a lot of Republicans have had enough of it. The Bushes have had their chance. It’s time for the dynasty to end.”George P. Bush spoke at a candidate forum in Midland last month. Mr. Paxton did not attend the event.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThat a top elected official in Texas could make such a stunning anti-Bush remark and face no political consequences illustrates just how loyal Texas Republicans have become to Mr. Trump and Trumpism.In Mr. Bush, Mr. Paxton has a near-perfect foil for a runoff election that is likely to have half or less the turnout from Tuesday’s primary. Mr. Bush has been an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump, but his father, Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and a 2016 presidential candidate, and his uncle, former President George W. Bush, have been harsh critics.At a debate last month, the younger Mr. Bush said President Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 election and called Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit to block the election results “frivolous” — statements Mr. Paxton’s campaign is using to attack Mr. Bush as insufficiently conservative.Mr. Bush said in radio interviews in recent days that he has contacted Mr. Trump’s advisers to suggest that he switch his endorsement from Mr. Paxton. A Trump aide said that was extremely unlikely. And Mr. Paxton said he spoke with Mr. Trump himself and extracted a pledge that the former president would continue to support him through the runoff.Still, Mr. Bush, whose father was savaged as “low energy” by Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, is not conceding Mr. Trump’s support. Last summer he distributed red koozies with a silhouette of himself shaking hands with Mr. Trump and a quote from the former president: “This is the only Bush that likes me! This is the Bush that got it right.”Mr. Bush signaled he will lean into Mr. Paxton’s ethical and legal issues, which have long been talked about in Texas political circles. In 2014, after Mr. Paxton was first elected attorney general but had not yet taken office, he was accused of taking a $1,000 pen that belonged to another lawyer. (He later returned it and said the episode was a simple mistake.) The State Bar of Texas is also investigating whether Mr. Paxton committed professional misconduct by challenging the 2020 presidential election results.In his own radio interview in Lubbock, Mr. Bush said the F.B.I. investigation and the securities-fraud case “are a matter of public record and should be discussed.” Mr. Bush’s campaign spokeswoman did not return repeated messages this week. Mr. Paxton declined to be interviewed.Mr. Paxton has denied wrongdoing in the securities case and has rejected claims that he accepted bribes in office. Last August, his office produced a 374-page report that cleared him of any wrongdoing and said there was “no evidence” he had accepted a bribe. “A.G. Paxton committed no crime,” the report issued by his office stated.There have been signals that Mr. Paxton’s litany of controversies has tested the limits of Texas Republicans’ patience with him. Representative Chip Roy, a conservative who used to work for Mr. Paxton, called for his resignation in 2020. Along with Mr. Bush, Mr. Paxton’s primary challengers included Representative Louie Gohmert, who gave up a safe East Texas congressional seat to run against him, and Eva Guzman, who resigned from the Texas Supreme Court to challenge him in the primary.During his campaign, Mr. Gohmert predicted Mr. Paxton would face a new federal indictment after winning the Republican nomination and lose the general election to a Democrat. If Mr. Paxton indeed wins the nomination but is defeated in November, it would be a devastating first for Republicans: No Democrat has won any statewide office in Texas since 1994.In the Democratic primary for attorney general, Rochelle Garza, a South Texas civil rights lawyer, garnered the most votes and is headed for a runoff. Her Democratic opponent remained unclear. The third-place vote-getter, Lee Merritt, a civil rights lawyer, said in a statement he was not ready to concede to the second-place candidate, Joe Jaworski, a former mayor of Galveston, because military and other ballots were still being counted. Ms. Garza said she was confident the attorney general’s office could be flipped from red to blue. In 2018, Mr. Paxton won re-election by narrowly defeating his opponent, Justin Nelson, by 3.56 percentage points.Mr. Paxton has brushed off any suggestion of a Democratic victory in the fall. “In this country, allegations don’t convict you,” he said in the Lubbock radio interview.Mr. Paxton’s aides said Texas Republicans don’t care about the allegations and controversies surrounding his office. They claimed credit for attacking Mr. Gohmert and Ms. Guzman in order to allow Mr. Bush to advance to the runoff. After the Paxton campaign attacked Ms. Guzman in television advertisements in the closing days before the primary, she dropped from winning 21 percent of the vote during the early-voting period to just 14 percent of the vote on Tuesday.“These ads clearly cost Eva a spot in the runoff,” Dick Weekley, the senior chairman of the mainstream Republican group Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which endorsed Ms. Guzman, wrote in an email to supporters after the primary.Both Mr. Paxton and Mr. Bush are certain to continue to pitch themselves as the true steward for Trump supporters among Texas Republicans.“It’s easy for me to say that I wouldn’t grovel for the Trump endorsement,” said Jerry Patterson, Mr. Bush’s predecessor as land commissioner and a Republican who is anti-Trump but is backing Mr. Paxton. “It’s just damn distasteful for George P. At some point you just have to have some pride in your own integrity.”Yet Mr. Patterson said he has no problem with Mr. Paxton doing Mr. Trump’s bidding about the 2020 election and constantly stressing his Trump bona fides.“For Paxton that came naturally,” Mr. Patterson said. “It’s not contrived.”Kirsten Noyes More

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      William P. Barr’s Good Donald Trump and Bad Donald Trump

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      ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHERMemoirs of an Attorney GeneralBy William P. BarrIt’s a rare Washington memoir that makes you gasp in the very second sentence. Here’s the first sentence from William P. Barr’s “One Damn Thing After Another,” an account of his two turns as attorney general: “The first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy.” Indeed it was. Here’s the second: “That afternoon, the president, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House. …” Uh, “struggling to come to terms with”? Not exactly. How about “struggling to overturn the election he just lost” or “struggling to subvert the will of the voters”? Maybe “struggling to undermine American democracy.”Such opening vignettes serve a venerable purpose in the Washington memoir genre: to show the hero speaking truth to power. Barr had just told a reporter that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This enraged the president. “You must hate Trump,” Trump told Barr. “You would only do this if you hate Trump.” But Barr stood his ground. He repeated that his team had found no fraud in the election results. (This is because there was none.) By the end of the book, Barr uses the election controversy as a vehicle for a novel interpretation of the Trump presidency: Everything was great until Election Day, 2020. As Barr puts it, “In the final months of his administration, Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” For Barr, it was as if this great president experienced a sudden personality transplant. “After the election,” Barr writes, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”The heart of “One Damn Thing After Another” concerns the earlier days of Trump’s presidency when, apparently, “country and principle” took first place. In his December confrontation with Trump, Barr recalls a comment that may be more revealing than he intends: “‘No, Mr. President, I don’t hate you,’ I said. ‘You know I sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged.’”Sarah Silbiger/The New York TimesThis, as the rest of the book makes clear, is the real reason Barr came out of a comfortable retirement in early 2019 to serve as Jeff Sessions’s successor as attorney general. Barr — who thought Trump was “being wronged” by the investigation into the 2016 election led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel — wanted to come to Trump’s defense. Barr refers to the allegations that Trump colluded with the Russians in the lead-up to the election as, variously, the “Russiagate lunacy,” the “bogus Russiagate scandal,” “the biggest political injustice in our history” and the “Russiagate nonsense” (twice). Barr was as good as his word and sought to undermine Mueller and protect Trump at every opportunity. As Barr reveals in his book, Trump first asked him to serve on his defense team, but Barr later figured he could do more good for the president as attorney general. He was right.Throughout, Barr affects a quasi-paternal tone when discussing Trump, as if the president were a naughty but good-hearted adolescent. When Trump says repeatedly that he fired the F.B.I. director James Comey because of the Russia investigation, Barr spins it as, “Unfortunately, President Trump exacerbated things himself with his clumsy miscues, notably making imprecise comments in an interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt and joking around with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador the day after firing Comey.” The just-joking defense is a favorite for Barr, as it is for the former president. In a strikingly humorless book, there is one “funny” line from Trump: “‘Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?’ he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. ‘Just the right amount of crazy,’ he said.” (Rest assured that Barr says the president spoke “playfully.”)During his confirmation hearing, Barr promised to make Mueller’s report public — and he contrived to do so in the most helpful way for the president. In the key part of the report, concerning possible obstruction of justice by Trump (like firing Comey to interfere with the Russia investigation), Mueller said he was bound by Justice Department policy barring indictments of sitting presidents. So, instead of just releasing the report as he had promised, Barr took it upon himself to decide whether Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice. Barr “cleared the decks to work long into the night and over the weekend, studying the report. I wanted to come to a decision on obstruction.” And then, mirabile dictu, Barr concluded that the president had not violated the law, and wrote a letter to that effect. When the Justice Department got around to releasing the actual report several weeks later, it became apparent that the evidence against Trump was more incriminating than Barr let on, but by that point the attorney general had succeeded in shaping the story to the president’s great advantage.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBarr portrays Mueller, a former colleague and friend from their service in the George H W. Bush administration, as a feeble old man pushed around by liberals on his staff. To thwart them, Barr took extraordinary steps to trash Mueller’s work. On the eve of the sentencing of Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, for obstruction of justice, Barr overruled the prosecutors and asked for a lighter sentence: “While he should not be treated any better than others because he was an associate of the president’s, he also should not be treated much worse than others.” In fact, Stone was being sentenced pursuant to guidelines that apply in all cases, but in this one and only instance, Barr decided to intervene.Even more dramatic was Barr’s intercession on behalf of Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. Prodded by Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, who later emerged as a principal conspiracy theorist in the post-2020 election period, Barr not only allowed Flynn to revoke his guilty plea but then dismissed the case altogether. “I concluded that the handling of the Flynn matter by the F.B.I. had been an abuse of power that no responsible A.G. could let stand,” he writes. Suffice it to say that none of the thousands of other cases brought by the Justice Department during Barr’s tenure received this kind of high-level attention and mercy; moreover, it was rare, and perhaps even unprecedented, for the department to dismiss a case in which the defendant pleaded guilty.The only scalps Barr wanted were of those in the F.B.I. who started the Russia investigation in the first place. He writes, “I started thinking seriously about how best to get to the bottom of the matter that really required investigation: How did the phony Russiagate scandal get going, and why did the F.B.I. leadership handle the matter in such an inexplicable and heavy-handed way?” He appointed a federal prosecutor named John Durham to lead this probe, which has now been going on longer than the Mueller investigation, with little to show for it.Drew Angerer/Getty Images“One Damn Thing After Another” begins with a fond evocation of Barr’s childhood in a conservative family nestled in the liberal enclave surrounding Columbia University in New York City. His mother was Catholic, and his father Jewish (though he later converted to Catholicism), and Barr gives a lovely description of his elementary school education at the local Corpus Christi Church. (George Carlin went there too. Go figure.) Barr went on to Horace Mann and then Columbia, where he developed an interest in China. After college, he worked briefly at the C.I.A. while attending night law school, where he excelled. He moved up the ranks in the Justice Department until the first President Bush made him attorney general, at 41, in 1991. He was a largely nonideological figure, mostly preoccupied, as many were in those days, with getting surging crime rates under control.The next quarter-century brought Barr great financial rewards as the top lawyer for the company that, in a merger, became Verizon. More to the point, it brought a hardening of his political views. Barr has a lot to say about the modern world, but the gist is that he’s against it. While attorney general under Trump, he dabbled as a culture warrior, and in his memoir he lets the missiles fly.“Now we see a mounting effort to affirmatively indoctrinate children with the secular progressive belief system — a new official secular ideology.” Critical race theory “is, at bottom, essentially the materialist philosophy of Marxism, substituting racial antagonism for class antagonism.” On crime: “The left’s ‘root causes’ mantra is really an excuse to do nothing.” (Barr’s only complaint about mass incarceration is that it isn’t mass enough.) Barr loathes Democrats: President Obama, a “left-wing agitator, … throttled the economy, degraded the culture and frittered away U.S. strength and credibility in foreign affairs.” (Barr likes Obama better than Hillary Clinton.) Overall, his views reflect the party line at Fox News, which, curiously, he does not mention in several jeremiads about left-wing domination of the news media.Barr is obviously too smart to miss what was in front of him in the White House. He says Trump is “prone to bluster and exaggeration.” His behavior with regard to Ukraine was “idiotic beyond belief.” Trump’s “rhetorical skills, while potent within a very narrow range, are hopelessly ineffective on questions requiring subtle distinctions.” Indeed, by the end, Barr concludes that “Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”Barr’s odd theory about Good Trump turning into Bad Trump may have more to do with his feelings about Democrats than with the president he served. “I am under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralizing our nation,” he writes. “It is the progressive left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals.” In a way, it’s the highest praise Barr can offer Trump: He had the right enemies. More

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      Pressure on Justice Dept. as Jan. 6 Panel Lays Out Case Against Trump

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      Building a criminal case against the former president is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is facing mounting pressure to prosecute former President Donald J. Trump after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack laid out its argument for a potential criminal case on Wednesday night, placing Attorney General Merrick B. Garland squarely in the middle of a politically charged debate over how to hold Mr. Trump accountable for efforts to overturn the election.Even as Democrats have criticized Mr. Garland for remaining silent on Mr. Trump’s actions, he has sought to insulate the agency from politicization, an effort he sees as a corrective to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaigns to force the department to bend to his agenda.Building a criminal case against Mr. Trump is very difficult for federal prosecutors, experts say, given the high burden of proof they must show, questions about Mr. Trump’s mental state and the likelihood of any decision being appealed, underlining the dilemma confronting the agency.The department has never said whether it is exploring a criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump, though Mr. Garland has vowed to pursue wrongdoing “at any level,” keeping alive the possibility that federal prosecutors might someday charge the former president.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.“The Justice Department will have to ask that question: Is there a winning case here?” said Norm Eisen, a Brookings Institution fellow who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Mr. Trump. “If there is strong evidence, but prosecutors don’t think they can secure a conviction, they will have to use prosecutorial discretion.”That said, Mr. Eisen said the evidence that the committee produced in support of its argument could be powerful, and “support the idea that Trump and those around him are at risk of federal or state prosecution.”It was far easier for the committee to claim that Mr. Trump had committed a crime in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by a lawyer — than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction over the same facts, legal specialists said.The filing on Wednesday, which said that the committee had evidence to suggest that Mr. Trump might have engaged in a criminal conspiracy, is the work of three veteran Justice Department lawyers who would be deeply familiar with the complications that such allegations create for the agency.Losing such a case has far-reaching implications. It risks severely undermining the department’s credibility, empowering and emboldening Mr. Trump and his allies, and making it harder for the federal courts to hold future presidents accountable for misdeeds.In publicly sharing its work, the committee has only escalated expectations that Mr. Trump will be prosecuted, regardless of whether its evidence meets the standard that a federal prosecutor must clear to secure a unanimous guilty verdict.In its court filing, the panel suggested it had evidence to support allegations that Mr. Trump committed two crimes: obstructing an official proceeding by working to disrupt the electoral vote count and conspiring with his allies, including the conservative lawyer John Eastman, to defraud the United States by working to overturn the election results.“The evidence supports an inference” that Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and several others “entered into an agreement to defraud the United States by interfering with the election certification process, disseminating false information about election fraud, and pressuring state officials to alter state election results and federal officials to assist in that effort,” the filing said.However, the filing was not necessarily a path to prosecution. The committee made its claim in the context of the court fight that prompted it — a dispute over a subpoena for documents written by Mr. Eastman. The standard it must meet to invoke crimes is much lower than it would be for prosecutors to win a criminal conviction, legal specialists said.Specifically, Mr. Eastman has invoked attorney-client privilege to block the subpoena, and the committee wants a judge to enforce it anyway under an exception for materials that involve crimes or fraud.It is asking the judge to view the disputed materials privately, and to do so it need only convince the court that it has a “good faith” reason to believe that such a private viewing “may reveal” evidence that the exception applies — a far lower bar than proving something to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.The central theory put forward by the Jan. 6 committee is that Mr. Trump tried to disrupt an official proceeding — Congress’s certification of the election results — by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to illegally reject the electoral votes from certain states.Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said that while the facts of what happened were largely clear, the challenge to convicting Mr. Trump would center on proving that he had a corrupt intent — essentially, that Mr. Trump knew that there was no valid lawful basis for Mr. Pence to do what he was demanding.At a trial, Mr. Trump’s defense team would have a powerful argument about his mental state: Even though government lawyers told him that Mr. Pence did not have that authority, Mr. Eastman told him that the vice president could lawfully do what he wanted. The defense could say this shows that Mr. Trump sincerely thought he was asking Mr. Pence to do something lawful — raising a possible reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about whether his intentions were corrupt.Mr. Buell said that in an ordinary white-collar criminal case, it is not uncommon for corporate defendants to point to something their lawyers had said to maintain that they did not think they were doing anything criminal. Prosecutors sometimes go forward with such cases anyway, he said, knowing it will be an argument in trial they will need to try to defeat.But the “enormous political implications” of charging the immediate past president — and possible 2024 election contender — make that calculus all the more risky for Mr. Garland, he said.Federal charges against a former president would be a first in American history. While President Richard M. Nixon resigned in 1974 to avoid being impeached, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned him, absolving him of any criminal charges and sparing the Justice Department from prosecuting him.A case against a former president would always be mired in politics, a dynamic especially true now given how deeply polarized the nation has become.If the Justice Department were to criminally charge Mr. Trump, his supporters would most likely interpret it as President Biden’s handpicked attorney general deploying the department to attack the de facto leader of a rival party — particularly if they believe Mr. Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen.Should the Justice Department not bring charges, Mr. Trump’s opponents could feel that it had blatantly abdicated its duties. After the election, Mr. Trump continued to declare himself the winner, denying evidence compiled by his own administration. He pressured public officials to support his false claims, and he exhorted his followers to stop the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6.If the Justice Department does not respond to such overt acts, it risks fostering the idea that presidents and their allies cannot be held accountable for behavior that undermines democracy.“Here, it’s a totally different situation because there is an enormous political envelope around whether you would charge this guy,” Mr. Buell said. “At some level you can’t analyze this in terms of what a prosecutor would normally do.” More

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      Panel Suggests Trump Knew He Lost the Election, Eyeing Criminal Case

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      At the core of the theory of a possible criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump is the argument that he knew he had lost the election and sought to overturn it anyway.WASHINGTON — Shortly after the 2020 election, as ballots were still being counted, the top data expert in President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign told him bluntly that he was going to lose.In the weeks that followed, as Mr. Trump continued to insist that he had won, a senior Justice Department official told him repeatedly that his claims of widespread voting fraud were meritless, ultimately warning him that they would “hurt the country.”Those concerns were echoed by the top White House lawyer, who told the president that he would be entering into a “murder-suicide pact” if he continued to pursue extreme plans to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.Yet Mr. Trump — time and again — discounted the facts, the data and many of his own advisers as he continued to promote the lie of a stolen election, according to hundreds of pages of exhibits, interview transcripts and email correspondence assembled by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack for a legal filing released late Wednesday.In laying out the account, the panel revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal case against Mr. Trump. At its core is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant about his defeat, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.It is a bold claim that could be difficult to back up in court, but in making it, the House committee has compiled an elaborate narrative of Mr. Trump’s extraordinary efforts to cling to power.In it, Mr. Trump emerges as a man unable — or unwilling — to listen to his advisers even as they explain to him that he has lost the election, and his multiple and varied claims to the contrary are not grounded in fact.At one point, Mr. Trump did not seem to care whether there was any evidence to support his claims of election fraud, and questioned why he should not push for even more extreme steps, such as replacing the acting attorney general, to challenge his loss.“The president said something to the effect of: ‘What do I have to lose? If I do this, what do I have to lose?’” Richard P. Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, told the committee in an interview. “And I said: ‘Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose. Is this really how you want your administration to end? You’re going hurt the country.’”Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, also tried to get Mr. Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He pushed back against a plan from a rogue Justice Department lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results.“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Donoghue. “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.”The account is part of a court filing in a civil case in California, in which the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the lawyer John Eastman and other allies could be charged with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the American people and common law fraud.The committee’s filing shows how some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers repeatedly — and passionately — tried to get him to back down from his various false claims and plans to try to stay in power.It started almost immediately after the polls closed in November 2020, when members of Mr. Trump’s campaign data team began trying to break through to the president to impress upon him that he had been defeated.During a conversation in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s lead campaign data guru “delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Jason Miller, another top campaign aide, told the panel. The president said he disagreed with the data expert’s analysis, Mr. Miller said, because he thought he could win in court.Mr. Miller also told the committee that he agreed with Attorney General William P. Barr’s analysis that there had not been widespread fraud in the election, and “said that to the president on multiple occasions,” the panel wrote in its filing.In the chaotic postelection period, Mr. Trump’s legal team set up a hotline for fraud allegations and was flooded with unverified accounts from people across the country who claimed they had evidence. A Postal Service truck driver from Pennsylvania asserted without evidence that his 18-wheeler had been filled with phony ballots. Republican voters in Arizona complained that some of their ballots had not been counted because they used Sharpie pens that could not be read by voting machines.Mr. Trump appeared to be aware of many of these reports, and would speak about them often with aides and officials, raising various theories about voting fraud even as they debunked them one by one.“When you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it,” Mr. Donoghue, the Justice Department official, told the committee. “But he would move to another allegation.”Mr. Donoghue recalled, for instance, how he told Mr. Trump that Justice Department investigators had looked into, and ultimately discounted, a claim that election officials in Atlanta had wheeled a suitcase full of phony ballots into their counting room on Election Day.Instead of accepting Mr. Donoghue’s account, Mr. Trump abruptly switched subjects and asked about “double voting” and “dead people” voting, then moved on to a completely different claim about how, he said, “Indians are getting paid” to vote on Native American reservations.Richard P. Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, repeatedly informed Mr. Trump that both his specific and general claims of fraud were false.Richard Drew/Associated PressAfter Mr. Donoghue sought to knock down those complaints as well, he told the committee, Mr. Trump changed topics again and wondered aloud why his numerous legal challenges to the election had not worked.Jeffrey A. Rosen, another top Justice Department lawyer who became the acting attorney general after Mr. Barr left the agency, fielded this question, according to Mr. Donoghue’s account, telling the president that he was “free to bring lawsuits,” but that the department could not be involved.Even though none of Mr. Trump’s persistent claims about election fraud turned out to be true, prosecutors will most likely have to grapple with the question of his state of mind at the time — specifically, the issue of whether he believed the claims were true, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3The potential case against Trump. More

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      In Georgia's Secretary of State Race, 2020 Is Still on the Ballot

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      A normally sleepy secretary of state race has become a critical barometer of Republicans’ views of the last election — and of Trump.We have a dispatch tonight from our colleague Nick Corasaniti, who traveled to Georgia last week to report on the Republican primary between Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and Representative Jody Hice, a challenger backed by Donald Trump.MACON, Ga. — At a regional airport in central Georgia, Representative Jody Hice offered a quick summation at the top of his remarks to a crowd of voters. Hice’s political situation requires repeated explanation — why he’s leaving a safe seat in Congress to run for a bureaucratic state government post.“I feel with all my heart that our last election was massively compromised right here in Georgia,” he told the crowd of roughly two dozen voters last week.The audience responded in unison: “Amen.”The last election, indeed, was not massively compromised in Georgia, as multiple audits and hand recounts affirmed. But as the normally sleepy races for secretary of state have suddenly become critical battlegrounds, Georgia remains on the front lines. It’s the site of the most high-profile Republican primary for secretary of state, between Hice and the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, who drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to acquiesce to his attempts to overturn the election.Hice’s campaign shows just how political these secretary of state races have become across the country, contests to determine who will oversee the supposedly apolitical task of administering elections. Hice spent last week barnstorming Georgia as if the primary election was a week away. (It’s actually scheduled for May 24.) He held four stops a day by chartering a private jet to crisscross the state, a flex of financial and organizational muscle that is more often found in a race for governor, Senate or even president.In a roughly 10-minute stump speech at the airport in Macon, Hice touted his conservative credentials as a member of the House Freedom Caucus, noted Trump’s endorsement and attacked Democratic attempts in Congress to write new federal voting legislation. But he avoided many of the specific and disproven conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He instead focused on broader, though still disproven, allegations about voting in Georgia.‘A lot of shenanigans’Core to Hice’s pitch on the campaign trail is that Raffensperger, his primary opponent, sent mail ballot applications to every voter on Georgia’s voting rolls and that all voter rolls were about 10 percent inaccurate. Sending out ballot applications, Hice said, “opened the door initially for all kinds of problems.”What he did not mention was that voters still needed to send in their applications and be verified by the state, so that each application was checked and verified before a voter could receive a ballot. And on the accuracy of the voter rolls, studies have varied, but more often than not inaccuracies occur because voters have moved locally.His supporters are more specific in their attacks on the 2020 election. They spoke in detail about a video that made the rounds in conservative media purporting to show election workers pulling ballots out from under a table. The workers, multiple state officials have confirmed, were simply continuing their counting after mistakenly taking a break.“The video of the ballots in a van coming in at three in the morning in the Fulton County counting room, that kind of tells you everything you need to know,” said Brad Ebel, 52, a Georgia delegate from Macon. “I think there was a lot of shenanigans that went on that were not lawful.”A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Ebel is not alone. In Georgia, 74 percent of Republican voters said there was widespread fraud in 2020, according to a recent poll by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, drew the ire of Donald Trump for refusing to overturn the 2020 election results. His primary challenger is backed by the former president.Audra Melton for The New York Times‘Pastor Q’ vs. the candidate of ‘truth’Raffensperger, for his part, has been busy making appearances on both conservative news sites and the mainstream press, seeking to match Hice’s statewide campaigning by utilizing his stature as the sitting secretary of state.In a recent interview, Raffensperger said that Hice “does not know what he’s talking about” regarding the absentee ballot process.“It’s just a myth that was made and propagated by people that had losing campaigns or didn’t do their job,” Raffensperger said. “The Republican Party and the Trump campaign did not have an absentee ballot chase program, whereas the other party did,” he added, referring to how political campaigns track absentee ballots and make sure voters return theirs.Raffensperger continually said he was the candidate of “the truth” and referred to his opponent as Pastor Q, a reference to the congressman’s former role as a pastor and his support for other candidates for secretary of state who have praised QAnon-style conspiracy theories.“At some point, Pastor Q endorsed them and they’ve endorsed him,” Raffensperger said. “And so that’s his position, and I think it’s untenable, and I believe that’s why he won’t be elected statewide.”When asked about his involvement with candidates who have appeared at pro-QAnon events, Hice said, “They reached out to us early about a meeting that I did not attend, but I’m in favor of any conservatives who will stand up and run for office.”‘I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia’Raffensperger is perhaps best known for rebuffing Trump’s request to “find 11,780 votes” in Georgia, one more than the amount he lost by, in a brazen attempt to overturn the election.When asked how he would respond had he received that call from Trump, Hice avoided a direct answer. But he appeared to side with Trump’s argument.“The context of the call was we need to make sure that legal ballots were counted and illegal ballots were not counted,” Hice said. “I’m totally convinced President Trump won Georgia had we had a true election that was fair, and that in essence is what the president was aware of. How do you continue finding ballots, ballots, ballots, ballots, days, days, days after the election, just enough for President Trump to lose?”Supporters of Hice backed the congressman’s view that Trump won Georgia.Representative Jody Hice campaigning for secretary of state in Macon, Georgia, last month. He said he is “totally convinced” that Trump would have won Georgia, echoing conspiracy theories.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“If you’re asking me do I think that there were things that occurred that were outside of what was correct and legal? Yes,” said Bert Adams, a Savannah resident who attended Hice’s meet-and-greet with her husband, Sam, in that Georgia city last Thursday. “And could that have led to a different outcome than the one that was correct and legal? Probably.”Though he remains focused on false allegations about the 2020 election, Hice also talked about state election law, and changes to it that he wants the Legislature to work on: banning drop boxes, banning outside funding and adding more limits to the absentee ballot process, though he did not specify those limits.Though he is the challenger, Hice has been by far the most prolific fund-raiser among candidates running for secretary of state, both in Georgia and around the country. He has raised more than $1.6 million since announcing his candidacy, and has roughly $650,000 in cash on hand.Yet as his single-engine turboprop jet sat idling outside in Macon, Hice made a closing plea.“We need your financial support,” he said. “It’s a huge endeavor, obviously, to reach out to the entire state.”What to readRussia laid siege to urban areas across Ukraine on Thursday, and the United Nations predicted that roughly a quarter of the population could be displaced. Our colleagues continue their live coverage.The confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, will begin on March 21, Carl Hulse reports.Democrats won an early victory in a New York State redistricting case, when a judge indicated on Thursday that he would allow this year’s midterm elections to proceed using newly drawn district lines that heavily favor Democrats. Nicholas Fandos reports.In a court filing, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said that there was enough evidence to conclude that Trump and some of his allies may have conspired to commit fraud and obstruction in misleading Americans about the outcome of the 2020 election and attempting to overturn the result, Luke Broadwater and Alan Feuer report.Closing segmentJessica Cisneros addressing supporters in Laredo, Texas, on Tuesday. She is facing an incumbent in a runoff election for a congressional district in South Texas.Jason Garza for The New York TimesSpoiler alertAnyone on the ballot can win an election. It’s also true that anyone on the ballot can sway an election — without actually winning.On Tuesday, a little-known candidate who won a couple thousand votes in the Texas primaries has stretched out an already bitter Democratic race by more than two months.In Texas, candidates have to win at least 50 percent of the vote to win their party nomination. If no one gets at least 50 percent, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff. On Tuesday, Representative Henry Cuellar, a longtime South Texas Democrat, received the most votes in his primary but fell short of the 50-percent threshold, pushing him into a runoff against Jessica Cisneros, a progressive immigration lawyer.As of Thursday afternoon, Cuellar had won 48.4 percent of the vote and Cisneros had 46.9 percent. A third liberal candidate, Tannya Benavides, had 4.7 percent. Attempts to reach Benavides were unsuccessful. She wasn’t anywhere near qualifying for the runoff in May, but she received just enough votes to prevent either candidate from winning the primary outright.They’re called spoiler candidates, but it’s not necessarily a fair descriptor.Major-party candidates who fail to win enough support are in many ways just as responsible for their losses as little-known candidates who earn a mere fraction of the vote. But spoiler candidates have helped shape American politics for better or for worse. One third-party candidate in Georgia told us that he has been a target of Republican ire — even death threats — for running in the 2020 Senate race.The candidate, Shane Hazel, a Libertarian, received 2.3 percent of the vote in the November general election in Georgia in 2020.David Perdue, who was the incumbent Republican senator, came less than half a percentage point shy of the 50 percent mark. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, advanced to the runoff as well — and won the Senate seat. Ossoff’s victory, alongside Raphael Warnock’s, a fellow Georgia Democrat, gave their party control of the Senate.While Hazel and his supporters were thrilled that a scrappy campaign had influenced a marquee Senate race, he doesn’t call himself a spoiler. He might have angered Republicans for helping to thwart a Perdue victory, but he said his intention was to give voice to voters, not to simply send a race to a runoff.And he’ll be back on the ballot in 2022, but for a different office.“There are a lot of Republicans who are extremely upset,” Hazel said, “that I’m running for governor.”Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— Blake & LeahIs 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