Presidential Election of 2020

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      Where Fox News and Donald Trump Took Us

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      Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse.When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.Roger Ailes interviewing Mr. Trump in 1995. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people,” Mr. Trump said.CNBCMr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.Three personalities he put on the air at Fox during that period stood out for the way they gave voice to a particular kind of American grievance. There was Glenn Beck, whose show debuted the day before the Obama inauguration in 2009. There was also Sarah Palin, who joined as a paid contributor earning $1 million a year in 2010.And of course there was Donald Trump. He was “relatable rich,” Mr. Ailes told his staff, betting that viewers would see something aspirational in him, when he decided to give Mr. Trump a weekly morning slot in early 2011.But it was what Mr. Ailes did not see about Mr. Trump — how his popularity was a double-edged sword — that led him to the same flawed assumption that the leaders of the Republican Party would eventually make. What neither they nor Mr. Ailes considered fully as they opened their arms to these insurgent forces was what would happen if encouraging and empowering them meant redefining the limits of acceptable political discourse, dropping the bar ever lower, and then discovering that they were helpless to reel it back in.That’s how Fox News landed in a once-unthinkable position behind CNN and MSNBC in the ratings in the weeks after Election Day in 2020, losing viewers to outlets like Newsmax and One America News eager to revel in — and profit from — the kind of misinformation that Fox rejected when it told its audience the truth about Mr. Trump’s defeat in Arizona.In reporting this book on the Republican Party, I spoke with the former president several times, and we discussed media coverage that debunked his unfounded claims about the 2020 election.“A lot of people don’t want that,” Mr. Trump told me in an interview about a month after President Biden’s inauguration, referring to critical — if accurate — news reports about his behavior. “They don’t want to hear negativity toward me.”Trump as a manageable riskAt his core, Mr. Ailes was two things that made him think someone like Mr. Trump was a manageable risk: deeply motivated by growing the size of the Fox audience and the attendant profits that would fatten his annual bonus; and an establishment Republican who, as G.O.P. strategist, had helped elect Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.He was no different from the transactionally minded Republican leaders in Congress who looked at the energized group of voters in the Tea Party and thought: This is going to be good for business. Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, recalled speaking with Mr. Ailes about the budding new political movement on the right — which would be good for both men’s bottom lines — and said that while Mr. Ailes liked the movement’s use of patriotic language and its rebellious spirit, he ultimately “saw them as a convenient grass-roots group.”Mr. Trump, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin — three new Fox stars — initially delivered what Mr. Ailes was looking for: compelling television, good ratings and content viewers could find nowhere else. All three also ended up growing into big enough political celebrities in their own right — one more popular and entitled than the next — that Mr. Ailes eventually lost his ability to control them. (Through representatives, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin declined to be interviewed.)One outburst from Mr. Beck in the summer of 2009 in particular demonstrated the extent to which norms were being stretched. That July, the raw, racialized anti-Obama anger of Tea Party sympathizers collided head-on with the country’s fraught history of systemic racial discrimination in Cambridge, Mass., when the noted Black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor assumed he was a burglar and called the police. The president defended Mr. Gates and criticized the police who had “acted stupidly,” in his view.Glenn Beck, here rehearsing his Fox News Channel show in 2009, was a Fox star but eventually fell out of Mr. Ailes’s favor.Nicholas Roberts for The New York TimesMr. Beck responded during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” saying that Mr. Obama had revealed his “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Then he added, matter of factly, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” When a public outcry ensued, the response from the network was to defend their host. Bill Shine, head of programming, released a statement that called Mr. Beck’s comment a “personal opinion” and not reflective of the network’s views over all. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions,” Mr. Shine added.The significance was hard to overstate. One of the biggest stars on the most-watched cable news network in the country said the country’s first Black president hated white people. And the response from Fox News was to say it was all perfectly defensible.But Mr. Beck would be out at Fox soon enough, as Mr. Ailes became convinced antics like these were too much of a distraction. According to a former senior on-air personality, Mr. Ailes told other people at the network that Mr. Beck was “insane” and had complained to him about various physical ailments that seemed fake, including fretting once that he might be going blind. The network announced Mr. Beck’s departure in the spring of 2011.A Fox News snubThe network’s relationship with another one of its stars was also changing: Mr. Ailes expressed concern about some of Ms. Palin’s public statements, including engagement with critics.Ms. Palin appeared to have reservations of her own. And the tension with Mr. Ailes, which was more nuanced than known publicly, would help open the door at the network for Mr. Trump.She told people close to her at the time that Mr. Ailes made her uncomfortable, especially the way he commented on her looks. “He’s always telling me to eat more cheeseburgers,” she told one member of her staff.Once, after a private meeting in Mr. Ailes’s office at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan in 2010, she came out looking white as a ghost.Sarah Palin on “The Sean Hannity Show” during the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes’s assistant had asked that the aides and family members traveling with her wait outside so the two of them could meet alone. And when she emerged, according to the former staff member who was there, she said, “I’m never meeting with him alone again.”She was the biggest star in Republican politics at the time. The former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee had come as close as anyone ever had to leading the leaderless Tea Party movement. And even without Fox, the media was tracking her every move.Over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, a caravan of journalists chased her up the East Coast during a six-day trip from Washington to New Hampshire, believing she might use the occasion to announce that she would run against Mr. Obama. The trip also included a dinnertime stop at Trump Tower, where she and its most famous resident stepped out in front of the paparazzi on their way to get pizza.She wouldn’t reveal her intentions until later that year, in October. And when she did, she broke the news on Mark Levin’s radio show — not on Fox News. It was a slight that infuriated Mr. Ailes, who had been paying her $1 million a year with the expectation that it would pay off with the buzz and big ratings that kind of announcement could generate.The Void Trump FilledThere were signs at the time that Mr. Trump was starting to fill the void in Fox’s coverage — and in conservative politics — that would exist without Ms. Palin center stage. He had been getting a considerable amount of coverage from the network lately for his fixation on wild rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.One interview in March 2011 on “Fox & Friends” — the show known inside the network to be such a close reflection of Mr. Ailes’s favorite story lines that staff called it “Roger’s daybook” — was typical of how Mr. Trump used his media platform to endear himself to the hard right. He spent an entire segment that morning talking about ways that the president could be lying about being born in the United States. “It’s turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying, ‘Please don’t give up on this issue,’” Mr. Trump boasted.Three days after that interview, the network announced a new segment on “Fox & Friends”: “Mondays With Trump.” A promo teased that it would be “Bold, brash and never bashful.” And it was on “Fox & Friends” where Mr. Trump appeared after his pizza outing with Ms. Palin in the spring, talking up his prospects as a contender for the White House over hers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes were, at first, seemingly well matched.Though he had financial motivations for promoting sensational but misleading stories, Mr. Ailes also seemed to be a true believer in some of the darkest and most bizarre political conspiracy theories.In 2013, Mr. Obama himself raised the issue with Michael Clemente, the Fox News executive vice president for news, asking him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner whether Mr. Ailes was fully bought-in on the conspiracies over the president’s birthplace. “Does Roger really believe this stuff?” Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Clemente answered, “He does.”The network boss and the celebrity developer also shared a dim view of the man who would win the 2012 Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. On election night, Mr. Ailes had already left the office by the time his network’s decision desk called the race for the president. Shortly after the election, he visited Mr. Romney at the Essex House, a posh hotel on Central Park South, to pay his respects. He also offered the candidate his unvarnished paranoia about the outcome.The Democrats had pulled a fast one, Mr. Ailes said, just as they always do. “They make promises they can’t keep. And they’re dirty. They cheat,” he said.Mr. Ailes, with his wife, Elizabeth, leaving the News Corp building in 2016.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes did not live to see Mr. Trump’s second, unsuccessful presidential campaign. A hemophiliac, he died after a bad fall in 2017. As confident as he was in his instincts that Mr. Trump would deliver good ratings, he wasn’t oblivious to the downside of emboldening him. At one point in 2016, he complained to a colleague, the former Fox News chief legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, that he dreaded hearing from Mr. Trump.“I hate it when he calls me. He talks to me like I talk to you. He cuts me off. He doesn’t let me finish my sentences. He constantly interrupts me,” the network chief grumbled to his subordinate, Mr. Napolitano recalled.But there is no doubt that in his chase for ratings and revenue, Mr. Ailes ultimately made his network the subordinate in its relationship with Mr. Trump. And for all his paranoia, Mr. Ailes failed to see how that might happen.Mr. Trump is still embittered by Fox’s decision on the night of the election to project that he had lost Arizona, and therefore most likely the White House. In an interview late last summer, he boasted about their ratings slide. “They’re doing poorly now, which is nice to watch,” he said.Fox News lost its crown as the most-watched cable news outlet in the weeks after the 2020 election, but it quickly regained it. It remains dominant today. Questions about its future in a Republican political environment still dominated by the former president abound. Will Mr. Trump grow irritated enough with the network to lash out and urge his followers to change the channel, tanking ratings again? Will its decision desk still feel empowered to make bold calls like the Arizona one after facing such an intense backlash?“Roger wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with,” Mr. Trump said in our interview, nodding to the rupture in their relationship toward the end. “But he was great at what he did. And he built a behemoth.”Then he offered a warning: “And that behemoth can evaporate very quickly if they’re not careful.”Jeremy W. Peters, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More

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      Jan. 6 Was a Warning. Will Lawmakers Do Anything to Protect the 2024 Election?

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      The transfer of political power is perhaps the most delicate moment in the life of a democracy. It follows an election which the party in power lost and its opponents won. Inevitably, feelings are raw, tempers are short, and mistrust can run high … all as control of the nation is changing hands.Because politics is how a self-governing society resolves its differences peacefully, it is essential that the rules of this transfer are as clear as they can be. If they are not, they can be exploited to create confusion and discord. In the extreme, as the world saw on Jan. 6, 2021, ambiguity on the page opens the door to bloodshed in the streets — exactly what the rules aim to avoid.This is why Republicans and Democrats in Congress are right to train their sights on fixing, at long last, the 135-year-old federal law that sets out the process for tabulating the electoral votes that decide who becomes president, known as the Electoral Count Act.Legal experts have been raising the alarm over the act for years. Its most consequential provision, dealing with Congress’s counting of electoral votes, is “a virtually impenetrable maze,” one scholar wrote in 2019. This was the provision that President Donald Trump, assisted by a posse of partisan lawyers, zeroed in on to encourage arguably unconstitutional behavior by Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, potentially criminal behavior by Rudy Giuliani and his dozens of fake electors, and obviously criminal behavior by hundreds of rioters who laid siege to the Capitol.It doesn’t matter whether any of these people actually believed the wild claims about how the Electoral Count Act works, if they had heard of it at all. The law’s confounding language created the space for a seductive narrative about a stolen election, and a legal path to take it back.More than a year later, Mr. Trump continues to lie about the law, revealing in the process his utter contempt for the most basic democratic principles. “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Mr. Trump said late last month in a statement opposing E.C.A. reform. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power — he could have overturned the election!”No, he could not. Mr. Pence acknowledged as much on Friday. “I had no right to overturn the election,” he said. Yet that much should have been crystal-clear even before 2020. Since it wasn’t, and since Mr. Trump shows every indication of planning to run again in 2024, it is imperative that Congress clarifies the law now — before anyone casts a ballot in that election, and before knowing which party will be in charge of the Senate or the House of Representatives. It’s not hyperbole to say that American democracy is at stake.To understand the mess of the Electoral Count Act requires a brief history lesson. The law arose out of one of the most controversial elections in American history, the 1876 presidential race, a nail-biter with disputes over electoral votes in several states, leading to an ad hoc congressional commission that haggled for months and did not settle on a clear winner until days before the inauguration. Rutherford B. Hayes, who in the end was awarded the presidency over the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, wrote that “radical change” was needed immediately to prevent a similar battle from tearing the nation apart. Still a decade went by before Congress took action, and the law it ultimately passed confused more than it clarified.Today, three reforms matter above all: clearly defining the role and powers of the vice president, of Congress and of the states in electing the president. All three are central to achieving the fundamental goal, which is to ensure that voters, and not partisan political officials, get to choose their leader.Let’s take each of the players in turn.First, the vice president. Contrary to the self-serving fantasies of Mr. Trump and the lawyers who schemed with him, like John Eastman, the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is a straightforward one. Starting at 1 p.m., the job is to open the envelopes and announce the electoral-vote counts from each state, in alphabetical order, then call for any objections. That’s it.She or he has no authority to unilaterally reject electors from the states. The law already lays out this process, but its outdated language is vague and should be clarified in a way that leaves no room for mischief.Next, Congress. The national legislature has many responsibilities, but sitting as a presidential-recount board is not one of them. Whenever a state submits a single, uncontested slate of electors, as all 50 states did in 2020, Congress’s job is to accept it. The problem is that the Electoral Count Act makes it easy to throw a wrench in the works by allowing objections to a state’s submission if only a single senator and a single representative sign on. This sets off hours of debate and delay — a recipe for chaos, as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley demonstrated with their grandstanding around baseless allegations about voting irregularities that had been rejected by every court to consider them.To avoid a repeat of this shameful and reckless behavior, Congress should raise the bar significantly — by requiring the assent of one-quarter or even one-third of both houses to lodge an objection, and a supermajority to sustain one. It should also strictly limit the grounds for raising an objection in the first place.What if a state submits two conflicting slates of electors? And what if the two houses of Congress disagree over which slate is valid? That’s a different sort of problem, and while it didn’t happen in 2020, it did in 1876 and could cause a major crisis again in 2024 — if, say, a Trump-aligned governor who believes that election was stolen refuses to certify a valid popular-vote count that favors the Democratic nominee, and instead authorizes his state’s Republican electors to cast their ballots for Mr. Trump. (Think that sounds crazy? Then you haven’t been listening to David Perdue, the former senator running for governor of Georgia.) In such a scenario, the Electoral Count Act needs to make it clear that Congress should accept the electors who were chosen in accordance with state law.This is where the courts, and especially the federal courts, play an essential role. The law should leave no doubt that judges — and not political actors — have the last word in resolving any vote-counting disputes that arise between Election Day and mid-December, when electors meet in state capitals to cast their ballots.Last, but far from least, are the states themselves. Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the authority to appoint their electors however they choose. They can let the voters do it, as all 50 states do today, or they can do it themselves, as many states did in the early years of the Republic. The key point is, there are no backsies. Once a legislature has settled on a method, it may not change its mind because it’s not happy with the results on Election Day. If a state uses the popular vote to appoint electors, it is required to count those votes fairly and accurately, and to appoint electors in line with the outcome. As the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives said last week in rejecting a bill that would have given the legislature the power to overturn the popular vote, “We gave the authority to the people. And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Yet there is a glaring loophole in the federal law: If a state fails to make a choice by its prescribed method on Election Day, the legislature may step in and do as it pleases. This provision, even older than the Electoral Count Act, was written to address a narrow set of scenarios specific to the mid-19th century. Today it only invites abuse, as state legislatures can try to spin any outcome they don’t like as a “failed” election.Congress needs to limit this provision to real “failures” — a major natural disaster, terrorist attack or some other catastrophe, and even then only if it is impossible to arrange for a popular election afterward.Electoral Count Act reform is not the voting issue Democrats were hoping to push through Congress. They are rightly furious with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, along with every Senate Republican, for thwarting two badly needed bills that would have attacked many forms of voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Still, the current push to reform the act, whose proponents include Senators Angus King, Amy Klobuchar, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, is worth the effort — not only because it will help protect the integrity of the presidential election, but because it may well be the only reform with enough bipartisan support to pass in this polarized moment.If its essential components do pass, Democrats can take comfort in knowing that politicians and lawmakers will have a much harder time undermining a valid vote. Republicans, who like to talk about the importance of states’ rights in our federalist system, can be reassured that Congress will stay in its lane and leave the power to appoint electors with the states, where it belongs.None of this would be an issue, of course, if the United States simply counted up all the votes and saw who won. In 2020, over seven million more Americans chose Joe Biden than chose Mr. Trump, a resounding victory that would have been impervious to all the legally dubious shenanigans Mr. Trump and his allies tried to pull. Even in the closest election of the last half century, in 2000, the national popular-vote margin was more than half a million — far more than the margins of victory in all the disputed states of 2000 and 2020 combined.But as long as we have the Electoral College, the process needs to be as clear and as foolproof as possible. Making it so will not guarantee that things run perfectly. After all, a political movement that is categorically unwilling to accept electoral defeat can do a lot of damage. But just because we can’t plan for everything is not an excuse to do nothing. When you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you get neither.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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      Jan. 6 Panel Adopts Prosecution Tactics for Its Investigation

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      The House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol and what led to it is employing techniques more common in criminal cases than in congressional inquiries.The House select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol is borrowing techniques from federal prosecutions, employing aggressive tactics typically used against mobsters and terrorists as it seeks to break through stonewalling from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies and develop evidence that could prompt a criminal case.In what its members see as the best opportunity to hold Mr. Trump and his team accountable, the committee — which has no authority to pursue criminal charges — is using what powers it has in expansive ways in hopes of pressuring Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to use the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute them.The panel’s investigation is being run by a former U.S. attorney, and the top investigator brought in to focus on Mr. Trump’s inner circle is also a former U.S. attorney. The panel has hired more than a dozen other former federal prosecutors.The committee has interviewed more than 475 witnesses and issued more than 100 subpoenas, including broad ones to banks as well as telecommunications and social media companies. Some of the subpoenas have swept up the personal data of Trump family members and allies, local politicians and at least one member of Congress, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio. Though no subpoena has been issued for Mr. Jordan, his text messages and calls have shown up in communications with Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, and in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.Armed with reams of telephone records and metadata, the committee has used link analysis, a data mapping technique that former F.B.I. agents say was key to identifying terrorist networks in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The F.B.I. said it used a similar tactic last month to identify the seller of a gun to a man in Texas who took hostages at a synagogue.Faced with at least 16 Trump allies who have signaled they will not fully cooperate with the committee, investigators have taken a page out of organized crime prosecutions and quietly turned at least six lower-level Trump staff members into witnesses who have provided information about their bosses’ activities.The committee is also considering granting immunity to key members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination as a way of pressuring them to testify.“Having lived through and being a part of every major congressional investigation over the past 50 years from Iran-contra to Whitewater to everything else, this is the mother of all investigations and a quantum leap for Congress in a way I’ve never seen before,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat and the former top lawyer for the House who is now representing Dan Scavino, one of Mr. Trump’s closest aides, in the investigation.It is a development, Mr. Brand suggested, that Democrats might one day come to regret. “When a frontier is pushed back, it doesn’t recede,” he said. “They think they’re fighting for the survival of the democracy and the ends justify the means. Just wait if the Republicans take over.”The committee’s aggressive approach carries with it another obvious risk: that it could fail to turn up compelling new information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power after his defeat or to make a persuasive case for a Justice Department prosecution. Mr. Trump survived years of scrutiny by the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and two impeachments. Despite a swirl of new investigations since he left office, the former president remains the dominant force in Republican politics.The committee has no law enforcement role, and its stated goal is to write a comprehensive report and propose recommendations, including for legislation, to try to make sure the events of Jan. 6 are never repeated.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no specific public indication that the Justice Department is investigating former President Donald J. Trump.Al Drago for The New York TimesNevertheless, its members have openly discussed what criminal laws Mr. Trump and his allies may have violated and how they might recommend that the Justice Department investigate him. Such a step could put considerable additional pressure on Mr. Garland, who has not given any specific public indication that the department is investigating Mr. Trump or would support prosecuting him.As the House investigation was gaining momentum late last year, the committee’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, read from the criminal code to describe a law she believed could be used to prosecute Mr. Trump for obstructing Congress as it sought to certify the Electoral College count of his defeat.Ms. Cheney and the other Republican on the committee, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, were censured by the Republican National Committee on Friday for their participation in the investigation.Mr. Trump’s allies have grown angry not just at the aggressiveness of the committee — for example, in making subpoenas public before they have been served — but also at the expansive list of people questioned, some of whom, these allies maintain, had minimal to no involvement in the events of Jan. 6.The tactics being used by the committee were described by nearly a dozen people, including members of the committee, aides, witnesses and their lawyers, and other people familiar with the panel’s work. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing what the committee says is a confidential investigation.By comparison, the House select committee that spent two and a half years investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack issued just a dozen or so subpoenas — a small fraction of the number issued by the Jan. 6 committee so far — and made no criminal referrals. The Jan. 6 panel has already recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against three witnesses who refused to cooperate, and one, Stephen K. Bannon, has already been indicted by the Justice Department.Members of the Jan. 6 committee say the obstacles thrown up by Mr. Trump and his allies and the high stakes of the investigation have left the panel with no choice but to use every tool at its disposal.“It’s not a criminal investigation, but having experienced former prosecutors who know how to run complex, white-collar investigations working on a plot to overturn the presidential election is a very useful talent among your team,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member.To lead the inquiry, the panel hired Timothy J. Heaphy, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia. In that position, he oversaw a number of high-profile prosecutions, including one in which the drugmaker Abbott Laboratories pleaded guilty in a fraud case and paid a $1.5 billion fine.Ms. Cheney and the committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, also hired John Wood, a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri and a former deputy associate attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. He is a senior investigative counsel for the committee and is focusing on Mr. Trump’s inner circle. Neither Mr. Heaphy nor Mr. Wood had previously worked on a congressional investigation.Some of the Democrats on the committee were concerned that if the panel was too aggressive, Republicans might turn the tables on the Democrats whenever they took back control of the House. But Ms. Cheney insisted that the committee be as aggressive as possible.She said that the panel would face significant resistance from Mr. Trump’s inner circle, and that the committee would be criticized no matter what it did, so there was no reason to hold back in the face of efforts to impede its work.Mr. Trump moved to block the National Archives from handing over documents from his White House, leading to a monthslong court fight that ended with the committee receiving the documents.At least 16 witnesses have sued to try to block the committee’s subpoenas. Four of the panel’s most sought-after targets — the conservative lawyer John Eastman; Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department lawyer deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s plays to try to stay in power; the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; and the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. — invoked the Fifth Amendment as a way to avoid answering questions without the threat of a contempt of Congress charge.Three Republican members of Congress — Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader; Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Jordan — told the committee that they would refuse to sit for questioning.The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said that he faced dogged questioning from the committee’s investigators — and that they already had his text messages.Jon Cherry/Getty ImagesDespite those obstacles, the committee turned its attention to lower-level aides, who investigators knew were in the room for many of the key events that occurred in the lead-up to and during the assault, or were told almost immediately about what had occurred. Those witnesses tended to be younger and have far less money to hire high-end white-collar defense lawyers to fend off the committee. So far, the committee has spoken to at least a half-dozen lower-level aides who fall into this category.When Mr. Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, refused to testify, the panel turned to his top aide, Ben Williamson, who complied with a subpoena and sat for hours of questioning. After Mr. Clark, the Justice Department lawyer, refused to cooperate, a former senior counsel who worked for him, Kenneth Klukowski, sat for an interview with the committee.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, said the committee was not trying to “flip” witnesses the way investigators might do in a criminal case. But, he said, “If you drew some kind of social diagrams of who’s testifying and who’s not, pretty much everyone is testifying, except for those who are in the immediate entourage of Donald Trump.”Among the other aides who have testified before the committee are Marc Short, Greg Jacob and Keith Kellogg, all of whom worked for former Vice President Mike Pence. Three former spokeswomen for Mr. Trump have also cooperated: Kayleigh McEnany, Stephanie Grisham and Alyssa Farah Griffin.The committee’s investigative work related to Mr. Trump’s current spokesman illustrates the aggressive steps the panel is taking. The spokesman, Taylor Budowich, turned over more than 1,700 pages of documents and sat for roughly four hours of sworn testimony.Shortly after testifying, Mr. Budowich learned that the committee had requested financial records from his bank related to pro-Trump rallies. A federal judge turned down an emergency request by Mr. Budowich to force congressional investigators to relinquish his banking records, which JPMorgan Chase had already given to the committee.Investigators also sought a broad swath of phone records from Ali Alexander, a right-wing rally organizer who was cooperating with the committee, for two months before Jan. 6, 2021 — well before he claims to have thought of planning an event that day — and for one month after.Late last month, another example of the panel’s investigative approach emerged. Mr. Jones, the conspiracy theorist, who has sued the committee, was questioned by investigators in a virtual interview. He later said on his radio show that in the interview he had invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination nearly 100 times.“I just had a very intense experience being interrogated by the Jan. 6 committee lawyers,” he said. “They were polite, but they were dogged.”Even though Mr. Jones refused to share information with the committee, he said the investigators seemed to have found ways around his lack of cooperation. He said the committee had already obtained text messages from him.“They have everything that’s already on my phones and things,” he said. “I saw my text messages” with political organizers tied to the Jan. 6 rally.Maggie Haberman More

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      Inside the Fox News That Donald Trump Helped Build

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      Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse in a way the country is still living with.When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.Roger Ailes interviewing Mr. Trump in 1995. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people,” Mr. Trump said.CNBCMr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.Three personalities he put on the air at Fox during that period stood out for the way they gave voice to a particular kind of American grievance. There was Glenn Beck, whose show debuted the day before the Obama inauguration in 2009. There was also Sarah Palin, who joined as a paid contributor earning $1 million a year in 2010.And of course there was Donald Trump. He was “relatable rich,” Mr. Ailes told his staff, betting that viewers would see something aspirational in him, when he decided to give Mr. Trump a weekly morning slot in early 2011.But it was what Mr. Ailes did not see about Mr. Trump — how his popularity was a double-edged sword — that led him to the same flawed assumption that the leaders of the Republican Party would eventually make. What neither they nor Mr. Ailes considered fully as they opened their arms to these insurgent forces was what would happen if encouraging and empowering them meant redefining the limits of acceptable political discourse, dropping the bar ever lower, and then discovering that they were helpless to reel it back in.That’s how Fox News landed in a once-unthinkable position behind CNN and MSNBC in the ratings in the weeks after Election Day in 2020, losing viewers to outlets like Newsmax and One America News eager to revel in — and profit from — the kind of misinformation that Fox rejected when it told its audience the truth about Mr. Trump’s defeat in Arizona.In reporting this book on the Republican Party, I spoke with the former president several times, and we discussed media coverage that debunked his unfounded claims about the 2020 election.“A lot of people don’t want that,” Mr. Trump told me in an interview about a month after President Biden’s inauguration, referring to critical — if accurate — news reports about his behavior. “They don’t want to hear negativity toward me.”Trump as a manageable riskAt his core, Mr. Ailes was two things that made him think someone like Mr. Trump was a manageable risk: deeply motivated by growing the size of the Fox audience and the attendant profits that would fatten his annual bonus; and an establishment Republican who, as G.O.P. strategist, had helped elect Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.He was no different from the transactionally minded Republican leaders in Congress who looked at the energized group of voters in the Tea Party and thought: This is going to be good for business. Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, recalled speaking with Mr. Ailes about the budding new political movement on the right — which would be good for both men’s bottom lines — and said that while Mr. Ailes liked the movement’s use of patriotic language and its rebellious spirit, he ultimately “saw them as a convenient grass-roots group.”Mr. Trump, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin — three new Fox stars — initially delivered what Mr. Ailes was looking for: compelling television, good ratings and content viewers could find nowhere else. All three also ended up growing into big enough political celebrities in their own right — one more popular and entitled than the next — that Mr. Ailes eventually lost his ability to control them. (Through representatives, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin declined to be interviewed.)One outburst from Mr. Beck in the summer of 2009 in particular demonstrated the extent to which norms were being stretched. That July, the raw, racialized anti-Obama anger of Tea Party sympathizers collided head-on with the country’s fraught history of systemic racial discrimination in Cambridge, Mass., when the noted Black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor assumed he was a burglar and called the police. The president defended Mr. Gates and criticized the police who had “acted stupidly,” in his view.Glenn Beck, here rehearsing his Fox News Channel show in 2009, was a Fox star but eventually fell out of Mr. Ailes’s favor.Nicholas Roberts for The New York TimesMr. Beck responded during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” saying that Mr. Obama had revealed his “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Then he added, matter of factly, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” When a public outcry ensued, the response from the network was to defend their host. Bill Shine, head of programming, released a statement that called Mr. Beck’s comment a “personal opinion” and not reflective of the network’s views over all. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions,” Mr. Shine added.The significance was hard to overstate. One of the biggest stars on the most-watched cable news network in the country said the country’s first Black president hated white people. And the response from Fox News was to say it was all perfectly defensible.But Mr. Beck would be out at Fox soon enough, as Mr. Ailes became convinced antics like these were too much of a distraction. According to a former senior on-air personality, Mr. Ailes told other people at the network that Mr. Beck was “insane” and had complained to him about various physical ailments that seemed fake, including fretting once that he might be going blind. The network announced Mr. Beck’s departure in the spring of 2011.A Fox News snubThe network’s relationship with another one of its stars was also changing: Mr. Ailes expressed concern about some of Ms. Palin’s public statements, including engagement with critics.Ms. Palin appeared to have reservations of her own. And the tension with Mr. Ailes, which was more nuanced than known publicly, would help open the door at the network for Mr. Trump.She told people close to her at the time that Mr. Ailes made her uncomfortable, especially the way he commented on her looks. “He’s always telling me to eat more cheeseburgers,” she told one member of her staff.Once, after a private meeting in Mr. Ailes’s office at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan in 2010, she came out looking white as a ghost.Sarah Palin on “The Sean Hannity Show” during the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes’s assistant had asked that the aides and family members traveling with her wait outside so the two of them could meet alone. And when she emerged, according to the former staff member who was there, she said, “I’m never meeting with him alone again.”She was the biggest star in Republican politics at the time. The former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee had come as close as anyone ever had to leading the leaderless Tea Party movement. And even without Fox, the media was tracking her every move.Over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, a caravan of journalists chased her up the East Coast during a six-day trip from Washington to New Hampshire, believing she might use the occasion to announce that she would run against Mr. Obama. The trip also included a dinnertime stop at Trump Tower, where she and its most famous resident stepped out in front of the paparazzi on their way to get pizza.She wouldn’t reveal her intentions until later that year, in October. And when she did, she broke the news on Mark Levin’s radio show — not on Fox News. It was a slight that infuriated Mr. Ailes, who had been paying her $1 million a year with the expectation that it would pay off with the buzz and big ratings that kind of announcement could generate.The Void Trump FilledThere were signs at the time that Mr. Trump was starting to fill the void in Fox’s coverage — and in conservative politics — that would exist without Ms. Palin center stage. He had been getting a considerable amount of coverage from the network lately for his fixation on wild rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.One interview in March 2011 on “Fox & Friends” — the show known inside the network to be such a close reflection of Mr. Ailes’s favorite story lines that staff called it “Roger’s daybook” — was typical of how Mr. Trump used his media platform to endear himself to the hard right. He spent an entire segment that morning talking about ways that the president could be lying about being born in the United States. “It’s turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying, ‘Please don’t give up on this issue,’” Mr. Trump boasted.Three days after that interview, the network announced a new segment on “Fox & Friends”: “Mondays With Trump.” A promo teased that it would be “Bold, brash and never bashful.” And it was on “Fox & Friends” where Mr. Trump appeared after his pizza outing with Ms. Palin in the spring, talking up his prospects as a contender for the White House over hers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes were, at first, seemingly well matched.Though he had financial motivations for promoting sensational but misleading stories, Mr. Ailes also seemed to be a true believer in some of the darkest and most bizarre political conspiracy theories.In 2013, Mr. Obama himself raised the issue with Michael Clemente, the Fox News executive vice president for news, asking him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner whether Mr. Ailes was fully bought-in on the conspiracies over the president’s birthplace. “Does Roger really believe this stuff?” Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Clemente answered, “He does.”The network boss and the celebrity developer also shared a dim view of the man who would win the 2012 Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. On election night, Mr. Ailes had already left the office by the time his network’s decision desk called the race for the president. Shortly after the election, he visited Mr. Romney at the Essex House, a posh hotel on Central Park South, to pay his respects. He also offered the candidate his unvarnished paranoia about the outcome.The Democrats had pulled a fast one, Mr. Ailes said, just as they always do. “They make promises they can’t keep. And they’re dirty. They cheat,” he said.Mr. Ailes, with his wife, Elizabeth, leaving the News Corp building in 2016.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes did not live to see Mr. Trump’s second, unsuccessful presidential campaign. A hemophiliac, he died after a bad fall in 2017. As confident as he was in his instincts that Mr. Trump would deliver good ratings, he wasn’t oblivious to the downside of emboldening him. At one point in 2016, he complained to a colleague, the former Fox News chief legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, that he dreaded hearing from Mr. Trump.“I hate it when he calls me. He talks to me like I talk to you. He cuts me off. He doesn’t let me finish my sentences. He constantly interrupts me,” the network chief grumbled to his subordinate, Mr. Napolitano recalled.But there is no doubt that in his chase for ratings and revenue, Mr. Ailes ultimately made his network the subordinate in its relationship with Mr. Trump. And for all his paranoia, Mr. Ailes failed to see how that might happen.Mr. Trump is still embittered by Fox’s decision on the night of the election to project that he had lost Arizona, and therefore most likely the White House. In an interview late last summer, he boasted about their ratings slide. “They’re doing poorly now, which is nice to watch,” he said.Fox News lost its crown as the most-watched cable news outlet in the weeks after the 2020 election, but it quickly regained it. It remains dominant today. Questions about its future in a Republican political environment still dominated by the former president abound. Will Mr. Trump grow irritated enough with the network to lash out and urge his followers to change the channel, tanking ratings again? Will its decision desk still feel empowered to make bold calls like the Arizona one after facing such an intense backlash?“Roger wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with,” Mr. Trump said in our interview, nodding to the rupture in their relationship toward the end. “But he was great at what he did. And he built a behemoth.”Then he offered a warning: “And that behemoth can evaporate very quickly if they’re not careful.”Jeremy W. Peters, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More

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

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

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      Arizona Republicans Sought to Overturn Votes. Rusty Said No.

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      The speaker of the Republican-controlled Arizona House — who supported Donald J. Trump in 2020 — just torpedoed a bill that would have let lawmakers reject the results of an election.It is a dark time in the life of the American experiment. The world’s oldest democracy, once assumed to be unbreakable, often appears to be coming apart at the rivets.From his Florida exile, a defeated leader, whose efforts to overturn the last election are still coming into view, is working to place loyalists in key offices across the country, and his followers are racing to install themselves at the controls of future elections.Yet in Arizona this week, the unlikeliest of characters just stepped forward with a palm raised to the forces of Donald J. Trump.When right-wing lawmakers there pushed a bill that would have given the Republican-controlled Legislature the power to unilaterally reject the results of an election and force a new one, Rusty Bowers said no.For decades, Bowers, the unassuming speaker of the Arizona House, has represented die-hard Republican beliefs, supporting the kinds of low-tax, limited-government policies that made the state’s Barry Goldwater a conservative icon.Bowers could have sat on the bill, letting it die a quiet death. Instead, he killed it through an aggressive legislative maneuver that left even veteran statehouse watchers in Arizona awe-struck at its audacity.“The speaker wanted to put the wooden cross right through the heart of this thing for all to see,” said Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant who has known Bowers for some 30 years.A line drawnThe bill’s sponsor, John Fillmore — who boasts of being the most conservative member of the Arizona State Legislature — told us in an interview that Bowers’s tactics amounted to saying: “I am God. I control the rules. You will do what I say.”But to the 69-year-old Bowers, a Mormon and father of seven who first entered politics in 1992, it was clearly a matter of something bigger than parliamentary procedure.By sending Fillmore’s legislation to not one but 12 committees, effectively dooming it, he was also sending an unmistakable message about the direction of his party — a G.O.P. that is unrecognizably different from what it was back when Goldwater-style conservatism itself represented an insurgency.Fillmore’s bill would have eliminated early voting altogether and mandated that all ballots be counted by hand.Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit group that tracks election laws, called it “one of the most comprehensive attacks on nonpartisan election administration and voter access that we have seen.”Most troubling, to voting rights advocates and independent experts, was a provision that would have empowered the Arizona Legislature to “accept or reject the election results” and given a single elector the power to demand that a fresh election be held.And while the bill was never likely to become law, it was an expression of what Barnes called a “cathartic moment” for the Republican Party. “And I think Rusty is not excited about that,” he said.‘We gave the authority to the people’The Arizona dispute comes amid a national convulsion within the Republican Party, which has split into two unequal factions — the pro-Trump forces, who have rallied behind the former president’s calls to overturn the 2020 election, and a dwindling establishment, which has either avoided the subject or faced the wrath of Trump’s allies.On Friday, the Republican National Committee moved to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. In so doing, the R.N.C. officially declared that the attack was “legitimate political discourse.”Bowers did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but his public comments indicate a deep unease with how Trump and his base of supporters have promoted wild theories about election fraud and have pushed legislation that voting rights groups say amounts to an undemocratic, nationwide power grab.“We gave the authority to the people,’’ Bowers told Capitol Media Services, an Arizona outlet, earlier this week. “And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Among Arizona political insiders, Bowers is known as a Renaissance man — an artist who’s equally comfortable rolling up his sleeves to fix a broken vehicle in the middle of the desert as he is painting landscapes in watercolor. A 2015 profile describes him as “a beekeeper and an orchardist” who once trekked to Mexico to live with a remote native tribe.“He has always struck me as independent, his own man,” Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, told us. “He’s a doctrinaire conservative on some things, but a pragmatic, conservative problem-solver on others. Very principled, straight-shooter, full of integrity.”Bowers, a libertarian-style conservative who came of age in Goldwater’s Republican Party, backed Trump in 2020. But he resisted calls after the election to overturn the results — dismissing his colleagues’ claims, which courts and independent experts have said are unfounded, that President Biden did not win Arizona fair and square.“As a conservative Republican, I don’t like the results of the presidential election,” he said in December 2020. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to re-elect him. But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”The Arizona G.O.P.’s civil warBowers’s resistance to the shifting currents of Republican politics has made him a frequent target of the pro-Trump right.Last year, when he survived an attempt to recall him from the Legislature, he complained about the aggressive tactics of the Trump supporters behind it.​​“They’ve been coming to my house and intimidating our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said, describing how mobile trucks drove by his home and called him a pedophile over a loudspeaker.He is term-limited, but his stance could revive efforts to oust him from the speakership — a move that would have national reverberations.Fillmore, who insisted he was willing to bargain over any aspects of his bill, said he was “disappointed that members of my caucus do not have the testicular fortitude” to stand up to Bowers.But he hinted at moves afoot to remove the speaker, whom he accused of sabotaging what he said was a good-faith effort to rein in voting practices that, in his view, have gone too far.“I’m an old-school person. I do not go calmly. I do not go quietly,” Fillmore warned. “I believe Republican voters are solidly in line with me.”Arizona political observers told us it was unlikely that the right wing of the Republican caucus could find a suitable replacement for Bowers, who has survived thus far through a combination of inertia and disorganization among his critics.Fillmore, who said he did not support Trump in 2016 and hadn’t spoken with him, said he had received death threats over the bill from people who accused him of racism for wanting, as he put it, to restore Arizona’s voting laws as they were when he grew up in the 1950s.He expressed his own fortitude pithily. “You know what, people?” he said. “Kiss my grits.”What to readThe Republican Party censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and called the events of Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse.” Party leaders later said that the language didn’t apply to the attack on the Capitol, report Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein. Read the censure resolution here.Former Vice President Mike Pence told the Federalist Society today in Florida that “President Trump is wrong,” and that Pence “had no right to overturn the election.” Lisa Lerer reports that his remarks “offered his most forceful rebuke of Donald Trump.”Biden celebrated the Labor Department’s January jobs report today. Ben Casselman and Talmon Joseph Smith explain that the “overreaching message of the report was one of resilience in the face of a resurgent pandemic.”viewfinderIn Upper Marlboro, Md., President Biden signed an executive order on Friday requiring project labor agreements on many federal construction projects.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesEye contact, with echoesOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. On Friday, Sarahbeth Maney caught President Biden looking up at three ironworkers, their legs hanging in the air, just before he signed an executive order benefiting construction trade unions. Here’s what she told us about capturing it:I like how all three of them are looking at Biden, and he’s looking at them. I was hoping there would be some sort of interaction. He thought it was fun. “You’re nuts,” he joked, comparing them to workers who were similarly situated at a job site when he got his first-ever union endorsement. It was a little offbeat moment that makes a speech a little more personal and interesting.They seemed like they were in their natural element. They looked really relaxed. Everyone in the crowd was sitting up very straight — very attentive, just like the men above — but down below, people had their phones out and were recording. When Biden signed the executive order, a lot of people stood up, which actually made it hard for me to take a picture — because their heads and phones were in the way.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Jan. 6 Defendant Seeks to Subpoena Trump as Witness at Trial

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      The request to have the former president testify faces an uphill fight, but it illustrates efforts by defendants to place him at the center of their cases.Almost from the moment that the first rioters were arrested in connection with the violent attack on the Capitol last January, defendants have tried in various ways to blame former President Donald J. Trump for their behavior.Some have attempted to get out of jail on bail by claiming that they stormed the building because Mr. Trump said they should. Others have sought reduced sentences by arguing that they only joined the riot because they believed Mr. Trump had authorized them to do so.On Friday, however, one Jan. 6 defendant took a different and much bolder step in seeking to pull Mr. Trump into the center of his case: He and his lawyer asked a federal judge for permission to subpoena the former president and several of his allies to testify as witnesses at his trial.“It is anticipated that, when called as a witness, Donald J. Trump will testify that he and others orchestrated a carefully crafted plot to call into question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and the validity of President Biden’s victory,” the lawyer, Samuel H. Shamansky, said in court papers filed on behalf of his client, Dustin Thompson.“Moreover, it will be established at trial that Mr. Trump and his conspirators engaged in a concerted effort to deceive the public, including defendant, into believing that American democracy was at stake if Congress was permitted to certify the election results,” the papers said.It will most likely be an uphill climb for Mr. Shamansky to get permission to subpoena Mr. Trump and force him to appear in court, a process that could also be time-consuming and involve extensive litigation.At a hearing last month, the judge in Mr. Thompson’s case, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, expressed skepticism about the notion of a former president and members of his inner circle being placed by force on the witness stand. He suggested that Mr. Shamansky could just as easily make his point by playing for the jury video or audio recordings of them speaking on Jan. 6 or in the days leading up to it.The request for the subpoenas came in conjunction with a separate motion in which Mr. Shamansky notified Judge Walton that he intended to mount what is known as a public authority defense when Mr. Thompson goes on trial in April. The strategy involves defendants arguing that they were authorized to commit crimes on the advice of a federal official.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the proposed subpoena.At the hearing last month, Mr. Shamansky told Judge Walton that he wanted to subpoena not only Mr. Trump, but also several of his former aides and advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Stephen K. Bannon, Stephen Miller and John Eastman.Acknowledging that he would have a hard time disputing that Mr. Thompson had committed a crime on Jan. 6, Mr. Shamansky told the judge that he wanted testimony from Mr. Trump and the others in order to establish Mr. Thompson’s mind-set that day and to prove that his client had effectively been duped into breaking the law.As for the recordings Judge Walton suggested, Mr. Shamansky argued that live witnesses always played better in front of juries. He also insisted that he had a right — even a duty — to mount the strongest defense of Mr. Thompson that he could.If Mr. Shamansky gets his way, it is almost certain that the famously litigious Mr. Trump would oppose the subpoena in a bruising legal fight, which could drag out the proceedings for months.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Shamansky said if he succeeded in obtaining the subpoenas, he would not only ask Mr. Trump about his speech that day, but also seek to get his hands on private notes or messages that were used in drafting the address. He added that he knew of no legal prohibition against trying to get testimony from a former president as a material witness in a criminal case.“I’m unaware of any authority that undermines our position,” he said. “The Constitution guarantees and demands Trump’s appearance at trial.”Some legal experts seemed to agree, pointing to President Richard M. Nixon’s failed attempts in 1974 to quash a subpoena by the Watergate special prosecutor for tapes and other documents related to his case. Others noted that, in 1990, former President Ronald Reagan gave videotaped testimony during the trial of John M. Poindexter, his onetime national security adviser, who was charged with obstructing a congressional inquiry into the Iran-contra affair.“Based on the precedent of United States v. Nixon, as well as President Reagan’s testimony in the Poindexter trial, I think there is a plausible case that Trump could be required to produce documents or otherwise testify, at least in some form, in some of the Jan. 6 trials,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.Dustin Thompson, right, with his lawyer, Samuel H. Shamansky, in Columbus, Ohio, last year. Mr. Thompson was charged shortly after the Capitol attack.Joshua A. Bickel/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressMr. Thompson, 37, of Columbus, Ohio, was charged soon after the Capitol attack with stealing a coat rack from inside the building and for being in a restricted area of the Capitol grounds with a onetime college classmate, Robert Lyon, who was also charged.Prosecutors later brought an additional charge against both men, accusing them of obstructing an official proceeding before Congress in which lawmakers were certifying the final count of the Electoral College vote.In an interview with The Columbus Dispatch shortly after the initial charges were filed, Mr. Shamansky said Mr. Thompson and others who went to the Capitol “got brainwashed to the point they felt duty bound to follow the encouragement of their commander in chief.” More