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      Trump’s Words, and Deeds, Reveal Depths of His Drive to Retain Power

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      Donald Trump said he wanted Mike Pence to overturn the election, dangled pardons for Jan. 6 rioters and called for protests against prosecutors. Now, it turns out, he had discussed having national security agencies seize voting machines.A series of new remarks by Donald J. Trump about the aftermath of the 2020 election and new disclosures about his actions in trying to forestall its result — including discussing the use of the national security apparatus to seize voting machines — have stripped away any pretense that the events of Jan. 6, 2021, were anything but the culmination of the former president’s single-minded pursuit of retaining power.Mr. Trump said on Sunday that Mike Pence “could have overturned the election,” acknowledging for the first time that the aim of the pressure campaign he focused on his vice president had simply been to change the election’s result, not just to buy time to root out supposed fraud, as he had long insisted. Those efforts ended at the Capitol with a violent riot of Trump supporters demanding that Mr. Pence block the Electoral College vote.Over the weekend, Mr. Trump also dangled, for the first time, that he could issue pardons to anyone facing charges for participating in the Jan. 6 attack if he is elected president again — the latest example of a yearslong flirtation with political violence.And, ignoring what happened the last time he encouraged a mass demonstration, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to gather “in the biggest protests we have ever had” if prosecutors in New York and Atlanta moved further against him. The prosecutor examining Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in Georgia immediately asked the F.B.I. to conduct a “risk assessment” of her building’s security.The events of Jan. 6 played out so publicly and so brutally — the instigating speech by Mr. Trump, the flag-waving march to the Capitol, the violent clashes with the police, the defiling of the seat of democracy — and have since been so extensively re-examined that at times it can seem as if there were little more to be discovered about what led up to that day.Then, The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Trump himself had directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security whether it could legally seize voting machines in three key swing states. Mr. Trump also raised, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, the possibility of the Justice Department’s seizing the machines.Both ideas quickly fizzled.But historians say the episodes and Mr. Trump’s new comments acknowledging his determination to stay in power — and his effective embrace of the Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol, who he said must be treated “fairly” — have newly underscored the fragility of the nation’s democratic systems.Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said voters were understandably desensitized, if not numb, after a year in which Mr. Trump methodically sought to undermine faith in the electoral process.“I actually think the American public is dramatically underplaying how significant and dangerous this is,” he said, “because we cannot process the basic truth of what we are learning about President Trump’s efforts — which is we’ve never had a president before who fundamentally placed his own personal interests above the nation’s.”The events of Jan. 6 played out so publicly and so brutally and have since been so extensively re-examined that at times it can seem as if there were little more to be discovered about what led up to that day.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAlready, Mr. Trump is gearing up for a potential third run for the White House, announcing on Monday that his political accounts had banked $122 million — a show of financial force as some polls show his support softening among Republicans.In the year since he left office, he has systematically tried to remove those who were obstacles to him in 2020 and its aftermath: seeking to drive out of office the Republicans who voted to impeach him on charges of inciting the riot, recruiting challengers to Republican officials who certified the 2020 vote, and backing new candidates to serve as election administrators and legislators in key states.Mr. Trump has made clear he is not necessarily seeking more Republican officials. He wants more election-denying Republican officials.On Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared in a new television ad attacking Gov. Brian Kemp, Republican of Georgia, with whom he has feuded for refusing to overturn the result there. He also hosted a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago for Joe Kent, a Republican in Washington who is challenging one of the House Republicans who voted to impeach him.And on Wednesday, Tudor Dixon, a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, where Mr. Trump lost and sought to undermine the results, is holding a Mar-a-Lago fund-raiser of her own.Meanwhile, congressional investigators with the Democratic-led Jan. 6 commission are busily examining what took place inside the White House in the weeks and months leading up to that day, interviewing senior administration officials and issuing subpoenas. A central focus of their inquiry is the attempt by Mr. Trump’s legal team and advisers to persuade him to use his presidential powers to deploy national security agencies to seize voting machines.It has been known for months that some advisers, including the lawyer Sidney Powell and Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, pitched Mr. Trump in December 2020 on using the military to seize the machines in order to check the validity of their tallies. But new accounts suggest that Mr. Trump was more receptive to this — even taking steps to act on some ideas — than previously understood.“Donald Trump’s a constitutional wrecking ball,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a freshman Democrat from Massachusetts, who saw the mob overrun his workplace in his first days on Capitol Hill. “To borrow a term from the financial markets, that’s priced in. So his revelations and his rhetoric are important. They are a clear and present threat to our democracy. But they’re also priced in.”The real question is for congressional Republicans, Mr. Auchincloss said: “They know as well as we do what threat he poses to our constitutional order. Are they going to stand up to him?”Mr. Trump’s discussion of pardons and of Mr. Pence’s potential to overturn the election, as well as his encouragement of another mass rally — against law-enforcement officials — were met mostly with a shrug among Capitol Hill Republicans.Mr. Trump said on Sunday that Mike Pence “could have overturned the election,” acknowledging for the first time that the aim of the pressure campaign he focused on his vice president had simply been to change the election’s result.Pool photo by Saul Loeb/EPA, via Shutterstock“I’m just glad that there were people in the right places and that the system worked — I mean, obviously, people who had positions of responsibility held their ground even when being asked to do things that they knew they shouldn’t do,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, who has occasionally clashed with Mr. Trump. “Things may have been bent a little bit, but they didn’t break.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. 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      Jan. 6 Panel Examining Trump’s Role in Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      The House committee is looking into efforts by the former president’s outside advisers to create a legal basis for national security agencies to help reverse his defeat in 2020.WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee is scrutinizing former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, including efforts to create a legal basis for directing national security agencies to take such an extreme action, according to three people with knowledge of the committee’s activities.It is not clear what evidence the committee is examining as it looks at any role Mr. Trump might have played in encouraging or facilitating the drafting of a so-called national security finding, a type of document more typically used as the basis for a presidential order to an intelligence agency to take covert action. But the committee recently received documents from the Trump White House including what court filings described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions,” along with related notes.A document fitting that description circulated among Mr. Trump’s formal and informal advisers in the weeks following the election. It reflected baseless assertions about foreign interference in American voting systems that had been promoted most prominently by one of his outside lawyers, Sidney Powell.That document, dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” was published last month by Politico. It used the groundless assertions about foreign interference in the vote tally to conclude that Mr. Trump had “probable cause” to direct the military to begin seizing voting machines.“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals championed by outside advisers to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.Those attempts included directing his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states — Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary, said no — and raising with Attorney General William P. Barr the question of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a query that Mr. Barr rejected, according to people familiar with the episodes.Mr. Cuccinelli, who had told Mr. Giuliani that the Homeland Security Department did not have the authority to audit or impound the machines, later encountered Mr. Trump at a meeting on another topic. Mr. Trump again raised with him, in passing, the idea of the department seizing the machines, and Mr. Cuccinelli reiterated that there was no legal authority for doing so, according to a person familiar with the exchange.The outside advisers had earlier pushed a plan under which Mr. Trump would direct the Pentagon to seize the voting machines, an idea that was killed by White House officials and Mr. Giuliani.“It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee.The panel for weeks has been studying the actions of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who investigators say was involved in discussions about seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers, including during a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18.Mr. Flynn also gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax a day earlier in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.At the Dec. 18 meeting, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, said he, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell decided they would get into the White House without an appointment “by hook or by crook” to present their plans to Mr. Trump. He said a junior staffer let them in the building, and eventually they got close enough to the Oval Office that Mr. Trump saw them and called them in.Once inside, the group pitched Mr. Trump on their plans for him to sign an executive order for the National Guard to take control of voting machines and for Ms. Powell to be appointed a special counsel overseeing election integrity.“We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas,” Mr. Byrne wrote of the episode in a book, referring to portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost.Mr. Byrne wrote that Mr. Flynn had drafted a “beautiful operational plan” that just needed “one signature from the president.” He described various versions of the plan, including an option for the U.S. Marshals to intervene and another for Mr. Trump to “have the National Guard rerun the elections in those six states.”He described White House lawyers and officials as fighting the plans in the meeting, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who thundered, “He does not have the authority to do this!”Representative Jaime Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said the panel is trying to understand the “whole picture” of the plan to seize voting machines and how it relates to other efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, such as the former president’s pressure campaign on Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states won by President Biden.“His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend,” Mr. Raskin said of Mr. Trump. “He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said outsider advisers’ proposals to Mr. Trump to use federal agencies to seize voting machines were “the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Raskin added: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”The extraordinary plan to mobilize the country’s national security agencies to take control of voting machines required an equally extraordinary first step. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was an ally of Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell, revealed in a podcast interview last year that the gambit initially hinged on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present to lawmakers by Dec. 18, 2020.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      Trump Had Role in Weighing Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      New accounts show that the former president was more directly involved than previously known in plans developed by outside advisers to use national security agencies to seek evidence of fraud.Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said.Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines.Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down.The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes.The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.But the new accounts provide fresh insight into how the former president considered and to some degree pushed the plans, which would have taken the United States into uncharted territory by using federal authority to seize control of the voting systems run by states on baseless grounds of widespread voting fraud.The people familiar with the matter were briefed on the events by participants or had firsthand knowledge of them.The accounts about the voting machines emerged after a weekend when Mr. Trump declared at a rally in Texas that he might pardon people charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol last Jan. 6 if he were re-elected. In a statement issued after the rally, Mr. Trump also suggested that his vice president, Mike Pence, could have personally “overturned the election” by refusing to count delegates to the Electoral College who had vowed to cast their votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The new information helps to flesh out how the draft executive orders to seize voting machines came into existence and points in particular to the key role played by a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron.According to people familiar with the accounts, Mr. Waldron, shortly after the election, began telling associates that he had found irregularities in vote results that he felt were suggestive of fraud. He then came up with the idea of having a federal agency like the military or the Department of Homeland Security confiscate the machines to preserve evidence.Mr. Waldron first proposed the notion of the Pentagon’s involvement to Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, whom he says he served with in the Defense Intelligence Agency.The plans were among an array of options that were placed before Mr. Trump in the tumultuous days and weeks that followed the election, developed by an ad hoc group of lawyers like Sidney Powell and other allies including Mr. Flynn and Mr. Waldron. That group often found itself at odds with Mr. Giuliani and his longtime associate Bernard Kerik, as well as with Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, and his team.Around the same time that Mr. Trump brought up the possibility of having the Justice Department seize the voting machines, for example, he also tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them, people familiar with the matter said. The state lawmakers refused to go along with the plan.The meeting with Mr. Barr took place in mid- to late November when Mr. Trump raised the idea of whether the Justice Department could be used to seize machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. Trump told Mr. Barr that his lawyers had told him that the department had the power to seize machines as evidence of fraud.Mr. Trump mentioned a specific state that had used machines built by Dominion Voting Systems, where his lawyers believed there had been fraud, although it is unclear which state Mr. Trump was referring to. Mr. Barr, who had been briefed extensively at that point by federal law enforcement officials about how the theories being pushed by Mr. Trump’s legal team about the Dominion machines were unfounded, told Mr. Trump that the Justice Department had no basis for seizing the machines because there was no probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.It was only after several early options were exhausted that Mr. Waldron pitched the idea of using other parts of the federal government to seize the machines to both Mr. Giuliani and members of the Trump legal team, and to Mr. Flynn and his own associates, including Ms. Powell and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election.Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, at his distillery in Dripping Springs, Texas, last year.ReutersMr. Waldron, who owns a bar and distillery outside Austin, Texas, was previously best known for having circulated a 38-page PowerPoint presentation to lawmakers and White House aides that was filled with extreme plans to overturn the election.Mr. Giuliani was vehemently opposed to the idea of the military taking part in the seizure of machines, according to two people familiar with the matter. The conflict between him and his legal team, and Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell and Mr. Byrne came to a dramatic head on Dec. 18, 2020, during a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Former Pence Chief of Staff Has Testified to the Jan. 6 Committee

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      Marc Short, who has firsthand knowledge of former President Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to throw out the election results, appeared under subpoena.WASHINGTON — Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, testified privately last week before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the latest turn in weeks of negotiations between the panel’s investigators and Mr. Pence’s team.Mr. Short appeared in response to a subpoena from the committee, according to three people with knowledge of the developments, making him the most senior person around Mr. Pence who is known to have cooperated in the inquiry.Investigators believe that participation by the former vice president and his inner circle is critical, because Mr. Pence resisted a pressure campaign by former President Donald J. Trump to use his role in presiding over Congress’s official count of electoral votes to try to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Short was with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, and has firsthand knowledge of the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to persuade the former vice president to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of fake slates of pro-Trump electors.The people spoke on condition of anonymity about Mr. Short’s testimony, which was earlier reported by CNN.Investigators have been in high-stakes negotiations for months with Mr. Pence’s team about whether he would cooperate with the inquiry. In recent weeks, they have sought the cooperation of Mr. Short and Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s former lawyer.Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were both closely involved in Mr. Pence’s consideration of whether to go along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he try to block the official count of Electoral College results by a joint session of Congress. Three days before the proceeding, the two men met with John Eastman, a lawyer then advising Mr. Trump, about a memo Mr. Eastman had written setting out a case for why Mr. Pence had the power to hold off the certification.As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Eastman sent a hostile email to Mr. Jacob, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence.“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” the lawyer, Mr. Eastman, wrote to Mr. Jacob.Mr. Eastman has since invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to defy the committee’s subpoena.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      The Democrats’ Use of Dark Money: Is It Hypocritical?

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      More from our inbox:Trump’s Big ‘If’Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Taking Cancel Culture Too FarEpilepsy and LEDs  Mark HarrisTo the Editor:“Denouncing Dark Money, Then Deploying It in 2020” (front page, Jan. 30) is one of many examples of attempts to gin up controversy over Democrats’ understandable reaction to Republican fund-raising operations.The piece details, at length, the many “dark money” activities of both Democrats and Republicans, while characterizing the Democrats’ behavior as exposing “the stark tension between their efforts to win elections and their commitment to curtail secretive political spending by the superrich.”Really? Is it valid to negatively judge Democrats for being forced to use dark money to level the playing field after Republicans’ long history of influencing elections with dark money? Dark money shouldn’t be legal, but it is. Until that changes Democrats can’t be held to a higher standard that puts their candidates at a serious disadvantage to Republicans.Gail M. BartlettChicagoTo the Editor:While your front-page story provided a great analysis of “dark money” spending in the 2020 election, it did not highlight who is working for and against regulation and transparency in campaign spending.For the past three years, my organization has been part of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition, working to pass the For the People Act. This legislation will reduce the influence of money in politics and create more robust ethics rules for elected officials.Almost every House and Senate Democrat has endorsed this legislation, and it has broad support from Democratic, independent and Republican voters. Conversely, every Republican member of Congress has voted against these bills when they’ve come up for a vote.I encourage all of us, when writing about subjects that significantly shape our elections, to think about who is working for the people and who is standing in the way of change.Alex MorganChicagoThe writer is executive director of the Progressive Turnout Project.To the Editor:While it would be healthy for the nation to regulate or eliminate dark money, I cannot criticize Democratic large donors for preserving their anonymity. There was a fair chance that Donald Trump, the most vengeful president in my time and probably in the nation’s history, was going to be re-elected. He has an enemies list a mile long, and I don’t envy anyone on it.Many of his supporters and fellow Republicans have been acting in like fashion. Respect for one’s opponents or their donors is a remnant of the past.George UbogySarasota, Fla.Trump’s Big ‘If’“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” former President Donald J. Trump said at a speech on Saturday in Conroe, Texas.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Suggests He May Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters if He Has Another Term” (news article, Jan. 31):Former President Donald Trump said at a political rally on Saturday night that if he wins the White House back, he may pardon people sentenced for the Capitol riot. He said they “are being treated so unfairly.”These words are important on three levels. First, he’s seriously thinking about running in 2024. Second, stunningly, he would actually consider pardoning convicted insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that he said, “If I run and I win.” This man with a monstrous ego and narcissism said “if”! Who knew that word was even in his vocabulary?It’s telling as he consciously and steadfastly remains to this day true to his “Big Lie” that he actually won the 2020 election. His “if” he wins in 2024 suggests that he knows, at least subconsciously, that he truly lost in 2020 and could do so again, if he runs in 2024.When Mr. Trump rambles on long enough, the truth sometimes spills out, as it seems to have at this rally. Our truth is that it is incumbent on all of us who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 to not allow Donald Trump to ever disgrace the office of the presidency again!Ken DerowSwarthmore, Pa.Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Taking Cancel Culture Too FarJoni Mitchell was honored by the Kennedy Center last year.Pool photo by Ron Sachs/EPA, via ShutterstockDarren Hauck/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Joni Mitchell Plans to Follow Neil Young Off Spotify, Citing ‘Lies’” (Daily Arts Briefing, nytimes.com, Jan. 28):So Joni Mitchell and Neil Young don’t want their music played on Spotify because it also carries “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Am I now supposed to follow their example and cancel my cable TV subscription because Spectrum carries Fox News, an even greater source of misinformation?Once in a while, the radical right has a legitimate point about “cancel culture” going too far, and this is one of them.Lawrence PeitzmanStudio City, Calif.Epilepsy and LEDsDeborah Turner of Columbus, Ohio, found that her local dollar stores didn’t stock LED bulbs, which could have saved her hundreds of dollars in electricity bills.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Obsolete Bulbs Fill the Shelves at Dollar Stores” (front page, Jan. 24) ignores a critical problem with LED lighting: It’s making many people seriously ill. I am one. I have epilepsy, and even the briefest glimpse of an LED light instantly throws me into a seizure. It’s incredibly dangerous for me to be anywhere near LEDs.LED-triggered seizures have left me with broken teeth, bruises and excruciating pain that lingers for days. I need to be able to buy incandescent bulbs. I can’t enter LED-lit stores, doctor’s offices, hospitals or civic buildings. How am I supposed to live if no one can purchase incandescent light bulbs?Super-efficient incandescent bulbs were developed but put aside by the industry in favor of LEDs. For the tens of thousands of Americans with light-reactive conditions, having access to incandescent bulbs is no mere “consumer choice”; it is a medical necessity.MarieAnn CherryCambridge, N.Y. More

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      Election Deniers Are Running for Secretary of State Across the Country

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      Brazenly partisan candidates who insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are transforming races for the once-obscure office of secretary of state.PHOENIX — Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.For decades, secretaries of state worked in relative anonymity, setting regulations and enforcing rules for how elections were administered by local counties and boards. Some held their jobs for many years and viewed themselves not as politicians but as bureaucrats in chief, tending to such arcane responsibilities as keeping the state seal or maintaining custody of state archives.The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election changed all that.In the two months between Election Day and Congress’s certification of President Biden’s victory, Mr. Trump and his allies pressured Republican secretaries of state, election board members and other officials in battleground states to overturn his defeat. In a phone call that is now the subject of an Atlanta grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s actions in Georgia, the former president urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden.That intense focus on a once-obscure state-level office has dramatically transformed its place in American politics — and the pool of candidates it attracts. Campaigns for secretaries of state this year are attracting more money, more attention and more brazenly partisan candidates than ever before.All told, some 21 candidates who dispute Mr. Biden’s victory are running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan group tracking races for secretary of state throughout the country.“It’s like putting arsonists in charge of the Fire Department,” said Joanna Lydgate, the group’s chief executive. “When we think about the anti-democracy playbook, you change the rules and you change the players so you can change the outcome.”Many of the election deniers are running in solidly red states where it is less likely that their actions could tilt a presidential election. But several others, who have formed a coalition calling itself the America First slate, are running in states won by Mr. Biden in 2020, including in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.The coalition’s members are coordinating talking points and sharing staff members and fund-raising efforts — an unusual degree of cooperation for down-ballot candidates from different states. They are in strong position to win Republican primaries in those battleground states, as well as in somewhat-bluer Colorado and heavily Democratic California.Their chances in November, should they succeed in the primaries, could rest heavily on how well Republicans fare in the midterm elections, given voters’ tendency to vote for down-ballot candidates such as secretary of state from the same party as their choices for governor or senator.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans appear poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.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: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.While local election officials typically oversee the counting of individual ballots, and state legislatures sign off on slates for the Electoral College, secretaries of state often certify elections and set the tone of how elections are run. Their election-management duties generally include distributing voter registration cards, allocating voting machines, educating voters, auditing election results and ordering recounts.Had secretaries of state taken their cues from Mr. Trump in the last election, they could have put their thumbs on the scales of fair elections by forcing the closure of polling places, removing ballot drop boxes or withholding other resources that could make voting easier in heavily Democratic precincts. Worse, critics say, they could have raised doubts about, or even refused to certify, Mr. Biden’s victories.The powers of secretaries of state to subvert elections vary from state to state and are largely untested in court. Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia raised the specter of out-and-out fraud in the tabulation of a presidential vote. Short of that, in states where secretaries of state have the power to certify elections, the refusal to do so could be a vital step in overturning one. In a presidential election, state legislators and the governor hold the power to approve an alternative set of presidential electors, and refusing to certify could boost such an effort.In contests for governor or for House or Senate seats, the refusal to certify the result of an election could send states into uncharted legal waters.Those who say they are alarmed at the possibilities include many current Democratic secretaries of state — and a few Republican ones.“The narrative that is being promoted by people who are ill-informed and simply trying to promote a political narrative to benefit themselves in a particular candidacy is very dangerous,” said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama who is term-limited.Former President Donald J. Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe significance of the America First coalition’s parallel efforts can be seen clearly in Arizona, where the slate’s candidate is Mark Finchem, a former firefighter and real estate agent who has served in the state House since 2015 and has become the leading Republican contender for secretary of state. He has raised some $663,000 for his campaign, according to state filings, more than the two leading Democratic candidates combined.Mr. Finchem, who declined to comment for this article, was in Washington on Jan. 6 and attended the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the Capitol. He has publicly acknowledged his affiliation with the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose leader and other members were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Capitol riot. He championed the Republican-ordered review of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County — though he never endorsed its conclusion that Mr. Biden won — and received a prime speaking spot in Mr. Trump’s Jan. 15 rally outside Phoenix.There, Mr. Finchem told the crowd that the 2020 election had prompted him to run for secretary of state, said he was part of a “nationwide populist movement to regain control over our government” and called for the State Legislature to decertify the presidential result in Arizona, which Mr. Biden carried by nearly 11,000 votes.“Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it — Donald Trump won,” Mr. Finchem said.The coalition’s other candidates include Jim Marchant in Nevada, a former state legislator; Rachel Hamm in California, who contends that Mr. Trump actually won that deep-blue state; and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, who developed a high profile in conservative media after she made uncorroborated claims that she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted in Detroit during the 2020 election, allegations that have been disproved by both local election officials and courts.Major donors to the coalition include such promoters of election conspiracies as Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, and Patrick Byrne, a former executive at Overstock.com, both of whom have also helped fund several election-denial campaigns and lawsuits. Mr. Byrne said he gave the group $15,000.“​​We would like as many like-minded secretary of state candidates to come forward as we can,” Mr. Marchant said at a Las Vegas conference that featured members of the coalition along with speakers who are well-known to followers of QAnon conspiracy theories. “I’ve got a few that have contacted me. We’re working to bring them into the coalition.”In an interview, Mr. Marchant said the group had presented its theories about the 2020 election at three “summits” in different states recently and planned others in Wisconsin, Texas, Colorado and Nevada.He brushed off concerns about undermining confidence in elections and instead assailed sitting state and local officials for resisting further audits of the 2020 vote. “If they’re so confident, wouldn’t they gloat and say, ‘See, we told you so?’” he said. “They won’t. They can’t afford to do that.”United States Representative Jody Hice of Georgia was one of the first secretary of state challengers to be endorsed by Mr. Trump.Dustin Chambers/ReutersTony Daunt, a longtime Michigan Republican official who was appointed last year to the panel that certifies the state’s election results, said Ms. Karamo, who has falsely claimed that Mr. Trump won Michigan, was unqualified to be secretary of state because of the “nonsense regarding the stolen election.”But Mr. Daunt and Mr. Merrill, of Alabama, are among very few Republican election officials who have publicly criticized the spreading of lies about the 2020 election. Instead, pro-Trump Republicans are enthusiastic about those candidates, and both the candidates and their supporters say the changes they are pushing for will make it more difficult to commit election fraud, which they portray as a pressing threat.Mr. Finchem is sponsoring a bill in Arizona that would treat all voters’ ballots as public records and make them searchable online. Another of his bills would require all ballots to be counted by hand, although studies show that hand counting introduces more errors. And he has repeatedly called for “currency grade” paper as a countermeasure against fake ballots, though there is no evidence that fake ballots have posed a threat to fair elections.Nothing and no one has catalyzed Republican enthusiasm for secretary of state contests more than Mr. Trump himself, who has offered three endorsements for Mr. Finchem, Ms. Karamo and United States Representative Jody Hice, who is challenging Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia’s Republican primary. Mr. Hice reported more than $575,000 in donations for his secretary of state candidacy in June, twice Mr. Raffensperger’s total.And Mr. Marchant, in Nevada, said he entered the race after being encouraged by allies of Mr. Trump.While the money being spent on races for secretary of state as yet does not approach the fund-raising by candidates for governor or Senate, they are no longer the low-budget affairs they once were. In Georgia, Michigan and Minnesota, fund-raising is more than double what it was at this point during the 2018 midterms, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Despite their fund-raising struggles in the Arizona contest, Democrats are having some success creating a national support structure for secretary of state candidates.Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan who is facing a likely re-election battle against Ms. Karamo, has raised $1.2 million this campaign cycle, more than six times what her Republican predecessor raised by this point in 2014. Nationally, Democratic candidates for secretary of state raised six times as much money in 2021 — and from five times as many donors — as they did in 2017, according to ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform.Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, claimed she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted during the 2020 election.Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesJena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said she had hired full-time staff for the first time in the association’s history. She said the group had set a fund-raising goal of $15 million for this cycle, far surpassing the $1.8 million it raised in 2019 and 2020, and had raised $4.5 million toward that goal so far.“The stature of the office is different, and the stature of what officeholders are doing is also different,” Ms. Griswold said.Susan C. Beachy More

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      What We Learned About ‘Dark Money’

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      What We Learned About ‘Dark Money’Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane GoldmacherFollowing the moneyFor years, Democrats attacked Republicans for spending huge sums on politics through secretive nonprofit groups that don’t reveal their donors. But in 2020, we found, Democrats evened the playing field, and even pulled ahead by some metrics. A big reason: former President Donald J. Trump.As Democrats’ outrage grew over the Trump presidency, so too did their undisclosed giving. More

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      Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels and a Courtroom Time Capsule From 2018

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      In what may be the last chapter in their unlikely story, Mr. Avenatti cross-examined Ms. Daniels for several hours during his trial on Friday.In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.“Yes,” she responded.The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”Yes, she said.He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.She responded affirmatively.As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More