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      Phil Waldron's Unlikely Role in Pushing Baseless Election Claims

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      Phil Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, is a case study in how pro-Trump fringe players managed to get a hearing for conspiracy theories at the highest level during the presidential transition.A few days after President Biden’s inauguration put to rest one of the most chaotic transitions in U.S. history, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare appeared on a Christian conservative podcast and offered a detailed account of his monthslong effort to challenge the validity of the 2020 vote count.In a pleasant Texas drawl, the former officer, Phil Waldron, told the hosts a story that was almost inconceivable: how a cabal of bad actors, including Chinese Communist officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros, had quietly conspired to hack into U.S. voting machines in a “globalist/socialist” plot to steal the election.In normal times, a tale like that — full of wild and baseless claims — might have been dismissed as the overheated rantings of a conspiracy theorist. But the postelection period was not normal, providing all sorts of fringe players an opportunity to find an audience in the White House.Mr. Waldron stands as a case study. Working in conjunction with allies of President Donald J. Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — and in tandem with others like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser and a retired lieutenant general — Mr. Waldron managed to get a hearing for elements of his story in the very center of power in Washington.Last week, the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a subpoena to Mr. Waldron, saying that it wanted to know more about his role in circulating an explosive PowerPoint presentation on Capitol Hill and to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff.The presentation, which Mr. Meadows gave to the committee (and which he said he never acted on), counseled Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency and to invalidate all digital votes in a bid to stay in power — the same advice that other election deniers gave him at the time.Committee officials have given Mr. Waldron, who retired from the military in 2016 and now owns a bar in Central Texas, until Jan. 10 to turn over any relevant documents. They have also tentatively set a deposition for the week after.When The New York Times sent a reporter last week to Mr. Waldron’s bar, outside of Austin, he told the reporter to leave his property immediately. He then called the local sheriff and described the reporter’s car, adding that the reporter was slurring his words and seemed impaired.Mr. Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, above, became part of a network of Trump supporters pushing election fraud claims.ReutersIt remains unclear whether Mr. Waldron will cooperate with the House committee. But the account he gave in January to the podcast, Flyover Conservatives, and in recent news articles, may give investigators plenty to work with.Mr. Waldron opened his story by saying that his “research” into the 2020 election began that summer, when he started to examine what he described as a network of nonprofit groups connected to Mr. Soros, an outspoken supporter of liberal causes who has long been at the center of right-wing, often antisemitic conspiracies.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Around that time, Mr. Waldron said, he and his associates — whom he has never named — developed a relationship with a Texas cybersecurity company, Allied Security Operations Group, which was co-founded by a man named Russell J. Ramsland Jr.According to Mr. Waldron, Mr. Ramsland and his team had made a startling discovery: that the Chinese Communist Party, through software companies it controlled, had developed a way to flip votes on American tabulation machines, particularly those built by Dominion Voting Systems. (Dominion has adamantly denied its machines have security flaws and has filed defamation suits against some of those who have repeated the claims, including Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.)Beginning in August last year, months before Election Day, Mr. Waldron started to “raise an alarm,” as he put it, and tried to get anyone he could interested in his claim that the country’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking.He told the podcast hosts that he and his partners had reached out to officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, all of which were run by Trump appointees at the time. Mr. Waldron said he also sent an email to Mr. Trump’s director of strategic communications, but all of it “fell on deaf ears.”But there was one person who listened, Mr. Waldron said: Mr. Gohmert, the Texas Republican and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that was traditionally loyal to Mr. Trump and ultimately played an outsize role in his efforts to overturn the election. By Mr. Waldron’s account, Mr. Gohmert promised to pass along his concerns about voting machines to the president, but apparently failed to do so until after the election. (Mr. Gohmert did not respond to questions seeking comment.)Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, expressed concern this month over the treatment of the Capitol rioters.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesOnce the votes were cast and Mr. Trump was declared the loser, Mr. Waldron embarked on what amounted to a two-pronged assault on the election. First, with Mr. Ramsland’s company, Allied Security, he funneled information about supposedly suspicious spikes in votes and other dirt on Dominion Voting Systems to Ms. Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who filed four unsuccessful lawsuits accusing Dominion of a conspiracy to hack the election.According to court papers filed by Dominion, Mr. Ramsland was hired that summer by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and a Trump supporter, to “reverse engineer” the evidence needed to “mislead people into believing” that the 2020 election had been rigged.When the legal challenges failed, Mr. Waldron took a new tack. He partnered with Mr. Giuliani, who was spearheading Mr. Trump’s attack on the election, and joined him at a series of unofficial election fraud hearings conducted by lawmakers in a handful of swing states. Mr. Giuliani did not respond to questions seeking comment on Mr. Waldron, but he has testified in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion that he not only knew and admired Mr. Waldron, but also had “substantial dealings” with him.Even as he toured the country with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Waldron appeared to have been working on a third attack on the election results: assembling the 38-slide PowerPoint presentation that ended up in Mr. Meadows’s possession. In his podcast interview, Mr. Waldron said that he and his associates had managed to get a nascent version of the proposal — to declare a national emergency and use the crisis to order a recount of paper ballots in eight key counties — to Mr. Trump around Thanksgiving, far earlier than public accounts had suggested.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      For First Time, Jan. 6 Panel Seeks Information From a House Member

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      The committee is requesting testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who was deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is seeking testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the first public step the panel has taken to try to get information from any of the Republican members of Congress deeply involved in President Donald J. Trump’s effort to stay in power.The committee sent a letter on Monday to Mr. Perry, the incoming chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, asking for him to meet with its investigators and voluntarily turn over his communications during the buildup to the riot.To date, the panel has been reluctant to issue subpoenas for information from sitting members of Congress, citing the deference and respect lawmakers in the chamber are supposed to show one another. But Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, has pledged to take such a step if needed.“The select committee has tremendous respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the privacy of its members,” Mr. Thompson said in his letter to Mr. Perry. “At the same time, we have a solemn responsibility to investigate fully all of these facts and circumstances.”A spokesman for Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry, a member of Congress since 2013, compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations and coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general, who was resisting Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, with a more compliant official.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?A former Army helicopter pilot and a retired brigadier general in the National Guard whose colleagues call him General Perry, Mr. Perry introduced Mr. Trump to Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division who became one of the Stop the Steal movement’s most ardent supporters. Around this time, the committee said, investigators believe Mr. Perry was communicating with Mark Meadows, who was then the White House chief of staff, via an encrypted app, Signal.Mr. Clark has said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he next appears before the panel.“We have received evidence from multiple witnesses that you had an important role in the efforts to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mr. Perry. “When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics.”Shortly after Mr. Trump lost the election, Mr. Perry joined Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, as they huddled with senior White House officials at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington County, Va., and came up with a strategy that would become a blueprint for Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress: hammer home the idea that the election was tainted, announce legal actions being taken by the campaign and bolster the case with allegations of fraud.Mr. Perry pressed the case for weeks, and in January circulated a letter written by Pennsylvania state legislators to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republicans in each chamber, asking Congress to delay certification. “I’m obliged to concur,” Mr. Perry wrote.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Weighs Possibility of Criminal Referrals

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      The House panel is examining whether there is enough evidence to recommend that the Justice Department pursue cases against Donald J. Trump and others.When the House formed a special committee this summer to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, its stated goal was to compile the most authoritative account of what occurred and make recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But as investigators sifted through troves of documents, metadata and interview transcripts, they started considering whether the inquiry could yield something potentially more consequential: evidence of criminal conduct by President Donald J. Trump or others that they could send to the Justice Department urging an investigation.That move — known as sending a criminal referral — has no legal weight, as Congress has little ability to tell the Justice Department what investigations it should undertake. But it could have a substantial political impact by increasing public pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who in his first year in office has largely sidestepped questions about what prosecutors are doing to examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud.The questions of criminality go far beyond the contempt of Congress referrals that the House has sent to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation. (Federal law requires prosecutors to bring contempt of Congress charges before a grand jury upon receiving such a referral.)According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.It is not clear what, if any, new evidence the committee has that might support a criminal referral, when and how it will determine whether to pursue that option and whether the committee could produce a case strong enough to hold up against inevitable accusations that it acted in a partisan manner.Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?The question is one of the most significant to emerge in the first six months of the investigation.The panel has nine House members — including two Republicans — and is modeling itself on the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The committee plans to produce the authoritative report about Jan. 6.It plans to hold televised hearings early next year to lay out for the public how the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement helped lead to the Capitol riot. And it ultimately may propose changes to federal laws, toughening statutes to rein in a president’s conduct and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to exploit in his attempt to cling to power.One of the challenges the committee faces is that so much has been reported about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and the attacks themselves. So far, the numerous disclosures about the role of Mr. Trump, his aides and others who promoted the baseless idea that the election had been stolen from him have had little impact on his Republican support in Congress.But a credible criminal referral could provide the committee an opportunity to underscore the gravity of what happened while potentially subjecting Mr. Trump and others to intensified legal scrutiny.Although congressional investigators have no powers to charge a crime, their ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify allows them to reveal new details about events. At times, that process leads to witnesses disclosing potential criminality about themselves or others.When that occurs, Congress can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department — often in the form of a public letter — that can increase pressure on the department to open investigations. Sometimes members of Congress, amid partisan squabbling, overstate the evidence of criminality and make referrals to the Justice Department that are ignored because they appear political.Congressional investigations also create problems for witnesses because it is against the law to make false or misleading statements to Congress. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, indicted Roger J. Stone Jr. in 2019 for lying to congressional investigators examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and for obstructing that inquiry. Mr. Stone was ultimately convicted and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stone appeared before the Jan. 6 committee on Friday to face questions about his role in the “Stop the Steal” movement. But rather than answer questions, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination because he said he feared that Democrats would again accuse him of lying under oath.During his meeting with the Jan. 6 committee last week, Roger J. Stone Jr., right, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAt a hearing this month, Ms. Cheney suggested that the committee could subpoena Mr. Trump to answer questions and that criminal penalties would hang over his head if he lied.“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” she said. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, said it was “certainly possible” that the panel would make criminal referrals before the investigation concluded.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Surprise! There’s No Voter Fraud. Again.

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      For those who spend their days operating within the constraints of empirical reality, the long-running voter-fraud scam peddled by right-wing con artists poses a dilemma: Respond to their claims and give them the veneer of legitimacy they crave. Ignore them, and risk letting transparent lies spread unchecked.I used to err on the side of responding as often as possible, in the belief that persistent fact-checking and debunking was the best way to inoculate the American public against a virulent campaign of deception. But it became clear to me, probably later than it should have, that this was always a fool’s game. The professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business. While they pretend to care about real election crimes, their purpose is not to identify whether voters are actually committing such crimes; it is to concoct a world in which the votes of certain people (and it always seems to be the same people) are presumptively invalid. That’s why they are not chastened by data demonstrating — again and again and again and again — that there is essentially no voter fraud anywhere in this country.Thanks to their efforts, about three quarters of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, and they won’t be convinced by evidence to the contrary.That evidence continues to grow. Earlier this week The Associated Press released an impressively thorough report examining every potential case of voter fraud in six decisive battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — where Donald Trump and his allies challenged the result in 2020. Voters in these six states cast a combined 25.5 million votes for president last year, and chose Joe Biden over Mr. Trump by 311,257 votes. The total number of possible cases of fraud the A.P. found? Fewer than 475, or 0.15 percent of Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in those states.Many of those cases the A.P. identified turned out not to be fraud at all. Some involved a poll worker’s error or a voter’s innocent confusion, such as the Trump supporter in Wisconsin who mistakenly thought he could vote while on parole. (“The guy upstairs knows what I did,” the man said after a court appearance. “I didn’t have any intention to commit election fraud.”)In the few instances of clear fraud — for example, a Pennsylvania man who cast two ballots, one for himself and, later in disguise, one for his son — local authorities were quick to act. In Arizona, officials investigated 198 cases of potential fraud, most involving double-voting. They invalidated virtually all of the second votes and have so far charged nine people with voting fraud crimes.That’s the thing about voter fraud: Not only is it rare, it’s generally easy to catch, especially if it happens on a larger scale. In 2019, North Carolina officials ordered a do-over of a congressional election after the winning candidate’s campaign was found to have financed an illegal voter-turnout effort. That candidate was a Republican, as were two of three residents of the Villages, a Florida retirement community, who were arrested and charged with double voting in the 2020 election earlier this month. (The third had no party affiliation.)Given how much Republicans bang on about the dangers of voter fraud, a little schadenfreude is in order here. But it misses the bigger point: To the extent there is any fraud, it is almost entirely an individual phenomenon. The A.P. report confirmed this, finding no evidence anywhere of a coordinated effort to commit voter fraud. That’s no surprise. Committing a single case of fraud is hard enough; doing so as part of a conspiracy is essentially impossible, once you consider how many people would need to be in on the scheme. “It’s a staggeringly inefficient way to affect an outcome,” said David Daley, the author of “Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy.” “It simply doesn’t work.”To sum up once more for the folks in the cheap seats: Voter fraud is vanishingly rare. It is virtually never coordinated. And when it does happen, it is often easily discovered and prosecuted by authorities.I hold no illusions that any of these truths will matter to those who have invested themselves in tales of widespread fraud. After all, they weren’t moved when both Republican and Democratic officials in states around the country reaffirmed, in some cases multiple times, the accuracy and integrity of their vote counts. Even Bill Barr, the former attorney general and one of Mr. Trump’s most reliable bootlickers, could not bring himself to repeat the lie that there was any meaningful fraud in 2020.Alas, Republican voters don’t listen to Bill Barr. They listen to Donald Trump, who dismissed the A.P.’s report by doing his standard Mafia don impression. “I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,” the former president told the news organization, insisting that the true number of fraudulent votes in 2020 was in the “hundreds of thousands.” His evidence? An unreleased report by a source he refused to name.This is how it goes with the vote-fraud fraudsters. The damning evidence is always right around the next corner, or the one after that. Recall that Mr. Trump established a voter-fraud commission soon after he entered office, with the goal of rooting out the supposedly massive fraud that led him to lose the popular vote by nearly three million votes. (Like everyone else, he knew that true democratic legitimacy comes not from the Electoral College, but from a majority of the American people.) The commission was led by Kris Kobach, the indefatigable vote-fraud warrior whom Mr. Daley once called “an Inspector Clouseau who gazes into his mirror and sees Sherlock Holmes.” In Mr. Kobach’s previous job as Kansas’s secretary of state, he spent years hunting for widespread vote fraud and won only nine convictions, most of them of older Republican men who had double voted. Under Mr. Kobach’s leadership, the Trump voter-fraud commission disbanded after less than a year of chaos and controversy, without having made any findings.That’s because, as the A.P. report affirms once again, there was nothing to find. American voters aren’t cheating, and certainly not in any coordinated way.And here lies the deepest irony of this strange, fragile moment we are living in. A very real threat is, in fact, looming over America’s electoral integrity. But it’s not coming from voters; it’s coming from the people braying the loudest about the importance of election integrity.Donald Trump turned fact-free charges of voter fraud into an art form, but the exploitation of the predictable public fear generated by that sort of rhetoric has been a central feature of the Republican playbook for years. Back in 2013, the then-North Carolina lawmaker Thom Tillis explained why Republicans in the Legislature were passing their strict voter-ID law. “There is some evidence of voter fraud, but that’s not the primary reason for doing this,” said Mr. Tillis, now a U.S. senator. “There are a lot of people who are just concerned with the potential risk of fraud.” Why are they so concerned? Because their leaders have been feeding them a steady diet of lies.That diet became an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Trump years, culminating in the “Stop the Steal” rallies after the 2020 election and then, horrifically, in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Now the same people who subscribed to the lies about election fraud are running for, and often winning, jobs overseeing the running of elections across the country. They are representative of a new generation of Republicans, raised in the fever swamps of Fox News and other purveyors of disinformation, who believe elections are valid only when their candidate wins.The goal of the voter-fraud brigade, it turns out, was never to identify fraud that might have happened in the past; it was to indoctrinate voters with the terror of stolen elections, and to pave the way for a hostile takeover of American democracy in the future.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 Committee May Add New Expertise for Investigation

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      As the panel continues to take testimony, it is looking to do more analysis of social media and possible foreign efforts to sow discord in the U.S. before the Capitol riot.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault at the U.S. Capitol is weighing whether to hire staff members who can analyze social media posts and examining the role foreign adversaries played in sowing divisions among Americans over the outcome of the presidential election, according to two people briefed on the committee’s decision making.The new avenues of inquiry come as the committee, which currently has about 40 staff members, continues to subpoena testimony and documents. Witnesses this week included William J. Walker, the former commander of the D.C. National Guard, who has said military leaders delayed the guard response on Jan. 6, and the conservative activist Dustin Stockton, whose lawyer said he is turning over a “treasure trove” of documents that would have senior Trump allies and lawmakers “quivering in their boots.”Mr. Stockton and his fiancée, Jennifer L. Lawrence, assisted in organizing rallies after the election advancing false claims about its outcome. But Mr. Stockton has said he was concerned that a march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 while Congress was certifying the election would mean “possible danger,” and that his urgent concerns were escalated to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time, according to the committee.The political operative Roger J. Stone Jr., a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, appeared before the committee for a deposition on Friday. But he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to each of the panel’s questions because, he said, he feared that Democrats would fabricate perjury charges.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?“I did my civic duty and I responded as required by law,” Mr. Stone said after the deposition. He then criticized the investigation as “Witch Hunt 3.0,” and accused the government of hiding potentially exculpatory video evidence about the attack on the Capitol.Mr. Stone has claimed that he was leaving town as rioters stormed the Capitol. “I did not march to the Capitol. I was not at the Capitol,” he said, adding that he believed the violence was “illegal and politically counterproductive.”But Mr. Stone promoted his attendance at the rallies on Jan. 5 and 6, solicited support to pay for security through the website stopthesteal.org and used members of the Oath Keepers militia group as personal security guards while he was in Washington. At least two of those members have been indicted on charges that they were involved in the Capitol attack.To bolster the public’s understanding of the attack, the committee is considering hiring several new staff members to analyze the vast amount of information that Mr. Trump’s supporters posted on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Parler and YouTube in the weeks before and after the attack. These digital footprints could help congressional investigators connect players and events, or bring to light details that witnesses might not know or remember.Federal prosecutors have relied on hundreds of thousands of pieces of digital evidence to identify and support charges against more than 700 defendants who have been arrested in nearly every state for their part in the attack.The committee’s investigators are also seeking to understand whether foreign governments were able to exploit and deepen social divisions created by Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede his election loss. Foreign adversaries have long tried to damage America’s national security interests by exacerbating social unrest and polarization.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Democrats Find Urgent New Reasons to Worry About Latino Voters

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      Two reports shed light on the issues driving Hispanic voters and why their support of the Democratic Party is eroding.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Of all the 2020 hangovers, perhaps none is as befuddling to Democrats as the party’s eroding support among Latino voters.And Democrats have plenty of reason to worry: For years, they have relied on Latinos as a crucial part of a winning coalition and held fast to the belief that the coalition would only grow along with new voters. Former President Donald J. Trump’s policies and rhetorical attacks on immigrants, many Democrats reasoned, would drive Hispanic voters to their party like no other candidate could.But Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign blew that theory out of the water: Hispanic support for him actually increased in 2020, particularly — but not only — in South Florida and South Texas. And two new reports this week show why Democrats should be worried.The first, by Equis Research, a Democratic-leaning group that focuses on Latinos, relies on polls and focus groups conducted over the year since the election. It found that the economy became the top issue for Latinos all over the country, replacing immigration for many voters.The report also found that fears of Democrats embracing socialist policies drove a large number of voters toward Mr. Trump, and that those fears persist even among Democratic voters.And in new polling by Way to Win, a Democratic-aligned group, the economy was seen as the most important issue among Latino voters. More alarming for Democrats though, is that half of all Hispanic voters polled in four key states said that they believed the country was going in the wrong direction.The poll surveyed 1,000 Latino voters in Texas, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona last month in both English and Spanish, and found that 58 percent of independent voters believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Still, 60 percent of all Latino voters surveyed said they had a favorable opinion of President Biden and the Democratic Party.But that level of support won’t be enough to hold on to the House or Senate in the midterms, said Tory Gavito, the president of Way to Win.“To win next November, we need to have Latinos at the 70 mark for Democrats, so we’ve got to move for these folks,” Ms. Gavito said in an interview. “Right now we see the support, but it’s soft.”Kristian Ramos, the campaign manager for Way to Win’s midterm message research project, said: “We could easily lose them to the couch. This administration has done 10 times more on Covid, has done miraculous work on the economy, but Latinos have no idea. And the economic anxiety in this group is off the charts.”Half of those polled by Way to Win said that they trusted the Democratic Party more on the issues of jobs and the economy, while 54 percent said they approved of Mr. Biden’s handling of the economy. Among those who have an unfavorable view of the party, 22 percent say it is too liberal or socialist, according to the poll.Yet the majority of those surveyed said they wished that Mr. Biden could have enacted more change than he has so far, which pollsters tied to “deep anxiety about the economy.”“They don’t really care ideologically, as long as someone is speaking to those pain points,” Mr. Ramos said.The Equis report found that Latinos who may have been otherwise inclined to vote for Mr. Trump in 2016 withheld their support in that campaign because of his hard-line stance on immigration and the “importance of the Hispanic identity.” But by the middle of 2020, neither of those issues clearly differentiated Trump supporters and Democratic voters. Instead, the impact of the pandemic appeared to drive a larger number of voters, and the Trump administration’s approach to reopening the economy was embraced by a majority of them.The Equis research found that Democrats are losing ground to Republicans on issues relating to the economy. Asked which party they find more accurately described as valuing hard work, better for the American workers and the party of the American dream, Latino voters were roughly evenly divided.“The challenge is that 2020 hasn’t ended, the same dynamics haven’t ended,” said Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis. If there is a moral to the story, Mr. Odio added, it is that less partisan Latinos moved toward the candidate they trusted more on their top issue. “So competing for the vote can pay off.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.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 Panel Subpoenas Retired Colonel Who Shared Plan to Overturn Election

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      Phil Waldron has been under scrutiny since a 38-page PowerPoint he circulated was turned over to the panel by former President Donald J. Trump’s last chief of staff.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol issued a subpoena on Thursday for Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare who had circulated a detailed and extreme plan to overturn the 2020 election.The committee has been scrutinizing Mr. Waldron’s role in spreading false information about the election since a 38-page PowerPoint presentation he circulated on Capitol Hill was turned over to the panel by Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s last chief of staff, who denied having anything to do with it.“The document he reportedly provided to administration officials and members of Congress is an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee, said.Waldron said he had not yet seen the subpoena and declined to comment.The PowerPoint — titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” — recommended that Mr. Trump declare a national emergency to cling to power and included the false claim that China and Venezuela had obtained control over the voting infrastructure in a majority of states.On Jan. 4, associates of Mr. Waldron spoke to a group of senators and informed them about the allegations of election fraud in the PowerPoint, Mr. Waldron told The New York Times recently in an interview. On Jan. 5, he said, he personally briefed a small group of House members whom he did not identify; that discussion also focused on baseless claims of foreign interference in the election. He said he had made the document available to the lawmakers.Mr. Waldron told The Washington Post that he had contributed to the creation of the document and had visited the White House several times after last year’s election, and spoken with Mr. Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times.”Mr. Waldron, who specialized in psychological influence operations and once was deployed to Iraq, retired from the military in 2016 after 30 years of service. He appears to lead a quieter life these days, describing himself on his LinkedIn page as the founder, forklift driver and floor sweeper at One Shot Distillery and Brewery in Dripping Springs, Texas.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?But almost as soon as the 2020 polls closed, he joined a wide-ranging effort to persuade the public and key Republican politicians that the vote count had been marred by rampant fraud.By mid-November, Mr. Waldron was in contact with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, who at the time was overseeing challenges to the election. Mr. Waldron fed Mr. Giuliani information about alleged attempts by foreign powers to hack American voting machines and about suspected left-wing operatives who were working for the vote tabulation company Dominion Voting Systems. Some of these baseless claims ultimately made their way into federal lawsuits attacking Dominion’s role in the election that were filed by the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.“Colonel in the military, great war record,” Mr. Giuliani later said of Mr. Waldron in a deposition he gave in a defamation lawsuit brought by a Dominion employee. “I’ve had substantial dealings with him and he’s very, very thorough and very experienced in this kind of work.”Mr. Giuliani said his legal team put up a “big whiteboard” that laid out its strategies while he and fellow lawyers, including Ms. Powell and Jenna Ellis, ran operations as “really active supervisors.”Mr. Giuliani said another lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, was focusing on fraud allegations in Nevada and Arizona, while Mr. Waldron was investigating conspiracies related to Dominion voting machines.“If I were to think of Dominion, I would think of Sidney carrying the ball on that, with everybody else helping, and Phil was the investigator,” Mr. Giuliani said.Mr. Waldron also participated in meetings at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in early January to plan ways to challenge the election results, according to the committee.Key Aspects of the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 8The House investigation. More

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      How Ashley Biden’s Diary Made Its Way to Project Veritas

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      New details shed light on the federal investigation into the conservative group’s acquisition last year of a journal kept by the president’s daughter.In the final two months of the 2020 campaign, President Donald J. Trump, his grip on power slipping because of his handling of the pandemic, desperately tried to change the narrative by attacking the business dealings of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, invoking his name publicly over 100 times.At the same time, another effort was underway in secret to try to expose the contents of a diary kept the previous year by Mr. Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, as she underwent treatment for addiction.Now, more than a year later, the Justice Department is deep into an investigation of how the diary found its way into the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump at the height of the campaign.Federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents are investigating whether there was a criminal conspiracy among a handful of individuals to steal and publish the diary. Those being scrutinized include current and former operatives for the conservative group Project Veritas; a donor Mr. Trump appointed to a political position in the final days of his administration; a man who once pleaded guilty in a money laundering scheme; and a financially struggling mother of two, according to people familiar with federal grand jury subpoenas and a search warrant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.Extensive interviews with people involved in or briefed on the investigation and a review of court filings, police records and other material help flesh out elements of a tale that is testing the line between investigative journalism and political dirty tricks.The investigation has focused new attention on how Mr. Trump or his allies sought to use the troubles of Mr. Biden’s two surviving children to undercut him.The inquiry has also intensified the scrutiny of Project Veritas. Its founder, James O’Keefe, was pulled from his apartment in his underwear and handcuffed during a dawn raid last month by the F.B.I., two days after a pair of his former employees had their homes raided.The group — which purchased the diary but ultimately did not publish it and denies any wrongdoing — has assailed the investigation. And it has been making a case in court and to Congress that, despite its use of undercover stings and other deceptive tactics, it is practicing a form of journalism that deserves the same legal and constitutional protections afforded news organizations.Asked a list of specific questions related to the investigation, a lawyer for Project Veritas, Paul A. Calli, responded with a statement from Mr. O’Keefe criticizing The New York Times.Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Ms. Biden, declined to comment.The episode has its roots in the spring of 2020, as Ms. Biden’s father was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. Ms. Biden, who has kept a low profile throughout her father’s vice presidency and presidency, had left a job the year before working for a criminal justice group in Delaware.She was living in Delray Beach, Fla., a small city between Miami and West Palm Beach, with a friend who had rented a two-bedroom house lined with palm trees with a large swimming pool and wraparound driveway, according to people familiar with the events. Ms. Biden, who had little public role in her father’s campaign, had earlier been in rehab in Florida in 2019, and the friend’s house provided a haven where she could avoid the media and the glare of the campaign.But in June, with the campaign ramping up, she headed to the Philadelphia area, planning to return to the Delray home in the fall before the lease expired in November. She decided to leave some of her belongings behind, including a duffel bag and another bag, people familiar with the events said.Weeks after Ms. Biden headed to the Northeast, the friend who had been hosting Ms. Biden in the house allowed an ex-girlfriend named Aimee Harris and her two children to move in. Ms. Harris was in a contentious custody dispute and was struggling financially, according to Palm Beach County court records. At one point in February 2020, she had faced eviction while living at a rental property in nearby Jupiter.Shortly after moving into the Delray home, Ms. Harris — whose social media postings and conversations with friends suggested that she was a fan of Mr. Trump — learned that Ms. Biden had stayed there previously and that some of her things were still there, according to two people familiar with the matter.September 2020: Project Veritas Obtains the DiaryExactly what happened next remains the subject of the federal investigation. But by September, the diary had been acquired from Ms. Harris and a friend by Project Veritas, whose operations against liberal groups and traditional news organizations had helped make it a favorite of Mr. Trump.In a court filing, Project Veritas told a federal judge that around Sept. 3, 2020, someone the group described as “a tipster” called Project Veritas and left a voice message. The caller said “a new occupant moved into a place where Ashley Biden had previously been staying and found Ms. Biden’s diary and other personal items.”The “diary is pretty crazy,” the tipster said on the voice mail, according to a Project Veritas court filing. “I think it’s worth taking a look at.”In a statement after the investigation became public, Mr. O’Keefe said: “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.” The lawyer who took Ms. Biden’s belongings to the police in Florida described them as “crap” and that he was “fine” with officers throwing the bags away.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesIn a recent letter to Congress, a lawyer for Project Veritas said it had been told the items had been abandoned in a room where Ms. Biden had stayed.Project Veritas has acknowledged buying the diary, through an unnamed proxy, from two people it identified in court filing as “A.H.” and “R.K.,” but said it was told they had acquired the diary lawfully.People involved in the case have identified “A.H.” as Ms. Harris and “R.K.” as Robert Kurlander. Mr. Kurlander, a self-described venture capitalist, is a longtime friend and former housemate of Ms. Harris. In October 2020, days before the election, Mr. Kurlander said on Twitter: “Where are Biden’s two kids?” adding, “Ashley and Hunter are disasters. Reflection of the parents.”In 1994, Mr. Kurlander pleaded guilty in federal court in Florida to a conspiracy count in a drug-related money laundering scheme that also led to a guilty plea from David Witter, the grandson of the founder of the investment firm Dean Witter. Mr. Kurlander was sentenced to 40 months in prison.Ms. Harris “is fully cooperating with the investigation and will remain responsive to the government’s requests for evidence and for her version of events,” her lawyer, Guy Fronstin, said in an email. “When the facts emerge it will be clear that my client has information relative to the investigation but no culpability.”Outside his house last month near a golf course in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Kurlander declined to comment, but a woman with him acknowledged they had been dealing with the matter and wanted to avoid public attention. She provided the name of their lawyer, who declined to comment.A Possible Link to Trump SupportersMr. Kurlander also provides a potential link to the possible role of a number of Trump supporters. Among those whose conduct is being scrutinized in the investigation is a woman with ties to Mr. Trump, Elizabeth Fago, a Florida businesswoman and Trump donor who was nominated by Mr. Trump in December 2020 to the National Cancer Advisory Board.Ms. Fago appears to know Mr. Kurlander. A picture on social media shows them dining together in July 2020. Investigators are also looking at the role of Ms. Fago’s daughter, Stephanie Walczak.Ms. Fago visited the Trump White House at least twice. Her son, Joey Fago — a real estate agent who this year worked with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberley Guilfoyle on their purchase of a $9.7 million Florida mansion — posted a video of him and his mother at the White House on election night in 2020 and at a Christmas party the next month, where they can be seen in the West Wing.Elizabeth Fago in 2018. Ms. Fago, a donor to former President Donald J. Trump who visited the White House at least twice, is among a number of individuals being scrutinized by federal investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. Nick Mele/Patrick McMullan via Getty ImagesShe and her son also met Mr. Trump on the tarmac of the West Palm Beach airport in 2019 and another picture shows the two together. In 2016, she co-hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump at his club at Mar-a-Lago.That year Ms. Fago gave $15,400 to pro-Trump fund-raising committees and an additional $7,600 to the Republican National Committee after Mr. Trump won the party’s nomination. In October 2020, she gave $500 to pro-Trump committees.It remains unclear how Ms. Harris and Mr. Kurlander made contact with Project Veritas and what role others might have played in facilitating the transaction.Ms. Fago did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Walczak declined to comment.Spokesmen for the F.B.I. and Justice Department declined to comment.Using the Diary as LeverageLess than a month before Election Day, in an Oct. 12, 2020, email that Project Veritas included in a court filing, Mr. O’Keefe told his team that he had made the decision not to publish a story about the diary, adding: “We have no doubt the document is real” but that reactions to its publication would be “characterized as a cheap shot.”But Project Veritas was still trying to use the diary as leverage. On Oct. 16, 2020, Project Veritas wrote to Mr. Biden and his campaign that it had obtained a diary Ms. Biden had “abandoned” and wanted to question Mr. Biden on camera about its contents that referred specifically to him.“Should we not hear from you by Tuesday, October 20, 2020, we will have no choice but to act unilaterally and reserve the right to disclose that you refused our offer to provide answers to the questions raised by your daughter,” Project Veritas’ chief legal officer, Jered T. Ede, wrote.In response, Ms. Biden’s lawyers accused Project Veritas of threatening them as part of “extortionate effort to secure an interview” with Mr. Biden in the campaign’s closing days.Ms. Biden’s lawyers refused to acknowledge whether the diary belonged to Ms. Biden but told Mr. Ede that Project Veritas should treat it as stolen property — the lawyers suggested that “serious crimes” might have been committed — and that any suggestion that the diary was abandoned was “ludicrous.”Ultimately, one of Ms. Biden’s lawyers, Roberta Kaplan, told Mr. Ede: “This is insane; we should send to SDNY.” Shortly thereafter Ms. Biden’s lawyers alerted prosecutors at the United States Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, which is now overseeing the case.In the midst of this exchange, a conservative website, National File, published excerpts from the diary on Oct. 24, 2020, and the full diary two days later, though it got little attention. The site said it had obtained the diary from someone at another organization that was unwilling to publish it in the campaign’s final days.Mr. O’Keefe’s lawyers said in a court filing last month that Project Veritas arranged for Ms. Biden’s items to be delivered in early November to the police in Florida, not far from the house where she had left them. As the investigation came to light last month, Mr. O’Keefe said in a statement that “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.”Adam Leo Bantner II, a Florida lawyer, delivered bags belonging to Ashley Biden to the police in Delray Beach the day after her father was declared the victor in the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Bantner’s interaction with an officer was recorded on a body camera.Delray Beach Police DepartmentBut a Delray Beach Police Department report and an officer’s body camera video footage tell a somewhat different story. On the morning of Sunday, Nov. 8 — 24 hours after Mr. Biden had been declared the winner of the election — a lawyer named Adam Leo Bantner II arrived at the police station with a blue duffel bag and another bag, according to the police report and the footage. Mr. Bantner declined to reveal the identity of his client to the police.Project Veritas has said in court filings that it was assured by the people who sold Ms. Biden’s items to the group that they were abandoned rather than stolen. But the police report said that Mr. Bantner’s client had told him that the property was “possibly stolen” and “he got it from an unknown person at a hotel.”The video footage, which appears to be a partial account of the encounter, records Mr. Bantner describing the bags as “crap.” The officer can be heard telling Mr. Bantner that he is going to throw the bags in the garbage because the officer did not have any “information” or “proof of evidence”“Like I said, I’m fine with it,” Mr. Bantner replied.But the police did examine the contents of the bag and quickly determined that they belonged to Ms. Biden. The report said the police contacted both the Secret Service and the F.B.I., which later collected the items.Patricia Mazzei More