Presidential Election of 2020

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      Fearing a Repeat of Jan. 6, Congress Eyes Changes to Electoral Count Law

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      Members of the special House committee investigating the Capitol riot are among those arguing for an overhaul of a more than century-old statute enacted to address disputed elections.WASHINGTON — Members of the select congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol are pressing to overhaul the complex and little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that the ambiguity of the statute puts democracy itself at risk.The push to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — enacted more than a century ago in the wake of another bitterly disputed presidential election — has taken on new urgency in recent weeks as more details have emerged about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plot to exploit its provisions to cling to power.Mr. Trump and his allies, using a warped interpretation of the law, sought to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate results when Congress met in a joint session on Jan. 6 to conduct its official count of electoral votes.It was Mr. Pence’s refusal to do so that led a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters to chant “Hang Mike Pence,” as they stormed the Capitol, delaying the proceedings as lawmakers fled for their lives. Members of Congress and the vice president ultimately returned and completed the count, rejecting challenges made by loyalists to Mr. Trump and formalizing President Biden’s victory.But had Mr. Pence done as Mr. Trump wanted — or had enough members of Congress voted to sustain the challenges lodged by Mr. Trump’s supporters — the outcome could have been different.“We know that we came precariously close to a constitutional crisis, because of the confusion in many people’s minds that was obviously planted by the former president as to what the Congress’s role actually was,” said Zach Wamp, a former Republican congressman from Tennessee who is a co-chairman of the Reformers Caucus at Issue One, a bipartisan group that is pressing for changes to the election process.Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked efforts by Democrats to alter election laws in the wake of the 2020 crisis, and it is not clear whether a bid to revamp the Electoral Count Act will fare any better. But experts have described the law as “almost unintelligible,” and an overhaul has the support of several leading conservative groups..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“There are a few of us on the committee who are working to identify proposed reforms that could earn support across the spectrum of liberal to conservative constitutional scholars,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the Jan. 6 committee. “We could very well have a problem in a future election that comes down to an interpretation of a very poorly written, ambiguous and confusing statute.”Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, said on Thursday that “the 1887 Electoral Count Act is directly at issue” and that the panel would recommend changes to it.The Constitution leaves it up to Congress to finalize the results of presidential elections shortly before Inauguration Day. Article II, Section 1 says, “The president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted.”Vice President Mike Pence presided over a joint session of Congress in January convened to formalize the Electoral College tally. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBut the process is further detailed in the Electoral Count Act, which says that as lawmakers read through the electoral results of each state during a joint session of Congress, members of the House and Senate may submit objections in writing, which can be sustained if a majority of both chambers approves. In the event that a state submitted multiple slates to Congress, the governor’s certified electors would hold, the law says, unless a majority in both chambers voted to reject them.The statute was written in the aftermath of the disputed election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, and has dictated how Congress formalizes elections, mostly without incident, ever since.But what unfolded on Jan. 6 tested its limits.Both of the objections by Mr. Trump’s allies — who sought to invalidate the electoral votes of Pennsylvania and Arizona — failed in the House, although the vast majority of Republicans supported them. Yet in the months since, it has become clear those challenges were part of a broader strategy. John Eastman, a lawyer advising Mr. Trump, drafted a plan that included sending to Mr. Pence, who presided over the joint session in his role as president of the Senate, a slate of Trump electors from seven states won by Mr. Biden.Mr. Eastman and other allies of Mr. Trump suggested pressuring the vice president to accept the alternate slate of Trump electors, throwing out legitimate votes for Mr. Biden. Under such a scenario, Mr. Eastman argued, a vote of those states’ delegations in the House, favoring Republicans, could keep Mr. Trump in power. (Mr. Eastman this week informed the committee he planned to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid answering the committee’s questions.)“The antiquated law governing the Electoral College vote count is too vague and ripe for abuse, and it resulted in baseless objections that delayed the democratic process,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the Senate Rules Committee. “It’s time to update this law to safeguard our democracy.”Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, has indicated an openness to revising the statute, and a small group of senators, including Senator Angus King, independent of Maine, has been working on potential solutions.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills

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      Republicans plan to carry their push to reshape the nation’s electoral system into next year, with Democrats vowing to oppose them but holding few options in G.O.P.-led states.A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot.In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia and a voting rights champion for her party, promise to put the issue front and center.But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Ms. Abrams said in an interview, adding that the country needed a Senate willing to “protect our democracy regardless of the partisanship of those who would oppose it.”Democrats and voting rights groups say some of the Republican measures will suppress voting, especially by people of color. They warn that other bills will increase the influence of politicians and other partisans in what had been relatively routine election administration. Some measures, they argue, raise the prospect of elections being thrown into chaos or even overturned.Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, though electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in American elections.“This is going to be one of the big political issues for at least the next year,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has helped craft voting legislation. He said the group wanted lawmakers to “stop thinking of election-related policies as something that only comes up once in a blue moon,” adding that “it should instead be something that comes up in every legislative session — that you take what you just learned from the last election.”G.O.P. lawmakers in at least five states have put forward legislation to review the 2020 election and institute new procedures for investigating the results of future elections.Many of the other bills are similar to those passed this year, which aim to limit access to mail-in voting; reduce the use of drop boxes; enact harsher penalties for election officials who are found to have broken rules; expand the authority of partisan poll watchers; and shift oversight of elections from independent officials and commissions to state legislatures.It remains unclear how new voting bills might affect turnout, and some election experts say that any measures designed to suppress voting carry the potential to backfire by energizing voters of the opposing party.Gov. Ron DeSantis is pushing for Florida to create an election law enforcement unit that would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election.”Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesIn Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is pushing for changes to election laws that build on the major bill his party passed this year, including a special force to investigate voting crimes. In New Hampshire, Republicans are proposing to require that all ballots be counted by hand and may try to tighten residency requirements. In Georgia, G.O.P. lawmakers are trying to restructure the Democratic-led government of the state’s most diverse county.The biggest potential changes to voting could come in Florida, which had just one prosecuted case of voter fraud in the 2020 election.Mr. DeSantis, who had been facing pressure from conservatives to greenlight a review of the 2020 election results in the state, has urged state lawmakers to send new election measures to his desk. One proposal would increase the penalty for the collection of more than two ballots by a third party from a misdemeanor to a third-degree felony. Another calls for more routine maintenance of voter rolls, which voting rights advocates say would lead to more “purges” of eligible voters.The governor said last month that the prospective election law enforcement unit would “have the ability to investigate any crimes involving the election” and would include sworn law enforcement officers, investigators and a statewide prosecutor. Critics argued that such a unit could intimidate voters and be prone to abuse by politicians.In New Hampshire, where Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, faces a potentially challenging re-election bid, Republicans have proposed to scrap the ballot-scanning machines that the state has used for decades in favor of hand-counting.That bill — introduced by Mark Alliegro, a Republican state representative who declined to comment about it — has drawn opposition from Democrats, who say that a lengthy delay between Election Day and the results would create an opening for those who want to challenge the election’s legitimacy.“Republicans are trying to sow distrust and discord in the process,” said Matt Wilhelm, a Democratic state representative. “If they’ve got an additional window of time of hours, days, weeks when Granite Staters don’t know the results of the election that they just participated in, that’s going to cast doubt on our democratic institutions.”A separate G.O.P. bill in New Hampshire introduced in the legislature’s prefiling portal contained a brief description: “Provide that only residents of the state may vote in elections.”Republicans have long tried to tighten residency requirements in New Hampshire, whose small population means that the elimination of even relatively small numbers of college students from the voter rolls could help give the G.O.P. an edge in close elections. This year, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected a 2017 state law requiring proof of residence to vote.A spokeswoman for Regina Birdsell, the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, said that it was “currently in draft form” and that Ms. Birdsell would not comment until the language had been finalized.Ballot-counting machines used in New Hampshire’s 2020 election were transported in May for a review of the results. A Republican proposal would scrap the machines in favor of hand-counting.Josh Reynolds/Associated PressIn Georgia, a plan by Republicans in the state legislature to restructure the government of Gwinnett County would effectively undercut the voting power of people of color in an increasingly Democratic area.Gwinnett, which includes northeastern suburbs of Atlanta, has swung from full Republican control to full Democratic control over four years, culminating last year with the selection of the first Black woman to oversee the county commission. President Biden carried the county by 18 percentage points last year.But last month, Clint Dixon, a Republican state senator, filed two bills that would allow the G.O.P.-led legislature to roughly double the size of the county’s Democratic-led board of commissioners and redraw new districts for the school board — moves that Democrats and civil rights leaders said would essentially go over the heads of voters who elected those officials.The changes would keep the county in Democratic control, but would most likely guarantee multiple safe Republican districts, including some that would be predominantly white despite the county’s diversity.After an outcry on the left, Republicans pushed the bills to the January session.Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county’s board of commissioners, said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”Mr. Dixon defended the bills, asserting that with more commissioners, voters would have more representation and elected leaders would be more accountable.“I don’t see any kind of swing back to a Republican majority; it has nothing to do with a power grab,” he said in an interview. “I think at that local level, local governance is intended at lower populations.”Investigating the 2020 election also remains a focus of many Republican state lawmakers.At least five states are pursuing partisan reviews of the 2020 election, and Republicans in states including Oklahoma, Tennessee and Florida have introduced bills to begin new ones next year.“There was suspiciously high voter turnout that broke all projections,” said Nathan Dahm, a Republican state senator in Oklahoma who sponsored a bill to review the results. “That alone is not enough to say that there absolutely was fraud, but it was suspicious enough to say that maybe there are some questions there.”Lawmakers will be aided in writing new voting bills by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which helped craft some of the 2020 legislation. A spokeswoman for the group said it would continue to push for measures including more maintenance of voting rolls; increased authority for poll watchers; reductions in the use of absentee ballots; more power for state legislatures in the election process; and additional voter identification regulations.Republicans around the country have highlighted polling that shows broad bipartisan support for some voter identification requirements.Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state of Missouri, has called for the state’s legislature to pass a bill that would require a state or federal photo ID to vote.“The idea that the voters of my state are too stupid to follow a simple photo ID requirement like this is ridiculous and ludicrous,” he said in an interview.Mr. Ashcroft noted that the Missouri bill would not ban people without IDs from voting; they would be allowed to vote provisionally and their ballots would be validated through signature matching.Voting rights leaders like Ms. Abrams, meanwhile, have sought to frame the issue as one that should transcend politics.“This isn’t simply about who wins or loses an election,” she said. “It is about what type of nation we intend to be. And are there consequences for undermining and breaking our system of government?” More

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      The Trump Conspiracy Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      Antebellum pro-slavery radicals spoke freely of secession and violence; Democratic Party paramilitaries planned their attacks on Reconstruction governments in public view; and the men who codified segregation into Jim Crow did so in the open. Bad actors, in other words, do not always make their plans in secret.When people plot to do wrong, they often do so in plain sight. To the extent that they succeed, it is at least partly because no one took them as seriously as they should have.And so it goes with the plot to restore Donald Trump to power over and against the will of the voters. The first attempt, prefigured in Trump’s refusal in 2016 to say whether he would accept the results of the presidential election, culminated in an attack on the Capitol this year, broadcast on camera to the entire world. Since then, the former president and his allies have made no secret of their intent to run the same play a second time.Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser and White House official, hosts a popular far-right podcast where he has urged his listeners to seize control of local election administration. “It’s going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don’t have an option,” he said in May. “We’re going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct.”Those listeners were, well, listening. “Suddenly,” according to a recent ProPublica investigation, “people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”Many of these new activists very much want to “stop the steal.” In Michigan, ProPublica notes, “one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party’s executive director, who contradicted Trump’s claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned.” In Arizona, likewise, new Bannon-inspired precinct officers have “petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the State Senate Republicans’ ‘forensic audit’ of 2020 ballots.”The obvious point of all this is to eliminate resistance should the outcome of the 2024 presidential election come down, once again, to the fortitude of local officials. In his desperate fight to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump looked for and found the soft spots in our electoral system. His supporters are fighting to make them more vulnerable.In tandem with the fight to seize control of election administration is an effort to gerrymander battleground states into nearly permanent Republican legislative majorities. “In Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia,” according to my colleagues in the newsroom, “Republican state lawmakers have either created supermajorities capable of overriding a governor’s veto or whittled down competitive districts so significantly that Republicans’ advantage is virtually impenetrable — leaving voters in narrowly divided states powerless to change the leadership of their legislatures.”In these states, Democrats could win a narrow majority of voters but gain fewer than half of the seats in the state legislature, while Republicans could win with that same majority and gain far more than half the seats. It’s an affront to the ideal of political equality, to say nothing of the “one person, one vote” standard enshrined in the 1964 Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims. A system in which some voters are worth much more than others — and where popular majorities are locked out of power if they contain the wrong kinds of people — is many things, but it isn’t a democracy (or, if you prefer, a “republic”).These impenetrable supermajorities serve a purpose beyond simple partisan advantage. The belief that Trump actually won the 2020 election is backed by the belief that elections are less about persuasion and more about rigging the process and controlling the ballots. And in the swing states that Trump lost, his strongest allies have pushed the radical idea that state legislatures have plenary authority over presidential elections even after voters have cast their ballots. Trump may lose the vote in Arizona, but under this theory, the legislature could still give him the state’s electoral votes, provided there is some pretext (like “voter fraud,” for example). What this would mean, in practice, is that these legislatures could simply hand their state’s electoral votes to Trump even if he were defeated at the ballot box.It’s with this in mind that we should look to Wisconsin, where Republicans are fighting to seize control of federal elections in the state now that they’ve gerrymandered themselves into an almost permanent legislative majority. (The Wisconsin Republican Party, along with the one in North Carolina, has been at the vanguard of the authoritarian turn in the national party.)Last month, Senator Ron Johnson said that lawmakers in his state could take control of federal elections even if Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, stood in opposition. “The State Legislature has to reassert its constitutional role, assert its constitutional responsibility, to set the times, place and manner of the election, not continue to outsource it through the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Johnson said, in reference to the bipartisan commission Republicans had established to manage elections. “The Constitution never mentions a governor.”And of course, Trump is taking an active role in all of this. From his perch in Mar-a-Lago, he has endorsed candidates for state legislative elections in Michigan with the clear hope that they would help him subvert the election, should he run as the Republican nominee for president in 2024. “Michigan needs a new legislature,” Trump wrote last month in one such endorsement. “The cowards there now are too spineless to investigate Election Fraud.”Increasingly untethered from any commitment to electoral democracy, large and influential parts of the Republican Party are working to put Trump back in power by any means necessary. Republicans could win without these tactics — they did so in Virginia last month — but there’s no reason to think that the party will pull itself off this road.Every incentive driving the Republican Party, from Fox News to the former president, points away from sober engagement with the realities of American politics and toward the outrageous, the antisocial and the authoritarian.None of this is happening behind closed doors. We are headed for a crisis of some sort. When it comes, we can be shocked that it is actually happening, but we shouldn’t be surprised.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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      Two Election Workers Targeted by Pro-Trump Media Sue for Defamation

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      The two Georgia workers were falsely accused of manipulating ballots by Trump allies and right-wing news sites. Election officials said the workers did nothing wrong.Two Georgia election workers who were the targets of a right-wing campaign that falsely claimed they manipulated ballots filed a defamation lawsuit on Thursday against one of the nation’s leading sources of pro-Trump misinformation.The suit against the right-wing conspiratorial website The Gateway Pundit was filed by Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board. It follows a series of defamation claims filed by elections equipment operators against conservative television operators such as Fox News, Newsmax and One America News.The lawsuit from Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss is among the first to be filed by individual election workers who found themselves unwittingly dragged into the alternate universe of far-right media that claimed, and still does, that Donald J. Trump won last year’s presidential election.“I want the defendants to know that my daughter and I are real people who deserve justice, and I never want them to do this to anyone else,” Ms. Freeman said in a statement.Ms. Moss, who continues to work for the Fulton County elections board, and Ms. Freeman, a temporary employee during the 2020 election, were ensnared by the Trump-supporting media and Mr. Trump himself after Gateway Pundit published dozens of false stories about them, starting last December and continuing through this November. The stories called the two women “crooked Democrats” and claimed that they “pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.”Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found that the two women did nothing wrong and were legally counting ballots.It all began one month after the 2020 election, on Dec. 3, when a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s campaign played a spliced segment of surveillance video footage for a Georgia Senate committee. The lawyer falsely claimed Fulton elections workers pulled 18,000 fraudulent ballots from a suitcase and illegally fed them through the voting machines.The accusation, which was quickly debunked by Fulton County and Georgia elections officials, was nevertheless amplified by Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump allies. A week after the first Gateway Pundit story, Mr. Giuliani compared Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman to drug dealers and called for their homes to be searched during a hearing with Georgia state legislators.Mr. Trump himself invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during his Jan. 3 call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. The call at the time was among the president’s most egregious efforts to overturn the results of the election he lost to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who defeated Mr. Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes.The Gateway Pundit is published by twin brothers, James and Joseph Hoft. The Hoft brothers did not respond to requests for comment.The lawsuit, filed in a Missouri circuit court in St. Louis, where James Hoft lives, articulates a litany of trauma the two women and their family suffered after Gateway Pundit began its campaign against them.They received death threats, unending harassment from phone calls and text messages, and unsolicited pizza deliveries to their homes. Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss, both of whom are Black, were also subjected to racial slurs.The harassment was detailed in a Reuters article published Wednesday that included recordings of 911 calls Ms. Freeman made when Trump supporters came to her home and banged on her door last December.According to Reuters, Ms. Moss earns about $36,000 a year for her full-time job with Fulton County. Ms. Freeman, a temporary worker, was paid $16 per hour. Ms. Freeman was forced to shut down her online business selling fashion accessories once she became inundated with threats.On Jan. 6, as thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington for a rally that led to the storming of the Capitol in an effort to block the congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, another crowd surrounded Ms. Freeman’s home in suburban Cobb County, the suit read, “some on foot, some in vehicles, others equipped with a bullhorn.”But, according to the lawsuit, Ms. Freeman had by then fled her home on the advice of the F.B.I. She did not return to her home for two months.The harassing calls to Ms. Moss came on a cellphone she had given her teenage son. He turned the phone’s cellular data off to stop the unsolicited calls, but he was unable to do so during school hours. He used the phone as a mobile hot spot to connect his computer to the internet for his virtual high school classes during the coronavirus pandemic.Her son failed his classes; Ms. Moss enrolled him in summer school to catch up, according to the suit.Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss are represented in their suit by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group focused on resisting authoritarianism in the United States. Protect Democracy has also sued Project Veritas, the conservative group that conducts undercover sting operations, on behalf of a Pennsylvania postmaster who was falsely accused of tampering with election returns.Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss did not specify an amount they are seeking from the Hoft brothers. They asked for compensatory and punitive damages “to be determined at trial.” More

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      Mark Meadows Agrees to Cooperate With Jan. 6 Attack Inquiry

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      President Donald J. Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has turned over documents and agreed to be deposed in the House’s inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack.WASHINGTON — Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff under President Donald J. Trump, has reached an agreement with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to provide documents and sit for a deposition, the panel said on Tuesday, a notable reversal for a crucial witness in the inquiry.The change of stance for Mr. Meadows, who had previously refused to cooperate with the committee in line with a directive from Mr. Trump, came as the panel prepared to seek criminal contempt of Congress charges against a second witness who has defied one of its subpoenas. It marked a turnabout after weeks of private wrangling between the former chief of staff and the House committee over whether he would participate in the investigation and to what degree.Mr. Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, is the highest-ranking White House official to cooperate in any way with the inquiry.“Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the select committee through his attorney,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the panel, said in a statement. “He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition.”Mr. Thompson indicated that he was withholding judgment about whether Mr. Meadows was willing to cooperate sufficiently, adding, “The committee will continue to assess his degree of compliance with our subpoena after the deposition.”Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, suggested that there were strict limits to his client’s willingness to participate in the inquiry.“As we have from the beginning, we continue to work with the select committee and its staff to see if we can reach an accommodation that does not require Mr. Meadows to waive executive privilege or to forfeit the longstanding position that senior White House aides cannot be compelled to testify before Congress,” Mr. Terwilliger said in a statement. “We appreciate the select committee’s openness to receiving voluntary responses on nonprivileged topics.”The deposition is expected to be private, as has been the panel’s practice with other witnesses.Mr. Meadows’s testimony is seen as key to the committee’s investigation because he was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and could provide crucial insight into what the president was doing and saying as the attack unfolded on Jan. 6. Mr. Meadows is believed to have spent considerable time by Mr. Trump’s side at the White House as throngs of the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol. Mr. Meadows is said to have tried to enlist Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter, to reason with her father during the rampage.In the weeks before the attack, Mr. Meadows repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories, according to emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times. He contacted several state officials to encourage investigations into election fraud claims even after such allegations were dismissed by the courts. And he attended a meeting in late December with far-right Republican members of Congress who led the effort to challenge the electoral count on Jan. 6.Mr. Meadows also was in communication with organizers of the rally near the White House that preceded the violence, the committee has said.Among the panel’s questions for him are whether he was using a private cellphone to communicate on Jan. 6 and the location of his text messages from that day.CNN earlier reported that Mr. Meadows had reached a deal with the committee.It was not immediately clear how extensive his cooperation would be or which documents he had turned over, though Mr. Thompson said they contained “significant email traffic.” But investigators had a major incentive to negotiate a deal to sit down with him, in large part because they view him as central to the public’s understanding of how the events of Jan. 6 occurred.“We’re seeing a game of chess in many ways between the committee and Meadows,” said Jonathan D. Shaub, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who worked at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. “The committee very much wants to hear from Meadows. He may know the most of any witness, so the committee is willing to give a little bit.”Members of the panel also believe that Mr. Meadows’s participation could be a strong signal to lower-ranking former White House staff members that they, too, should cooperate.Citing Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege, Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, Mr. Terwilliger, wrote to the committee on Nov. 10 saying that his client could not “in good conscience” provide testimony out of an “appreciation for our constitutional system and the separation of powers.” That stance was condemned by Mr. Thompson and the panel’s vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming. They accused Mr. Meadows of defying a lawful subpoena and said that they would consider pursuing contempt charges to enforce it.Mr. Thompson and Ms. Cheney called Mr. Trump’s privilege claims “spurious” and added that many of the matters they wished to discuss with Mr. Meadows were “not even conceivably subject to any privilege claim, even if there were one.”On Wednesday, the committee is expected to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to upend the election, when it holds a voting session to recommend that the full House find him in criminal contempt.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      How Much Are Latinos Shifting Right?

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      So far, the data remains mixed. And the defection of Ryan Guillen, a Texas state lawmaker, to the G.O.P. may not have been driven solely by ideology.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.For years, State Representative Ryan Guillen of Texas was regarded as the most conservative Democratic legislator in Austin. He was one of just a few from the party to vote in favor of carrying handguns without a permit, and the sole Democrat in the House chamber to vote for the state’s new law banning most abortions. He remained popular in his Rio Grande Valley district, winning re-election last year by 17 percentage points.Then came the news this month: He was switching parties.“After much consideration and prayer with my family, I feel that my fiscally conservative, pro-business, and pro-life values are no longer in step with the Democratic Party of today,” Mr. Guillen said.It’s an old saw in politics: I haven’t changed, the party has changed. And in the past, it has been fairly applied to both Republicans and Democrats. Mr. Guillen has portrayed himself as part of a trend of Hispanic voters moving toward the Republican Party, especially in South Texas, where Donald J. Trump made major inroads during the 2020 election. But it’s too soon to tell just how much of a lasting shift the movement represents.The Republican Party has been reaching out to Latino voters for decades, particularly in Texas. Former President George W. Bush famously courted them with his “compassionate conservatism.” And it was former President Ronald Reagan who told his Hispanic outreach director that he would have the easiest job in the world, because “Hispanics are already Republicans, they just don’t know it yet.”Historically, roughly 30 percent of Hispanic voters have chosen to vote Republican in presidential elections, a number that increased slightly in 2020, surprising many Democrats. Republicans, unsurprisingly, celebrated the shift and have portrayed it as a seismic shift that could transform the parties.“Republicans’ enthusiasm and sense of momentum ebbs and flows, and this is a moment of high enthusiasm,” said Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of the book “The Hispanic Republican.” “They want to capitalize on the momentum they feel like they have right now. They really think the energy is on their side, but they have to prove that 2020 wasn’t just a blip.”So far, the data remains mixed. While there was some dampened enthusiasm among Latino voters during the recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, for example, an analysis from the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that Latino-heavy precincts overwhelmingly backed Newsom’s remaining in office.But in San Antonio this month, Democrats lost another State House seat to a Hispanic Republican, John Lujan.Now, many Democrats are openly worried, with some calling Hispanics the new swing voter group.“Democrats have to prove that they can stop their losses, and they have to show these voters they are hearing them and caring about them,” Dr. Cadava said.Of course, perception can drive reality: If Latinos believe that Democrats take them for granted, they are more likely to vote for Republican candidates, according to analysis from Equis Research, a Washington-based firm that focuses on Latino voters across the country.Mr. Guillen, who did not respond to several messages from The Times, has fiercely embraced his new party, appearing with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas during his party switch announcement and welcoming an endorsement from Mr. Trump by enthusiastically recalling how his signs “covered South Texas” during the presidential election. (Four years after Hillary Clinton won the district by 13 percentage points, Mr. Trump won by the same margin in 2020.)“Something is happening in South Texas, and many of us are waking up to the fact that the values of those in Washington, D.C., are not our values, not the values of most Texans,” Mr. Guillen told reporters during his announcement. “The ideology of defunding the police, of destroying the oil and gas industry and the chaos at our border is disastrous for those of us who live here in South Texas.”But ideology may not have been the only driver of Mr. Guillen’s decision, which came after Republican-controlled redistricting turned his legislative district from a Republican-leaning district into one that would most likely be solidly red.Mr. Guillen has brushed aside suggestions that he simply switched parties to stay in office, telling reporters that his 2020 victory as a Democrat showed his allegiance with voters in the district.“I have found that my core beliefs align with the Republican Party,” he said. “I am confident that my switch today is the right decision.”Mr. Abbott, for his part, portrayed Mr. Guillen’s flip as inevitable.“It’s something that has been, candidly, the worst-kept secret in the Capitol,” he said. “Ryan, we’re glad you finally came out of the closet.”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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      The Republicans We’re Thankful For

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      It has been a tough year for fans of American democracy. The sacking of the Capitol on Jan. 6 set the tone. Former President Donald Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party continues to fuel its most unhinged impulses and elements. More than two-thirds of Republicans buy the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, according to a recent poll by Public Religion Research Institute, while 30 percent say violence may be needed to save the country.Too many party leaders who know better are playing along. The United States even made this year’s list of “backsliding” democracies, issued by the International IDEA think tank, which cited a “visible deterioration” that began in 2019.More prosaically, there have been the usual obstructionism and attempts to make the government as dysfunctional as possible that we have come to expect from congressional Republicans.Not exactly a glowing advertisement for the American way.But there have been exceptions, select Republicans who have put the public good ahead of partisan and personal interests — some more dramatically than others. Not that these folks are saints, or even consistent in their commitment. But these days, even glimmers of responsible, pro-democratic behavior amid the miasma of Trumpism merit a shout-out. So in the spirit of the season, let us give thanks for these rare Republican pockets of character and duty.1. Representative Liz Cheney. Who would have predicted that Dick Cheney’s superconservative daughter, long despised by many as a pro-torture, anti-abortion, warmongering chip off the old block, would wind up on the same side as Democrats on anything ever? Yet here we are. Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump (in his second round), her service on the Jan. 6 select committee, her steady drumbeat of warnings about the threat Mr. Trump’s lies pose to the nation — these shouldn’t be partisan issues, but in today’s G.O.P. they absolutely set her apart from the sniveling herd. (Plus, her running feud with Senator Ted Cruz is a delight.) In return, she was booted from the House leadership in May, and the Wyoming G.O.P. voted this month to stop recognizing her as a Republican. She is facing a fierce primary challenge next year, enthusiastically backed by Mr. Trump and some of her MAGA colleagues.2. Representative Adam Kinzinger. The Illinois lawmaker has been an outspoken Trump critic, voting for impeachment this year and serving on the Jan. 6 committee. Even some of his family members turned on Mr. Kinzinger for his betrayal of Mr. Trump, firing off a group letter in January proclaiming themselves “disgusted” and accusing him of joining the “devil’s army” of “Democrats and the fake news media.” Last month, after redistricting complicated his re-election prospects, Mr. Kinzinger announced his retirement from the House at the end of this term — though he left open the possibility of running for higher office.3. The impeachment backers. Ten House Republicans voted to impeach Mr. Trump last January for having incited the Jan. 6 insurrection attempt. In February, seven Senate Republicans voted to convict. These members upheld the Constitution and put country over party, so naturally they have been targeted for payback by the former president and his toadies.4. The infrastructure package supporters. For G.O.P. lawmakers, just doing one’s job has become risky business. This month, 13 Republican House members helped pass a badly needed bipartisan infrastructure package, putting constituents’ interests ahead of their party’s desire to deny the Democrats a legislative accomplishment. For their troubles, the 13 were trashed as “RINOs” by Mr. Trump and declared “traitors” by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who posted their office phone numbers on social media. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon similarly posted the numbers of the 19 Republican senators who voted for the plan in August. The insults, invective and death threats promptly came rolling in.5. The Georgia vote defenders. Mr. Trump lost Georgia fair and square, but that didn’t stop him from trying to persuade state leaders to overturn the results and declare him the winner. Were it not for the spinal fortitude of people like Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the election official Gabriel Sterling in resisting the former president’s machinations, America could have been plunged into a full-blown constitutional crisis.6. Al Schmidt. The Republican on Philadelphia’s city commission, the three-member bipartisan board in charge of elections there, Mr. Schmidt went on “60 Minutes” the weekend after Election Day last November to dispute claims that the vote had been rigged. “Counting votes cast on or before Election Day by eligible voters is not corruption,” he said. “It is not cheating. It is democracy.” His office received death threats. Of course.7. Maricopa County Republican officials. Postelection audits have been one of Trumpworld’s go-to moves to undermine public confidence in the 2020 election. Arguably nowhere has this push been more pathetic than in Arizona, where Republican state lawmakers, unhappy with previous recounts of the voter-rich Maricopa County that verified President Biden’s victory, began their own partisan effort. The process proved so sketchy and embarrassing that Republican leaders in Maricopa denounced it as a “sham” and “a grift disguised as an audit.”8. Oregon state lawmakers who said no to mob violence. In June, Republicans in the State House joined the Democratic majority to expel a Republican colleague, Mike Nearman, who had let violent, armed, right-wing protesters into the State Capitol last December. (He objected to the building’s closure to the public because of Covid safety precautions.) It was the first such expulsion in the body’s history. Mr. Nearman’s was the only vote opposed.Apologies to any stand-up Republicans who got overlooked this time around. And here’s hoping that in the months to come, even more officials at all levels get fed up with licking Mr. Trump’s anti-democratic, filth-encrusted boots.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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      House Panel Subpoenas Roger Stone and Alex Jones in Capitol Riot Inquiry

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      Investigators summoned five more allies of former President Donald J. Trump as they dug further into the planning and financing of rallies before the Jan. 6 attack.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Capitol attack issued five new subpoenas on Monday, focusing on allies of former President Donald J. Trump who helped draw crowds to Washington before the riot on Jan. 6, including the political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. and the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.The subpoenas, which come after the committee has interviewed more than 200 witnesses, indicate that investigators are intent on learning the details of the planning and financing of rallies that drew Mr. Trump’s supporters to Washington based on his lies of a stolen election, fueling the violence that engulfed Congress and delayed the formalization of President Biden’s victory.“We need to know who organized, planned, paid for and received funds related to those events, as well as what communications organizers had with officials in the White House and Congress,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee.Mr. Stone promoted his attendance at the rallies on Jan. 5 and 6, and solicited support to pay for security through the website stopthesteal.org. While in Washington, he used members of the Oath Keepers as personal security guards; at least one of them has been indicted on charges that he was involved in the Capitol attack.In a statement, Mr. Stone said he had not yet been served with the subpoena and denied any involvement with the violence.“I have said time and time again that I had no advance knowledge of the events that took place at the Capitol on that day,” he said.Mr. Jones helped organize the rally at the Ellipse near the White House before the riot — including by facilitating a donation from Julie Jenkins Fancelli, the heiress to the Publix Super Markets fortune — to provide what he described as “80 percent” of the funding, the House committee said. Mr. Jones has said that White House officials told him that he was to lead a march to the Capitol, where Mr. Trump would speak, according to the committee.Mr. Stone and Mr. Jones were among the group of Trump allies meeting in and around the Willard Intercontinental Hotel near the White House the day before the riot.Mr. Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, was seen flashing his signature Nixon victory sign to supporters as members of the Oath Keepers protected him. He was also photographed on Jan. 5 with Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser who has also been subpoenaed. But Mr. Stone has claimed that he was leaving town as rioters stormed the Capitol.Mr. Stone said he had decided against a plan to “lead a march” from the Ellipse to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to a video posted on social media.Mr. Jones conducted an interview of Mr. Flynn from the Willard on Jan. 5 in which the men spread the false narrative of a stolen election. Mr. Jones was then seen among the crowd of Mr. Trump’s supporters the next day, amplifying false the claims but also urging the crowd to be peaceful. Among those who marched alongside him to the Capitol was Ali Alexander, a promoter of the “Stop the Steal” effort who has also been issued a subpoena, the committee said.“The White House told me three days before, ‘We’re going to have you lead the march,’” Mr. Jones said on his internet show the day after the riot. “Trump will tell people, ‘Go, and I’m going to meet you at the Capitol.’”The panel is also demanding documents and testimony from Dustin Stockton and his fiancée, Jennifer L. Lawrence, who assisted in organizing a series of rallies after the election advancing false claims about its outcome.Mr. Stockton was concerned that the rally at the Ellipse would lead to a march to the Capitol that would mean “possible danger,” which he said “felt unsafe,” the committee said. These concerns were escalated to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More