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    How Trial Delays Could Pay Off for Trump

    Former President Donald J. Trump faces four criminal trials this year, but delays are already underway. The odds are that no more than one or two will finish before voters choose the next president. Trump’s trials are unlikely to happen as scheduled The trials, which may require a couple of months or more, are unlikely […] More

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    Why Americans Are Feeling Better About the Economy

    In 2022, Republicans seemed to have an easy path to regaining the White House, no actual policy proposals required. All they had to do was contrast Donald Trump’s economic record — which they portrayed as stellar — with the lousy economy under President Biden.That rosy view of the Trump economy involved a lot of selective forgetting — more about that in a minute. But the Biden economy was indeed troubled for much of 2022, with the highest inflation in 40 years. Jobs were plentiful, with unemployment near a 50-year low, but many economists were predicting an imminent recession.Since then, however, two terrible things have happened — terrible, that is, from the point of view of Republican partisans. First, the economy has healed: Inflation has plunged without any major rise in unemployment. Second, Americans finally seem to be noticing the good news.Before I get to that, however, let’s talk for a second about Biden’s predecessor. How can people claim that Trump presided over a great economy when he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he arrived?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Judge Unseals Records in Divorce Case That Has Entangled Trump Prosecutors

    A judge in Georgia also delayed a deposition of Fani T. Willis, the district attorney accused of having a romantic relationship with a prosecutor she hired.A Georgia judge unsealed a divorce case on Monday that has entangled the Atlanta district attorney prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump, but halted plans to force the testimony of the prosecutor, Fani T. Willis.One of the parties to the divorce, Nathan Wade, is the lawyer whom Ms. Willis hired to manage the election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies.Earlier this month, Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who is one of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants, asserted in a filing that the two prosecutors were in a romantic relationship, and that Ms. Willis may have violated laws and ethics rules by hiring Mr. Wade.The same day, Ms. Willis received a subpoena from Mr. Wade’s wife, Joycelyn Wade, to testify in the divorce case.While Mr. Roman initially provided no evidence of a relationship, a filing last week in the Wade divorce case included credit card statements showing that Mr. Wade purchased airline tickets for himself and Ms. Willis on April 25, 2023, for a trip from Atlanta to San Francisco, and on Oct. 4, 2022, for a trip to Miami.The unsealing of the case means that many of Ms. Wade’s ongoing efforts to provide proof of a relationship between her estranged husband and Ms. Willis will now be public. These could include new subpoenas of documents, such as financial statements, and witnesses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    How Allegations of an Office Romance Came to Complicate the Case Against Trump

    The claims involving Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired to manage the sprawling case in Georgia, have led to new questions about Mr. Wade’s qualifications.Fani T. Willis ran for district attorney in Georgia’s Fulton County in 2020 with the slogan “Integrity matters!” and frequently pummeled the incumbent, her former boss, with accusations of ethical lapses. Soon after her victory, she set up a group to interview job candidates called the Integrity Transition Hiring Committee.One of its members was Nathan J. Wade, a lawyer and municipal court judge from the Atlanta suburbs whom she counted as a longtime friend and mentor. Indeed, it was the personal bond they shared that Ms. Willis has described as a key to her decision to hire him to lead the criminal case of a lifetime: her office’s prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.“I need someone I can trust,” she said in a 2022 interview.But in recent days, allegations have surfaced that Mr. Wade was not only a mentor to Ms. Willis, but also a romantic partner. The allegations appeared in a court motion filed this month by Michael Roman, one of Mr. Trump’s 14 co-defendants in the Georgia case. In an interview with The New York Times, a person familiar with the situation said the two had grown close after meeting in a legal education course for judges in 2019 — some two years before Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade as special prosecutor in the Trump case.The two lawyers had at times been affectionate with each other in public settings, the person said. Ms. Willis has not addressed the allegations of a romantic relationship, nor has Mr. Wade. Ms. Willis’s office said it would reply to Mr. Roman’s motion in court filings.On Friday, credit card statements included in a filing in Mr. Wade’s divorce case show that he purchased airline tickets for himself and Ms. Willis on April 25, 2023, for a trip from Atlanta to San Francisco, and on Oct. 4, 2022, for a trip to Miami. They appear to partially support the contention in Mr. Roman’s motion that Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis had made trips to numerous vacation spots together, with Mr. Wade paying for some of the travel.Ms. Willis speaking at Big Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta last Sunday.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesWhether these new revelations will disrupt the Trump case — or Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade’s role in it — remains unclear. Mr. Roman’s motion argues that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade violated the state bar’s rules of professional conduct, the county code regarding conflicts of interest and, possibly, federal law. It calls for the case against Mr. Roman to be dismissed, and for Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and Ms. Willis’s entire office to be disqualified from the case.In a letter to Ms. Willis on Friday, the county commissioner who chairs the board’s audit committee, Bob Ellis, demanded documents from her in an effort to determine whether county funds paid to Mr. Wade “were converted to your personal gain in the form of subsidized travel or other gifts.”At the very least, the revelations have raised questions about Ms. Willis’s motivation for hiring Mr. Wade, a legal generalist who appears to act as a sort of player-manager for the prosecution’s multi-lawyer team.A review of Mr. Wade’s more than two decades as a lawyer by The New York Times also raises the issue of his qualifications, and whether they were sufficient to justify his appointment to a job that has made him more than $650,000 in taxpayer dollars and catapulted him to the top of one of the highest-profile criminal cases in the country. As a fixture on the legal and political scene in suburban Cobb County, Mr. Wade spent years handling low-level criminal cases, first as a prosecutor and then a judge. But he yearned to take on weightier work. And while he landed some, defending clients in a number of serious felony cases, his dream of being elected a superior court judge, where he could preside over bigger cases, was repeatedly denied to him by voters. Mr. Wade’s publicly available record as a lawyer shows scant evidence that he prosecuted major criminal cases, with no evidence that he has handled a major political corruption case or one involving the state’s complicated racketeering statute, known as RICO, under which all of the defendants in the Trump case have been charged. “The realm of attorneys who handle Georgia RICO cases is a small one, and he is not someone who was in that realm before the Trump case,” said Chris Timmons, an Atlanta trial lawyer who handled white-collar cases for more than 15 years as a prosecutor. Several former Georgia prosecutors say that Mr. Wade’s fee, of $250 per hour, did not seem excessive. But some of them also questioned whether he had the qualifications to lead such a high-stakes case. “I can’t judge on whether it’s a legitimate hire, but I think it’s a legitimate question to ask why this particular lawyer was hired,” said Danny Porter, the former longtime district attorney in Gwinnett County and a Republican.Speaking recently at a historically Black church in Atlanta, Ms. Willis said that the questions raised about her hiring of Mr. Wade were racist. She praised Mr. Wade’s “impeccable credentials” and said they were being questioned because both she and Mr. Wade were Black.Mr. Wade could not be reached for comment for this story. But his defenders point to the measurable successes the prosecution team has notched so far under his stewardship. Prosecutors have obtained four guilty pleas from the original cast of 19 co-defendants, and beaten back, so far, an effort to have the case moved to the federal court system, which would offer some advantages to the defendants.Gerald A. Griggs, a lawyer and the president of the state N.A.A.C.P. who knows both Mr. Wade and Ms. Willis personally, noted that as a defense lawyer, Mr. Wade brings a valuable perspective to a team that includes a number of veteran prosecutors. A defense lawyer “can show you where the holes are to make sure your case is strong,” he said. From traffic tickets to feloniesMr. Wade’s publicly available record as a lawyer shows scant evidence that he prosecuted major criminal cases.Pool photo by Elijah NouvelageMr. Wade, according to an old job application, was born in Houston, studied at Texas State University, then went on to attend John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. He once told an Atlanta-area magazine, Cobb in Focus, that his career path was influenced by his father, a Vietnam veteran, and by early involvement in church activities that sparked an interest in public speaking.By the late 1990s, Mr. Wade was in Cobb County, where he spent some time as an assistant solicitor, a prosecuting job that handles traffic cases and minor crimes. He moved to private practice to focus on civil matters but told the magazine that he continued to do some prosecution work for local municipalities.Mr. Wade’s civil cases have ranged from divorces to paternity matters, child support, car accidents, small claims and personal injury issues. The criminal cases he handled as a defense lawyer included clients charged with aggravated assault and battery, armed robbery, rape, cocaine trafficking and financial fraud.Ron Coleman, a retired Atlanta lawyer, said he faced Mr. Wade in a 2016 case in which Mr. Wade’s client claimed that she found glass in her food at a chain restaurant. A settlement was reached in mediation, and one of the things that Mr. Coleman recalled was that Mr. Wade was not as aggressive as some other lawyers he has worked against in such cases. “I’ve dealt with a lot of guys who would destroy you if they saw an opening, but he didn’t strike me as having that kind of focus or intensity,” he said. In a 2021 slip and fall case in which one of Mr. Wade’s clients was suing another restaurant company, Robert Jenkins, a lawyer for the defendant, said he found Mr. Wade to be both assertive and skilled.“He was forceful, but cool and composed,” he said. “And when he asks question number one, he knows what question number three is going to be. He seemed two steps ahead.”A Black Republican amid demographic changeMr. Wade representing the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in court. Pool photo by Jason GetzMr. Wade had already made history, in 2011, as the first Black man to be appointed to a judgeship in the city of Marietta, Ga. As an associate judge for the Marietta Municipal Court, he dealt with small-bore matters like traffic stops. He set his sights on more.Politically, it seemed as though there might be a path. Cobb County’s population boomed in the 1960s and 1970s with an influx of white city dwellers fearful of an integrating Atlanta. In the 1990s it was represented by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who in 1994 led a national conservative resurgence known as the Republican Revolution.But by the 2000s, demographic change was afoot as racial attitudes shifted and people of all kinds sought the same suburban idyll. As it gained residents, Cobb County became increasingly integrated, with Black residents growing to nearly 30 percent of the population in 2022 from just under 10 percent in 1990.For years, Mr. Wade was a regular at county Republican breakfast meetings, and he served for a time as a delegate to the county convention, said Jason Shepherd, who chaired the Cobb County Republican Party at the time. Mr. Shepherd said he once helped distribute yard signs for Mr. Wade during one of his numerous failed bids to be elected to a higher judgeship, and called him “charismatic,” “energetic” and “more on the Republican side on law enforcement issues.” In 2016, during one of his unsuccessful attempts to run for Cobb County superior court judge, he was supported by Ashleigh Merchant — the lawyer who filed the motion this month on Mr. Roman’s behalf that seeks to have him removed from the Trump case. The motion questions Mr. Wade’s qualifications. But in a Facebook post in the midst of his judge’s race, she praised him for his extensive résumé. “Nathan has practiced in every area of the law that appears before the Superior Court bench,” she wrote. (She recently explained her change of heart by saying that Mr. Wade seemed like a better choice to her than his opponent at the time.)According to the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration, Mr. Wade ran four times for superior court judge between 2008 and 2016. They were nonpartisan races. He lost each time. Mr. Wade found himself embroiled in Cobb County politics in a different way in 2020, when he was accused in a lawsuit filed by a local NBC affiliate of heading an investigation of the county jail that, according to the suit, was in fact a ruse by the longtime sheriff at the time, Neil Warren, a Republican, to keep reporters from accessing documents about a string of jailhouse deaths. No investigative report ever came publicly to light. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office said it had no such report in its files and was “unable” to comment on any work Mr. Wade might have done on the jail. Mr. Warren did not respond to numerous calls and texts seeking comment. Mr. Wade also declined to answer questions on the matter. But in an earlier court hearing, he said his inquiry had not been memorialized in documents. “I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it,” he said. “That’s what I have.” Two lawyers land two big jobsMs. Willis and Mr. Wade, second from left, in August.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesWhen Ms. Willis won election in 2020, she instilled high hopes for a fresh start at the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, which is the largest such office in Georgia and handles most of the criminal cases in Atlanta. Her predecessor, Paul L. Howard Jr., who had been in office for more than 20 years, was burdened with a recent ruling against him from the state ethics commission, a sexual harassment complaint (of which he was later found not guilty) and questions, raised by Ms. Willis, about whether he had played politics in his handling of a high-profile police shooting.Ms. Willis, a single mother of two who had been one of Mr. Howard’s courtroom stars, handily defeated him in a Democratic primary runoff in August 2020. In heavily Democratic Fulton County, there was no Republican opponent on the general election ballot. She would become the first woman to hold the job.“Y’all, we made herstory,” she said in her victory speech. “You have my word, during my tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, we will be a beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation.”She took office in January 2021. The next month, she opened the criminal investigation into Mr. Trump and his allies and began building a team to prosecute the case. Some of them, like the lawyers Donald Wakeford and Daysha Young, were experienced prosecutors who had left the office but rejoined as full-time employees after Ms. Willis’s election. She also contracted for outside expertise, bringing in John Floyd, a lawyer widely considered Georgia’s premier expert on racketeering law. She hired Anna Green Cross, a former prosecutor with extensive experience trying murder cases who has been a key player for the D.A.’s office in federal court, where some co-defendants in the Trump case have been arguing, so far unsuccessfully, to have the case moved.Ms. Willis said she also needed a special prosecutor to lead the growing team, and turned to Mr. Wade to help her find one. “The truth is, and I mean it in no way disrespectful to Mr. Wade, he was not my first choice as special counsel,” she said in an interview in 2022.She said she had told a number of more experienced or well-known lawyers about the job first. But they turned her down. At least one of them was concerned that trying Mr. Trump could open the door to personal security threats. Eventually, she said, she and other advisers turned to Mr. Wade and encouraged him to take the position. Ms. Willis recalled that Mr. Wade said, “Well, you know, I’ve spent a little time as a prosecutor, but really more of my career has been as a defense attorney.”She replied: “Well, I’ve been a defense attorney and a prosecutor, too. What I need is a trial lawyer.” From that point, Ms. Willis recalled, “it was a convincing process” to get Mr. Wade to sign up. “But he wasn’t afraid,” she said. “And I needed someone not afraid.”Mr. Wade’s first day under contract with the district attorney’s office was Nov. 1, 2021. He was to be paid an hourly rate of $250 per hour, the same rate as Ms. Cross. Records show Mr. Floyd has charged between $150 and $200 per hour.County records posted online also show that Mr. Wade’s law partner, Christopher A. Campbell, has been paid $126,070 by the district attorney’s office since June 2021 and that his former law partner, Terrence Bradley, was paid at least $74,480 since May of that year. Jeff DiSantis, a spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office, said that the payments to Mr. Campbell and Mr. Bradley were for services unrelated to the Trump case, including making court appearances in cases on behalf of the D.A.’s office when it was short-staffed and removing documents in potential public corruption cases that members of the D.A.’s office are not allowed to see.Managing the caseMr. Wade, left, and the lawyer Daysha Young during a hearing in October.Pool photo by Alyssa PointerIn court appearances, various members of the Trump prosecution team have taken turns handling presentations before judges. In state court, many of the complex legal issues that have arisen have been argued by prosecutors other than Mr. Wade. But much of the work of the Trump prosecution team occurs behind closed doors, which makes Mr. Wade’s full contribution difficult to discern. In some cases, Mr. Wade has raised the ire of lawyers connected to the case. One of them was Tim Parlatore, the lawyer for Bernard Kerik, a former New York Police commissioner who had been subpoenaed to testify by the district attorney’s office. In a letter to Mr. Wade in October, Mr. Parlatore said that prosecutors had identified Mr. Kerik as a co-conspirator in the case. For that reason, Mr. Parlatore said, Mr. Wade should have understood from the beginning that he would not allow Mr. Kerik to testify without a grant of immunity. “You seemed genuinely surprised by this relatively basic application of the 5th Amendment right to not answer questions from the very prosecuting agency that has publicly accused him of being a co-conspirator,” Mr. Parlatore wrote, addressing Mr. Wade.Another who clashed with Mr. Wade was Brian F. McEvoy, a lawyer for Gov. Brian P. Kemp of Georgia, whom Mr. Trump had telephoned late in 2020 for help in overturning Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win in the state. In a 2022 motion, Mr. McEvoy described a breakdown in communications between him and prosecutors as they discussed the terms of a potential interview of the governor. Mr. McEvoy said Mr. Wade’s demand that Mr. Kemp meet with prosecutors within a specific time frame came off as “threatening.”Ms. Willis weighed in with an email to Mr. McEvoy, accusing him of “rude and disparaging” conduct toward her staff that was “beneath an officer of the court.”One the most awkward moments Mr. Wade has spent in the spotlight came when a number of co-defendants in the Trump case complained to the presiding judge that they had received auto-generated mailers from a local law firm that was trying to drum up business.“Our lawyers have an abundance of experience handling cases in the state and local courts of Metro Atlanta,” the letters stated.The law firm was Mr. Wade’s.Reporting was contributed by More

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    Jan. 6 Cannot Go Down the Memory Hole

    Following the passage of the first Enforcement Acts, written to protect the civil rights of the formerly enslaved, Congress created a bipartisan committee in 1871 to investigate reports of vigilante violence against freed people and their white allies in the states of the former Confederacy. The next year, the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States released its report, a 13-volume collection of testimony from 600 witnesses, totaling more than 8,000 pages.The men and women who spoke to the committee attested to pervasive violence and intimidation. There were innumerable reports of whippings and beatings and killings. “Tom Roundtree, alias Black, a negro, murdered by a Ku-Klux mob of some fifty or sixty persons, who came to his house at night on the 3rd of December last, took him out, shot him, and cut his throat,” reads a typical entry in the volume devoted to Klan activity in South Carolina. “James Williams,” reads another entry in the same volume, “taken from his home at night and hung, by Ku-Klux numbering about forty or fifty.”There were also, as the historian Kidada E. Williams shows in “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” accounts of terrible sexual violence. Williams describes one attack in which a group of vigilantes whipped their victim, Frances Gilmore of Chatham County, N.C., “set fire to her pubic hair, and cut her genitals.”Because of these reports and others collected by lawyers, journalists and other investigators, the American public had “access to more information about the Ku-Klux than about almost any other person, event, phenomenon, or movement in the nation,” the historian Elaine Frantz Parsons observes in “Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.” Between government reports, testimony from witnesses, the confessions of actual Klansmen and the physical evidence of violence and destruction, it would seem impossible to deny the awful scope of Klan terror, much less the existence of the Klan itself.Yet that is exactly what happened.“Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan,” Parsons writes, “the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”In fact, as the historian Stephen A. West points out in The Washington Post in a 2022 piece on the committee’s report, “for much of the last 150 years, Reconstruction’s critics trivialized Black witnesses’ testimony in the Klan report and used it instead to discredit the period’s democratic possibilities.”It is difficult to look at this episode, which transpired a little more than 150 years ago, and not think of the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which compiled a similarly painstaking record of fact on the effort to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Thousands of pages of testimony. Tens of thousands of hours of video footage. The words, under oath, of men and women who participated. The physical evidence. The broken bodies and lost lives.We know, as much as we can know anything, that Donald Trump led a conspiracy to overturn the results of an election that he lost. We know that this involved an attempt to derail the certification of electoral votes. We know that he assembled a crowd of thousands to protest that process. We know that he told that crowd, soon a mob, to “fight like hell” to try to seize the victory they could not win at the ballot box.But despite this unambiguous evidence of insurrection, there is a concerted effort — either out of skepticism or denial — to present the events of Jan. 6, including the schemes that led up to the attack on the Capitol, as something else. The legitimate protest of an exuberantly disappointed group of ordinary American voters, perhaps, or — in the rendering of Trump’s most devoted apologists — a last-ditch effort to save the Republic itself from the illegitimate grasp of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.It is tempting to say that the facts contained in the Jan. 6 committee report will stand on their own, that the body of evidence is simply too great to sustain a posture of skepticism and denial. But facts are mediated to us through our beliefs, experiences and interests. Most people do not and will not believe facts that cut against those beliefs, experiences and interests.In the case of the Ku Klux Klan testimony, it was in the political, social or ideological interests of many Americans — from partisans of the Democratic Party to leading members of the national press — to downplay the significance of the testimony. The same is true today of the facts gathered by the Jan. 6 committee.Those facts will not speak for themselves. The struggle for the meaning of Jan. 6 will, like the struggle over the significance of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, resolve itself only through politics. And in much the same way that the collapse of Reconstruction and the political victory of so-called Redeemers heralded the ideological victory of the Klan’s defenders, sympathizers and apologists, it is Trump’s ultimate fate that will shape and determine our lasting memory of what happened on Jan. 6.In other words, the world in which the attack on the Capitol of the United States by the vengeful followers of a defeated president is just ordinary politics gone a little wild is a world in which Trump and his rioters eventually won.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    Peter Navarro’s Prosecutors Ask for 6-Month Sentence

    Mr. Navarro would be the second Trump official to be sentenced for stonewalling Congress in its Jan. 6 investigation.Federal prosecutors asked on Thursday night for a sentence of six months in prison for Peter Navarro, a former White House adviser to President Donald J. Trump, for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Prosecutors said they were seeking a sentence at the top end of the guidelines because of his “bad-faith strategy” of “sustained, deliberate contempt of Congress.”“The defendant, like the rioters at the Capitol, put politics, not country, first, and stonewalled Congress’s investigation,” they wrote in their sentencing memo. “The defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over the rule of law.”The memo echoed the sentence recommendation for Stephen K. Bannon, who was ultimately given four months in prison for defying his own subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. The sentencing would make Mr. Navarro the second Trump official to be sentenced for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas.Sentencing is set for Jan. 25 in Federal District Court in Washington.Mr. Navarro was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress in September, and this week the judge presiding over the case, Amit P. Mehta, turned down a request from his lawyers to dismiss the verdict and convene a new trial. Mr. Navarro had argued that jurors were exposed to political bias while lunching outside the courthouse where demonstrators were protesting.“The evidence establishes that the jurors only interacted with each other” and a court security officer, Judge Mehta wrote in a ruling on Tuesday.Mr. Navarro’s lawyers argued that the subpoena flew in the face of the notion that a president could direct his subordinates to refuse to testify before Congress, citing executive immunity.In their own memo, they wrote that “history is replete” with people who “have refused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and Dr. Navarro’s sentence should not be disproportionate from those similarly situated individuals.”Mr. Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist and a vocal critic of China, helped devise some of the Trump administration’s most adversarial trade policies and played a role in the U.S. pandemic response. But after the 2020 presidential election, he became more focused on efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power.Mr. Navarro frequently made television appearances in which he cast doubt on the election results and peddled specious claims of voter fraud. He also documented those assertions in a report, as well as in a memoir he published after leaving the White House in which he described a strategy known as the Green Bay Sweep aimed at overturning the election results.When the committee asked Mr. Navarro to testify, he repeatedly asserted executive privilege, insisting that Mr. Trump had ordered him not to cooperate. But Judge Mehta ruled that Mr. Navarro could not raise executive privilege in his defense at trial, saying that there was no compelling evidence that Mr. Trump had ever told him to ignore the committee. More

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    Judge Denies Effort to Remove Trump From the Ballot in Washington State

    A judge in Washington State said on Thursday that former President Donald J. Trump’s name could remain on the state’s primary ballot. The ruling was the latest in a series of battles nationwide over whether Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat make him ineligible to hold the presidency again.A group of voters had filed a legal challenge asking state officials in Washington to leave Mr. Trump off the Republican primary ballot. But Judge Mary Sue Wilson said that Washington’s secretary of state had acted “consistent with his duties” by including Mr. Trump.Formal challenges to Mr. Trump’s candidacy have been filed in at least 35 states, according to a New York Times review of court records and other documents. So far, he has been disqualified in only two states: Colorado, by an appeals court ruling, and Maine, by the secretary of state.The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Mr. Trump’s appeal of the Colorado decision on Feb. 8. The case could determine his eligibility for the ballot nationally.Tracking Efforts to Remove Trump From the 2024 BallotSee which states have challenges seeking to bar Donald J. Trump from the presidential primary ballot.As in other states, the voters in Washington argued that Mr. Trump’s actions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol made him ineligible for office under the 14th Amendment. Steve Hobbs, the secretary of state and Washington’s top election official, has said he does not believe that he has the power to remove Mr. Trump from the primary ballot on his own.But Mr. Hobbs has said that court rulings could change his decision. A lawyer representing his office asked Judge Wilson on Thursday for a prompt ruling on the challenge to Mr. Trump’s eligibility, because ballots would be going out later this month to voters in the military and overseas.A lawyer representing the state Republican Party argued that the case brought by voters was flawed for technical reasons, and also because federal courts had not convicted Mr. Trump of any criminal conduct that would disqualify him.The issue could return after the primary, depending on Mr. Trump’s legal fortunes. Washington State law allows a voter to seek the removal of a candidate from the general election ballot if that candidate has been convicted of a felony, and Mr. Trump faces 91 felony charges as part of various criminal cases against him.In her ruling, Judge Wilson declined, for now, to rule on Mr. Trump’s eligibility for the general election in November.Lazaro Gamio More