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      Georgia’s Hot Mess Is Headed Your Way

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      Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.Republicans elsewhere should keep watch. Democrats too. What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism. And while every state’s political dynamics are unique, a variation of the Peach State drama could be headed your way soon — if it hasn’t begun already.The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.Why should anyone care about the state of the Georgia G.O.P.? Well, what is happening in Georgia is unlikely to stay in Georgia — and has repercussions that go beyond the health and functionality of the Republican Party writ large. After election deniers failed to gain control of statewide offices across the nation in 2022, many of them refocused their efforts farther down the food chain. In February, The Associated Press detailed the push by some of these folks to become state party chairmen, who are typically chosen by die-hard activists. In Michigan, for instance, the state G.O.P. elevated the Trumpist conspiracy lover and failed secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo to be its chairwoman.MAGA zealots don’t simply present ideological concerns, though their politics do tend toward the fringes. Too many embraced the stop-the-steal fiction that the electoral system has been compromised by nefarious Democrats and must be “saved” by any means necessary. Letting them oversee any aspect of the electoral process seems like a poor idea.If this development persists, Republicans more interested in the party’s future than in relitigating its past might want to look at how Kemp & Company have been trying to address their intraparty problems — and what more could and should be done to insulate not only the party’s less-extreme candidates, but also the democratic system, from these fringe forces. There are risks that come with ticking off election deniers and other Trumpian dead-enders. But the greater risk to the overall party, and the nation, would be declining to do so.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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      Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising

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      The Justice Department has been gathering evidence about whether the former president and his allies solicited donations with claims of election fraud they knew to be false.As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.In the past several months, prosecutors have issued multiple batches of subpoenas in a wide-ranging effort to understand Save America, which was set up shortly after the election as Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising entity. An initial round of subpoenas, which started going out before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in the 2024 race and Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November, focused on various Republican officials and vendors that had received payments from Save America.But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power.But the Justice Department, with its ability to bring criminal charges, has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from a number of witnesses. And prosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter.The fund-raising efforts are just one focus of Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse his loss at the polls.Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes.Peter Dejong/Associated PressProsecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the broader push by Mr. Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.On Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a key witness to Mr. Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America.The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas.Mr. Trump’s team may argue that the fund-raising represented political speech with solicitations that were generally vague, and that subjecting it to a criminal process could raise First Amendment issues and create a slippery slope for future candidates. Political fund-raising materials often engage in bombast or exaggeration.Republicans may also argue that Democrats have been loose in claims they have used in fund-raising solicitations. And the Trump campaign may argue that it did in fact use the funds to try to investigate fraud.Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump who worked on the 2020 campaign, said that the “Deep State is ramping up their attacks on President Trump” as his poll numbers have increased. “The ‘political police’ have been pushing their witch hunt since President Trump came down the escalator, and they’ve been proven wrong every single time,” he added.Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to comment.Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.Jason Miller, a former top Trump aide, appearing on a screen last year during a hearing of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Mr. Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.Mr. Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Mr. Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Mr. Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.Days after starting to work with Mr. Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Mr. Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. The company was hired through a law firm that has long represented Mr. Trump in his personal capacity, Kasowitz Benson Torres, although lawyers there were not involved in pursuing Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims, according to a person briefed on the matter.A deputy counsel for Berkeley Research Group said the company has a “no comment” policy and declined to discuss the matter further.During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Mr. Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television.As part of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s postelection fund-raising, the Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed records from Salesforce.com, a vendor that helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee send emails to potential donors. The R.N.C. fought back, filing a lawsuit to quash the subpoena, and the House committee ultimately withdrew it.In the latest round of subpoenas, federal prosecutors have sought documents related to Salesforce in addition to other vendors, according to a person briefed on the matter. More

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      Seeking Clarity Amid Confrontation

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      In the new season of “The Run-Up” podcast, the host Astead W. Herndon interviews some of the political establishment’s loudest voices. It’s not always easy.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.“The Run-Up,” a New York Times podcast hosted by the politics reporter Astead W. Herndon, returned this month to try to make sense of the political divisions in the United States and the intricacies of the 2024 presidential election — no small tasks.Last year, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots movements; Mr. Herndon interviewed voters on both sides of the aisle to help listeners think critically about the midterm elections. With the 2024 race looming, Mr. Herndon is using this season to explore the larger political establishment and how decision makers influence daily life in America.But interviewing media-savvy figures, who often have an agenda to push, can be tricky, and conversations can become tense. On the most recent episode of “The Run-Up,” for example, Mr. Herndon spoke with Mike Lindell, the founder and chief executive of MyPillow and an ally of former President Donald J. Trump’s.Mr. Lindell, an election denier, is being sued by the election equipment company Dominion Voting Systems over his assertions that Dominion’s machines helped to orchestrate election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. At times during the interview, Mr. Lindell yells and cuts off Mr. Herndon.In an interview, Mr. Herndon explained his approach to these kinds of exchanges and how he keeps his cool under pressure. This interview has been edited and condensed.How would you describe your interview style?It depends on who I’m interviewing. I’m someone who wants to come in with a purpose and know why I’m talking to someone. You have to have a sense of mission. I’m a friendly, alert and respectful interviewer. I want to be a direct and active listener so that I am responding to someone in real time based on what I’m hearing and what I’m learning.One of the things I love about audio is that we have a plan as to what we want to do in these interviews. But I’m also empowered to freestyle questions based on what I’m hearing.I’m not trying to be the smartest person in the room or confrontational for confrontation’s sake. I am trying to get clarity. If I feel I’m not getting that clarity, I will push back, but I think it has to be earned.During a recent episode, Mike Lindell sounded agitated when you asked him about voter fraud. What was going through your head?I think he was agitated because we were pushing him for real answers. In that moment, I didn’t want to escalate the situation; I wanted to sift through that anger and bluster to hear whether he’s answering my question or not. Particularly when it’s someone who is a political figure, I do not see anger as a thing that should scare me off, especially if I know that I’ve come to this interview respectfully seeking answers. As long as you’re engaging, there’s more opportunity to get that clarity. I’m not going to stoke the anger, but at the same time, I’m not going to be put off by it.How do you prepare for interviews you think may become tense?I learned this from reporting on crime when I was at The Boston Globe. I would get to a scene — a murder, a fire, some deeply emotional scene — and I would sit in the car for a minute and make sure that I was emotionally ready to step into it. I see this in the same way. When I am going to do something that might be difficult, it may get prickly, it may lead to something that can be tense, I want to make sure that I am not taking it personally. I want to make sure I’m not escalating, that I’ve centered myself.How do you approach interviews with listeners in mind and get them to think critically and broadly about the election?I don’t think we do our job if things feel smart; I think we do our job if things feel clear. That to me is the line we are always pushing for: How are we untangling a political system — that is not actually built for people to understand — in a tangible way? How are we clearing up the political decisions folks are making that are intended to be out of public view? That, to me, is the core of “The Run-Up.”We try to start episodes from ground zero, so that we’re not assuming any knowledge. The question I was getting from friends while I was on the trail from 2018 to 2021 was, “Why are things moving in one direction, when it feels like people have been begging for it to move in the opposite direction?” I started our reporting process thinking, let’s help people understand why. We’re trying to live up to it. More

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      Pence Testifies Before Grand Jury on Trump’s Efforts to Retain Power

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      The former vice president is a key witness to former President Donald Trump’s attempts to block congressional certification of Joseph Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Former Vice President Mike Pence appeared on Thursday before the grand jury hearing evidence about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election, a person briefed on the matter said, testifying in a criminal inquiry that could shape the legal and political fate of his one-time boss and possible 2024 rival.Mr. Pence spent more than five hours behind closed doors at the Federal District Court in Washington in an appearance that came after he was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury earlier this year.As the target of an intense pressure campaign in the final days of 2020 and early 2021 by Mr. Trump to convince him to play a critical role in blocking or delaying congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, Mr. Pence is considered a key witness in the investigation.Mr. Pence, who is expected to decide soon about whether to challenge Mr. Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, rebuffed Mr. Trump’s demands that he use his role as president of the Senate in the certification of the Electoral College results to derail the final step in affirming Mr. Biden’s victory.Mr. Pence’s advisers had discussions with Justice Department officials last year about providing testimony in their criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and a number of his allies broke federal law in trying to keep Mr. Trump in power. But the talks broke down, leading prosecutors to seek a subpoena for Mr. Pence’s testimony.Both Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump tried to fight the subpoena, with the former vice president claiming it violated the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution given his role overseeing the election results certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump claiming their discussions were covered by executive privilege.Mr. Trump’s efforts to prevent testimony based on executive privilege claims were rebuffed by the courts. Mr. Pence partially won in his effort to forestall or limit his testimony; the chief judge overseeing the grand jury ruled that he would not have to discuss matters connected to his role as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, but that he would have to testify to any potential criminality by Mr. Trump.A federal appeals court on Wednesday night rejected an emergency attempt by Mr. Trump to stop Mr. Pence’s testimony, allowing the testimony to go forward on Thursday.Mr. Trump’s effort to hold onto the presidency after his defeat at the polls — and how it led to the assault on the Capitol — is the focus of one of the two federal criminal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. Mr. Smith is also managing the parallel investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.Mr. Smith has gathered evidence about a wide range of activities by Mr. Trump and his allies following Election Day in 2020. They include a plan to assemble slates of alternate electors from a number of swing states who could be put forward by Mr. Trump as he disputed the Electoral College results. They also encompass an examination of whether Mr. Trump defrauded donors by soliciting contributions to fight election fraud despite having been repeatedly told that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen from him.A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., Fani T. Willis, has also been gathering evidence about whether Mr. Trump engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election results in that state, and has signaled that she will announce any indictments this summer.Mr. Pence’s unwillingness to go along with Mr. Trump’s plan to block or delay certification of the electoral outcome, infuriated Mr. Trump, who assailed his vice president privately and publicly on Jan. 6.Mr. Pence subsequently became a target of the pro-Trump mob that swamped the Capitol building that day, with some chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” as they moved through the complex. Someone brought a fake gallows that stood outside the building.It is not clear what testimony Mr. Pence provided on Thursday. But prosecutors were surely interested in Mr. Pence’s accounts of his interactions with Mr. Trump and Trump advisers including John Eastman, a lawyer who promoted the idea that they could use the congressional certification process on Jan. 6 to give Mr. Trump a chance to remain in office.That plan relied on Mr. Pence using his role as president of the Senate to hold up the process. But Mr. Pence’s top lawyer and outside advisers concluded that the vice president did not have the legal authority to do so.Mr. Pence described some of his conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoir, “So Help Me God.”Mr. Pence described in the book how Mr. Trump worked with Mr. Eastman to pressure him into doing something that the vice president was clear that he could not and would not do. He wrote that on the morning of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump tried to bludgeon him again on a phone call.“You’ll go down as a wimp,” the president told the vice president. “If you do that, I made a big mistake five years ago!”Some of Mr. Pence’s aides have already appeared before the grand jury, in addition to providing extensive testimony last year to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and what led to it. More

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      The Moment When Donald Trump Started to Lose May Have Begun

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      What’s the right form of justice for the problem of Donald Trump?There’s already been one indictment. There’s expected to be another in Georgia, possibly a sprawling one, about the effort to overturn the 2020 election. Although there’s a literal point to an investigation (find out what went wrong) followed by a prosecution (hold people accountable), investigations and prosecutions can also take on cultural or symbolic meaning.The Fox News settlement last week offered a microcosm of what’s happening now with Mr. Trump: The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit was about one thing (the claim of defamation against a business), but it took on a broader meaning (the public learned more about how Republican politics really works right now). And, notably, few agree what the settlement means, whether the $787.5 million paid by Fox to Dominion reflects accountability or inconsequence, whether an apology was required or whether a trial was, even as the case risked a ruling with unpredictable repercussions.Different people have different views of what the real problem and the right form of justice look like for Mr. Trump. Maybe the only certainty right now is the answer will be unsatisfying.He, meanwhile, has never let up. Last month, Mr. Trump stood with his hand over his heart in Waco, Texas, as scenes from the Jan. 6 riot played on a big screen and a recording by the J6 Prison Choir blasted through speakers at a rally for his presidential campaign.So what’s the point? Mr. Trump is surrounded by disparate legal actions of varying importance by disconnected individuals. But if we step back and think about the meaning of this period, are we trying to move on from the Trump era, to put it behind us, or to understand what went wrong? “Justice for the problems of the Trump era” or “preventing another Trump presidency”?If you think hard about the Jan. 6 select House committee, its exact point might seem a little opaque. The committee couldn’t arrest anybody; its criminal referrals depended on a different branch of government to pursue them. The point couldn’t be justice, and while people may have mistaken the committee for a legal entity, it was a political one.But the committee served some purpose in American life: Millions of people watched its hearings, millions learned new details about this major event. Maybe the committee’s chief purpose, then, was about the documents and the interview transcripts and video — a truth project.Former Representative Stephanie Murphy, who served on the committee, told me in November this was its meaning: “for history,” to “document what happened.” To her, a former national security specialist at the Pentagon, the riot revealed the Capitol to the world as a “soft target,” and that “if we don’t walk away from perilous moments like that and take a moment to reflect and figure out how to improve, then I think we will have failed.” In an interview this month, Representative Zoe Lofgren isolated the main question — “We were there for the riot and the mob. How did it happen?” — and took it one further: to make the details “accessible to people,” filming depositions (even if only iPhone video or screen capture was available) and releasing the maximum amount of supporting material with the final report.The effect of the committee’s presentation, a kind of effort at building consensus about recent history, was less tangible: to reorient the country’s attention, through the hearings, to how bad Jan. 6 really was. Attention is hard to maintain and focus, especially when, with Mr. Trump, it’s as if we’re always trying to hold water in our hands.And this can have political consequences. In December, Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics wrote on Twitter that he had come to believe the Dobbs abortion ruling had more of a regional effect on the 2022 midterm results, but it was the hearings that shaped the national choice: “By re-centering Trump in the narrative,” the Trump-backed candidates became “less palatable to independents at a time when impressions were formed.”With hindsight, that committee had a pretty contained purpose — a public examination and narrative about a catastrophic event in American life, a kind of truth project.But it’s hard to assign a neat goal like that to every piece of the avalanche of litigation, investigation and prosecution that has converged in the last few months, between prosecutions or investigations for things that are or aren’t the problem with Mr. Trump (the Stormy Daniels payments, the efforts to overturn the election in Georgia, the handling of classified documents); the lawsuits about Mr. Trump’s business dealings in New York; the lawsuits about actors who responded to Mr. Trump’s election claims (like the Fox-Dominion lawsuit). We probably wouldn’t be here if, after the riot, Republicans had actually barred Mr. Trump from holding office, as my colleagues Ezra Klein and David French recently discussed. Impeachment was another political, civic process, rather than a criminal one. But it didn’t work, and now we have this.Without obvious shared goals, arguably all these different prosecutors, officials and individuals are undertaking an inadvertent deterrence project, keeping alive the bad parts of the recent past and applying pressure on the central players. We talk about a “chilling” effect with abortion laws, regulatory action against corporations and certain speech policies; these “work” by exerting pressure, making people skittish and worried about getting caught up in legal trouble.The endless hearings and legal heartburn might be working in a similar manner. As a friend put it to me, post-Jan. 6 prosecutions and the prospect of an indictment in Georgia may be causing people to be less rowdy.In advance of Mr. Trump’s New York indictment, his former adviser Roger Stone reminded people to keep their protests “civil” and “legal.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would “be pointing at people to be arrested if they’re being violent.” Many (but not all) of the Trump-backed candidates who lost in November conceded their elections within a normal time frame. This was good for the country, but also a bit of a puzzle: Many of these people claimed a major election was stolen, why wouldn’t they do the same for their own? The drag and scrutiny in the aftermath of Jan. 6 might be an answer.Deterrence is an uneasy goal, however — hard to measure, impossible to predict, and at danger of becoming retribution in the wrong hands, or even hardening reactionary and illiberal elements by accident.Deterrence would also suggest an established kind of consensus: that a specific crime was, in fact, committed and the goal moving forward is to keep other crimes like it from being perpetrated. With many entry points to the problem, and without a shared consensus about what the real problem with the Trump era was, satisfaction here might be difficult to achieve. There’s also a kind of dark-night-of-the-soul, “The Godfather Part II” concern, which surfaced in early polling after the New York indictment, that at least some segment of the country likely finds that prosecution to be political, and doesn’t seem to mind. And Mr. Trump is raising a lot of money and consolidating his polling advantage in the wake of the first indictment.Consensus and order are unusual, though. Ms. Lofgren noted that the Jan. 6 committee was different from any experience she’d had, beginning with its unique presentation structure. “You had to have a unified view of what was the mission, and the mission was to find all the facts that we could, and then tell them,” she said. “There wasn’t a political divide on that. But that doesn’t mean we saw everything exactly the same way, exactly at the same time.” The committee, she explained, used closed-door discussions to reach public unity: “There were times when I thought one thing and by the time we’d spent a couple of hours thinking through it, I became convinced of someone else’s point of view. And the same thing happened with other members. That’s also rare.”Reaching one shared idea of what happened and why things went wrong, even within a smaller group behind closed doors, has real appeal, even if it’s not how we would want a country run. Instead, it’s like the best society can do is to keep applying a kind of societal weight to Mr. Trump — attention on the accurate memory of the events, the creation of legal hurdles and public scrutiny, possibly doomed prosecutions of varying quality — adding a little more weight, a little more weight, a little more weight in an effort to contain him. It’s like some mixed-up version of deterrence and truth, with a society trying something, anything, with possibly volatile precedents for the future.Even in all this chaos of information and opaque goals, a story can still stick out as representative of the frustrating parts of this time. In part of the materials released at Christmas by the select committee, in an episode you may have missed, a former White House deputy press secretary, Sarah Matthews, described an argument some of the press staff got into about who would benefit if Mr. Trump called the insurrection off, and whether he should condemn the violence at all.Ms. Matthews wanted him to do that:tell everyone to go home. According to her account of the day from her closed-door testimony, someone suggested that maybe people from the antifa movement were behind the riot; that was, Ms. Matthews said, all the more reason to condemn the violence. According to Ms. Matthews, someone kept arguing that to condemn the riot would allow the media to “win,” because Democrats had not been asked to condemn violence during the protests after George Floyd’s death in 2020.“I pointed at the TV,” Ms. Matthews testified last year, “and said — I guess yelled — ‘Do you think we’re winning right now?’” She became emotional, left the room and, later that day, resigned.This is, on the one hand, sort of a pointless thing to know — a vivid but peripheral episode, from overlooked supporting materials to a report from a committee that no longer exists. On the other hand, it speaks to the lasting change in American politics since 2016: When Ms. Matthews was working for House Republicans and testified publicly last summer, the House Republican Conference called her a “liar” and “pawn” on Twitter, before deleting the post.There’s something emblematic of this frustrating and confused era in a woman hopelessly shouting, “Do you think we’re winning right now?”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Covering Dominion’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox

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      Katie Robertson, a media reporter for The New York Times, was in court in Wilmington, Del., when Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle for a staggering $787.5 million.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The first sign that things were amiss came Sunday evening, the day before what was supposed to be the most high-profile media defamation trial in decades was set to begin.I was eating dinner with a few New York Times colleagues at a hotel restaurant close to the courthouse in Wilmington, Del., where Fox News was facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. We, along with journalists from what seemed like every media outlet in the country, and more than a few from overseas, had expected to spend the next six weeks writing articles on the trial.But around 8 p.m., we received an email from the Delaware Superior Court. It said Judge Eric M. Davis had decided to delay the trial’s start by a day, though it offered no reasons for the move.While one of my Times colleagues fielded calls from our editors, the rest of us tried to riddle out the cause of the delay. Was Fox about to settle, or was a commonplace court issue at play? At the restaurant, we spotted a couple of lawyers for Dominion. They were casually drinking by the hotel bar, seemingly unbothered by the turn of events.Fox News was on trial for defaming Dominion by linking its voting technology to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. But the trial was about more than that.Some saw it as a chance for accountability for the lies about a stolen election, pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. The trial touched on questions about a divided country and the role the media plays in those divisions, about echo chambers and the distortion of facts, about how a country operates as a democracy in an age of misinformation.It was also a test of First Amendment protections for the press, placing some libel experts in a curious position: cheering on a case against a media company when they were typically the first to warn of the dangers of such a thing.Media reporters at The Times had covered the lead-up to the trial since the lawsuit was filed in March 2021. Since January, I had pored over hundreds of pages of exhibits and attended numerous pretrial hearings. I’d gone back and forth from Wilmington enough times to warn my colleagues which hotels to avoid.Since the judge would not allow filming or recording inside the court, the Media team at The Times had planned to provide readers with real-time updates of the trial with a daily newsletter and a live blog.We were expecting to see some high-profile witnesses testify, too — including Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old head of the Murdoch media empire that owns Fox News, and a few of the network’s top-rated hosts. A tent had been erected at the back of the courthouse to shield some of the witnesses when they entered and exited. (A source told me the tent had been set up by the Delaware Capitol Police after Fox told the court that some of its witnesses had received threats.)Two days after the judge’s announcement, on Tuesday morning, we watched the jury selection. My colleagues Jeremy Peters and Jim Rutenberg were in the main courtroom, where reporters were allowed to have laptops only for taking notes; they weren’t allowed to use the internet. I watched the proceedings from an overflow room next door, where I was able to connect to the internet and report live updates on the proceedings.After a lunch break, lawyers for Dominion and Fox were ready to give their opening statements. The minutes, though, ticked by — no judge or jury had entered the courtroom. After about two hours of waiting, we saw the lawyers speaking quietly on their cellphones and occasionally ducking into the judge’s chambers for brief, private meetings.Then Judge Davis came out and addressed the court: “The parties have resolved the case.” It was all over before it began.Journalists scrambled to try to catch the lawyers as they were leaving. Fox’s legal team didn’t make any comments, but Dominion’s lead lawyers set up an impromptu news conference in front of the courthouse and told us the details of the settlement.Fox had agreed to pay a staggering $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s ruling that certain claims it had made about Dominion were false. Defamation cases are almost always settled before they get to trial. That we had gotten this far was a wonder in itself, but the settlement still caught me somewhat by surprise — and upended our carefully laid coverage plans.Still, Dominion’s case provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a news empire that I had reported on for years. I started my career in journalism as a reporter for an Australian tabloid newspaper owned by Mr. Murdoch. The way the Murdochs, and especially Rupert, run their hugely influential media operations across the world has long interested me, from my inside view in Perth, Australia, to my current role years later covering the media industry from The Times’s Manhattan headquarters.The Dominion case revealed hundreds of emails, texts and internal messages between Fox hosts and executives that showed they hadn’t believed what they were telling their viewers. Those filings presented a challenge, too. Many pages of depositions and messages were heavily redacted, and The Times, along with NPR and The Associated Press, hired a lawyer to challenge the legality of those redactions. The settlement was also not the end of the story: On Monday, Fox News dropped the bombshell that it was parting ways with Tucker Carlson, its most popular prime time host, a signal that the Murdochs were making changes in the wake of the lawsuit and a move I had not expected.We are still calling, emailing and talking with sources to figure out which shoe will drop next, and when. One of the most difficult aspects of my job as a reporter who covers the news media is sifting through volumes of gossipy chatter (from sources, in my inbox and on social media) to find the truth. But experience on the beat and an understanding of Murdoch Kremlinology go a long way in discerning who is credible and who is not. More

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      Trump Can’t Stop Pence From Testifying to Jan. 6 Grand Jury, Court Rules

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      The ruling by an appeals court paved the way for the former vice president to appear before a federal grand jury as early as this week.A federal appeals court rejected on Wednesday night an emergency attempt by former President Donald J. Trump to stop former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying in front of a grand jury investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.The 11th-hour ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia paved the way for Mr. Pence to appear before the federal grand jury as early as this week.Mr. Pence has always been a potentially important witness in the inquiry because of conversations he took part in at the White House in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that time, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressed Mr. Pence to use his ceremonial role overseeing the congressional count of Electoral College votes to block or delay certification of his defeat.Prosecutors have been trying to get Mr. Pence to talk about Mr. Trump’s demands for several months — first in requests by the Justice Department for an interview and then through a grand jury subpoena issued by the special counsel Jack Smith, who inherited the inquiry into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power.Last month, in a pair of sealed rulings, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of Federal District Court in Washington, ordered Mr. Pence to appear before the grand jury, striking down two separate challenges that would have kept him from answering certain questions.In one of those challenges, Mr. Pence sought on his own to limit his testimony by arguing that his role as the president of the Senate on Jan. 6, when Mr. Trump’s defeat was certified by Congress, meant he was protected from legal scrutiny by the executive branch — including the Justice Department. That argument was based on the “speech or debate” clause of the Constitution, which is intended to protect the separation of powers.Judge Boasberg ruled that while Mr. Pence could claim some protections against testimony under the clause, he would have to answer questions about any potentially illegal acts committed by Mr. Trump. This month, Mr. Pence announced that he did not intend to appeal the decision.Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump’s lawyers took the opposite path, asking the appeals court to reverse Judge Boasberg’s ruling on their own attempts to narrow the scope of the questions Mr. Pence would have to answer. Mr. Trump’s legal team based its arguments on the concept of executive privilege, which protects certain communications between the president and some members of his administration.The appeals court’s sealed ruling on Wednesday night came in response to an emergency request — it was also sealed — to temporarily stop Mr. Pence from answering questions in front of the grand jury as the broader appeal is being considered.When Mr. Pence ends up testifying, it will mark a significant turning point in the monthslong behind-the-scenes battle waged by Mr. Trump and several witnesses close to him to block the disclosure of details about plans to overturn the election. More

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      What Tucker Carlson’s Dismissal From Fox News Means for the Network

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      The host’s abrupt dismissal upends Fox News’s prime-time lineup — and the carefully honed impression that the ratings star was all but untouchable.In the days after the 2020 election, the Fox host Tucker Carlson sent an anxious text message to one of his producers. Fox viewers were furious about the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The defeated president, Donald J. Trump, was eagerly stoking their anger. As Mr. Carlson and his producer batted around ideas for a new Carlson podcast — one that might help win back the audience most angry about Mr. Trump’s defeat — they saw both opportunity and peril in the moment.“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Mr. Carlson warned, in a text released during Fox’s now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion.Mr. Carlson proved prophetic, if not entirely in the way he had predicted. His nearly six-year reign in prime-time cable came to a sudden end on Monday, as Fox abruptly cut ties with the host, thanking him in a terse news release “for his service to the network.”And while the exact circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday evening, the dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes — and already high-priced — legal battles emanating from Fox’s postelection campaign to placate Mr. Trump’s base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham.Mr. Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved capable of withstanding controversy after controversy.The network stuck by him — as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation — after Mr. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He seemed to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” along with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the company’s own dirty laundry. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Carlson’s show frequently promoted the Kremlin’s point of view, attacking U.S. sanctions and blaming the conflict on American designs for expanding NATO.The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — driven away by boycotts targeting his more racist and inflammatory segments — did not seem to dent his standing within the network, so long as the audience stuck around. Disdainful of the cable network’s top executives, Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was close to the Murdoch family and, perhaps, untouchable.Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: His own conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the party during the Obama years. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.Despite his private disparagement of Mr. Trump — “I hate him,” Mr. Carlson texted a colleague in January 2021 — Mr. Carlson electrified the president’s white, older base with vivid monologues about elite corruption, American decay and a grand plan by “the ruling class” to replace “legacy” Americans with a flood of migrants from other countries and cultures. With deliberate, hypnotic repetition, he warned viewers: “They” want to control and destroy “you.”Crucially, he worked to help Fox woo Trump supporters back to the network in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat.In 2022, Mr. Carlson’s program averaged three million total viewers a night.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn broadcast after broadcast, he unspooled a counternarrative claiming falsely that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters” and suggesting that the voting had been rife with fraud and corruption. After Trump supporters — whipped into a frenzy in part by Mr. Trump and Fox — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, he recast the assault as a largely peaceful protest against legitimate wrongdoing, its violence the product of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the F.B.I.As a programming strategy, it worked: Last year, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged more than three million total viewers a night. At his height, and perhaps still, Mr. Carlson counted among the most influential figures on the right.But if Fox and its star host once prospered because of Mr. Trump, their efforts to deny or overturn the election results have also thrust both the network and the former president into legal peril.Mr. Trump faces one investigation by a federal special counsel over his efforts to retain power after losing and another by a local prosecutor in Georgia that began after the defeated president, determined to prevail, asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results there.A lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems speaking to reporters last week. Fox has agreed to pay the voting software company $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesFox agreed last week to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation claim brought by Dominion, which had sued Fox for spreading false accusations that the voting software company was at the center of a vast conspiracy to cheat Mr. Trump of victory in 2020.Mr. Carlson and his show featured prominently in the Dominion case. And thousands of pages of internal texts and emails released as part of the suit revealed that the network’s embrace of election-fraud theories — and their promotion by guests and personalities at Fox News and Fox Business — were part of a broader campaign to assuage viewers angry about Mr. Trump’s loss.They also revealed that neither Mr. Carlson nor his fellow hosts truly believed that the election was rigged, despite their on-air commentary. And texts showed that Mr. Carlson held Fox’s titular executives in low regard, slamming them for “destroying our credibility” — for allowing Fox to accurately report Mr. Biden’s win — and belittling them as a “combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down.”Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer, is also suing the network.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe company is also facing a lawsuit from a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossberg, who said that she faced sexual harassment from other Carlson staff members and was coached by Fox lawyers to downplay the role of news executives in allowing unproven allegations of voting fraud onto the air.Yet another election technology company that featured in Fox’s coverage of supposed election fraud, Smartmatic, is still suing the network. In its complaint, Smartmatic said that Fox knowingly aired more than 100 false statements about its products. A day after the suit was filed in 2021, Fox Business canceled the show hosted by Lou Dobbs, who had been among the foremost spreaders of baseless theories involving election fraud.In the wake of Mr. Carlson’s abrupt dismissal, current and former Fox employees buzzed with speculation about the true reasons for his firing, and what it said about the company plans moving forward.Few seemed to believe that Mr. Carlson was being punished for his lengthy history of inflammatory remarks on-air — if so, why now? — or for his formerly private criticisms of Fox executives. (Some pointed out that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were similarly scathing in their own text messages.)A more interesting question, perhaps, is what Mr. Carlson will do next.Like his clearest intellectual predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J. Buchanan, Mr. Carlson is one of the few people to find success as not only a television entertainer, but also an institution-builder — he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller — and a movement leader. More than any other figure with a mainstream platform, he succeeded in bring far-right ideas about immigration and culture to a broad audience.He is also, now, among the very few television talents to have been canceled by all three major cable news networks. Before Fox, he had a long run as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and later headlined a show at MSNBC. In recent years, he served as both a pillar of Fox News’s prime-time lineup and the biggest-name draw on the company’s paid streaming network, Fox Nation, where he aired a thrice-weekly talk show and occasional documentaries.Within hours of his firing on Monday, at least one putative job offer was forthcoming.“Hey @TuckerCarlson,” tweeted RT, the Russian state-backed media channel. “You can always question more with @RT_com.” More