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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

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      D.A. in Georgia Trump Investigation Says Any Charges Would Be Announced This Summer

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      In a letter on Monday, the prosecutor said she would announce any indictments from her investigation into Donald J. Trump and his allies between July 11 and Sept. 1.ATLANTA — The prosecutor leading the investigation of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia said on Monday that she is aiming to announce any indictments by mid-July at the earliest, according to a letter she sent to a top local law enforcement official.In her letter, Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., said that any charges would come during the court term that runs from July 11 to Sept. 1.In January, Ms. Willis said that charging decisions in the investigation were “imminent.” But her timetable has been delayed, in part because a number of witnesses have sought to cooperate as the investigation has neared an end. Local law enforcement also needs time to prepare for potential security threats, a point that Ms. Willis emphasized in the letter.Further complicating matters, Ms. Willis’s office filed a motion last week seeking the removal of a lawyer who is representing 10 Republicans who were part of a bogus slate of electors who sought to help Mr. Trump stay in power even after he lost the 2020 election in Georgia.“In the near future, I will announce charging decisions resulting from the investigation my office has been conducting into possible criminal interference in the administration of Georgia’s 2020 General Election,” Ms. Willis wrote in the letter, which was sent to the sheriff of Fulton County, Patrick Labat, and was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I am providing this letter to bring to your attention the need for heightened security and preparedness in coming months due to this pending announcement.”Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 election, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden.A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Ultimately, it will be up to Ms. Willis to decide which charges to seek before a regular grand jury. Her letter, which was copied to a number of local officials, expressed grave concerns about courthouse security after her decisions are announced.“Open-source intelligence has indicated the announcement of the decisions in this case may provoke a significant public reaction,” Ms. Willis wrote. “We have seen in recent years that some may go outside of public expressions of opinion that are protected by the First Amendment to engage in acts of violence that will endanger the safety of our community. As leaders, it is incumbent upon us to prepare.”Security has been a concern of Ms. Willis’s for some time, and she has had some members of her staff outfitted with bulletproof vests. She wrote to the Atlanta field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in early 2022, a few months before the special grand jury began meeting to consider evidence and hear testimony in the case.In that letter, Ms. Willis asked that the F.B.I. conduct a risk assessment of the county courthouse in downtown Atlanta and “provide protective resources to include intelligence and federal agents.”Ms. Willis also noted in the F.B.I. letter that Mr. Trump, at a rally in Conroe, Texas, had called the prosecutors investigating him “vicious, horrible people,” and said he hoped “we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere because our country and our elections are corrupt.”Ms. Willis wrote that Mr. Trump had said at the same event that if re-elected, he might pardon people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the United States Capitol. Armed pro-Trump protesters appeared around the Georgia State Capitol building a number of times in the weeks after the 2020 election, as Mr. Trump and his allies pushed false accusations of electoral fraud. On at least one occasion, armed counterprotesters were also in the streets.On Jan. 6, 2021, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia and his staff evacuated their offices at the State Capitol over concerns about a group of pro-Trump protesters, some armed with long guns, who were massing outside. Mr. Trump had previously called Mr. Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” for what Mr. Trump characterized as his mishandling of the Georgia election process.“We must work together to keep the public safe and ensure that we do not have a tragedy in Atlanta similar to what happened at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Willis wrote to the F.B.I.Last month, Mr. Trump’s legal team in Georgia filed a motion seeking to quash the final report of the special grand jury. Portions of that report, which remain sealed, recommend indictments for people who have not been specified. The motion also asks that Ms. Willis’s office be disqualified from the case.In a statement on Monday, the lawyers reiterated that they believed that the investigation so far has been a “deeply flawed legal process.”Richard Fausset More

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      Biden Has Something He’d Like to Tell You

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      Gail Collins: Well, Bret it looks like Joe Biden will be announcing his re-election bid this week.Bret Stephens: Proving my prediction from last week dead wrong.Gail: I know you disagree with him on many issues, particularly relating to the economy.But given the likely Republican presidential candidates, any chance you’ll actually be able to avoid voting for him?Bret: Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Probably not.It says something about the state of the Republican Party that the two current front-runners — let’s call them Don Caligula and Ron Torquemada — are nonstarters for a voter like me. And I’m a guy who believes in low taxes, a strong military, broken-windows policing, entitlement reform, a border wall and school choice. That’s the Nikki Haley side of the party — now reduced to single digits of the G.O.P. base.Gail: Sorry about Haley’s failure to take flight. I know you were rooting for her.Bret: Well, I’m still holding out hopes — increasingly faint though they are.On the other hand, I really, really wish Biden weren’t running, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. He’s just not a convincing candidate. And for all the talk of Donald Trump being unelectable in the general election, we’ve heard those predictions before. All it might take is a recession — which is probably coming — for swing voters to care a lot less about abortion rights in Florida or the Jan. 6 attempted coup than they will about jobs and the economy.Aren’t you a wee bit nervous?Gail: Nervous? Just because we’re talking about a presidential election in which one of the two major parties nominates either a loony ex-president drowning in legal problems or a deeply unappealing, extremely right-wing enemy of Disney World?Bret: It’s a game of Russian roulette, played with three bullets in the six-shooter.Gail: As for the Democrats, I’ve already told you I think 80 is too old to be planning another presidential campaign. And Biden has been around so long, it’s hard to make anything he talks about doing sound exciting.But what you’re worried about — a popular reaction against a bad economy — would be a problem for anybody in the party.Bret: True, but Amy Klobuchar or Gretchen Whitmer or some other plausible nominee can’t be accused of owning the economy the way Biden can.Gail: Biden certainly has negatives. But Trump has a lot more — all way more dire. And even if Ron DeSantis weren’t a terrible campaigner, I can’t see him winning over the electorate with his past plans to torpedo Medicare.Bret: You’re probably right about DeSantis, who seems too obsessed trying to slay Mickey and Minnie to appeal to regular voters outside Florida. As for Trump, this is a strange thing to say, but: The guy has demon energy. You know the movie “Cocaine Bear”? Trump is “Diet Coke Cujo,” if you get my Stephen King reference.Gail: Yeah, he’s never boring. Sigh. But we’ll see how energetic he looks when he’s defending himself for falsifying business records, and all the other investigations that await him.Alas, we’ll be conversing about this for a very long time, Bret. On the more immediate horizon, there’s the Fox-Dominion settlement. Tell me your thoughts.Bret: I am sorry we didn’t get to watch Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the gang of cynical, lying, repulsive and wretched propagandists squirm under oath in courtroom testimony. Would have paid money just to see that.But, realistically speaking, it’s probably the best possible result. $787.5 million is rich vindication for Dominion. It’s the closest Fox will ever come to admitting guilt. And it spares us the possibility of an appeals process that might have ended with the Supreme Court revisiting the strict libel standards of Times v. Sullivan and potentially limiting the freedom of the press.Gail: Yeah, for all my daydreams about Fox celebrities having to get up in court and apologize to the nation, in the real world this is probably the best you can get while protecting all the rights of a free press.Bret: The good news, Gail, is that Dominion still has suits pending against Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Newsmax and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow Guy, along with a few others. And there’s also the pending Smartmatic suit against Fox, too.Having fun, making bank and doing good at the expense of creeps has got to be the greatest joy adults can have in a boardroom.But we mentioned the Supreme Court. Any thoughts on the mifepristone ruling, staying the lower court’s ban on the abortion pill? I’m relieved, of course, that the court will allow the pill to remain on the market.Gail: Well, this is the nice thing about a democracy. You have the powers that be suddenly realizing the public is totally not on their side. So they fudge a little, dodge a little and quietly backtrack.Bret: It’ll be some irony if Republicans come to rue last year’s Dobbs decision for making them unelectable in all but the reddest parts of the country — and Democrats come to celebrate it for helping them cement a long-term majority that eventually changes the composition of the court so that abortion rights are restored.Gail: But we’re still a long way from living in a country where every woman has the right to control her own body when it comes to reproduction issues.Bret: As the dissents from Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in the mifepristone ruling make clear ….Gail: I’ve always wanted to see state lawmakers from both sides get together on a package of reforms that would couple abortion rights with easily available, easily affordable health and counseling services for poor pregnant women.Along, of course, with high quality child care for low-income working mothers. Ahem.Bret: Gail, would it shock you to know that I don’t disagree with anything you just said? Of course, child care won’t solve the root of so many of our problems, which is the near-destruction of stable two-parent families in too many poor households. But that’s a disaster whose cure lies beyond a government’s ability to solve.Gail: Wow — government support for high-quality early education? I think I’m hearing a major change of heart. If so, gonna buy a very nice bottle of wine for dinner tonight and drink a toast to you.Bret: I tend to soften in your presence.Gail: Awww. Well, go on — back to the issues of the day.Bret: Speaking of disasters, your thoughts on Biden’s E.P.A. rule controlling emissions from power plants?Gail: A worthy effort to protect future generations from environmental disaster, and of course the Republicans hate it.Bret: There should be a better way of saving the planet than by using administrative means to impose high costs on industry that will inevitably be passed along to consumers in the form of higher energy prices — which also hit poorer people harder — while setting wildly unrealistic target dates for an energy transition.Notice that I’m saying this and I still will probably have no choice but to vote for Biden. Unbelievable.Gail: Our colleague Jim Tankersley wrote a great analysis about the ongoing crisis over raising the debt limit, which has got to get done this spring. And how more than half of the Republicans’ 320-page version of a debt limit bill is actually about removing clean energy restrictions.Bret: I’d need to see the fine print before making a judgment, but a lot of what passes for “clean energy,” like biofuels, is really a dirty-energy, big government, big business boondoggle. As for the debt limit, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Biden showed any willingness to meet Republicans halfway on spending cuts and work requirements for able-bodied adults taking federal subsidies.Gail: Bret, the debt limit is — something responsible people take care of without creating a political crisis with demands they’ll never achieve.But hey, that’s a mean way to end our talk. You’re always great about telling me about something new you’ve just read. Go ahead.Bret: Gail, I have to recommend Katie Hafner’s smart and humane obituary on Richard Riordan, the last Republican mayor of Los Angeles and a man who brought calm good sense to a city reeling from riots and racial strife. Riordan was a warts-and-all kind of guy, who cracked some dumb jokes that would have probably been politically fatal in our cancel-culture age. But he also brought common sense and a strong work ethic to his job and embodied a Republican pragmatism that we could sorely use today. He was the last of nine children born to an Irish Catholic family — California is better because his parents were persistent.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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      Testimony Suggests Trump Was at Meeting About Accessing Voting Software in 2020

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      In a letter to federal officials, a liberal-leaning group highlighted testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee that described then-President Trump attending a meeting about the plan in December 2020.ATLANTA — Former President Donald J. Trump took part in a discussion about plans to access voting system software in Michigan and Georgia as part of the effort to challenge his 2020 election loss, according to testimony from former Trump advisers. The testimony, delivered to the House Jan. 6 committee, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to federal officials from a liberal-leaning legal advocacy group.Allies of Mr. Trump ultimately succeeded in copying the elections software in those two states, and the breach of voting data in Georgia is being examined by prosecutors as part of a broader criminal investigation into whether Mr. Trump and his allies interfered in the presidential election there. The former president’s participation in the discussion of the Georgia plan could increase his risk of possible legal exposure there.A number of Trump aides and allies have recounted a lengthy and acrimonious meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, which one member of the House Jan. 6 committee would later call “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.” During the meeting, then-President Trump presided as his advisers argued about whether they should seek to have federal agents seize voting machines to analyze them for fraud.Testimony to the Jan. 6 committee from one aide who attended the meeting, Derek Lyons, a former White House staff secretary and counselor, was highlighted on Friday in a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Free Speech for People, a liberal nonprofit legal advocacy group. Mr. Lyons recounted that during the meeting, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, opposed seizing voting machines and spoke of how the Trump campaign was instead “going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” and that the access would be “voluntary.”Other attendees offered similar testimony to the committee, which released its final report on the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in late December. Among those involved in the Oval Office discussion were two prominent pro-Trump conspiracy theorists: Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, and Sidney Powell, a lawyer who spread numerous falsehoods after the 2020 election and who also discussed Mr. Giuliani’s comments in her testimony.Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., is trying to clarify Mr. Trump’s role in a number of efforts to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia — including the plan to gain access to voting machine data and software — and determine whether to recommend indictments for Mr. Trump or any of his allies for violating state laws.A spokesman for Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment Friday on Mr. Lyons’s testimony. Marissa Goldberg, an Atlanta-area lawyer representing Mr. Trump in Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment.In its letter, Free Speech for People argued that the testimony and other details that have been made public prove that Mr. Trump “was, at a minimum, aware” of an “unlawful, multistate plot” to access and copy voting system software. The group urged the Justice Department and the F.B.I. to conduct “a vigorous and swift investigation.”On Jan. 7, 2021, a small group working on behalf of Mr. Trump traveled to rural Coffee County, Ga., some 200 miles southeast of Atlanta, and gained access to sensitive election data; subsequent visits by pro-Trump figures were captured on video surveillance cameras.The group’s first visit to Coffee County occurred on the same day that Congress certified President Biden’s victory; the certification had been delayed by the storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. The visitors to Coffee County apparently saw it as an ideal place to gather intelligence on what they viewed as voting irregularities: At one point, video footage shows the then-chair of the Coffee County Republican Party, Cathy Latham, appearing to welcome into the building the members of a forensics company hired by Ms. Powell.Ms. Latham was also one of the 16 pro-Trump fake electors whom Georgia Republicans had assembled in an effort to reverse the election results there.Text messages from that period indicate that some Trump allies seeking evidence of election fraud had considered other uses for the Coffee County election data and their analyses of it. One cybersecurity consultant aiding in the effort even raised the possibility, in a text message to other Trump allies in mid-January 2021, of using a report on Coffee County election data “to try to decertify” a highly consequential United States Senate runoff election that Democrats had just won in Georgia. CNN reported on the existence of that text message on Friday.The Trump allies who traveled to Coffee County copied elections software used across the state and uploaded it on the internet, creating the potential for future election manipulation, according to David Cross, a lawyer involved in civil litigation over election security in Georgia filed by the Coalition for Good Governance. The Coffee County data was also used earlier this year in a presentation to conservative activists that included unfounded allegations of electoral fraud, The Los Angeles Times has reported.Some of those involved with the Coffee County effort came to regret it. A law firm hired by SullivanStrickler, the consulting firm hired by Ms. Powell to help gain access to the county’s voting machines, would later release a statement saying that, “With the benefit of hindsight, and knowing everything they know now, they would not take on any further work of this kind.” More