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      When American History Turns Into American Mythology

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      In the realm of folklore and ancient traditions, myths are tales forever retold for their wisdom and underlying truths. Their impossibility is part of their appeal; few would pause to debunk the physics of Icarus’s wings before warning against flying too close to the sun.In the worlds of journalism and history, however, myths are viewed as pernicious creatures that obscure more than they illuminate. They must be hunted and destroyed so that the real story can assume its proper perch. Puncturing these myths is a matter of duty and an assertion of expertise. “Actually” becomes an honored adverb.I can claim some experience in this effort, not as a debunker of myths but as a clearinghouse for them. When I served as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles in which experts tackled the most common fallacies surrounding subjects in the news. This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?These questions came up frequently as I read “Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton. The book, which the editors describe as an “intervention” in long-running public discussions on American politics, economics and culture, is an authoritative and fitting contribution to the myth-busting genre — authoritative for the quality of the contributions and the scope of its enterprise, fitting because it captures in one volume the possibilities and pitfalls of the form. When you face down so many myths in quick succession, the values that underpin the effort grow sharper, even if the value of myths themselves grows murkier. All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects. Carol Anderson of Emory University discredits the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. elections, showing how the politicians and activists who claim to defend “election integrity” are often seeking to exclude some voters from the democratic process. Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University puts the lie to the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions; with its territories and tribal nations and foreign bases, he contends, the country is very much an empire today and has been so from the start. And after reading Lawrence B. Glickman’s essay on “White Backlash,” I will be careful of writing that a civil-rights protest or movement “sparked” or “fomented” or “provoked” a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable. “Backlashers are rarely treated as agents of history, the people who participate in them seen as bit players rather than catalysts of the story, reactors rather than actors,” Glickman, a historian at Cornell, writes. Sometimes the best myth-busting is the kind that makes you want to rewrite old sentences.The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur. “All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,” Kruse and Zelizer write. Yet, this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.Sarah Churchwell’s enlightening chapter on the evolution of “America First” as a slogan and worldview, for instance, builds on her 2018 book on the subject. But to address the topic as a myth, Churchwell, a historian at the University of London, asserts that Donald Trump’s invocation of “America First” in the 2016 presidential race was “widely defended as a reasonable foreign policy doctrine.” (Her evidence is a pair of pieces by the conservative commentators Michael Barone and Michael Anton.)In his essay defending the accomplishments of the New Deal, Eric Rauchway of the University of California, Davis, admits that the policy program’s alleged failure “is not a tale tightly woven into the national story” and that “perhaps myth seems an inappropriate term.” He does believe the New Deal’s failure is a myth worth exploding, of course, but acknowledges that there are “many analytical categories of falsehood.” The admission deserves some kudos, but it also might just be right.In Kruse’s chapter on the history of the “Southern Strategy” — the Republican Party’s deliberate effort to bring white Southerners to its side as the Democratic Party grew more active in support of civil rights — the author allows that “only recently have conservative partisans challenged this well-established history.” This singling out of conservatives is not accidental. In their introduction, Kruse and Zelizer argue that the growth of right-wing media platforms and the Republican Party’s declining “commitment to truth” have fostered a boom in mythmaking. “Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,” they write.The editors note the existence of some “bipartisan” myths that transcend party or ideology, but overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right. In an analysis that spans 20 chapters, more than 300 pages and centuries of American history and public discourse, this emphasis is striking. Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. If not, it might require its own debunking.One of those bipartisan myths, typically upheld by politicians of both major parties, is the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism. In his essay on the subject, David A. Bell, another Princeton historian, can be dismissive of the term. “Most nations can be considered exceptional in one sense or another,” he writes. Today, the phrase is typically deployed as a “cudgel” in the country’s culture wars, Bell contends, a practice popularized by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has long hailed the United States as “the most unique civilization in history” and assails anyone who does not bow before the concept. “For Gingrich, demonstrating America’s exceptionality has always mattered less than denouncing the Left for not believing in it,” Bell writes.When exploring earlier arguments about America’s unique nature, Bell touches on John Winthrop’s 17th-century sermon “Model of Christian Charity,” in which the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Puritan community would be “as a city on a hill” (a line that President Ronald Reagan expanded centuries later to a “shining city upon a hill”). The reference is obligatory in any discussion of American exceptionalism, though Bell minimizes the relevance of the lay sermon to the exceptionalism debates, both because the text “breathed with agonized doubt” about whether the colonists could meet the challenge and because the sermon “remained virtually unknown until the 19th century.”It is an intriguing assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial obscurity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) would render it irrelevant, no matter how significant it became to later generations. It is the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and the author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, takes toward Federalist No. 10. James Madison’s essay “foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” Amar writes, in part for its argument that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, almost no one paid attention to Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays that resonated widely during the debates over constitutional ratification, Amar writes, No. 10 “failed to make a deep impression in American coffeehouses and taverns where patrons read aloud and discussed both local and out-of-town newspapers.” Alas, Mr. Madison, your piece was not trending, so we’re taking it off history’s home page.To his credit, Amar is consistent in privileging immediate popular reactions in his historical assessments. He criticizes the argument of Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an antidemocratic document. “If the document was truly antidemocratic, why did the People vote for it?” Amar asks. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working men enthusiastically join massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” Even just in the aftermath of the 2020 election and the Capitol assault of Jan. 6, however, it seems clear that people in a free society can be rallied to democratic and anti-democratic causes, with great enthusiasm, if they come to believe such causes are righteous.Other contributors to “Myth America” are more willing to squint at the first impressions of the past. In a chapter minimizing the transformational impact of the Reagan presidency, Zelizer laments how “the trope that a ‘Reagan Revolution’ remade American politics has remained central to the national discourse,” even though it “has been more of a political talking point than a description of reality.” (Reminder: Calling them “tropes” or “talking points” is an effective shorthand way to dismiss opposing views.) When Zelizer looks back on a collection of historians’ essays published in 1989, just months after Reagan left office, and which argued that Reagan’s 1980 victory was “the end of the New Deal era,” he does not hesitate to pass judgment on his professional colleagues. “Even a group of historians was swept up by the moment,” he writes.Here, proximity to an earlier historical era renders observers susceptible to transient passions, not possessors of superior insights. If so, perhaps an essay collection of American myths that is published shortly after the Trump presidency also risks being swept up by its own moment. (Incidentally, that 1989 book, edited by the historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and titled “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,” shares one contributor with “Myth America.” Michael Kazin, take a bow.)Zelizer writes that the notion of a revolutionary Reagan era did not emerge spontaneously but was “born out of an explicit political strategy” aimed at exaggerating both conservative strength and liberal weakness. This is another recurring conclusion of “Myth America” — that many of our national mythologies are not the product of good-faith misunderstandings or organically divergent viewpoints that become entrenched over time, but rather of deliberate efforts at mythmaking. The notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms, that voting fraud is ubiquitous, that the feminist movement is anti-family — in this telling, they are myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.But in his essay on American exceptionalism, Bell adds in passing an idea somewhat subversive to the project of “Myth America,” and it separates this book from standard myth-quashing practices. After writing that narratives about America’s exceptional character were long deployed to justify U.S. aggression abroad and at home, Bell posits that notions of exceptionalism “also highlighted what Americans saw as their best qualities and moral duties, giving them a standard to live up to.”Bell does not suggest that the belief in American exceptionalism fulfills this latter role today; to the contrary, its politicization has rendered the term vacuous and meaningless. “The mere notion of being exceptional can do very little to inspire Americans actually to be exceptional,” he writes. Still, Bell has opened a door here, even if just a crack. National myths can be more than conspiratorial, self-serving lies spread for low, partisan aims. They can also be aspirational.American aspiration, idealism and mythology have mingled together from the start. In her 2018 one-volume American history, “These Truths,” Jill Lepore wrote eloquently of those self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence — political equality, natural rights, popular sovereignty — that the country never ceases to claim yet always struggles to uphold. It is the argument, often made by former President Barack Obama, that America becomes a more perfect union when it attempts to live up to its ideals and mythologies, even if it often fails. The tension between myth and reality does not undermine America. It defines it.In his best book, “American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony,” published in 1981, the political scientist Samuel Huntington distills the tension in his final lines: “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” The authors and editors of “Myth America” do plenty to discredit the lies and reveal the disappointments, as they well should. Reimagining myth as aspiration can be a task for historians, but it is not theirs alone.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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      Biden Will Mark Jan. 6 With Presidential Medals for Election Officials

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      The Presidential Citizens Medal will honor those who resisted efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including law enforcement officers and Rusty Bowers, the former House speaker in Arizona.WASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday will mark the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to a dozen people who resisted efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Mr. Biden will present the award, which is among the nation’s highest civilian honors, at a ceremony at the White House, officials said. The award is given to people who have “performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens.”The group to be honored is a who’s who of figures that defended the 2020 election results in the face of threats from Donald J. Trump and his most fervent supporters.It includes leading Republicans, like Rusty Bowers, the former Arizona House speaker, and Al Schmidt, a city commissioner in Pennsylvania, who helped confirm Mr. Trump’s defeat in their states by insisting all absentee ballots be counted. Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan, oversaw an extended process to tabulate votes in Detroit.Mr. Biden will also honor Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, who processed ballots during the 2020 election for the Fulton County, Ga., elections board. They were falsely accused of manipulating ballots by Mr. Trump, his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and the conspiracy website The Gateway Pundit.The two women later sued The Gateway Pundit and Mr. Giuliani, and Ms. Freeman, like several of the other honorees, testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.The president will also honor seven police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6, including Brian Sicknick, who died of a stroke a day later.The ceremony comes two years after the attacks by Trump supporters, who violently forced their way into the Capitol with the intent to stop lawmakers from formally certifying Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump.Since then, Mr. Biden has repeatedly warned that the day’s events — and the broader effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undermine confidence in the election — represent a significant threat to American democracy.“For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol,” Mr. Biden said during a speech on the first anniversary of the attacks.In those remarks, Mr. Biden vowed to work against the forces who enabled the attack on that dark day in American history.“I will stand in this breach,” he said, speaking from the Capitol. “I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”This year, Mr. Biden’s speech will focus on the people who attempted to defend democracy.Other awardees include:Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who faced racial slurs and harassment on Jan. 6.Caroline Edwards, the first law enforcement officer injured by the rioters.Michael Fanone, a Washington police officer who was injured in the attack.Aquilino Gonell, a sergeant with the Capitol Police who was injured in the attack.Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer who led a pro-Trump mob away from the entrance to the Senate chamber during the attack.Daniel Hodges, a Washington police officer who was injured in the attack. According to the White House, Jan. 6 was his first time in the Capitol. More

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      Trying to Trademark ‘Rigged Election,’ and Other Revelations From the Jan. 6 Transcripts

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      The Jan. 6 committee released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday.WASHINGTON — The nation’s top military officer saw the Jan. 6 attack as similar to the “Reichstag moment” that led to Nazi dictatorship. Aides for former President Donald J. Trump saw their future job opportunities slipping away, and predicted being “perpetually unemployed.” Mr. Trump himself saw the push to overturn the 2020 election as a financial opportunity, moving to trademark the phrase “Rigged Election.”These were among the latest revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee, which released a whirlwind of documents in its final days and wrapped up its work on Monday. Since Friday night, the panel has released several troves of evidence, including about 120 previously unseen transcripts along with emails and text messages obtained during its 18-month inquiry, totaling tens of thousands of pages.The evidence touched on nearly every aspect of Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election. It provided new details about how some of his top allies lobbied for aggressive plans to keep him in power, while others lamented how the dark day of Jan. 6, 2021, had negatively affected their employment prospects.The panel said it has now turned over an “enormous volume of material” to the Justice Department as Jack Smith, the special counsel, conducts a parallel investigation into the events of Jan. 6.“Accountability is now critical to thwart any other future scheme to overturn an election,” the committee’s leaders, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, said in a statement.In the end, the committee released about 280 transcripts of interviews. Though the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, only a few hundred sessions took the form of formal depositions or transcribed interviews. Lawmakers said they withheld certain transcripts that contained sensitive information.Here are some takeaways from the recently released evidence:A senior military adviser said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge his defeat.In a 302-page transcript of his interview with the committee, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the voluble chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the panel about a meeting in the Oval Office a few weeks after Election Day, in which he said Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge he was not going to be sworn in again.General Milley described Mr. Trump saying “words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy. Meaning President Biden.”That statement built on other evidence the committee spent significant time documenting: That Mr. Trump was aware he had lost but continued to falsely claim otherwise. At one point General Milley suggested it might have been another adviser who said it, but stated when asked again that it was Mr. Trump.General Milley also recalled seeing the Nazi imagery in the crowd on Jan. 6 and saying to his staff: “These guys look like the brown shirts to me. This looks like a Reichstag moment.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Aides saw their futures damaged.Some of the most striking exchanges in the committee’s text messages were between Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Hope Hicks and Julie Radford, the chief of staff to Mr. Trump’s oldest daughter, Ivanka.In them, both women lamented that Mr. Trump had caused irreparable harm to his own staff as the violence played out.“In one day he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local Proud Boys chapter,” Ms. Hicks fumed in a message. “All of us that didn’t have jobs lined up will be perpetually unemployed.”More evidence emerged that Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol.Several Trump advisers made clear that Mr. Trump had intended for days to join a crowd of his supporters marching on the Capitol.“POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the ellipse, and call on everyone to march to the capitol,” Katrina Pierson, a Trump spokeswoman, wrote in a Jan. 2, 2021, email.Kayleigh McEnany, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, also wrote in a note on Jan. 6 that Mr. Trump had wanted to walk alongside the crowd as it descended on the Congress: “POTUS wanted to walk to capital. Physically walk. He said fine ride beast.”Bannon continued to agitate.Stephen K. Bannon, an outside adviser to Mr. Trump, continued to endorse extreme tactics even after the violence of Jan. 6.On Jan. 8, 2021, he wrote in a text message to his spokeswoman, Alexandra Preate, that he wanted one million people to surround the Capitol after Mr. Biden was seated in the White House.“I’d surround the Capitol in total silence,” Mr. Bannon wrote, according to a transcript of Ms. Preate’s interview.Mr. Bannon also advised that Mr. Trump should have nothing to do with Patrick Byrne, the wealthy businessman who financed efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “Steve Bannon once told me, he said, Patrick Byrne’s crazy, and he should not be on the stage with Donald Trump,” Ms. Preate testified.Trump lawyers investigated fraud claims and couldn’t prove them.Joshua Findlay, a Trump campaign lawyer, told the panel he was tasked with looking into fraud allegations in Georgia, but came up empty.“The big complaints that you would hear about, you know, massive vote flips and things like that, we just didn’t ever — at least in Georgia — we did not ever find any evidence of that,” he testified.Nevertheless, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, joined forces with another lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro, who devised ways to challenge the 2020 election through the use of alternative slates of electors.Mr. Findlay said Mr. Chesebro and Mr. Giuliani teamed up “promoting these theories and being aggressive, you know, aggressively promoting them,” Mr. Findlay recalled.“Rudy Giuliani was making a lot of the decisions about litigation strategy,” he testified. “He really bought into Ken’s theory on this.”Kash Patel was a recurring figure.Mr. Smith, the special counsel, is also investigating Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive documents.A figure in both the documents investigations and the committee’s inquiry was Kash Patel, currently one of Mr. Trump’s representatives to the National Archives. Several witnesses testified about a push to install Mr. Patel, a Trump loyalist, in a high-ranking C.I.A. post, something that the agency’s director, Gina Haspel, along with Vice President Mike Pence and the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, moved to stop. But not everyone found Mr. Patel objectionable.Robert C. O’Brien, Mr. Trump’s final national security adviser, called Mr. Patel a “good guy” in his testimony.General Milley took a different view, describing the elevation of Mr. Patel as concerning.He recalled confronting Mr. Patel and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while in a V.I.P. box at the Army-Navy game.“To Kash Patel, I said: ‘So, Kash, which one are you going to get, C.I.A. or F.B.I.?’ And Patel’s face, you know, he looks down and he comes back and says: ‘Chairman, Chairman.’ And I looked at White House Chief of Staff Meadows and said: ‘What are you guys trying to do?’”Trump wanted to trademark ‘Rigged Election.’During the tumultuous post-election period, Mr. Trump and his team worked intensely at raising money — bringing in hundreds of millions — while trying to register trademarks about fighting election results, the transcripts show.In one recent transcript, the committee revealed an email from Dan Scavino Jr., a deputy White House chief of staff, to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, titled “POTUS requests.”“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see — or ask…I don’t know who to take to,” the email states, before providing two bolded terms: “Save America PAC!” with an exclamation mark and “Rigged Election!”“Guys — can we do ASAP please?” Mr. Kushner then wrote, forwarding the request.‘I don’t recall.’The transcripts also, once again, show the difficulties for investigators.Mr. Chesebro repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, while Molly Michael, an assistant to Mr. Trump, told the committee more than 100 times that she couldn’t recall events from Jan. 6.The committee ran into a similar problem with Anthony Ornato, a former deputy chief of staff at the White House who had also been the special agent in charge of Mr. Trump’s Secret Service detail. He said he did not remember significant moments that multiple witnesses recounted to the panel. “I don’t recall any conversation taking place about the possible movement of the president to the Capitol,” Mr. Ornato testified.The committee published excerpts from text messages between Mr. Ornato and a White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson — whose statements have at times been in conflict — that appeared to support her memory of some events on Jan. 6 that she has spoken of. In the messages, she relayed that Mr. Trump was talking, as he had previously, about going to the Capitol himself, with Mr. Ornato replying to her comment.Trump was directly involved in the false elector scheme.Mr. Trump personally involved himself in the false elector scheme, according to Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. Ms. McDaniel recounted a call after the election in which Mr. Trump introduced her to John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote a now-infamous memo that laid out a path for the former president to remain in power.Mr. Eastman, she said, then spoke about how he believed it was important for the committee to help the Trump campaign “gather these contingent electors,” she said.Stephanie Lai More

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      Jan. 6 Transcripts Reveal Disagreements That Divided Trump Camp

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      Interviews revealed that people in President Donald J. Trump’s orbit had very different views on seizing voting machines, the Proud Boys and each other’s roles.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Friday released more than 40 additional transcripts of its interviews, bringing the total number of transcripts published to more than 160.So far, the transcripts have added details to the public’s understanding of how police intelligence failures contributed to the Capitol attack, how former President Donald J. Trump considered “blanket pardons” for those charged, and how Trump-aligned lawyers allegedly tried to steer witness testimony.The committee is rushing to publish more interviews before Jan. 3, when Republicans will take control of the House. Though the committee conducted more than 1,000 interviews, many of them were informal; only a few hundred were transcribed sessions.Here are some takeaways from the thousands of pages released this week.Giuliani thought seizing voting machines could be an impeachable offense.At a chaotic meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020, outside advisers urged Mr. Trump to use the military to seize voting machines in a bid to rerun the election.That was too much for even Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who had encouraged baseless election fraud claims but told Mr. Trump that the plan could be impeachable behavior.“This may be the only thing that I know of that you ever did that could merit impeachment,” Mr. Giuliani recalled telling the president.In his interview with the committee, Mr. Giuliani refused to discuss his role in many aspects of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, though he said he had rejected Mr. Trump’s idea of granting him a pardon.“The president asked me what I thought of it,” he said of the pardon. “And I said I thought it would be a terrible mistake for him.”Mr. Giuliani was less forthcoming when asked if Mr. Trump had ever thought of pardoning himself. “That would be privileged, actually, if he raised that with me,” he said.The Secret Service was concerned about the Proud Boys leader’s White House visit.On Dec. 12, 2020, hours before hundreds of members of his far-right group took part in a pro-Trump protest, Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, posted a photo of the White House steps on social media.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“Last minute invite to an undisclosed location,” Mr. Tarrio wrote on Parler, a right-wing social media app.Newly released emails and testimony suggest that some Secret Service agents were concerned about how a prominent far-right extremist had so easily gained access to the White House.Committee investigators later determined that the White House visit had been a public event that was likely arranged by a friend of Mr. Tarrio, Bianca Gracia, the founder of a group called Latinos for Trump.In an email obtained by the committee, Ron Rowe, the chief of staff to the Secret Service’s director, asked Bobby Engel, a Secret Service agent: “Can we get some specifics on who submitted him for the tour? Why didn’t we pick up on his role/membership in the Proud Boys?”Anthony Ornato, a former Secret Service agent who was Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, told the panel that he did not recall if he knew who the Proud Boys were at the time of Mr. Tarrio’s visit. The group’s name notably came up during a 2020 presidential debate.Mr. Tarrio is one of five members of the Proud Boys who are now on trial in Washington, where they are facing charges of seditious conspiracy. Opening arguments are expected to begin next month.Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, denied that she had discussed her political activities with her husband.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressVirginia ‘Ginni’ Thomas tried to play down her role in contesting the election.In a wide-ranging interview, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who is known as Ginni, sought to play down her role in attempts to challenge election results.Ms. Thomas acknowledged that she had exchanged text messages after the election with Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, in which she recommended that he support Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who was pushing false accusations that foreign governments had hacked into the country’s voting machines.Ms. Thomas denied that she had discussed her activities with her husband. But she did acknowledge that she had been referring to Justice Thomas as her “best friend” in texts with Mr. Meadows, in which she said a talk with her “best friend” had cheered her up while she was distraught over Mr. Trump’s loss.“My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset,” she told investigators.Ms. Thomas also acknowledged taking part in a project called FreeRoots that had sent mass emails to state lawmakers in key swing states saying they had “power to decide if there were problems in their election.”In a tense exchange with Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and vice chairwoman of the panel, Ms. Thomas said that she still believed that the election had been marred by fraud. When questioned further, Ms. Thomas could not come up with any specific instances of fraud.C.I.A. staff had a ‘suicide pact’ to resign if Trump fired the director.New details also arose this week about plans to replace the director of the Central Intelligence Agency with a Trump loyalist in the final stages of the administration. The committee received testimony about a mass resignation plan at the C.I.A. in opposition to Mr. Trump’s attempt to replace Gina Haspel as director with Kashyap P. Patel, a lawyer and staunch supporter of the president.According to Alyssa Farah Griffin, the former White House communications director, Ms. Haspel had a “suicide pact” in place, in which the entire intelligence community would resign if she were removed from her post.“Allegedly, for about 14 minutes, Kash was actually the C.I.A. director,” Ms. Griffin said.Trump’s White House was marked by constant infighting.One theme throughout the transcripts is the intense infighting that was a constant feature of the Trump White House. Lawyers fought with lawyers. Communications staff fought among themselves. The president berated aides of all ranks.Some examples: Ms. Griffin provided a scathing assessment of Kayleigh McEnany, the former White House press secretary: “I am a Christian woman, so I will say this. Kayleigh is a liar and an — She’s a opportunist.”The Trump adviser Jason Miller told investigators he was “pissed off” when he learned that Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer, listed his name as the official to contact on a document she circulated denying that President Biden had won the election. “I called Cleta and said, ‘What the hell?’” Mr. Miller said. “And she said, ‘Yeah, you guys weren’t moving fast enough, so I just put your name on it and sent it out.’”Trump didn’t want to do ‘a big PR push’ for a Capitol Police officer who died after Jan. 6.The transcripts also show the conditional nature of the former president’s support for law enforcement. Mr. Trump agreed at the urging of his staff to lower the flag over the White House to honor a Capitol Police officer who died after Jan. 6, but “was adamant that we not do a press release or a big PR push,” Mr. Miller wrote in a text message.“We want to make it clear nobody is a stronger supporter of law enforcement than President Trump but we don’t want to blast it out,” Mr. Miller wrote.A furniture executive bankrolled private jets for Trump’s circle.Testimony released Friday detailed how Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of the furniture retail company Overstock, took on the role of a financier who chartered private jets for people in Mr. Trump’s circle as they fought election results.Trips included bringing Trump supporters and members of the Proud Boys to attend rallies in Washington before Jan. 6, taking lawyers and cyberexperts to investigate voting machines and transporting people who signed affidavits about election fraud.Mr. Byrne also attended a White House meeting in which participants urged Mr. Trump to seize voting machines. In his deposition, Mr. Byrne said he had called for the meeting and asked the president to “put us in, coach.”Senator Mike Lee initially supported Mr. Trump, but ultimately voted to certify the election for Mr. Biden.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesIn one telling, the fake electors scheme originated from a senator.According to Ms. Mitchell, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, came up with the idea to submit alternate electors to cast their ballots for the former president instead of Mr. Biden.“It was actually Mike Lee’s idea,” she told investigators.Mr. Lee has said he was eager to fight alongside Mr. Trump, but backed off when evidence of a stolen election did not appear. Mr. Lee ultimately voted to certify the election for Mr. Biden. More

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      George Santos Is In a Class of His Own. But Other Politicians Have Embellished Their Resumes, Too.

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      Mr. Santos, a Republican representative-elect from Long Island, has admitted to lying about his professional background, educational history and property ownership.With his admission this week that he lied to voters about his credentials, Representative-elect George Santos has catapulted to the top of the list of politicians who have misled the public about their past.Mr. Santos, a New York Republican, fabricated key biographical elements of his background, including misrepresentations of his professional background, educational history and property ownership, in a pattern of deception that was uncovered by The New York Times. He even misrepresented his Jewish heritage.While others have also embellished their backgrounds, including degrees and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.Many candidates, confronted over their inconsistencies during their campaigns, have stumbled, including Herschel Walker and J.R. Majewski, two Trump-endorsed Republicans who ran for the Senate and the House during this year’s midterms.Mr. Walker, who lost Georgia’s Senate runoff this month, was dogged by a long trail of accusations that he misrepresented himself. Voters learned about domestic violence allegations, children born outside his marriage, ex-girlfriends who said he urged them to have abortions and more, including questions about where he lived, his academic record and the ceremonial nature of his work with law enforcement.Mr. Majewski promoted himself in his Ohio House race as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but the U.S. Air Force had no record that he served there. He lost in November.Some of the nation’s most prominent presidential candidates have been accused of misrepresenting themselves to voters as well; perhaps none more notably than Donald J. Trump, whose 2016 campaign hinged on a stark exaggeration of his business background. While not as straightforward a deception as Mr. Santos saying he worked somewhere he had not, Mr. Trump presented himself as a successful, self-made businessman and hid evidence he was not, breaking with decades of precedent in refusing to release his tax records. Those records, obtained by The Times after his election, painted a much different picture — one of dubious tax avoidance, huge losses and a life buttressed by an inherited fortune.Prominent Democrats have faced criticisms during presidential campaigns too, backtracking during primary contests after being called out for more minor misrepresentations:Joseph R. Biden Jr. admitted to overstating his academic record in the 1980s: “I exaggerate when I’m angry,” he said at the time. Hillary Clinton conceded that she “misspoke” in 2008 about dodging sniper fire on an airport tarmac during a 1996 visit to Bosnia as first lady, an anecdote she employed to highlight her experience with international crises. And Senator Elizabeth Warren apologized in 2019 for her past claims of Native American ancestry.Most politicians’ transgressions pale in comparison with Mr. Santos’s largely fictional résumé. Voters also didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCovid Myths: Experts say the spread of coronavirus misinformation — particularly on far-right platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.Midterms Misinformation: Social media platforms struggled to combat false narratives during the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, but it appeared most efforts to stoke doubt about the results did not spread widely.A ‘War for Talent’: Seeing misinformation as a possibly expensive liability, several companies are angling to hire former Twitter employees with the expertise to keep it in check. A New Misinformation Hub?: Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on TikTok.Here are some other federal office holders who have been accused of being less than forthright during their campaigns, but got elected anyway.Representative Madison Cawthorn, who lost his primary this year, was elected in 2020 despite a discrepancy over his plans to attend the Naval Academy.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesMadison Cawthorn’s 2020 House campaignMadison Cawthorn became the youngest member of the House when he won election in 2020, emerging as the toast of the G.O.P. and its Trump wing. North Carolina voters picked him despite evidence that his claim that the 2014 auto accident that left him partly paralyzed had “derailed” his plans to attend the Naval Academy was untrue.Reporting at the time showed that the Annapolis application of Mr. Cawthorn, who has used a wheelchair since the crash, had previously been rejected. Mr. Cawthorn has declined to answer questions from the news media about the discrepancy or a report that he acknowledged in a 2017 deposition that his application had been denied. A spokesman for Mr. Cawthorn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Cawthorn, whose term in Congress was marked by multiple scandals, lost the G.O.P. primary in May to Chuck Edwards, a three-term state senator who represents the Republican old guard.Andy Kim’s 2018 House campaignAndy Kim, a Democrat who represents a New Jersey swing district, raised eyebrows during the 2018 campaign when his first television ad promoted him as “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.”While Mr. Kim had worked as a national security adviser under President Barack Obama, his claim that he had filled a key role in the administration of former President George W. Bush was not as ironclad.A Washington Post fact check found that Mr. Kim had held an entry-level job for five months as a conflict management specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development.Mr. Kim’s campaign manager at the time defended Mr. Kim, telling The Post that he played a key role as a public servant during the Bush administration that involved working in the agency’s Africa bureau on issues like terrorism in Somalia and genocide in Sudan.Voters did not appear to be too hung up about the claims of Mr. Kim, who last month was elected to a third term in the House.During the 2010 Senate campaign, Senator Marco Rubio described being the son of Cuban immigrants who fled Fidel Castro, but his parents moved to the United States before Castro returned to Cuba.Steve Johnson for The New York TimesMarco Rubio’s 2010 Senate campaignMarco Rubio vaulted onto the national political stage in the late 2000s after a decade-long rise in the Florida Legislature, where he served as House speaker. Central to his ascent and his 2010 election to the Senate was his personal story of being the son of Cuban immigrants, who Mr. Rubio repeatedly said had fled during Fidel Castro’s revolution.But Mr. Rubio’s account did not square with history, PolitiFact determined. In a 2011 analysis, the nonpartisan fact-checking website found Mr. Rubio’s narrative was false because his parents had first moved to the United States in 1956, which was before Castro had returned to Cuba from Mexico and his takeover of the country in 1959.Mr. Rubio said at the time that he had relied on the recollections of his parents, and that he had only recently learned of the inconsistencies in the timeline. He was re-elected in 2016 and again in November.Mark Kirk’s 2010 and 2016 Senate campaignsMark Kirk, who was a five-term House member from Illinois, leaned heavily on his military accomplishments in his 2010 run for the Senate seat once held by Barack Obama. But the Republican’s representation of his service proved to be deeply flawed.Mr. Kirk’s biography listed that he had been awarded the “Intelligence Officer of the Year” while in the Naval Reserve, a prestigious military honor that he never received. He later apologized, but that was not the only discrepancy in his military résumé.In an interview with the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune, Mr. Kirk accepted responsibility for a series of misstatements about his service, including that he had served in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, that he once commanded the Pentagon war room and that he came under fire while flying intelligence missions over Iraq.Mr. Kirk attributed the inaccuracies as resulting from his attempts to translate “Pentagonese” for voters or because of inattention by his campaign to the details of his decades-long military career.Still, Illinois voters elected Mr. Kirk to the Senate in 2010, but he was defeated in 2016 by Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who lost her legs in the Iraq war. In that race, Mr. Kirk’s website falsely described him as an Iraq war veteran.Richard Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist during the Vietnam War, but did not enter combat, as he had suggested.Christopher Capozziello for The New York TimesRichard Blumenthal’s 2010 Senate campaignRichard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, misrepresented his military service during the Vietnam War, according to a Times report that rocked his 2010 campaign.Mr. Blumenthal was a Marine Corps reservist but did not enter combat. After the report, he said that he never meant to create the impression that he was a combat veteran and apologized. Mr. Blumenthal insisted that he had misspoken, but said that those occasions were rare and that he had consistently qualified himself as a reservist during the Vietnam era.The misrepresentation did not stop Mr. Blumenthal, Connecticut’s longtime attorney general, from winning the open-seat Senate race against Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling mogul. She spent $50 million in that race and later became a cabinet member under Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly zeroed in on Mr. Blumenthal’s military record.Wes Cooley’s 1994 House campaignWes Cooley, an Oregon Republican, had barely established himself as a freshman representative when his political career began to nosedive amid multiple revelations that he had lied about his military record and academic honors.His problems started when he indicated on a 1994 voters’ pamphlet that he had seen combat as a member of the Army Special Forces in Korea. But the news media in Oregon reported that Mr. Cooley had never deployed for combat or served in the Special Forces. Mr. Cooley was later convicted of lying in an official document about his military record and placed on two years of probation.The Oregonian newspaper also reported that he never received Phi Beta Kappa honors, as he claimed in the same voters’ guide. He also faced accusations that he lied about how long he had been married so that his wife could continue collecting survivor benefits from a previous husband.Mr. Cooley, who abandoned his 1996 re-election campaign, died in 2015. He was 82.Kirsten Noyes More

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      For Trump, the Legal Shoes Finally Drop

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      Nicole Craine for The New York TimesNext up, a special grand jury report in Fulton County, Ga. At issue is whether Trump or his allies broke Georgia laws trying to overturn the state’s 2020 results. Indictments would be up to the district attorney, Fani Willis, but the grand jury report, due within weeks, could recommend criminal prosecution. More

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      With Detailed Evidence and a Call for Accountability, Jan. 6 Panel Seeks a Legacy

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      The final report of the committee provides many new details on former President Donald J. Trump’s actions and a record for history. But Republicans will soon begin a campaign to discredit it.WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee’s 845-page final report is chock-full of new details about former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.It documents how Mr. Trump and his allies tried at least 200 times to convince state or local officials to throw out President Biden’s victory. It reveals that Mr. Trump did, in fact, push for the National Guard to be present on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021 — but to protect his supporters as they marched on Congress, not lawmakers.And it has new testimony from Trump aides like Hope Hicks, who became overwhelmed with disgust at the president’s behavior and the mob riot they were witnessing. “We all look like domestic terrorists now,” she wrote in a text.But even as the committee continues to reveal damning evidence about the attack on the Capitol and what led to it, it has reached the end of its run. The publication of the report, the result of an exhaustive monthslong effort, has created a permanent record intended at a minimum to hold Mr. Trump accountable in history. Criminal referrals have been issued. Much of the panel’s staff has moved on, accepting other jobs.To be sure, there is still some final work to do. The panel has an interactive website to unveil and hundreds of transcripts to release — even after a batch of nearly 50 more on Friday evening that included testimony by former Attorney General William P. Barr; Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel; and Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump.But its members are now beginning to share their views on a central question: What is the legacy of the Jan. 6 committee?The panel — made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans — consistently broke new ground for a congressional investigation. Staffed with more than a dozen former federal prosecutors, it set a new production standard for how to present a congressional hearing. It also got significantly ahead of a parallel Justice Department investigation into the events of Jan. 6, with federal prosecutors later interviewing many of the same witnesses the panel’s investigators had already spoken with.For Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is the chairman of the committee, the answer to the question of legacy is simple: The committee raised the issue of threats to democracy to the top of the public consciousness and, during midterm elections in state after state, voters repeatedly defeated election-denying candidates.“We demonstrated that Jan. 6 was a clear and present danger that an overwhelming majority of the people rejected,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “A lot of them expressed that rejection at the ballot box on Nov. 8.”But Republicans still gained enough seats that they are set to take over the House in January, and are likely to undermine the panel’s legacy in other areas.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.The committee recommended that Congress consider barring Mr. Trump and his allies from holding office under the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists, a proposal likely to go nowhere. Most of its recommendations for legislation are also likely to meet a dead end, with the major exception of the passage on Friday of an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, the law Mr. Trump had tried to exploit to get his vice president to throw out electoral votes.Moreover, Republicans are likely to try to turn the tables on the committee, beginning an investigation into the investigators.A counternarrative is already underway. Mr. Trump bashed the committee’s report as “highly partisan.” And five House Republicans led by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana released their own report on the Capitol attack this week. That 141-page document criticizes law enforcement failures, accuses Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her senior team of bungling Capitol security and tries to recast Mr. Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6 as a voice for peace and calm.Mr. Thompson has shrugged off calls to investigate the investigators as a distraction, and pointed instead to his own panel’s findings. The legacy, he said, was in the mountain of evidence the panel amassed.The committee presented evidence that Mr. Trump had rejected an internal plea for a more “direct statement” to tell his rioting supporters to leave the Capitol. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe committee’s final report revealed more of the scope of that mountain, describing in extensive detail how Mr. Trump had carried out what it called “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.”Among the new evidence were revelations about how early on Jan. 6 Mr. Trump knew about the mayhem at the Capitol.After giving a speech to his supporters at the Ellipse, Mr. Trump ran into a member of the White House staff and asked whether he or she had watched his speech on television.“Sir, they cut it off because they’re rioting down at the Capitol,” the employee said around 1:21 p.m., in an early indication Mr. Trump was aware of the violence, according to the report.Shortly after 2:44 p.m., Mr. Trump was made aware the riot had turned deadly.A Capitol Police officer had shot a rioter named Ashli Babbitt, and a handwritten note presented to the president — dashed off onto a White House pocket card and preserved by the National Archives — read: “1x civilian gunshot wound to chest @ door of House chaber.” A White House employee saw the note on the dining table in front of Mr. Trump, according to the committee’s report.Still, Mr. Trump waited hours to call for his supporters to go home.The committee presented evidence that Mr. Trump had rejected an internal plea for a more “direct statement” to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol, saying, “These people are in pain.”In his last phone call of the night, Mr. Trump spoke with Johnny McEntee, his director of personnel. “This is a crazy day,” the president told him. Mr. McEntee said his tone was one of “like, wow, can you believe this?” But asked if Mr. Trump had expressed sadness over the violence, Mr. McEntee said no, adding, “I mean, I think he was shocked by, you know, it getting a little out of control, but I don’t remember sadness, specifically.”The committee’s report revealed new evidence about how those inside the Trump administration had viewed the president’s conduct.Mr. Trump’s speechwriter Robert Gabriel Jr. sent a text message at 2:49 p.m. as the riot was escalating: “Potus im sure is loving this.”Another aide, Ms. Hicks, texted a colleague that evening after learning of Mr. Trump’s denigrating comments about his own vice president, Mike Pence: “Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him.”As the riot was underway, Ms. Hicks texted Eric Herschmann, a Trump lawyer: “So predictable and so sad.”“I know,” he replied. “Tragic.”“I’m so upset,” she continued. “Everything we worked for wiped away.”“I agree,” he wrote. “Totally self-inflicted.”The report revealed text messages from Hope Hicks, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, expressing disgust at the day’s events and his reaction. “We all look like domestic terrorists now,” she said.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe panel also added new evidence about how deeply Mr. Trump was involved in the false elector scheme. Joshua Findlay, a Trump lawyer, testified that it was his “understanding” that Mr. Trump had personally directed campaign lawyers to pursue the false elector plan.That built on testimony from the Republican National Committee chairwoman, revealed during the committee’s summer hearings, that Mr. Trump had connected the R.N.C. with the conservative lawyer John Eastman “to talk about the importance of the R.N.C. helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”The report also illustrated how many witnesses connected to the Trump White House had their memories fail them when they were interviewed by the committee.Mr. Trump’s personal secretaries Molly Michael and Austin Ferrer Piran Basualdo, for instance, claimed to remember hardly anything from one of the most memorable days in recent American history, the committee said.Other witnesses attempted to clean up for Mr. Trump and cast his behavior in a more flattering light, the committee suggested.Ivanka Trump claimed that her father had been “disappointed and surprised” by the Jan. 6 attack, but she could not name a specific instance of him expressly saying it.“He — I just felt that,” she said. “I know him really well.”But when the committee staff asked her if Mr. Trump had ever expressed any regret about his actions or sympathy for the people who were injured that day, she answered no.Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is the vice chairwoman of the committee, said the “tremendous amount of evidence and information, including witness testimony documents,” that the committee produced would shape its legacy.“The report demonstrated the very significant and troubling plan that President Trump oversaw to overturn an election,” she said. “People will read the report. They will read the transcripts, and be able to see what evidence the committee has gathered. I’m proud of what we’ve done.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Donald Trump Is Now Forever Disgraced

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      On Monday, at the final public hearing of the House Jan. 6 committee, Representative Bennie Thompson said that any attempt to overturn the legitimate results of an American election, impede the peaceful transfer of power or foment an insurrection must never be allowed to happen again. To that end, Representative Jamie Raskin firmly announced that the committee was making four criminal referrals whose center, in each, was Donald Trump, the man who hatched a scheme that would, if successful, defraud Americans of their sacred right to have their vote count.These unprecedented referrals suggest that Mr. Trump, who as president took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not only violated that oath but also committed a series of specifically indictable crimes. One of these referrals — for the crime of inciting an insurrection — is the most stunning, the most unpredictable and the most crucial, for its implications and its remedy, which includes barring the former president from holding political office.In making these referrals, the committee was certainly considering the past as well. Representative Liz Cheney spoke movingly of her great-great-grandfather, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, who served in the Union’s 21st Regiment, Ohio Infantry, during the Civil War. After the war, he marched with his fellow soldiers in the Grand Review of the Armies, passing President Andrew Johnson in the reviewing stand. She might also have added that Johnson, the 17th president of the United States, would soon be impeached. Like Donald Trump. And like Donald Trump, he was acquitted.Johnson then returned to office, almost as if nothing had happened. That’s a cautionary tale.After Ulysses S. Grant won the election of 1868, Johnson went home to Tennessee, where he began to plot his comeback. Since he possessed a talent for uniting moderate and radical Republicans along with Democrats and former secessionists, many of whom either hated him or now wanted nothing more to do with him, it wouldn’t be easy. But it wasn’t illegal.He hadn’t tried to overturn the election of Grant. He hadn’t impeded the peaceful transfer of power. (But like Mr. Trump, he refused to attend his successor’s inauguration.) He had abused power, usurping the function of Congress, which has the right to determine the qualifications of its own members — all the more critical after a civil war in which 11 states had been in rebellion.As for inciting or aiding an insurrection, that was arguable. Though a staunch Unionist, in 1866 Johnson had stood by silently during the massacre in New Orleans that prevented a state convention from amending its Constitution to give Black men the vote. The mob included members of the New Orleans police department, which was largely composed of former rebels. They were supported by the mayor, a Confederate sympathizer, who had been jailed during the war as a traitor and elected even before he was pardoned.An 1867 congressional investigation into that tragedy reported that more than 35 people, the vast majority of them Black, had died, and roughly 145 people were wounded. It also found that the massacre would never have happened without Johnson’s tacit approval. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips predicted that “what New Orleans is today, Washington will be” — “ruled by the president and his mob.”In 1868, when he was finally impeached, the 10th article of impeachment accused Johnson of ridiculing Congress and setting aside its authority, and the 11th article involved his obstructing its laws. During the impeachment trial, when Representative John Bingham of Ohio argued for the president’s conviction, he reminded senators that “none are above the law; that no man lives for himself alone, ‘but each for all.’” With tears in his eyes, he concluded that “position, however high, patronage, however powerful, cannot be permitted to shelter crime to the peril of the Republic.”But since the Senate did not convict Andrew Johnson, there was no way to disqualify him from holding office. He may have abused power, ridiculed Congress, arrogated to himself a form of Reconstruction that enshrined white supremacy, but the arguable criminal charge (violating the Tenure of Office Act) did not stick — and even if it had, it was an impeachment tribunal, not a court of law, that had charged him.So a disgraced Johnson returned to Washington in 1875 as a senator from Tennessee. He did not believe he was disgraced. He believed he had done nothing wrong, and though he might have been a bit foul-mouthed, he wanted to know: Who wasn’t? Certainly no one had ever suggested a criminal referral. That is new. Until this week, nothing like it had happened. And the implications are far-reaching.“So we are to have Andrew Johnson back again,” the Washington journalist Mary Clemmer Ames wrote with some surprise. Not only did he return to the Senate (though he died only a few months after he was sworn in), by the 20th century, history resurrected Andrew Johnson. He would be seen just as he saw himself, the persecuted victim of vicious political enemies.Which brings us to the investigation into the Capitol riot and the Jan. 6 committee’s four referrals to the Department of Justice for obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make a false statement and for inciting or assisting an insurrection or offering aid and comfort to its participants. The last is the most important. Violating 18 U.S.C. 2383, which derives from a law dating to the Civil War, carries the penalty that, if convicted, Donald Trump “shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”Here, at last, is an accountability that goes beyond what the impeachment managers, regardless of their brilliant arguments, were able to do in 2021. Here is the uncompromising statement that while an insurrection is an impeachable offense — Mr. Trump was after all impeached by the House of Representatives — it is also unequivocally and horribly a criminal act.This specific referral then holds out the hope that Mr. Trump will not be permitted to hold elective or appointed political office ever again. That was arguably the point of the impeachment: to make sure that his political career had ended.Now, whatever the Department of Justice decides to do and whatever the special counsel Jack Smith discovers or determines, the Jan. 6 committee has achieved what the impeachment of Mr. Trump could not: a series of referrals that caps an expansive and heart-rending investigation into the abuse of power, the obstruction of Congress and the aiding and abetting of a rebellion, condoned, if not designed, by an American president. That president will be remembered as lawless, indicted or not, and will be disgraced in perpetuity, as Andrew Johnson should have been.Brenda Wineapple is the author of “The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.” She is at work on a book about the Scopes trial.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