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      A Common Answer to Jan. 6 Panel Questions: The Fifth

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      Transcripts released by the House Jan. 6 committee showed nearly two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination, underscoring the hurdles to the investigation.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released a batch of 34 transcripts on Wednesday that showed witnesses repeatedly stymying parts of the panel’s inquiry by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who advised former President Donald J. Trump on how to try to overturn the 2020 election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times.The political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. did so in response to more than 70 questions, including ones regarding his communications with Mr. Trump and his role in the events of Jan. 6. The activist Charlie Kirk took a similar stance, citing the potential for self-incrimination in response to most of the committee’s questions, even about his age and education (he was willing to divulge the city in which he resides).Time and again, the panel ran into roadblocks as it tried to investigate the effort to overturn the election, the transcripts show.“Trump lawyers and supporters Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Phil Waldron and Michael Flynn all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the select committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen,” the committee wrote in an executive summary of its final report. “Not a single witness — nor any combination of witnesses — provided the select committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any state.”The transcripts released on Wednesday do shine some light on previously unknown aspects of the committee’s investigation. As part of their questioning, the committee’s lawyers referred to emails or text messages they had obtained through subpoenas, quoting aloud in hopes of eliciting more information from the recalcitrant witnesses.During the questioning of Mike Roman, director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign, a committee lawyer revealed communications that investigators said showed that Mr. Roman sent Gary Michael Brown, who served as the deputy director, to deliver documents to the Capitol related to a plan to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors.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.After doing so, Mr. Brown sent a photo of himself wearing a suit and a mask with the U.S. Capitol over his shoulder. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote.Investigators also asked Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena, about a text she sent to a member of the Maricopa County board of supervisors that said: “We need you to stop the counting.”And investigators revealed how disputes broke out among organizers over the financing of the rally that preceded the violence on Jan. 6, including a payment of $60,000 to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., for her brief speech.“You’re done for life with me because I won’t pay you a $60,000 speaking fee for an event you aren’t speaking at?” Caroline Wren, a Trump fund-raiser, wrote, as she implored Ms. Guilfoyle to call and thank Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heir to the Publix supermarket fortune who had donated millions to put on the rally. “This poor woman has donated $1 million to Don’s Senate PAC and $3 million to this rally and you’ll can’t take five minutes out of your day to thank her. It’s so humiliating. And then you have the audacity to ask me why I won’t have her pay you $60,000?”The transcripts also show the combative stance some witnesses and their lawyers took during questioning. For instance, a lawyer for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes repeatedly challenged the committee’s investigators and accused them of grandstanding.“I will note the irony of an accusation of grandstanding in a deposition of Mr. Fuentes,” a lawyer for the committee shot back.Another time, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, asked Mr. Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.”Mr. Stone replied: “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.”The release of the transcripts came a day ahead of the committee’s planned release of its more than 800-page final report, likely the final act of an 18-month investigation during which the lawmakers interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses.Hundreds more transcripts are expected to be released before the end of the year, including those in which witnesses provided extensive testimony used by the committee in reaching its decision to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others involved in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in power after his 2020 election loss.In an attempt to rebut the committee’s final report, five House Republicans led by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana released their own report into the attack on the Capitol. 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.“Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on Jan. 6, 2021,” the Republican report stated. “The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day.”A bipartisan Senate report last year also detailed Capitol security failures but did not find any blame in the actions of Ms. Pelosi or her staff, who fled from a mob of Trump supporters chanting her name as the speaker tried to get the National Guard to respond to the violence.The Senate report found top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to “storm the Capitol,” infiltrate its tunnel system and “bring guns.”An F.B.I. memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for “war” at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials.The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of Mr. Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss.A spokesman for the House Jan. 6 committee declined to comment.Catie Edmondson More

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      Hannity and Other Fox Employees Said They Doubted Trump’s Fraud Claims

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      On Wednesday, lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems shared some of the strongest evidence yet that some Fox employees knew what they broadcast about the claims was false.On Nov. 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was “corruption all across the country, in countless districts,” in a plot to steal re-election from the president, Donald J. Trump.At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used “to trash large batches of votes.”Mr. Hannity interrupted her with a gentle question that had been circulating among election deniers, despite a lack of supporting proof: Why were Democrats silencing whistle-blowers who could prove this fraud?Did Mr. Hannity believe any of this?“I did not believe it for one second.”That was the answer Mr. Hannity gave, under oath, in a deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to information disclosed in a court hearing on Wednesday. The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April.Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.More on Fox NewsDefamation Case: ​​Some of the biggest names at Fox News are being questioned in the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. The suit could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.Exploring a Merger: Fox and News Corp, the two sides of Rupert Murdoch’s media business, are weighing a proposal that could put Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and the Fox broadcasting network under the same corporate umbrella.‘American Nationalist’: Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, the TV host transformed Fox News and became former President Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.The high legal standard of proof in defamation cases makes it difficult for a company like Dominion to prevail against a media organization like Fox News. Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite. And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network.In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.One lawyer for Dominion said that “not a single Fox witness” so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to the Dominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford.This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.“Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies,” he said, naming both Ms. Cooper and Mr. Carlson.Mr. Shackelford described how Mr. Carlson had “tried to squirm out of it at his deposition” when asked about what he really believed.Mr. Shackelford started to elaborate about what Mr. Carlson had said privately, telling the judge about the existence of text messages the host had sent in November and December of 2020. But the judge, Eric M. Davis, cut him off, leaving the specific contents of those texts unknown.A spokeswoman for Fox News had no immediate comment.Another previously unknown detail emerged on Wednesday about what was going on inside the Fox universe in those frantic weeks after the election. A second lawyer representing Dominion, Justin Nelson, told Judge Davis about evidence obtained by Dominion showing that an employee of the Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, had tried to intervene with the White House to stop Ms. Powell. According to Mr. Nelson, that employee called the fraud claims “outlandish” and pressed Mr. Trump’s staff to get rid of Ms. Powell, who was advising the president on filing legal challenges to the results.Mr. Nelson said that evidence cut straight to the heart of whether the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, was also liable for defamation. Judge Davis ruled in June that Dominion could sue the larger, highly profitable corporation, which includes the Fox network on basic television and a lucrative sports broadcasting division.A spokesman for the Fox Corporation had no immediate comment.Over the last several months, Dominion has been combing through mountains of private email and text messages from people at every level of Fox News and the Fox Corporation — hosts like Mr. Hannity, senior executives and midlevel producers. A lawyer for Fox, Dan K. Webb, said on Wednesday that the company had produced more than 52,000 documents for Dominion, with more to come.During the hearing, the judge was asked to rule on several issues. One was whether a second voting company that is suing Fox for defamation, Smartmatic, could be given access to the documents Dominion had obtained for its case. Judge Davis ruled in Fox’s favor, denying Smartmatic’s motion.A second issue was whether certain evidence that Dominion has used against Fox in its court filings — including emails among Fox employees and a page from a deposition in which someone from Fox describes the journalistic processes of one of the network’s programs — should be made public.Throughout the case, Fox has asked the court to keep almost everything in the case pertaining to its inner workings under seal. A third lawyer for Dominion, Davida Brook, argued on Wednesday that the public had a fundamental right to see what it had filed with the court in the interest of fostering the openness that a democracy requires.Judge Davis disagreed, ruling that the evidence would stay under seal. But he admonished the lawyers that neither party in the case should be overly aggressive in trying to keep facts in the case confidential.If, for instance, someone says something “not bright” — and therefore embarrassing — that wouldn’t be enough to keep that information under seal, Judge Davis said.“That’s too bad,” he said. More

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      Key Findings From the Jan. 6 Committee’s Report, Annotated

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      The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol outlined 17 specific findings on Monday in the executive summary of its final report. Here are the findings, with additional context.1. Beginning election night and continuing through Jan. 6 and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on Jan. 6.Annotation: This reflects the committee’s finding that Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was rigged had both a political and financial motive. During its second hearing, the panel introduced evidence that Trump supporters donated nearly $100 million to Mr. Trump’s so-called Election Defense Fund but that the money flowed instead into a super PAC the president had created. It was not just “the big lie,” the committee said. It was also “the big rip-off.”2. Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisers refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.Annotation: Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election and lost all but one of them. Many of the suits, the committee determined, were brought even after some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides — including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and his attorney general, William P. Barr — told him that there was no fraud that could have changed the outcome of the race.3. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on Jan. 6.Annotation: The committee discovered that the lawyer John Eastman had advised Mr. Trump to undertake a campaign to push Mr. Pence into single-handedly deciding the election in his favor even though there was evidence that Mr. Eastman knew the plan was illegal. Some of Mr. Pence’s own aides told Mr. Trump the same, but he pressured Mr. Pence nonetheless.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.4. Donald Trump sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice by attempting to enlist department officials to make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the presidential election. After that effort failed, Donald Trump offered the position of acting attorney general to Jeff Clark knowing that Clark intended to disseminate false information aimed at overturning the election.Annotation: After leaders in the Justice Department — including Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, and Richard Donoghue, his deputy — told Mr. Trump that he was wrong about his claims concerning fraud in the election, Mr. Trump wanted to appoint Mr. Clark, a loyalist, to run the department. Mr. Clark had promised to send out letters to leaders in key swing states saying that prosecutors had in fact found fraud in the election. The president decided not to appoint Mr. Clark only after several senior department officials threatened to quit if he did.5. Without any evidentiary basis and contrary to state and federal law, Donald Trump unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.Annotation: In the weeks that followed the election, Mr. Trump and his allies had calls and meetings with local officials in key swing states like Michigan and Arizona in which they pressured the officials to use their powers to assign electors from the states to him. More famously, Mr. Trump also asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to help him “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to win the election there.6. Donald Trump oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.Annotation: This refers to one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive schemes to maintain his grip on power: a plan to have state officials create and submit fake electors pledged to him in seven swing states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.7. Donald Trump pressured members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states.Annotation: The committee found that Mr. Trump also played a role in a plan closely related to the fake-electors scheme: He helped to persuade 139 House Republicans to dispute the Electoral College count on the day the Capitol was attacked.8. Donald Trump purposely verified false information filed in federal court.Annotation: In December 2020, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Fulton County, Ga., contending that thousands of votes had been improperly counted and citing specific numbers of dead people, felons and unregistered voters who had cast ballots. Mr. Trump signed an official attestation attached to the suit swearing that the data in it was accurate despite the fact that one of his own lawyers, Mr. Eastman, had determined it was false.9. Based on false allegations that the election was stolen, Donald Trump summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6. Although these supporters were angry and some were armed, Donald Trump instructed them to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to “take back” their country.Annotation: The committee determined that a tweet posted by Mr. Trump on Dec. 19, 2020, announcing a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6 was heard as a clarion call by both far-right extremists and ordinary Trump supporters who sprang into action preparing for the event. When they got to Washington for the rally, Mr. Trump’s speech calling on them to “fight like hell” was a central driver in sending them on toward the Capitol.10. Knowing that a violent attack on the Capitol was underway and knowing that his words would incite further violence, Donald Trump purposely sent a social media message publicly condemning Vice President Pence at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6.Annotation: The tweet the committee is referring to here said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Court papers show that some rioters at the Capitol responded directly to it by pushing toward and ultimately into the building.11. Knowing that violence was underway at the Capitol, and despite his duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, Donald Trump refused repeated requests over a multiple-hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television. This failure to act perpetuated the violence at the Capitol and obstructed Congress’s proceeding to count electoral votes.Annotation: The committee accused Mr. Trump of “a dereliction of duty” for letting nearly three hours pass between learning that the Capitol was under siege and calling for his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds. During that time, several people close to him — including his daughter Ivanka — begged Mr. Trump to issue a statement that would calm down the crowd.12. Each of these actions by Donald Trump was taken in support of a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election.13. The intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol. As Jan. 6 approached, the intelligence specifically identified the potential for violence at the Capitol. This intelligence was shared within the executive branch, including with the Secret Service and the president’s National Security Council.14. Intelligence gathered in advance of Jan. 6 did not support a conclusion that antifa or other left-wing groups would likely engage in a violent counterdemonstration, or attack Trump supporters on Jan. 6. Indeed, intelligence from Jan. 5 indicated that some left-wing groups were instructing their members to “stay at home” and not attend on Jan. 6. Ultimately, none of these groups was involved to any material extent with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.15. Neither the intelligence community nor law enforcement obtained intelligence in advance of Jan. 6 on the full extent of the ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates to overturn the certified election results. Such agencies apparently did not (and potentially could not) anticipate the provocation President Trump would offer the crowd in his Ellipse speech, that President Trump would “spontaneously” instruct the crowd to march to the Capitol, that President Trump would exacerbate the violent riot by sending his 2:24 p.m. tweet condemning Vice President Pence, or the full scale of the violence and lawlessness that would ensue. Nor did law enforcement anticipate that President Trump would refuse to direct his supporters to leave the Capitol once violence began. No intelligence community advance analysis predicted exactly how President Trump would behave; no such analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6.Annotation for 13, 14 and 15: The committee has faced criticism, especially from Republicans, for not focusing more attention on the failures by intelligence and law enforcement officials on Jan. 6 and in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack. But the panel did present some preliminary findings and may ultimately issue a separate report.16. Hundreds of Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers performed their duties bravely on Jan. 6, and America owes those individual immense gratitude for their courage in the defense of Congress and our constitution. Without their bravery, Jan. 6 would have been far worse. Although certain members of the Capitol Police leadership regarded their approach to Jan. 6 as “all hands on deck” the Capitol Police leadership did not have sufficient assets in place to address the violent and lawless crowd. Capitol Police leadership did not anticipate the scale of the violence that would ensue after President Trump instructed tens of thousands of his supporters in the Ellipse crowd to march to the Capitol, and then tweeted at 2:24 p.m. Although Chief Steven Sund raised the idea of National Guard support, the Capitol Police Board did not request Guard assistance prior to Jan. 6. The Metropolitan Police took an even more proactive approach to Jan. 6, and deployed roughly 800 officers, including responding to the emergency calls for help at the Capitol. Rioters still managed to break their line in certain locations, when the crowd surged forward in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet. The Department of Justice readied a group of federal agents at Quantico and in the District of Columbia, anticipating that Jan. 6 could become violent, and then deployed those agents once it became clear that police at the Capitol were overwhelmed. Agents from the Department of Homeland Security were also deployed to assist.17. President Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on Jan. 6 or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense could, and ultimately did, deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.Annotation: The question of why it took so long to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol is one of the enduring mysteries of Jan. 6. While the committee sharply criticized Mr. Trump for failing to taking action that day, it also found that there was no evidence the deployment of the Guard was delayed for political reasons. More

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      A Diminished Trump Meets a Damning Narrative

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      Former President Donald Trump’s current woes extend beyond the report by the House Jan. 6 committee, but the case the panel laid out against him further complicates his future.As the summer and the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearings began, former President Donald J. Trump was still a towering figure in Republican politics, able to pick winners in primary contests and force candidates to submit to a litmus test of denialism about his loss in the 2020 election.Six months later, Mr. Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape. His fade is partly a function of his own missteps and miscalculations in recent months. But it is also a product of the voluminous evidence assembled by the House committee and its ability to tell the story of his efforts to overturn the election in a compelling and accessible way.In ways both raw and easily digested, and with an eye for vivid detail, the committee spooled out the episodic narrative of a president who was told repeatedly he had lost and that his claims of fraud were fanciful. But Mr. Trump continued pushing them anyway, plotted to reverse the outcome, stoked the fury of his supporters, summoned them to Washington and then stood by as the violence played out.It was a turnabout in roles for a president who rose first to prominence and then to the White House on the basis of his feel for how to project himself on television.Guided by a veteran television executive, the committee sprinkled the story with moments that stayed in the public consciousness, from Mr. Trump throwing his lunch in anger against the wall of the dining room just off the Oval Office to a claim that he lunged at a Secret Service agent driving his car when he was denied his desire to join his supporters at the Capitol.On Monday — the second anniversary of Mr. Trump’s Twitter post urging his followers to come to Washington to protest his loss, promising it “will be wild!” — the committee wrapped up its case by lending the weight of the House to calls for Mr. Trump to be held criminally liable for his actions and making the case that he should never again be allowed to hold power.“No man who would behave that way at that moment can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again,” said Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who served as the committee’s vice chairwoman, referring to Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to intervene to stop the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. “He’s unfit for office.”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.To emphasize that point, the committee did something Congress had never done before: It referred a former president to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, a largely symbolic step but one that only added to the sense that Mr. Trump is starting his 2024 presidential campaign under a number of very dark legal clouds.Federal prosecutors are investigating not only Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the results of the election, but also his mishandling of presidential records and classified material that he took with him when he left the White House. A prosecutor in Georgia is barreling ahead with an investigation of his efforts to reverse his election loss in that state, and his company, the Trump Organization, was convicted in New York this month of tax fraud.Whether Mr. Trump’s legal woes and political missteps will keep him from winning his party’s nomination again is another matter.Mr. Trump still has a durable base of support within the party, though just how large it is at this point is up for debate after a handful of public polls have shown more Republican voters backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as an alternative. Other potential candidates are also watching carefully, weighing their chances if they get into a race with a weakened Mr. Trump.To some, the talk of Mr. Trump’s current fortunes is like a movie they have seen before, one in which the lead figure is left for dead only to rise again.“There’s still a lot of people that support Donald Trump; there’s just no question about that,” said Rob Gleason, the former chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. He pointed to stories that have dominated headlines, such as the number of Republicans whom Mr. Trump backed who lost their races, that he said simply have not seeped into the consciousness of his supporters.“We assume people know too much,” he said. “They’re not following a lot of this stuff.”Indeed, some Republicans said privately that the House select committee’s criminal referrals could serve to galvanize Mr. Trump’s supporters behind him, as was the case for a short time after the F.B.I. searched his club, Mar-a-Lago, in August, looking for additional classified documents.Some other Republicans are more skeptical.“I don’t think that anything can save Donald Trump,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida. “He’s decidedly on the path to irrelevance. He reduces himself by the day.”The rally speeches Mr. Trump gave at events during the midterm elections and his 2024 campaign announcement were largely centered on his grievances about 2020 or the investigations into his conduct — a formulation that some Republicans say is increasingly out of step with voters.“This time is different,” Mr. Curbelo said, adding that six years ago, Mr. Trump was “new and interesting” and that people were curious what kind of leader he would be. “Now Donald Trump is old, predictable, obviously petty.”Some of the candidates who most closely identified with Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election performed poorly in the midterm elections, and Republicans barely captured a House majority, despite a sitting Democratic president whose approval rating has been depressed.“I think he’s been a diminishing figure for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania and a longtime critic of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump insisted on declaring a 2024 presidential campaign a week after the midterms, against the advice of nearly all his aides and allies, delivering a lackluster speech he read with minimal emotion from a teleprompter. He has held no public political events in the nearly five weeks since.Instead, he has gotten attention for hosting a dinner at his members-only club and home in Florida with a Holocaust denier and Kanye West, the rap artist who has made a rapid descent into peddling antisemitism.For many members of a party that would like to recover from three bruising election cycles, Mr. Trump has never felt more like a product of the past.“Ironically, this is not too different from a reality TV series that’s run its course,” Mr. Curbelo said. “And people are just kind of over it, even his supporters.” More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Accuses Trump of Insurrection and Refers Him to Justice Dept.

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      WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the referrals.Mr. Trump attacked the committee as “highly partisan” ahead of a final meeting the panel held on Monday to release an executive summary of its final report on the Capitol attack and to vote on referring the former president to the Justice Department.“It’s a kangaroo court,” Mr. Trump said Monday on “The Dan Bongino Show.” “The people aren’t going to stand for it.” He elaborated on that theme in a post on Truth Social, his social media network, after the meeting.“These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me,” he said, adding that he “told everyone to go home” on Jan. 6, but leaving out his hours of inaction before that while a mob of his supporters rampaged through the Capitol.Republicans, who have vowed to investigate the committee after they take control of the House in January, mounted a modest response. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, was one of the few to react with a statement, accusing the committee of staging a “partisan charade.” She promised that Republicans “will hold House Democrats accountable for their illegitimate abuse of power.”The executive summary, a 154-page narrative of Mr. Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, identifies co-conspirators who aided Mr. Trump. But it singles out the former president as the primary cause of the mob violence.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary stated. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”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 summary closely follows the evidence from the committee’s 10 previous public hearings, but the facts have been assembled into a readable narrative that amounts to an astonishing story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to effectively overthrow the government he led. The committee is expected to release a lengthy final report on Wednesday.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chairwoman of the committee, said at the start of the meeting.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said of Mr. Trump: “Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order.”The action is the culmination of the committee’s intense 18-month investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe summary and referrals have now set up a dynamic without parallel in the annals of American campaigns: Congress asking the Justice Department of an incumbent president to consider criminal charges against the president’s potential opponent in the next election. President Biden has indicated his intent to run in 2024, and Mr. Trump announced his re-election campaign last month.The summary laid out step by step how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power, much as the committee did during its televised hearings in the summer. First, the summary said, Mr. Trump lied about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false. He then organized false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden as he pressured state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. Finally, he amassed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“Even key individuals who worked closely with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6 ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful,” the committee wrote.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe panel also referred four Republican members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee — including the man seeking to become the next speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — because of their refusal to comply with the panel’s subpoenas.Mr. McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.The other Republicans referred were Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona.A spokesman for Mr. Jordan, Russell Dye, said in a statement that the referral was “just another partisan and political stunt.” A spokesman for Mr. Perry, Jay Ostrich, said the committee was engaged in “more games from a petulant and soon-to-be kangaroo court.’’Mr. Biggs said in a tweet that the referral was the committee’s “final political stunt” and that he looked forward to “reviewing their documents, publishing their lies and setting the record straight” in the next Congress.In its summary, the committee did not entirely resolve disputed accounts of what happened inside the presidential S.U.V. when Mr. Trump was told by his Secret Service agents that they could not take him to the Capitol to join the crowd on Jan. 6. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, testified under oath to the committee in public last summer that Anthony M. Ornato, a White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Mr. Trump grew so angry that he lunged at his Secret Service agent and tried to grab the steering wheel. The Secret Service denied that account anonymously.The summary said only that the “committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’” that occurred in the S.U.V. “The vast majority of witnesses who have testified to the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the Secret Service, a member of the Metropolitan Police and national security officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate,’ ‘furious,’ ‘insistent,’ ‘profane’ and ‘heated.’”The committee’s summary also concluded that there was no nefarious reason for why the National Guard was delayed for hours in responding to violence of Jan. 6.“Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard,” the committee wrote. “The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”In its summary, the panel asked the Justice Department to investigate whether anyone had interfered with or obstructed the panel’s investigation, including whether any lawyers paid for by groups connected to Mr. Trump “may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the committee.”Among the committee’s findings, revealed at its meeting on Monday, was that lawmakers became concerned that lawyers who were paid by Trump associates may have tried to interfere with the panel’s investigation. The panel also learned that a client was offered potential employment that would make her “financially very comfortable” as the date of her testimony approached. But then offers were withdrawn or did not materialize as reports of the content of her testimony circulated, the committee said.The committee also chastised certain witnesses that it said had not been forthright with investigators. It said it had “significant concerns about the credibility” of the testimony of Mr. Ornato.The committee also said Kayleigh McEnany, one of Mr. Trump’s former press secretaries, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, had been less than forthcoming.The summary demonstrated, as the committee’s hearings did, how despite being told repeatedly that his claims of election fraud were false, Mr. Trump kept up the lies.Bill Stepien, a former White House political director, told the committee how he and others would investigate the claims, find them to be false, and report back to the president. “It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Mr. Stepien said. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”The summary also contained evidence that certain White House aides had grown concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and urged Mr. Trump to make a pre-emptive statement calling for peace. No such statement was made.Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, said she suggested “several times” on Jan. 4 and 5 that Mr. Trump “publicly state that Jan. 6 must remain peaceful, and that he had refused her advice to do so,” the panel wrote.The panel played new video from Ms. Hicks, who described a conversation with Mr. Trump.“I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy,” Ms. Hicks said she told the president.Mr. Trump’s response? “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose, so that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning,” she recalled him saying.Supporters of Mr. Trump confronting Capitol Police officers outside the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhile the executive summary of the report focused heavily on Mr. Trump, it did conclude some findings about law enforcement failures, a topic not previously addressed at the panel’s hearings. “No analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6,” the committee wrote, although the “intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol.”Over the past year and a half, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, obtained more than one million documents, issued more than 100 subpoenas and held hearings that drew millions of viewers.The House created the Jan. 6 committee after Senate Republicans used a filibuster to defeat a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate the attack.The committee — 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, the panel set a new production standard for how to hold 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 Congress had spoken to.In recent weeks, federal prosecutors under the supervision of a special counsel have issued subpoenas to officials in seven states in which the Trump campaign organized electors to falsely certify the election for Mr. Trump despite the voters choosing Mr. Biden.Lawmakers on the panel also believe they played a significant role in elevating the issue of threats to democracy to voters, who rejected many election deniers in the November midterms.In terms of legislative recommendations, the panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6 in an attempt to cling to power. Lawmakers have also discussed changes to the Insurrection Act and legislation to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists holding office. Those recommendations are expected to be detailed in the committee’s final report.Katie Benner More

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      6 Takeaways From the Final Jan. 6 Hearing

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      The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Monday concluded a year and a half of work, finding that former President Donald J. Trump and some of his associates violated federal laws, conspired against the United States and should be prosecuted.At their final meeting, the bipartisan committee of nine House lawmakers released a 160-page summary of their findings, bringing to an end the most comprehensive examination of the violence aimed at stopping the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the 46th president.The panel voted 9 to 0 to accept the final report and to urge the Justice Department to consider criminal charges against Mr. Trump and his allies in four separate areas of the law.Here are some takeaways:The committee kept its focus on Trump.The committee’s hourlong presentation focused almost exclusively on Mr. Trump, essentially ignoring findings about intelligence and security failures at the Capitol before and during the attack. The committee also did not dwell on the information it collected about the rise of domestic extremism.The focus on Mr. Trump had been telegraphed for months as the committee drafted its final report, using it primarily as a means to hold Mr. Trump to account for his actions in trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power after a presidential election. As Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican and the panel’s vice chairwoman, put it: “Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one.”In one place, the report laid out the facts of how Trump attempted to stay in power.The summary of the committee’s final report is a remarkable account of a president’s desperate attempt to stay in office following his election loss to Mr. Biden in 2020.While it breaks no new ground since the panel’s series of public hearings this summer, the report for the first time brings together all the facts in one place.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 report states that even people around Mr. Trump “ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful.”The report laid out, step by step, how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power after losing the 2020 election: first, by lying about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false; by organizing false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden by pressuring state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election; and finally, by amassing a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the report states. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”During the final day of hearings, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway were included in a projection of officials who told former President Trump that there was no election fraud.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe committee revealed new details from two top advisers: Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway.The committee revealed on Monday the investigative work it had done since the end of their previous hearings. That included the panel’s first interviews with two of the former president’s top advisers: Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway.Ms. Hicks, who served as a senior adviser in the White House, said that when she raised concerns with the former president about the actions on Jan. 6 affecting Mr. Trump’s legacy, he responded that “nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.”The committee also revealed testimony from Ms. Conway, who described telling Mr. Trump that Jan. 6 was a “terrible day.” She recalled him responding: “No. People are upset. They are very upset.”The events of Jan. 6 hurt Trump but did not knock him out of 2024 contention.The work of the committee over the past year has already helped to chip away at Mr. Trump’s political standing and his reputation as the nation’s 45th president. Ms. Cheney said again on Monday that Mr. Trump should never “serve in any position of authority in our nation again. He is unfit for any office.”And yet, Mr. Trump already has announced his pursuit of the presidency again, hoping to reclaim the office he falsely asserts was stolen from him. Despite a rocky campaign announcement and a swirl of potential criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump remains a central figure in the Republican Party, with strong support across the country. And he has weathered setbacks, both political and legal, before.The committee’s legacy is still an open question.The legacy of the Jan. 6 committee is now out of the panel’s hands, and will most likely be determined by federal prosecutors in the coming months. It will be up to Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee investigations into Mr. Trump’s actions, to determine whether the information sent over by the committee, along with the Justice Department’s own material, warrants charging the former president with any crimes.That remains an open question. Members of the committee were firm on Monday in their belief that Mr. Trump and the people around him violated four statutes in the planning and execution of the Capitol attack. They are: obstructing or influencing an official proceeding; conspiring against the U.S. government; making false statements to the government; and engaging in insurrection against the government.Pursuing those charges, or others, against Mr. Trump would be a historic effort to hold the nation’s top official accountable for his actions. But it will be up to the special counsel, and ultimately Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, to decide whether to move forward. Other Justice Department officials will have to decide whether to charge Mr. Trump’s aides as committee members called for.Meanwhile, Republicans are already gearing up to discredit the committee when they take control of the House in January. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who is seeking to become the speaker next year, has vowed to investigate the committee’s work and has demanded that the staff and lawmakers preserve records for that purpose.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack during the final meeting on Monday.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe committee has not been a political boon for many of its members.The end of the Jan. 6 committee is also the end of the House careers of four of the nine members of the panel.Two of them — Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, and Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — decided not to run for re-election in 2022. Mr. Kinzinger faced fierce opposition from within his own party because of his frequent criticism of Mr. Trump and his decision to be part of the Jan. 6 committee.Two others — Ms. Cheney and Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia — lost their House seats in 2022. Ms. Cheney was defeated in her primary campaign in Wyoming after drawing the ire of party officials and voters for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her determination to hold him accountable for Jan. 6. Ms. Luria was defeated in the general election in Virginia.All four have said they have no regrets about serving on the committee. But it is unlikely to serve as a political steppingstone for many of its members. More

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      In Capitol Attack, Over 900 People Have Been Criminally Charged

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      Even as a House select committee prepared on Monday to recommend criminal charges in connection with a series of attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the Justice Department has not relented in its own investigation of the culmination of those efforts: the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The inquiry into the Capitol assault is the largest criminal investigation in the department’s history and has shown no signs of slowing down. More than 900 people, from nearly every state, are now facing charges, and prosecutors have indicated that hundreds more cases could be filed.While most of the charges brought have been for petty offenses like disorderly conduct or illegally parading in the Capitol, more than 280 people have been accused of assaulting or resisting the police, including about 100 who are facing additional charges of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing bodily injury to officers.In addition, 290 people have been charged with obstructing an official proceeding in front of Congress — the count that prosecutors have used to describe how the mob disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Last week, a federal appeals court was asked to toss the charge in all of the cases by defense lawyers who claim it was improperly used.Nearly 40 defendants have gone to trial in Jan. 6-related cases, and only one of them — a former government contractor from New Mexico — has been fully acquitted. All of the trials have taken place in Federal District Court in Washington, which sits within sight of the Capitol building. In the most prominent trial so far, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, was convicted along with one of his lieutenants of seditious conspiracy.The sentences handed down by judges in the cases have varied widely. Many, if not most, of the defendants who were charged with minor crimes and pleaded guilty have faced no jail time. The stiffest sentence issued so far — a 10-year prison term — was given to a former New York City police officer who swung a metal flagpole at a Washington officer during the attack.In a separate investigation, a special counsel, Jack Smith, is examining the roles that former President Donald J. Trump and several of his allies played in seeking to overturn the results of the election. While that inquiry has many tentacles, one of the chief lines of investigation concerns an expansive plan to create false slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in seven key swing states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. More

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      What Are Criminal Referrals?

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      Members of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol have suggested that they are heavily inclined to call for prosecutions of those involved in the riot and the monthslong election subversion effort that gave rise to it.Criminal referrals — essentially letters to the Justice Department laying out evidence of specific crimes — from the panel would be largely symbolic. They would hold no legal weight because Congress has no enforcement power and no formal say in what the Justice Department does. The department has been carrying out a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including the appointment last month of a special counsel who authorized a round of subpoenas after taking over.Yet a referral would be another remarkable development in a precedent-shattering investigation by Congress of former President Donald J. Trump’s bid to nullify his defeat, and it could increase the pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to bring prosecutions.If members of the committee agreed to move forward with criminal referrals, they would be creating a road map for prosecutors, in granular detail, of how they contend Mr. Trump and his allies broke the law. The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including some of the former president’s closest confidants, and examined reams of text messages, emails and notes.Peter Navarro and Stephen K. Bannon were charged by the Justice Department after Congress referred them for prosecution — albeit under a slightly different process that involves not just a letter but a law granting lawmakers the power to refer contempt of Congress charges. Both men were charged with contempt of Congress for ignoring subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Bannon was convicted in July; Mr. Navarro is set to go on trial in January.Alan Feuer More