Presidential Election of 2020

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      Defamation Suit Against Fox Grows More Contentious

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      Lachlan Murdoch is set to be deposed on Monday, the latest in a flurry of activity in the high-stakes case.Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, is expected to be deposed on Monday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for amplifying bogus claims that rigged machines from Dominion Voting Systems were responsible for Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020.Mr. Murdoch will be the most senior corporate figure within the Fox media empire to face questions under oath in the case so far. And his appearance before Dominion’s lawyers is a sign of how unexpectedly far and fast the lawsuit has progressed in recent weeks — and how contentious it has become.Fox and Dominion have gone back and forth in Delaware state court since the summer in an escalating dispute over witnesses, evidence and testimony. The arguments point to the high stakes of the case, which will render a judgment on whether the most powerful conservative media outlet in the country intentionally misled its audience and helped seed one of the most pervasive lies in American politics.Although the law leans in the media’s favor in defamation cases, Dominion has what independent observers have said is an unusually strong case. Day after day, Fox hosts and guests repeated untrue stories about Dominion’s ties to communist regimes and far-fetched theories about how its software enabled enemies of the former president to steal his votes.“This is a very different kind of case,” said David A. Logan, dean of the Roger Williams School of Law, who has argued in favor of loosening some libel laws. “Rarely do cases turn on a weekslong pattern of inflammatory, provably false, but also oddly inconsistent statements.”Dominion, in its quest to obtain the private communications of as many low-, mid- and high-level Fox personnel as possible, hopes to prove that people inside the network knew they were disseminating lies. Fox hopes to be able sow doubt about that by showing how its hosts pressed Trump allies for evidence they never produced and that Dominion machines were vulnerable to hacking, even if no hacking took place.The judge, Eric M. Davis, has ruled in most instances in Dominion’s favor, allowing the voting company to expand the pool of potential evidence it can present to a jury to include text messages from the personal phones of Fox employees and the employment contracts of star hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, along with those of Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and her top corporate managers.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.Dominion has conducted dozens of depositions with current and former network personalities, producers, business managers and executives. The people questioned come from the rungs of middle management at Fox News headquarters in Manhattan to the corner office in Century City, Los Angeles, where Mr. Murdoch oversees the Fox Corporation and its sprawling enterprise of conservative media outlets.The fight over depositions has intensified in recent weeks as lawyers for the two companies sparred over whether Mr. Hannity and another pro-Trump host, Jeanine Pirro, should have to sit for a second round of questioning about messages that Dominion obtained from their phones as part of the discovery process. Fox lawyers have argued that the hosts should not be compelled to testify again, citing the legal protections that journalists have against being forced to reveal confidential sources.The judge ruled that Dominion’s lawyers could question both Mr. Hannity and Ms. Pirro again but limited the scope of what they could ask. Ms. Pirro’s second deposition was late last month; Mr. Hannity’s has yet to be scheduled.Fox has accused Dominion in court filings of making “escalating demands” for documents that are voluminous in quantity, saying it would have to hire a second litigation team to accommodate such a “crushing burden.” (The judge has largely disagreed.)In a sign of the simmering tensions between the two sides, Fox lawyers have asked the court to impose tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions against Dominion. Fox has accused the voting machine company’s chief executive, John Poulos, and other senior company officials of failing to preserve their emails and text messages, as parties to a lawsuit are required to do with potentially relevant evidence.After Dominion filed its lawsuit in March 2021 — claiming that Fox’s coverage of its machines not only cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in business but “harmed the idea of credible elections” — many media law experts assumed this case would end like many other high-profile defamation case against a news organization: with a settlement.Fox News has a history of settling sensitive lawsuits before they reach a jury. In the last several years alone, it has paid tens of millions of dollars in claims: to women who reported sexual harassment by its former chief executive, Roger Ailes, and by prominent hosts including Bill O’Reilly; as well as to the family of Seth Rich, a former Democratic Party staff member who was killed in a robbery that some conservatives tried to link to an anti-Clinton conspiracy theory.But a settlement with Dominion appears to be a remote possibility at this point. Fox has said that the broad protections provided to the media under the First Amendment shield it from liability. The network says it was merely reporting on Mr. Trump’s accusations, which are protected speech even if the president is lying. Dominion’s complaint outlines examples in which Fox hosts did more than just report those false claims, they endorsed them.“This does not appear to be a case that’s going to settle — but anything can happen,” said Dan K. Webb, a noted trial lawyer who is representing Fox in the dispute. “There are some very fundamental First Amendment issues here, and those haven’t changed.”In a statement, Dominion said the company was confident its case would show that Fox knew it was spreading lies “from the highest levels down.”“Instead of acting responsibly and showing remorse, Fox instead has doubled down,” the statement said. “We’re focused on holding Fox accountable and are confident the truth will ultimately prevail.”The judge has set a trial date for April of next year. A separate defamation suit against Fox by the voting company Smartmatic is not scheduled to be ready for trial until the summer of 2024.Part of the reason Fox executives and its lawyers believe they can prevail is the high burden of proof Dominion must reach to convince a jury that the network’s coverage of the 2020 election defamed it. Under the law, a jury has to conclude that Fox acted with “actual malice,” meaning that people inside the network knew that what they were reporting was false but did so anyway, or that they recklessly disregarded information showing what they were reporting was wrong.That is what Dominion hopes to show the jury with the private messages it obtained from a several-week period after the election from Fox employees at all levels of the company. Very little is known publicly about what those messages could contain.In addition to arguing that its coverage of Dominion was protected as free speech, Fox argues it was merely covering statements from newsmakers. “There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the United States and his lawyers making allegations of voter fraud,” a spokeswoman said.Fox’s lawyers are also planning lines of defense that they hope will dent Dominion’s credibility, even if that means leaning into some of the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of Dominion’s case. They may argue, for example, that it was plausible that the machines had been hacked, pointing to questions that were raised by at least one independent expert about whether the software was secure.As part of their fact-finding, Fox lawyers sought information from a University of Michigan computer scientist who wrote a report this year saying there were vulnerabilities in Dominion’s system that could be exploited, even though there is no evidence of any such breach.Mr. Webb said the intent would be to show that the fraud allegations “were not made up out of whole cloth.” But it was not his plan, he said, to pretend that Mr. Trump’s voter fraud falsehoods — which were the same as many of the falsehoods uttered on the air at Fox — were true. “The president’s allegations were not correct,” Mr. Webb said. He added that he planned “to show the jury that those security concerns were there and were real and added plausibility to the president’s allegations.”After Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on Monday, lawyers on both sides of the case said they expected one additional senior executive to be questioned by Dominion’s lawyers: Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the Fox Corporation, who founded Fox News with Mr. Ailes more than 25 years ago. More

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      They Used Robocalls to Suppress Black Votes. Now They Have to Register Voters.

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      An Ohio judge ordered Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who concocted a 2020 robocall scheme to discourage mail-in voting, to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.Two conservative operatives responsible for placing tens of thousands of calls in Midwestern states that made false claims about the legitimacy of mail-in ballots were sentenced by an Ohio judge to spend hundreds of hours registering new voters.The operatives, Jack Burkman, 56, of Arlington, Va., and Jacob Wohl, 24, of Irvine, Calif., orchestrated a robocall scheme that targeted Black neighborhoods in Ohio in 2020, prosecutors said.More than 8,000 of the roughly 67,000 phone calls the pair made across the Midwest, using a voice broadcasting service, were sent to phone numbers in Cleveland and East Cleveland, where many Black voters reside, prosecutors said. The calls were placed during the pandemic, ahead of the 2020 election, a time of heightened interest in absentee voting because of rising concerns about health and safety.The calls falsely stated that voting by mail meant the personal information of people who cast those ballots would be added to a public database and that they would be tracked by the authorities.“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man,” the recorded message said, according to a court filing in Michigan, which said Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl specifically targeted “Black neighborhoods” in the Midwest, including Cleveland. “Stay safe and beware of vote by mail.”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.The prerecorded messages claimed that mail-in voting would result in a cascade of negative consequences, including pursuit by the authorities for outstanding debts and warrants, and mandatory vaccines.On Tuesday, Mr. Burkman and Mr. Wohl were sentenced in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in Cleveland. At the hearing, which the defendants attended by videoconference, Judge John Sutula likened the robocall scheme to voter suppression efforts targeting Southern Black voters in the 1960s, Cleveland.com reported.“I think it’s a despicable thing that you guys have done,” Judge Sutula remarked, according to Cleveland.com.Mr. Wohl previously promoted false sexual assault allegations against Pete Buttigieg, then a Democratic presidential candidate, and Robert S. Mueller, the former special counsel.In the robocall case, Mr. Wohl and Mr. Burkman were each sentenced to completing two years of probation, working 500 hours at a voting registration center in Washington, D.C., and paying a $2,500 fine, a spokeswoman for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office said. They will also be electronically monitored for 12 hours, starting at 8 p.m. each day, through the first six months of their probation period.Michael C. O’Malley, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, called the sentence “appropriate.”“These two individuals attempted to disrupt the foundation of our democracy,” Mr. O’Malley said in a statement.The sentence arrived two years after they were indicted in Ohio for their voter intimidation scheme. They had initially faced up to 18 years in prison for multiple charges of bribery and telecommunications fraud but under a plea deal, the charges were merged into a single count each of telecommunications fraud, which they pleaded guilty to in October 2022.Mark Wieczorek, a lawyer representing Mr. Wohl, said that the sentence was “fair” and “in the spirit of justice.”“We think it’s a great sentence given the amount of charges he was originally indicted with,” Mr. Wieczorek said. “I think he is genuinely remorseful for his actions and took full responsibility for it.”Mr. Burkman’s lawyer could not be reached for comment.The pair also face similar charges in Michigan, where a case against them is still pending in the state’s Supreme Court, said John Nevin, a spokesman for the court. In 2020, they were charged with intimidating voters, conspiracy to intimidate voters, using a computer to intimidate voters and conspiracy to use a computer to intimidate voters, according to a criminal complaint. A judge in New York previously ordered them to call 85,000 people back to inform them that their initial calls about voting by mail had included false information. More

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      Mike Pence Plays to the G.O.P. Base From a Times Stage

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      Mr. Pence, while promoting his new book at the DealBook Summit, frowned upon the idea of the Justice Department’s taking action against his former boss.Former Vice President Mike Pence said that he hoped Elon Musk would “create a level playing field” on Twitter that doesn’t censor users.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesNEW YORK — Former Vice President Mike Pence leaned into Republican talking points on Wednesday about Elon Musk and Disney while walking a familiar fine line on his former boss, delivering a message seemingly geared toward conservatives who will decide whether he is a viable presidential contender in 2024.Appearing at The Times’s DealBook Summit in New York, Mr. Pence was repeatedly pressed by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the founder of DealBook, to talk about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the character of former President Donald J. Trump. He demurred.Even as he repeated his belief that Mr. Trump is not an antisemite, he again condemned Mr. Trump for hosting Nick Fuentes, an outspoken antisemite and racist, at a recent dinner.“President Trump was wrong to give a white nationalist, a Holocaust denier, a seat at the table,” Mr. Pence said.He defended the role he had played on Jan. 6, when Mr. Trump’s supporters called for his hanging after he had refused to overturn the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.And he said that he had never seen “evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome” of the 2020 presidential election.When asked whether Mr. Trump should face an indictment by the Justice Department, he frowned on the scenario.“I’m not sure that taking bad advice from lawyers is a violation of criminal law,” he said. “We see too many cases in third world countries where the incoming administration prosecutes a prior administration. That is not an image I want to resonate for the United States.”He also doubled down on comments he made earlier in the day during a Fox News appearance about Mr. Musk, saying he had faith in Mr. Musk’s overhaul of Twitter and its content guidelines, which had led the company under its previous ownership to banish Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 attack.Mr. Pence, who is weighing a run for president, took a swipe at Disney during his remarks as well. He sought to correlate its stock losses and a recent executive shake-up with the company’s criticism of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The measure prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in some elementary school grades.“I think Bob Iger’s recent statements, coming into lead Disney again, prove that the antidote to woke America is America,” he said, referring to Mr. Iger’s return as Disney’s chief executive.He also mentioned his new book, “So Help Me God,” no fewer than seven times — enough to make it a punchline.“As you can tell, if I haven’t mentioned, I have a book,” Mr. Pence joked.“We got that,” Mr. Sorkin said. “We are good.”Mr. Pence underlined, as he often had before, that he was proud of the work done by the Trump administration. But, he noted, “It obviously didn’t end well.” More

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      Oath Keepers Leader Found Guilty of Seditious Conspiracy in Jan. 6 Case

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      A jury in federal court in Washington convicted Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia, and one of his subordinates for a plot to keep Donald Trump in power.Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, was convicted on Tuesday along with one of his subordinates of seditious conspiracy as a jury found them guilty of seeking to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power through an extensive plot that started after the 2020 election and culminated in the mob attack on the Capitol.The jury in Federal District Court in Washington found three other defendants in the case not guilty of sedition and acquitted Mr. Rhodes of two separate conspiracy charges.The split verdicts, coming after three days of deliberations, were a landmark — if not total — victory for the Justice Department, which poured enormous effort into prosecuting Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants.The sedition convictions marked the first time in nearly 20 trials related to the Capitol attack that a jury had decided that the violence that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, was the product of an organized conspiracy.Seditious conspiracy is the most serious charge brought so far in any of the 900 criminal cases stemming from the vast investigation of the Capitol attack, an inquiry that could still result in scores, if not hundreds, of additional arrests. Mr. Rhodes, 57, was also found guilty of obstructing the certification of the election during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 and of destroying evidence in the case. On those three counts, he faces a maximum of 60 years in prison.Nearly two years after the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters, the events of Jan. 6 and what led up to them remain at the center of American politics and the subject of multiple investigations, including an inquiry by the Justice Department into any criminal culpability that Mr. Trump and some of his allies might face and an exhaustive account being assembled by a House select committee.The conviction of Mr. Rhodes underscored the seriousness and intensity of the effort by pro-Trump forces to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, and was the highest-profile legal reckoning yet from a case related to Jan. 6.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.But it is not clear how much effect it might have on broader public perceptions that have hardened, largely along partisan lines, over the past two years. Mr. Trump, written off as a political force in the days after the attack, is again a candidate for president, embraced by a substantial portion of his party as he continues to promote the lie that the election was stolen from him.Mr. Rhodes was convicted of sedition along with Kelly Meggs, who ran the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers at the time the Capitol was stormed. Three other defendants who played lesser roles in the planning for Jan. 6 — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — were found not guilty of sedition.Mr. Rhodes was also acquitted of two different conspiracy charges: one that accused him of plotting to disrupt the election certification in advance of Jan. 6 and the other of planning to stop members of Congress from discharging their duties that day.Mr. Meggs, who led a group of Oath Keepers into the Capitol, and Ms. Watkins, who went in separately and was recorded on a digital walkie-talkie app, were both convicted of conspiracy to stop the election certification. Along with Mr. Harrelson, they were also found guilty of the count of conspiracy to interfere with members of Congress during the attack. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding and destroying evidence in the case.Taken as a whole, the verdicts suggested that the jury rejected the centerpiece of Mr. Rhodes’s defense: that he had no concrete plan on Jan. 6 to disrupt the transfer of presidential power and to keep Joseph R. Biden Jr. from entering the White House.But the jury also made the confusing decision to acquit Mr. Rhodes of planning in advance to disrupt the certification of the election yet convict him of actually disrupting the certification process. That suggested that the jurors may have believed that the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 erupted more or less spontaneously, as Mr. Rhodes has claimed.“The government did a good job — they took us to task,” said James Lee Bright, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers. Mr. Bright added that he intended to appeal the convictions. No sentencing date was set.In a statement on Tuesday night, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland noted the convictions against all five defendants.“The Justice Department is committed to holding accountable those criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021,” he said.A charge that traces back to efforts to protect the federal government against Southern rebels during the Civil War, seditious conspiracy has been used over the years against a wide array of defendants — among them, far-right militias, radical trade unions and Puerto Rican nationalists. The last successful sedition prosecution was in 1995 when a group of Islamic militants was found guilty of plotting to bomb several New York City landmarks.The Oath Keepers sedition trial began in Federal District Court in Washington in early October. In his opening statement, Jeffrey S. Nestler, one of the lead prosecutors, told the jury that in the weeks after Mr. Biden won the election, Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy”: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.Mr. Nestler also closed the government’s case last week, declaring that the Oath Keepers had plotted against Mr. Biden, ignoring both the law and the will of the voters, because they hated the results of the election.“They claimed to be saving the Republic,” he said, “but they fractured it instead.”In between those remarks, prosecutors showed the jury hundreds of encrypted text messages swapped by Oath Keepers members, demonstrating that Mr. Rhodes and some of his followers were in thrall to outlandish fears that Chinese agents had infiltrated the United States government and that Mr. Biden — a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party — might cede control of the country to the United Nations.The messages also showed that Mr. Rhodes was obsessed with the leftist movement known as antifa, which he believed was in league with Mr. Biden’s incoming administration. At one point during the trial, Mr. Rhodes, who took the stand in his own defense, told the jury he was convinced that antifa activists would storm the White House, overpower the Secret Service and forcibly drag Mr. Trump from the building if he failed to admit his defeat to Mr. Biden.Prosecutors sought to demonstrate how Mr. Rhodes, a former Army paratrooper with a law degree from Yale, became increasingly panicked as the election moved toward its final certification at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6. Under his direction, the Oath Keepers — whose members are largely former law enforcement officers and military veterans — took part in two “Stop the Steal” rallies in Washington, providing event security and serving as bodyguards for pro-Trump dignitaries.Throughout the postelection period, the jury was told, Mr. Rhodes was desperate to get in touch with Mr. Trump and persuade him to take extraordinary measures to maintain power. In December 2020, he posted two open letters to Mr. Trump on his website, begging the president to seize data from voting machines across the country that would purportedly prove the election had been rigged.In the letters, Mr. Rhodes also urged Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, a more than two centuries-old law that he believed would give the president the power to call up militias like his own to suppress the “coup” — purportedly led by Mr. Biden and Kamala Harris, the incoming vice president — that was seeking to unseat him.“If you fail to act while you are still in office,” Mr. Rhodes told Mr. Trump, “we the people will have to fight a bloody war against these two illegitimate Chinese puppets.”As part of the plot, prosecutors maintained, Mr. Rhodes placed a “quick reaction force” of heavily armed Oath Keepers at a Comfort Inn in Arlington County, Va., ready to rush their weapons into Washington if their compatriots at the Capitol needed them. Mr. Caldwell, a former Navy officer, tried at one point to secure a boat to ferry the guns across the Potomac River, concerned that streets in the city might be blocked.Mr. Rhodes tried to persuade the jury during his testimony that he had not been involved in setting up the “quick reaction force.” But he also argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, it would have given the Oath Keepers the legal standing as a militia to use force of arms to support the president.On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Rhodes remained outside the Capitol, standing in the crowd like “a general surveying his troops on the battlefield,” Mr. Nestler said during the trial. While prosecutors acknowledged that he never entered the building, they claimed he was in touch with some of the Oath Keepers who did go in just minutes before they breached the Capitol’s east side.Even with the convictions, the government is continuing to prosecute several other Oath Keepers, including four members of the group who are scheduled to go on trial on seditious conspiracy charges on Monday. A second group of Oath Keepers is facing lesser conspiracy charges at a trial now set for next year, and Kellye SoRelle, Mr. Rhodes’s onetime lawyer and girlfriend, has been charged in a separate criminal case. More

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      Mark Meadows Ordered to Testify in Trump Investigation

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      The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected an effort by the former White House chief of staff to avoid testifying in an investigation of election meddling.ATLANTA — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered Mark Meadows, a White House chief of staff under Donald J. Trump, to testify in the criminal investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn his November 2020 election loss in Georgia.In a three-paragraph written opinion, the court pointedly said Mr. Meadows’s legal efforts to avoid participating in the investigation were “manifestly without merit.”Mr. Meadows, 63, is one of three well-known Trump allies — in addition to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the former national security adviser Michael Flynn — who have been trying to fend off subpoenas ordering them to testify before a special grand jury in Atlanta. Those efforts are part of a broader endeavor by a number of Trump’s allies to avoid cooperating in the Georgia investigation. That attempt has been met with mixed results. Last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina testified after a protracted legal fight that was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.The special grand jury is considering whether Mr. Trump and others broke state laws by, among other actions, spreading falsehoods about election fraud and pressuring state officials to consider changing the results of Georgia’s presidential election, which Mr. Trump lost by fewer than 12,000 votes.Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Flynn were ordered to travel to Atlanta to testify by judges in their respective home states of Virginia and Florida, and they have appealed those decisions.Mr. Meadows, a former Republican representative from North Carolina, was deeply involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol showed that he repeatedly asked the Department of Justice to conduct investigations based on Mr. Trump’s unfounded theories about election improprieties around the country.Prosecutors say the special grand jury has evidence that Mr. Meadows set up and participated in the now infamous recorded phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Mr. Trump can be heard telling Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, that he wanted to “find” the 11,780 votes that would allow him to win in Georgia. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to try to view an election audit that was in progress there. He was told by local officials that he was not authorized to see it.Like Mr. Flynn and Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Meadows has argued that he does not have to testify on the grounds that the Georgia special grand jury should be considered civil, not criminal, in nature. That, he argues, makes the subpoena unenforceable under an agreement among states that allows them to secure the attendance of out-of-state witnesses for criminal investigations.This legal strategy was successfully employed in Texas, where it found favor with a majority of members of that state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, and that most likely explains why a number of Texas-based witnesses who received subpoenas in the Georgia case have not appeared in court.In South Carolina, however, a lower court judge rejected Mr. Meadows’s argument in late October. Later, a group of current and former prosecutors filed an amicus brief arguing that if the state’s Supreme Court accepted Mr. Meadows’s argument it would “undermine interstate comity and the effectiveness of law enforcement across state borders, not just between South Carolina and its neighbor Georgia, but nationwide.”Mr. Meadows was originally scheduled to testify on Wednesday, but that appointment will most likely be pushed back. A spokesman for Mr. Meadows’s lawyer declined to comment on Tuesday, as did a spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is heading up the investigation.Danny Hakim More

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      Mike Pence Is Having a Moment He Doesn’t Deserve

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      Mike Pence had a go-to line during his time as vice president of the United States. When his boss would ask him to carry out some task or duty — say, take an overseas trip or run the response to a pandemic — Pence would look President Trump in the eye, nod and say, “I’m here to serve.”The phrase recurs in Pence’s new memoir, “So Help Me God,” which covers his years as a congressman, governor of Indiana and vice president, with a focus on Pence’s actions during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. It is the tale of the loyalist who finally had enough, of the prayerful stand-taker who insisted that he did not have the power to overturn an election, no matter the arguments concocted by Trump and his air-quote lawyers.With rioters calling for his hanging and Trump tweeting that Pence lacked “the courage to do what should have been done,” the vice president turned to the aides and family members with him in an underground loading dock at the Capitol. “It doesn’t take courage to break the law,” he told them. “It takes courage to uphold the law.” It is an inspiring scene, marred only by Pence then asking his daughter to write down what he said.Pence has been busy promoting “So Help Me God” on television, distancing himself from Trump (urging him to apologize for dining with a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago last week) and even teasing a possible White House run of his own in 2024. The book debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, and the Justice Department is now seeking to question Pence in its investigation of Trump’s efforts to remain in power after the 2020 election. Clearly, the former veep is having his moment.Feel free to buy the book, but don’t buy the redemption tale just yet. Pence was indeed in the White House to serve, but he served the president’s needs more than those of the nation. In “So Help Me God,” Pence rarely contradicts the president, even in private, until the days immediately preceding Jan. 6. He rarely attempts to talk Trump out of his worst decisions or positions. He rarely counters Trump’s lies with the truth.Most damning, Pence failed to tell the president or the public, without hedging or softening the point, that the Trump-Pence ticket had lost the 2020 election, even after Pence had reached that conclusion himself. Americans should be enormously grateful that the vice president did not overstep his authority and attempt to reverse the will of the voters on Jan. 6. But you shouldn’t get the glory for pulling democracy back from the brink if you helped carry it up there in the first place. And, so help me God, Pence did just that.Why wouldn’t Trump — a man Pence invariably calls “my president” and “my friend” — assume that his vice president would help steal the election? Pence had agreed to so much else, had tolerated every other national and personal indignity with that faraway, worshipful gaze.The irony is that Pence’s record of reliable servility was a key reason he was in position to be the hero at the end. And so the vice president became that rarest of Trump-era creatures: a dedicated enabler who nonetheless managed to exit the administration with a plausible claim to partial credit. If Pence got to do the right thing on Jan. 6, it was because he had done the wrong one for so long.The purpose of the vice president, of course, is to serve as second banana, preferably without getting too mottled by lousy assignments, presidential indifference or embarrassing deference. (Pence fills his sycophancy quotas in the book, extolling the president’s physical stamina, likening Trump to Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and noting that he displayed a signed copy of “The Art of the Deal” in his West Wing office during his entire vice presidency.) Still, I searched through the 542 pages of this memoir for any instances in which Pence exercised enough character and independent judgment to tell Trump that he might have been on the wrong course about something, about anything. I found two such cases before the events surrounding Jan. 6. Two.No, it’s not when the president fired F.B.I. director James Comey in May of 2017, an action Trump took not for self-serving reasons, he assured Pence, but because it was “the right thing to do for the country.” (Apparently Pence is so persuaded by this argument that he quotes it twice.) It’s not when Trump praised the “very fine people” on both sides of the Charlottesville tragedy in August 2017. (Any notion of a false equivalence between neo-Nazis and those opposing them, Pence explains, was an unfortunate “narrative” that “smeared” his good friend in the Oval Office.)It’s not when the administration separated children from their parents at the southern U.S. border. (On immigration, Pence writes, Trump “led with law and order but was prepared to follow with compassion.”) It’s not when Trump pressed Ukraine’s leader to investigate a potential Democratic rival in the 2020 election. (“It was a less-than-perfect call,” Pence acknowledges, but its imperfections were stylistic, the product of Trump’s “casual” and “spontaneous” approach to foreign relations.)It’s not when Trump confused a frightened populace with his nonsensical coronavirus briefings in the spring of 2020. In fact, Pence explains away those sessions by suggesting that Trump believed that “seeing him and the press argue was in some way reassuring to the American people that life was going on.” And it’s not when Trump shared a stage with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018 and accepted the Russian president’s denials about election interference. Pence says he encouraged Trump to “clarify” his views, but the vice president seemed far more troubled by media coverage of the event. “The press and political establishment went wild,” he writes. “It sounded as though the president was taking Putin’s side over that of his national security officials.” If it sounded that way, it was because that was the sound the words made when they left the president’s mouth.That is a standard Pence feint: When Trump says or does something wildly objectionable, Pence remains noncommittal on the matter and just condemns the “ever-divisive press” that covered it. When Trump derided Haiti, El Salvador and various African nations as “shithole countries” in an Oval Office conversation in early 2018, “the media predictably went into a frenzy,” Pence laments. The former vice president even faults journalists for drawing attention to Covid infection numbers in May 2020, “at a time,” Pence writes, “when cases in more than half of the states were dropping, and case rates were also in decline, numbering 20,000 a day, down from 30,000 in April.” As if 20,000 new Americans infected with a dangerous virus each day was not newsworthy.The two meaningful disagreements that Pence expressed to the president in real time were these: First, Pence demurred when Trump considered inviting Taliban representatives to Camp David; he suggested that the president “reflect on who they are and what they’ve done and if they have truly changed.” Second, the president and vice president had a testy exchange when Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump campaign manager, left a pro-Trump super PAC and joined Pence’s political action committee. Pence reminded Trump that he had encouraged the move, but Trump denied having done so. “By that point I was angry,” Pence acknowledges; he even admits to raising his voice. Somehow, the Taliban and Corey Lewandowski rated equally as lines that shall not be crossed.Between Election Day on Nov. 3, 2020, and the tragedy of Jan. 6, 2021, while Trump and his allies propagated the fiction of a stolen vote, Pence enabled and dissembled. Describing the outcome of the vote in his memoir, he offers a gloriously exculpatory euphemism, writing that “we came up short under circumstances that would cause millions of Americans to doubt the outcome of the election.” (Circumstances could not be reached for comment.)When Trump declared victory in the early hours of Nov. 4, Pence stood alongside him in the East Room of the White House, in front of dozens of U.S. flags and behind a single microphone, and “promised that we would remain vigilant to protect the integrity of the vote,” Pence recalls. In the days that followed, Pence addressed conservative audiences and pledged to continue the fight “until every legal vote is counted and every illegal vote is thrown out!”Note those slippery, wiggle-room formulations. Pence does not directly state that he believed the election had been stolen, yet his rhetoric still appears fully in line with Trump’s position. The ovations at his speeches were “deafening,” Pence notes. So was his public silence about the truth. Less than a week after the election, Pence had already admitted to Jared Kushner that “although I was sure that some voter fraud had taken place, I wasn’t convinced it had cost us the election.” Why not share that conclusion with the public? Why stand by as the big lie grew bigger and Jan. 6 grew inevitable?The memoir revisits several conversations between Pence and Trump in the weeks immediately preceding Jan. 6 — all missed opportunities to convey the truth to the boss. Instead, Pence reassured Trump that “the campaign was right to defend the integrity of America’s elections.” (Pence often refers obliquely to the actions of “the campaign,” as if he played no role in it, as if his name was not even on the ballot.) He dances around reality, coming closest to it when he advised the president that “if the legal challenges came up short and if he was unwilling to concede, he could simply accept the results of the elections, move forward with the transition, and start a political comeback.”On Dec. 14, 2020, state electors officially voted and delivered an Electoral College majority to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, leading Pence to acknowledge that “for all intents and purposes, at that point the election was over.” He says so now in the memoir; if only he had said it in public at the time. Yes, he told Trump repeatedly that the vice president lacks the authority to overturn the results of the election. But not once in his book does Pence say to the president that, even if I had the authority, I would not exercise it — because we lost.Throughout “So Help Me God,” readers find Pence still running interference for Trump, still minimizing his transgressions. When he quotes the president’s video from the afternoon of Jan. 6, in which Trump finally called on the rioters to stand down, Pence makes a revealing omission. Here is how he quotes Trump: “I know your pain, I know your hurt … but you have to go home now, we have to have peace.” What did Pence erase with that ellipsis? “We had an election that was stolen from us,” Trump said in the middle of that passage. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.” So much of Pence’s vice presidency is captured in those three little dots.Sometimes the problem is not the relevant material Pence leaves out, but the dubious material he puts in. Pence writes, with an overconfidence bordering on overcompensation, that he was going to win re-election as Indiana governor in 2016, that his victory “was all but assured.” In fact, Pence’s approval ratings in the final stretch of his governorship were low and polls indicated a tight contest against his Democratic opponent.Pence writes that Trump “never tried to obscure the offensiveness of what he had said” on the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, perhaps forgetting that Trump dismissed his words as mere “locker room talk” and later suggested that the voice on the recording might not have been his own.Pence also writes that the White House, busy with its Covid response, did not have “much time for celebrating” after the president’s acquittal in his first Senate impeachment trial in February 2020, even though the next day Trump spoke about it in the White House for more than an hour before a crowd of lawmakers, aides, family members and lawyers. Trump explicitly called the speech a “celebration” and referred to that day, Feb. 6, 2020, as “a day of celebration,” as Pence, sitting in the front row, no doubt heard. The day would indeed prove a high point in the administration’s final year, as a pandemic, electoral defeat and insurrection soon followed.“I prayed for wisdom to know the right thing to do and the courage to do it,” Pence writes of the days before Jan. 6. Unsurprising for a book with this title, Pence’s Christian faith is a constant reference point. Raised Catholic, Pence describes being born again during his college years and joining an evangelical church with his wife. Throughout the memoir, Pence is often praying, and often reminding readers of how often he prays.Each chapter begins with a Bible passage, and Pence highlights individuals he deems particularly “strong” or “devout” Christians, with Representative Julia Carson of Indiana, who died in 2007, Senator Josh Hawley, Representative Jim Jordan and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo making the cut. I kept wondering if he would consider the role that his outspoken faith may have played in getting him on the ticket in the first place. If Trump picked him to reassure Christian conservatives, how does Pence feel about that bargain?In the epilogue, Pence provides a clue. Of all the Trump administration’s accomplishments, he writes, the “most important of all” was making possible the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, which ended the constitutional right to abortion. “The fact that three of the five justices who joined that opinion were appointed during the Trump-Pence administration makes all the hardship we endured from 2016 forward more than worth it.” Pence, in other words, is the ultimate “But Gorsuch!” voter. That is what he got out of the bargain, plus a new national profile that he may leverage into a bid for the only higher office left to seek.In the book’s appendix, Pence reprints several documents that emphasize different aspects of his public service. There is his 2016 Republican convention speech, in which he hailed Trump as both an “uncalculating truth-teller” and “his own man, distinctly American”; his 2016 State of the State of Indiana address; his letter to Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in which he stated that the vice president’s role in certifying an election is “largely ceremonial”; and his letter to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, six days after the attack on the Capitol, refusing to invoke the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office. Pence also adds two texts in which he takes special pride, and which I imagine him citing in any future presidential run.First is an essay titled “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” which Pence published in 1991 after his second failed run for Congress. “It is wrong, quite simply, to squander a candidate’s priceless moment in history, a moment in which he or she could have brought critical issues before the citizenry, on partisan bickering,” Pence wrote. He was describing himself, with regret. The second is a speech that Pence, then representing Indiana’s Sixth Congressional District, delivered at Hillsdale College in 2010. “You must always be wary of a president who seems to float upon his own greatness,” Pence declared. He was describing the Obama presidency, with disdain. The president, he wrote, “does not command us; we command him. We serve neither him nor his vision.” Pence warned that “if a president joins the power of his office to his own willful interpretation, he steps away from a government of laws and toward a government of men.”These documents provide an apt coda to Pence’s vice presidency. One day, he may use them to distinguish himself from his president and his friend, to try to show that Pence, too, can be his own man. For now, he does not make the obvious connection between the sentiments in his essay and speech and his experience campaigning and governing alongside Donald Trump. Or if he does, he is calculating enough to keep it to himself.After all, Mike Pence was there to serve.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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      Was Election Denial Just a Passing Threat?

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      Or is it here to stay?In the months before the midterm elections, a reporter for Time magazine asked Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, why he was so convinced that Donald Trump had won the state in 2020 despite all evidence to the contrary.“It strains credibility,” Finchem responded. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?”It was as succinct an explanation as any for why so many Americans believed the 2020 election had been stolen. Republicans, especially those living in deep-red areas, knew so few Democrats that it beggared their imagination that anyone, as Finchem put it, would vote for one.Now, two political scientists have put some rigor behind this idea. The more that voters were surrounded by other Republicans, Nicholas Clark and Rolfe Daus Peterson of Susquehanna University report in a forthcoming research paper, the more likely that they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen, controlling for other factors.Using survey data collected through the Voter Study Group, a nonpartisan research project, Clark and Peterson tested two alternate hypotheses:The more rural voters were, the more likely they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen.The more Republican their congressional district was, the more likely they were to say that the 2020 election had been stolen.When the two researchers ran the numbers, they found that both hypotheses were true. The Trumpier voters’ surroundings — whether measured by population density or by Trump’s margin of victory in their congressional district — the more likely they were to say that Biden had stolen the presidency.These voters are living in what Clark and Peterson describe as “ideological and cultural vacuums” — and for this reason, the professors fear, election denialism is not going away. In the future, they write, “the public’s trust in the integrity of elections cannot be taken for granted by elected officials.”Elaborating on that point in an interview, Clark emphasized that his findings were still preliminary. But he came up with the idea for the paper, he said, because he lived in a heavily pro-Trump area and had heard a lot of people advance a version of Finchem’s argument. That experience has left Clark with the impression that America’s partisan geography offers fertile soil for unscrupulous politicians who seize upon public misconceptions about elections.“The door has been opened on it now, and there’s always the possibility that a politician can take advantage of it more effectively than Trump has,” Clark said.Election denial isn’t a loser everywhereIt’s a sobering finding at a time when one of the dominant narratives emerging from the 2022 midterm elections is that election deniers were trounced at the ballot box. That was true in many places — and for the highest-profile candidates — but it was hardly the case everywhere.In Indiana and Wyoming, for instance, voters elected secretaries of state who expressed support for Trump’s claims of fraud, while voters in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico rejected similar candidates. Most of the 139 House members who voted against certifying the 2020 election results for Pennsylvania were re-elected. And in Arizona, the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general are still disputing the results.The Aftermath of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6A moment of reflection. More

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      Is Donald Trump Ineligible to Be President?

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      How does a democracy protect itself against a political leader who is openly hostile to democratic self-rule? This is the dilemma the nation faces once again as it confronts a third presidential run by Donald Trump, even as he still refuses to admit he lost his second.Of course, we shouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. The facts are well known but necessary to repeat, if only because we must never become inured to them: Abetted by a posse of low-rent lawyers, craven lawmakers and associated crackpots, Mr. Trump schemed to overturn the 2020 election by illegal and unconstitutional means. When those efforts failed, he incited a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol, causing widespread destruction, leading to multiple deaths and — for the first time in American history — interfering with the peaceful transfer of power. Almost two years later, he continues to claim, without any evidence, that he was cheated out of victory, and millions of Americans continue to believe him.The best solution to behavior like this is the one that’s been available from the start: impeachment. The founders put it in the Constitution because they were well acquainted with the risks of corruption and abuse that come with vesting great power in a single person. Congress rightly used this tool, impeaching Mr. Trump in 2021 to hold him accountable for his central role in the Jan. 6 siege. Had the Senate convicted him as it should have, he could have been disqualified from holding public office again. But nearly all Senate Republicans came to his defense, leaving him free to run another day.There is another, less-known solution in our Constitution to protect the country from Mr. Trump: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who, “having previously taken an oath” to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to America’s enemies.On its face, this seems like an eminently sensible rule to put in a nation’s governing document. That’s how Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who has drafted a resolution in Congress enabling the use of Section 3 against Mr. Trump, framed it. “This is America. We basically allow anyone to be president,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “We set limited disqualifications. One is, you can’t incite an insurrection against the United States. You shouldn’t get to lead a government that you tried to destroy.”This was also the reasoning of the 14th Amendment’s framers, who intended it to serve as an aggressive response to the existential threat to the Republic posed by the losing side of the Civil War. Section 3 was Congress’s way of ensuring that unrepentant former Confederate officials — “enemies to the Union” — were not allowed to hold federal or state office again. As Representative John Bingham, one of the amendment’s lead drafters, put it in 1866, rebel leaders “surely have no right to complain if this is all the punishment the American people shall see fit to impose upon them.”And yet despite its clarity and good sense, the provision has rarely been invoked. The first time, in the aftermath of the Civil War, it was used to disqualify thousands of Southern rebels, but within four years, Congress voted to extend amnesty to most of them. It was used again in 1919 when the House refused to seat a socialist member accused of giving aid and comfort to Germany in World War I.In September, for the first time in more than a century, a New Mexico judge invoked Section 3, to remove from office a county commissioner, Couy Griffin, who had been convicted of entering the Capitol grounds as part of the Jan. 6 mob. This raised hopes among those looking for a way to bulletproof the White House against Mr. Trump that Section 3 might be the answer.I count myself among this crowd. As Jan. 6 showed the world, Mr. Trump poses a unique and profound threat to the Republic: He is an authoritarian who disregards the Constitution and the rule of law and who delights in abusing his power to harm his perceived opponents and benefit himself, his family and his friends. For that reason, I am open to using any constitutional means of preventing him from even attempting to return to the White House.At the same time, I’m torn about using this specific tool. Section 3 is extraordinarily strong medicine. Like an impeachment followed by conviction, it denies the voters their free choice of those who seek to represent them. That’s not the way democracy is designed to work.And yet it is true, as certain conservatives never tire of reminding us, that democracy in the United States is not absolute. There are multiple checks built into our system that interfere with the expression of direct majority rule: the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Electoral College, for example. The 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause is another example — in this case, a peaceful and transparent mechanism to neutralize an existential threat to the Republic.Nor is it antidemocratic to impose conditions of eligibility for public office. For instance, Article II of the Constitution puts the presidency off limits to anyone younger than 35. If we have decided that a 34-year-old is, by definition, not mature or reliable enough to hold such immense power, then surely we can decide the same about a 76-year-old who incited an insurrection in an attempt to keep that power.So could Section 3 really be used to prevent Mr. Trump from running for or becoming president again? As a legal matter, it seems beyond doubt. The Capitol attack was an insurrection by any meaningful definition — a concerted, violent attempt to block Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated job of counting electoral votes. He engaged in that insurrection, even if he did not physically join the crowd as he promised he would. As top Democrats and Republicans in Congress said during and after his impeachment trial, the former president was practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of Jan. 6. The overwhelming evidence gathered and presented by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has only made clearer the extent of the plot by Mr. Trump and his associates to overturn the election — and how his actions and his failures to act led directly to the assault and allowed it to continue as long as it did. In the words of Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, Mr. Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”A few legal scholars have argued that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency because it does not explicitly list that position. It is hard to square that claim with the provision’s fundamental purpose, which is to prevent insurrectionists from participating in American government. It would be bizarre in the extreme if Mr. Griffin’s behavior can disqualify him from serving as a county commissioner but not from serving as president.It’s not the legal questions that give me pause, though; it’s the political ones.First is the matter of how Republicans would react to Mr. Trump’s disqualification. An alarmingly large faction of the party is unwilling to accept the legitimacy of an election that its candidate didn’t win. Imagine the reaction if their standard-bearer were kept off the ballot altogether. They would thunder about a “rigged election” — and unlike all the times Mr. Trump has baselessly invoked that phrase, it would carry a measure of truth. Combine this with the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from right-wing media figures and politicians, including top Republicans, and you have the recipe for something far worse than Jan. 6. On the other hand, if partisan outrage were a barrier to invoking the law, many laws would be dead letters.The more serious problem with Section 3 is that it is easy to see how it could morph into a caricature of what it is trying to prevent. Keeping specific candidates off the ballot is a classic move of autocrats, from Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus to Vladimir Putin. It sends the message that voters cannot be trusted to choose their leaders wisely — if at all. And didn’t we just witness Americans around the country using their voting power to repudiate Mr. Trump’s Big Lie and reject the most dangerous election deniers? Shouldn’t we let elections take their course and give the people the chance to (again) reject Mr. Trump at the ballot box?To help me resolve my ambivalence, I called Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who sits on the Jan. 6 committee and taught constitutional law before joining Congress. He acknowledged what he called an understandable “queasiness” about invoking Section 3 to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. But Mr. Raskin argued that this queasiness is built into the provision. “What was the constitutional bargain struck in Section 3?” he asked. “There would be a very minor incursion into the right of the people to elect exactly who they want, in order to obtain much greater security for the constitutional order against those who have demonstrated a propensity to want to overthrow it when it is to their advantage.”The contours of the case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification might get stronger yet, as the Justice Department and state prosecutors continue to pursue multiple criminal investigations into him and his associates and as the Jan. 6 committee prepares to release its final report. While he would not be prohibited from running for office even if he was under criminal indictment, it would be more politically palatable to invoke Section 3 in that case and even more so if he was convicted.I still believe that the ideal way for Mr. Trump to be banished for good would be via the voters. This scenario is democracy’s happy ending. After all, self-government is not a place; it is a choice, and an ongoing one. If Americans are going to keep making that choice — in favor of fair and equal representation, in favor of institutions that venerate the rule of law and against the threats of authoritarian strongmen — they do it best by themselves. That is why electoral victory is the ultimate political solution to the ultimate political problem. It worked that way in 2020, when an outright majority of voters rejected Mr. Trump and replaced him with Joe Biden.But it’s essential to remember that not all democracies have happy endings. Which brings us to the most unsettling answer to the question I began with: Sometimes a democracy doesn’t protect itself. There is no rule that says democracies will perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Many countries, notably Hungary and Turkey, have democratically undone themselves by electing leaders who then dismantled most of the rights and privileges people tend to expect from democratic government. Section 3 is in the Constitution precisely to help ensure that America does not fall into that trap.Whether or not invoking Section 3 succeeds, the best argument for it is to take the Constitution at its word. “We undermine the importance of the Constitution if we pick and choose what rules apply,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “One of the ways we rebuild confidence in American democracy is to remind people we have a Constitution and that it has in it provisions that say who can run for public office. You don’t get to apply the Constitution sometimes or only if you feel like it. We take an oath. We swear to uphold it. We don’t swear to uphold most of it. If Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s about protecting the Constitution of the United States.”Surely the remedy of Section 3 is worth pursuing only in the most extraordinary circumstances. Just as surely, the events surrounding Jan. 6 clear that bar. If inciting a violent insurrection to keep oneself in office against the will of the voters isn’t such a circumstance, what is?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