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      These Republicans Questioned the 2020 Election — and Most Are Still Doing It. Many Will Win.

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      Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Together they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party, and a potential threat to American democracy. Together they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party, […] More

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      In Utah, a Trump Loyalist Sends an S.O.S. to Romney

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      The appeal carried the unmistakable whiff of desperation. That it was delivered on live television only heightened the dramatic tension.A Utah Republican, Senator Mike Lee, was publicly begging a fellow Utah Republican, Senator Mitt Romney, for a simple act of solidarity: an endorsement in his campaign for re-election. One that, in Mr. Lee’s telling, could amount to no less than an act of salvation, as he battles for political survival against an unexpectedly fierce challenger, the independent candidate Evan McMullin.“Please, get on board,” Mr. Lee said, looking into the camera and addressing Mr. Romney by name on Tuesday night. “Help me win re-election. Help us do that. You can get your entire family to donate to me.”But Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney are not merely fellow Utah Republicans. And this was not just any television show.Mr. Lee and Mr. Romney were — and evidently remain — antagonists in the lingering drama of Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Lee played a key role in support of President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and cling to power. Mr. Romney was a stalwart opponent of it.And Mr. Lee was making his appeal to Mr. Romney on Tuesday night on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program — a venue in which Mr. Romney has been routinely roasted, for years, before audiences of millions of conservative viewers.The irony of the moment seemed lost on both Mr. Lee and the show’s host, though that may have been a bit of a shared ruse.Either way, audacity was in abundant supply.Mr. Lee’s plea for Mr. Romney’s assistance, after all, came after Mr. Lee’s votes in opposition to three bipartisan bills that Mr. Romney helped to pass, on infrastructure, gun safety and semiconductor manufacturing. Mr. Lee denounced the infrastructure bill, for one, as “an orgiastic convulsion of federal spending.”The S.O.S. to his fellow senator also appeared to ignore Mr. Lee’s own actions of intraparty sabotage, dating back a dozen years: Mr. Lee refused to endorse Mr. Romney’s 2018 Senate campaign. He declined in 2012 to endorse the senior senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, even as his own chief of staff openly predicted Mr. Hatch’s defeat. And Mr. Lee first won his own seat in 2010 by orchestrating the defeat of a popular Republican senator, Robert F. Bennett, during the state’s Republican convention.What Mr. Lee was not ignoring, however, was a new poll published in Utah’s Deseret News this week showing Mr. Lee leading Mr. McMullin 41 percent to 37 percent, with 12 percent undecided. Self-described moderates made up a plurality of those undecided voters, as the center of Utah’s political spectrum seems to be agonizing over which candidate to coalesce behind.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.The Final Stretch: With less than one month until Election Day, Republicans remain favored to take over the House, but momentum in the pitched battle for the Senate has seesawed back and forth.A Surprising Battleground: New York has emerged from a haywire redistricting cycle as perhaps the most consequential congressional battleground in the country. For Democrats, the uncertainty is particularly jarring.Pennsylvania Governor’s Race: Attacks by Doug Mastriano, the G.O.P. nominee, on the Jewish school where Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate, sends his children have set off an outcry about antisemitic signaling.Herschel Walker: The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia reportedly paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion, but some conservative Christians have learned to tolerate the behavior of those who advance their cause.“We are winning this race, and Mike Lee is panicked,” Mr. McMullin said in an interview on Wednesday.Evan McMullin is not far behind Mr. Lee according to a Deseret News poll that also shows a high number of undecided voters.Rick Bowmer/Associated PressIn fact, Mr. McMullin’s task of uniting independents, Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans remains daunting in Utah, a state that gave Mr. Trump 58 percent of the vote in 2020. When Mr. McMullin ran for president in 2016 as an independent, he netted 21.5 percent in his home state. (One of those voters was Mr. Lee.)Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, which conducted the poll, stressed that Mr. Lee “is still in the driver’s seat,” but, he said, with so many centrist voters still undecided, “this is one still to watch.”The FiveThirtyEight polling average still has Mr. Lee up by 7.6 percent.“Let’s be clear, Mike Lee is leading this race,” said Matt Lusty, an adviser to the Lee campaign. “Every reliable poll shows Senator Lee with a significant lead, and our internal polling gives us even greater confidence in the strong support he has across the state.” Mr. Lee himself declined to comment.But no contest in the country is as closely tied to the failed efforts to deny President Biden’s victory as the Utah Senate race. And no other race is as squarely centered on the fate of representative democracy.Mr. Lee appears particularly spooked by the $6.3 million in campaign contributions — a small portion of that through ActBlue, an online Democratic fund-raising tool — that have flowed to Mr. McMullin, who has vowed to caucus with neither party if he wins..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Mr. Lee was exaggerating a little when he told Mr. Carlson, “Evan McMullin is raising millions of dollars off of ActBlue, the Democratic donor database, based on this idea that he’s going to defeat me and help perpetuate the Democratic majority.” But his fears were clear.Mr. Romney, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has explained his decision not to endorse Mr. Lee or Mr. McMullin by saying “both are good friends.”But the personal divide between him and Mr. Lee over the events surrounding the 2020 election remains deep, and is playing a role now, according to Stuart Stevens, a senior official in Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential run who is also an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Romney became the first senator from a president’s party ever to vote to convict him after Mr. Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial, when he sided with Democrats to try to throw Mr. Trump out of office for abuse of power, for conditioning military aid to Ukraine on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s launching an investigation into Mr. Biden.Mr. Romney again voted to convict Mr. Trump in 2021 for inciting the attack on the Capitol.Mr. Lee, in contrast, was an active participant in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in office. He cheered Mr. Trump on for weeks in late 2020, and privately offered in a text to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”Mr. Lee also endorsed a plan to have legislatures in “a very small handful of states” carried by Mr. Biden put forward pro-Trump electors, as part of a scheme to allow Vice President Mike Pence to reject Mr. Biden’s victory.Ultimately, Mr. Lee backed away from those plans and voted to certify Mr. Biden’s election, unlike eight of his Senate colleagues, a point that the Lee campaign stresses.But turning against a plan as it was failing does not exonerate him, Mr. McMullin argues.“Senator Lee, who called himself a constitutional conservative and who swore an oath to the Constitution, betrayed the Constitution in an effort to overturn the will of the people by recruiting fake electors to topple American democracy,” Mr. McMullin said in the interview. “It was one of the most egregious betrayals of the American republic in its history.”Senators Mike Lee, left, and Mitt Romney during former President Donald J. Trump’s first impeachment hearings in January 2020. Mr. Romney voted to convict.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIt is, in some sense, that inconstancy that has gotten Mr. Lee in trouble: his willingness to challenge the powers in his own party, then tack back when his base demands it.“Reaping what he sowed is a good way to put it,” quipped Christopher F. Karpowitz, co-director of the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at Brigham Young University.Mr. Lee led the floor fight to stop Mr. Trump’s nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention, called for Mr. Trump to exit the race after the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced, and voted for Mr. McMullin in protest. Then he became one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters.“Politics is an ongoing character test, and the people of Utah are going to have to ask themselves if he’s passed,” said Mr. Stevens, the former Romney aide.How real a threat Mr. McMullin poses to Mr. Lee’s re-election remains to be seen. Both sides produce internal polls that serve their purposes, Mr. Lee’s showing him with a double-digit lead, Mr. McMullin’s showing him barely overtaking the incumbent.It’s entirely possible that Mr. Lee’s dire-sounding appearance on Fox News proves a reprise of the pleas that Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, made toward the end of his 2020 re-election run as he watched his Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, rake in a record $57 million in a single quarter, $132 million in total, for his challenge: All panic aside, Mr. Graham ultimately won by more than 10 percentage points.Still, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of two Republicans serving on the House Jan. 6 Committee, will campaign with Mr. McMullin next week in Salt Lake City, trying to rally disaffected Republicans, a crucial bloc after Utah Democrats decided not to field their own candidate. The state’s most important Democrats, Mayor Jenny Wilson of Salt Lake County and former Representative Ben McAdams, are backing Mr. McMullin.Though Mr. McMullin says the preservation of democracy is the organizing theme of his campaign, he has branched out to tar Mr. Lee as “the most ineffective member of the Senate,” contrasting his ideological stands with Mr. Romney’s productivity.And, as Mr. Lee’s campaign tries to project an air of confidence, his appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show projected anything but.Pressing Mr. Romney to do the right thing as a Republican, he repeatedly warned Fox viewers that Mr. Romney’s mere neutrality could give Mr. McMullin — “a closeted Democrat,” as he put it — a victory, and ensure continued Democratic control of the Senate.On Wednesday, Mr. Lusty, the Lee campaign adviser, said his boss still hoped that Mr. Romney would come around. “Senator Lee sees it as important for all members of the party to stand together,” he said.But if Mr. Lee had truly hoped to change Mr. Romney’s mind, there were few avenues likely to be less persuasive than Mr. Carlson’s show.As Mr. Lee spoke, Mr. Romney’s picture was shown with a beret and handlebar mustache crudely superimposed, over the caption “Pierre Delecto Strikes Again” — the nom de plume Mr. Romney once got caught using on Twitter.“Mitt Romney has stood up to withering criticism from Trump and others,” said Mr. Karpowitz, the B.Y.U. professor. “I’m not sure Tucker Carlson is going to move him.” More

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      The Jan. 6 Committee Has Been Almost Wholly Ineffective

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      The House Jan. 6 committee, which reconvenes on Thursday for its ninth and likely final hearing, has been assiduous in its research, artful in its cinematography and almost wholly ineffective in shifting views about the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 by a pro-Trump crowd.A Monmouth University poll taken this summer during the committee’s hiatus found public opinion largely unchanged — even calcified, to use a word that has lately come into vogue among American political scientists. The 65 percent of Americans who in late June remembered Jan. 6 as a “riot” had become 64 percent a month later when the summer hearings ended. Twenty-nine percent thought Joe Biden had been fraudulently elected before, and 29 percent did after.It is easy to see why minds have been so hard to change. Why would Democrats budge? There is incontrovertible evidence of Donald Trump’s misbehavior after Election Day 2020, and the committee members — wholly Democrat except for two Republicans hostile to Mr. Trump — are patiently laying it out.On the other hand, the committee members are pursuing their case in a grandiose and ideological manner, tarring Mr. Trump’s voting base as a bunch of authoritarians and election deniers. Mr. Trump’s machinations and protesters’ misdeeds, it appears, are being used as a pretext for self-appointed guardians of democracy to reorient American politics to their liking. So why would Republicans budge?There are two parties to Jan. 6 that the committee has had a hard time keeping distinct: the crowd and Mr. Trump. What the crowd did — to obstruct, through physical intimidation, the counting of votes — was a constitutional trespass of maximum gravity, for which the instigators deserve punishment.But who were the instigators? The committee has focused on extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that played an outsize role in storming the Capitol. But their violence, coordination and resolution were not typical of the broader crowd. No firearms were found on those who invaded the Capitol.It was not a coup attempt. And even if you believe it was, Mr. Trump was not leading it.For someone supposedly bent on overthrowing the government, Mr. Trump did an awful lot of television-watching and surprisingly little seizing of broadcast centers, mobilizing of commando units and issuing of emergency decrees. He certainly demeaned the office, embarrassed the country and behaved irresponsibly on Jan. 6. But to focus on that day distracts from his less dramatic but more consequential misdeeds.Elections require of candidates a never-say-die optimism that can lead even levelheaded people to make bold claims. After the German national election of 2002, the conservative candidate Edmund Stoiber walked onstage as his prospects of winning dwindled, and announced, with a thrilled smile, “We have won the election.” In 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico City’s head of government, refused to accept the official tally showing him the loser in a national presidential race, camped out in the city’s central square and drew hundreds of thousands of supporters to the city, where they battled the police.Mr. Trump’s loss was razor thin: A shift of fewer than 80,000 votes in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin would have given him the victory. But his loss is different from the near misses to which it is sometimes compared. For one thing, Mr. Trump was an incumbent. While Samuel Tilden in 1876, Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000 each lost the presidency by a whisker, they weren’t in the Oval Office and suffered no demotion in dignity.Mr. Trump, by contrast, faced what the New York Times correspondent Maggie Haberman, the author of a new book on Mr. Trump, called “the worst predicament he could imagine: being turned into a loser by the entire country.” He took extraordinary measures, including a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, four days before the storming of the Capitol, in which Mr. Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” This was an unambiguous act of constitutional wrongdoing.But the Jan. 6 committee’s members are focused on something else. They have set themselves up less as investigators than as defenders of America’s democracy. This is the wrong venue for such a mission. The committee has wound up too partisan to carry it out. You can blame Republicans for nominating Trump defenders to the committee or Democrats for freezing them out, but the fact is the committee has seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both in open rebellion against their Trumpified party (and both now on their way out of Congress).The almost complete removal of oppositional checks leaves the committee ill suited to what is really a very delicate task. The Jan. 6 march on the Capitol was both a protest questioning the integrity of the 2020 election (protected by the First Amendment) and a violent assault on the integrity of the 2020 election (punishable by law).On top of that, there are two different contexts for understanding the event: judicial and civic. In the judicial context, those judges who ruled against more than 60 Trump-initiated and Trump-linked lawsuits to reopen vote counts and reverse election results did exactly the right thing. A courtroom is the wrong place to reward doubts about the legitimacy of elections. Overruling elections from the bench would undermine democracy and provide tomorrow’s lawyers with incentives to undermine it further.But in a civic context, matters are different. Citizens have a right to examine the matter as freely and doggedly as they wish.The committee jumbles all these contexts together. Ms. Cheney recently complained that Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, “is, right now, campaigning for election deniers.” She went on: “Either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.” But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and a person who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.In June the committee chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, opened the hearings by mentioning that he had taken an oath “to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.” He added that “that oath was put to the test on Jan. 6.”Certainly there were constitutional crimes that day. But the committee members have been too inclined to look at the Republican Party as a nest of subversives, much as certain anti-Communists did the Democrats at some of the colder points in the Cold War. The investigation into possible Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign — an investigation that on essential matters came up empty — reflected similar suspicions. Mr. Biden’s recent speech in Philadelphia, in which he described “MAGA Republicans” as part of an ideological threat to democracy and “the very soul of this country,” is evidence that he, too, views matters in this light.This is to misunderstand the nature of the challenge to American democracy posed by Donald Trump. Any reader of Michael Wolff’s book “Landslide,” about the final days of the Trump presidency, will see that his unsuitability is a matter of psychology, not ideology — of character, not politics. He’s George III, not Hitler. We haven’t given enough thought to flawed personalities in recent years. Modern government structures may have seemed too complex to be run on gut reactions and private whims. For several generations politicians with Mr. Trump’s personality profile were incapable of going far.That this is no longer the case ought to preoccupy us. After his defeat in November 2020, Mr. Trump began working the last available pressure point in the system — the Electoral College, as it turned out — to see if he could somehow lawyer and cajole his way to an alternative outcome. That a president would try such a thing required not just effrontery but also a colossal collapse in standards, integrity and public trust. But the requisite collapse had already taken place, by 2016 at the latest.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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      Lawyers Ask Court to Sanction Kenneth Chesebro Over Trump Fake Electors Scheme

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      An ethics complaint in New York against Kenneth Chesebro is the latest example of legal troubles for lawyers who helped Donald J. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — In the emerging history of how a small group of lawyers aided former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election, Kenneth Chesebro has received far less attention than others like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman.But documents show that Mr. Chesebro played a central part in developing the idea of having Trump supporters pretend to be electors from states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., then claiming that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to cite the purported existence of rival slates to delay counting or to discard real Electoral College votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6, 2021.On Wednesday, several dozen prominent legal figures submitted an ethics complaint to the Supreme Court of New York’s attorney grievance committee, calling Mr. Chesebro “the apparent mastermind behind key aspects of the fake elector ploy” and accusing him of conspiring “with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman and others to subvert our democracy.”The complaint said Mr. Chesebro had acted with “dishonesty, fraud, deceit or reckless or intentional misrepresentation” in violation of rules of conduct for lawyers who, like him, are licensed to practice in New York.The request was organized by Lawyers Defending American Democracy; a similar request by the group helped lead to the suspension of Mr. Giuliani’s law license in June 2021 and to a continuing investigation by the State Bar of California into Mr. Eastman. The complaint against Mr. Chesebro did not explicitly call for him to lose his license but asked for an investigation and “appropriate sanctions.”Adam S. Kaufmann, a lawyer for Mr. Chesebro, condemned the complaint against his client, warning that it was dangerous to attack lawyers for providing legal theories to political candidates. Drawing on a 1960 precedent involving a close vote in Hawaii, he said Mr. Chesebro was offering the Trump campaign advice for “keeping its options open” through Jan. 6 as a “contingency” in case the courts found electoral fraud in any of the swing states where Mr. Trump’s team was disputing the outcome.The idea that Mr. Pence could delay or block the electoral vote count on Jan. 6 was a key part of the events leading to the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters. Some of those supporters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” because the vice president — whose lawyers told him there was no legal basis for him to delay or discard the official state-certified votes for Mr. Biden — rejected Mr. Trump’s pressure to do so anyway.On Nov. 18, 2020, Mr. Chesebro wrote the earliest known memo putting forward a proposal for having a slate of Trump supporters purport to be electors, in that case for Wisconsin. He expanded the proposal for other states, including in a letter to Mr. Giuliani on Dec. 13, 2020.An email by a Trump campaign lawyer in Arizona on Dec. 8, 2020, cited Mr. Chesebro as having had the idea for “sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence,” even though they would not be legal because the governor had not signed them..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.The complaint filed on Wednesday characterized Mr. Chesebro as a participant and not only a supplier of theories, referring to his help with a fake electors effort in Georgia, one of the swing states Mr. Biden won. Mr. Chesebro has fought a subpoena to testify before a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., where a prosecutor is investigating efforts to overturn the election results there.Mr. Kaufmann said the only communication Mr. Chesebro had with anyone in Georgia regarding alternate electors was sending ballot forms to a state Republican leader.Mr. Eastman wrote two memos laying out steps that could result in Mr. Trump being declared the winner of the election that hinged on a disputed claim about Mr. Pence and alternate “electors.” Mr. Chesebro helped edit the first, emails obtained by the Jan. 6 committee show.The complaint says that “while Mr. Eastman and Mr. Giuliani have received more attention, the public record amply demonstrates Mr. Chesebro’s central role. As the original author of the fake elector scheme, Mr. Chesebro bears special responsibility for it and its consequences.”In an email exchange with Mr. Eastman on Dec. 24, 2020, Mr. Chesebro also wrote that the odds of a Supreme Court intervention would “become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”Another organization, The 65 Project, filed a similar ethics complaint against Mr. Chesebro in July. The group has filed complaints against about 55 lawyers associated with aspects of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. There has been no public sign of action in response to its complaint about Mr. Chesebro, but its director Michael Teeter, said on Wednesday that an investigator has been assigned to it.The new filing was distinguished by a list of high-profile legal figures who endorsed it, such as past presidents of the New York State Bar Association and of the American Bar Association, retired judges, current and former deans of major law schools, and other legal scholars and prominent lawyers.Among them was Laurence H. Tribe, a liberal Harvard Law School professor. He said in an interview that as a law student in the mid-1980s, Mr. Chesebro had been one of his research assistants and continued to help him with volunteer litigation after graduating — including when Mr. Tribe represented Vice President Al Gore before the Supreme Court in the disputed 2000 election.Mr. Tribe said he attended Mr. Chesebro’s wedding and once considered him a friend, but then gradually came to see him as an “ideological chameleon” who had adopted “the posture he thought would appeal to me” and “came to distrust Ken’s sense of boundaries and his moral compass.” More

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      Kellye SoRelle’s Journey From Lawyer for Oath Keepers to Defendant

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      The lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, has been charged with working with the far-right militia to disrupt the 2020 election. Now, her text messages — and testimony — could emerge as evidence at their trial.In the normal course of business, lawyers like Kellye SoRelle wear a variety of hats for their clients: They might keep secrets for them, offer them advice or defend them against charges.But Ms. SoRelle has a far more fraught relationship with one of her biggest former clients: the Oath Keepers militia.Last month, Ms. SoRelle was indicted on conspiracy charges, accused of working with the far-right group in its monthslong plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.Now, she has found herself at the center of a battle over whether her text messages — and testimony — can be used as evidence at the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, and four of his subordinates.The struggle between the defense and prosecution over how to define Ms. SoRelle’s role at the trial revolves around the issue of attorney-client privilege, which generally bars lawyers from disclosing private information about their clients.The dispute has become more complicated because the Oath Keepers may seek to call Ms. SoRelle as a witness in the case and defend themselves against some of the charges they are facing by claiming they were merely following her instructions in what is known as an advice-of-counsel defense.The boundaries of attorney-client privilege often become a matter of legal dispute. Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are fighting to use the protections of attorney-client privilege — and executive privilege — to limit the scope of a grand jury investigation into the role that Mr. Trump played in seeking to overturn his defeat in the election. Other lawyers for Mr. Trump are facing the prospect of becoming witnesses against him in a separate Justice Department inquiry into his handling of classified documents.On Monday night, before the Oath Keepers trial resumed in Federal District Court in Washington on Tuesday, prosecutors filed court papers asking a judge to set aside attorney-client privilege and admit text messages that Ms. SoRelle had swapped with Mr. Rhodes in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In one of the messages, from Dec. 29, 2020, Mr. Rhodes complained that he was getting tired of showing up at pro-Trump rallies in Washington where members of his group and other Trump supporters would simply “wave a sign, pray or yell.”“They won’t fear us,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Ms. SoRelle, “till we come with rifles in hand.”Prosecutors argued that the incendiary message should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because Ms. SoRelle, despite having described herself as the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, did not perform any legal work for the group until after the Capitol was attacked.Ms. SoRelle also played “an active role in the conspiracy” to disrupt the certification of the election, prosecutors wrote, so any communications between her and the Oath Keepers should be exempt from privilege under what is known as the “crime-fraud exception.”Based in Texas, Ms. SoRelle first emerged into the public eye one day after Election Day when, as a member of a group called Lawyers for Trump, she raised claims in a widely seen video that election workers in Detroit had committed voter fraud. Around the same time, prosecutors say, the Oath Keepers began to work for her as bodyguards.By the following month, she had signed her name to two open letters to Mr. Trump that Mr. Rhodes had posted on the Oath Keepers website. The letters, introduced as evidence at the trial last week, called on Mr. Trump to take a series of aggressive steps to remain in power, including invoking the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given Mr. Trump the authority to mobilize militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.While Mr. Rhodes has so far been the focus of the trial, testimony turned on Tuesday to one of his co-defendants, Jessica Watkins, an Ohio bar owner who ran her own militia in the state.Prosecutors introduced that evidence that Ms. Watkins had discussed cutting off pool cues to serve as “antifa smashers” at pro-Trump rallies in Washington and sought to recruit and train people to join the Oath Keepers at the events.One of the recruits sent a message to Ms. Watkins in mid-November of 2020 asking, “So should I get comfortable with the idea of death?”“That’s why I do what I do,” Ms. Watkins responded.Both defense lawyers and the government have claimed that Ms. SoRelle was, for a time, romantically involved with Mr. Rhodes, though she has said that is not true. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.Regardless of how she felt about Mr. Rhodes, there is no doubt that she did things for — and with — him that went beyond the typical services rendered to a legal client.The day before the Capitol attack, Ms. SoRelle accompanied Mr. Rhodes to a meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol where the two encountered Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, and Mr. Tarrio’s longtime associate, Bianca Gracia, the leader of a group called Latinos for Trump. Mr. Tarrio is facing seditious conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol attack.On Jan. 6, Ms. SoRelle followed Mr. Rhodes into a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, giving a celebratory play-by-play of the mob breaching barriers at the building on a Facebook livestream.“That’s how you take your government back,” she said. “You literally take it back.”After Mr. Rhodes fled Washington that day, fearing the authorities were after him, Ms. SoRelle took possession of his cellphone, the government said in the papers filed on Monday. Prosecutors claim that within two days, she had started sending orders in Mr. Rhodes’s name to other Oath Keepers, telling them to delete any incriminating messages and to stop discussing their roles in the Capitol attack.“CLAM UP,” she wrote at one point. “DO NOT SAY A DAMN THING.”For more than a year after Jan. 6, it remained unclear whether Ms. SoRelle would be charged. Even though the F.B.I. seized her phone and eventually arrested more than 20 members of the Oath Keepers — including Mr. Rhodes — she remained at large.During that time, she often told reporters she was cooperating with the government’s inquiry into the group and also claimed to have spoken repeatedly to staff investigators working with the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have said that it was only after Ms. SoRelle agreed this summer to testify at the trial on his behalf that the F.B.I. arrested her.The lawyers have further said they may call Ms. SoRelle as a witness, hoping that she bolsters one of Mr. Rhodes’s chief defenses in the case.The government has accused Mr. Rhodes of staging a heavily armed “quick reaction force” in hotel rooms in Virginia that was poised to rush to the aid of their compatriots at the Capitol if things got out of hand.While Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have not disputed that there was a quick reaction force, they have argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, as Mr. Rhodes recommended, it would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to use force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Ms. SoRelle gave this legal strategy her professional stamp of approval, telling the Oath Keepers they could “lawfully assist” Mr. Trump in putting down an insurrection, Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers said in court papers last month.The lawyers have argued that if Mr. Rhodes was simply following legal advice, he could not be held accountable for showing “any unlawful intent.”The gambit, however, is far from certain to work. While no one knows what Ms. SoRelle will do if called to the witness stand, she has repeatedly told reporters that she will exercise her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. More

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      in Elections

      Christina Bobb, a Trump Lawyer, Is Under Justice Dept. Scrutiny

      by

      Christina Bobb is a former Marine and a fervent believer that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. She went to work for him and quickly found herself enmeshed in an obstruction investigation.WASHINGTON — This spring, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization.The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met Ms. Bobb at the president’s residence and private club in Florida and asked her to sign a statement for the department that the Trump legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government.Ms. Bobb, a 39-year-old lawyer juggling amorphous roles in her new job, was being asked to take a step that neither Mr. Trump nor other members of the legal team were willing to take — so she looked before leaping.“Wait a minute — I don’t know you,” Ms. Bobb replied to Mr. Corcoran’s request, according to a person to whom she later recounted the episode. She later complained that she did not have a full grasp of what was going on around her when she signed the document, according to two people who have heard her account.Ms. Bobb, who relentlessly promoted falsehoods about the 2020 election as an on-air host for the far-right One America News Network, eventually signed her name. But she insisted on adding a written caveat before giving it to a senior Justice Department official on June 3: “The above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”Her sworn statement, hedged or not, was shown to be flatly false after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, which recovered about 100 additional highly sensitive government documents, including some marked with the highest levels of classification. And prosecutors are now investigating whether her actions constitute obstruction of justice or if she committed other crimes.On Friday, Ms. Bobb sat for a voluntary interview with Justice Department lawyers in Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation. She told them that another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, contacted her the night before she signed the attestation and connected her with Mr. Corcoran. Ms. Bobb, who was living in Florida, was told that she needed to go to Mar-a-Lago the next day to deal with an unspecified legal matter for Mr. Trump.In her meeting with the department — a development reported by NBC News on Monday — Ms. Bobb, who was accompanied by her criminal defense lawyer, John Lauro, emphasized that she was working as part of a team rather than as a solo actor when she signed the statement attesting to the return of all the documents, the people said.Mr. Corcoran, she told the Justice Department, had walked her through how he had conducted a search of a storage facility at Mar-a-Lago for the documents. She said she had believed at the time she signed the attestation in June that it was accurate, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.Ms. Bobb has made clear that she is not taking an adversarial position toward Mr. Trump in answering the Justice Department’s questions. She told investigators that before she signed the attestation, she heard Mr. Trump tell Mr. Corcoran that they should cooperate with the Justice Department and give prosecutors what they wanted — an assurance that would come to ring hollow as the investigation proceeded and became a bitter court fight.The Justice Department declined to comment. Ms. Bobb, Mr. Corcoran and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Epshteyn did not respond to an email seeking comment.Ms. Bobb has been a fervent promoter of baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.Josh Ritchie for The New York TimesMs. Bobb’s trajectory is a familiar one in Mr. Trump’s orbit: a marginal player thrust by ambition and happenstance into a position where her profile and prospects are elevated, but at the cost of serious legal and reputational risk.But she stands out for a varied background — she is a former Marine who served in Afghanistan and a failed political candidate who jettisoned a conventional career to become a far-right cable news host — and for the tensile strength of her baseless conviction that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.More on the Trump Documents InquirySupreme Court Request: The Justice Department urged the justices to reject a request from former President Donald J. Trump asking the court to intervene in the litigation over documents seized from his Florida estate.Documents Still Missing?: A top Justice Department official told Mr. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the agency believed he had not returned all the records he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.Deflecting Demands: Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.Dueling Judges: The moves and countermoves by a federal judge and the special master she appointed reflect a larger struggle over who should control the rules of the review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.In the past two years, Ms. Bobb has emerged as one of his truest of true believers, embracing conspiracy theories with a fervor that has at times seemed over the top even to her colleagues, according to interviews with a dozen people who have worked with her over the past several years.Ms. Bobb has not been shy about expressing her opinions on conservative news outlets, speaking expansively about the court-authorized F.B.I. search and her low opinion of those who executed it.“I don’t believe that there was any classified material in there, though I’m sure the F.B.I. will say that there is,” she said in an interview with the conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza two days after the warrant was executed.Another conservative activist, Mike Farris, asked if she was concerned by the Justice Department’s aggressive approach.“I’m not too worried about it,” she replied. “They are all a bunch of cowards; they don’t have anything.”Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts.She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Dominion Voting Systems is suing Ms. Bobb and OAN for promoting unsubstantiated claims that the company was part of a vote-switching scheme to favor Joseph R. Biden Jr. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot subpoenaed Ms. Bobb in March to testify about her “attempts to disrupt or delay” certification of the election and her reported involvement in drafting the executive order.She complied, but provided no proof when pressed on her claims about the election, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of her testimony.Ms. Bobb blurred the lines between covering Mr. Trump and working for him:She offered a dour after-action report of the failed attempt to appoint alternate electors to overturn the election in a previously undisclosed memo she sent to Mr. Trump on March 29, 2021, while working for OAN. The memo, obtained from a person to whom it was later forwarded, was marked “ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE” even though she was not on Mr. Trump’s legal team at the time.“If three states changed their electors, the result of the election would have flipped,” Ms. Bobb wrote, adding a caveat at the end: It was “unclear” whether the Supreme Court would have supported the elector scheme.It is not known if Mr. Trump read it. He seems to have a mixed opinion of Ms. Bobb’s on-air work, however, grousing that she was too flattering to him in several OAN interviews, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.After leaving the Department of Homeland Security, Ms. Bobb became a host on the far-right One America News Network.Gabby Jones/BloombergMs. Bobb, a standout soccer and volleyball player during her high school years in the Phoenix area, graduated with a joint business and law degree from San Diego State University and California Western School of Law in 2008.She joined the Marine Corps, going through officer candidate school and completing a grueling basic training course in May 2010 as one of 16 women in a class of 280. She served in the Judge Advocate General’s office, representing Marines in disciplinary hearings, and was assigned for a time in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as an operational law attorney consulting combat commanders on the legality of military operations.Those experiences, Ms. Bobb has suggested, were front of mind as she stood in the sweltering Mar-a-Lago parking lot angrily observing F.B.I. agents carrying out the search warrant. “Every service member can tell you that you have an affirmative obligation to disregard an unlawful order,” she told Mr. Farris in August.Ms. Bobb left the Marines after two years to work for a law firm in San Diego, where she served as a junior lawyer in three trademark infringement cases brought by CrossFit against local gym operators, according to court records.Ms. Bobb, second from right, during a meeting about a ballot review at the Arizona Senate in Phoenix in July 2021. In the postelection period, she blurred the lines between her work for One America News and her advocacy of Mr. Trump.Joseph Cooke/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORKAround that time, she made her first foray into politics, running as an independent for a House seat in a predominantly Democratic district in San Diego. She kept a defiantly low profile, criticizing politicians who craved the “limelight,” maintaining a bare-bones website and raising no money.“I understand that it might not work, but it might,” she told a reporter covering the race in 2014.It did not. Ms. Bobb finished last in a field of eight, with 929 votes. She did not challenge the result.A few years later, she moved to Washington; in mid-2019, she was selected for an administrative job at the Department of Homeland Security — executive secretary. She served as a conduit for external correspondence, and her name was often attached to important memos, largely drafted by others, such as a list of locations where Mr. Trump’s border wall was to be built.The job also entailed another responsibility: ensuring compliance with federal records laws.Colleagues remember Ms. Bobb as hardworking and professional, with a bearing more military than political (she retained the habit of referring to superiors as “sir” and “ma’am”). But it soon became clear that the department’s leadership, while satisfied with her work, was not wowed with it and had no intention of promoting her, two former co-workers said.In late 2019, she requested a position in the policy unit of Customs and Border Protection but left after only a few months, they said.At that point, Ms. Bobb made an abrupt career shift, applying for a job with the San Diego-based OAN, where her connection to homeland security seemed to have been a selling point.The network’s conservative owners viewed immigration as their top priority and wanted to bolster their coverage. Ms. Bobb’s first on-air interview was with her former boss Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary.It was after Election Day 2020 that she seemed to find her calling, airing multiple reports of unproven electoral fraud, culminating in a lengthy February 2021 segment, “Arizona Election Heist,” which promoted debunked and dubious claims about her home state.After the election, Ms. Bobb was also a fixture at meetings where Trump hard-liners like John Eastman and Sidney Powell discussed plans to reverse the results — which initially raised questions about whether she was embedded for reporting purposes or committed to the cause. Participants quickly concluded it was the latter, according to one of them.By December, she was back-channeling requests from Mr. Giuliani to Republican state officials in Arizona, pressuring them to authorize a recount of the Maricopa voting, despite a statewide canvass that confirmed Mr. Biden’s 10,000-vote margin of victory.“Mayor Giuliani asked me to send you these declarations,” Ms. Bobb wrote to one leader, accompanied by affidavits, according to an email obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.By March 2022, Ms. Bobb decided to leave OAN and relocated to Florida to be closer to Mr. Trump and some of the senior leadership of the Trump-affiliated Save America PAC, taking a staff job that paid $144,600 a year, according to federal campaign finance records.While she has been a fixture on the airwaves and social media, Ms. Bobb requested that her name be redacted from the signed attestation about the documents when it was unsealed in late August, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.It leaked anyway.Susan C. Beachy More