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      Giuliani and Graham Among Trump Allies Subpoenaed by Georgia Grand Jury

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      Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, John Eastman and several others in the former president’s orbit were subpoenaed in the election meddling inquiry.Seven advisers and allies of Donald J. Trump, including Rudolph W. Giuliani and Senator Lindsey Graham, were subpoenaed on Tuesday in the ongoing criminal investigation in Georgia of election interference by Mr. Trump and his associates. The move was the latest sign that the inquiry has entangled a number of prominent members of Mr. Trump’s orbit, and may cloud the future for the former president.The subpoenas underscore the breadth of the investigation by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta. She is weighing a range of charges, according to legal filings, including racketeering and conspiracy, and her inquiry has encompassed witnesses from beyond the state. The latest round of subpoenas was reported earlier by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The Fulton County investigation is one of several inquiries into efforts by Mr. Trump and his team to overturn the election, but it is the one that appears to put them in the greatest immediate legal jeopardy. A House committee continues to investigate the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. And there is an intensifying investigation by the Justice Department into a scheme to create slates of fake presidential electors in 2020.Amid the deepening investigations, Mr. Trump is weighing an early entrance into the 2024 presidential race; people close to him have said he believes it would bolster his claims that the investigations are politically motivated.A subpoena is not an indication that someone is a subject of an inquiry, though some of the latest recipients are considered at risk in the case — in particular Mr. Giuliani, a personal lawyer for Mr. Trump who has emerged as a central figure in the grand jury proceedings in the Georgia investigation. Mr. Giuliani spent several hours speaking before state legislative panels in December 2020, where he peddled false conspiracy theories about corrupted voting machines and a video that he claimed showed secret suitcases of Democratic ballots. He told members of the State House at the time, “You cannot possibly certify Georgia in good faith.”Ms. Willis’s office, in its subpoena, said Mr. Giuliani “possesses unique knowledge concerning communications between himself, former President Trump, the Trump campaign, and other known and unknown individuals involved in the multistate, coordinated efforts to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”Though the subpoenas were issued Tuesday, not all had necessarily been received. Robert J. Costello, a lawyer for Mr. Giuliani, said, “We have not been served with any subpoena, therefore we have no current comment.”Others sent subpoenas included Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked closely with Mr. Giuliani to overturn the 2020 election results; John Eastman, the legal architect of a plan to keep Mr. Trump in power by using fake electors, and Mr. Graham, the South Carolina Republican who called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, days after the election to inquire about the rules for discarding mail-in ballots.Jenna Ellis, a lawyer who worked with Rudolph W. Giuliani to overturn the 2020 election results, was also subpoenaed.Rey Del Rio/Getty ImagesAnother prominent lawyer who received a subpoena, Cleta Mitchell, was on a Jan. 2, 2021, call that Mr. Trump made to Mr. Raffensperger where he asked him to find enough votes to reverse the state’s results. The subpoena to her said, “During the telephone call, the witness and others made allegations of widespread voter fraud in the November 2020 election in Georgia and pressured Secretary Raffensperger to take action in his official capacity to investigate unfounded claims of fraud.”Two other Trump lawyers were also subpoenaed: Jacki Pick Deason, who helped make the Trump team’s case before the Georgia legislature, and Kenneth Chesebro, whose role has come into sharper focus during the House Jan. 6 hearings in Washington. In an email exchange with Mr. Eastman in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, he wrote that the Supreme Court would be more likely to act on a Wisconsin legal challenge “if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”Most of those subpoenaed could not be immediately reached for comment. A spokesman for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Ms. Deason is a senior fellow, declined to comment.The special grand jury was impaneled in early May and has up to one year to complete its work before issuing a report advising Ms. Willis on whether to pursue criminal charges, though Ms. Willis has said she hopes to conclude much sooner. In official letters sent to potential witnesses, her office has said that it is examining potential violations that include “the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”The new subpoenas offered some further clues about where her investigation is focused.Mr. Eastman was a key witness at one of the December 2020 legislative hearings that were led by Mr. Giuliani. Ms. Willis’s office said in its subpoena to Mr. Eastman that during the hearing he had “advised lawmakers that they had both the lawful authority and a ‘duty’ to replace the Democratic Party’s slate of presidential electors, who had been certified as the duly appointed electors for the State of Georgia after the November 2020 election, due to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud within the state.”John Eastman, a Trump legal adviser and the architect of the fake-elector plan, with Mr. Giuliani.Jim Bourg/ReutersThey called the appearance part of a “multistate, coordinated plan by the Trump campaign to influence the results of the November 2020 election in Georgia and elsewhere.”The subpoena also noted that Mr. Eastman “drafted at least two memoranda to the Trump Campaign and others detailing a plan through which Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, could refuse to count some of President Joe Biden’s electoral votes” on Jan. 6 — a plan that was rejected by Mr. Pence.Regarding Ms. Ellis, Ms. Willis’s office said that even after Mr. Raffensperger’s office debunked claims of fraud by election workers at an Atlanta arena, Ms. Ellis persisted. “Despite this, the witness made additional statements claiming widespread voter fraud in Georgia during the November 2020 election,” the subpoena said.Mr. Trump has derided the inquiry; last year, a spokesman for the former president called it “the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.”Sean Keenan More

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      On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat’

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      Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.November’s midterm elections are still months away, but to many conservative commentators, the fix is already in. Democrats have cheated before, they say, and they will cheat again.Never mind that the claims are false.In Lafayette, La., Carol Ross, host of “The Ross Report,” questioned how Democrats could win a presidential election again after a tumultuous few years in power. “They’re going to have to cheat again,” she said. “You know that. There will be rampant cheating.”In Greenville, S.C., Charlie James, a host on 106.3 WORD, read from a blog post arguing that “the Democrats are going to lose a majority during the midterm elections unless they’re able to cheat in a massive wide-scale way.”And on WJFN in Virginia, Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who was indicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, summed it up this way: “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.”Mr. Trump introduced the nation to a flurry of false claims about widespread voter fraud after his electoral loss in 2020. The extent of his efforts has been outlined extensively in the past couple of weeks during the hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot — including a speech that day in which he falsely said Democrats changed voting laws “because they want to cheat.”Republican politicians and cable outlets like Fox News have carried the torch for Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories ever since. But the loudest and most consistent booster of these unfounded claims has been talk radio, where conservative hosts reduce the jumble of false voter fraud theories into a two-word mantra: “Democrats cheat.” More

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      New Insights Into Trump’s State of Mind on Jan. 6 Chip Away at Doubts

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      Former President Donald J. Trump has weathered scandals by keeping his intentions under wraps, but recent testimony paints a stark portrait of a man willing to do almost anything to hang onto power.WASHINGTON — He was not speaking metaphorically. It was not an offhand comment. President Donald J. Trump had every intention of joining a mob of supporters he knew to be armed and dangerous as it marched to the Capitol. And there had even been talk of marching into the House chamber himself to disrupt Congress from ratifying his election defeat.For a year and a half, Mr. Trump has been shielded by obfuscations and mischaracterizations, benefiting from uncertainty about what he was thinking on Jan. 6, 2021. If he truly believed the election had been stolen, if he genuinely expected the gathering at the Capitol would be a peaceful protest, the argument went, then could he be held accountable, much less indicted, for the mayhem that ensued?But for a man who famously avoids leaving emails or other trails of evidence of his unspoken motives, any doubts about what was really going through Mr. Trump’s mind on that day of violence seemed to have been eviscerated by testimony presented in recent weeks by the House committee investigating the Capitol attack — especially the dramatic appearance last week of a 26-year-old former White House aide who offered a chilling portrait of a president willing to do almost anything to hang onto power.More than perhaps any insider account that has emerged, the recollections of the aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, demolished the fiction of a president who had nothing to do with what happened. Each revelation was stunning on its own: Mr. Trump knew that weapons were in the crowd as he exhorted supporters to “fight like hell,” and even tried to stop anyone from disarming them. He was so determined to join the mob at the Capitol that he lashed out at his Secret Service detail for refusing to take him. And he was so nonchalant about the bedlam he had unleashed that he suggested Vice President Mike Pence might deserve to be executed for refusing to overturn the election.But when added together, the various disclosures have produced the clearest picture yet of an unprecedented attempt to subvert the traditional American democratic process, with a sitting president who had lost at the ballot box planning to march with an armed crowd to the Capitol to block the transfer of power, brushing aside manifold concerns about the potential for violence along the way.“The innocent explanations for Trump’s conduct seem virtually impossible to credit following the testimony we have seen,” said Joshua Matz, who served as a lawyer for House Democrats during both of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trials in the Senate. “At the very least, they powerfully shift the burden to Trump and his defenders to offer evidence that he did not act with a corrupt, criminal state of mind.”And so nearly two and a half centuries after the 13 American colonies declared independence from an unelected king, the nation is left weighing a somber new view of the fragility of its democracy — and the question of what, if anything, could and should be done about it.To the extent that there may be a turning point in that debate, Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony proved decisive for some who had been willing to give Mr. Trump the benefit of the doubt or had been uncertain that the committee had gathered enough evidence about the former president’s state of mind.Solomon L. Wisenberg, a former deputy independent counsel under Ken Starr, called her account “the smoking gun” making a case “for his criminal culpability on seditious conspiracy charges.” Mick Mulvaney, who served as Mr. Trump’s third White House chief of staff, said he had been defending him, but learning that Mr. Trump knew some in the crowd were armed and still encouraged it to go to the Capitol “certainly changes my mind,” he told Fox News.David French, a conservative critic of Mr. Trump, had been skeptical the committee would produce sufficient evidence. “But Hutchinson’s sworn testimony closes a gap in the criminal case against Trump,” he wrote on The Dispatch, a conservative website. Two law professors, Alan Z. Rozenshtein of the University of Minnesota and Jed Handelsman Shugerman of Fordham University, likewise opposed prosecution until seeing Ms. Hutchinson, writing on the Lawfare blog that she changed their minds because she provided “proof of intent.”The hearings, which will continue after Congress returns on July 11 from its holiday recess, have presented only the prosecution’s side of the story. With Mr. Trump’s acquiescence, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, opted against appointing anyone to the select committee after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected a couple of his original selections, leaving the panel composed entirely of Democrats and two Republicans deeply critical of the former president.Neither Ms. Hutchinson nor any of the other witnesses who have testified have been cross-examined. Their testimony has often been presented in short edited clips rather than in their entirety, and no contrary testimony has been offered publicly. In a courtroom, if it ever came to that, the case against Mr. Trump would be tested as it has not been so far.“The committee’s presentation has been a purely political exercise, deceptively edited,” said Jason Miller, who served as a political adviser to Mr. Trump during and after the election.Yet even outside the confines of the hearing room, Mr. Miller and others in Mr. Trump’s camp have mainly attacked the committee or tried to chip away at pieces of the testimony rather than produce much of a defense of the former president’s actions or an alternate explanation for his state of mind.In his social media posts, Mr. Trump denied asking that armed supporters be allowed at his rally. “Who would ever want that?” he wrote. “Not me!” He focused more of his energy on castigating Ms. Hutchinson in scathing personal terms (“whacko,” “total phony”) and concentrated on one small aspect of her testimony, namely whether he lunged for the wheel of his presidential vehicle when his Secret Service detail refused to take him to the Capitol on Jan. 6.Throughout his time in politics, Mr. Trump has survived one scandal after another in part because people in authority felt unable to read his mind. Investigators were not sure they could definitively prove that he intended to break the law when he authorized hush money to silence a pornographic film actress or when he provided false valuations of his properties to lenders or when he sought to impede the inquiry into Russia’s election interference. Fact checkers similarly documented tens of thousands of false statements he made while in office, but were reluctant to declare that he knowingly lied.“He learned from Dad, Norman Vincent Peale and especially Roy Cohn that you can get away with almost anything if you never back down and insist long enough and loud enough that you’re right, and he held onto that right up to the final ride” back to the White House, said Gwenda Blair, his biographer, referring in turn to Fred Trump; the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking”; and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting chief counsel, who became a mentor to Mr. Trump. For Mr. Trump, “he was being completely consistent with the way he has acted his entire life.”Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime associate who served briefly in the White House before breaking with Mr. Trump, has talked in the past about Mr. Trump’s power to interpret reality in whatever way suited him. But Mr. Scaramucci said he had concluded that Mr. Trump understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen and that his actions on Jan. 6 to overturn it were illegitimate.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7Making a case against Trump. More

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      Women Will Save Us

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      Men are pack animals.Not all of us, of course, but male culture is ordered by hierarchies of power, with the apex being the alpha. It can be toxic and problematic, ill-considered and tribal, but it is also deeply embedded in our society and resistant to modification.The pack mentality is particularly prevalent in politics, where even men of principle drift toward the centers of gravity.Donald Trump rose to power, and continues to pose a threat to this country, by pretending to be an alpha male and exploiting the pack behavior of politicians, particularly the Republican men with the most power.Nothing illustrates pack behavior better than the immediate aftermath of the insurrection: Some Republicans briefly turned on Trump and blamed him, believing him injured and weakened by the episode. But, when he appeared to survive it, they quickly, obsequiously, fell back into line, tails tucked.Both the men in the Capitol and the man on the street exhibit pack behavior.In a gym in Brooklyn a few months ago, I overheard a group of friends loudly discussing politics. Two were white, and one was Black.The two white men were boasting about Trump, how much they loved his bravado. Even if there were drawbacks, they were overcome by this one positive attribute. The Black man interjected with comments about Trump’s racism, but the two white men dodged and dismissed it. They wanted to focus on his strength and his power.This is why I have come to fully, religiously believe that if this country is to be saved, it will be women who do the saving.The riveting testimony of the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson on Tuesday only reinforced my belief. She did what so many men around the president have refused to do: She spoke up in service of the truth and the country.This is not to say that there haven’t been men who have acted heroically in the face of recent threats to the country, but the women have truly distinguished themselves, which is even more remarkable in politics, which even now is dominated by men.There were the brave women who came forward with sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, even though they were being attacked and vilified. I don’t want to fail to mention Christine Blasey Ford, who testified to her allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.There was Nancy Pelosi, who held the line as best she could when Republicans held the majority, and expedited an aggressive liberal agenda when Democrats regained the majority.She also oversaw not one, but two impeachment votes against Trump, the first on accusations of soliciting foreign interference for the 2016 election, and the second on allegations of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection.In fact, in 2020, no group of voters voted more strongly to oust Trump than Black women. In fact, regardless of their race, more women voted to get rid of Trump than men, although a majority of white women still voted for him.Then, there is this point: America will rue the day that it did not elect Hillary Clinton president in 2016. There was an open Supreme Court seat when people were casting their ballots, and it still didn’t motivate enough Democrats to turn out to the polls or convince enough undecided voters to support her.Sure, there were overlapping factors operating in that cycle — Russian interference, the media’s lopsided treatment of Clinton and Trump, Anthony Weiner’s laptop and James Comey’s outrageous 11th-hour announcement — but sexism was also one of them.Now we have a Supreme Court poised to plunge us into an era of regression. But even there, we must take note of the women. When Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in on Thursday, the entire liberal arm of the court will be female. They may not be able to blunt the rulings of the theocratic majority, but this trio of women will compose the dissents, outline the moral argument, and lay the groundwork for future courts more inclined to undo the damage wreaked by this one.The change could start as soon as this fall, if enough women, riled up by the Dobbs decision, head to the polls to punish Republicans for putting them in this position.It is conventional wisdom that parties in power lose seats during the midterms, but in this cycle many women in this country are mad as hell about the loss of their civil rights and therefore may challenge that conventional wisdom.In two generic congressional polls taken in the days after the court handed down its decision in Dobbs, the Democrats held a significant lead over the Republicans. There are months to go before the elections, but this finding is interesting and must be unsettling for Republicans.In the meantime, it is women like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush who are pushing for an aggressive response to the abortion decision, while President Biden hews to his institutionalist instincts.It simply feels in this moment that women, more than men, have a clarity about the danger we face and the courage demanded to fight it.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Election Workers Don’t Feel Safe Despite Federal Effort to Combat Threats

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      WASHINGTON — “Do you feel safe? You shouldn’t.”In August, 42-year-old Travis Ford of Lincoln, Neb., posted those words on the personal Instagram page of Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and chief election official of Colorado. In a post 10 days later, Mr. Ford told Ms. Griswold that her security detail was unable to protect her, then added:“This world is unpredictable these days … anything can happen to anyone.”Mr. Ford paid dearly for those words. Last week, in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, he pleaded guilty to making a threat with a telecommunications device, a felony that can carry up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But a year after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland established the federal Election Threats Task Force, almost no one else has faced punishment. Two other cases are being prosecuted, but Mr. Ford’s guilty plea is the only case the task force has successfully concluded out of more than 1,000 it has evaluated.Public reports of prosecutions by state and local officials are equally sparse, despite an explosion of intimidating and even violent threats against election workers, largely since former President Donald J. Trump began spreading the lie that fraud cost him the 2020 presidential election.Colorado alone has forwarded at least 500 threats against election workers to the task force, Ms. Griswold said.The sluggish pace has sparked consternation among both election workers and their supporters, some of whom say they are souring on the idea of reporting the menacing messages to prosecutors if nothing comes of it.“The reaction usually is ‘Thank you for reporting that; we’ll look into it,’ and there’s no substantive follow-up to understand what they’re doing,” said Meagan Wolfe, the president of the National Association of State Election Directors. That leads some “to feel there isn’t adequate support that can deter people from doing this in the future,” she added.U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland formed the Election Threats Task Force in June 2021.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThe depth of election workers’ fear was underscored in hearings this month by the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault at the U.S. Capitol. Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who are mother and daughter and both election workers in Atlanta, told of being forced into hiding by a barrage of threats in December 2020, after being falsely accused of election fraud by Rudy Giuliani, who was then Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer. Protesters tried to enter a relative’s house in search of the two. Eventually, they quit their positions.That is not the norm, but neither is it uncommon. Ms. Griswold said one Colorado county clerk wears body armor to work, and another conducts business behind bulletproof glass.“In my experience, if someone is telling you over and over how they’re going to hang you, asking you the size of your neck so they can cut the rope right, you have to take the threats really seriously,” she said, citing threats she had received.The city clerk in Milwaukee, Claire Woodall-Vogg, said she had “completely redesigned our office at City Hall for safety reasons” after receiving hundreds of threats, which she said had been forwarded to the task force.An investigation by Reuters in September turned up more than 100 threats of death or violence to election officials in eight battleground states, which at that time had produced four arrests and no convictions.A survey in March by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in six local election officials have personally experienced threats, and nearly a third said they knew people who had left their jobs at least in part because of safety concerns.Justice Department officials declined to comment on the task force’s progress. The department has said previously that the task force was tracking and logging election-related threats, and had opened dozens of criminal investigations as a result. That led to charges in February against men from Texas and Nevada and the recent guilty plea in Nebraska.Claire Woodall-Vogg, the city clerk in Milwaukee, had to reconfigure the clerk’s office due to safety concerns.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThe task force also has conducted training and education sessions on threats with state and local law enforcement and election officials and social media platforms. Each of the 56 F.B.I. field offices has assigned an agent to collect and analyze threat reports, and federal prosecutors have been trained in assessing and investigating threats.The trickle of prosecutions in the wake of those moves is explained in part by federal law, which defines illegal threats extremely narrowly in the name of preserving the constitutional right to free speech.“You need to say something like, ‘I am going to kill you.’ It can’t be ‘Someone ought to kill you,’” said Catherine J. Ross, a professor and expert on First Amendment law at George Washington University. “That’s a very high bar, and intentionally a high bar.”That so-called true threat doctrine classifies even many extreme statements as protected political speech. That rules out charges in a great many cases of threats against election officials — even when the recipients feel terrified for their lives.Joanna Lydgate, founder and chief executive officer of the bipartisan legal watchdog organization States United Democracy Center, said she was encouraged to see results from the task force and understood, “These cases can be challenging to bring, and they take time.”She said: “We definitely hope to see more of this from DOJ, because investigating these threats, building these cases and holding people accountable is critically important, especially as we’re looking toward the midterms.”In Arizona, the office of Secretary of State Katie Hobbs has reported more than 100 threats to the F.B.I. in the last year, said a spokeswoman, C. Murphy Hebert. Ms. Hebert said she was confident that the task force was reviewing those threats, but that could be cold comfort to recipients who have not seen results.“For the folks monitoring and the folks being targeted, a hundred messages saying ‘You should die’ is pretty threatening,” she said. “But based on what we know of the process,” they are not actionable, she said.Protesting supporters of U.S. President Donald J. Trump are reflected in a window of a tabulation center during the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County, Ariz.Jim Urquhart/ReutersMatt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said threats sent to him in the past year included voice mail and online chatter urging that he, his wife and children be shot in the head. He said he had reported at least one threat to the F.B.I.But while the bureau has helped clarify how its threat review process works and has met with local clerks, he said, he still does not know whether his report was followed up on.“It does not give a lot of comfort to the people who receive threats,” he said. “I’ve heard some say: ‘Why should I report it? I’m better off just carrying my gun with me and if something happens, at least I can do something to protect myself.’”Other experts say the lack of both action and transparency was undermining the principal goal of the task force — to stop the epidemic of violent threats.“Three prosecutions in a year for a problem that is nationally widespread seems awfully low,” said David J. Becker, a onetime voting rights lawyer at the Justice Department who now directs the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Whether accurate or not, the impression among election officials is that the effort the Department of Justice launched with great fanfare a year ago isn’t getting the job done.”The Brennan Center report in March found that more than half the threats against election officials who were polled had gone unreported, and that a vast majority of threats were forwarded to local law enforcement agencies, not state or federal law enforcement.Four in 10 election officials said they had never heard of the task force. And while the Justice Department has increased outreach to election officials and publicized a hotline that can be used to report complaints, “there is really very little detail about what happens when complaints are made,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the center’s Elections and Government Program.“Election officials rightly feel that public repercussions for these threats are going to be critical to curtailing them,” he said. But, so far, there have been too few court cases to provide any sense that offenders will be held accountable.Until that changes — if it does — election officials need more reassurance that law enforcement has their back, he and others said.“You have a lot more election officials who are exercising their Second Amendment rights than before 2020,” said Mr. Crane, the head of the Colorado clerks association. “It only takes one of these crazy people to show up at your doorstep.” More

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      The Jan. 6 Hearings Have Been So Much Better Than I Expected

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      I felt a nauseating dread as the Jan. 6 hearings approached, fearing that all they would do is demonstrate Donald Trump’s impunity. That the former president attempted a coup has been obvious since his mob descended on the Capitol, if not before. With Trump, however, the question has never been whether he’s committed outrageous misdeeds, but whether those misdeeds can be made to matter. Over and over again, the answer to that question has been no.It might still be no. But the hearings are having more of an impact than I expected. The decision by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to keep pro-Trump Republicans off the Jan. 6 committee has eliminated the back-and-forth bloviating that typically plague congressional inquiries, allowing investigators to present their findings with the narrative cohesion of a good true-crime series. Trump, who understands television, appears to be aware of how bad the hearings are for him; The Washington Post reported that he’s watching all of them and is furious at McCarthy for not putting anyone on the dais to defend him.There are signs that public opinion is moving, at least a little. A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe Trump should be criminally charged for his role in the Jan. 6 riots, compared to 52 percent in late April. Sixty percent think the committee’s investigation has been “fair and impartial.” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, has been conducting focus groups of Trump voters since Jan. 6. In her last two, none of the participants wanted Trump to run again — something that hadn’t happened before.Longwell emphasizes that these people aren’t watching the hearings, which they dismiss as partisan. But some of the news emerging from them is still sinking in. The Republicans in her focus groups aren’t mad at Trump, but they seem to be growing weary of him. “It is plausible that part of what the Jan. 6 hearings are doing is just creating more of that reminder that Trump is a lot to have to defend, a lot to deal with,” Longwell said.For some, the hearings are doing more than that. Dustin Stockton helped organize the pro-Trump bus tour that culminated in the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House. Politico once called him and his fiancée, Jennifer Lawrence, the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA world.” On Tuesday, after a hearing that included testimony by Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House, and the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Stockton tweeted, “This has been the most impactful of the January 6th Committee hearings. Embarrassed that I was fooled by the Fulton County ‘suitcases of ballots’ hoax.”He was referring to the conspiracy theory, pushed by Trump and his allies, that election workers smuggled fraudulent ballots into the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and ran them through the voting machines multiple times. Tuesday, he said, was the first time he realized the tale was a complete fabrication.This wasn’t a total about-face; as Hunter Walker reported in Rolling Stone, Stockton and Lawrence had already grown disillusioned with Trump. They claim they were appalled by the attack on the Capitol and blamed Trump for propping up what Stockton called “the worst chaos agents” in their milieu. Figuring that they couldn’t afford to fight subpoenas, they were cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee.Still, Stockton has been publicly skeptical of the congressional investigation, and he remains a hater of Joe Biden and a fan of right-wing trolling. The hearing on Tuesday, however, got to him, especially the testimony from Freeman and Moss about how their lives were upended by the lie Stockton helped spread.“To see the just absolute turmoil it caused in her life, and the human impact of that accusation, especially, was incredibly jarring,” Stockton said of Freeman.Very few on the right, of course, are watching these hearings as closely at Stockton, but he said he’s hearing from some people who are following them. “I think the loudest voices are doing their best to divert attention and not focus on it all,” he said. “There are tons of conservatives who private message me, who don’t have large voices, who are paying attention to some degree.” Some of them, he said, are deeply disappointed by what they’re hearing.Perhaps this makes sense. Elite conservatives mostly understood that Trump’s stories about a stolen election were absurd; as one senior Republican official asked The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” But his rank-and-file devotees weren’t all in on the con. Instead, they were the marks.“If there are parts of the population that are totally captive to Trump’s propaganda and cannot be reached by facts and truth, that part of the population will begin to shrink over time,” said Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan. 6 committee and an incorrigible optimist. “It’s certainly not going to grow.”There’s not going to be a big moment when the scales fall from Republican eyes. Too many already see Trump clearly and simply prefer autocrats to Democrats. Even Bowers, who at one hearing described Trump’s acolytes terrorizing his family while his daughter was dying, said he’d vote for Trump again if he’s the nominee. But as the Jan. 6 committee methodically lays out what was, for all its squalor and absurdity, a systematic plan to subvert the 2020 election, it will get marginally harder for Trump to present himself as a defrauded winner rather than the flailing loser he is.That might, in turn, make the prosecution of Trump and his enablers a tiny bit less politically fraught. Getting the truth out won’t guarantee justice. It’s at least a step toward making justice possible.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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      As Midterms Loom, Mark Zuckerberg Shifts Focus Away From Elections

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      Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, made securing the 2020 U.S. election a top priority. He met regularly with an election team, which included more than 300 people from across his company, to prevent misinformation from spreading on the social network. He asked civil rights leaders for advice on upholding voter rights.The core election team at Facebook, which was renamed Meta last year, has since been dispersed. Roughly 60 people are now focused primarily on elections, while others split their time on other projects. They meet with another executive, not Mr. Zuckerberg. And the chief executive has not talked recently with civil rights groups, even as some have asked him to pay more attention to the midterm elections in November.Safeguarding elections is no longer Mr. Zuckerberg’s top concern, said four Meta employees with knowledge of the situation. Instead, he is focused on transforming his company into a provider of the immersive world of the metaverse, which he sees as the next frontier of growth, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly.The shift in emphasis at Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, could have far-reaching consequences as faith in the U.S. electoral system reaches a brittle point. The hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riots have underlined how precarious elections can be. And dozens of political candidates are running this November on the false premise that former President Donald J. Trump was robbed of the 2020 election, with social media platforms continuing to be a key way to reach American voters.Election misinformation remains rampant online. This month, “2000 Mules,” a film that falsely claims the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump, was widely shared on Facebook and Instagram, garnering more than 430,000 interactions, according to an analysis by The New York Times. In posts about the film, commenters said they expected election fraud this year and warned against using mail-in voting and electronic voting machines.Voters casting their ballots in Portland, Maine, this month.Jodi Hilton for The New York TimesOther social media companies have also pulled back some of their focus on elections. Twitter, which stopped labeling and removing election misinformation in March 2021, has been preoccupied with its $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, three employees with knowledge of the situation said. Mr. Musk has suggested he wants fewer rules about what can and cannot be posted on the service.“Companies should be growing their efforts to get prepared to protect the integrity of elections for the next few years, not pulling back,” said Katie Harbath, chief executive of the consulting firm Anchor Change, who formerly managed election policy at Meta. “Many issues, including candidates pushing that the 2020 election was fraudulent, remain and we don’t know how they are handling those.”Meta, which along with Twitter barred Mr. Trump from its platforms after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has worked over the years to limit political falsehoods on its sites. Tom Reynolds, a Meta spokesman, said the company had “taken a comprehensive approach to how elections play out on our platforms since before the U.S. 2020 elections and through the dozens of global elections since then.”Mr. Reynolds disputed that there were 60 people focused on the integrity of elections. He said Meta has hundreds of people across more than 40 teams focused on election work. With each election, he said, the company was “building teams and technologies and developing partnerships to take down manipulation campaigns, limit the spread of misinformation and maintain industry-leading transparency around political ads and pages.”Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said the company was continuing “our efforts to protect the integrity of election conversation and keep the public informed on our approach.” For the midterms, Twitter has labeled the accounts of political candidates and provided information boxes on how to vote in local elections.How Meta and Twitter treat elections has implications beyond the United States, given the global nature of their platforms. In Brazil, which is holding a general election in October, President Jair Bolsonaro has recently raised doubts about the country’s electoral process. Latvia, Bosnia and Slovenia are also holding elections in October.“People in the U.S. are almost certainly getting the Rolls-Royce treatment when it comes to any integrity on any platform, especially for U.S. elections,” said Sahar Massachi, the executive director of the think tank Integrity Institute and a former Facebook employee. “And so however bad it is here, think about how much worse it is everywhere else.”Facebook’s role in potentially distorting elections became evident after 2016, when Russian operatives used the site to spread inflammatory content and divide American voters in the U.S. presidential election. In 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg testified before Congress that election security was his top priority.“The most important thing I care about right now is making sure no one interferes in the various 2018 elections around the world,” he said.The social network has since become efficient at removing foreign efforts to spread disinformation in the United States, election experts said. But Facebook and Instagram still struggle with conspiracy theories and other political lies on their sites, they said.In November 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg hosted a dinner at his home for civil rights leaders and held phone and Zoom conference calls with them, promising to make election integrity a main focus.He also met regularly with an election team. More than 300 employees from various product and engineering teams were asked to build new systems to detect and remove misinformation. Facebook also moved aggressively to eliminate toxic content, banning QAnon conspiracy theory posts and groups in October 2020.Around the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated $400 million to local governments to fund poll workers, pay for rental fees for polling places, provide personal protective equipment and other administrative costs.The week before the November 2020 election, Meta also froze all political advertising to limit the spread of falsehoods.But while there were successes — the company kept foreign election interference off the platform — it struggled with how to handle Mr. Trump, who used his Facebook account to amplify false claims of voter fraud. After the Jan. 6 riot, Facebook barred Mr. Trump from posting. He is eligible for reinstatement in January 2023.Last year, Frances Haugen, a Facebook employee-turned-whistle-blower, filed complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission accusing the company of removing election safety features too soon after the 2020 election. Facebook prioritized growth and engagement over security, she said.In October, Mr. Zuckerberg announced Facebook would focus on the metaverse. The company has restructured, with more resources devoted to developing the online world.The team working on elections now meets regularly with Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs.Christopher Furlong/Getty ImagesMeta also retooled its election team. Now the number of employees whose job is to focus solely on elections is approximately 60, down from over 300 in 2020, according to employees. Hundreds of others participate in meetings about elections and are part of cross-functional teams, where they work on other issues. Divisions that build virtual reality software, a key component of the metaverse, have expanded.What Is the Metaverse, and Why Does It Matter?Card 1 of 5The origins. More

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      Judge Allows Dominion’s Defamation Suit to Include Fox Corporation

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      The decision broadens the possible legal exposure to the highest ranks of the Fox media empire.A judge presiding in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems ruled this week that the cable channel’s parent company, Fox Corporation, can be included in the suit, broadening the possible legal exposure to the highest ranks of the Fox media empire.Dominion had argued that Fox Corporation should also be part of the litigation because its two most senior executives, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, played “a direct role in participating in, approving and controlling” statements that fed false perceptions of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.In a decision, Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court said Dominion had “adequately pleaded” facts supporting its claim that Fox Corporation was “directly liable” for what Fox News put on the air. He reasoned that the Murdochs were widely known to have a hand in shaping Fox News coverage. Judge Davis also said it was reasonable to infer that Fox Corporation had “participated in the creation and publication of Fox News’s defamatory statements.”Dominion’s suit against Fox News, filed in March 2021 in Delaware, where both companies are incorporated, seeks at least $1.6 billion in damages.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”Fox News and its parent company have denied that the statements in question were defamatory in the first place, arguing that what was said on Fox broadcasts about Dominion was, in part, protected expressions of opinion. Included were various unsubstantiated allegations from Fox News hosts and guests that Dominion was somehow complicit in a conspiracy to steal votes from former President Donald J. Trump.Separately, Judge Davis denied a claim from Dominion to extend its suit to Fox Broadcasting, the television and entertainment division of the Fox brand that is home to shows including “MasterChef” and “The Simpsons.”Fox News moved to dismiss the Dominion suit late last year, but that motion was rejected.The lawsuit is in the discovery phase, the process through which Dominion lawyers are combing through internal Fox communications in search of evidence. Dominion’s lawyers will need to prove that people at the network acted with “actual malice,” meaning they either knew the allegations against Dominion were false or they recklessly disregarded facts that would have shown them to be false. More