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      How a Bipartisan Senate Group Addressed a Flaw Exposed by Jan. 6

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      Democrats and Republicans managed to come together to update the archaic Electoral Count Act after they recognized it could again be abused to subvert the presidential vote.WASHINGTON — Like most members of Congress, Senator Susan Collins was rocked by the events of Jan. 6, 2021, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and violently disrupted the ceremonial tally of presidential electoral votes.Almost exactly a year later, Ms. Collins, Republican of Maine, happened upon an article by a prominent Republican election law expert proposing changes in the way Congress counted electoral votes, in the hopes of preventing a recurrence. She headed into the regular private weekly party luncheon last Jan. 4 and spontaneously raised the idea of overhauling the antiquated 135-year-old law, the Electoral Count Act.She found a ready audience among some fellow Republicans who recognized the threat.“Our system was clearly at risk,” Ms. Collins said of the prospect that ambiguities in the archaic law could again be exploited to try to overturn a presidential election and halt the peaceful transfer of power.There was one significant problem. Senate Democrats had election-related goals of their own aimed at countering attempts at voter suppression in some Republican-led states. They saw the new proposal as a subterfuge intended to sabotage their much broader legislation.As word got out that Ms. Collins, with early encouragement from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and always a figure of suspicion among Democrats, was pursuing changes in the electoral count law, the Senate’s top Democrat objected sharply.“The McConnell plan, that’s what it is, is unacceptable, unacceptably insufficient and even offensive,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said as he blistered the “cynical” idea on the Senate floor on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault. “Score keeping matters little if the game is rigged.”Now, another year later, Congress is poised to approve changes to the law in an effort to better secure the presidential election system that was severely tested when President Donald J. Trump and his supporters sought to exploit uncertainty in the law to hold on to power.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.It took the efforts of a bipartisan group of 15 senators, months of intense negotiations, the endorsement of outside experts aligned with both parties and a stark realization that the outdated law could again be misused if changes weren’t made. And the results the next time could be worse.“It has been lying there like unexploded ordnance since 1887,” said Bob Bauer, an election law specialist who had served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama, referring to the existing law. “It just cried out for attention.”It also required an acceptance by Democrats that the law needed to be strengthened even if they could not obtain much broader voter protections they were pursuing. Democrats failed in that push because of Republican resistance and a refusal by two Democrats to eliminate the filibuster to impose the voting changes.Congress is poised to approve changes to the law in an effort to assure that it cannot be used to subvert the counting of electoral votes.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“It finally got down to what can we do truly to address this horrific insurrection,” said Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Ms. Collins’s initial bipartisan partner in the effort. “How do we prevent this from ever happening again? And that’s really how we got down to the basics.”Under the legislation, which was deemed urgent enough to be added to the huge year-end spending bill now heading toward final approval, the role of the vice president in overseeing the quadrennial counting is spelled out as strictly ceremonial. That provision was a response to Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful effort to convince Vice President Mike Pence that the law gave him the power to reject electoral votes from some states and block or delay certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election.The new legislation also raises the threshold for objecting to a state’s electoral votes to one-fifth of both the House and Senate. Until now, just one House member and one senator could force the House and the Senate to consider objections, and members of both parties have raised objections over the years with little to no evidence to back them up. The legislation also seeks to prevent competing slates of electors from being presented to Congress.The article that spurred Ms. Collins was written by Ben Ginsberg, a well-known Republican election lawyer who served as counsel to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush and was deeply involved in the Florida recount.He argued in National Review that Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself should want the law rewritten because the Jan. 6 assault had essentially provided a “blueprint” for future efforts to undermine an election, noting that in 2024 a Democratic vice president would be presiding over the counting of the ballots.After opening the door to a potential rewrite, Ms. Collins immediately began meeting with a core group of senators who are typically part of bipartisan Senate efforts, including Mr. Manchin, the Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona (now an independent), and the Republicans Mitt Romney of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.The group quickly expanded to include the Republicans Todd Young of Indiana, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, along with two more Democrats, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Warner of Virginia.As their work was proceeding behind the scenes, Democrats were pushing ahead with an ambitious plan to counter what they saw as a pervasive effort in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after an expansion of vote-by-mail efforts and other pandemic-releated changes led to Democratic victories in 2020. Democrats said the state voting law changes were aimed mainly at minorities, and President Biden infuriated Republicans when he referred to the new laws as “Jim Crow 2.0.”The Democratic legislation encountered united Republican opposition in the Senate and died after Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema refused to support a change in Senate rules to gut the filibuster. Mr. Manchin said he sought to incorporate some of the more general electoral provisions in the rewrite of the electoral count law but was rebuffed by Republicans.Ms. Collins said the bipartisan group needed to remain focused on the electoral count or risk a shattering of the coalition.“If we got sidetracked and started re-litigating the Voting Rights Act, we would lose the Republican support, and the effort would go nowhere,” she said in an interview. “And an opportunity to really make a difference in future presidential elections would be lost.”With Democrats unhappy about the fate of their broader bill, Ms. Shaheen encouraged Ms. Collins to add more Democrats to the group to increase chances that Democrats could ultimately be persuaded to back it. Senators Christopher S. Murphy of Connecticut and Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, both Democrats, came aboard as Ms. Collins said she realized she needed to broaden the ideological base “beyond the usual suspects.”Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said he unsuccessfully sought to incorporate some of the more general voting rights provisions favored by his party in the rewrite of the electoral count law.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMs. Shaheen said she suggested “that having them involved from the beginning in the discussion would be very helpful in persuading the rest of the Democratic caucus that this was a serious effort and we needed to do this even though we couldn’t get some of the changes people wanted.”Members of the bipartisan group also kept in regular contact with the leaders of the Rules Committee, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the Democrat who leads the panel, and Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, its top Republican, to ease the way for the panel’s review of the legislation and avoid criticism they were operating outside of normal channels.Ms. Collins also briefed top White House officials on the legislation to assure them it was both in good faith and a necessary effort. And the group enlisted respected legal experts like Mr. Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a senior lawyer in the administration of George W. Bush, to advise the lawmakers and publicly back the legislation.The Rules Committee ultimately voted 14 to 1 on Sept. 27 to send the legislation to the floor with just Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, objecting and Mr. McConnell voting in favor. Even Mr. Schumer got on board despite his early skepticism.“I worked to get this legislation included in the omnibus because we must prevent the electoral count process from being used as a trigger point for insurrection again,” said Ms. Klobuchar, adding that Senate approval means “we are one step closer to protecting our country from the chaos we saw on Jan. 6.” More

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      The Last Lesson of the Jan. 6 Committee

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      The hearings of the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol presented a careful, convincing and disturbing account of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. They provided an abundance of detail about what we’ve long known: that Mr. Trump and his allies engaged not only in an assault on Congress, but on democracy itself.The work done by the committee over the past 18 months may be even more important than its report, which is expected to be released Thursday. The long months of scouring investigation and the carefully staged hearings, in which the evidence of Mr. Trump’s malfeasance was presented to the public, were critical elements in the nation’s full understanding of the attack on the Capitol. Through the work of these hearings, Congress showed that the best possible answer to political violence lay in the tools that were right at hand: the rule of law, checks and balances, testimony given under oath and the careful process of bureaucracy.Like a slow-motion replay, the committee’s work also gave Americans a second chance to comprehend the enormity of what transpired on Jan. 6. It seems plausible, as some members of the panel have asserted, that the hearings made protecting democracy a significant issue in the midterm elections and helped to persuade voters to reject some election deniers who ran for state offices. The sustained attention on Mr. Trump’s conduct in his final days in office is also valuable as he mounts a renewed campaign for the presidency. And the hearings focused the attention of the public and policymakers on the extremist groups that participated in the attack on the Capitol and that pose a threat of renewed violence.Congressional hearings are often filled with the distraction of partisan squabbling, grandstanding and detours into tangential subjects. The Jan. 6 committee was different, and the American people were better off for it. Mr. Trump and others refused to answer subpoenas from the committee, which would have given them an opportunity to answer questions and make their case. Their refusal is unfortunate; they deserve the chance to defend themselves and present their account of the facts, and Americans deserve the chance to hear from them. They’re still due that chance, and Mr. Trump may still have his say in a court of law.The seven Democrats and two Republicans who served on the committee captured the attention of Americans who may not have been sufficiently informed or alarmed about Mr. Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6 to take notice. The two Republicans on the committee, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, deserve particular credit for defying their own party to participate. Their presence, and the damning testimony delivered by Mr. Trump’s own aides and allies, conveyed the message that some things are necessarily more important than loyalty to a political party.Americans have also learned, thanks to these hearings, exactly how close this country came to even greater tragedies. Rioters came within 40 feet of Vice President Mike Pence. A Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, in late December 2020 sought to send a letter — based on lies — to officials in Georgia and potentially several other key states that warned of election irregularities and called for a special legislative session to select alternate slates of presidential electors.The lesson, in part, is that our democracy is inescapably fragile. It requires Americans, and those who serve them as elected officials and in law enforcement, to act in good faith. The committee rightly spent many hours of its work documenting the actions of all those local, state and federal officials who defied Mr. Trump’s demands and acted in many different ways to protect democracy.The dangers remain clear and present, so this work is not complete. House Republicans will be in the majority come January, including many who sought to overturn President Biden’s victory, and some who encouraged the rioters.Political violence is on the rise, especially among right-wing extremists.And Mr. Trump is running for president again on a platform of his grievances, still insistent that he did not lose the last election, still refusing to accept the rule of law. He is, in fact, escalating his rhetoric.The nation needs to respond to these threats. Congress needs to pass the reforms to the electoral process that are included in the year-end omnibus spending bill. Law enforcement can do more to crack down on extremist violence. Voters should reject Mr. Trump at the polls.As the select committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, emphasized at its final hearing on Monday, the government should continue to pursue those responsible for the Jan. 6 attack and to hold them accountable.More than 900 people already have been charged with crimes related to the attack on the Capitol, and several hundred of those have either been convicted or pleaded guilty. Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the extremist Oath Keepers group, was convicted of seditious conspiracy in November. Jury selection has begun in the federal trial of Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, another extremist group, who faces similar charges.The committee called upon the Justice Department to also bring criminal charges against Mr. Trump and the lawyer John Eastman, for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack. The Justice Department is still engaged in its own investigation. As we wrote in August, if there is sufficient evidence to establish Mr. Trump’s guilt on a serious charge in a court of law, then he should be charged and tried; the same goes for all of the others whom the committee referred to the Justice Department.Mr. Thompson, urging action on all these fronts, said that as a nation, “We remain in strange and uncharted waters.” Yet the hearings also underscored that the country is better off with clarity and truth.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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      George Santos and how Opposition Research Really Works

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      One of the worst things that can happen to a politician is that someone will write about you in the newspaper. The most recent example: On Monday, The New York Times reported that Representative-elect George Santos appears to have misrepresented staggeringly large portions of his résumé.Mr. Santos, who is due to be sworn in next month to represent a New York district that includes parts of Long Island and Queens, appears to have made false claims about his education, employment history and the operation of an animal rescue charity. He talked on Twitter about being a landlord but does not appear to own property in New York City or Nassau County, according to the Times reporters’ review of property records and financial disclosures. He even claimed four of his employees died in the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., but Times reporters could not find any public connections between any of the victims and his reported companies. (His lawyer said that the reporters “are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”)This pattern of apparent deception raises serious questions about his sudden possession of enough wealth to self-fund a campaign.But the even bigger question is: How did no one catch this until now? Didn’t anyone do any opposition research on this guy? Didn’t reporters look into him before the election? What happened here?It will probably be impossible to determine definitively. But my answer is that if you look closely, Democrats did do the basic outlines of this opposition research, just not enough for the full picture to come into view. In the end, many people missed the biggest story about him: that he may be a serial fabulist. Instead, Democrats emphasized a different story about Mr. Santos, for reasons that make a lot of sense.To lay my cards on the table: I was not involved in this race, nor did I do political work at any level in New York this past cycle. But I do have 12-odd years of experience doing opposition research for Democrats, so hopefully I am qualified to offer a response.Let’s go through the opposition research process. A junior researcher is tasked to write a “book” — a comprehensive report laying out a buffet of opposition research attacks on a given opponent. Then a senior researcher oversees and edits the book. As the Democratic candidate was not chosen until Aug. 23 in a district Democrats won comfortably in 2020, this process probably started late and was rushed.Think back to that animal-rescue nonprofit, which reportedly was not registered as a charity. How did Mr. Santos get away with that unnoticed? He didn’t, exactly. We have a copy of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s research book on Mr. Santos, polished for public consumption and posted online in August. Sure enough, we see that Mr. Santos’s charity is documented as unfindable in an I.R.S. database.Documented, too, are evictions during the 2010s and instances of undisclosed personal finances that appear in the Times story. They’re in small sections interspersed through a nearly 90-page document, yet they’re there. Maybe given more time the researchers could have gone further to confirm the nonprofit’s lack of state filings or could have contacted his former landlords.What about Mr. Santos’s apparently lying about his employers and education? The Times reported that Baruch College could not confirm that he graduated in the year he claimed, and companies he has listed, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, found no record of his employment. Often, opposition research is the dark art of searching databases and copying and pasting information so you can write prompts for reporters. You’d be shocked to know what a 20-something given enough time and direction can find out about a person. But oppo researchers are not private investigators, and it’s helpful to consider their sources. During their work, a researcher may notice there’s not a single piece of evidence outside of the candidate’s own claims about their history.So how do you verify? There are sources like yearbooks and services used by employers for education checks, or you can always try asking politely. Employers and universities are under no requirement to share this information with anyone who calls — including a random person asking for the sake of political research. (Though I stress: The odds are better than you think if you ask.) An alternative solution is to bug newspaper reporters to ask those questions and hope their paper’s reputation compels an answer.Reporters asking questions is what happened to Mr. Santos, as employers and schools spoke with The New York Times. Whether anyone else tried to this extent before, we don’t know. Certainly this story shows why researchers — and reporters — should kick the tires on even small claims by a candidate.Let’s return to the research process: After a book is completed, communications staff members, campaign officials and consultants are briefed on the best hits the researchers could find for pitching to reporters and for advertising purposes. We can see one outcome of those briefings in a research-packed news release from the D.C.C.C. that blasted Mr. Santos as a “shady Wall Street bro.” Specifically, it highlights the absence of the nonprofit in the I.R.S. database and his previously undisclosed personal finances. It’s not the exact story, but months ago, a Democratic operative had the thought to call him “untrustworthy.”Then what happened? The D.C.C.C. research department probably moved on to the next project. This year, as they do every two years, Democrats competed in hundreds of House races. The junior staff member may even be moved to a position at a technically distinct division and be legally unable to communicate with his or her former co-workers. That’s how some lines of inquiries never progress beyond PDF files.Gently, however, I would suggest that the rest of the prepared Democratic research is quite compelling. Mr. Santos claimed he was at the Ellipse at the Stop the Steal rally in Washington, claimed in a video captured by trackers to have assisted with legal fees for Capitol rioters and said he supported a national abortion ban. Heavy stuff! That’s along with your standard politically toxic Republican agenda of cutting taxes for the rich while pursuing some form of partial privatization for Social Security.We’re waiting for the final data, but Republicans probably carried this New York district for governor and senator. And that’s despite Senator Chuck Schumer’s spending $41 million to his opponent’s $545,000 statewide. Perhaps a stronger attack on Mr. Santos as a possible fraud would have allowed his Democratic opponent to escape such gravity.Could Mr. Santos’s opponent and Democratic operatives have pursued this story harder and found out much more? I can imagine why that didn’t happen: We’re talking about what appeared to be résumé embellishment, evictions and legal liabilities. These are not always shocking things on their own in politics; it’s the extent of Mr. Santos’s apparent false claims that’s highly unusual.The message Democrats chose instead whiffed across New York, but it took the party to a historically strong midterm cycle nationally. When the only thing you don’t get more of on a campaign is time, what are you going to spend it talking about?Tyson Brody is a research and communications consultant who has worked for Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.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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      Gods Don’t Bleed. Trump is Bleeding.

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      I wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who liked him, which meant that his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only did not damage him, they added to his legend.The folk hero is transcendent. He defies convention and defies gravity — in Trump’s case, political and cultural gravity. He overcomes the impossible, wins the improbable, evades authority.He was a classic trickster figure, common in folklore.For instance, for a Black child growing up in the American South, Stack-O-Lee (or, among other variations, Stagger Lee, as we pronounced it) was a folk hero. “Stack” Lee Shelton was a Black man, a pimp, who in 1895 shot another man dead for snatching his hat. The story became the subject of so-called murder ballads. Shelton bolstered his legend when, after being released from prison, he killed another man during a robbery.This man, this figure, who negotiated the space between slavery and freedom, between criminal and hero, “came to personify the collective feeling of blacks at the bottom of society, and it was in this sense that Stagolee became a symbol of the Black community,” as Cecil Brown wrote in his book “Stagolee Shot Billy.”Writing in Mother Jones in 2011, Joe Kloc described how Stack-O-Lee became a hero in Southern Black society by unapologetically breaking its rules. The murders he committed “only serve to illustrate the injustices of southern society,” Kloc wrote. “For all the myth surrounding him, there is something very rational about Stack-O-Lee’s character: Why follow some of society’s rules when so many others work against you?”This is why I so instinctively understood Trump’s appeal and heroizing.Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.But things have changed.Trump’s announcement of a third run for the White House landed with a thud. High-profile Republicans have refused to sign on as early endorsers. Trump himself is cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, having not held a single public campaign event since his announcement. In fact, he has been reduced to the low and laughable position of personally hawking digital trading cards of himself. (Trump has always seen his die-hard supporters as customers to whom he could sell a product, whether a candidacy or a card.)And a recent poll showed that Republican and Republican-leaning voters, at least at this point, prefer Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to Trump by double digits.So, what happened? In short, God bled. And once you see God bleed, you can no longer believe that someone is God.It is impossible to overstate how damaging the results of the midterms were, not just to Republicans, but to Trump himself.For years, Trump had been able to blame losses or defeats on other people, or even recast them as victories.Even though the Robert Mueller report was damning in many ways and went out of its way not to exonerate Trump, the fact that no charges were brought against Trump left him with the opening to claim total vindication.He wasn’t disgraced as much as a victim of a politically motivated plot. Impeachment, he told his supporters, driven by my political enemies, had twice failed to remove me. He wasn’t the most flawed president, but the most resilient.When Trump lost in 2020, he blamed corruption and a stolen election. That, of course, was another lie. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Nevertheless, Republican state legislatures across the country used Trump’s election fraud lie as a rationale to “fix” election systems that weren’t broken, to implement even more oppressive voting restrictions.But there was an unintended consequence: By boasting about making their electoral processes more secure, Republicans took away whatever latitude they had to lie about elections being stolen when they lost.And, in the midterms, they lost some major races, including in states that had implemented the most regressive voter laws, like Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats handily dispatched Trump’s anointed candidates. There was no way to wiggle out of the devastating truth of the cycle: The Trump brand was too tarnished and toxic to win in many battleground states. He was no longer able to defy political gravity.At the same time, Trump’s legal losses are mounting as multiple investigations close in on him. The man many had compared to Teflon is beginning to appear more like fly paper.Where some Republicans once saw invincibility, they now sense weakness and injury. And in the pack mentality of politics, this is the moment that they are most likely to turn on him.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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      Why No One in Politics Wants to Talk About the Sam Bankman-Fried Scandal

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      The fallout from the crypto controversy is widely spread — and it has hit both parties.Back in May, months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange imploded seemingly overnight, he suggested that he might be willing to spend as much as $1 billion in political donations during the 2024 presidential election.It was an astronomical sum to throw around — Bankman-Fried later called it “a dumb quote on my part” — but at the time, the crypto kingpin was still an object of curiosity rather than ridicule.Billboards with his frizzy-haired visage popped up in Manhattan; journalists examined his growing political empire and his “schlubby” personal style. Endless articles were written about “effective altruism,” his utilitarian-tinged philanthropic philosophy. At one point, Forbes pegged his net worth as high as $26.5 billion; Fortune ran a cover, cringe-inducing in hindsight, asking, “The Next Warren Buffett?”It’s hard to quickly sum up the extent of the influence operation Bankman-Fried, 30, and his associates built during his meteoric ascent. My colleagues have described it as “a network of political action committees, nonprofits and consulting firms” that “worked to court politicians, regulators and others in the policy orbit.”Last week, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, and a federal grand jury indicted him on eight charges that include wire and securities fraud and money laundering, along with conspiracy to commit those offenses. He has agreed to be extradited to the United States as soon as Wednesday, a decision one of his lawyers said defied “the strongest possible legal advice.” Bankman-Fried has denied wrongdoing.The extraordinary financial scandal has also become a sticky political morass, sucking in dozens of lawmakers and groups. Prosecutors also accused Bankman-Fried last week of defrauding the Federal Election Commission by running what’s known as a straw-donor scheme — making political contributions under someone else’s name.Bankman-Fried’s contributions, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said last week, “were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators when in fact the contributions were funded by Alameda Research,” a hedge fund closely tied to Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, “with stolen customer money.”FTX, under new management, said on Tuesday that it wanted to recoup that money, and is threatening legal action if the cash is not returned voluntarily. It’s not clear how much is considered stolen, but Bankman-Fried and his associates poured at least $70 million into various campaigns over 18 months.In 2022, Bankman-Fried donated about $40 million to various candidates and political committees, overwhelmingly to Democrats. Those donations were “mostly for pandemic prevention,” Bankman-Fried has insisted. But a less lofty aim of his influence-peddling, clearly, was to shape federal regulations in his company’s favor.Before his arrest, Bankman-Fried told Tiffany Fong, a YouTube journalist, that he had also donated about the same amount to Republicans in ways, he suggested, that would not necessarily pop up in federal campaign finance reports.What to Know About the Collapse of FTXCard 1 of 5What is FTX? More

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      An Early Trump Backer’s Message to the Republican Party: Dump Him

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      Tom Marino, one of the first members of Congress to support Trump, now says the G.O.P. “has to do whatever it has to do” to get away from him.The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has always come from the ranks of his own supporters, rather than those who disliked him all along. So it’s significant that one of his earliest backers is coming out swinging against him.In February 2016, when Representative Tom Marino became one of the first Republican members of Congress to endorse Trump, he called the decision “one of my life-changing moments” and hailed the presidential candidate as a fresh voice who was not beholden to Wall Street.At the time, Trump was still locked in a tight nomination battle with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and he was struggling to attract support from elected officials. Marino, a former prosecutor who represented a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just endorse him. He was a loud and proud Trump booster who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.Trump expressed fondness for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chairman of Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania, calling them “thunder and lightning.”As president, Trump tapped Marino to be director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino withdrew after questions about his record on opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019 soon after beginning his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.During this year’s Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania, Marino sharply criticized Trump for refusing to endorse Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now, he is urging his fellow Republicans to move on.“I think the Republican Party has to do whatever it has to do to get away from Trump,” Marino said in an interview. “He certainly, I think, has cost the party losses in this election that we had in November. I’m deeply disappointed in him.”In an unpublished letter that he shared with The New York Times, Marino castigated Trump for “acting like a childish bully” by attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom the former president ripped as “Ron DeSanctimonious” as Republicans began to coalesce around a possible alternative for 2024.To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump would have had to “grow up and act presidential and refrain from calling potential candidates derogatory names.”Trump, he added, “has thrown several people that were close to him under the bus”; “has no idea what loyalty means”; and “severely lacks character and integrity.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“I will not support Trump, in fact, I will campaign against him,” Marino’s letter concluded. “Our country deserves a person who is mature, respects others and is honest to lead our nation.”Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Trump keeps sinkingThe evidence that Trump is getting weaker within the Republican Party is mounting by the day, and Marino’s letter is just the latest indicator.“G.O.P. primary voters are moving,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, nodding to Trump’s worsening poll numbers in hypothetical 2024 matchups. “They are exhausted having to defend his every word and action,” he added, and want “similar policies and fight without all the drama.”Consider the party’s less-than-full-throated reaction to Monday’s big news: the Jan. 6 committee’s call to the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. The panel also issued a damning, 154-page executive summary of its final report, which comes out in full on Wednesday.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary reads. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”Trump responded with typical bluster. “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me,” he posted on Truth Social, “people who love freedom rally around me.”He went on: “It strengthens me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”There are no signs of that so far. As Maggie Haberman writes in assessing the damage wrought both by the former president’s recent actions and by the committee’s investigation, “Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape.”Two possible presidential contenders — former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas — took the position that Trump had acted recklessly on Jan. 6, though they argued that he should not be criminally prosecuted.In the Senate, Trump also didn’t get much political cover on Monday. Only one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has endorsed his presidential bid.“The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told reporters at the Capitol. “Beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.”Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the panel had “interviewed some credible witnesses.” Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while criticizing what she called a “political process,” said that Trump “bears some responsibility” for the riot.And even in the House — which is still very much Trump country — the reaction was well short of thorough, orchestrated pushback.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, perhaps mindful that he needs moderate Republicans to support his bid for speaker just as badly as he needs pro-Trump die-hards, said nothing.McCarthy’s lieutenants dutifully attacked the Jan. 6 panel, but there was no phalanx of pro-Trump surrogates holding court for reporters at the Capitol, no point-by-point rebuttal of the committee’s key findings.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is in charge of Republicans’ message, put out a single tweet calling the Jan. 6 investigation a “partisan charade.” Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, complained that McCarthy hadn’t been allowed to put his allies on the panel, which he boycotted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his first two choices. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia went after “communist” Democrats and attacked Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of just two Republicans on the committee, as “crybaby Adam.”More often, Republicans preferred to change the subject to anything else — the year-end spending bill that many on the right oppose, the recent surge of migrants along the border, Twitter’s handling of articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 or the effects of inflation.Trump appeared on a screen during the hearing of the Jan. 6 committee on Monday. A new poll suggested that the panel’s findings had at least some effect on the midterm elections.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDid the Jan. 6 hearings hurt Trump?Democrats tend to view Republicans’ attitude toward Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, remembering how a good chunk of the party rallied to his side in early 2021 — then eagerly sought his endorsement in 2022.“If the G.O.P. had won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate on the backs of Trump’s candidates, the reaction to these recent troubles would be very, very different,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, wrote Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.What this misses, though, is that the Jan. 6 committee — especially its slickly produced prime-time hearings over the summer, which riveted millions of viewers — does seem to have been at least a minor factor in Republicans’ losses this year.One of the few polls to try to isolate the question came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46 percent of voters in five battleground states said that the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group — 57 percent — said they had been at least some exposure to the hearings.The poll zeroed in on so-called ticket-splitters — Republicans and independents who voted for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9 percent of those ticket-splitters said that Jan. 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number was just 8.5 percent. Those numbers are pretty modest, but every vote counts.When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who worked to defeat election deniers in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role democracy played in the midterms, she was cautious.“I do think we’ve just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denialism and extremism is a loser with swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power,” she said in an email. But it was too soon, she said, to say that American democracy was “out of the woods.”So far, the most potent argument within the base of the Republican Party has not been Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his obsession with the 2020 election cost the G.O.P. crucial seats this year.That could be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that election denial is a political loser.“All that matters is the interpretation,” Sides said. “If that perception takes root, then it really doesn’t matter what the real reason is.”What to readTop lawmakers in Washington unveiled a sprawling spending package that would keep the government open through next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, Emily Cochrane reports. Congress faces a midnight Friday deadline to fund the government or face a shutdown.The House Ways and Means Committee today is considering the release of Trump’s tax returns. Such a move would risk reprisals from Republicans, Alan Rappeport writes.Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries cope with climate change, a figure that falls significantly short of what President Biden promised, Lisa Friedman reports.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Elections

      George Santos Dodges Questions as Democrats Label Him ‘Unfit to Serve’

      by

      Democratic House leaders stopped short of calling for the resignation of Mr. Santos, a Republican, who may have misrepresented himself in his résumé.Representative-elect George Santos on Monday faced a barrage of questions, as well as an uncertain future, after an article in The New York Times revealed that he may have misrepresented key parts of his résumé on the campaign trail.The Times’s report found that Mr. Santos, a Republican whose victory in Long Island and northeast Queens last month helped his party clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, may have misled voters about his college graduation and his purported career on Wall Street and omitted details about his business from financial disclosures forms.House Republicans and state party leaders were largely silent on Monday. But Joseph G. Cairo Jr., the Nassau County Republican chairman, said in a statement that The Times’s reporting raised “serious” issues that he believed Mr. Santos should address.“Every person deserves an opportunity to ‘clear’ his/her name in the face of accusations,” Mr. Cairo said. “I am committed to this principle, and I look forward to the congressman-elect’s responses to the news reports.”Mr. Santos, 34, has declined numerous requests to be interviewed. On Monday evening, he used Twitter to recirculate a short statement that his lawyer, Joseph Murray, had released on Friday, with one small addition. On Monday, Mr. Murray characterized the Times article as a “shotgun blast of attacks,” but did not provide specific criticisms of what he had called The Times’s “defamatory allegations.”The statement was Mr. Santos’s first public acknowledgment of the questions surrounding his background since Sunday night, when — hours after he had been notified of The Times’s plans to publish its findings — Mr. Santos said on Twitter that he enthusiastically backed Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be the next House speaker.Mr. McCarthy has been working to quell an effort by hard-right lawmakers to threaten his bid to become speaker when Republicans take control of the House. He has not addressed Mr. Santos’s remarks or The Times’s reporting. A spokesman did not respond to emails and phone calls asking for an interview.A New U.S. Congress Takes ShapeFollowing the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats maintained control of the Senate while Republicans flipped the House.McCarthy’s Fraught Speaker Bid: Representative Kevin McCarthy has so far been unable to quash a mini-revolt on the right that threatens to imperil his effort to secure the top House job.The G.O.P.’s Fringe: Three incoming congressmen attended a gala that drew white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, raising questions about the influence of extremists on the new Republican-led House.Kyrsten Sinema: The Arizona senator said that she would leave the Democratic Party and register as an independent, just days after the Democrats secured an expanded majority in the Senate.A Looming Clash: Congressional leaders have all but abandoned the idea of acting to raise the debt ceiling before Democrats lose control of the House, punting the issue to a new Congress.Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat of California, questioned on Twitter whether Mr. McCarthy might “strike a corrupt bargain” with Mr. Santos, suggesting that Mr. McCarthy would refrain from taking action against Mr. Santos in exchange for his vote as House speaker.Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who will be the House Democrats’ leader when the next Congress begins in January, said in a statement that Mr. Santos was “woefully unqualified” and “clearly unfit to serve.”But Mr. Jeffries, whose caucus is days away from falling out of power, stopped short of calling for action on the part of Republican leaders, even as some state Democrats pushed for further investigation.Susan Lerner, the executive director of the government reform group Common Cause, called on Mr. Santos to step down and urged the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics and federal prosecutors to investigate.With a razor-thin majority, Republicans have few reasons for challenging or investigating Mr. Santos, and many for defending him. If Mr. Santos were to resign, there is no guarantee that a Republican would win a special election to fill his seat.Mr. Santos, who ran unopposed in his primary this year, was already expected to face a challenging re-election in 2024 in a largely suburban district that, until this year, had recently favored Democrats.Over the course of his campaigns, Mr. Santos claimed to have graduated from Baruch College in 2010 before working at Citigroup and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. But officials at Baruch said they could find no record of his having graduated that year, and representatives from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs could not locate records of his employment.Experts in ethics noted that Mr. Santos’s campaign disclosures revealed little about the source of his fortune, in particular failing to name any client who paid more than $5,000 to his company, the Devolder Organization. Such an omission could be problematic if it were to become clear that he had intentionally avoided disclosing his clientele.Mr. Santos’s candidate disclosures show that he paid himself $750,000 annually, and earned dividends of more than $1 million while running for Congress.There are several avenues by which an ethics investigation could take place within the House of Representatives, but none would be likely to affect Mr. Santos’s ability to assume office in January.Any process would require bipartisan cooperation and would be likely to be lengthy. There is also the question of whether the House would claim jurisdiction over behavior that took place before the subject assumed office, though some recent actions suggest that they might be inclined to take a more expansive approach, if the behavior was campaign-related.Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chair, said that Mr. McCarthy should delay seating Mr. Santos pending an investigation. The state party has been under siege since Democrats underperformed in November, particularly on Long Island, and faced new criticism on Monday over its failure to identify or effectively publicize the inconsistencies in Mr. Santos’s résumé before Election Day.Mr. Jacobs acknowledged that the revelations would have had more impact during the campaign. “The opposition research wasn’t as complete as the Times investigation,” he said, but said that attention would be more appropriately directed at Mr. Santos rather than the party.Several of Mr. Santos’s future constituents said they were shocked and disappointed at the disclosures of his apparent misrepresentations.Andres Thaodopoulos, 36, the owner of a Greek restaurant in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens, said that he did not vote in November, but that he had welcomed Mr. Santos’s promises to fight crime and cut taxes.“I feel disappointed because the people trust our lives to these leaders,” he said.On Monday night, after Mr. Santos posted his lawyer’s statement, Mr. Swalwell criticized it for insufficiently addressing the questions raised by The Times’s story, including a criminal case for check fraud in Brazil that officials there said remained unresolved.Of the 132 words in the statement, Mr. Swalwell said, “not one addresses the mountain of evidence that you’re a wanted international criminal who lied about graduating college and where you worked.”Others pointed to another seeming inaccuracy. In the last sentence of his statement, Mr. Santos’s lawyer closed with a quote he attributed to Winston Churchill: “You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”According to the fact-checking website PolitiFact, the words probably were not said by Churchill. PolitiFact instead attributed the original sentiment to the French writer Victor Hugo.Nate Schweber More

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      in Elections

      How Latinos Voted in Key House Races

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      Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesBoth parties lavished attention on South Texas, where Republicans have made gains. Mayra Flores, a Republican, won a special election this summer, but then lost the Brownsville district. And in a sign of the tossup quality of Latino voters in the midterms, Monica De La Cruz, a Republican, captured the neighboring district. More