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      Lee Zeldin Captures Republican Primary for N.Y. Governor

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      Representative Lee M. Zeldin, a four-term congressman from Long Island, won the Republican primary for governor of New York on Tuesday, fending off a spirited challenge in a four-way race where fealty to conservative values — and Donald J. Trump — proved critical.Mr. Zeldin, 42, will face Gov. Kathy Hochul in November in a contest that Republicans hope will break a two-decade losing streak in statewide races. Ms. Hochul easily won her primary, but has suffered from middling poll numbers in recent months amid voters’ concerns about crime and the economy.Mr. Zeldin was the putative favorite in the primary, having won the backing of state leaders at a convention this winter, held not far from his district.But that imprimatur did not stop three other Republicans from mounting monthslong efforts to gain the nomination via the primary: Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive making his second run for governor; Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani; and Harry Wilson, a corporate turnaround specialist.Each had tried to find a lane to challenge Mr. Zeldin, with Mr. Astorino emphasizing his executive experience, and Mr. Wilson leaning into his economic bona fides. Mr. Giuliani, however, was perhaps the candidate who drew the most attention, a newcomer making his first run for public office, leaning on his father and his experience working for four years in the Trump administration.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying to fend off energetic challenges from two fellow Democrats, while the four-way G.O.P. contest has been playing in part like a referendum on Donald J. Trump.Where the Candidates Stand: Ahead of the primaries for governor on June 28, our political reporters questioned the seven candidates on crime, taxes, abortion and more.Maloney vs. Nadler: New congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats — including New York City’s last remaining Jewish congressman — on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.15 Democrats, 1 Seat: A newly redrawn House district in New York City may be one of the largest and most freewheeling primaries in the nation.Offensive Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.Mr. Zeldin had won about 42 percent of the Republican primary vote, with a little more than 40 percent of the expected vote counted. He was followed by Mr. Giuliani with some 24 percent; 19 percent for Mr. Astorino; and about 14 percent for Mr. Wilson. The race was called by The Associated Press about 90 minutes after the polls had closed.Mr. Giuliani had openly courted the right-wing vote, voicing belief in Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election and promising to emulate the former president, and his father, if elected governor. The primary had little definitive polling, but some surveys had shown Mr. Giuliani running a close second, or even surpassing, Mr. Zeldin in the closing weeks of the campaign.For his part, Mr. Zeldin had also hewed closely to Mr. Trump’s policies when he was president, going so far as to vote to to overturn the results of the 2020 election in key swing states. As a candidate for governor, Mr. Zeldin has somewhat moderated those conservative opinions — voicing skepticism about outlawing abortion in New York, for instance, and giving only muted support to the idea of another Trump candidacy — yet still managed to appeal to the die-hard Republican voters who typically vote in primaries.The resulting general election campaign will still be an uphill climb for Mr. Zeldin, considering that registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by more than two to one in New York. In order to win in November, Mr. Zeldin will need not only to galvanize his base but also to attract moderate swing voters who may be dissatisfied with Democrats, including President Biden and Ms. Hochul.No Republican has been elected governor in the state since George Pataki defeated Carl McCall, a Democrat, and a billionaire third-party candidate, Tom Golisano, in 2002. The three most recent contests were easily won by Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who served until his resignation last August.Mr. Zeldin, who is married with twin daughters, has since 2015 represented the eastern part of Long Island, encompassing a mix of suburban districts that could be critical in a general election. In 2021, Democrat-backed changes to bail laws, for instance, were potent issues for Republicans on Long Island, leading to a surge of wins in elections in Nassau County, adjacent to Mr. Zeldin’s district.A precocious legal student — he became a lawyer at 23 — Mr. Zeldin also served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer and prosecutor, as well as being deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne in 2006. He still serves in the Army Reserve.His stump speech has included both a raft of policy plans — including allowing fracking, cutting taxes and fighting crime — and a call to arms for his party.“I’m not in this race to win a primary,” Mr. Zeldin said, in a recent interview. “I’m in this race to win in November.” More

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      Republican Yesli Vega Falsely Suggests Rape Victims Are Unlikely to Get Pregnant

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      A Republican nominee in a closely watched House race in Virginia made bizarre and false comments about rape victims, saying in leaked audio recordings that she wouldn’t be surprised if a woman’s body prevents pregnancies from rape because “it’s not something that’s happening organically,” and that the rapist is doing it “quickly.”The nominee, Yesli Vega, a supervisor and sheriff’s deputy in Prince William County, made the remarks at a campaign stop last month in Stafford County, according to Axios, which published the audio recordings on Monday.The person Ms. Vega is speaking with in the two clips, which together run about a minute long, is not identified and Axios did not reveal the source of the audio.In a statement, Ms. Vega did not dispute the authenticity of the recordings, but said: “As a mother of two children, yes I’m fully aware of how women get pregnant.”The first clip indicates Ms. Vega was speaking in the context of the debate about abortion, as she can be heard saying: “The left will say, ‘What about in cases of rape or incest?’”Ms. Vega cited her experience as a police officer, saying that she had “worked one case” since 2011 “where as a result of rape the young woman became pregnant.”In the second clip, after the unidentified woman said she heard that it is “harder for a woman to get pregnant if she’s been raped,” Ms. Vega replied: “Well maybe, because there’s so much going on in the body, I don’t know. I haven’t, haven’t, you know, seen any studies but if I’m processing what you’re saying it wouldn’t surprise me, because it’s not something that’s happening organically, right? It’s forcing it.”After the unidentified woman said the body “shuts down,” Ms. Vega replied: “Yeah, yeah, and then the individual, the male, is doing it as quickly, it’s not like, you know, and so I can see why maybe there’s truth to that.”Ms. Vega’s statement did not say directly whether she stood by her comments. “Liberals are desperate to distract from their failed agenda,” the statement reads. She also said her political opponents “would rather lie and twist the truth” than explain their stance on abortion.Her campaign did not explain what “lie” her comment was referring to.Ms. Vega won a June 21 Republican primary to take on the Democratic incumbent Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District, a newly drawn, Democratic-leaning district. Ms. Spanberger supports abortion rights.On Twitter, Ms. Spanberger called Ms. Vega’s comments “extreme and ignorant” and “devoid of truth.”Ms. Vega’s recorded comments are similar to remarks made in August 2012 by Representative Todd Akin, who, as the Republican Senate nominee in Missouri, said pregnancy from rape is “really rare” because, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”Leading Republicans called on Mr. Akin to drop out of the race, which he rebuffed. He went on to lose the race to the Democratic incumbent, Senator Claire McCaskill, by nearly 16 percentage points. More

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      Under Court’s Shadow, N.Y. Governor Candidates Lob Final Pitches

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      Rulings on abortion and guns shape the final weekend of campaigning before Tuesday’s primary.A pair of seismic rulings by the Supreme Court jolted the race for governor of New York on Sunday, as Democrats and Republicans made final pitches to an electorate that found itself at the center of renewed national debates over guns and abortion rights.All three Democratic candidates for governor fanned out Sunday morning to Black churches in Harlem and Queens, Manhattan’s Pride March and street corners across the city to denounce the rulings and promise an aggressive response.“We’re going to pass a law that’s going to say, you can’t bring a weapon into this church on a Sunday,” Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democratic front-runner, assured congregants at Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral of New York in Jamaica, Queens.“I don’t want those guns on subways, either,” she added. “I don’t want them in playgrounds. I don’t want them near schools.”The Republican candidates, who mostly lauded both rulings, generally stuck to other messages with broad appeal to a state where both abortion rights and gun control are popular — attacking Ms. Hochul for New York’s rising inflation and elevated crime rates.But in at least one episode, the abortion issue was hard to avoid. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, said that he was slapped in the back by a grocery store employee referencing abortion on Sunday afternoon while he was campaigning for his son, Andrew, on Staten Island.“The one thing he said that was political was ‘you’re going to kill women, you’re going to kill women,’” said Mr. Giuliani, who said he understood the remark to be a reference to the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade on Friday.The police, who did not confirm the abortion remark, said a suspect was in custody but had not been charged. The younger Mr. Giuliani was not on hand.Equal parts exuberance and frustration, the final pitches roughly hewed the battle lines that were drawn months ago in races that have been punctuated by violent tragedies — like the racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket in May — and buffeted by quality-of-life concerns.Wendy Dominski of Youngstown, N.Y., left, exchanged a blown kiss with Andrew Giuliani as he arrived at Lebanon Valley Speedway in New Lebanon, N.Y.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesOnly this time, the fights played out in the shadow of the Supreme Court decisions issued in recent days on abortion rights and New York’s ability to regulate firearms. The rulings have injected a fresh dynamic into the races and appear to have given Democrats a new sense of urgency.Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female governor, put both rulings at the center of her weekend hopscotch across the city, highlighting her decisions to spend $35 million to aid abortion access and call lawmakers back to Albany next week for a special legislative session to address the justices’ decision to overturn a 100-year-old New York law limiting the ability to carry concealed weapons.Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, the governor raced to a protest in Manhattan’s Union Square, promising thousands of New Yorkers that New York would be a “safe harbor” for abortion under her leadership.In a show of her standing with the state’s Democratic establishment, Ms. Hochul and her running mate, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, also trotted out powerful Democratic surrogates. Mayor Eric Adams campaigned with them in Brooklyn on Saturday, and Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the chairman of the Queens Democratic Party who has prodded her to put together a more diverse campaign, accompanied her to church on Sunday.“I’m not telling you who to vote for,” Ms. Hochul teased in Jamaica. “You’re not supposed to do that in church.”Some voters said they were already impressed.“Thus far, I’ve been happy with what she’s done,” said Shirley Gist, a 74-year-old retired speech pathologist who voted early for Ms. Hochul on Saturday. “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”Governor Hochul campaigned at the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral of New York in Queens on Sunday.Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesJumaane D. Williams, New York City’s left-leaning public advocate, and Representative Thomas R. Suozzi, who is running to Ms. Hochul’s right, did their best at a Sunday appearance at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to convince the uncommitted of just the opposite.“I’m a common-sense Democrat. I’m tired of far left, and I’m tired of crazy right,” Mr. Suozzi said in remarks where he tied himself to Mr. Adams’s crime-fighting plans and pledged to cut taxes and improve public education. He knocked Ms. Hochul for accepting support from the National Rifle Association in past campaigns — an affiliation she has since disavowed.Mr. Williams did not explicitly address the Supreme Court decisions but laid blame nonetheless at the feet of Democratic power structure.“I have to be clear, Democratic leadership has failed this time,” he said. “They failed to act.”Still, it was far from clear that the attacks would be enough to turn the tide against Ms. Hochul, who is spending millions of dollars more in advertising than either primary opponent and holds a large lead in public polls. In fact, some Democrats predicted that backlash to the Supreme Court rulings would only help Ms. Hochul, a moderate from Buffalo who only took office last summer.“What can the two Democratic challengers do?” said former Gov. David A. Paterson. “They can’t be against it, so they have to kind of sit and watch.”He predicted a comfortable win for Ms. Hochul: “When people are embattled, they tend to vote more pragmatically,” he said.Democrats will also decide on a candidate for lieutenant governor on Tuesday. Mr. Delgado has ample institutional support, but he faces a pair of spirited challenges from Ana María Archila, a progressive activist aligned with Mr. Williams, and Diana Reyna, a more moderate Democrat running with Mr. Suozzi.Jumaane Williams, the New York City public advocate, said Democratic leadership has failed.Craig Ruttle/Associated PressThe winner will face Alison Esposito, a Republican and longtime New York City police officer.The Republican race for governor has been considerably more lively — full of name-calling, increasing disdain and sharper policy differences between the candidates. But with scant public polling available and most of the candidates still struggling to establish name recognition with primary voters, even the state’s most-connected Republicans were scratching their heads.“I have no idea how this turns out,” said John J. Faso, a former Republican congressman and the party’s 2006 nominee for governor.With Mr. Giuliani and Harry Wilson nipping at his heels, Representative Lee Zeldin, the presumptive front-runner backed by the State Republican Party, spent the weekend touring upstate New York in a campaign bus trying to shore up support in regions that typically sway his party’s primary.“Everybody’s hitting their breaking point right now,” Mr. Zeldin told a small crowd of about three dozen who gathered in an industrial park outside of Albany. He promised to rehire people who had been fired for refusing to be vaccinated, and to fire the Manhattan district attorney, who has become a punching bag for Republicans.Another candidate, Rob Astorino, spent Sunday shaking hands with potential voters on the boardwalk in Long Beach on Long Island.Mr. Wilson, a moderate who favors abortion rights and has positioned himself as a centrist outsider, has done relatively little in person campaigning. But he has blanketed the airwaves with more than $10 million worth of advertisements filleting Mr. Zeldin as a flip-flopping political insider.Near Albany, an entirely different message was being delivered by Andrew Giuliani, who spent Saturday night spinning laps around the Lebanon Valley Speedway in a Ram pickup emblazoned with his face. He gleefully tied himself to his former boss, Donald J. Trump: “You like that guy, right?”Though Mr. Giuliani, 36, is an outspoken critic of abortion and proponent of firearms, he spent much of his three hours at the speedway Saturday night reminding voters of his MAGA credentials.The cheers that rose from the crowd suggested he was among friends.Wearing an American flag wrap over a tank top, Wendy Dominski, 52, a retired nurse who drove five hours from Youngstown, N.Y., to volunteer for the event, said the other Republicans in the race are either RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — or “flat-out flip-flop liars.”She had little doubt who the former president supports, even if he hasn’t said so. “Giuliani stands for everything that Trump stands for, and that we stand for,” she said.Reporting was contributed by More

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      MAGA Voters Send a $50 Million G.O.P. Plan Off the Rails in Illinois

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      Republican leaders think a moderate nominee for governor could beat Gov. J.B. Pritzker. But the party’s base seems to prefer a far-right state senator — and he is getting help from Mr. Pritzker.LINCOLN, Ill. — Darren Bailey, the front-runner in the Republican primary for governor of Illinois, was finishing his stump speech last week at a senior center in this Central Illinois town when a voice called out: “Can we pray for you?”Mr. Bailey readily agreed. The speaker, a youth mentor from Lincoln named Kathy Schmidt, placed her right hand on his left shoulder while he closed his eyes and held out his hands, palms open.“More than anything,” she prayed, “I ask for that, in this election, you raise up the righteous and strike down the wicked.”The wicked, in this case, are the Chicago-based moderates aiming to maintain control over the Illinois Republican Party. And the righteous is Mr. Bailey, a far-right state senator who is unlike any nominee the party has put forward for governor in living memory.A 56-year-old farmer whose Southern Illinois home is closer to Nashville than to Chicago, he wears his hair in a crew cut, speaks with a thick drawl and does not sand down his conservative credentials, as so many past leading G.O.P. candidates have done to try to appeal to suburbanites in this overwhelmingly Democratic state. On Saturday, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Mr. Bailey at a rally near Quincy, Ill.Mr. Bailey has sought to respond to grievances long felt across rural Central and Southern Illinois toward Chicago, which he once proposed removing from the state.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Bailey rose to prominence in Illinois politics by introducing legislation to kick Chicago out of the state. When the coronavirus pandemic began, he was removed from a state legislative session for refusing to wear a mask, and he sued Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, over statewide virus mitigation efforts. Painted on the door of his campaign bus is the Bible verse Ephesians 6:10-19, which calls for followers to wear God’s armor in a battle against “evil rulers.”He is the favored candidate of the state’s anti-abortion groups, and on Friday he celebrated the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade as a “historic and welcomed moment.” He has said he opposes the practice, including in cases of rape and incest.Mr. Bailey has upended carefully laid $50 million plans by Illinois Republican leaders to nominate Mayor Richard C. Irvin of Aurora, a moderate suburbanite with an inspiring personal story who they believed could win back the governor’s mansion in Springfield in what is widely forecast to be a winning year for Republicans.Mr. Bailey has been aided by an unprecedented intervention from Mr. Pritzker and the Pritzker-funded Democratic Governors Association, which have spent nearly $35 million combined attacking Mr. Irvin while trying to lift Mr. Bailey. No candidate for any office is believed to have ever spent more to meddle in another party’s primary.The Illinois governor’s race is now on track to become the most expensive campaign for a nonpresidential office in American history.Public and private polling ahead of Tuesday’s primary shows Mr. Bailey with a lead of 15 percentage points over Mr. Irvin and four other candidates. His strength signals the broader shift in Republican politics across the country, away from urban power brokers and toward a rural base that demands fealty to a far-right agenda aligned with Mr. Trump.For Mr. Bailey, the proposal to excise Chicago, which he called “a hellhole” during a televised debate last month, encapsulates the grievances long felt across rural Central and Southern Illinois — places culturally far afield and long resentful of the politically dominant big city.An audience in Green Valley, Ill., listened to Mr. Bailey speak. Polling shows him leading the Republican primary by double digits.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“The rest of the 90 percent of the land mass is not real happy about how 10 percent of the land mass is directing things,” Mr. Bailey said in an interview aboard his campaign bus outside a bar in Green Valley, a village of 700 people south of Peoria. “A large amount of people outside of that 10 percent don’t have a voice, and that’s a problem.”That pitch has resonated with the conservative voters flocking to Mr. Bailey, who seemed to compare Mr. Irvin to Satan during a Facebook Live monologue in February.“Everything that we pay and do supports Chicago,” said Pam Page, a security analyst at State Farm Insurance from McLean, Ill., who came to see Mr. Bailey in Lincoln. “Downstate just never seems to get any of the perks or any of the kickbacks.”The onslaught of Democratic television advertising attacking Mr. Irvin and trying to elevate Mr. Bailey has frustrated the Aurora mayor, whose campaign was conceived of and funded by the same team of Republicans who helped elect social moderates like Mark Kirk to the Senate in 2010 and Bruce Rauner as governor in 2014. Their recipe: In strong Republican years, find moderate candidates who can win over voters in Chicago’s suburbs — and spend a ton of money.Richard C. Irvin speaking to employees at a manufacturing plant in Wauconda, a suburb north of Chicago. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Irvin, 52, fit their bill. Born to a teenage single mother in Aurora, he is an Army veteran of the first Gulf War who served as a local prosecutor before becoming the first Black mayor of the city, the second most populous in Illinois.Kenneth Griffin, the Chicago billionaire hedge fund founder who is the chief benefactor for Illinois Republicans, gave $50 million to Mr. Irvin for the primary alone and pledged to spend more for him in the general election. Mr. Griffin, the state’s richest man, will not support any other Republican in the race against Mr. Pritzker, according to his spokesman, Zia Ahmed. Mr. Griffin announced last week that his hedge fund and trading firm would relocate to Miami.While Mr. Irvin, a longtime Republican who has nevertheless voted in a series of recent Democratic primaries in Illinois, expected an expensive dogfight in the general election, he is frustrated by the primary season intervention from Mr. Pritzker, a billionaire who is America’s richest elected official.“This has never happened in the history of our nation that a Democrat would spend this much money stopping one individual from becoming the nominee of the Republican Party,” Mr. Irvin said in an interview after touring a manufacturing plant in Wauconda, a well-to-do suburb north of Chicago. “There are six Republican primary opponents — six of them. But when you turn on the television, all you see is me.”Mr. Griffin said that “J.B. Pritzker is terrified of facing Richard Irvin in the general election.”He added, “He and his cronies at the D.G.A. have shamelessly spent tens of millions of dollars meddling in the Republican primary in an effort to fool Republican voters.”Mr. Pritzker said that ads emphasizing Mr. Bailey’s conservative credentials had the same message he plans to use in the general election. He said he was not afraid of running against Mr. Irvin or of the millions Mr. Griffin would spend on his campaign.“It’s a mess over there,” Mr. Pritzker said in an interview on Friday. “They’re all anti-choice. Literally, you can go down the list of things that I think really matter to people across the state. And, you know, they’re all terrible. So I’ll take any one of them and I’ll beat them.”Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the country’s richest elected official, has poured money into the primary, attacking Mr. Irvin while trying to help Mr. Bailey. Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressThe primary race alone has drawn $100 million in TV advertising. Mr. Pritzker has spent more money on TV ads than anyone else running for any office in the country this year. Mr. Irvin ranks second, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.Far behind them is Mr. Bailey, whose primary financial benefactor is Richard Uihlein, the billionaire megadonor of far-right Republican candidates, who has donated $9 million of the $11.6 million Mr. Bailey has raised and sent another $8 million to a political action committee that has attacked Mr. Irvin as insufficiently conservative.Presidential politics for both parties loom over the primary.Mr. Irvin won’t say whom he voted for in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and, in the interview, declined to say if he would support Mr. Trump if he ran for president in 2024. He called President Biden “the legitimate president” and said former Vice President Mike Pence had performed his constitutional duty on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Bailey would not say if the 2020 election had been decided fairly or if Mr. Pence did the right thing.Mr. Pritzker’s motivation to help Mr. Bailey in the primary may be informed not only by his desire for re-election but also by what many see as potential aspirations to seek the White House himself. Last weekend he addressed a gathering of Democrats in New Hampshire — a stop only those with national ambitions make in the middle of their own re-election campaigns.Mr. Bailey, 56, is a farmer with roots in Southern Illinois. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesAs the primary draws near, establishment Republicans across the state are fretting about the prospect of Mr. Bailey dragging down the entire G.O.P. ticket in November.Representative Darin LaHood predicted an “overwhelming” Bailey primary victory in his Central Illinois district, but warned that he would be toxic for general-election voters.“Bailey is not going to play in the suburbs,” said Mr. LaHood, who has not endorsed a primary candidate. “He’s got a Southern drawl, a Southern accent. I mean, he should be running in Missouri, not in suburban Chicago.”Former Gov. Jim Edgar, the only Illinois governor from outside the Chicago area since World War II, said Mr. Bailey’s rise showed that party leaders “don’t have the grasp or the control of their constituents like they did back in the ’80s and the ’90s.”Mr. Bailey’s supporters say the real fight is for the soul of the Republican Party. To them, winning the primary and seizing control of the state party is just as important, if not more so, than triumphing in the general election.Thomas DeVore, left, a candidate for Illinois attorney general who has “Freedom” and “Liberty” tattooed on his arms, with Mr. Bailey in Lincoln.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesRunning for attorney general on a slate with Mr. Bailey is Thomas DeVore, his lawyer in the pandemic lawsuits against Mr. Pritzker. On the campaign trail, he wears untucked golf shirts that reveal his forearm tattoos — “Freedom” on his right arm, “Liberty” on his left.“Whether or not Darren and I win the general election, if we can at least get control within our own party, I think long term we have an opportunity to be successful,” Mr. DeVore said at their stop in Green Valley.And David Smith, the executive director of the Illinois Family Institute, an anti-abortion organization whose political arm endorsed Mr. Bailey, said the G.O.P. race was about excising the party’s moderate elements.“This primary,” he said, “has got to purge the Republican Party of those who are self-serving snollygosters.”Catie Edmondson More

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      Trump, the Man Most Responsible for Ending Roe, Worries It Could Hurt His Party

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      The end of the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling was the culmination of decades of work by Republicans and social conservatives — one that came to pass only after a former Democrat from New York who had once supported abortion rights helped muscle through three Supreme Court justices.Publicly, former President Donald J. Trump heralded the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday ending federal abortion protections as a victory. Yet, as he faces possible prosecution over his efforts to subvert the 2020 election and prepares for a likely 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has privately told friends and advisers the ruling will be “bad for Republicans.”When a draft copy of the decision leaked in May, Mr. Trump began telling friends and advisers that it would anger suburban women, a group who helped tilt the 2020 race to President Biden, and would lead to a backlash against Republicans in the November midterm elections.In other conversations, Mr. Trump has told people that measures like the Texas state law banning most abortions after six weeks and allowing citizens to file lawsuits against people who enable abortions are “so stupid,” according to a person with direct knowledge of the discussions. The Supreme Court let the measure stand in December 2021.For the first hours after the decision was made public on Friday, Mr. Trump was muted in response, a striking contrast to the conservatives who worked in his administration, including former Vice President Mike Pence. Mr. Pence issued a statement saying, “Life won,” as he called for abortion opponents to keep fighting “in every state in the land.”Former Vice President Mike Pence called for abortion opponents to keep fighting “in every state in the land.”Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesFor weeks in advance of the ruling, Mr. Trump had been just as muted. In an interview with The New York Times in May, Mr. Trump uttered an eyebrow-raising demurral in response to a question about the central role he had played in paving the way for the reversal of Roe v. Wade.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, who has spent his career affixing his name to almost anything he could.Pressed to describe his feelings about having helped assemble a court that was on the verge of erasing the 1973 ruling, Mr. Trump refused to engage the question and instead focused on the leak of the draft opinion.“I don’t know what the decision is,” he said. “We’ve been reading about something that was drawn months ago. Nobody knows what that decision is. A draft is a draft.”By early afternoon on Friday, Mr. Trump put out a statement taking a victory lap, including applauding himself for sticking by his choice of nominees. All three of Mr. Trump’s appointees to the court — whom he pushed through with help from Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader — were in the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling. He left unspoken the fact that he repeatedly attacked the court for not interceding on his behalf after he lost the 2020 election.Mr. Trump with the newest of his three Supreme Court nominees, Amy Coney Barrett, at the White House in 2020.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“Today’s decision, which is the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation, along with other decisions that have been announced recently, were only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said.The former president also told Fox News, in an interview published after the decision on Friday, that the court was “following the Constitution, and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago.” He added, “I think, in the end, this is something that will work out for everybody.”Republicans are bracing for a fight: A memo in May from the National Republican Senate Committee, first reported by Axios, suggested that G.O.P. candidates deal with criticism from Democrats by highlighting “extreme and radical views” in support of late-term abortions and government funding for abortions, and suggesting that their own views are based “in compassion and reason.”While Mr. Trump had stayed quiet on the issue in recent weeks, people close to him anticipate he will become more vocal as he watches how clearly his right-wing base responds and how easily he can point to it as something that he made happen. His advisers believe he can highlight the issue as he faces potential Republican challengers and sees signs that his own political base has moved further to the right on vaccines and other issues.Other potential candidates have been far more vocal. Mr. Pence has spent months talking about his desire to see Roe v. Wade end and visiting pregnancy centers. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, another evangelical Christian considering a presidential campaign, wrote on Twitter after the draft opinion emerged: “I pray for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Every human being, born and unborn, has a fundamental right to life, and it is our calling to guard and secure it.”Most significantly from Mr. Trump’s perspective, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the Republican whom a number of Mr. Trump’s former supporters have expressed interest in seeing as a 2024 candidate, signed a bill this spring banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Bob Vander Plaats, president of the Family Leader, a socially conservative political group based in Iowa, praised Mr. Trump before the ruling came down. “What he did as president is, he followed through on what he said he was going to do and appoint Supreme Court justices that were faithful to the Constitution,” Mr. Vander Plaats said.Asked about Mr. Trump’s private remarks that the ruling would hurt Republicans, Mr. Vander Plaats responded, “I would just vehemently disagree with that.”Indeed, while Republicans in competitive states and congressional districts have expressed some anxiousness about the sort of blowback Mr. Trump has told people he fears, many pollsters say it is too soon to tell how the issue will play out in the midterm elections.A Gallup survey this month found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said.Advocates for and against abortion rights outside the Supreme Court in Washington on Friday after Roe v. Wade was overturned.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesA May survey conducted for CNN found that 66 percent of the people questioned said they believed Roe v. Wade should not be overturned.But anti-abortion activists who supported Mr. Trump as president insist the ruling will be a political boon to Republicans, and maintained that surveys in which voters are asked specific questions about the measure indicate that.“When pro-life Republicans go on offense to expose the abortion extremism of their opponents, life is a proven winning issue for the G.O.P.,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which supports anti-abortion candidates.Voluble as he is, Mr. Trump has long seemed to have a special difficulty in grappling with the subject of abortion, which he supported for years as a right but said he personally abhorred. In 2011, as he considered a presidential campaign as a Republican, he announced he did not support abortion rights, but struggled to discuss the issue as a candidate four years later.“I know you’re opposed to abortion,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said to him in a June 2015 interview.“Right,” Trump replied. “I’m pro-choice.”Mr. Tapper furrowed a brow. “You’re pro-choice or pro-life?”“I’m pro-life,” Mr. Trump quickly corrected himself. “I’m sorry.”In March 2016, Mr. Trump said in an MSNBC town hall event that if the nation outlawed abortion — a change he supported — there would have to be “some form of punishment” for a woman seeking abortion. The remark set off a firestorm, which Mr. Trump tried to quell by issuing two statements that only added to the confusion.Two days later, on CBS, Mr. Trump said that he wished abortion were left up to the states, but that the federal laws were “set, and I think we have to leave it that way.”Officials with the Susan B. Anthony List said at the time that Mr. Trump had disqualified himself for the presidency. His campaign again issued a cleanup statement, saying he only meant that the laws must remain in place “until he is president.”Yet in his third and final debate against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election, Mr. Trump laid out his belief that he would have two and as many as three Supreme Court seats to fill. And he explicitly promised, in a way other candidates never had, that when he chose jurists who shared his stated beliefs, Roe v. Wade would be overturned.As president, however, Mr. Trump often wanted little to do with the issue.Mr. Trump seemed to swing between fascination with and repulsion from the subject, remarking upon the thorniness of it and how divided the country was on abortion, and wringing his hands when it came time to make decisions.Participants in the March for Life in Washington in 2020 attended an address by Mr. Trump.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAnd he often preferred to defer to Mr. Pence, even at one point expressing hope that Mr. Pence would cancel a trip to Rome, including an audience with the pope, and instead represent the administration at the March for Life in Washington.One of Mr. Trump’s supporters, Robert Jeffress, a Texas pastor, recalled having discussions with the former president about the “political complexities” of the issue, describing Mr. Trump as an opponent of abortion but also a “realist.”“I’ve heard him point out in the Oval Office that 60-plus percent of Americans are against a repeal of Roe, and that makes this a politically complex issue,” Mr. Jeffress said. 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      No One Is Above the Law, and That Starts With Donald Trump

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      In a 2019 ruling requiring the former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify at a congressional hearing about former President Donald Trump’s alleged abuses of power, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson declared that “presidents are not kings.” If we take that admonition from our next Supreme Court justice seriously and look at the evidence amassed so far by the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, we can — and in fact must — conclude that the prosecution of Mr. Trump is not only permissible but required for the sake of American democracy.This week’s hearings showed us that Mr. Trump acted as if he thought he was a king, not a president subject to the same rules as the rest of us. The hearings featured extraordinary testimony about the relentless pressure to subvert the 2020 election that the former president and his allies brought against at least 31 state and local officials in states he lost, like Michigan, Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. He or his allies twisted the arm of everyone from top personnel at the U.S. Department of Justice to lower-level election workers.The evidence and the testimony offered demonstrates why Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department should convene a grand jury now, if it hasn’t already, to consider indicting Mr. Trump for crimes related to his attempt to overturn the results of the election, before he declares his candidacy for president in 2024, perhaps as early as this summer.Although a Trump prosecution is far from certain to succeed, too much focus has been put on the risks of prosecuting him and too little on the risks of not doing so. The consequences of a failure to act for the future of democratic elections are enormous.There’s no denying that prosecuting Mr. Trump is fraught with legal difficulties. To the extent that charges like obstructing an official proceeding or conspiring to defraud the United States turn on Mr. Trump’s state of mind — an issue on which there is significant debate — it may be tough to get to the bottom of what he actually believed, given his history of lying and doubling down when confronted with contrary facts. And Mr. Trump could try to shift blame by claiming that he was relying on his lawyers — including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — who amplified the phony claims of fraud and who concocted faulty legal arguments to overturn the results of the election. Mr. Trump could avoid conviction if there’s even one juror who believes his repeated lies about the 2020 election.And yes, there are political difficulties too. The “Lock her up!” chants against Hillary Clinton at 2016 Trump rallies for her use of a personal email server while she was secretary of state were so pernicious because threatening to jail political enemies can lead to a deterioration of democratic values. If each presidential administration is investigating and prosecuting the last, respect for both the electoral process and the legal process may be undermined.That concern is real, but if there has ever been a case extreme enough to warrant indicting a president, then this is the case, and Mr. Trump is the person. This is not just because of what he will do if he is elected again after not being indicted (and after not being convicted following a pair of impeachments, one for the very conduct under discussion), but also because of the message it sends for the future.Leaving Mr. Trump unprosecuted would be saying it was fine to call federal, state and local officials, including many who have sworn constitutional oaths, and ask or even demand of them that they do his personal and political bidding.The testimony from the hearings reveals a coordinated and extensive plot to overturn the will of the people and install Mr. Trump as president despite Joe Biden winning the election by 74 Electoral College votes (not to mention a margin of about seven million in the popular vote). There was political pressure, and sometimes threats of violence, across the board. Mr. Trump and his cronies hounded poll workers and election officials to admit to nonexistent fraud or to recount votes and change vote totals.Wandrea Moss, known as Shaye, a former Georgia election worker, testified Tuesday about the harassment and violent threats she faced after Trump allies accused her and her mother of election fraud. As The Associated Press reported, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Giuliani, pointed to surveillance video of the two women working on ballot counting and “said the footage showed the women ‘surreptitiously passing around USB ports as if they are vials of heroin or cocaine.’” The “USB ports” turned out to be ginger mints.It is no wonder that election workers and election officials are leaving their offices in fear of violence and harassment.Former top Department of Justice officials in the Trump administration testified on Thursday about pressure from Mr. Trump, in collusion with a lower-level department official named Jeffrey Clark, to issue a letter falsely claiming evidence of significant fraud in the elections. We heard in Thursday’s hearing that Mr. Trump, in a meeting that echoed his earlier role as boss on the television show “The Apprentice,” almost fired the attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to replace him with Mr. Clark, who had no experience in either criminal law or election law.The confirmation by the Department of Justice under Mr. Clark of this “fraud” would have served as a predicate for state legislators, also pressured by Mr. Trump and his allies, to “decertify” Biden electors and conjure up a new slate of electors supporting Mr. Trump.The pressure did not stop there. An earlier committee hearing recounted severe pressure from Mr. Trump on Vice President Mike Pence to manipulate the rules for Congress to count electoral votes, a plan that depended on members of Congress supporting spurious objections to the Electoral College votes in states that Mr. Biden won.Mr. Trump also whipped up the Jan. 6 crowd for “wild” protests and encouraged it to join him in pressuring Mr. Pence to violate his constitutional oath and manipulate the Electoral College count.In his testimony on Tuesday before the Jan. 6 committee, the speaker of the Arizona House, Rusty Bowers, described the intense barrage coming at him from calls from Mr. Trump and his allies, and from Trump supporters who protested outside his house and threatened his neighbor with violence. But Mr. Bowers compared the Trump crew to the book “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” because they failed to come forward with a plausible plan to overturn the election results in Arizona or elsewhere.Seeing the group as bumbling, though, minimizes the danger of what Mr. Trump and his allies attempted and downplays how deadly serious this was: As Representative Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, noted, the country “barely” survived Mr. Trump’s attempt at election subversion, which could have worked despite the legal and factual weaknesses in the fraud claims.What if people of less fortitude than Mr. Bowers and others caved? Consider Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia, who also testified on Tuesday about pressure from the Trump team. He described a direct phone call from a man who was then the sitting president prodding him to “find” 11,780 votes to flip Georgia from Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump. What if, instead of rebuffing Mr. Trump, Mr. Raffensperger declared that he felt there were enough questions about the vote count in Democratic counties in Georgia to warrant the legislature’s appointment of new electors, as Mr. Trump had urged?If even one of these officials had cooperated, the dikes could have broken, and claims in state after state could have proliferated.There’s no question that Mr. Trump tried to steal the election. Richard Donoghue, a top official at the Department of Justice serving during the postelection period, testified on Thursday that he knocked down with extensive evidence every cockamamie theory of voter fraud that Mr. Trump and his allies raised, but to no avail. He testified that there were nothing but “isolated” instances of fraud, the same conclusion reached by the former attorney general, Bill Barr.Mr. Bowers testified that when he demanded evidence from Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Giuliani said he had theories, but no evidence. The president appears to have known it too. According to Mr. Donoghue’s handwritten notes of his conversation with Mr. Trump, when confronted with the lack of evidence of fraud, the former president said, “Just say the election was corrupt” and “leave the rest to me” and the Republican congressmen. The president even talked about having the federal government seize voting machines, perhaps in an attempt to rerun the election.The longer Mr. Garland waits to bring charges against Mr. Trump, the harder it will be, especially if Mr. Trump has already declared for president and can say that the prosecution is politically motivated to help Democrats win in 2024. The fact that federal investigators conducted a search for evidence at the home of Mr. Clark shows that the department is working its way ever closer to the former president.What Mr. Trump did in its totality and in many individual instances was criminal. If Mr. Garland fails to act, it will only embolden Mr. Trump or someone like him to try again if he loses, this time aided by a brainwashed and cowered army of elected and election officials who stand ready to steal the election next time.Mr. Trump was the 45th president, not the first American king, but if we don’t deter conduct like this, the next head of state may come closer to claiming the kind of absolute power that is antithetical to everything the United States stands for.Richard L. Hasen (@rickhasen), who will join the University of California, Los Angeles, as a professor of law in July, is the author of “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics — and How to Cure It.” In 2020, he proposed a 28th Amendment to the Constitution to defend and expand voting rights.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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      Eric Greitens to Face New G.O.P. Attacks in Missouri Senate Race

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      The long-awaited effort to stop Eric Greitens from becoming the Republican nominee for Senate in Missouri is finally getting underway.The big question is whether it’s too late to stop him.A robust, well-financed Republican campaign to highlight Greitens’s personal scandals — which include allegations of domestic and sexual abuse — is set to begin on Friday, starting with at least $1 million in paid television ads.Politico first reported the arrival of the new super PAC, Show Me Values, which is being led by Johnny DeStefano, a longtime aide to Representative John Boehner of Ohio who became a powerful figure inside the Trump White House.The leaders of the drive to halt Greitens, which is being spearheaded by a coalition of in-state donors, hope to fundamentally alter the dynamics of a race that has been stagnant for months by sounding a drumbeat of allegations about disturbing and erratic behavior by the former Missouri governor.But as they look to avoid jeopardizing what is most likely a safe Republican Senate seat, they face a tight timeline ahead of Missouri’s Aug. 2 primary, and it is unclear whether new details about Greitens’s alleged conduct will resonate with G.O.P. voters.The front-runner: Eric GreitensGreitens’s history has long been subject to scrutiny — and new accusations have steadily emerged.In 2018, he resigned as governor amid allegations that he had sexually abused a hair stylist with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Greitens denies the accusations, which the woman detailed in sworn testimony during an impeachment inquiry led by fellow Republicans in the state.His ex-wife, Sheena Greitens, a scholar of Asian geopolitics, left him after those allegations came to light and moved to Texas. The couple are now waging a bitter court battle over custody of their elementary-school-age children.Sheena Greitens, second from left, during a court session in her child custody case against her former husband on Thursday in Columbia, Mo.David A. Lieb/Associated PressIn a sworn affidavit released in April, Greitens accused her former husband of a pattern of abusive behavior, including allegedly “cuffing our then-3-year-old son across the face” and “yanking him around by his hair.”The former governor has denied all wrongdoing, and on Thursday his campaign pointed to a previous statement provided to The New York Times by Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for the candidate. The alleged abusive behavior “never happened,” Parlatore said.At a court hearing on Thursday, a lawyer for Sheena Greitens, Helen Wade, said that her client had received death threats this week after the former governor released a violent new political video that shows him armed with a shotgun and storming a home in search of “RINOs,” or Republicans in name only, along with what appears to be a SWAT team wielding military-style rifles. Wade did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment on Thursday.The kingmaker: Rex SinquefieldFor now, Greitens is ahead of his nearest opponent, Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general, by about 3.5 percentage points, polling averages of the race show.Schmitt has the backing of Save Missouri Values, a super PAC bankrolled by Rex Sinquefield, a wealthy retired investor who is a dominant player in state politics.Sinquefield, who is also the primary funder of Show Me Values, the new anti-Greitens super PAC, is best known for his devotion to three “idiosyncratic passions,” according to a critical 2014 profile in Politico Magazine: “promoting chess, dismantling the traditional public school system and eliminating income taxes.”Until now in the Senate primary campaign, not one television ad has aired laying out Sheena Greitens’s most recent allegations. One of the new ads from Show Me Values will focus on her accusations, saying that Eric Greitens has faced “scandal after scandal,” according to two people familiar with its contents.The most effective knock on Greitens with likely Republican primary voters in Missouri, polling conducted by a rival campaign discovered, might sound a bit surprising.It involved informing them that he had previously identified as a Democrat and traveled to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 to hear a young, progressive senator named Barack Obama accept his party’s nomination for president.The X Factor: TrumpThe president’s endorsement could be decisive — and everybody knows it.Allies of both Schmitt and Representative Vicky Hartzler, another Senate candidate who is closely trailing Schmitt in most polling, have been cautioning Trump and his allies against backing Greitens.One argument that seems to resonate with the former president, according to people who have spoken with him: Don’t risk upsetting your pristine endorsement record in 2022 Senate races.On Wednesday, after Katie Britt defeated Representative Mo Brooks in a G.O.P. primary runoff for a Senate seat in Alabama, Trump boasted that his scorecard remained perfect in Senate primaries this year.“With the great ALABAMA win by Katie Britt tonight, I am pleased to announce that WE (MAGA!) are 12 WINS & ZERO LOSSES in U.S. Senate Primary races this cycle,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his Twitter-like social media site. He made no mention of the fact that he had previously endorsed Brooks before souring on his candidacy.Eric Schmitt, left, the attorney general of Missouri, is hoping for a surge to win the Republican nomination for Senate.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIn Missouri, Trump’s notoriously chaotic decision-making process is complicated by the fact that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Don Jr.’s fiancée, are backing Greitens.The younger Trump has advised his father to allow the primary to develop further before endorsing anyone, according to two people familiar with his thinking. A spokesman for Trump said that, to his knowledge, an endorsement was not “imminent,” and that he had not seen any draft announcements.Allies of Greitens are eager to link any effort to attack him to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who is a frequent target of Trump’s ire. McConnell’s team did not return phone calls on Thursday, but there is no evidence that his allies have any connection to the new super PAC.Republicans in Washington worry that if Greitens manages to win the primary, he might saddle their party with an embarrassing, and expensive, candidate who could throw the seat to Democrats.Guilfoyle is the national finance chair of Greitens’s campaign. Despite her help, his campaign has struggled to raise money, according to the most recent campaign finance reports, forcing him to rely almost exclusively on one Republican donor — the billionaire shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, who has given at least $2.5 million to a super PAC supporting Greitens’s candidacy.The potential sleeper: Josh HawleyAllies argue that Hartzler, a House lawmaker from western Missouri, has the best chance at beating Greitens. They are counting on the clout of Josh Hawley, the arch-conservative freshman senator who holds the state’s other Senate seat.Her campaign this week began airing a new ad promoting the endorsement of Hawley, who has capitalized on his opposition to the certification of the 2020 election results to earn Trump’s favor and build a nationwide grass-roots donor base.Polls show that Hawley is the state’s most popular politician, and the Hartzler campaign hopes to use his fund-raising prowess and omnipresence on Fox News to move voters in the state’s socially conservative hinterlands. Hawley raised about $400,000 for the campaign over a span of four days, his aides said.“There’s a lot of Republicans running for the Senate,” Hawley says in the ad. “I know all of them.”That’s an understatement: Hawley was the attorney general of Missouri while Greitens was governor, and the two men are not exactly friends.Josh Hawley, left, and Eric Greitens, right, with Steven Mnuchin at a Trump rally in St. Louis in 2017. Whitney Curtis/Getty ImagesIn 2018, Hawley accused Greitens of misusing the donor list of his veterans charity and called on him to resign over the allegations involving the hair stylist.The move helped sideline Greitens, a potential rival for Missouri’s other Senate seat, which Hawley assumed after defeating Claire McCaskill, the incumbent Democrat, in 2018.“Fortunately for Josh,” Greitens shot back at the time, “he’s better at press conferences than the law.”What to read tonightThe Jan. 6 committee revealed on Thursday that a White House lawyer told Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department attorney pushing a Trump-backed plan to subvert the 2020 election results, that he would be committing a felony if he helped to overturn the outcome. Catch up with our live coverage of the day’s big hearing here.In a separate development, federal investigators carried out a predawn search on Clark’s home in connection with the Justice Department’s sprawling inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 contest, Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman and Maggie Haberman report.The day’s other big political news: The Supreme Court struck down New York’s gun law, most likely limiting the ability of state and local governments to restrict guns outside the home. Hours later, the Senate advanced a bipartisan gun safety bill that responded to a spate of mass shootings.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Abandoned by Trump, Mo Brooks Is Now Open to Testifying About Jan. 6

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      Stinging from his resounding defeat in Alabama’s Republican runoff for the Senate on Tuesday and a snub from former President Donald J. Trump, Representative Mo Brooks now appears to be willing to testify as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.Mr. Brooks signaled on Wednesday that he would comply with an impending subpoena from the bipartisan House committee that is leading the inquiry into the attack on the Capitol — but only under certain conditions.His comments to the media, reported by CNN on Wednesday, came one day after he lost a bitter primary runoff to Katie Britt. Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Brooks in March when he began slipping in the polls, and gave his support to Ms. Britt in the final weeks of the campaign.Mr. Brooks bemoaned his loss, telling a Politico reporter that the “bad guys won.”He hinged his willingness to testify before the House committee on being able to do so “in public so the public can see it — so they don’t get bits and pieces dribbled out,” Mr. Brooks said, according to CNN.The congressman added that he would only testify about matters related to Jan. 6, 2021, and that he wanted to see copies of documents that he might be asked about beforehand, the network reported.Mr. Brooks was not available for an interview on Thursday, and his office declined to elaborate on his comments.Mr. Brooks, a hard-right Republican and a once-fierce ally of Mr. Trump’s whom the former president has accused of becoming “woke,” has drawn intense scrutiny for his actions preceding the violence on Jan. 6.Outfitted in body armor at a rally before the siege, Mr. Brooks exhorted Mr. Trump’s election-denying supporters to start “kicking ass.”Investigators have also sought to question Mr. Brooks about his interactions with Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the attack. They zeroed in on Mr. Brooks’s comments in March, when he said that Mr. Trump had, since leaving office, repeatedly asked him to illegally “rescind” the 2020 election, remove President Biden and force a new special election.But as of Wednesday, Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the head of the Jan. 6 committee, acknowledged that Mr. Brooks still had not been served with a subpoena. Mr. Thompson said that process servers in Washington had been unable to track down Mr. Brooks because he had been campaigning in Alabama.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 6Making a case against Trump. More