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      McCarthy Threatens Technology Firms That Comply With Riot Inquiry

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      The top House Republican said his party would retaliate against any company that cooperated with an order to preserve the phone and social media records of G.O.P. lawmakers.WASHINGTON — Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot, after the panel asked dozens of firms to preserve the phone and social media records of 11 far-right members of Congress who pushed to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Mr. McCarthy’s warning was an escalation of his efforts to thwart a full accounting of the deadly attack at the Capitol carried out by a pro-Trump mob, and his latest attempt to insulate the former president and Republican lawmakers from scrutiny of any ties to the violence. It came after he led the G.O.P. opposition to the creation of an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the riot, and then pulled five Republican congressmen from the select committee that Democrats created on their own, boycotting the proceedings.In preservation orders the special committee sent to 35 technology firms this week, members of the panel included the names of hundreds of people whose records they might want to review, among them some of Donald J. Trump’s most ardent allies in Congress, according to several people familiar with the documents who were not authorized to speak about their contents.The 11 Republicans are Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jody B. Hice of Georgia, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.The preservation demands were accompanied by a statement that said the committee was merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual.” But the inclusion of the Republicans’ names, reported earlier by CNN, indicated that the panel planned to scrutinize any role they may have played in fueling the violence.“These are the individuals who have been publicly supportive of Jan. 6 and the people who participated in the insurrection on Jan. 6,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s chairman, said in an interview.“We need to find out exactly what their level of participation in this event was,” he said. “If you helped raise money, if you provided misinformation to people, if you served on a planning committee — whatever your role in Jan. 6, I think the public has a right to know.”The panel has not asked to preserve the records of Mr. McCarthy, who has said he had a tense phone call with Mr. Trump as the mob laid siege to the Capitol, but Mr. Thompson said the top Republican’s name could yet be added.Mr. Thompson said Mr. McCarthy’s protestations were “typical of somebody who may or may not have been involved in Jan. 6 and doesn’t want that information to become public.”On Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy said Republicans would “not forget” and “hold accountable” those tech companies that preserve records sought by the committee. His remarks followed denunciations of the committee’s work by Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, who has called the panel’s tactics “authoritarian,” and Mr. Trump, who has called it a “partisan sham.”Ms. Greene threatened on Fox News that telecommunications companies that cooperated with the investigation would be “shut down.”Mr. McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to cooperate with the inquiry, even though congressional investigations have obtained phone records before. He said that if his party won control of the House, it would use its power to punish any that did.“If these companies comply with the Democrat order to turn over private information, they are in violation of federal law and subject to losing their ability to operate in the United States,” Mr. McCarthy wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “If companies still choose to violate federal law, a Republican majority will not forget and will stand with Americans to hold them fully accountable under the law.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said he was stunned by Mr. McCarthy’s remarks, describing them as akin to obstructing an investigation.“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Mr. Raskin said. “That’s an astounding turn of events. Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the Jan. 6 attack?”Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, called Mr. McCarthy’s claims “baseless,” noting that the panel had not requested the content of any communication.“He is falsely portraying the committee as overreaching so that he can protect his own political interests, to the detriment of Congress’s ability to do its job and the public trust in our institutions of government,” she said.In the past week, the select committee has ramped up its work, taking three wide-ranging investigative steps: a records demand to seven federal agencies focusing in part on any ties Mr. Trump may have had to the attack’s planning or execution; a document demand to 15 social media companies for material about efforts to overturn the election and domestic violent extremists who may have been involved; and the record preservation orders including the Republican representatives.The 11 Republicans include lawmakers who spearheaded the effort to challenge the election outcome in Congress on Jan. 6 and those who played at least some role in the “Stop the Steal” effort to protest the results, including promoting rallies around the country and the one in Washington whose attendees attacked the Capitol.Some of the lawmakers named in the order have continued to publicly spread the election lies that inspired the riot, and to allude to the possibility of more violence to come. Mr. Cawthorn falsely claimed on Sunday that the election had been “rigged” and “stolen,” telling a crowd in Franklin, N.C., that if elections were not safeguarded in the future, it could result in “bloodshed.”The select committee has been meeting twice a week, even during Congress’s summer recess, as its members plan their next steps. Mr. Thompson said two more hearings were in the works, one to dig deeper into the pressure campaign Mr. Trump and his allies started to overturn President Biden’s victory, and another to explore who encouraged militia and extremist groups to come to Washington before the assault.Representative Bennie G. Thompson, right, and members of the select committee have ramped up their work in the past week. Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“There’s a concern on the committee about the executive branch leaning on state elected officials to change the outcome of the election,” Mr. Thompson said. “There’s concern about the identification with domestic terrorist organizations and their participation and encouragement to participate in the Jan. 6 march and insurrection.”Last week, the panel sought communications among top Trump administration officials about attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions in the run-up to the attack; the planning and funding of pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and 6; and other attempts to stop or slow the process of Mr. Trump handing over the presidency to Mr. Biden.It demanded records of communications between the White House and Ali Alexander, who publicized the “Stop the Steal” rallies, as well as Tom Van Flein, Mr. Gosar’s chief of staff.Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member, said the requests were “broad” by design as the panel sought to produce a “comprehensive report.” He said they could be expanded to include more members of Congress if evidence emerges to suggest it is necessary.“We know that there are members who were involved in the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally; we know that there are members who had direct communications with the president while the attack on the Capitol was going on,” he said. “There are any number of members who have very pertinent information.”On Friday, the panel sent letters to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website theDonald.win — seeking any documents in their possession pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.The committee had already asked for records on extremist groups and militias that were present at the Capitol that day, including QAnon, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. A person familiar with the committee’s discussions said its members intended to investigate more deeply plans among militia groups to coordinate.At least 10 suspected militia extremists attended paramilitary training in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina before the breach, according to court documents. Suspected domestic violent extremists also “coordinated efforts to bring tactical equipment to the event, presumably in anticipation of violence,” according to an April homeland security analysis obtained by The New York Times through a public records request filed by the group Property of the People.“There were undoubtedly insurrectionist groups that were dead-set on committing violence,” Mr. Raskin said. “If you listen to their chatter post-Jan. 6, it’s all abut how close they came, and next time they will be carrying arms.”The records preservation request delivered on Monday asked telecommunications companies to keep on file information about cell tower locations, text messages and call logs, and information uploaded to cloud storage systems.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, emphasized that the request was “an investigation, not an accusation.”“We’ll see what we find out,” she said. “It’s fair to say you didn’t have 10,000 people just happen to show up and attack Capitol Police officers, maim them and threaten to kill the vice president and members of Congress just because they felt like it. There was a reason, there was a structure to this, and we need to uncover everything about that.” More

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      Reporter Discusses False Accusations Against Dominion Worker

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      Through one employee of Dominion Voting Systems, a Times Magazine article examines the damage that false accusations can inflict.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.As Susan Dominus, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, approached her reporting for an article on the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, a business that supplies election technology, she wanted to tell the story of one of the Dominion employees who was being vilified by supporters of President Trump.She zeroed in on one man: Eric Coomer, whose anti-Trump social media posts were used to bolster false allegations that Dominion had tampered with the election, leading to death threats. Her article, published on Tuesday, is a case study in what can happen when information gets wildly manipulated. In an edited interview, Ms. Dominus discussed what she learned.How did you come upon Eric Coomer — did you have him in mind all along? Or did you want to do something on Dominion and eventually found your way to him?The Magazine was interested in pursuing a story about how the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems — a private business — were dramatically influencing the lives of those who worked there, people who were far from public figures. Many employees there were having their private information exposed, but early on, a lot of the threats were focusing on Eric Coomer, who was then the director of product strategy and security at Dominion. Eventually, people such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and the president’s son Eric Trump were naming him in the context of accusations about Dominion fixing the election.What was the biggest surprise you came across in your reporting?I was genuinely surprised to find that Mr. Coomer had expressed strong anti-Trump sentiments, using strong language, on his Facebook page. His settings were such that only his Facebook friends could see it, but someone took a screenshot of those and other divisive posts, and right-wing media circulated them widely. The posts were used in the spread of what cybersecurity experts call malinformation — something true that is used to support the dissemination of a story that is false. In this case, it was the big lie that the election was rigged. I think to understand the spread of spurious information — to resist its lure, to fight it off — these distinctions are helpful to parse. Understanding the human cost of these campaigns also matters. We heard a lot about the attacks on Dominion, but there are real people with real lives who are being battered in a battle they had no intention of joining, whatever their private opinions.There were so many elaborate theories of election fraud involving Dominion. How important were the accusations against Eric Coomer in that bigger story?It’s hard to say. But Advance Democracy Inc., a nonpartisan nonprofit, looked at the tweets in its database from QAnon-related accounts and found that, from Nov. 1 to Jan. 7, Eric Coomer’s name appeared in 25 percent of the ones that mentioned Dominion. Coomer believes the attacks on Dominion were somewhat inevitable but considered his own role as “an accelerant.”Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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      House Panel Demands Records of Trump’s Movements on Jan. 6

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      The request was part of a far-reaching set of documents the select committee sought from seven federal agencies, which suggested the inquiry was focusing on the former president’s role.WASHINGTON — The select committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 Capitol riot demanded detailed records on Wednesday about Donald J. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, in a series of requests to federal agencies that suggested it was focusing on any ties the former president may have had to the attack’s planning or execution.The committee’s demands, sent to the National Archives and Records Administration and six other agencies, show that as they ramp up their inquiry, investigators are looking closely at efforts by the former president to overturn the results of the 2020 election and any connections he or his administration had to the rioters.They are also looking into the potential involvement of at least one top aide to a Republican member of Congress who helped publicize the “Stop the Steal” rallies, which drew Mr. Trump’s supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 to protest the election outcome.The panel sought communications among top Trump administration officials about attempts to place politically loyal personnel in senior positions as Mr. Trump sought to invalidate President Biden’s victory in the run-up to the attack. Investigators are also focused on the planning, organization and funding of pro-Trump rallies on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 and other attempts to stop or slow the process of Mr. Trump handing over the presidency to Mr. Biden.“Our Constitution provides for a peaceful transfer of power, and this investigation seeks to evaluate threats to that process, identify lessons learned and recommend laws, policies, procedures, rules or regulations necessary to protect our Republic in the future,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, wrote in the letters.The committee asked the National Archives, which keeps presidential records, for material it has about any plans hatched from within the White House or other federal agencies to derail the Electoral College vote count by Congress. The process was halted for hours on Jan. 6 as a mob of rioters breached the Capitol, hunting for lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence and brutalizing police officers in the name of Mr. Trump.From the Defense Department and the Justice Department, the committee asked for records of discussions about potentially invoking the Insurrection Act, which some feared Mr. Trump might use to deploy the military to cling to power; communications between government entities during the Capitol violence; and exchanges between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump’s campaign legal team about challenges to the election’s outcome.The committee called on the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. to furnish records of intelligence gathered before the assault; documents about the Secret Service’s protection of Mr. Pence and his family as the mob threatened him; and records tracking the spread and source of online disinformation about the election.The panel also sought information from the Interior Department about permitting for the rallies that preceded the mob violence and communications with the U.S. Park Police as the attack escalated. And it requested information from the National Counterterrorism Center about briefing materials prepared for senior officials before Jan. 6.The letters kicked off what is expected to be a flurry of records demands the committee plans to issue this week.Mr. Thompson told reporters that the committee planned to ask social media and telecommunications companies to preserve records of potentially “several hundred people,” including several unidentified members of Congress, as it scrutinizes those who worked to inflame the mob and were in communication with groups seeking to overturn the election.“We’ll look at everything that will give us information on what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson said on Capitol Hill this week. “We have quite an exhaustive list of people.”The expansion of the select committee’s investigation came after a hearing in July in which four police officers told in excruciating detail of the brutal violence, racism and hostility they suffered as a throng of angry rioters beat, crushed and shocked them on Jan. 6.After that hearing, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of two Republicans on the panel, pledged to move quickly to uncover any potential ties between the rioters and the Trump administration and campaign.Lawmakers must learn “what happened every minute of that day in the White House: every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during and after the attack,” Ms. Cheney said then.Among the documents sought on Wednesday were “all calendars, schedules and movement logs regarding meetings or events attended by President Trump, including the identity of any individuals in attendance, whether virtual or in-person, on Jan. 6, 2021.”The committee asked for any documents and communications between the White House and some of Mr. Trump’s allies most involved in trying to undermine the election, including Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser; Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as his lawyer; and his longtime associate Roger J. Stone Jr.The committee is also seeking White House communications with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive and confidant of Mr. Trump, and the lawyer Sidney Powell, both of whom pushed lies and conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud. And it demanded records of communications between the White House and Ali Alexander, who publicized the “Stop the Steal” rallies, as well as Tom Van Flein, the chief of staff to Representative Paul Gosar, the Arizona Republican who helped promote them and tried to invalidate electoral votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6.It also asked for records on extremist groups and militias that were present at the Capitol that day, including QAnon, the Proud Boys, Stop the Steal, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.The requests indicated the committee planned to investigate Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on state officials to overturn the results of the election. Among the information sought were records from Republican state officials including Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state.A records demand is often the first step a congressional committee takes before issuing subpoenas to obtain documents.The investigative push came as Michael A. Bolton, the Capitol Police inspector general, is continuing his own internal investigation into security failures on Jan. 6.In his latest report, a summary of which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Bolton faulted the agency’s communications during the attack, when officers say their urgent pleas for help went unanswered.The report, based on interviews with 36 Capitol Police officers, criticized what the inspector general called “departmentwide command and control deficiencies related to information sharing, chain of command directions, communication, preparedness, training, leadership development, emergency response procedures and law enforcement coordination.”In response, the Capitol Police said in a statement that the agency had “acknowledged there were communication gaps on Jan. 6.”“Given the events of Jan. 6, the enormous amount of radio traffic that day was not surprising,” the statement said. “Additionally, the size and magnitude of Jan. 6 made it difficult to respond to each officer’s emergency radio broadcast in real time.”The department said it had enlisted a retired Secret Service agent to help oversee a new operational planning process. 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      The Trump Clown Car Has a Smashup in Arizona

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      Monday was supposed to be a banner day for former President Donald Trump and the MAGAverse. After multiple delays, legal challenges and public controversies, the results of the third — and hopefully final — review of the presidential voting in Maricopa County, Ariz., was scheduled for delivery to its Republican sponsors in the State Senate. At long last, the proof of mass election fraud would be laid out for all to see! Mr. Trump would be vindicated! Maybe even reinstated!At least, that’s what MAGA die-hards hunkered down in their bunkers of disinformation were hoping. Most everyone else — including plenty of Arizona officials from both parties — just wanted this gong show to end.Alas, it was not to be. On Monday, the Republican president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, announced that the Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based firm overseeing the recount, had not yet completed a full draft report after all. It seems the firm’s chief executive and two other members of the “audit team” had come down with Covid-19. Also, the State Senate had only just received images of the ballot envelopes from Maricopa County, which still needed to be analyzed for inclusion in the final report.And so the spectacle grinds on.The clown-car chaos in Arizona is a near-perfect distillation of what Mr. Trump has done to the Republican Party, as well as much of the broader public. On what feels like a daily basis, he beats the drum about a stolen election, setting a tuneful lie that many Republican voters still dance to as the party mandarins look on, in either active support or silence. The political ramifications of this disinformation will be on display in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race next year, as well as those elsewhere, as independents and moderates assess if this is the party they want to reward.But there’s another cost that should worry all of us: the integrity of election audits, which are important and are necessary. While many secretaries of state are now pushing for new standards for such audits, the Arizona recount stands as an object lesson about the embarrassing damage to democracy that one party can inflict when led by a sore loser who still manages to scare people.For those who have blissfully forgotten the Arizona back story: Mr. Trump was mad about narrowly losing the state to Joe Biden. He was madder still when two recounts of vote-rich Maricopa County confirmed his loser status. Desperate to appease him and his devoted base, a gaggle of Republican state senators arranged for yet another review, this one run according to their preferences and overseen by private contractors of their choosing. The result has been a poisonous, partisan P.R. stunt so poorly executed that it makes the hunt for a new “Jeopardy!” host look smooth by comparison.From the jump, it was clear that Arizona’s Republican lawmakers weren’t interested in putting together a serious audit. Ms. Fann tapped the Cyber Ninjas to run the show, despite the firm’s total lack of auditing experience — and despite it not submitting a formal proposal. How did this happen? It may have helped that the firm’s chief executive, Doug Logan, had tweeted his support of some of the wackier election-fraud conspiracy theories. (Venezuela? Really?)The Republican lawmakers arranged for state taxpayers to foot part of the bill — an outrage in itself. But the Cyber Ninjas also gathered millions in private funding from Trump supporters. These include the former chief executive of Overstock.com, himself another spreader of election-fraud manure; a nonprofit group led by the former Trump administration official and QAnon flirt Michael Flynn; and a nonprofit founded by a host on the MAGA-tastic One America News Network.As for the ballot counting process, the word “squirrelly” doesn’t begin to cover it. Among other absurdities, the ballots were examined for secret watermarks and for bamboo fibers, a nod to the conspiracy theory that fake ballots had been shipped over from Asia. And forget careful screening of workers for political bias. Among those hired was the former state lawmaker Anthony Kern, a “stop the steal” crusader who was photographed on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot. (After a reporter posted a picture on Twitter of Mr. Kern at a counting table, the ex-lawmaker was removed over concerns about “optics.”)In an independent evaluation of the process, Barry Burden, the head of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky, detailed the review’s many “maladies.” “They include processing errors caused by a lack of basic knowledge, partisan biases of the people conducting the audit, and inconsistencies of procedures that undermine the reliability of the review and any conclusions they may draw. In particular, the operation lacks the consistency, attention to detail and transparency that are requirements for credible and reliable election reviews.”Even some Republican officials have had enough. In May, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, a Republican-dominated body, accused state lawmakers of having “rented out the once good name of the Arizona State Senate” to “grifters.”Last week, the Maricopa County recorder, a Republican, issued a long prebuttal to the Ninjas’ expected report, lamenting that the process had been an unnecessary disaster, that its results could not be trusted and that it was time for his party to “move forward.”If only.Some of the costs of the recount are easier to calculate than others. Because of concerns that the security of its voting machines had been compromised during the review, Maricopa County decertified the equipment. Last week, county officials demanded that the State Senate shell out $2.8 million for the purchase of new machines. Ms. Fann promptly pooh-poohed the request, but if the Senate doesn’t officially respond within 60 days, the county can sue.However the Arizona odyssey ends, officials who care about restoring faith in the electoral system should take steps to prevent such nonsense from spreading. The Republicans’ recount was never going to change the outcome of the 2020 race. But it did become a model for Trump dead-enders across the nation — a beacon of obduracy.At its summer conference this month, the National Association of Secretaries of State overwhelmingly recommended establishing concrete guidelines for postelection audits. Among other measures, they advised states to adopt timelines for audits, to ensure that area election officials remain central to the process and to rely only on state or federally accredited test labs. Outside contractors, they urged, should be used sparingly and operate under intensive oversight.Having observed the slow-rolling Arizona debacle, states would be well served to install guard rails sooner rather than later. If there’s one thing the Trump years taught the nation, it’s that you cannot simply rely on public officials to operate in good faith or abide by widely accepted norms.Serious, well-run audits play an important role in safeguarding the integrity of elections. What Arizona’s Republican senators arranged, by contrast, is what you’d get if you crossed a clown pageant with a QAnon convention and made the whole thing open bar. The whole mess would be entertaining if it weren’t so destructive.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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      Already Distorting Jan. 6, G.O.P. Now Concocts Entire Counter-Narrative

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      A new version of the attack amounts to a disinformation campaign aimed at giving cover to the party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.In the hours and days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, rattled Republican lawmakers knew exactly who was to blame: Donald J. Trump. Loyal allies began turning on him. Top Republicans vowed to make a full break from his divisive tactics and dishonesties. Some even discussed removing him from office.By spring, however, after nearly 200 congressional Republicans had voted to clear Mr. Trump during a second impeachment proceeding, the conservative fringes of the party had already begun to rewrite history, describing the Capitol riot as a peaceful protest and comparing the invading mob to a “normal tourist visit,” as one congressman put it.This past week, amid the emotional testimony of police officers at the first hearing of a House select committee, Republicans completed their journey through the looking-glass, spinning a new counternarrative of that deadly day. No longer content to absolve Mr. Trump, they concocted a version of events in which accused rioters were patriotic political prisoners and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was to blame for the violence.Their new claims, some voiced from the highest levels of House Republican leadership, amount to a disinformation campaign being promulgated from the steps of the Capitol, aimed at giving cover to their party and intensifying the threats to political accountability.This rendering of events — together with new evidence that Mr. Trump had counted on allies in Congress to help him use a baseless allegation of corruption to overturn the election — pointed to what some democracy experts see as a dangerous new sign in American politics: Even with Mr. Trump gone from the White House, many Republicans have little intention of abandoning the prevarication that was a hallmark of his presidency.Rather, as the country struggles with the consequences of Mr. Trump’s assault on the legitimacy of the nation’s elections, leaders of his party — who, unlike the former president, have not lost their political or rhetorical platforms — are signaling their willingness to continue, look past or even expand his assault on the facts for political gain.The phenomenon is not uniquely American.“This is happening all over the place — it is so much linked to the democratic backsliding and rising of authoritarian movements,” said Laura Thornton, the director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It’s about the same sort of post-truth world. You can just repeat a lie over and over and, because there’s so little trust, people will believe it.”Behind the Republican embrace of disinformation is a calculus of both ambition and self-preservation. With members of the select committee hinting that they could subpoena Trump aides, allies on Capitol Hill and perhaps Mr. Trump himself, the counterfactual counterattack could pre-emptively undercut an investigation of the riot.As videos shown during the hearing gave harrowing new reminders of the day’s violence, leading House Republicans claimed that Ms. Pelosi — a target of the mob — had been warned about the violence in advance but failed to prevent it.From his private club in New Jersey, Mr. Trump suggested that Ms. Pelosi should “investigate herself,” yet again falsely insinuating that antifa and Black Lives Matter — not his followers — caused the destruction on Jan. 6 and that a democratically decided election had been stolen from him.All the while, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican, who once led his party in condemning both the riot and Mr. Trump’s role in it, made no visible attempt to stop the flood of fabrications, telling reporters he had not watched the hearing and had little new to say about the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.House Republicans’ desire to bury the attack on their own workplace has created a dysfunctional governing atmosphere. Ms. Pelosi has increasingly treated them as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust, and has expressed deep disdain for Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, whom she called a “moron” this past week.A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.“Anytime you mention his name, you’re not getting an answer from me,” she told reporters. “Don’t waste my time.”Almost as soon as the police retook control on Jan. 6, hard-core defenders of Mr. Trump in Congress began recasting the gruesome scenes of violence that left five people dead.Mr. McCarthy, the California Republican, responded differently at first: He angrily demanded that Mr. Trump stop the rioters, according to an account he gave fellow Republicans at the time. A week later, as the House moved to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy said that “the president bears responsibility” for the “attack on Congress by mob rioters” and called for a fact-finding commission.But in the months since, that early resolve has given way to an out-and-out intent to bury the attack. Mr. McCarthy, who is trying to win back the majority in 2022, moved quickly to patch things up with Mr. Trump, gave latitude to far-right members of his caucus and worked furiously to block the creation of an independent 9/11-style commission.This past week, just before the officers began to deliver anguished testimony about the brutality they had endured, Mr. McCarthy repeatedly laid blame not with Mr. Trump, the rioters or those who had fueled doubts about the election outcome, but with Ms. Pelosi, one of the invading mob’s chief targets.“If there is a responsibility for this Capitol, on this side, it rests with the speaker,” Mr. McCarthy said.Officers who defended the Capitol, like Harry Dunn, delivered emotional testimony at the first hearing of a House select committee this past week.Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesRepresentative Elise Stefanik of New York, the recently selected House conference chairwoman, went even further, saying Ms. Pelosi “bears responsibility” as speaker “for the tragedy that occurred on Jan. 6” and deriding her as “an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”Ms. Pelosi is not responsible for the security of Congress; that job falls to the Capitol Police, a force that the speaker only indirectly influences. Republicans have made no similar attempt to blame Mr. McConnell, who shared control of the Capitol at the time.Outside the Justice Department, meanwhile, a group of conservative lawmakers gathered to accuse prosecutors of mistreating the more than 500 people accused in the Jan. 6 riot.Encouraged by Mr. Trump, they also echoed far-right portrayals of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was shot trying to break into the House chamber, as a patriotic martyr whose killing by the police was premeditated.As if to show how anti-democratic episodes are ping-ponging around the globe, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in June seized on Ms. Babbitt’s killing — calling it an “assassination” — to deflect questions about his own country’s jailing of political prisoners.Some senior Republicans insist that warnings of a whitewash are overwrought.“I don’t think anybody’s going to be successful erasing what happened,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “Everybody saw it with their own eyes and the nation saw it on television.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi has increasingly treated House Republicans as a pariah party, unworthy of collaboration or trust.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesFor Mr. Cornyn and other lawmakers, continuing to talk about the attack is clearly an electoral loser at a time when they are trying to retake majorities in Congress and avoid Mr. Trump’s ire.Most Republican lawmakers instead simply try to say nothing at all, declining even to recount the day’s events, let alone rebuke members of their party for spreading falsehoods or muddying the waters.Asked how he would describe the riot, in which a hostile crowd demanded the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, his brother, Representative Greg Pence of Indiana, responded curtly, “I don’t describe it.”Yet the silence of party stalwarts, including nearly all of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the attack and the Republican senators who voted to convict him, has created an information void that hard-right allies of Mr. Trump have readily filled. And they have found receptive audiences in a media environment replete with echo chambers and amplifying algorithms.In a July poll by CBS News, narrow majorities of Trump voters said they would describe the attack as an example of “patriotism” or “defending freedom.”That silence follows a familiar pattern: Rather than refute false allegations about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud, many leading Republicans have simply tolerated extremist misinformation. Perhaps no one’s silence has been more significant than that of Mr. McConnell, who criticized Mr. Trump and his party in the immediate aftermath of the attack, denouncing it as a “failed insurrection” fueled by the former president’s lies.A group of conservative members of Congress called a hasty news conference outside the Justice Department to accuse prosecutors of treating the arrested rioters unfairly.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesSince Mr. Trump’s impeachment acquittal by the Senate in February, when Mr. McConnell declared him “practically and morally responsible,” the minority leader has all but refused to discuss Jan. 6. The quiet acquiescence of party leaders has effectively left Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois as the only two Republicans still willing to speak out against a majority of their party.“Clearly there were security failings at the Capitol, but there was a mob that tried to prevent us from carrying out our constitutional duty,” Ms. Cheney said in an interview. “It’s very hard for me to understand why any member of Congress of either party would want to whitewash that.”Ms. Cheney has already paid a price: Republicans ousted her this spring from their No. 3 leadership position, replacing her with Ms. Stefanik.Now, House hard-liners want to expel her and Mr. Kinzinger from the Republican conference altogether, portraying them as “snitches” and “spies” in league with Democrats.The message is clear: Adherence to facts cannot overcome adherence to the party line. More

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      Trump, Covid and the Loneliness Breaking America

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      I wasn’t planning on reading any of the new batch of Donald Trump books. His vampiric hold on the nation’s attention for five years was nightmarish enough; one of the small joys of the post-Trump era is that it’s become possible to ignore him for days at a time. More

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      Will Christian America Withstand the Pull of QAnon?

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      The scandals, jagged-edged judgmentalism and culture war mentality that have enveloped significant parts of American Christendom over the last several years, including the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, have conditioned many of us to expect the worst. Which is why the annual meeting of the convention this week was such a pleasant surprise.The convention’s newly elected president, the Rev. Ed Litton, barely defeated the Rev. Mike Stone, the choice of the denomination’s insurgent right. Mr. Litton, a soft-spoken pastor in Alabama who is very conservative theologically, has made racial reconciliation a hallmark of his ministry and has said that he will make institutional accountability and care for survivors of sexual abuse priorities during his two-year term.“My goal is to build bridges and not walls,” Mr. Litton said at a news conference after his victory, pointedly setting himself apart from his main challenger. But those bridges won’t be easy to build.Tensions in the convention are as high as they’ve been in decades; it is a deeply fractured denomination marked by fierce infighting. The Conservative Baptist Network, which Mr. Stone is part of, was formed in 2020 to stop what it considers the convention’s drift toward liberalism on matters of culture and theology.Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias of The Times describe the individuals in the Conservative Baptist Network as “part of an ultraconservative populist uprising of pastors” who want to “take the ship.” They are zealous, inflamed, uncompromising and eager for a fight. They nearly succeeded this time. And they’re not going away anytime soon.They view as a temporary setback the defeat of Mr. Stone, who came within an eyelash of winning even after allegations by the Rev. Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, that Mr. Stone blocked investigations of sexual abuse at Southern Baptist churches and engaged in a broader campaign of intimidation. (Mr. Stone has denied the charges.)True to this moment, the issues dividing the convention are more political than theological. What preoccupies the denomination’s right wing right now is critical race theory, whose intellectual origins go back several decades, and which contends that racism is not simply a product of individual bigotry but embedded throughout American society. As The Times put it, “the concept argues that historical patterns of racism are ingrained in law and other modern institutions, and that the legacies of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow still create an uneven playing field for Black people and other people of color.”What upset many members of the Conservative Baptist Network was a nonbinding 2019 resolution approved at the convention’s annual meeting stating that critical race theory and intersectionality could be employed as “analytical tools” — all the while acknowledging that their insights could be subject to misuse and only on the condition that they be “subordinate to Scripture” and don’t serve as “transcendent ideological frameworks.”Late last year, the Rev. J.D. Greear, who preceded Mr. Litton as president, tweeted that while critical race theory as an ideological framework is incompatible with the Bible, “some in our ranks inappropriately use the label of ‘CRT!’ to avoid legitimate questions or as a cudgel to dismiss any discussion of discrimination. Many cannot even define what C.R.T. is. If we in the S.B.C. had shown as much sorrow for the painful legacy that sin has left as we show passion to decry C.R.T., we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.” (The Southern Baptist Convention was created as a result of a split with northern Baptists over slavery. In 1995, the convention voted to “repent of racism of which we have been guilty.”) In his farewell address as president last week, Mr. Greear warned against “an S.B.C. that spends more energy decrying things like C.R.T. than they have of the devastating consequences of racial discrimination.” And another former president of the convention, the Rev. James Merritt, said, “I want to say this bluntly and plainly: if some people were as passionate about the Gospel as they were critical race theory, we’d win this world for Christ tomorrow.”Even if you believe, as I do, that some interpretations of critical race theory have problematic, illiberal elements to them, it is hardly in danger of taking hold in the 47,000-plus congregations in the convention, which is more theologically and politically conservative than most denominations. What is ripping through many Southern Baptist churches these days — and it’s not confined to Southern Baptist churches — is a topic that went unmentioned at the annual convention last week: QAnon conspiracy theories.Dr. Moore, who was an influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention until he split with the denomination just a few weeks ago, told Axios, “I’m talking literally every day to pastors, of virtually every denomination, who are exhausted by these theories blowing through their churches or communities.” He said that for many, QAnon is “taking on all the characteristics of a cult.”Bill Haslam, the former two-term Republican governor of Tennessee, a Presbyterian and the author of “Faithful Presence: The Promise and the Peril of Faith in the Public Square,” put it this way in a recent interview with The Atlantic:I have heard enough pastors who are saying they cannot believe the growth of the QAnon theory in their churches. Their churches had become battlegrounds over things that they never thought they would be. It’s not so much the pastors preaching that from pulpits — although I’m certain there’s some of that — but more people in the congregation who have become convinced that theories are reflective of their Christian faith.According to a recent poll by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, nearly a third of white evangelical Christian Republicans — 31 percent — believe in the accuracy of the QAnon claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” White evangelicals are far more likely to embrace conspiracy theories than nonwhite evangelicals. Yet there have been no statements or resolutions by the Southern Baptist Convention calling QAnon “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message,” which six S.B.C. seminary presidents said about critical race theory and “any version of critical theory” late last year. Too many Southern Baptist leaders, facing all sorts of internal problems and dangers, would rather divert attention and judgment to the world outside their walls. This is not quite what Jesus had in mind.The drama playing out within the convention is representative of the wider struggle within American Christianity. None of us can fully escape the downsides and the dark sides of our communities and our culture. The question is whether those who profess to be followers of Jesus show more of a capacity than they have recently to rise above them, to be self-critical instead of simply critical of others, to shine light into our own dark corners, even to add touches of grace and empathy in harsh and angry times.That happens now and then, here and there, and when it does, it can be an incandescent witness. But the painful truth is it doesn’t happen nearly enough, and in fact the Christian faith has far too often become a weapon in the arsenal of those who worship at the altar of politics.Rather than standing up for the victims of sexual abuse, their reflex has been to defend the institutions that cover up the abuse. Countless people who profess to be Christians are having their moral sensibilities shaped more by Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologues than by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.Perhaps without quite knowing it, many of those who most loudly proclaim the “pre-eminence of Christ” have turned him into a means to an end, a cruel, ugly and unforgiving end. And this, too, is not quite what Jesus had in mind.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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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      Is America’s Democracy Slipping Away?

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      On Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was revving up the rioters who would attempt an insurrection at the Capitol, just a short distance away, he said to them: “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” More