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      As Midterms Loom, Mark Zuckerberg Shifts Focus Away From Elections

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

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      Un juicio penal contra Donald Trump tendría desafíos para el Departamento de Justicia

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      Durante las audiencias del comité que investiga el asalto al Capitolio han surgido pruebas y testimonios que aumentan la presión para iniciar un proceso judicial contra el expresidente. Pero especialistas legales consideran que sería un caso difícil.Cuando durante la semana pasada surgieron nuevos cuestionamientos sobre un posible juicio penal contra el expresidente Donald Trump por tratar de anular las elecciones de 2020, este emitió un confuso comunicado de 12 páginas.Dicho comunicado contenía la habitual combinación de sus aseveraciones estrafalarias, exageraciones y rotundas mentiras, pero también algo que los aliados de Trump y los expertos jurídicos señalaron como llamativo y diferente: el inicio de una defensa jurídica.Casi en todas las páginas, Trump daba explicaciones de por qué estaba convencido de que le habían hecho trampa en las elecciones de 2020 y por qué tenía todo el derecho de cuestionar los resultados a través de cualquier medio disponible.Trump escribió que lo que ocurrió en el Capitolio el 6 de enero de 2021 fue resultado de un intento de los estadounidenses “de responsabilizar a las autoridades electorales por las claras señales de actividades delictivas a lo largo del proceso electoral”.Esta aseveración, aunque infundada, tenía especial significado debido al creciente interés acerca de si enfrentaría acciones penales. Si el Departamento de Justicia entablara un juicio en su contra, los fiscales tendrían que demostrar que él sabía —o debía haber sabido— que su postura se basaba en afirmaciones falsas sobre un fraude electoral generalizado o que su intento de impedir la certificación de los resultados por parte del Congreso era ilegal.Como una posible defensa, la táctica presente en el comunicado de Trump está lejos de ser una garantía para que no lo procesen y tiene problemas de credibilidad evidentes. Trump cuenta con un largo historial de que es capaz de decir lo que sea con tal de lograr sus objetivos, sin importar si es verdad o no. Y algunas de las medidas que tomó después de las elecciones de 2020, como presionar a las autoridades de Georgia para que encontraran los votos suficientes como para cambiar el resultado en ese estado a su favor, habla de un intento decidido de mantenerse en el poder y no de abordar algunos puntos débiles más generales percibidos en el sistema electoral.Pero su continua sarta de mentiras pone de manifiesto algunas de las dificultades para entablar cualquier proceso penal en su contra, a pesar de lo bien establecidos que están en este momento los hechos primordiales.Además, el comunicado también señala las medidas que Trump está tomando tras bambalinas para formar un nuevo equipo de abogados a fin de que hagan frente a una serie de investigaciones, como, por ejemplo, su campaña de presión con la que intentaba cambiar los resultados de las elecciones en Georgia y el hecho de que extrajera documentos clasificados cuando dejó el cargo.Según dos personas enteradas de este asunto, en la elaboración del borrador del documento participó Evan Corcoran, un abogado defensor para delitos de cuello blanco y exfiscal federal designado por Trump. Corcoran también ha representado a Steve Bannon, un aliado de Trump que el Departamento de Justica ha acusado de rehusarse a cooperar con el comité de la Cámara Baja que investiga los hechos del 6 de enero.Ni Corcoran ni la portavoz de Trump respondieron a la solicitud de ofrecer comentarios.El comunicado llegó en una semana en la que las audiencias del comité de la Cámara de Representantes dejaron clara la posibilidad de someter a Trump a procesos penales y civiles al enfatizar el testimonio de sus asesores y colaboradores que documentaron lo que le habían dicho, y cuándo, acerca de la validez de las acusaciones de fraude electoral y la legitimidad de su estrategia para mantenerse en el poder.En su tercera audiencia del jueves de la semana pasada, el comité argumentó que Trump había seguido adelante con el plan de hacer que el vicepresidente Mike Pence revocara de manera unilateral las elecciones de 2020 a pesar de que le habían dicho a Trump que no se contaba con bases legales para hacerlo.El Departamento de Justicia está investigando una serie de elementos relacionados con el asalto al Capitolio y con el intento más general de Trump y sus aliados para conservar la Casa Blanca pese al triunfo de Joe Biden. El fiscal general Merrick Garland no ha dado indicios de que el departamento esté armando un caso contra Trump, quien desde hace mucho tiempo ha sostenido que las investigaciones sobre el ataque del 6 de enero son partidistas e infundadas y cuya versión de los hechos no ha sido presentada en las audiencias del comité de la Cámara Baja.Pero las investigaciones del panel ya han arrojado pruebas que podrían aumentar la presión a Garland para que avance con mayor firmeza, plan de acción que conllevaría tremendas implicaciones legales y políticas. Después del acicate del Departamento de Justicia, en estos últimos días, el comité de la Cámara Baja dio señales de que ya el mes entrante comenzaría a compartir con los fiscales federales algunas transcripciones de sus entrevistas con los testigos.Greg Jacob, a la izquierda, quien fue abogado jefe del vicepresidente Mike Pence y J. Michael Luttig, un exjuez conservador, prestan su declaración en una audiencia del comité selecto de la Cámara de Representantes que investiga el asalto al Capitolio del 6 de enero.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesEn una demanda civil relacionada con el trabajo del comité, un juez federal concluyó en marzo que lo más probable era que Trump y un abogado que lo había asesorado, John Eastman, hubieran cometido un delito en su intento de anular las elecciones. “La ilegitimidad del plan era evidente”, concluyó en ese caso el juez David O. Carter del Tribunal de Distrito de Estados Unidos para el Distrito Central de California.Carter hizo referencia a dos delitos que, según él, era probable que estos hombres hubieran cometido: conspiración para cometer fraude contra Estados Unidos y obstruir los procedimientos del Congreso. Los miembros del comité de la Cámara Baja han hecho insinuaciones parecidas y algunos abogados han sostenido que hay probabilidades de que también acusen de sedición a Trump.No obstante, llevar a juicio con éxito las posibles acusaciones sugeridas por Carter y otras personas podría depender de establecer cuáles eran las intenciones de Trump, un asunto que, al parecer, abordó su comunicado de la semana pasada con el argumento de que él creía que su impugnación de los resultados se basaba en dudas legítimas sobre la realización de las elecciones.Daniel L. Zelenko, un abogado defensor para delitos de cuello blanco y exfiscal federal, señaló que en todos los posibles delitos que se estaban analizando relacionados con el comportamiento de Trump, el Departamento de Justicia tendría que demostrar que el expresidente tenía la intención de cometer un delito. Zelenko comentó que, aunque los nuevos detalles revelados por el comité ayudarían a los fiscales a probar sus intenciones, el gobierno seguía teniendo que afrontar una serie de otras dificultades para entablar cualquier juicio.“Lo fundamental es tener pruebas actuales de que él dijera que sabía que las elecciones no habían sido fraudulentas, pero que de todas maneras estaba tratando de mantenerse en el poder”, explicó Zelenko, copresidente del ejercicio de la defensa de delitos de cuello blanco en Crowell & Moring. “El problema con Trump es que tenemos que intentar meternos en su cabeza, y su historial de mentiras y embustes es tal, que resulta difícil determinar qué es lo que en realidad cree”.Aparte de las pruebas que el comité ya ha revelado, el panel ha recibido otros testimonios que socavan la afirmación de Trump de que pensaba que realmente había ganado las elecciones. Según dos personas informadas del asunto, Alyssa Farah Griffin, la directora de Comunicaciones de la Casa Blanca en los días posteriores a las elecciones, declaró recientemente al comité que Trump le dijo en noviembre de 2020 palabras del estilo de: ¿puedes creer que perdí contra Biden?En su audiencia del jueves de la semana pasada, el comité de la Cámara de Representantes armó un caso en el que Trump se lanzó de cabeza a un plan para que Pence anulara unilateralmente la elección a pesar de que se le había dicho a Trump que no tenía ninguna base legal.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEn una entrevista por televisión el otoño pasado, Griffin, que no respondió a una solicitud de comentarios, reconoció uno de los factores que complican establecer lo que Trump puede haber creído. Dijo que Trump podría haber cambiado de opinión después de las elecciones.“Me dijo poco después que sabía que había perdido, pero entonces, ya sabes, la gente que lo rodea…”, dijo Griffin en la CNN, refiriéndose a los asesores externos que impulsaron falsas afirmaciones de fraude electoral. “Consiguieron información delante de él, y pienso que su opinión realmente podría haber cambiado sobre eso, y eso da miedo, porque sí perdió, y los hechos están al alcance de todos”.Samuel W. Buell, profesor de Derecho en la Universidad Duke y exfiscal federal, mencionó que cualquier acción penal contra Trump tendría que comenzar por establecer que él sabía que lo que estaba haciendo no era correcto.“Hay que demostrar que sabía que lo que estaba haciendo no era correcto y que no tenía sustento legal para hacerlo”, comentó. “No digo que tenga que pensar: ‘Lo que estoy haciendo es un delito’. Se trata de probar que pensaba: ‘Sé que no tengo ningún argumento jurídico, sé que he perdido las elecciones, pero seguiré adelante con una afirmación que sé que es falsa y un plan que no tiene sustento legal’”.Las audiencias del comité de la Cámara Baja no son un juicio. El panel tiene la libertad de ser selectivo con respecto al testimonio que usa para plantear una acusación contra Trump y el expresidente no tiene aliados en el comité que puedan cuestionar a los testigos ni proporcionarle información que le sea de utilidad.Sin embargo, las audiencias han hecho hincapié en una serie de testigos que dijeron que antes del 6 de enero le habían dicho de manera directa y constante a Trump que sus aseveraciones de que un fraude electoral le hubiese costado la reelección no estaban fundamentadas.Además, el comité presentó un testimonio corto, pero posiblemente muy crucial del abogado jefe de Pence, Greg Jacob. En una declaración, Jacob le dijo al panel que, el 4 de enero de 2021, Eastman —quien estaba urdiendo un plan para que Pence impidiera o retrasara la certificación del conteo del Colegio Electoral— le dijo a Trump que este plan transgrediría la ley de conteo electoral, la cual es la ley federal que rige el proceso.En las investigaciones que se centran casi exclusivamente en la acción física, como las agresiones, los asaltos y los asesinatos, los fiscales no necesitan centrarse en probar la intención, ya que el vínculo entre la acción y el daño suele ser claro.La cuestión de la intención, sin embargo, puede ser confusa cuando el delito investigado implica una acción en la que el estado mental del acusado puede ser difícil de establecer. Los delitos que, según los expertos jurídicos, puede haber cometido Trump —obstrucción al Congreso, defraudación al pueblo estadounidense y conspiración sediciosa— caen en esa categoría.En esos casos, el gobierno se enfrenta a una serie de obstáculos que debe superar para demostrar la intención. La forma más limpia es encontrar pruebas de que el acusado sabía que estaba haciendo algo malo.En el caso de Trump, dijeron los abogados, eso podría tomar la forma de pruebas directas de que él sabía que sus afirmaciones de fraude electoral generalizado eran infundadas o que sabía que la estrategia que estaba llevando a cabo era ilegal.Si el Departamento de Justicia no pudiera establecer ninguna prueba directa de lo que Trump sabía, los fiscales tendrían que recurrir a pruebas circunstanciales. Para hacerlo, por lo general dependerían de lo que los expertos y las personas con autoridad de su alrededor le estuvieran diciendo acerca de si las elecciones en realidad habían sido fraudulentas o si sería legal el tipo de estrategias para impugnar el resultado.Los abogados explicaron que las recomendaciones de un experto casi siempre son suficientes para demostrarle al jurado lo que sabía el acusado. Pero, según ellos, esto se podría dificultar en el caso de Trump porque se sabe que, desde hace mucho tiempo, no escucha ni a los expertos ni a sus propios asesores.Debido a las dificultades de demostrar lo que Trump sabía en realidad, hay otra manera en que los fiscales podrían demostrar que no tenía buenas intenciones: probar lo que a menudo se denomina “ignorancia deliberada”.Según ese principio, el gobierno tendría que demostrar que Trump creía que existía una alta probabilidad de que los expertos y sus asesores le estuvieran diciendo la verdad cuando dijeron que las elecciones no habían sido fraudulentas, pero que él tomó medidas deliberadas para no saber por qué ellos creían eso.Zelenko comentó que entendía por qué muchos estadounidenses que observaron las audiencias estarían convencidos de que había buenas posibilidades de entablar un juicio en contra del expresidente. Pero advirtió que los criterios para usar pruebas contra un acusado son más exigentes en el tribunal, donde casi siempre los jueces insisten en que los fiscales se basen en testimonios de primera mano, se puede contrainterrogar a los testigos y los fiscales tienen que probar sus argumentos más allá de una duda razonable.Michael S. Schmidt es corresponsal en Washington y cubre investigaciones federales y de seguridad nacional. Formó parte de dos equipos que ganaron el Pulitzer en 2018: uno por informar sobre acoso sexual en el trabajo y el otro por la cobertura del presidente Trump y los vínculos de su campaña con Rusia. @NYTMikeMaggie Haberman es corresponsal de la Casa Blanca. Se unió al Times en 2015 como corresponsal de campaña y formó parte de un equipo que ganó un Pulitzer en 2018 por informar sobre los asesores de Trump y sus conexiones con Rusia. @maggieNYT More

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      What Watergate Highlights About the Jan. 6 Hearings

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      On the anniversary of the June 17, 1972, break-in, alumni of the hearings gather for a reunion. They had it easier than the Jan. 6 committee, they say.WASHINGTON — In the grandly marbled space of the Russell Senate Office Building known as the Kennedy Caucus Room, where a bipartisan select committee held nationally televised hearings to investigate the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate a half-century ago, alumni of that inquiry gathered Friday evening to reminisce — and issue warnings.Their remarks, somber and theatrical as the room itself, were pitched to a present-day investigative body: the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.“Some things change, and some things remain the same,” said a host of the gathering, Rufus L. Edmisten, the deputy chief counsel for the Senate select committee that investigated Watergate. “What hasn’t changed between Watergate and Jan. 6 is how money has stolen our democracy.”The Watergate inquiry, a more than two-year combined effort on the part of both Senate and House committees, the special prosecutor’s office, a federal grand jury and the media, has been widely hailed as an investigatory gold standard and potential model for the Jan. 6 committee.It is seen as a triumph of assiduous digging and partisan-free statesmanship with made-for-Hollywood heroes: There was the heavy-jowled Senate Watergate Committee chairman, Sam Ervin of North Carolina; John Dean, President Richard M. Nixon’s former counsel, an owlish figure whose riveting testimony thoroughly implicated the president in covering up the Watergate break-in that took place in the small hours of June 17, 1972; and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the story and became household names.But the committee’s work today faces hurdles that the Watergate investigators did not.The present-day panel is racing the clock, attempting to uncover all that it can with the recognition that Republicans may win back the House majority and pull the plug on the committee’s endeavors come January. Nixon was defiant, but not at the level of former President Donald J. Trump. And truth was not up for debate in 1973.A screen above the Jan. 6 committee showing former President Donald J. Trump and his family during Thursday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York Times“What we investigated was understood to be substantive and real,” said Gordon Freedman, who served as a staffer on Mr. Ervin’s committee. “We now live in an era where the truth has been eroded as a standard.”Watergate investigators also had the benefit of the secret recordings made by Nixon in the Oval Office. By contrast, Mr. Trump did not tape his private conversations and he shredded White House documents while in office. Several of his former aides have defied subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee, some justifying their intransigence through “executive privilege,” a phrase that entered the lexicon in the Nixon era. But none of Nixon’s top advisers invoked it and instead elected to testify before Mr. Ervin’s committee — a reflection of a Republican Party far different from the one today.“It took a lot of guts for seven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and three conservative Southern Democrats to do the right thing and vote to impeach Nixon,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, who 50 years after being elected to Congress and serving on the House Judiciary Committee is running for Congress again. “They didn’t do it to agree with me. They did it because they followed the truth. And they did it, really, because the American public forced them to.”The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Nixon of course did use executive privilege to avoid handing over what would prove to be some of the most damning taped conversations. Only after Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, prevailed in the Supreme Court did Nixon acquiesce, resulting in his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.Mr. Jaworski, I should note, was my grandfather. I was two weeks shy of 15 when he was appointed by Nixon on Nov. 1, 1973, after Archibald Cox was fired on Nixon’s orders in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.As my grandfather would later maintain in his Watergate memoir, Nixon’s resignation proved that “no one — absolutely no one — is above the law.” That assessment deserves some qualification, however.Nixon was never indicted or much less convicted of any Watergate-related crimes. Against the wishes of the federal grand jury empaneled in the wake of the burglary, my grandfather declined to bring criminal charges against the president, and later signaled to the Ford administration that he would not challenge a presidential pardon.Nixon’s fate was an ignominious one, my grandfather insisted, saying, “A pardon isn’t just a beautiful document to frame and hand-hang on the wall.”Still, Nixon was free to write a best-selling memoir and to remain something of a Republican grandee all the way up to his death nearly two decades after he resigned in disgrace. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, remains the most influential member of his party after two impeachments and an electoral defeat he contests to this day.Despite the efforts of my grandfather and his investigators, and those of the media and Watergate committees, basic questions about the scandal remain unanswered. It is still unclear what, if any, advance knowledge Nixon had of the break-in. Though the president is on tape approving hush money payments to the defendants, it remains unknown whether he personally played a role in raising the funds. For that matter, the degree to which H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and Attorney General John Mitchell directed illegal activities on a day-to-day basis has not come to light.Such questions, of course, are analogous to those currently faced by the Jan. 6 committee.Richard Ben-Veniste, one of my grandfather’s top deputies who was at the reunion, said he was asked by the Jan. 6 committee to offer advice. “Jan. 6 was the Saturday Night Massacre on steroids,” he said. “It was far more dangerous than what we thought was unthinkable: the appearance of a coup d’état when raw power replaced the rule of law. Nixon, for all his criminality and authoritarian sensibilities, possessed a sense of shame.”The continuum that stretches from Watergate to the present features a few ironies. During and after the Nixon scandals, congressional checks on executive power were enacted, including the War Powers Act of 1973 and modifications to the Federal Election Campaign Act. Those legislative initiatives led to charges of overreach and a counter-movement by some Republicans who wanted to restore power to the executive branch.One of them, a former Nixon White House aide named Dick Cheney, was elected to Congress four years after Nixon’s resignation. Mr. Cheney, of course, was vice president during the George W. Bush administration and his daughter, Liz Cheney, is the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee who has sharply criticized Mr. Trump as an abuser of executive power.An additional irony following Nixon’s secretive presidency was the push for greater transparency in government: more sunlight, less smoke-filled rooms. But that effort has not necessarily translated into more efficient governance. To take a recent example, House conservatives led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia freshman who was born three months before Nixon’s resignation, have used the virtue of legislative transparency as an argument for slowing the House Democrats’ agenda by insisting on roll call votes for everything on the legislative calendar.At the reunion, Representative Deborah Ross, a North Carolina Democrat, was mingling among the guests as she recalled listening to the Senate Watergate hearings at the age of 10 while driving cross-country in her family’s station wagon. Noting the coincidence of the Watergate anniversary taking place in the middle of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, Ms. Ross said that “the obvious thing the two scandals had in common was that we’re talking about two men who wanted to hang onto power no matter what. The irony is that Nixon would have won in 1972 anyway, if he hadn’t been so paranoid about the Democrats.”“And if not for the tapes!” chimed in Judi Dash, whose late father, Sam Dash, served as the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee.Two former members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, Jill Wine-Banks and George Frampton, were at the reunion discussing the work of the Jan. 6 committee over cocktails. “I was very skeptical at first about the committee only televising six or eight hearings,” Ms. Wine-Banks said. “But I think they’ve done an excellent job, even without having the narrator we had, John Dean.”Turning to Mr. Frampton, she said, “For all that Nixon did, I’m not sure I ever felt democracy was in danger like it is now. Did you?”“Oh, certainly a little bit,” Frampton said. More

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      Trump Attacks Mike Pence for Not Rejecting Electoral Votes in 2020

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      In a speech, Donald J. Trump was undeterred by the Jan. 6 House committee’s account of how his rioting supporters menaced the vice president, and the panel’s dismantling of many of his election lies.A day after the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault illustrated the serious danger that rioters posed to Mike Pence, former President Donald J. Trump unleashed a new attack on the man who had served him as vice president, criticizing him for refusing to interfere with the Electoral College certification of the 2020 presidential contest.Speaking on Friday afternoon before a faith-based group, Mr. Trump said that “Mike did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.On Thursday, the House panel demonstrated that Mr. Trump and his advisers were told repeatedly that Mr. Pence had no power to block the certification and that doing so would violate the law, but pressed him to try anyway.The committee also used witnesses to dismantle and debunk Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud — arguments that he repeated in his keynote speech on Friday at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville.Mr. Trump has grown angry watching the hearings, knowing that he lacks a bully pulpit from which to respond, according to his advisers. He used much of his Friday address to repeat his false election claims and to denigrate Mr. Pence.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Most striking was the context for the attack on Mr. Pence, whose presence on the presidential ticket in 2016 was critical to reassuring evangelical voters that Mr. Trump, a thrice-married New York real estate developer whose first divorce was tabloid fodder for months and who had supported abortion rights, had become sufficiently conservative on social issues.Mr. Pence, who often talks about his religious faith, is a favorite among the kind of voters attending the conference. But that did not stop Mr. Trump from denouncing him from the stage on Friday.After repeating claims about election fraud that have been widely debunked, including by his former attorney general, William P. Barr, Mr. Trump turned his sights on Mr. Pence.First, he insisted that he had not called Mr. Pence a “wimp” in a phone call with the vice president on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, even though Mr. Trump’s former aide Nick Luna had testified under penalty of perjury about such a comment. “I don’t even know who these people are,” Mr. Trump told the crowd.“I never called Mike Pence a wimp,” said Mr. Trump, whose daughter Ivanka was present for the call and later told her chief of staff that Mr. Trump had effectively called Mr. Pence a coward, using a vulgarity. Then, Mr. Trump went on to describe Mr. Pence as weak.“Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic,” the former president said. “But just like Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people,” he said, Mr. Pence “did not have the courage to act.” The comment was met with applause.Mr. Trump continued to mock Mr. Pence, whose aides testified that he had told Mr. Trump repeatedly that he did not have the power to dismiss Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory or declare a 10-day recess in the congressional session to send the votes back to states to be re-examined.“Mike Pence had absolutely no choice but to be a human conveyor belt,” Mr. Trump said.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the 1801 certification of Thomas Jefferson’s presidential victory — a process that Jefferson, then the vice president, oversaw — to argue that Mr. Pence should have used that model to keep Mr. Trump in office.“I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson,’” Mr. Trump said. “And then after it all went down, I looked at him one day and I said, ‘Mike, I hate to say this, but you’re not Thomas Jefferson.’”Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, said this conversation never happened. Mr. Short did not comment more broadly on Mr. Trump’s speech.Mr. Trump also complained that the House committee had edited videos of his former aides’ testimony so that they were not played in full context. He appeared to be referring indirectly to testimony by his daughter Ivanka, whose remarks have been used against her father in two hearings.Speaking of the mob that left his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and swarmed the Capitol, Mr. Trump remained defensive. “It was a simple protest,” he said. “It got out of hand.” More

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      Deceptive Mailings, False Billboards: Voting Disinformation Is Not Just Online

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      A survey by election researchers argues that efforts to confuse or scare away prospective voters disproportionately target minority groups in battleground states.When it comes to elections, disinformation is not just a problem online.Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin argue in a new report that disinformation targeting communities of color in three battleground states circulated as often through traditional sources of information, complicating efforts to fight it.The misleading information was included in mailings and campaign advertisements in newspapers, radio, television and even billboards. Those efforts are more likely to reach voters in those communities than targeted disinformation campaigns on the internet.“Online disinformation is just one small piece of the puzzle,” said Rachel Goodman of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that commissioned the report. “There are many other failures in the information ecosystem that allow disinformation about elections to thrive.”False or misleading information about registering and voting is so pervasive, the researchers said, that it amounts to what they call “structural disinformation.” It affects not only elections but also other issues, like health care, creating information gaps that those propagating disinformation can exploit.The report argued that poor dissemination of changes in voting rules “creates openings for targeted disinformation and innocent misunderstandings which will keep members of that community from exercising their rights.”The report, based on surveys of election activists in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, also cited direct mailings sent to Black voters in Milwaukee containing false information about voting, though they were made to look like official documents.Billboards in Wisconsin wrongly warned that people with felony convictions could not vote after completing their sentences. In rural parts of Arizona, Native American voters had trouble providing proof of residence because they lived in places without United States Postal Service addresses.Changes to state election laws, like the one in Georgia that Republican lawmakers enacted after Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential victory in 2020, are likely to compound the problem.“Structural disinformation, particularly structural disinformation related to the right to vote, has a disproportionate impact on communities of color and other historically marginalized communities,” the report said.The findings suggested that efforts to rebut disinformation should not be limited to online services. The researchers said the most effective measures involved direct contact with prospective voters — in person, at events or through direct mailings. Those efforts are expensive and labor intensive, however.The cumulative effect of disinformation and partisan controversy over elections has been to create distrust and demoralization, dampening turnout and eroding confidence in the government more broadly.“The low turnout rates and things that we see happening now in their states and their communities are at least in large part due to the ways in which over the course of time disinformation has made their communities skeptical of the American democratic system,” said one of the researchers, Samuel Woolley, the program director of propaganda research at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin. More

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      Inside the Night That Began Trump’s Bid to Overturn the Election

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      Donald J. Trump’s advisers urged him not to declare victory on election night in 2020. He listened to the one who told him what he wanted to hear.The Jan. 6 committee used interviews with Donald J. Trump’s own family and his closest advisers to illustrate how he rejected advice and falsely claimed he won the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani seemed drunk, and he was making a beeline for the president.It was election night in 2020, and President Donald J. Trump was seeing his re-election bid slip away, vote by vote. According to video testimony prepared by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, was spouting conspiracy theories.“They’re stealing it from us,” Mr. Giuliani told the president when he found him, according to Jason Miller, one of the president’s top campaign aides, who told the Jan. 6 committee that Mr. Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” that night. “Where do all the votes come from? We need to go say that we won.”Several times that night, Mr. Trump’s own family members and closest advisers urged him to reject Mr. Giuliani’s advice. Mr. Miller told him not to “go and declare victory” without a better sense of the numbers. “It’s far too early to be making any proclamation like that,” said Bill Stepien, his campaign manager. Even his daughter Ivanka Trump told him that the results were still being counted.But in the end, Mr. Giuliani was the only one that night who told the president what he wanted to hear.Mr. Giuliani’s rantings about stolen ballots fed into the president’s own conspiracy theories about a rigged election, nursed in public and private since long before the votes were counted. They helped spark a monthslong assault on democracy and — in the committee’s view — led inexorably to the mob that breached the Capitol hoping to stop the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president.Mr. Trump told Mr. Miller, Mr. Stepien and the rest that they were being weak and were wrong. During a conversation in the reception area of the White House living quarters, he told them he was going to go in “a different direction.”Not long after, Mr. Trump did just that, appearing for the cameras at 2:21 a.m. in the East Room in front of a wall of American flags.He denounced the election in the speech, calling the vote “a fraud on the American public” and an “embarrassment” to the country. “We were getting ready to win this election,” he told his supporters and the television viewers. “Frankly, we did win this election.”The inside account of the White House that night was assembled by the Jan. 6 committee. During its second public hearing on Monday, the committee played a video that painted a vivid portrait of how Mr. Trump rejected cautions from his closest aides and advisers and went out to declare himself the winner.Testimony from those closest to the former president effectively documented the formal beginning of Mr. Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.The Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Mr. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Liz Cheney: The vice chairwoman of the House committee has been unrepentant in continuing to blame Mr. Trump for stoking the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Trump had not been shy about that expectation; weeks before Election Day, he had predicted a “fraud like you’ve never seen.” And even as the votes were being counted, Mr. Trump began delivering that message. But the testimony offered at Monday’s hearing was the linchpin of the argument that the committee is trying to make: that Mr. Trump knew his claims of a fraudulent election were not true and made them anyway.“That’s the bottom line,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is chairman of the committee. “We had an election Mr. Trump lost, but he refused to accept the results of the democratic process.”In the weeks to follow election night, Mr. Trump was repeatedly told by top aides that his claims of fraud were baseless.The committee underscored that fact with long video clips of former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said that beating back the “avalanche” of fraud allegations from the president was “like playing whack-a-mole because something would come out one day and then the next day it would be another issue.” He called the claims of fraud from Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani “completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.”But the committee’s depiction of the White House on election night was the day’s most compelling narrative. And the testimony by Trump aides saying they had doubts about Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud was striking, particularly because some of those same aides had expressed support for the president in public, casting doubt on the outcome of the election.At just after 11:15 p.m., Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden, a major blow to Mr. Trump’s campaign. Using interviews with Ivanka Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and several of the president’s campaign aides, the committee video captured how the sense of celebration inside the White House residence turned from giddy optimism to grim anxiety.“Both disappointed with Fox and concerned that maybe our data or our numbers weren’t accurate,” Mr. Miller testified, describing the mood among the president’s supporters.After the Arizona call, Mr. Trump’s team was livid, according to earlier reporting about the night. Mr. Trump told aides to get Fox News to reverse course somehow. Mr. Miller made a call to a contact at the network. Mr. Kushner reached out to the network’s owner.“Hey, Rupert,” the president’s son-in-law said into a cellphone as Rupert Murdoch, the head of the network’s corporate parent, took his call.But soon, there would be another concern for the group of aides who later were referred to as “Team Normal,” according to Mr. Stepien. They received an alarming warning: Mr. Giuliani had had too much to drink and had made his way upstairs to the living quarters, where the president was watching returns.Several of Mr. Trump’s aides tries to run interference, but Mr. Giuliani, who had been staring at the screens in the campaign war room and insisted that the president had won Michigan, was undeterred.He demanded to see the president, according to a former aide familiar with the conversation.Mr. Stepien confronted Mr. Giuliani. How are we winning? he asked him. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, was there as well, and told Mr. Giuliani that he was wrong to say Mr. Trump had won Michigan.“That’s not true, Rudy!” he said loudly, according to the person familiar with the conversation. (Mr. Meadows would almost immediately go on to publicly and privately embrace the president’s fraud accusations, as documented in text messages discovered by the committee.)The president’s aides soon failed in their effort to keep Mr. Giuliani away from him. In the video presentation, Mr. Giuliani dismissed his rivals for their attempts to stop him from giving the president his advice.“I spoke to the president,” he told the committee investigators. “They may have been present. But I talked to the president several times that night.”Few of the president’s aides went public with their doubts about the president’s chances in the days after the election. In fact, it was the opposite. During a conference call with reporters the day after the election, Mr. Stepien said that he believed Mr. Trump would win Arizona by 30,000 votes when the counting was over.Mr. Trump had been saying for months that he would win the election, even as polling showed him behind Mr. Biden, in a political climate soured by Mr. Trump’s bumbling and erratic performance during the coronavirus pandemic. But he still started sowing seeds of doubt about the reliability of mail-in ballots, made available more broadly because of the pandemic, much earlier in the year.Warned weeks before Election Day that those ballots, along with the ones cast through early voting, would be tallied later than the same-day votes cast for Mr. Trump, the president stunned advisers by declaring he would simply go out and say he had won.“We want all voting to stop,” Mr. Trump said in his remarks early the morning of Nov. 4. “We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. OK?”Later that day, Ivanka Trump sent a text to a chain that included Mr. Meadows: “Keep the faith and the fight!” Mr. Trump almost immediately began telling Mr. Giuliani to start gathering what information he could.By Friday, it was clear from the Trump campaign’s data guru that the numbers simply were not there for him to succeed. The following day, Mr. Stepien, Mr. Miller and other aides were sent by Mr. Kushner to tell Mr. Trump that he had extremely low odds of any success coming from ongoing challenges.When the men arrived at the White House residence, Mr. Trump was calm, but he was not interested in heeding the warnings. He continued repeating his election conspiracies after Monday’s hearing, issuing a rambling 12-page response with a simple bottom line:“They cheated!” he wrote. More

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      Chris Stirewalt Defended Calling the Election for Biden. Fox News Fired Him.

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      When Chris Stirewalt watched rioters attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, he was a journalist for Fox News, which was trying to recover from a ratings slump in the weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost the election.Two months later, Mr. Stirewalt was fired by Fox, where he had been a regular on-air presence as the politics editor.The network gave no public reason for his dismissal. But Mr. Stirewalt, who before his ouster was one of the shrinking number of news journalists left at Fox News, was on the team that had decided to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. shortly before midnight on Election Day in 2020, effectively declaring the race over days before the results would be settled.On Monday morning, Mr. Stirewalt will testify before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. He is expected to discuss how he and the members of the Fox News Decision Desk relied on hard data to make that call, which deeply angered Mr. Trump and blunted his ability to falsely claim that he had won.In the days after the election, Mr. Stirewalt was one of the Fox personalities who went on the air to defend the call as Mr. Trump attacked the network and his supporters voted with their remotes, switching over to Fox rivals like Newsmax and the One America News Network.Mr. Stirewalt described the decision as the product of a cautious and rigorous internal process. “We are careful about making calls,” he said the day after the election. “That’s why we have those protocols in place so that we make good calls and that they stand up.”Since his ouster, Mr. Stirewalt has become an outspoken critic of his former employer and what he has described as an information bubble that is doing a disservice to Trump supporters. He has called the notion that fraud cost Mr. Trump the election a “lie” and said that the former president’s initial success was in part the result of the “informational malnourishment” of his supporters.In an opinion article for The Los Angeles Times that he wrote shortly after departing Fox, Mr. Stirewalt said he was hopeful that the truth would prevail. But he acknowledged that after watching what happened on Jan. 6, he had doubts as to whether that would “come quickly enough when outlets have the means to cater to every unhealthy craving of their consumers.” More

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      Trump Is Still a Threat

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      Donald Trump is a cancer on this country.Not only because of the way that he has behaved in it and at its helm, but because of the way that he has fundamentally changed it.On Thursday night, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection held the first of what will be a series of public hearings. The hearing was methodical and, at times, sensational. It underscored and buttressed the alarming, central thesis: Trump, as president of the United States, took aim at the democratic process of the United States by inciting a riot at the Capitol, among other things.Throw any adjective at it — brazen, shocking, outrageous, unprecedented — they are all insufficient to capture the enormity of what he did. A president with an autocratic fetish — one who assumed office with a welcome assist from the autocratic ruler of Russia — nearly hobbled the government of the most powerful country on the planet.Yet, with all of this, a poll published in February by the Pew Research Center found that fewer Americans believed that Trump bore responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot than they did in its immediate aftermath. Nearly six in 10 Republicans believed that he bore no responsibility at all for the rioting, compared to 46 percent the year before, and in June 2021, 66 percent of Republicans said that Trump “definitely” or “probably” won the 2020 election.The committee’s hearing may put a dent in those numbers, but if history is our guide, his cult will remain unflappable and intact.This is the legacy of Trump: the alteration of our political reality.As was made clear during Thursday’s hearing, multiple people told Trump that he had lost the election and that there was no widespread fraud. It appears that he wasn’t laboring under a delusion when he attempted to steal the election; he was raging his own lie about that election.Lying was a life skill for Donald Trump. But, before entering politics, he mostly used it as a tool to inflate his assets and his ego and to sell gold-plated aspiration to new-money social climbers. His entire brand was packaging garish people’s interpretations of glamour.In that world, he regularly skirted the rules. But when he entered politics, he found rules that were in some cases even more fungible than those covering finance. Many of the constraints on the president were customs and traditions. There were rules that no one had ever pushed to enforce, because previous presidents conformed to them.In some ways, the only thing constraining Trump as president was the unwillingness of other officials — many of whom he could appoint or replace at will — to break the rules.He was like a pirate landing among an Indigenous population. Instead of appreciating the elegance of the culture and history of its rites, he focused on its weaknesses, scheming ways to exploit it, and if need be, destroy it.Donald Trump didn’t create the modern American right, but he arrived in a moment when it was thirsty for unapologetic white nationalism, when it was terrified of white replacement and when it had flung open its arms in its willingness to embrace fiction.He quickly understood that these impulses, which establishment Republicans had told their base to suppress and only whisper, were the things the base wanted to hear shouted, things the base wanted to cheer.Now, millions of Americans have fallen for a lie and follow a liar.This means that our politics still exist in Trump’s shadow. Republican politicians, afraid to buck him and afraid of the mob he controls, toe the line for him and parrot his lies. The conservative media echo chamber, hermetically sealed and resistant to reality, ensures that Trump propaganda is repeated until it is accepted without examination.The Democrats also exist in Trump’s shadow. A large part of the reason Joe Biden was selected as the Democratic nominee was not because he had the most exciting set of policies, but because Democrats desperately wanted to beat Trump, and saw Biden as the safest bet to do so.Now that he has been elected, many factions of his winning coalition feel like constituencies held hostage. Any critique of Biden, even mild and legitimate, must be tempered so as not to give ammunition to the Mar-a-Lago Menace who looks poised to attempt another run for the White House.If he does, this country could well tear itself apart. And I make that statement with absolutely no hyperbolic intent. Indeed, it is not clear to me that this country can survive him calling the shots from the sidelines now.The political system has proved too compromised by Trump’s own influence to hold Trump accountable in a way that ends this nightmare. Now, the legal system is all we have left, and Trump has been harder to pinch than flesh slathered in tanning oil.We must now wait to see if the committee has the goods not to change the minds of voters, which feels increasingly like a lost cause, but to change the minds — or quicken the spirits — of prosecutors at the Department of Justice.Trump has changed America, but we can still prevent him from destroying it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More