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    Prosecutors Ask Witnesses Whether Trump Acknowledged He Lost 2020 Race

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    Jared Kushner was questioned before a federal grand jury as prosecutors appeared to be trying to establish if the former president knew his efforts to stay in power were built on a lie.Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have questioned multiple witnesses in recent weeks — including Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — about whether Mr. Trump had privately acknowledged in the days after the 2020 election that he had lost, according to four people briefed on the matter.The line of questioning suggests prosecutors are trying to establish whether Mr. Trump was acting with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power — essentially that his efforts were knowingly based on a lie — evidence that could substantially bolster any case they might decide to bring against him. Mr. Kushner testified before a grand jury at the federal courthouse in Washington last month, where he is said to have maintained that it was his impression that Mr. Trump truly believed the election was stolen, according to a person briefed on the matter.The questioning of Mr. Kushner shows that the federal investigation being led by the special counsel Jack Smith continues to pierce the layers closest to Mr. Trump as prosecutors weigh whether to bring charges against the former president in connection with the efforts to promote baseless assertions of widespread voter fraud and block or delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory.A spokesman for Mr. Kushner and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Trump is already facing federal charges brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel, in connection with classified documents taken from the White House. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBut others in Mr. Trump’s orbit who interacted with him in the weeks after the 2020 election, who have potentially more damaging accounts of Mr. Trump’s behavior, have been questioned by the special counsel’s office recently.Among them is Alyssa Farah Griffin, the White House communications director in the days after the 2020 election. Repeating an account she provided last year to the House select committee on Jan. 6, she told prosecutors this spring that Mr. Trump had said to her in the days after the election: Can you believe I lost to Joe Biden?“In that moment I think he knew he lost,” Ms. Griffin told the House committee.Ms. Griffin’s lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, declined to comment.Still other witnesses have been asked whether aides told Mr. Trump that he had lost, according to people familiar with some of the testimony, another topic explored by the House committee. Witnesses have also been asked about things the former president was telling people in the summer months leading up to Election Day and even as far back as the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began.The question of Mr. Trump’s intent could be important in strengthening the hand of prosecutors if they decide to charge Mr. Trump in the case. It is not known what charges they might be considering, but the House select committee, controlled by Democrats, referred a number of possible charges to the Justice Department last year, including inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing an act of Congress.Prosecutors may be trying to establish whether Mr. Trump was acting with corrupt intent as he sought to remain in power after the election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Trump is already facing federal charges brought by Mr. Smith in connection with classified documents taken from the White House, and he is under indictment in New York on charges related to hush-money payments to a pornographic film actress before the 2016 election. A district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., has been investigating efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Legal experts and former federal prosecutors say that establishing Mr. Trump’s mind-set to show he knew that what he was doing was wrong would give prosecutors in Mr. Smith’s election-focused inquiry a more robust case to put in front of a jury if they choose to bring charges.Prosecutors do not need hard evidence of a defendant saying: I know that I am breaking the law. But their cases are made stronger when they can produce evidence that the defendant knows there is no legal or factual basis for a claim but goes ahead with making it anyway.Daniel Zelenko, a partner at the firm Crowell & Moring and a former federal prosecutor, said that being able to cite a defendant’s own words can go a long way in helping prosecutors convince a jury that the defendant should be convicted.“Words are incredibly powerful in white-collar cases because in a lot of them you’re not going to hear from a defendant, as they are seldom going to take the stand,” he said. “So, having those words put in front of a jury gives them more importance and makes them more consequential.”Andrew Goldstein, the lead prosecutor in the investigation into Mr. Trump for obstruction during the Russia investigation and a partner at the law firm Cooley, said there were other benefits to having Mr. Trump’s own statements that were critical in such a potentially weighty case.“Just as important, if the Department of Justice has this kind of evidence, it could help justify to the public why charges in this case would be necessary to bring,” Mr. Goldstein said.Some aides and allies who interacted with Mr. Trump in the days after the election have previously disclosed that Mr. Trump indicated that he knew he lost the election. In testimony before the House select committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, said that in an Oval Office meeting in late November or early December 2020, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he had lost the election.“He says words to the effect of: Yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy,” Mr. Milley said, adding: “Meaning President Biden.”“And the entire gist of the conversation was — and it lasted — that meeting lasted maybe an hour or something like that — very rational,” General Milley said. “He was calm. There wasn’t anything — the subject we were talking about was a very serious subject, but everything looked very normal to me. But I do remember him saying that.”General Milley said, though, that in subsequent meetings Mr. Trump had increasingly discussed how the election was stolen from him.“It wasn’t there in the first session, but then all of a sudden it starts appearing,” General Milley said. A text message from early December 2020 between some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, disclosed on Tuesday night, shows Mr. Trump searching at that time for reports of how the election was stolen, if they had not been substantiated. The text was sent by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, to other members of the legal team, including Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Epshteyn said that he was relaying a direct message from Mr. Trump’s communications aide Jason Miller.Rudolph W. Giuliani urged Mr. Trump to follow through with a plan to simply declare victory in the 2020 election.Nicole Craine for The New York Times“Urgent POTUS request need best examples of ‘election fraud’ that we’ve alleged that’s super easy to explain,” the text message said. “Doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand.”He continued, “Is there any sort of ‘greatest hits’ clearinghouse that anyone has for best examples? Thank you!!!”That same day, Mr. Giuliani replied: “The security camera in Atlanta alone captures theft of a minimum of 30,000 votes which alone would change result in Georgia.” He continued, “Remember it will live in history as the theft of a state if it is not corrected by State Legislature.”The text messages were made public in connection with a defamation lawsuit being brought by two Georgia election workers against Mr. Giuliani.Mr. Trump has continued to maintain publicly, without any credible evidence, that he lost his re-election bid because of fraud and has defended the motivations of the mob that sought to disrupt the certification of his loss on Jan. 6, 2021. Even if Mr. Kushner, a key White House adviser to Mr. Trump, did not provide prosecutors with evidence to bolster any charge they might bring, his testimony gives them a sense of what he might say if called by the defense to testify in any trial.The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Smith’s office had subpoenaed Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, to testify before the grand jury. The special counsel’s office has yet to question her before the grand jury. Ms. Trump testified before the House committee last year.The House Jan. 6 committee determined that Mr. Trump’s decision to declare victory on election night even though the votes had not been fully counted yet was not spontaneous, but rather a “premeditated” plan promoted by a small group of his advisers.The panel found evidence, for instance, that Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative group Judicial Watch, was in direct communication with Mr. Trump even before Election Day and understood that he “would falsely declare victory on election night and call for the vote counting to stop.”Similarly, congressional investigators unearthed an audio recording made on Oct. 31, 2020, of Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump, who told associates that the president was going to summarily declare he had won the election.“But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Mr. Bannon said in the recording. “He’s just going to say he’s a winner.”Mr. Bannon was issued a subpoena last month to appear before the grand jury in Washington investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.In the last two years, reported accounts of Mr. Trump’s final months in office included his former White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, describing to a friend how Mr. Trump had acted out a script the month before the election that he planned to deliver on election night, saying he had won if he was ahead in the early returns. Mr. Trump at the White House on election night. The House Jan. 6 committee determined that Mr. Trump’s decision to declare victory was a “premeditated” plan.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn election night, Mr. Giuliani — who, witnesses testified to the House committee, appeared inebriated — wanted Mr. Trump to follow through with the plan to simply declare victory. Mr. Giuliani was the sole adviser encouraging Mr. Trump to pursue that course, the committee found.Among those telling Mr. Trump on election night that it was too early to know if he had won or lost were his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and Mr. Miller, the communications adviser. In the weeks that followed, several other aides and advisers told Mr. Trump there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the results of the election, including William P. Barr, his former attorney general.Alan Feuer More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Tracks How Trump Created and Spread Election Lies

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      In its second hearing this month, the committee showed how the former president ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol made a wide-ranging case on Monday that former President Donald J. Trump created and relentlessly spread the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him in the face of mounting evidence from an expanding chorus of advisers that he had been legitimately defeated.The committee, in its second hearing this month, traced the origins and progression of what it has described as Mr. Trump’s “big lie.” It showed through live witness testimony and recorded depositions how the former president, defying many of his advisers, insisted on declaring victory on election night before the votes were fully counted, then sought to challenge his defeat with increasingly outlandish and baseless claims that he was repeatedly informed were wrong.“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview the panel played on Monday, in which he at one point could not control his laughter at the absurdity of the claims that the former president was making.“There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Mr. Barr said.The panel also used the testimony of Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign chief, who told its investigators that Mr. Trump had ignored his election-night warning to refrain from declaring a victory that he had no basis for claiming. Instead, the president took the advice of Rudolph W. Giuliani — his personal lawyer who was, according to Jason Miller, a top campaign aide, “definitely intoxicated” — and said he had won even as the votes were still being tabulated.It was all part of the committee’s bid to show how Mr. Trump’s dissembling about the election results led directly to the events of Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in the deadliest attack on the building in centuries, spurred on by the president’s exhortations to “stop the steal.”Investigators went further on Monday, detailing how the Trump campaign and its Republican allies used claims of a rigged election that they knew were false to mislead small donors and raise as much as $250 million for an entity they called the Official Election Defense Fund, which top campaign aides testified never existed.“Not only was there the big lie,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who played a key role in the hearing, “there was the big rip-off.”Money ostensibly raised to “stop the steal” instead went to Mr. Trump and his allies, including, the investigation found, $1 million for a charitable foundation run by Mark Meadows, his chief of staff; $1 million to a political group run by several of his former staff members, including Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda; more than $200,000 to Trump hotels; and $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., which ran the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riot.Aides said Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., was paid $60,000 to speak at that event, a speech that lasted less than three minutes.“It is clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist and used the money raised for something other than what he said,” Ms. Lofgren said of Mr. Trump.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.But the bulk of the session was dedicated to showing how determined Mr. Trump was to cling to the fiction that he had won the election, only digging in more deeply as aide after aide informed him that he had not.Representatives Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren at the hearing.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe list of aides and advisers who sought to steer Mr. Trump away from his false claims was long and varied, according to the committee’s presentation. They included low-level campaign lawyers who outlined how they told the president that the returns coming in from the field showed that he was going to lose the race. Also among them were top officials in the Justice Department — including his onetime attorney general — who walked through how they had investigated claims that the race had been rigged or stolen and found them not only to be unsubstantiated, but to be nonsensical.“There were suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we’d won it outright,” Mr. Miller said in a video interview played by the panel.Mr. Stepien later said he considered himself part of “Team Normal,” while a separate group of outside advisers including Mr. Giuliani were encouraging Mr. Trump’s false claims.The committee played several portions of a deposition by Mr. Barr, Mr. Trump’s last attorney general, who called the president’s claims of a stolen election “bullshit” and “bogus.”“I told them that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time,” Mr. Barr testified. “And it was a great, great disservice for the country.”Mr. Trump was still at it on Monday, issuing a rambling 12-page statement several hours after the committee hearing ended in which he doubled down on his claims of fraud, complaining — yet again without any evidence — that Democrats had inflated voter rolls, illegally harvested ballots, removed Republican poll watchers from vote-counting facilities, bribed election officials and stopped the counting on election night when he was still in the lead.“Democrats created the narrative of Jan. 6 to detract from the much larger and more important truth that the 2020 Election was rigged and stolen,” Mr. Trump wrote.Representative Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said Mr. Trump waged an attack on democracy.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesIn the hearing room on Monday, the panel showed in striking detail how Mr. Trump’s advisers tried and failed to get him to drop his lies and accept defeat. In his deposition, Mr. Barr recalled several scenes inside the White House, including one in which he said he asked Mr. Meadows and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, how long Mr. Trump intended “to go on with this stolen election stuff.”Mr. Barr recalled that Mr. Meadows had assured him that Mr. Trump was “becoming more realistic” and knew “how far he can take this.” As for Mr. Kushner, Mr. Barr recounted that he responded to the question by saying, “We’re working on this.”After informing Mr. Trump that his claims of fraud were false, Mr. Barr had a follow-up meeting with the president and his White House counsel, Pat Cipollone. Mr. Barr described in his deposition how Mr. Trump became enraged that his own attorney general had refused to back his fraud allegations.Chris Stirewalt, the first witness of the day, was on the Fox News team that called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.Doug Mills/The New York Times“This is killing me,” Mr. Barr quoted Mr. Trump as saying. “You must have said this because you hate Trump.”Altogether, Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election. But among the numerous claims of fraud, Mr. Barr told the committee, the worst — and most sensational — concerned a purported plot by Chinese software companies, Venezuelan officials and the liberal financier George Soros to hack into machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems and flip votes away from Mr. Trump.These allegations were most prominently pushed by a former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell, who collected several unvetted affidavits from witnesses who supposedly had information about Dominion. In the weeks after the election, Ms. Powell, working with a group of other lawyers, filed four federal lawsuits laying out her claims in the Democratic strongholds of Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee and Phoenix even though the Trump campaign had already determined that some of her allegations were false.All of the suits — known as the “Krakens,” a reference to a mythical, havoc-wreaking sea beast — were eventually dismissed and deemed to be so frivolous that a federal judge sanctioned Ms. Powell and her colleagues. Dominion has sued her and others for defamation.Mr. Barr, in his deposition, described the claims against Dominion as “crazy stuff” — a sentiment that was echoed by other Trump aides whose testimony was presented by the committee.After Mr. Barr left his position as attorney general, his successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also told Mr. Trump his claims of widespread fraud were “debunked.”The committee showed through live witnesses and recorded depositions how Mr. Trump refused to listen to those around him.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesAnother witness who testified on Monday and dismissed Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud was Byung J. Pak, the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta who abruptly resigned on Jan. 4, 2021. After speaking with Mr. Barr, Mr. Pak looked into allegations of election fraud in Atlanta, including a claim pushed by Mr. Giuliani that a suitcase of ballots had been pulled from under a table in a local counting station on election night.Mr. Trump and his allies also claimed that there was rampant fraud in Philadelphia, with the former president recently asserting that more people voted in the city than there were registered voters. In his deposition, Mr. Barr called this allegation “rubbish.” To bolster this argument, the committee called Al Schmidt, a Republican who served as one of three city commissioners on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections.Mr. Schmidt rejected the fraud claims raised by Mr. Trump and his allies, saying there was no evidence that more people voted in Philadelphia than were registered there or that thousands of dead people voted in the city.Mr. Schmidt also testified that after Mr. Trump posted a tweet accusing of him by name of committing election fraud, he received threats online from people who publicized the names of his family members, his address and photographs of his home.Zach Montague 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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      Trump Campaign Chief to Headline Jan. 6 Hearing on Election Lies

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      Bill Stepien is expected to appear alongside a fired Fox News editor who called Trump’s loss and a former U.S. attorney who resigned rather than go along with false claims of election fraud.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol plans to use the testimony of former President Donald J. Trump’s own campaign manager against him on Monday as it lays out evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him in an attempt to overturn his defeat.The committee plans to call Bill Stepien, the final chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, who is expected to be asked to detail what the campaign and the former president himself knew about his fictitious claims of widespread election fraud. Those claims will be the focus of the second in a series of hearings the panel is holding this month to reveal the findings of its sprawling investigation.After an explosive first hearing last week in prime time, leaders of the committee are aiming to keep up a steady stream of revelations about the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the election and how it sowed the seeds of the violent siege of the Capitol by his supporters last year.On Monday, they plan to describe the origin and spread of Mr. Trump’s election lies, including the former president’s refusal to listen to advisers who told him that he had lost and that there was no evidence of widespread irregularities that could change the outcome. Then they plan on demonstrating the chaos those falsehoods caused throughout several states, ultimately resulting in the riot.A committee aide said the panel would focus in particular on Mr. Trump’s decision on election night to declare victory even though he had been told he did not have the numbers to win.A second panel of witnesses will include Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta who resigned abruptly after refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia.According to an internal memo made public as part of a court case, the Trump campaign knew as early as November that its outlandish fraud claims were false. Last week, the panel showed videotaped testimony of his top advisers and even the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, saying that they had told Mr. Trump and top White House officials as much.Mr. Stepien was present for key conversations about what the data showed about Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding in an effort to win swing states, beginning on election night. He was part of a meeting with Mr. Trump on Nov. 7, 2020, just after the election had been called by television networks in favor of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., in which he told Mr. Trump of the exceedingly low odds of success with his challenges.Mr. Trump, urged on by his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, wanted to press forward anyway.Mr. Stepien, who rarely speaks in public, is appearing under subpoena, raising questions about how willing a witness he will be against Mr. Trump.Mr. Stepien is currently serving as an adviser to Harriet Hageman, a Republican endorsed by Mr. Trump who is mounting a primary challenge to Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the panel’s vice chairwoman, setting up a potentially adversarial dynamic for his questioning on Monday.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.The Jan. 6 committee suggested in a letter sent to Mr. Stepien that it had evidence that he was aware that the campaign was raising money by making false claims about election fraud.“As manager of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, you oversaw all aspects of the campaign,” the letter said. “You then supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fund-raising. That messaging included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.”Mr. Stepien will appear alongside Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor at Fox News who was fired after Fox correctly called the 2020 president election in Arizona for Mr. Biden, a move that angered Mr. Trump.U.S. Attorney Byung J. Pak, who resigned after learning that Mr. Trump wanted to fire him for rejecting claims of rampant voter fraud in Georgia, in Atlanta in 2019.Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressThe second part of the hearing will turn to the reverberations of Mr. Trump’s false claims around the country, particularly in competitive states. Along with Mr. Pak, who resigned after learning that Mr. Trump wanted to fire him for rejecting claims of rampant voter fraud in Georgia, the panel is scheduled to hear from Al Schmidt, a Republican former city commissioner in Philadelphia who also stood up to Mr. Trump’s lies. Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer who served as the national counsel to George W. Bush’s presidential campaign and played a central role in the Florida recount of 2000, is also slated to appear.Monday’s lineup of witnesses suggests that the committee wants to chart the impact Mr. Trump’s lies had in conservative media and in various states, as well as contrasting the baseless nature of Mr. Trump’s claims with legitimate legal challenges from Republican campaigns of the past.A committee aide said the panel would present evidence during the hearing from witnesses who had investigated Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud and found them to be false.The panel also plans to show how Mr. Trump’s fiction of a stolen election was used as a fund-raising tool, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6. A fraudulent fund-raising effort could be grounds for a possible criminal referral to the Justice Department against Mr. Trump and his allies.And some on the committee have long believed that one way they could break through to Mr. Trump’s supporters would be to prove to them that they had been duped into donating their money to a bogus cause.Aides said the committee would also try on Monday to show how the rioters who stormed the Capitol had echoed back Mr. Trump’s words, and cited him as their motivation in storming the building in an attempt to stop Congress from formalizing his defeat.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the House Administration Committee, is slated to play a key role presenting evidence at the hearing, aides said.Time and again, top Trump administration officials told Mr. Trump he had lost the 2020 election. But time and again, Mr. Trump pressed forward with his lies of widespread fraud.Shortly after the election, as ballots were still being counted, the top data expert in Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign told him bluntly that he was going to lose.In the weeks that followed, as Mr. Trump continued to insist that he had won, a senior Justice Department official told him repeatedly that his claims of widespread voting fraud were meritless, ultimately warning him that they would “hurt the country.”Those concerns were echoed by the top White House lawyer, who told the president that he would be entering into a “murder-suicide pact” if he continued to pursue extreme plans to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.Last week, the Jan. 6 panel played video of an interview showing Mr. Barr testifying that he knew the president’s claims were false, and told him so on three occasions.“I told the president it was bullshit,” Mr. Barr is heard telling the committee’s investigators. “I didn’t want to be a part of it.”Al Schmidt, a Philadelphia city commissioner, outside City Hall in Philadelphia in 2020.Michelle Gustafson for The New York TimesCommittee members previewed some of the evidence they plan to present at Monday’s hearing during television news interviews Sunday.“Former President Trump was told by multiple people — it should have been abundantly clear — that there was no evidence that showed the election was stolen, and he ignored that,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, drew a contrast between those close to Mr. Trump who told him the truth and the “yes people” who encouraged his fantasy of a stolen election in order to please him.“If you truly believe the election was stolen, then if the president truly believed that, he’s not mentally capable to be president,” Mr. Kinzinger said on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” adding: “I think he didn’t believe it. I think the people around him didn’t believe it. This was all about keeping power against the will of the American people.”Michael S. Schmidt More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Weighs Possibility of Criminal Referrals

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      The House panel is examining whether there is enough evidence to recommend that the Justice Department pursue cases against Donald J. Trump and others.When the House formed a special committee this summer to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, its stated goal was to compile the most authoritative account of what occurred and make recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But as investigators sifted through troves of documents, metadata and interview transcripts, they started considering whether the inquiry could yield something potentially more consequential: evidence of criminal conduct by President Donald J. Trump or others that they could send to the Justice Department urging an investigation.That move — known as sending a criminal referral — has no legal weight, as Congress has little ability to tell the Justice Department what investigations it should undertake. But it could have a substantial political impact by increasing public pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who in his first year in office has largely sidestepped questions about what prosecutors are doing to examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud.The questions of criminality go far beyond the contempt of Congress referrals that the House has sent to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation. (Federal law requires prosecutors to bring contempt of Congress charges before a grand jury upon receiving such a referral.)According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.It is not clear what, if any, new evidence the committee has that might support a criminal referral, when and how it will determine whether to pursue that option and whether the committee could produce a case strong enough to hold up against inevitable accusations that it acted in a partisan manner.Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?The question is one of the most significant to emerge in the first six months of the investigation.The panel has nine House members — including two Republicans — and is modeling itself on the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The committee plans to produce the authoritative report about Jan. 6.It plans to hold televised hearings early next year to lay out for the public how the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement helped lead to the Capitol riot. And it ultimately may propose changes to federal laws, toughening statutes to rein in a president’s conduct and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to exploit in his attempt to cling to power.One of the challenges the committee faces is that so much has been reported about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and the attacks themselves. So far, the numerous disclosures about the role of Mr. Trump, his aides and others who promoted the baseless idea that the election had been stolen from him have had little impact on his Republican support in Congress.But a credible criminal referral could provide the committee an opportunity to underscore the gravity of what happened while potentially subjecting Mr. Trump and others to intensified legal scrutiny.Although congressional investigators have no powers to charge a crime, their ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify allows them to reveal new details about events. At times, that process leads to witnesses disclosing potential criminality about themselves or others.When that occurs, Congress can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department — often in the form of a public letter — that can increase pressure on the department to open investigations. Sometimes members of Congress, amid partisan squabbling, overstate the evidence of criminality and make referrals to the Justice Department that are ignored because they appear political.Congressional investigations also create problems for witnesses because it is against the law to make false or misleading statements to Congress. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, indicted Roger J. Stone Jr. in 2019 for lying to congressional investigators examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and for obstructing that inquiry. Mr. Stone was ultimately convicted and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stone appeared before the Jan. 6 committee on Friday to face questions about his role in the “Stop the Steal” movement. But rather than answer questions, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination because he said he feared that Democrats would again accuse him of lying under oath.During his meeting with the Jan. 6 committee last week, Roger J. Stone Jr., right, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAt a hearing this month, Ms. Cheney suggested that the committee could subpoena Mr. Trump to answer questions and that criminal penalties would hang over his head if he lied.“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” she said. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, said it was “certainly possible” that the panel would make criminal referrals before the investigation concluded.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Subpoenas Flynn and Eastman, Scrutinizing Election Plot

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      The latest batch of subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot also includes officials from former President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued new subpoenas on Monday for a half-dozen allies of former President Donald J. Trump, including his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, as it moved its focus to an orchestrated effort to overturn the 2020 election.The subpoenas reflect an effort to go beyond the events of the Capitol riot and delve deeper into what committee investigators believe gave rise to it: a concerted campaign by Mr. Trump and his network of advisers to promote false claims of voter fraud as a way to keep him in power. One of the people summoned on Monday was John Eastman, a lawyer who drafted a memo laying out how Mr. Trump could use the vice president and Congress to try to invalidate the election results.In demanding records and testimony from the six Trump allies, the House panel is widening its scrutiny of the mob attack to encompass the former president’s attempt to enlist his own government, state legislators around the country and Congress in his push to overturn the election.Mr. Flynn discussed seizing voting machines and invoking certain national security emergency powers after the election. Mr. Eastman wrote a memo to Mr. Trump suggesting that Vice President Mike Pence could reject electors from certain states during Congress’s count of Electoral College votes to deny Joseph R. Biden Jr. a majority. And Bernard Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who was also subpoenaed, participated in a planning meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington on Jan. 5 after backing baseless litigation and “Stop the Steal” efforts around the country to push the lie of a stolen election.“In the days before the Jan. 6 attack, the former president’s closest allies and advisers drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said in a statement. “The select committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot and who paid for it all.”The panel also issued subpoenas for Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, who supervised its conversion into a “Stop the Steal” operation; and Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign who participated at the Jan. 5 meeting at the Willard, where associates discussed pressuring Mr. Pence not to certify the Electoral College results.Also included in the group that received subpoenas on Monday was Angela McCallum, the Trump campaign’s national executive assistant, who left a voice message for an unknown Michigan state representative in which she said she wanted to know whether the campaign could “count on” the representative to help appoint an alternate slate of electors.The subpoenas — which bring to 25 the number issued by the committee — require that the witnesses turn over documents this month and sit for depositions in early December. More than 150 witnesses have testified in closed-door sessions with the committee’s investigators.In a statement on Monday evening, Mr. Kerik said his lawyer had accepted the committee’s subpoena, but he defended his actions. He said that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, had brought him into the legal effort to investigate claims of voter fraud, but he argued that he had nothing to do with plans to try to sway Congress.“I was not hired to overturn the will of the people — only to look into the integrity of the process and ensure that the results accurately reflected the will of the people,” Mr. Kerik said. “As to the events of Jan. 6, I was not involved.”Mr. Flynn, Mr. Eastman, Mr. Stepien, Mr. Miller and Ms. McCallum did not immediately respond to requests for comment..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The panel’s latest move indicates that it is zeroing in on how — in the days and weeks before a throng of Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted Congress’s counting of votes — the former president’s closest associates were planning an effort stretching from the Oval Office, the House and Senate to state officials across the country.Critical to that push, investigators believe, was the meeting the day before the riot at the Willard Hotel. The Washington Post reported that Mr. Kerik paid for rooms and suites in Washington hotels as he worked with Mr. Giuliani on “Stop the Steal” efforts.“They are really honing in on this strategy at the Willard Hotel,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and a law professor at the University of Michigan. “If it’s a campaign war room, that’s one thing. But the question is: To what extent are they looking at blocking the certification of the election? The Eastman memo is a real smoking gun. It really appears to be a concerted effort here.”Even as the committee ramps up its inquiry, it is facing stonewalling from Mr. Trump and many of his allies, whom he has directed to defy the panel based on a claim of executive privilege.Mr. Trump has filed suit against the committee to keep secret at least 770 pages of documents concerning handwritten notes, draft speeches and executive orders, and records of his calls, meetings and emails with state officials. But the Biden administration has declined to support his claim to executive privilege, arguing that there is no such prerogative for documents related to an attempt to undermine democracy and the presidency itself.The Justice Department is weighing whether to charge Stephen K. Bannon with criminal contempt of Congress after the House voted last month to recommend his prosecution for defying its subpoena. Another witness, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was involved in frenzied efforts to overturn the election, refused to cooperate on Friday.Mr. Flynn, who spent 33 years as an Army intelligence officer, has emerged as one of the most extreme voices in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election.Mr. Flynn attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18 in which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers and continuing to spread the false message that the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud, the committee said. That meeting came after Mr. Flynn gave an interview to the right-wing site Newsmax in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.Mr. Stepien helmed Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, which urged state and party officials to affect the outcome of the election by asking states to delay or deny the certification of electoral votes and by sending multiple slates of the votes to Congress to allow a challenge to the results, the committee said. In particular, Mr. Stepien supervised a fund-raising effort that sought to profit off the election challenges and promote lies about voting machines that campaign staff had determined to be false, the committee said.Mr. Trump and the Republican Party raised $255.4 million in the eight weeks after the election as he promoted unfounded accusations of fraud.Mr. Eastman has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent weeks after it was revealed that he wrote a memo to Mr. Trump suggesting that Mr. Pence could reject electors from certain states. Mr. Eastman is also reported to have participated in a briefing for nearly 300 state legislators, during which he told the group that it was their duty to “fix this, this egregious conduct, and make sure that we’re not putting in the White House some guy that didn’t get elected,” the committee said.He met with Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence to push his arguments, participated in the meeting at the Willard and spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, before the Capitol assault. As violence broke out, he sent a message blaming Mr. Pence for not going along with his plan. More