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    We Underestimated Trump Before. It Didn’t Go Well.

    Sometimes, and much to our detriment, we find real events are simply too outlandish to take seriously.Many professional Republicans, for example, initially dismissed the movement to “Stop the Steal” as a ridiculous stunt.“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an anonymous senior Republican official told The Washington Post a few days after Joe Biden claimed victory:He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.Republicans went ahead and humored the president, who then urged his followers to assault the Capitol and try to void the election results in his favor.Now, 10 months after the election, “Stop the Steal” is something like party orthodoxy, ideological fuel for a national effort to seize control of election administration and to purge those officials who secured the vote over Donald Trump’s demand to subvert it. Assuming that he is in good health, Trump will almost certainly run for president in 2024, and if he does, he’ll do so in a Republican Party pacified of any resistance to his will to power.The upshot is that we are on our way to another election crisis. Or, as the election law expert (and frequent New York Times contributor) Rick Hasen has written in a new paper on the risk of election subversion, “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”Despite the danger at hand, there doesn’t appear to be much urgency among congressional Democrats — or the remaining pro-democracy Republicans — to do anything. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has passed a new voting rights act aimed at the wave of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures, and Democrats in the Senate have introduced a bill that would establish “protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.” But as long as the Senate filibuster is in place — and as long as key Democrats want to keep it in place — there is almost no chance that the Senate will end debate on the bill and bring it to the floor for a simple majority vote.It’s almost as if, to the people with the power to act, the prospect of a Trumpified Republican Party with the will to subvert the next presidential election and the power to do it is one of those events that just seems a little too out there. And far from provoking action, the sheer magnitude of what it would mean has induced a kind of passivity, a hope that we can solve the crisis without bringing real power to bear.It is here that I am reminded of a previous existential threat to American democracy and how one group of Americans struggled to accept the unthinkable even as it unfolded right before their eyes.On Nov. 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The plurality popular vote winner in a four-way race — the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party fielded separate candidates, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, while conservative Southern unionists coalesced behind the Tennessee Senator John Bell under the Constitutional Union party — Lincoln won a solid majority of electoral votes, 180 out of a total of 303. But his was a sectional victory; not only did Lincoln not win a single Southern electoral vote, but in 10 of the 11 states that became the Confederacy there wasn’t even a Lincoln ballot to cast.The new Republican president was also a specifically Northern president, with a coalition united by its antislavery beliefs. “The country had committed itself electorally to a party which opposed slavery, at least to the extent of agreeing with Lincoln that the institution must ‘be placed in the course of ultimate extinction,’” the historian David M. Potter explains in “The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848 to 1861.”South Carolina, with its heavy concentration of enslaved people and deep-seated pro-slavery sentiment, took the first steps toward leaving the Union, passing a bill that set the date for a convention where elected delegates would debate secession. The speed of South Carolina’s action, Potter notes, “accelerated the tempo of the disunion movement in a decisive way.” In short order, the legislatures of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida announced similar conventions.Secessionists had momentum but, as the historian Russell McClintock writes in “Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession,” “Republicans showed no anxiety about disunion before the election and remarkably little after it.” Lincoln’s first concern, after celebrating his victory, was cabinet selection and the question of patronage since, as McClintock explains, “the individuals Lincoln chose as his advisers would strongly suggest which way he was leaning in his attitude toward the gathering storm in the South and would have great influence over his policy.”Republican-aligned newspapers were nonplused by events in the South. “South Carolina may fume and fulminate, and call conventions and pass resolutions till the crack of doom,” wrote one correspondent in The Chicago Tribune, but “up to this writing nobody is scared that we know of.”Similarly, wrote a like-minded Boston editor, “Almost the only topic of political interest just now, is the rumored insane attempt of a few hotheaded fanatics, to induce the people of a few slave states to secede from the American Union. There is in this nothing new, unexpected, or alarming.”After all, pro-slavery ideologues had threatened disunion in response to policy and political defeats for decades. If the South did not act before, why would it act now?In fact, many Republicans believed the South needed the Union to maintain slavery. In “The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861,” the historian John Ashworth summarized the Republican view. “How would slave insurrections be put down without federal forces? How could the slaveholders secure the loyalty of the nonslaveholding whites in their own localities?” And, most important, “How could the slaveholders cater to the economic ambitions of the nonslaveholding whites, who because of the inadequacies of the slave system were denied any real economic opportunity?”In short, there was no way the slaveholding South could sustain itself on its own.There was also, for Republicans, the matter of sectional pride. In the past, threats of disunion were part of a Kabuki theater of negotiations. Here’s McClintock: “Southerners demanded political advantages, Northerners balked, Southerners threatened to secede, and Northern Democrats gave in and voted with the Southerners.” The Republicans who scoffed at this latest threat of secession were saying, in essence, that the North would no longer play this game. “Since this is not the first time such cries are heard — since, indeed, they have been long-sounding in our ears, so that their exact value is perfectly understood from the very beginning — there seems no longer excuse or apology for hearkening to them,” the staunchly antislavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said. “They are to be treated as threats, and nothing more.”Unfortunately for Sumner and the Republicans, their confidence was misplaced. Yes, there were Southern unionists, and yes, there were serious political tensions within the seceding states. But the secessionists had the initiative, and within 90 days of Lincoln’s election they had, as Potter writes, “won ten legislative decisions to hold elections for state conventions, held seven such elections, gained majorities in each, assembled seven conventions, voted seven ordinances of secession, and also took the first steps toward formation of a southern confederacy.”When Republicans finally turned to face the crisis, in December, there were few options at hand. Lincoln would not take office for another three months, Congress had just come back into session, and the outgoing Buchanan administration was divided and in disarray, beset by resignations as some members — like Howell Cobb, of Georgia, the secretary of the Treasury — stood with their states and others stood with the Union.There was obviously no appetite, among Republicans, for disunion. There was also no appetite for compromise, even as a few lawmakers — led by John Crittenden of Kentucky, a Whig — tried to forge one last agreement to satisfy the sections and secure the Union. His proposal, a set of constitutional amendments and congressional resolutions, would have shielded slavery from federal power and congressional interference, reinstating the Missouri Compromise by writing it into the Constitution itself.Republicans were not interested. For the past decade, the Northern lawmakers had made concessions to the South. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one; Whig support for James Buchanan over the Republican John C. Fremont in the 1856 election was another. “From the standpoint of a sincere Unionist,” Potter writes, “there was something self-defeating about getting the Union temporarily past a crisis by making concessions which strengthened the disunionist faction and perpetuated the tendency toward periodic crises.”The only option left was confrontation, and when Lincoln finally took the reins of state on March 4, 1861, he made it clear that this was the path he would take. “I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual,” Lincoln famously said in his first inaugural address:Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.I am not making a direct analogy between the Civil War era and current American politics. There is nothing, yet, that divides us as starkly as slavery did in the 1840s and 1850s. Nor is the crisis of democratic integrity as acute now as it was during the secession crisis. But the value of studying history is that we can see how previous generations of Americans faced the challenges of their time. No one knows, in the moment, how the story ends, and we can use that insight to try to understand the options available to our forebears as they lived through their present.Republicans had good reason to ignore threats of secession. But they also had reason to heed them. With Lincoln’s election, the slave-owning South had lost its almost total grip on federal power. Sectional tensions had never been stressed in this way before, and Southern panic was palpable. Republicans could not have stopped secession, but they might have been able to better prepare for whatever confrontation lay on the horizon.It is impossible to say where we stand in relation to our own crisis. Perhaps the worst is yet to come; perhaps we’ve already sailed through. Either way, we should secure our elections against whatever threat might materialize because if there is anything our history tells us, it’s that everything looks settled until one day it isn’t.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    The Jan. 6 Plotters Had a Mob. They Also Had the Eastman Plan.

    You can understand a revolution as a time when the unthinkable becomes, suddenly, thinkable. It is a time when the rules that ordinarily govern political life lose their force and conflict takes the place of consensus, a time when the struggle for power is a struggle to define the political order itself.Sometimes, as with our Civil War, revolutions are loud, violent and disruptive. At other times, as in the 1930s, revolutions are a little quieter, if no less significant.As the full picture of Jan. 6 begins to come into view, I think we should consider it a kind of revolution or, at least, the very beginning of one. Joe Biden ultimately became president, but Donald Trump’s fight to keep himself in office against the will of the voters has upturned the political order. The plot itself shows us how.Trump, we know, urged Mike Pence to reject the votes of the Electoral College, with the mob outside as the stick that would compel his obedience. “You can either go down in history as a patriot,” Trump told Pence, as recounted in this newspaper, “or you can go down in history as a pussy.”When this was first revealed, I assumed that Trump simply wanted Pence to do whatever it would take to keep himself in power. But this week we learned that he had an actual plan in mind, devised by John Eastman, a prominent conservative lawyer who worked with the former president to challenge the election results, a job that included a speaking slot at the rally on the National Mall that preceded the attack on the Capitol.“We know there was fraud,” Eastman said to the crowd that would become a mob. “We know that dead people voted.”“All we are demanding of Vice President Pence,” he continued, “is this afternoon at 1 o’clock, he let the legislatures of the states look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!”These weren’t just the ravings of a partisan. Eastman was essentially summarizing the contents of a memo he had written on Trump’s behalf, describing the steps Pence would take to overturn the election in Trump’s favor.First, as presiding officer of the joint session in which Congress certifies the election, Pence would open and count the ballots. When he reached Arizona, Pence would then announce that he had “multiple slates of electors” and would defer his decision on those votes until he finished counting the other states. He would make this announcement for six other swing states — including Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — before announcing that “there are no electors that can be deemed validly appointed in those States” on account of election disputes and accusations of fraud.Mike Pence presiding over the certification of the 2020 Electoral College results.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJohn Eastman, left, with Rudy Giuliani, at the “Stop the Steal” protest in Washington on Jan. 6.Jim Bourg/ReutersAt this point, Eastman explained, Pence could declare Trump re-elected, because — with seven states removed from the count — the president would have a majority of whatever electors were left, and the 12th Amendment states that the “person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed.”If, for some reason, this didn’t fly, Eastman went on, Pence could then say that no candidate had won a majority and thus the election must go to the House of Representatives, where each state has a single vote and Republicans controlled a slim majority of state delegations, 26 to 24. If Democratic objections led both houses of Congress to split into their separate chambers to resolve the dispute, then Republicans could obstruct the process in the Senate and create a stalemate that would allow Republican-controlled state legislatures “to formally support the alternate slate of electors.”As for the courts? Eastman argued that they don’t matter. “The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter.” If Pence has the power, then Pence should act and “let the other side challenge his actions in court.”Eastman’s confidence throughout this memo (he dismisses potential Democratic objections as “howls”) belies his shoddy legal, political and constitutional thinking. For one, his argument rests on an expansive reading of the Twelfth Amendment for which there is no precedent or justification. The vice president has never directly counted electoral votes. “Beginning in 1793, and in every presidential election since,” the legal scholar Derek Muller notes in a piece debunking key claims in the memo for the website Election Law Blog, “the Senate and the House have appointed ‘tellers’ to count the electoral votes. These tellers actually tally the votes and deliver the totals to the President of the Senate, who reads the totals aloud before the two houses after the tellers, acting on behalf of Congress, have ‘ascertained’ the vote totals.”The 12th Amendment, ratified in 1804, codified that practice into the Constitution. Congress would do the counting, and the vice president would simply preside over the process.Eastman also asserted that the vice president could disregard the procedure specified under the Electoral Count Act because the law itself is unconstitutional. That, Muller notes, is controversial (and something Eastman himself rejected in 2000, in testimony before the Florida Legislature during the dispute between George W. Bush and Al Gore). And even if it were true, the 117th Congress, on its first day in operation, Jan. 3, adopted the provisions of the law as its rule for counting electoral votes, which is to say Pence had no choice but to follow them. His hands were tied.Which gets to the politics of this scheme. If Pence were to disregard the rules and the history and seize control of the counting process, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would presumably have suspended the joint session, which relies on the consent of both chambers of Congress. “With a stalled and incomplete count because of a standoff between Pence and Pelosi,” the legal scholar Ned Foley writes in a separate Election Law Blog post, “the Twentieth Amendment becomes the relevant constitutional provision.” Meaning, in short, that at noon on Jan. 20, Pelosi would become acting president of the United States. Pence would lose authority as vice president (and president of the Senate) and the joint session would resume, with Congress putting its stamp of approval on Biden’s victory.And let’s not forget that a series of moves of the sort envisioned by Eastman would spark national outrage. The “howls” would not just come from congressional Democrats; they would come from the 81 million voters who Pence would have summarily disenfranchised. It is conceivable that Trump and his allies would have prevailed over mass protests and civil disobedience. But that would depend on the support of the military, which, if the actions of Gen. Mark Milley were any indication, would not have been forthcoming.None of this should make you feel good or cause you to breathe a sigh of relief. Consider what we know. A prominent, respected member in good standing of the conservative legal establishment — Eastman is enrolled in the Federalist Society and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — schemed with the president and his allies in the Republican Party to overturn the election and overthrow American democracy under the Constitution. Yes, they failed to keep Trump in office, but they successfully turned the pro forma electoral counting process into an occasion for real political struggle.It was always possible, theoretically, to manipulate the rules to seize power from the voters. Now, it’s a live option. And with the right pieces in place, Trump could succeed. All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.As it happens, Trump may well run for president in 2024 (he is already amassing a sizable war chest) with exactly that board in play. Republican state legislatures in states like Georgia and Arizona have, for example, used claims of fraud to seize control of key areas of election administration. Likewise, according to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada — have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded that authorities invalidate the results in their states. It is also not unlikely that a Republican Party with pro-Trump zealots at its helm wins Congress in November of next year and holds it through the presidential election and into 2025.If Trump is, once again, on the ballot, then the election might turn on the manipulation of a ceremony that was, until now, a mere formality.Here, I’ll return to where I started. If this happens, it would be a revolutionary change. In this world, the voters, as filtered through the Electoral College, no longer choose the president. It becomes less a question of the rule of law and more one of power, of who holds the right positions at the right time, and especially, of who can bring the military to their side.On Jan. 20, Joe Biden became president and Donald Trump slunk off to Mar-a-Lago to lick his wounds. But the country did not actually return to normalcy. Jan. 6 closed the door on one era of American politics and opened the door to another, where constitutional democracy itself is at stake.There are things we can do to protect ourselves — legal experts have urged Congress to revise the Electoral Count Act to close off any Eastman-esque shenanigans — but it is clear, for now at least, that the main threat to the security and stability of the United States is coming from inside the house.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Bob Woodward Extends His Trump Chronicles With the Chaotic Transfer of Power

    The titles of Bob Woodward’s three books about the Trump administration — “Fear,” “Rage” and now “Peril” — are appropriately blunt. The books, about the staccato stream of events that accompanied Donald Trump’s time in office, are written at a mostly staccato clip.The frantic pace is redoubled in “Peril,” written with Robert Costa, Woodward’s colleague at The Washington Post. Broken up into 72 short chapters, it hurtles through the past two years of dizzying news. But while it covers the 2020 campaign season and the course of the pandemic and the protests after George Floyd’s murder and the opening months of Joseph Biden’s presidency, the book’s centerpiece is the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and its primary concern is how President Trump behaved in the lead-up to and the aftermath of that crisis.Books in this genre like to make news, and this one doesn’t waste any time. Its opening pages recount how last October and again in January, after the riot, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had secret conversations with his Chinese counterparts to assure them that the United States was “100 percent steady,” despite what they might be seeing and hearing. “Everything’s fine,” he told them, “but democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”The Chinese were concerned that Trump might lash out on a global scale in a desperate attempt to secure his power. Milley went over the process for nuclear strikes and other acts of war with his colleagues, to make sure nothing was instigated without his awareness. He was, Woodward and Costa write, “overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.”The authors then go back to begin charting the path to the extraordinary events of Jan. 6, alternating between Republicans’ attempts to corral Trump’s most outlandish behavior and scenes of Biden weighing whether to enter the 2020 race.The day after the election, speaking to Kellyanne Conway, Trump “seemed ready, at least privately, to acknowledge defeat.”Enter Rudy Giuliani.The former New York mayor becomes a more prominent player here than in the previous books. (One especially brutal set of consecutive entries for him in the index reads: “hair dye incident,” “hospitalized with coronavirus.”)Bob Woodward, the co-author of “Peril.”Lisa BergIn “Fear,” Woodward had noted that Giuliani was the only Trump campaigner to appear on a prominent Sunday morning talk show to support his candidate the week that the notorious “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked. He actually went on five shows, a rare feat. At the end, Woodward wrote, he was “exhausted, practically bled out,” but had “proved his devotion and friendship.” His reward? “Rudy, you’re a baby!” Trump reportedly yelled at him in front of staffers on a plane later that day. “I’ve never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You’re like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?”It will be left to psychologists, not historians, to write the definitive account of why Giuliani remained so steadfast to the president, but in “Peril” he’s portrayed as the prime force behind Trump’s refusal to let the election go.“I have eight affidavits,” Giuliani said in a room of friends and campaign officials three days after the election, hinting at the scope of the alleged voting fraud. Later the same day, in front of Trump and others: “I have 27 affidavits!” And yet again the same day, he urged Trump to put him in charge. “I have 80 affidavits.”Woodward and Costa have Trump telling advisers that, yes, Giuliani is “crazy,” but “none of the sane lawyers can represent me because they’ve been pressured.”Lee Holmes, chief counsel for the Trump supporter Senator Lindsey Graham, is portrayed in “Peril” as “astonished at the overreach” of fraud claims by Giuliani and others. Holmes wrote to Graham that the data behind the claims were “a concoction, with a bullying tone and eighth-grade writing.” (Graham disagreed. “Third grade,” he said.)The note about this book’s sources is nearly identical to the notes in the previous two books. The authors interviewed more than 200 firsthand participants and witnesses, though none are named. Quotation marks are apparently used around words they’re more sure of, but there’s a seemingly arbitrary pattern to the way those marks are used and not used even within the same brief conversations.And as usual, though the sources aren’t named, some people get the type of soft-glow light that suggests they were especially useful to the authors. In this book, much of that light falls on Milley and William P. Barr, Trump’s attorney general from November 2018 to December 2020.It was reported when Barr resigned that his relationship with Trump had soured because Barr wouldn’t indulge the president’s belief in election fraud. In “Peril,” that resistance gets fleshed out with some long and pointed speeches suspiciously recalled verbatim. “Your team is a bunch of clowns,” goes part of one of Barr’s confrontations. “They are unconscionable in the firmness and detail they present as if it is unquestionable fact. It is not.”Robert Costa, the co-author of “Peril.”Lisa BergMilley looks admirable and conscientious if you believe — as Woodward and Costa seem to — that someone needed to surreptitiously work to counteract Trump’s destabilizing effects during the transition of power. (Milley, who remains the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Biden, has unsurprisingly taken fire from the right over his reported disloyalty to Trump. Biden has publicly expressed confidence in Milley since the book’s revelations emerged.)In addition to Milley’s actions, the book has gotten attention for a scene in which — read this next part slowly — the former Vice President Dan Quayle talks sense into Pence. Trump had suggested to Pence that he had the power to essentially rejigger the electoral outcome as head of the Senate, an idea that Quayle told Pence was “preposterous and dangerous.” Woodward and Costa write, in a rare bit of deadpan: “Pence finally agreed acting to overturn the election would be antithetical to his traditional view of conservatism.”Trump tweeted about the election ballots on the morning they were to be certified: “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!” “Extreme courage” is not the first phrase one reaches for to describe Pence after reading “Peril.”The vice president talked halfheartedly about election problems in public to stay on Trump’s good side “without going full Giuliani,” Woodward and Costa write. As the certification approached, he asked many lawyers to consider his options. It doesn’t seem he wanted them to empower him as much as he wanted to simply avoid a confrontation with Trump.On his way to the Capitol on Jan. 6, Pence released a letter saying that he did not have the “unilateral authority” to decide which electoral votes got counted. His reward? About an hour later, protesters inside the Capitol chanted for him to be hanged.When Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper less than a week after the election, Milley saw it, Woodward and Costa write, as part of a “mindless march into more and more disorder.”The unfortunate truth is that disorder is dramatic. In the wake of the riot, “Peril” loses force. A protracted recounting of security efforts leading up to Biden’s inauguration feels considerably less urgent after the fact. Even more fatally for the book’s momentum, Woodward and Costa devote 20 pages — a lifetime by their pacing standards — to behind-the-scenes negotiations for President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package. This involves a lot of back and forth with Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia whose crucial vote was considered uncertain. Sources may have given Woodward and Costa every detail of these negotiations, but the authors weren’t obligated to use every last one.The book mounts a final rally, helped by circumstance. In light of recent events, a late section closely recounting Biden’s decision to end the American war in Afghanistan is plenty absorbing. The authors recount Biden’s resistance to the war when he was vice president under Obama: He felt that the addition of 30,000 troops was, Woodward and Costa write, “a tragic power play executed by national security leaders at the expense of a young president.” Biden was long insistent that the point of American engagement in the country was to diminish the threat of Al Qaeda and not to crush the Taliban. He held to his strategy despite advisers who presented him with a “stunning list of possible human disaster and political consequences.”As “Peril” nears its close, the Delta variant is muddying the pandemic picture, and that’s not the only detail that makes it read like a cliffhanger. “Trump was not dormant,” the authors write. He was staging rallies for supporters, and getting good news about his place in very early polls for 2024. Like an installment of a deathless Marvel franchise, for all its spectacle “Peril” ends with a dismaying sense of prologue. More

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    Debunking the Pro-Trump Right’s Claims About the Jan. 6 Riot

    A rally scheduled for Saturday in Washington is intended to continue a Republican effort to rewrite the narrative of the assault on the Capitol. The facts undercut their assertions.In the eight months since a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, some Republicans have tried to build a case — belied by the facts — that the vast federal investigation of the riot has been essentially unfair, its targets the victims of political persecution.The people charged in the Jan. 6 attack are “being persecuted so unfairly,” former President Donald J. Trump said in a statement on Thursday.That sentiment is the organizing principle behind the rally scheduled in Washington on Saturday, billed as “Justice for J6.” According to the permit application submitted by the organizers, a group called Look Ahead America, the event is meant to “bring awareness and attention to the unjust and unethical treatment of nonviolent Jan. 6 political prisoners.”The rally is the latest effort in the right’s continuing attempt to rewrite the history of the mob attack on Congress, which prosecutors say led to as many as 1,000 assaults against the police and sought to disrupt certification of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.Here is what the facts say about assertions from those seeking to promote a false narrative about Jan. 6.The rioters weren’t just tourists who now face excessive criminal charges.One of the first claims that pro-Trump conservatives made about Jan. 6 was that the rioters were little more than tourists and that those arrested were victims of prosecutorial overreach. Representative Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, described the scene at the Capitol that day as “a normal tourist visit,” implying that hundreds of people taken into custody were facing excessive charges.But, in fact, nearly half of the more than 600 people charged have been accused only of misdemeanors like trespassing and disorderly conduct, rather than more serious felonies.At this point, more than 50 of these low-level defendants have pleaded guilty. All of them will serve prison terms of six months or less, or no time at all — fairly modest sentences for the federal penal system. But even when the authorities have agreed to lenient penalties, they have still insisted that no one who broke into the Capitol is innocent.“A riot cannot occur without rioters,” prosecutors wrote in a recent memo proposing no jail time for Valerie Ehrke, a California woman who only spent one minute in the building. “And rioter’s actions — from the most mundane to the most violent — contributed, directly and indirectly, to the violence and destruction of that day.”The government hasn’t widely detained nonviolent protesters.At an event last month hosted by Republican officials in his home state of North Carolina, Representative Madison Cawthorn repeated an oft-heard myth. He complained that hundreds of people taken into custody after Jan. 6 were “political hostages.”The truth is that about 15 percent of those arrested so far in connection with the riot have been denied bail and remain in pretrial custody — much lower than the overall federal pretrial detention rate of 75 percent. Moreover, all of those being detained on charges related to Jan. 6 are facing serious charges like assault or obstruction of Congress; none have been accused of only misdemeanors.Far from jailing everyone, in fact, judges have granted bail to numerous defendants accused of violent attacks on the police or of belonging to extremist groups like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers militia.There are a handful of cases in which people have been denied bail without having engaged in physical violence, but those are the exceptions to the rule.This week, a lawyer for Ethan Nordean, a leader of the Proud Boys, complained in court that his client has been in jail for months not because of anything he personally did on Jan. 6, but rather because he is a member of a reviled political organization.Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was appointed to the federal bench by Mr. Trump, responded that the law alone was guiding Mr. Nordean’s case.“Politics has nothing to do with it,” Judge Kelly said. “Not one whit.”Capitol Police officers preparing riot equipment at the Capitol before the rally on Saturday.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesJan. 6 defendants haven’t been treated more harshly than racial justice protesters.The assertion has become a staple on the right: Trump supporters were charged with violent crimes in the Capitol attack because of their conservative beliefs while many leftist activists had similar charges stemming from the racial justice protests last year in cities like Portland, Ore., reduced or dismissed.This summer, a Jan. 6 defendant named Garret Miller filed court papers making that argument. Mr. Miller, who lives in Dallas, claimed he had been “treated differently by the government than the Portland rioters based upon the politics involved,” his lawyer wrote.In rebutting these claims, the government argued there was no comparison between the protests last year prompted by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the storming of the Capitol. While prosecutors acknowledged that those arrested during weeks of unrest at the Portland federal courthouse had committed “serious offenses,” they insisted that the rioters in Washington were involved in “a singular and chilling event” that threatened not only the Capitol but also “democracy itself.”Trying to explain why many cases in the racial justice protests were eventually dismissed, prosecutors also said they have much better evidence against Capitol rioters like Mr. Miller than they ever had against protesters in Portland. Among the material they collected after Jan. 6 were thousands of hours of video footage from surveillance and body cameras worn by the police, and hundreds of thousands of social media posts.A few months after Mr. Miller filed his claims, The Associated Press published an analysis of more than 300 criminal cases stemming from the protests incited by Mr. Floyd’s murder. The analysis undercut the argument that pro-Trump defendants were treated more harshly than Black Lives Matter protesters, showing that many leftist rioters had received substantial sentences.There’s no evidence that Jan. 6 defendants are being treated worse than others in jail.Perhaps the loudest grievances about Capitol defendants concern the jail conditions of those denied bail.The accusations have been many and wide-ranging. Some defendants have complained of being locked in their cells for 23 hours a day in what amounts to solitary confinement. Others have claimed that they have been denied the right to hold religious services and that their hygiene needs have been restricted.One defendant, charged with assaulting the police, has said that he was zip-tied and then “savagely” beaten by a correctional officer in the District of Columbia jail, according to his lawyer. The assault resulted in a broken nose, a dislocated jaw and the loss of sight in the man’s right eye.Jail, of course, is a terrible place to be, regardless of one’s politics. But at least so far, no one has offered evidence that the authorities have imposed harsh conditions on Jan. 6 defendants because of their political beliefs.A spokeswoman for the District of Columbia jail said the 23-hour lockdown was not imposed solely on the Capitol defendants but was a medical provision used throughout the jail to curb the spread of the coronavirus. It has recently been lifted, she said.The Justice Department is using a novel charge in some cases.Prosecutors have taken a legal risk in the way they have chosen to prosecute scores of Capitol cases. The potential problem concerns the use of a federal obstruction law to charge people with disrupting Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote. Lawyers for some of the defendants are challenging the Justice Department in court over use of the law, but pro-Trump activists have yet to make it a big public issue.Instead of using politically fraught and hard-to-prove charges like sedition or insurrection to describe the attempt to block certification of the election results, the Justice Department used a much more measured — albeit novel — law: obstruction of an official proceeding.The law is not a perfect match for what happened on Jan. 6; indeed, it had never before been used in a situation like the Capitol attack.Passed in 2002 as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a corporate overhaul law, the measure was devised to prohibit things like shredding documents or tampering with witnesses. Several lawyers have filed papers arguing that the law does not apply to the riot at the Capitol. Two federal judges have signaled that they might agree and could decide to toss the charge for more than 200 defendants.The Justice Department’s use of the obstruction law is arguably the most political move prosecutors have made to date. After all, as some defense lawyers have noted, the government did not use the same charge in 2018 when left-wing activists swarmed the Capitol to protest the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. More

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    Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Won't Run in 2022

    Representative Anthony Gonzalez, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump, is the first of the group to retire rather than face a stiff primary challenge.WASHINGTON — Calling former President Donald J. Trump “a cancer for the country,” Representative Anthony Gonzalez, Republican of Ohio, said in an interview on Thursday that he would not run for re-election in 2022, ceding his seat after just two terms in Congress rather than compete against a Trump-backed primary opponent.Mr. Gonzalez is the first, but perhaps not the last, of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot to retire rather than face ferocious primaries next year in a party still in thrall to the former president.The congressman, who has two young children, emphasized that he was leaving in large part because of family considerations and the difficulties that come with living between two cities. But he made clear that the strain had only grown worse since his impeachment vote, after which he was deluged with threats and feared for the safety of his wife and children.Mr. Gonzalez said that quality-of-life issues had been paramount in his decision. He recounted an “eye-opening” moment this year: when he and his family were greeted at the Cleveland airport by two uniformed police officers, part of extra security precautions taken after the impeachment vote.“That’s one of those moments where you say, ‘Is this really what I want for my family when they travel, to have my wife and kids escorted through the airport?’” he said.Mr. Gonzalez, who turns 37 on Saturday, was the sort of Republican recruit the party once prized. A Cuban American who starred as an Ohio State wide receiver, he was selected in the first round of the N.F.L. draft and then earned an M.B.A. at Stanford after his football career was cut short by injuries. He claimed his Northeast Ohio seat in his first bid for political office.Mr. Gonzalez, a conservative, largely supported the former president’s agenda. Yet he started breaking with Mr. Trump and House Republican leaders when they sought to block the certification of last year’s presidential vote, and he was horrified by Jan. 6 and its implications.Still, he insisted he could have prevailed in what he acknowledged would have been a “brutally hard primary” against Max Miller, a former Trump White House aide who was endorsed by the former president in February.Yet as Mr. Gonzalez sat on a couch in his House office, most of his colleagues still at home for the prolonged summer recess, he acknowledged that he could not bear the prospect of winning if it meant returning to a Trump-dominated House Republican caucus.“Politically the environment is so toxic, especially in our own party right now,” he said. “You can fight your butt off and win this thing, but are you really going to be happy? And the answer is, probably not.”For the Ohioan, Jan. 6 was “a line-in-the-sand moment” and Mr. Trump represents nothing less than a threat to American democracy.“I don’t believe he can ever be president again,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “Most of my political energy will be spent working on that exact goal.”Mr. Gonzalez said there had been some uncertainty after the assault on the Capitol over whether Republican leaders would continue to bow to Mr. Trump.But the ouster of Representative Liz Cheney from her leadership post; the continued obeisance of Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader; and the recent decision to invite Mr. Trump to be the keynote speaker at a major House Republican fund-raiser were clarifying. At least in Washington, this is still Mr. Trump’s party.“This is the direction that we’re going to go in for the next two years and potentially four, and it’s going to make Trump the center of fund-raising efforts and political outreach,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “That’s not something I’m going to be part of.”His decision to leave rather than fight, however, ensures that the congressional wing of the party will become only more thoroughly Trumpified. And it will raise questions about whether other Trump critics in the House will follow him to the exits. At the top of that watch list: Ms. Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who are both serving on the otherwise Democratic-dominated panel investigating the Capitol riot.Mr. Gonzalez said he believed he could have prevailed in a “brutally hard primary” against Max Miller, right, a former Trump White House aide, who appeared with the former president at an Ohio rally in June.David Maxwell/EPA, via ShutterstockAsked how he could hope to cleanse the party of Mr. Trump if he himself was not willing to confront the former president in a proxy fight next year against Mr. Miller, Mr. Gonzalez insisted that there were still Republicans in office who would defend “the fundamentals of democracy.”With more ardor, he argued that Mr. Trump has less of a following among grass-roots Republicans than the party’s leaders believe, particularly when it comes to whom the rank-and-file want to lead their 2024 ticket.“Where I see a big gap is, most people that I speak to back home agree with the policies but they also want us to move on from the person” and “the sort of resentment politics that has taken over the party,” Mr. Gonzalez said.Congressional maps are set to be redrawn this year, and it’s unclear what Mr. Gonzalez’s district, the 16th, will look like afterward. But he said he would probably not take sides in the primary to succeed him, which is now likely to include additional candidates.He said he would remain in the House through the end of his term unless something changed with his family.Mr. Gonzalez was emphatic that the threats were not why he was leaving — the commute was more trying, he said — but in a matter-of-fact fashion, he recounted people online saying things like, “We’re coming to your house.”In accordance with the advice House officials gave to all members, Mr. Gonzalez had a security consultant walk through his home to ensure it was well protected.“It’s a reflection of where our politics looked like it was headed post-Jan. 6,” he said.Neither Mr. Trump nor any of his intermediaries have sought to push him out of the race, Mr. Gonzalez said.Asked about Mr. Trump’s inevitable crowing over his exit from the primary, Mr. Gonzalez dismissed the former president.“I haven’t cared what he says or thinks since Jan. 6, outside when he continues to lie about the election, which I have a problem with,” he said.What clearly does bother him, though, are the Republicans who continue to abet Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods, acts of appeasement that he said were morally wrong and politically foolhardy after the party lost both chambers of Congress and the White House under the former president’s leadership.“We’ve learned the wrong lesson as a party,” Mr. Gonzalez said, “but beyond that, and more importantly, it’s horribly irresponsible and destructive for the country.” More

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    Portraits of the Lasting Trauma of the Capitol Riot

    WASHINGTON — Three months after supporters of President Donald J. Trump violently stormed the Capitol, Alisa La, a close aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sat in the office suite where she had hid from the rioters, describing the lasting effects of her traumatic experience on Jan. 6. Just as she finished speaking, an intercom began […] More

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    The Trump Coup Is Still Raging

    What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not a coup attempt. It was half of a coup attempt — the less important half.The more important part of the coup attempt — like legal wrangling in states and the attempts to sabotage the House commission’s investigation of Jan. 6 — is still going strong. These are not separate and discrete episodes but parts of a unitary phenomenon that, in just about any other country, would be characterized as a failed coup d’état.As the Republican Party tries to make up its mind between wishing away the events of Jan. 6 or celebrating them, one thing should be clear to conservatives estranged from the party: We can’t go home again.The attempted coup’s foot soldiers have dug themselves in at state legislatures. For example, last week in Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced a draft of legislation that would require an audit of the 2020 general election in the state’s largest (typically Democratic-heavy) counties, suggesting without basis that it may show that these areas cheated to inflate Joe Biden’s vote count.Florida’s secretary of state, a Republican, knows that an audit is nonsense and has said so. But the point of an audit would not be to change the outcome (Mr. Trump won the state). The point is not even really to conduct an audit.The obviously political object is to legitimize the 2020 coup attempt in order to soften the ground for the next one — and there will be a next one.In the broad strategy, the frenzied mobs were meant to inspire terror — and obedience among Republicans — while Rudy Giuliani and his co-conspirators tried to get the election nullified on some risible legal pretext or another. Republicans needed both pieces — neither the mob violence nor an inconclusive legal ruling would have been sufficient on its own to keep Mr. Trump in power.True to form, Mr. Trump was able to supply the mob but not the procedural victory. His coup attempt was frustrated in no small part by a thin gray line of bureaucratic fortitude — Republican officials at the state and local levels who had the grit to resist intense pressure from the president and do their jobs.Current efforts like the one in Florida are intended to terrorize them into compliance today or, short of that, to push such officials into retirement so that they can be replaced with more pliant partisans. The lonely little band of Republican officials who stopped the 2020 coup is going to be smaller and lonelier the next time around.That’s why the Great Satan for the Republican Party right now is not Mr. Biden but Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of a small number of Republicans willing to speak honestly about Jan. 6 and to support the investigation into it — and willing to contradict powerful people like Kevin McCarthy of California, who has falsely (and preposterously) claimed that the F.B.I. has cleared Mr. Trump of any involvement in Jan. 6.The emerging Republican orthodoxy on Jan. 6 is created by pure political engineering, with most party leaders either minimizing, halfheartedly defending or wholeheartedly celebrating the coup, depending on their audience and ambitions. Pragmatic party leaders like Mitch McConnell, and others like him who were never passionately united with Mr. Trump but need his voters, are hoping that the memory of the riot gets swept away by the ugly news from Afghanistan and the usual hurly-burly. But other Republicans have praised the rioters: Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina insisted that those who have been jailed are “political prisoners” and warned that “bloodshed” might follow another “stolen” election. The middle-ground Republican consensus is that the sacking of the Capitol was at worst the unfortunate escalation of a well-intentioned protest involving legitimate electoral grievances. More

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    Liz Cheney Promoted to No. 2 Post on Jan. 6 Committee

    The move was unusual in the House, where the majority party typically gives such roles to one of its own. The Wyoming Republican has been a vocal critic of Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — House Democrats leading the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob named Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming on Thursday as the committee’s vice chairwoman, elevating the role of a Republican who has been a vocal critic of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.The announcement effectively makes Ms. Cheney the special committee’s second-ranking member, an unusual move for the majority party in the House, which typically grants that position to one of its own. But her appointment to the panel has been part of a break with convention from the start, given that Democrats nominated her and another Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, in a bid to bring bipartisan credibility to an investigation that most other G.O.P. lawmakers had denounced and worked to thwart.“Representative Cheney has demonstrated again and again her commitment to getting answers about Jan. 6, ensuring accountability, and doing whatever it takes to protect democracy for the American people,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, said in a statement announcing the move. “Her leadership and insights have shaped the early work of the select committee and this appointment underscores the bipartisan nature of this effort.”It comes as the special committee is ramping up its investigation into the violence that engulfed the Capitol as supporters of Mr. Trump stormed the building in his name, brutalizing police officers and delaying for hours the official counting of electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s victory.The committee sent record preservation demands this week to 35 technology firms naming hundreds of people whose records they might want to review, including 11 of Mr. Trump’s most ardent allies in Congress, according to several people familiar with the documents who were not authorized to speak about its contents.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, has threatened to retaliate against any company that complies with the request.Mr. McCarthy led the charge to strip Ms. Cheney of her Republican leadership post over her continued denunciation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. This week, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona and leader of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, circulated a letter calling on Mr. McCarthy to expel both Ms. Cheney, a staunch conservative whose father served as vice president, and Mr. Kinzinger from the Republican conference..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-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;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-w739ur{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-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.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-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 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:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Congresswoman Cheney and Congressman Kinzinger are two spies for the Democrats that we currently invite to the meetings, despite our inability to trust them,” Mr. Biggs wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Biggs, who promoted false claims of widespread election rigging in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack, is among the Republicans whose social media and phone records the select committee is seeking to preserve. In his letter, he proposed changing rules for the Republican caucus to expel any member who accepts a committee assignment from Democrats, a step that Mr. McCarthy has suggested in the past would be appropriate.“We cannot trust these members to sit in our Republican conference meetings while we plan our defense against the Democrats,” Mr. Biggs wrote.Ms. Cheney said in a statement that she was pleased to accept the post as the committee’s No. 2.“Every member of this committee is dedicated to conducting a nonpartisan, professional, and thorough investigation of all the relevant facts regarding Jan. 6 and the threat to our Constitution we faced that day,” Ms. Cheney said. “I have accepted the position of vice chair of the committee to assure that we achieve that goal. We owe it to the American people to investigate everything that led up to, and transpired on, Jan. 6th. We will not be deterred by threats or attempted obstruction and we will not rest until our task is complete.” More