Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Mike Pence, the Indictment and the Chaos of Donald Trump

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      What if he’s president again? Who will be around for that, inside a second Trump administration, when he asks why the military can’t shoot protesters in the legs, or when he wants to withdraw all military dependents from South Korea and throw Asia into an economic crisis?Nobody, outside his supporters, wants to talk about the eventuality — not probable but definitely not impossible — that Donald Trump will be re-elected. His former cabinet secretaries don’t. The people — the foreign ministers and former national security officials — at the Aspen Security Forum don’t.And the closer you get to presidential campaign events, elections can become a kind of dreamscape, a contained universe where meta attacks are signaled yet nothing seems that weird about Mr. Trump’s dominance. After Friday night’s Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines — a fund-raiser for the Iowa Republican Party, held in the city’s convention center — the candidates hosted after-parties off a long hallway, producing an animatronicesque gallery effect.In one room, for about an hour, Mr. Trump stood grinning and shaking hands and posing for photos, with an ever-replenishing line of dozens waiting to get in, and dozens wandering out, ice cream in hand and wearing “TRUMP COUNTRY” stickers. In the next room, Senator Tim Scott, a putting green and cornhole game. In the next, Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami and a live band, with a foursome playing dominoes, red wine on the table. Through another door, at a more subdued valence, you could see Mike Pence talking to little groups of people, mostly older couples, a father and son, a nod, a hand on a shoulder, a photo. Nikki Haley signed books and posters in the hall, and 20-something aides holding red “DESANTIS 2024” signs roamed, directing people to his room, where Republicans threw baseballs at pyramids of Bud Light cans. Step, repeat.This looked fun and vaguely normal — like something from the past. In reality, Mr. Pence is disappearing, politically, before our eyes. Mr. Scott says he can hold only the rioters who were violent, and not Mr. Trump, responsible for the events of Jan. 6. The physical distance between all three of them on Friday night was roughly the distance that separated that mob from Mr. Pence, or the mob from the Senate chamber, that day.That wasn’t that long ago. You can read all about it, across 45 pages in the federal indictment against Mr. Trump for events some of which unfolded in public. We know what happens to people around Mr. Trump. To preserve influence, those hired by him either exist on a total MAGA wavelength, or else have to dodge or lie sometimes to beat back chaos. And in the indictment, the frayed and unnerving interpersonal dynamics abound: Consider the case of Co-conspirator 4, whose description matches Jeffrey Clark, and who prosecutors say kept pressing to send a letter claiming the Justice Department had concerns — or had even found — “significant irregularities” in the 2020 election.It’s hard not to flash back and then forward, to that surreal period when politicians joined the first administration and to think about the even more uncertain future. Recall the photo of Mitt Romney and Mr. Trump eating dinner after the 2016 election; despite having opposed Mr. Trump’s nomination, there was Mr. Romney, offering himself as secretary of state. Mr. Romney’s expression captured a strong public sentiment toward people who joined the Trump administration: at best, it was seen as a slightly embarrassing exposure of the pursuit of power and personal ambition.The last year of the Trump administration concentrated how bad and complex this situation was: The government transformed into a body that had to handle crisis, but also one in which officials’ intentions could not be always known by the public, and one in which the act of joining government service came with deep personal repercussions. The pandemic required, for instance, a massive collaboration across departments and the private sector to produce a vaccine. Things had to stop, or start, with government employees at moments of intense crisis.And, in books, committee depositions and now in this latest indictment, the months after the 2020 election sound especially abysmal — a White House ghost town deserted by people tired of dealing with Mr. Trump and his break with reality about election’s outcome. They left behind a few panicked people who remained grounded in reality like former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Mr. Pence, and then Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and the rest. Again and again, people describe desperate circumstances, arguments about doing things like seizing the voting machines, or trying to persuade Mr. Trump to call off the riot. According to prosecutors, at 7:01 p.m. on Jan. 6, Mr. Cipollone called Mr. Trump and asked him to withdraw his objections to certification; Mr. Trump refused. Would there be more Clarks or Cipollones in a future administration? The idea for many around Mr. Trump is to use a second administration as a path to clearing out parts of the government and reorganizing it around a stronger executive, with true believers underneath him. Jonathan Swan has written extensively about those plans, most recently in an article about the expansive efforts Trump allies want to undertake, like placing the Federal Trade Commission under presidential control, or using Schedule F to fire federal employees. The idea for the next term, in Mr. Trump’s telling, is also retribution.This only ups the anxiety around, basically, who might be involved in such an administration and what the broader American public would tolerate from them. In his book, “Why We Did It,” Tim Miller debates this question with Alyssa Farah Griffin, a former White House communications official. “Governing is happening under him whether we want it to be or not,” she argues, citing the prospect of whatever goon would serve instead of her, which Mr. Miller concedes is true. But, he counters: “This logic is circular. It justifies anything! Alyssa was a flack; she wasn’t securing loose nukes.” She counters again, ticking off different things people had talked Mr. Trump out of: invoking the Insurrection Act during the George Floyd protests or firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper.In these circumstances, the line between “responsible influence, working to contain the worst impulses in private” and “passive bystander” and “amoral chump” is difficult to discern.Mr. Pence’s experience highlights the dangers for the individual and the public. In his book, Mr. Esper describes the way Mr. Pence represented a sane, normal presence in meetings. But, Mr. Esper writes, he could never discern how much their boss even considered the vice president’s views: “He was part cheerleader and part sounding board, though I could never tell how much influence he really had with Trump. He often didn’t say much in meetings that the president attended, and he rarely disagreed with Trump in front of us.”Mr. Trump’s first vice president ended up trapped inside the Capitol with a mob calling for his death by hanging. Now people talk about the other Republican presidential candidates as though they might be his running mate this time around, as though all this didn’t just happen. And now, as Mr. Pence runs for president himself, the reward for coming through in a central moment of American history is a kind of surround-sound aversion.At first, at that dinner in Iowa last week, Mr. Pence talked brightly, in the expectation of applause, which came, sort of, at muted levels, muted even for the kinds of things — like his abortion politics — that resulted in applause for others.This was tepid, indifferent clapping, a kind of subtle hell worse than booing, where people who knew you have forgotten you. Mr. Pence kept talking, the delivery staying even and polished, the brightness fading, talking about restoring civility. “So I thank you for hearing me out tonight,” he said, almost somber.On Tuesday evening, Mr. Pence was one of few Republican candidates to put the situation plainly: “Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” At the moment, Mr. Pence has not yet qualified for the debates, and is polling badly.As Mr. Trump told him when he balked at the idea of returning votes to the states, according to the indictment, “You’re too honest.”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury

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      Donald J. Trump has long understood the stakes in the election: The courts may decide his cases, but only voters can decide whether to return him to power.The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump on charges of conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election ensures that a federal jury will determine whether he is held accountable for his elaborate, drawn-out and unprecedented attempt to negate a vote of the American people and cling to power.But it is tens of millions of voters who may deliver the ultimate verdict.For months now, as prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him in multiple jurisdictions, Mr. Trump has intertwined his legal defenses with his electoral arguments. He has called on Republicans to rally behind him to send a message to prosecutors. He has made clear that if he recaptures the White House, he will use his powers to ensure his personal freedom by shutting down prosecutions still underway.In effect, he is both running for president and trying to outrun the law enforcement officials seeking to convict him.That dynamic has transformed the stakes of this election in ways that may not always be clear. Behind the debates over inflation, “wokeness” and the border, the 2024 election is at its core about the fundamental tenets of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power, the independence of the nation’s justice system, the meaning of political free speech and the principle that no one is above the law.Now, the voters become the jury.Mr. Trump has always understood this. When he ran for president the first time, he channeled the economic, racial and social resentments of his voters. But as his legal peril has grown, he has focused on his own grievances and projected them onto his supporters.“If these illegal persecutions succeed, if they’re allowed to set fire to the law, then it will not stop with me. Their grip will close even tighter around YOU,” Mr. Trump wrote to supporters on Tuesday night. “It’s not just my freedom on the line, but yours as well — and I will NEVER let them take it from you.”Mr. Trump’s arguments have so far been effective in his pursuit of his party’s nomination. After two previous indictments — over hush-money payments to a porn star and purloined classified documents — Republican voters rallied behind the former president with an outpouring of support and cash.A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week found that Mr. Trump has a commanding lead over all his Republican rivals combined, leading Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida by a two-to-one margin in a theoretical head-to-head matchup. Mr. Trump, even as America’s best-known criminal defendant, is in a dead heat with Mr. Biden among general election voters, the poll found.About 17 percent of voters who said they preferred him over Mr. Biden supported Mr. Trump despite believing that he had committed serious federal crimes or that he had threatened democracy after the 2020 election.The prevailing Republican view is that the charges against Mr. Trump are a political vendetta.Republicans have spent two years rewriting the narrative of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, reimagining the violent attempt to disrupt the Electoral College vote count as a freedom fight against a Washington “deep state.” The result is that in many quarters of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is more trusted than the prosecutors, special counsels and judges handling the cases against him.“Even those who were fence sitting or window shopping, many of them are of the belief that the justice system under President Biden is simply out to get the former president,” said Jimmy Centers, a former aide to former Gov. Terry Branstad of Iowa, a Republican who later served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to China. “It has only strengthened his support in Iowa, to the point at which his floor is much more solid than what it was earlier this spring.”Whether Republicans continue to stand by Mr. Trump, as they have for months, remains to be seen in the wake of Tuesday’s indictment.“At a certain point, are you really going to hitch your whole party to a guy who is just trying to stay out of jail?” asked former Representative Barbara Comstock, a Virginia Republican who lost her seat when suburban voters turned against Mr. Trump in 2018. “There may be another strategy that Republicans could come up with. And if they can’t, I think they lose.”Strategists supporting rivals of Mr. Trump say that over time, the continued charges could hurt his standing with Republican voters, distract Mr. Trump from focusing on presenting his plans for the future and raise questions about his electability in the general election.“Even though people will rally around him in the moment, it starts to erode favorablity and his market share,” said Kristin Davison, chief operating officer of Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Mr. DeSantis. “More people will start to look forward.”Or they may not.Republicans’ responses to the third indictment have been similar to their complaints about the previous two — if slightly more muted. Loyal allies in Congress have rallied around Mr. Trump, blasting the Justice Department while most of his rivals for the party’s nomination declined to directly attack him over the charges.Richard Czuba, a veteran pollster who conducts surveys for Detroit’s media outlets, said opinions about Mr. Trump on both sides of the aisle had long been cased in cement. Like the past three cycles, this election will probably be another referendum on Mr. Trump, he said, and the outcome is likely to depend on which side can best drive its voters to the polls — regardless of whether Mr. Trump faces three indictments or 300.“We have to be brutally honest: Donald Trump sucks all the oxygen out of the room,” Mr. Czuba said. “If you were with him, you’re with him. If you were against him, you’re against him.”Still, Democrats are hopeful that in a general election, the indictments might sway some small slice of independents or swing voters. There is little doubt that a steady drumbeat of news out of the various court proceedings will ensure that Mr. Trump’s legal troubles continue to dominate the news in 2024. Court appearances and legal filings will compete for attention with debates and policy rollouts.Biden campaign officials and allies believe they can focus on topics with a more direct impact on the lives of voters — economic issues, abortion access and extreme weather — without explicitly addressing Mr. Trump’s issues.About an hour after news of Mr. Trump’s indictment broke, Mr. Biden and his wife finished dinner at a seafood restaurant in Delaware, then went to the movies. The president did not address the indictment, just as he had stayed silent after reports broke of the first two.Still, Democrats believe there will be an impact. Representative Brendan Boyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat who is a member of the Biden campaign’s national advisory board, said prosecuting Mr. Trump for his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack has the potential to galvanize the country in a way that the other legal cases against Mr. Trump do not.Tens of millions of people tuned in last summer for the hearings of the House Select Committee’s investigation of the Capitol riot, he noted, and Mr. Trump’s approval ratings among persuadable voters dropped afterward.Although a federal trial would not be televised, a steady stream of news may be enough to remind voters of the stakes in electing a candidate who is also a defendant, he said.“When you see witness after witness, day after day,” Mr. Boyle said, “I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility that that could end up changing things.” More

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      It’s No Surprise That Donald Trump Is Being Charged Under a Reconstruction-Era Law

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      Of the four charges included in the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump, one — violating Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code — seemed to surprise many. It shouldn’t have.That statute dates back to Reconstruction, as Congress responded to the Confederacy’s white-power insurrection against the United States. Reconstruction sought not only to restore the Union after the Civil War, but also to build guardrails against such an authoritarian faction ever again being able to subvert the Republic.It’s therefore appropriate that Section 241 and other Reconstruction-era laws are precisely those that the American legal system is turning to in response to a former president who stoked the flames of an insurrection in which a violent mob stormed the Capitol in an effort to undermine the democratic process. One of the rioters, later sentenced to three years in prison, carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol, an indelible image captured in photographs and widely circulated.Congress enacted Section 241 as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1870 (also known as the Enforcement Act for its role in enforcing the terms of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, crucial to providing Black people with the rights and protections of citizenship). The law addressed the rise of white supremacist groups after the Civil War, especially the Ku Klux Klan, which organized citizens and public officials to intimidate freed Black people to suppress their participation in the political process. It empowered federal agents to stop these conspirators from depriving any Americans, in particular Black Americans, of the right to have a say in their government.The Justice Department has charged Mr. Trump with doing exactly that: the government asserts in its detailed 45-page indictment that through his attempts “to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Trump conspired to “injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate” voters in exercising their “right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”Bringing civil rights charges against the former president is not overreach by the Justice Department, as some have suggested. By enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1870, the department is doing the very thing the law was designed to do by prosecuting a political leader who, while in office and after, sought to cancel the votes of millions to hold power.In 1871, with Klan violence continuing, Congress passed two more bills to enforce the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Ku Klux Klan acts. Among other things, these laws empowered citizens to sue anyone who conspired to intimidate or retaliate against them for exercising their political rights.Armed with these laws, the Justice Department oversaw the arrest and conviction of hundreds of Klansmen, and by 1873 the group had been effectively (though temporarily) crushed. While Section 241 has regularly been used ever since to police civil rights violations, with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Klan Act litigation brought by private parties declined precipitously, according to our research, until in recent years.In July 2017, our organization, Protect Democracy, filed a Klan Act lawsuit against the 2016 Trump campaign over what we asserted was its role in Russian efforts to compromise the political rights of Americans. While that suit did not succeed, it was the beginning of a spate of private Klan Act litigation unseen in more than 100 years.Several lawsuits have been filed by our group and others. Among the results: A restraining order was issued against armed groups that surrounded ballot drop boxes in ways that intimidated voters; the Proud Boys were ordered to pay more than $1 million in damages for desecrating the property of a Black church; and a jury ordered 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $26 million in damages to nine people who suffered physical or emotional injuries at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017. Still pending are lawsuits seeking damages against those responsible for Jan. 6, against those who organized a car caravan that threatened to drive a campaign bus off the highway and against Mr. Trump and others for seeking to deprive Black voters from having their votes counted in the 2020 election.Other Reconstruction-era laws are also in the center of debates today. Congress recently reformed the Electoral Count Act, passed in response to the contested presidential election of 1876, after Mr. Trump and his allies sought to use the law’s ambiguities to overturn the 2020 election. The former president has also pledged, if re-elected, to abolish the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. That guarantee was ratified in 1868 to reverse the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision holding that African Americans were not citizens.Yet another 14th Amendment provision, Section 3’s prohibition on those who have engaged in insurrection against the United States from holding power again, was recently applied for the first time since Reconstruction to bar from office a New Mexico county commissioner who breached the barricades outside the Capitol on Jan. 6. And recently, our organization filed a voting rights lawsuit under the 1870 law that readmitted Virginia to the Union. The Virginia Readmission Act limited the circumstances in which the state could disenfranchise its citizens, and our lawsuit argues that the state’s lifetime ban on voting by anyone convicted of any felony violates that law.These battles are the newest iterations of the Reconstruction-era clashes. Just as the integration of freed Black people into our democracy in the 1870s was met with fierce resistance, so too did the election of the nation’s first Black president give rise to a revival of open bigotry. And just as the enactment of laws in the 1870s to enforce equal citizenship were met with intransigence, so too today should we expect to see their enforcement resisted.The outcome of these legal clashes will determine the future of the country’s experiment in self-government. Either these laws will finally be fully realized and usher in a true multiracial democracy or the 150-year resistance to Reconstruction will prevail and white Americans reluctant to share power will reinforce their dominance over a diversifying nation. Authoritarianism rather than democracy would then be the order of the day.Ian Bassin is a co-founder and the executive director of the group Protect Democracy and a former associate White House counsel. Kristy Parker is counsel at Protect Democracy and the former deputy chief of the criminal section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.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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      Trump Election Charges Set Up Clash of Lies Versus Free Speech

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      The indictment of former President Donald J. Trump over his efforts to retain power accuses him of conspiracies built on knowing falsehoods. His supporters say he is protected by the First Amendment.Running through the indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election was a consistent theme: He is an inveterate and knowing liar.The indictment laid out how, in the two months after Election Day, Mr. Trump “spread lies” about widespread election fraud even though he “knew that they were false.”Mr. Trump “deliberately disregarded the truth” and relentlessly disseminated them anyway at a “prolific” pace, the indictment continued, “to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”Of course, Mr. Trump has never been known for fealty to truth.Throughout his careers in business and politics, he has sought to bend reality to his own needs, with lies ranging from relatively small ones, like claiming he was of Swedish and not German descent when trying to rent to Jewish tenants in New York City, to proclaiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.If you repeat something enough, he has told confidants over time, people will believe it.By and large, this trait has served him well, helping him bluster and bluff his way through bankruptcies and then to the White House and through crises once he was there: personal scandals, two impeachments and a special counsel’s investigation when he was in office.But now he is being held to account in a way he never has been before for what a new special counsel, Jack Smith, is asserting was a campaign of falsehoods that undermined the foundations of democracy.Already, Mr. Trump’s lawyers and allies are setting out the early stages of a legal strategy to counter the accusations, saying that Mr. Trump’s First Amendment rights are under attack. They say Mr. Trump had every right to express views about election fraud that they say he believed, and still believes, to be true, and that the actions he took or proposed after the election were based on legal advice.Jack Smith, the special counsel, announced an indictment of former President Donald J. Trump in Washington on Tuesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe indictment and his initial response set up a showdown between those two opposing assertions of principle: that what prosecutors in this case called “pervasive and destabilizing lies” from the highest office in the land can be integral to criminal plans, and that political speech enjoys broad protections, especially when conveying what Mr. Trump’s allies say are sincerely held beliefs.While a judge and jury will ultimately decide how much weight to give each, Mr. Trump and his allies were already on the offensive after the indictment.“So the First Amendment protects President Trump in this way: After 2020, he saw all these irregularities, he got affidavits from around the country, sworn testimony, he saw the rules being changed in the middle of the election process — as a president, he’s entitled to speak on those issues,” Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in the case, John Lauro, said on Wednesday in an interview on CBS.”What the government would have to prove in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt, is that speech is not protected by the First Amendment, and they’ll never be able to do that,” he said.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 Republican in the House, said in a statement that Mr. Trump had “every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.”Representative Gary Palmer of Alabama, the chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, called the indictment a “criminalization of disinformation and misinformation, which raises serious concerns about the public’s right to speak openly in opposition to policies they oppose.”Legal experts were skeptical about the strength of those claims as a defense. They pointed out that the indictment said on its second page that all Americans had the right to say what they wanted about the election — even if it was false. But, the indictment asserts, it is illegal to use those false claims to engage in criminal conduct, the experts said.An individual’s free-speech rights essentially end as soon as those words become evidence of criminality, they said. In the case of the indictment against Mr. Trump, the prosecutors argue that Mr. Trump used his statements to persuade others to engage in criminal conduct with him, like signing fake slates of electors or pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay Electoral College certification of President Biden’s victory.According to the indictment, Mr. Trump “knowingly” used “false claims of election fraud” to try to “convince the vice president to accept the defendant’s fraudulent electors, reject legitimate electoral votes or send legitimate electoral votes to state legislatures for review rather than counting them.”The indictment goes on to say that when those efforts failed, Mr. Trump turned to using the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse “to pressure the vice president to fraudulently alter the election results.”Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University and a lead federal prosecutor in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Enron, said that it “won’t work legally but it will have some appeal politically, which is why he is pushing it.”“There is no First Amendment privilege to commit crimes just because you did it by speaking,” Mr. Buell said.Referring to both public and private remarks, Mr. Buell said that “there is no First Amendment privilege for giving directions or suggestions to other people to engage in illegal acts.”Referring to the fictional television mafia boss Tony Soprano, Mr. Buell added, “Tony Soprano can’t invoke the First Amendment for telling his crew he wants someone whacked.”For decades, Mr. Trump’s penchant for falsehoods and exaggerations was well known in New York City. He was so distrusted by Mayor Ed Koch in the 1980s that one of the mayor’s deputies, Alair Townsend, famously quipped, “I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if his tongue were notarized.”Mr. Trump spoke with journalists by phone while pretending to be a spokesman representing himself, in order to leak information about his business or his personal life. He claimed to have dated women who denied being involved with him. He claimed that he lived on the 66th through 68th floors of Trump Tower, which in fact has only 58 floors.Reaching the presidency did not lead to a change in his habits. The Washington Post’s fact checker identified more than 30,000 false or misleading claims from him over his four years in office, a figure equivalent to 21 a day.Mr. Trump has already tried to invoke the First Amendment in civil cases related to the attacks on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In February 2022, a federal judge in Washington ruled that lawsuits related to whether he incited the crowd that stormed the Capitol could proceed, in part because the First Amendment did not protect the speech he gave on the Ellipse before the riot.“Only in the most extraordinary circumstances could a court not recognize that the First Amendment protects a president’s speech,” Judge Amit P. Mehta of the Federal District Court in Washington ruled. “But the court believes this is that case. Even presidents cannot avoid liability for speech that falls outside the expansive reach of the First Amendment. The court finds that in this one-of-a-kind case the First Amendment does not shield the president from liability.”The experts and defense lawyers who read the indictment against Mr. Trump said that claiming that he was relying on the advice of lawyers was likely to provide Mr. Trump with a stronger defense than if he invoked the First Amendment.In the interview on CBS, Mr. Lauro leaned into that argument, saying that Mr. Trump had a “smoking gun of innocence” in a memo that the conservative legal scholar John Eastman wrote for him. The memo said Mr. Trump could ask Mr. Pence to pause the congressional certification of the election. Mr. Eastman was not a White House lawyer at the time.“John Eastman, who is an eminent scholar, gave the president an option — several options,” Mr. Lauro said.Alan Feuer More

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      The Far-Reaching Consequences of the Latest Trump Indictment

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      The latest charges against Donald Trump amount to “the most consequential of all the indictments filed so far,” the Opinion columnist David French argues in this audio essay. On Tuesday, the former president was indicted on four federal counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, efforts that were part of what French calls “one of the most malicious conspiracies in American history.” Despite this, the case, which hinges on proving Trump’s intent, may not be a slam dunk.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesThe 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.This Opinion Short was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      How Rudy Giuliani Became Co-Conspirator 1 in the Trump Indictment

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      Referred to as “Co-Conspirator 1” in the indictment of Donald Trump, the former prosecutor, mayor and presidential lawyer faces an uncertain legal future.Rudolph W. Giuliani is Co-Conspirator 1.Mr. Giuliani, the crime-fighter who rose from a federal prosecutor’s office to lead New York City at its moment of deepest crisis, is not named in the indictment that was filed Tuesday accusing his former client, Donald J. Trump, of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.But Co-Conspirator 1, who Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer acknowledged appeared to be his client, figures in each of the three conspiracies it alleges took place — leaving open the possibility that Mr. Giuliani could be charged himself.The next chapter in his long public life will now be written by the special counsel who filed the indictment, Jack Smith, who can prosecute him, pressure him into cooperating or leave him dangling, potentially to be indicted by a district attorney investigating election interference in Georgia.The former mayor who made his name as a lawman now faces a reckoning with the law.Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Mr. Trump hangs in the balance. A person close to Mr. Trump who spoke confidentially to describe a private relationship said that while they don’t speak regularly, the former president retains a fondness for Mr. Giuliani born from his stint as mayor, when the two dealt with each other often.But in recent years, their relationship has been on uneven footing as the former president had refused to pay his former lawyer’s legal bills amid mounting legal troubles for both, infuriating Mr. Giuliani’s allies. The former president had told advisers that he did not want Mr. Giuliani to be reimbursed, The New York Times reported.This year, filings suggest, Mr. Trump’s super PAC paid a legal vendor working on Mr. Giuliani’s behalf. The $340,000 payment was made weeks before Mr. Giuliani met voluntarily with Mr. Smith’s office — a meeting that took place under a proffer agreement, in which prosecutors consent to not use any statements during an interview in criminal proceedings unless it is determined that the subject was lying. The agreement does not mean that prosecutors will not charge Mr. Giuliani, nor does it indicate they will seek his cooperation.The payment appeared to bail Mr. Giuliani out of a difficult financial situation. Before it was made, he had told the federal judge presiding over a defamation lawsuit filed against him by two Georgia election workers that he could not afford to pay some of his legal expenses.Tuesday’s indictment, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, details five ways in which six co-conspirators aided Mr. Trump. The attempts begin with efforts to persuade state officials — sometimes by using threats — to overturn the legitimate vote so that false electors could deliver their support to Mr. Trump in the Electoral College. They end with attempts to flip the result even after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Giuliani, 79, was involved in every step, the indictment says. He bullied and cajoled officials in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; helped convene slates of fraudulent electors to cast ballots for Mr. Trump; falsely claimed that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election; and, finally, called lawmakers after the attack on the Capitol, asking that they delay the election’s certification.Mr. Giuliani became one of Mr. Trump’s foremost political defenders after the 2020 election.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesOn Tuesday, Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, said that his client appeared to be the person identified as Co-Conspirator 1 before blasting the indictment, saying it “eviscerates the First Amendment” and was meant to disrupt Mr. Trump’s third presidential campaign.“Every fact that Mayor Giuliani possesses about this case establishes the good-faith basis President Donald Trump had for the action that he took,” Mr. Costello said.“This indictment underscores the tragic reality of our two-tiered justice system — one for the regime in power and the other for anyone who dares to oppose the ruling regime,” Ted Goodman, political adviser to Mr. Giuliani, said on Wednesday.By this stage of his alliance with the former president, Mr. Giuliani is used to legal trouble.The two men have known each other for decades. After serving in the Reagan Justice Department, Mr. Giuliani in 1983 became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, one of the most prominent legal posts in the government. There, he focused on disrupting organized crime, zeroing in on the five Mafia families of New York. At the same time, Mr. Trump was leveraging his real estate empire to burnish his tabloid celebrity.The men shared a thirst for public attention and a harsh law-and-order politics that kept them aligned after Mr. Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993.His leadership after the Sept. 11 attacks briefly vaulted Mr. Giuliani to the pinnacle of American public life; he was named Time magazine’s person of the year, his leadership compared to that of Winston Churchill. But after Mr. Giuliani left office at the end of 2001 he sank toward irrelevancy, a decline reflected in his failed 2008 Republican presidential campaign.When he re-emerged, it was on behalf of Mr. Trump. He was an omnipresent surrogate for the candidate in the final stages of the 2016 campaign and never abandoned Mr. Trump once he became president. In 2018 — despite having been passed over for the position he coveted, secretary of state — Mr. Giuliani began working as a lawyer for Mr. Trump.Tuesday’s indictment accuses Mr. Trump and co-conspirator 1 of attacking the underpinnings of American democracy.Al Drago for The New York TimesBy that time, the president was fighting a first special counsel investigation, led by Robert S. Mueller III, which concerned possible Russian interference in the election. Mr. Giuliani joined the battle with gusto, saying that Mr. Trump was being targeted for his politics.Like several of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Mr. Giuliani became embroiled in the legal travails of his client. He had tried to push a new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to investigate Joseph R. Biden Jr. as Mr. Biden emerged as Mr. Trump’s chief rival in the 2020 presidential race. Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine prompted federal prosecutors in Manhattan to open an investigation into the man who had once led the office.Mr. Smith has homed in on the aftermath of Mr. Biden’s victory that year. The indictment says that Mr. Trump on Nov. 14, 2020, appointed Mr. Giuliani to “spearhead his efforts going forward to challenge the election results.”Mr. Giuliani took up the mission, meeting with speakers of the house in Arizona and Michigan, asking them to replace their proper electors with groups that would cast votes for Mr. Trump. In all, Mr. Giuliani helped coordinate a scheme to put forward fraudulent slates of electors in seven states, the indictment said.In Georgia, Mr. Giuliani organized a presentation for lawmakers where people claiming to be electoral fraud experts falsely claimed that 10,000 dead people had voted.And after the attack on the U.S. Capitol delayed the certification of the election, Mr. Giuliani helped Mr. Trump lobby lawmakers, unsuccessfully, to keep Mr. Biden out of the White House.When Mr. Trump left office, the legal pressure on Mr. Giuliani escalated.FB.I. agents searched his home and office, seizing cellphones and computers. The federal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s actions in Ukraine ended in 2022 with no charges, but he was sued by voting machine companies that he claimed had helped engineer Mr. Biden’s victory.In June, his law license was suspended in connection with the statements he made about the 2020 election. Mr. Giuliani’s legal bills piled up. Mr. Trump was declining to pay him even as Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, investigated him for his attempts to overturn the election in Georgia.Soon, Mr. Smith would join her.Maggie Haberman More

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      Why Jack Smith Had to Bring This Indictment Against Trump

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      Donald Trump has now been indicted three times, accused of crimes occurring before, during and after his presidency. The latest indictment alleges facts from all quarters to prove his criminality: from the vice president to the White House counsel and the heads of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence, as well as many others. All are Republican loyalists.But the indictment does more: It skillfully avoids breathing air into a Trump claim of selective prosecution. To not have brought this case against Mr. Trump would have been an act of selective nonprosecution. The Justice Department has already charged and obtained convictions for myriad foot soldiers related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including charging well over 300 people for obstructing the congressional proceedings. In this indictment, the special counsel Jack Smith wisely brings that same charge, but now against the alleged leader of the effort to thwart the transfer of power.That charge of obstruction and conspiracy to defraud the United States in the administration of elections are entirely fitting for the conduct alleged in the indictment. In a civil case last year, the Federal District Court judge David Carter held that Mr. Trump and John Eastman likely engaged in a criminal conspiracy under both those statutes in their schemes to organize false electors and pressure the vice president. Mr. Smith has now said he can prove the same conduct beyond a reasonable doubt.Although the Jan. 6 select committee referred Mr. Trump for investigation for inciting an insurrection, Mr. Smith wisely demurred. The Justice Department has not charged that offense in any other case involving the attack on the Capitol, and insurrection has not been charged since the 19th century. Of course, no president has engaged in it since then — but since no one else has been charged with that crime relating to Jan. 6, it likely would have been an issue. And since the penalty for the insurrection offense is that the defendant would not be eligible to hold federal office, it would have fueled a claim of weaponizing the Justice Department to defeat a political rival.Mr. Trump and others like him will of course continue to assert that the Justice Department has been politically weaponized. That claim has it exactly backward.To not charge Mr. Trump for trying to criminally interfere with the transfer of power to a duly elected president would be to politicize the matter. It would mean external political considerations had infected the Justice Department’s decision-making and steered the institution away from its commitment to holding everyone equally accountable under the law.What those circling their wagons around Mr. Trump are in effect asking for is a two-tiered system, in which the people who were stirred by lies to interrupt the congressional certification are held to account but not the chief instigator. That injustice has not been lost on judges overseeing cases related to Jan. 6. In the 2021 sentencing of John Lolos — a 48-year-old man with no criminal record who traveled from Seattle to hear Mr. Trump’s speech at the Ellipse before being convinced to “storm” the Capitol — Judge Amit Mehta commented on the incongruity in the D.C. courtroom.“People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, fed falsehoods, and told that our election was stolen when it clearly was not,” the judge said. He went on to add that those “who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’s conduct” and the events of Jan. 6 have “in no meaningful sense” been held “to account for their actions and their words.”We are now on the doorstep of the sort of accountability that Judge Mehta found lacking.That is what also makes this indictment of the former president different. Where both the Manhattan hush money case and classified documents case have been, in some part, mired in discussions of whataboutism, the 2020 election interference indictment is where whataboutism goes to die.In this case, the Trump stratagem is unmasked. Given the record of robust prosecutions of Jan. 6 foot soldiers and Mr. Trump’s responsibility for their actions, he has had to resort to saying the Capitol attack was good, and he and his enablers have lauded convicted felons as heroes and “political prisoners.” Mr. Trump’s continued statements in favor of the Jan. 6 defendants can and likely will be used against him in any trial.As the narrative of the indictment lays out, Mr. Trump’s schemes — to sell the big lie and promote election fraud even when he privately conceded to advisers the claims were “unsupported” and “crazy” — are what contributed to the attack of Jan. 6. And it is a relief that the indictment includes Mr. Trump’s role and responsibility in that violence. Many Americans would not understand the Justice Department focusing only on bureaucratic and procedural efforts to affect the congressional certification.As Senator Mitch McConnell said at the close of Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, “There is no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.”He added: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”What is also clear from the indictment is that Mr. Trump will most likely not be the last white-collar defendant charged for the set of crimes it sets out. Mr. Smith clearly, and properly, considers that the six co-conspirators — parts of the indictment describe actions by co-conspirators that correspond with those taken by, for example, Mr. Eastman and Rudy Giuliani — committed federal offenses that threatened the core of our democracy. The rule of law cannot tolerate those actors facing charges with the main protagonist going scot free.The main task ahead for Mr. Smith is getting his cases to trial before the general election. But the true test ahead will not be for Mr. Smith. It will be for us: Will Americans care about the rule of law enough to vote for it? The courtroom is a place where facts and law still matter, but the criminal cases against Mr. Trump will test whether the same can be said for the ballot box.Ryan Goodman, a law professor at the New York University School of Law, is a co-editor in chief of Just Security. Andrew Weissmann, a senior prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, is a professor at N.Y.U. School of Law and a host of the podcast Prosecuting Donald Trump.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A President Accused of Betraying His Country

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      Of all the ways that Donald Trump desecrated his office as president, the gravest — as outlined in extraordinary detail in the criminal indictment issued against him on Tuesday — was his attempt to undermine the Constitution and overturn the results of the 2020 election, hoping to stay in office.The special counsel Jack Smith got right to the point at the top of the four-count federal indictment, saying that Mr. Trump had knowingly “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”Bedrock. It’s an apt word for a sacred responsibility of every president: to honor the peaceful transfer of power through the free and fair elections that distinguish the United States. Counting and certifying the vote, Mr. Smith said, “is foundational to the United States democratic process, and until 2021, had operated in a peaceful and orderly manner for more than 130 years,” since electoral counting rules were codified. Until Mr. Trump lost, at which point, the indictment makes clear, he used “dishonesty, fraud and deceit to impair, obstruct and defeat” that cornerstone of democracy.The criminal justice system of the United States had never seen an indictment of this magnitude. It’s the first time that a former president has been explicitly accused by the federal government of defrauding the country. It’s the first time a former president has been accused of obstructing an official proceeding, the congressional count of the electoral votes. Mr. Trump also stands accused of engaging in a conspiracy to deprive millions of citizens of the right to have their votes counted. This fraud, the indictment said, led directly to a deadly attack by Mr. Trump’s supporters on the seat of American government.It’s the third criminal indictment of Mr. Trump, and it demonstrates, yet again, that the rule of law in America applies to everyone, even when the defendant was the country’s highest-ranking official. The crimes alleged in this indictment are, by far, the most serious because they undermine the country’s basic principles.The prosecution’s list of false voter fraud claims made by Mr. Trump and his associates is extensive: that 10,000 dead people voted in Georgia, that there were tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada, 30,000 noncitizens voting in Arizona and 200,000 mystery votes in Pennsylvania, as well as suspicious vote dumps and malfunctioning voting machines elsewhere.After presenting this list, the indictment makes its case with 12 simple but searing words: “These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false.” Mr. Smith points out how many people told Mr. Trump that he was repeating lies. He was told by Vice President Mike Pence that there was no evidence of fraud. He was told the same thing by the Justice Department leaders he appointed, by the director of national intelligence, by the Department of Homeland Security, by senior White House attorneys, by leaders of his campaign, by state officials and, most significantly, by dozens of federal and state courts. The indictment emphasizes that every lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump and his allies to change the outcome was rejected, “providing the defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”Demonstrating Mr. Trump’s knowledge that he was lying will be central to the prosecution’s case when it comes to trial, because Mr. Smith wants to make clear that Mr. Trump wasn’t genuinely trying to root out credible instances of voter fraud. The indictment doesn’t charge him with lying or speaking his mind about the outcome of the election, and it notes that he had the right to challenge the results through legal means. But the charges show in detail how, after all those methods failed, his “pervasive and destabilizing lies” set the table for the criminal activity that followed, specifically fraud, obstruction and deprivation of rights. As much as defense lawyers are trying to frame the case as an attack on Mr. Trump’s free speech, the indictment makes clear that it was his actions after Election Day that were criminal.That “criminal scheme” began, the indictment says, on Nov. 14, 2020, when Mr. Trump turned to Rudy Giuliani (acknowledged by his lawyer to be “co-conspirator 1”) to challenge the results in the swing state of Arizona, which Mr. Trump had lost. “From that point on,” the charges state, “the defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states,” which also included Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In an example cited in the charges, Mr. Giuliani sent a text to the Senate majority leader in Michigan on Dec. 7 demanding that the legislature pass a resolution saying the election was in dispute and that the state’s electors were not official. That demand was refused, but Mr. Trump continued to claim that more than 100,000 ballots in Detroit were fraudulent.The scope of Mr. Trump’s plot touched every level of American political life. While the four federal crimes charged by Mr. Smith all relate to the same set of facts, three of those crimes, one for fraud and two related to obstruction of a proceeding, are crimes against the U.S. government. The fourth crime is against the American people, millions of whom Mr. Trump sought to deprive of their right to have their vote counted. This crime carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.It appears increasingly likely that Mr. Trump will soon face charges for crimes against yet another level of American government — the states — as the district attorney in Atlanta reaches the final stages of a grand jury investigation into his pressure campaign to get Georgia to reverse its certified vote count and award its 16 electors to him instead of Joe Biden.The former president responded to this latest and most serious indictment in his customary style, denouncing it as “corrupt” and invoking, among other things, the “Biden Crime Family” and Nazi Germany. Mr. Smith, a veteran prosecutor on the International Criminal Court who has prosecuted far more brutal and popular leaders than Mr. Trump, has surely heard it all before. But that does not excuse the support Mr. Trump is receiving from his Republican allies in Congress, who insist that this prosecution is political and have helped damage the respect for the criminal justice system in the minds of so many voters. Yes, some in Mr. Trump’s party, including his former vice president, have stood up for democratic norms in the wake of these indictments, and yet it is impossible to ignore those who have not. These attacks are dangerous and have led to death threats against prosecutors, judges and other civil servants for doing their jobs.If Mr. Smith’s previous indictment of Mr. Trump is any indication, we have not heard the end of the charges in this case. In that earlier case, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally hoarding and refusing to return highly classified documents after he left office, the special counsel issued a superseding indictment last week, adding serious obstruction charges against the former president and one of his aides at Mar-a-Lago. It would not be surprising if Mr. Smith has more coming in the new case as well, whether additional evidence of Mr. Trump’s lawbreaking or charges against his co-conspirators, who are not named in the indictment but who are readily identifiable. Several are lawyers who advised or worked for the former president, including Mr. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and John Eastman.In many ways, the indictment continues the work of the House Jan. 6 committee, which uncovered many of the same allegations. Several of the committee’s members had urged this prosecution, particularly after the Senate failed to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. After he voted to acquit Mr. Trump, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said there were other ways to bring Mr. Trump to account. “We have a criminal justice system in this country,” he said. “We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being accountable by either one.”In that, at least, Mr. McConnell was right. A former president is now being charged with extreme abuse of office and will eventually be judged by a jury. Mr. Trump tried to overturn the nation’s constitutional system and the rule of law. That system survived his attacks and will now hold him to account for that damage.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