Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Oath Keepers Leader Points Finger at Colleagues in Sedition Trial

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      Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia, testified that he did not order anyone to go into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that he had nothing to do with an armed force waiting nearby.WASHINGTON — At the height of the chaos at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, two dozen members of the Oath Keepers militia met outside the building with their leader, Stewart Rhodes.When some of them reported that they had just come back from inside the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes was outraged, he testified in court on Monday. Taking the stand at his own sedition trial, he said that those who had gone inside the building that day had done so of their own accord — and that he had never had a plan or had given any orders to go in.“When I heard that they went in,” he told jury, “I said, ‘That was stupid.’”Testifying for a second day at the trial in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Rhodes sought to wash his hands of much of what the Oath Keepers did on Jan. 6, laying the blame on several of his colleagues.He told the jury that one of his co-defendants, Kelly Meggs, who went inside the Capitol with others in the group, had gone “off mission.”He also claimed — for the first time — that he had “nothing to do with” an armed “quick reaction force” made of up Oath Keepers that was staged in hotel rooms in Virginia, ostensibly to rush to the aid of compatriots if things at the Capitol went wrong.Mr. Rhodes has firmly denied there was a plan to break into the Capitol on Jan. 6 and disrupt the certification of the 2020 election, as the government has claimed. He has also argued that the Oath Keepers went to Washington that day on what he claims was a peaceful mission: to serve as bodyguards for pro-Trump celebrities like Ali Alexander, a Stop the Steal organizer, and Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump.It is rare for a defendant, especially one of his prominence, to take the witness stand, but Mr. Rhodes, who holds a law degree from Yale, has been visibly confident in putting forward several intersecting arguments.He spent much of the afternoon sparring with a prosecutor, Kathryn Rakoczy. Ms. Rakoczy’s questions seemed designed to both poke holes in the details of his account and to chip away at his broader credibility.Ms. Rakoczy started, for example, by suggesting that Mr. Rhodes had soft-pedaled the nature of the Oath Keepers during his first turn on the witness stand on Friday. She pointed out that while telling the jury about some of the missions the group had been involved in over the years, he had failed to mention several in which his members used weapons to confront government forces and challenge their authority.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that even when the Oath Keepers have undertaken nominally defensive operations — serving, say, as self-appointed protectors of residents and businesses during periods of unrest — local law enforcement leaders have expressed exasperation at their involvement.From well before the trial began, lawyers for Mr. Rhodes have claimed that the armed “quick reaction force” in Virginia would have been mobilized only if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to take up arms in support of Mr. Trump.Last week, Mr. Rhodes testified that he had established a similar force for a pro-Trump rally in Washington in November 2020, fearing that leftist activists were going to break into the White House and drag Mr. Trump into the streets. On Monday, he told the jury that as Jan. 6 approached, he no longer feared that the White House might be overrun and that an armed force was not needed.He then suggested that his compatriots could have set up the reaction force without his knowledge.But Ms. Rakoczy showed Mr. Rhodes a series of messages he exchanged with Mr. Meggs and others in the days leading up to Jan. 6 in which he seemed to be aware of the quick reaction force — or Q.R.F.“Ok We WILL have a QRF,” he wrote in one of the messages. “This situation calls for it.”Mr. Rhodes suggested that despite this apparent confirmation, his colleagues could have hashed out the details for the force without him — noting, as he often did during his day on the stand, that he did not like to micromanage as a leader.“Sir, the buck stops with you in this operation, right?” Ms. Rakoczy asked.“I’m responsible for everything that everyone did?” Mr. Rhodes responded.During more than three hours of questions, Ms. Rakoczy also sought to make another point: that Mr. Rhodes had planned to act on Jan. 6 even without the legal cover that would have been offered by Mr. Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.She showed Mr. Rhodes a message he had written saying that the Oath Keepers were going to “rise up in insurrection” against Joseph R. Biden Jr. even if Mr. Trump never summoned them. What Mr. Rhodes had really wanted, Ms. Rakoczy said, was for Mr. Trump to call up the Oath Keepers to “serve as his private bodyguards to stay in power.”Mr. Rhodes denied it.To prove the seditious conspiracy charges against Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Meggs and their co-defendants — Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — prosecutors must persuade the jury that the Oath Keepers plotted to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of power from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden. Several government witnesses have already admitted under questioning from the defense that there was no explicit plan to storm the Capitol and disrupt the election certification.That left Ms. Rakoczy with the task of using circumstantial evidence to argue that Mr. Rhodes had encouraged his compatriots to go into the building.She pointed out that as rioters were storming toward the Capitol, Mr. Rhodes compared the attack to the country’s founders destroying the house of the governor of Massachusetts during the Revolutionary era. Mr. Rhodes acknowledged he had made that comparison, but claimed at the time that he did not know the extent of the violence at the Capitol.Ms. Rakoczy also noted that, according to phone records, Mr. Rhodes had a call with one of his top lieutenants, Michael Greene, and Mr. Meggs just minutes before Mr. Meggs went into the Capitol with other Oath Keepers in what prosecutors have described as a military “stack.”Mr. Rhodes admitted he was on the 90-second call but could not hear a thing that Mr. Meggs had said.“For 90 seconds you sat on that dead air?” Ms. Rakoczy asked, sounding incredulous.Mr. Rhodes said yes.Bringing her questions to a close, Ms. Rakoczy reminded Mr. Rhodes that even after Jan. 6, he continued his attempts to reach Mr. Trump and persuade him to invoke the Insurrection Act. She suggested that the storming of the Capitol was for him “just a battle in an ongoing war.”“You and the Oath Keepers were prepared to take steps to abolish this government?” she asked.“We were prepared to walk the founders’ path, yes,” Mr. Rhodes said. “If the government steps outside of the Constitution, it puts you in a bad place.” More

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      A MAGA America Would Be Ugly

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      If you aren’t feeling a sense of dread on the eve of the midterm elections, you haven’t been paying attention.We can talk about the conventional stakes of these elections — their implications for economic policy, major social programs, environmental policy, civil liberties and reproductive rights. And it’s not wrong to have these discussions: Life will go on whatever happens on the political scene, and government policies will continue to have a big impact on people’s lives.But I, at least, always feel at least a bit guilty when writing about inflation or the fate of Medicare. Yes, these are my specialties. Focusing on them, however, feels a bit like denial, or at least evasion, when the fundamental stakes right now are so existential.Ten or 20 years ago, those of us who warned that the Republican Party was becoming increasingly extremist and anti-democracy were often dismissed as alarmists. But the alarmists have been vindicated every step of the way, from the selling of the Iraq war on false pretenses to the Jan. 6 insurrection.Indeed, these days it’s almost conventional wisdom that the G.O.P. will, if it can, turn America into something like Viktor Orban’s Hungary: a democracy on paper, but an ethnonationalist, authoritarian one-party state in practice. After all, U.S. conservatives have made no secret about viewing Hungary as a role model; they have feted Orban and featured him at their conferences.At this point, however, I believe that even this conventional wisdom is wrong. If America descends into one-party rule, it will be much worse, much uglier, than what we see in today’s Hungary.Before I get there, a word about the role of conventional policy issues in these elections.If Democrats lose one or both houses of Congress, there will be a loud chorus of recriminations, much of it asserting that they should have focused on kitchen table issues and not talked at all about threats to democracy.I don’t claim any expertise here, but I would note that an incumbent president’s party almost always loses seats in the midterms. The only exception to that rule this century was in 2002, when George W. Bush was able to deflect attention from a jobless recovery by posing as America’s defender against terrorism. That record suggests, if anything, that Democrats should have talked even more about issues beyond economics.I’d also say that pretending that this was an ordinary election season, where only economic policy was at stake, would have been fundamentally dishonest.Finally, even voters who are more worried about paychecks and living costs than about democracy should nonetheless be very concerned about the G.O.P.’s rejection of democratic norms.For one thing, Republicans have been open about their plan to use the threat of economic chaos to extract concessions they couldn’t win through the normal legislative process.Also, while I understand the instinct of voters to choose a different driver if they don’t like where the economy is going, they should understand that this time, voting Republican doesn’t just mean giving someone else a chance at the wheel; it may be a big step toward handing the G.O.P. permanent control, with no chance for voters to revisit that decision if they don’t like the results.Which brings me to the question of what a one-party America would look like.As I said, it’s now almost conventional wisdom that Republicans are trying to turn us into Hungary. Indeed, Hungary provides a case study in how democracies can die in the 21st century.But what strikes me, reading about Orban’s rule, is that while his regime is deeply repressive, the repression is relatively subtle. It is, as one perceptive article put it, “soft fascism,” which makes dissidents powerless via its control of the economy and the news media without beating them up or putting them in jail.Do you think a MAGA regime, with or without Donald Trump, would be equally subtle? Listen to the speeches at any Trump rally. They’re full of vindictiveness, of promises to imprison and punish anyone — including technocrats like Anthony Fauci — the movement dislikes.And much of the American right is sympathetic to, or at least unwilling to condemn, violence against its opponents. The Republican reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi by a MAGA-spouting intruder was telling: Many in the party didn’t even pretend to be horrified. Instead, they peddled ugly conspiracy theories. And the rest of the party didn’t ostracize or penalize the purveyors of vile falsehoods.In short, if MAGA wins, we’ll probably find ourselves wishing its rule was as tolerant, relatively benign and relatively nonviolent as Orban’s.Now, this catastrophe doesn’t have to happen. Even if Republicans win big in the midterms, it won’t be the end for democracy, although it will be a big blow. And nothing in politics, not even a full descent into authoritarianism, is permanent.On the other hand, even if we get a reprieve this week, the fact remains that democracy is in deep danger from the authoritarian right. America as we know it is not yet lost, but it’s on the edge.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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      Moderate House Democrats Are at Risk, Putting the Majority Up for Grabs

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      Several Democrats elected in 2018 with an anti-Trump message in conservative-leaning districts are centering their closing argument on protecting democracy as they try to buck national trends.NORFOLK, Va. — In her final campaign ad, Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat and Navy veteran who sits on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, practically dares her constituents to replace her in Congress with her Republican opponent, who has refused to condemn former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer, has blanketed her central Virginia district with ads portraying her challenger as a supporter of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In Michigan, Representative Elissa Slotkin, herself a former C.I.A. analyst, has been campaigning with Representative Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who is the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee and has made combating threats to democracy the focus of her final year in Congress.The three Democrats, all of whom are in difficult re-election races in swing districts with conservative leanings, are at risk of being swept out in next week’s midterm elections, possibly costing Democrats the House majority.They are part of a class of moderates — many of them women with national security credentials who ran for Congress to counter the threat they saw from Mr. Trump — who flipped Republican districts in the 2018 election, delivering Democrats the House majority. Now they are centering their closing campaign argument on protecting democracy.For two election cycles, these Democrats have largely managed to buck Republican attempts to brand them as liberal puppets of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but the challenge has grown steeper in 2022.President Biden’s popularity has sagged. State redistricting has shifted some of their districts, including Ms. Luria’s on the eastern shore of Virginia, to include higher percentages of conservatives. And polls indicate that the issues at the top of mind for voters across the political spectrum are inflation and the economy, even though they overwhelmingly believe that American democracy is under threat.“This is the first time they’ve had to run in a hostile political environment,” David Wasserman, the House editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said of the group. “The class of 2018 — we’re going to see some losses this year. But it’s remarkable that many of them are doing as well as they are given the president’s approval rating.”A dozen of Ms. Luria’s 2018 classmates lost their bids for re-election in 2020, and as many as a dozen more are at risk of being swept out next week. Two of them — Representatives Cindy Axne of Iowa and Tom Malinowski of New Jersey — are behind in the polls, and analysts believe more are headed for defeat.But these frontline Democrats believe if anyone can buck the national trends, it is them.“It’s a lot of pressure,” Ms. Luria said of holding onto a pivotal seat. A recent poll from Christopher Newport University showed her tied with her Republican opponent, Jen A. Kiggans.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.As they battle for political survival, they have worked to dramatize the stakes for voters.“I believe that our democracy is the ultimate kitchen table issue,” Ms. Slotkin said during a sold-out event with Ms. Cheney in East Lansing. “It’s not even the kitchen table; our democracy is the foundation of the home in which the kitchen table sits.”Ms. Luria has campaigned on her reputation as one of the most bipartisan members of Congress, and her record of using her perch on the Armed Services Committee to secure tens of millions of shipbuilding dollars for her district.On a recent Tuesday, as she walked through the Dante Valve manufacturing plant in Norfolk, a small business where workers build key parts for submarines, executives said her support for the Navy fleet had proved “critical” for providing steady paychecks in a town where the economy is inextricably tied to the U.S. military.Republican strategists concede that this group of Democrats has proved tough to knock off, having built brands in their districts that outperform the typical Democrat. Their internal polling shows some of them outperforming Mr. Biden by double digits in favorability.To counter the Democrats’ national security credentials, Republicans have recruited military and law enforcement veterans of their own.Ms. Slotkin is facing off against Tom Barrett, a state senator and Army veteran who served in Iraq.“I have no idea if I’m going to win my election — it’s going to be a nail biter,” she said recently.Ms. Spanberger, who has frequently criticized her party’s leadership, is also in a close race with Yesli Vega, a law enforcement officer.Ms. Luria won election to Congress in 2018 as part of a wave of Democrats who flipped Republican districts and turned the House blue.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesMs. Luria’s challenger, Ms. Kiggans, is also a Navy veteran and has run a campaign focused on pocketbook issues.“They talk to me about the gas prices that are too much even this past week,” Ms. Kiggans said of voters during a recent debate. “They talk to me about their grocery prices. They talk to me about their savings account. People don’t have as much as they used to in their savings account.”She has also tried to tarnish Ms. Luria’s independent credentials, portraying her as a stooge of Ms. Pelosi.Ms. Luria has not allowed the attacks to go unanswered. She has repeatedly cast Ms. Kiggans, who opposes abortion rights and has dodged questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, as an extremist and an election denier.“If standing up for what’s right means losing an election, so be it,” Ms. Luria says in her recent ad, adding: “If you believe the 2020 election was stolen, I’m definitely not your candidate.”Jen A. Kiggans is running to take Ms. Luria’s seat.Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesMs. Kiggans answered this line of argument with an ad of her own, in which she is shown sitting at a kitchen table and surrounded by family photographs, and declares that she is no “extremist.”Interactions between the two candidates have been testy.“She’s an election denier,” Ms. Luria said of Ms. Kiggans, with a note of contempt in her voice. “She has never clearly said in public that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.”Ms. Kiggans shot back at a recent debate, while not specifically denying the charge: “Shame on you for attacking my character as a fellow female Naval officer.”One reason some of the swing-state Democrats remain competitive in their races, despite the national headwinds, is their ability to raise enormous sums of money.Ms. Luria, for instance, has posted some of the highest fund-raising totals this cycle, raking in three times as much as her challenger in the most recent quarter.But national Republicans are working to counter that cash advantage, with political action committees pumping huge amounts of money into districts to prop up challengers, including about $5 million to aid Ms. Kiggans.“Frontline Democrats promised voters they’d be bipartisan problem solvers, but they came to D.C. and voted in lock step with Nancy Pelosi,” said Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the National Republican Campaign Committee. “Now their constituents are dealing with record-high prices and soaring violent crime.”For better or worse, Ms. Luria’s image is now bound up in confronting threats to democracy. She sought a seat on the Jan. 6 committee — a move she knew could cost her her seat — calling it an outgrowth of her life’s work serving in the military.Supporters of Ms. Kiggans at a rally in Smithfield, Va.Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesHer supporters have cheered the decision.“The people who serve in our Congress, they were at great risk,” said Melanie Cornelisse, a supporter who was on hand outside a Norfolk television studio for Ms. Luria’s final debate with Ms. Kiggans. “And I think it’s really admirable that she is one of the people who is leading that investigation.”Ms. Luria has posted some of the highest fund-raising totals this cycle, and raised three times as much as her challenger in the most recent quarter. Kristen Zeis for The New York TimesA reporter asked Ms. Luria recently why she had focused so intently on threats to democracy rather than, say, the price of gasoline. Ms. Luria has supported measures to make the nation “energy independent,” through increased use of nuclear and wind energy.But also, as a Navy veteran, Ms. Luria said, she felt she had to be true to herself — and that meant continuing to call out Mr. Trump’s lies.“To me, there’s really two things that keep me up at night: One is China and the other is protecting our democracy and our democratic institutions,” Ms. Luria said. “As a candidate, I’m going to talk about the things that I think are the most important for our future. There’s still a clear and present danger.” More

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      Justice Dept. Weighs Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries if He Runs

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      The department is hoping to make decisions on whether to charge the former president in the documents and Jan. 6 inquiries before the 2024 campaign heats up.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department hopes to reach a decision on whether to bring charges against former President Donald J. Trump before the 2024 campaign heats up, and is considering appointing a special counsel to oversee investigations of him if he runs again, according to people familiar with the situation.The department is investigating Mr. Trump’s role in the efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and his retention of sensitive government documents at his residence and resort in Florida. It has made no decision in either case, but the inquiry into the former president’s handling of the documents is more straightforward, with prosecutors having publicly cited potential crimes that could be charged.Senior department officials and veteran prosecutors with the department’s national security division, in conjunction with the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida, have spent recent weeks quietly navigating the thicket of thorny issues needed to file charges in the documents investigation, weighing evidence, analyzing legal precedents and mulling practical considerations such as the venue of a possible trial.The investigation, while proceeding quickly by Justice Department standards, has been slowed by Mr. Trump’s efforts in court to restrict the government’s access to the files removed from his home, and by the department’s self-imposed 30-day pause in issuing subpoenas ahead of this year’s midterm elections.But behind the scenes, prosecutors have been busily compiling evidence and case law that could be used to frame a memo that would be the basis for any prosecution. And some involved in that effort have become concerned that an indictment or trial of Mr. Trump during the campaign could generate fierce criticism that could undercut the department’s commitment to being seen as enforcing the law in a nonpartisan manner.Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and his team have long considered creating a layer of protection for the department by tapping a special counsel, a veteran prosecutor appointed by Mr. Garland to run the day-to-day investigation. But even with the appointment of a special counsel, any final decisions on whether to charge Mr. Trump would still be made by Mr. Garland and the department’s senior leadership.Under federal law, a special counsel functions, in essence, as a pop-up U.S. attorney’s office with broad discretion over every aspect of an investigation in “extraordinary circumstances” in which the normal chain of command could be seen as creating a conflict of interest.An attorney general still has the right to approve or discard a special counsel’s recommendations. But if Mr. Garland were to reject the counsel’s recommendation, he would have to inform Congress, a safeguard intended to ensure transparency and autonomy.The department’s consideration of a special counsel appointment was first reported by CNN.A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Recent special counsels include Robert S. Mueller III, who oversaw the investigation into connections between Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, and John H. Durham, who brought two unsuccessful prosecutions of officials accused of acting improperly in the Trump-Russia inquiry.Some former officials and legal experts said the appointment of a special counsel would give Mr. Garland an opportunity to choose a lawyer to counter charges of a political witch hunt.Mr. Garland “needs to have a lawyer with Republican pedigree on that team to send the message that this is not a political persecution,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017.“This is the most important criminal case in our country’s history. Ultimately, every person in the United States will be the jury in this case, and they will need to have confidence that the prosecution team reflects all of them,” he said.On Wednesday, the Justice Department offered to allow Kash Patel, a close adviser to Mr. Trump, to testify to a federal grand jury under a grant of immunity about Mr. Trump’s handling of highly sensitive presidential records.It was the latest indication prosecutors are moving aggressively to gather the evidence necessary to determine whether the former president mishandled sensitive government documents and tried to obstruct justice by withholding information about the location of materials he removed from the White House after leaving office.Mr. Trump, who remains the most powerful, most popular and best-funded Republican in the country, has repeatedly suggested he would run, including at a rally in Iowa on Thursday, when he said he would “very, very, very probably” run again.He has been a vocal supporter of candidates who backed his lies about the 2020 election, but has not yet declared his intention to seek a second term.The status of the sprawling investigation related to Jan. 6 remains less clear. Prosecutors have been seeking testimony and evidence from a number of people associated with Mr. Trump, including lawyers like John Eastman. But officials have yet to set out any public indications of what charges, if any, could ultimately be brought against Mr. Trump. More

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      Gingrich Is Willing to Testify to Jan. 6 Panel, His Lawyer Says

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      Mr. Gingrich would speak about his role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, a move his lawyer suggested should spare him from having to testify in a separate inquiry in Georgia.ATLANTA — Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker involved in efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss, is willing to give an interview to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol after certain conditions are met, his lawyer said Thursday.Mr. Gingrich, a staunch ally of Mr. Trump, was asked to appear before the committee in a Sept. 1 letter from Representative Bennie Thompson, the Democrat who serves as the panel’s chairman. The letter noted that the committee’s investigators had obtained evidence that Mr. Gingrich had been in touch with senior advisers to Mr. Trump about advertisements that amplified false claims about election fraud in the November 2020 election.According to Mr. Thompson, Mr. Gingrich urged the Trump campaign to run ads focused on the bogus assertion that suitcases of fake ballots had been smuggled into a vote-processing area by election workers in Atlanta.Mr. Gingrich, 79, a former member of Congress from Georgia, rose to power and fame in the early 1990s promoting a so-called “Contract with America,” a statement of conservative governing principles. Mr. Gingrich has also been ordered to give testimony on Nov. 16 before a special grand jury in Atlanta that is conducting a criminal investigation into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse Mr. Trump’s loss in the Southern state.A court hearing in Fairfax County, Va., where Mr. Gingrich lives, on whether he must testify in Georgia is scheduled for Wednesday.However, in an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gingrich’s lawyer, J. Randolph Evans, said that he hoped a Virginia judge would be convinced that Mr. Gingrich’s testimony before members of Congress would render his client’s appearance in Atlanta unnecessary.“The idea being that if this really is about information, presumably the Jan. 6 committee would do a good job and obviate the need for testimony in Georgia,” Mr. Evans said.Mr. Evans described the outstanding conditions to be agreed upon as “transparency and attorney-driven issues” but did not elaborate further.Mr. Evans said that John A. Burlingame, the lawyer representing Mr. Gingrich in the Virginia hearing, would also likely argue that he does not have to testify in Georgia and follow a legal strategy used, with varying success, by other out-of-state Trump allies who have fought orders to testify in Georgia. The strategy rests on the idea that the special grand jury is civil in nature, not criminal, and therefore lacks the power to compel appearances by people who are not residents of Georgia.A spokesman for Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who is leading the investigation, declined to comment on Thursday. Mr. Evans said that his client had broken no laws and was not a target of the investigation but rather “just a potential witness.”In a court document seeking Mr. Gingrich’s testimony, Ms. Willis referenced the advertisements mentioned by Mr. Thompson in his letter, noting that they had “encouraged members of the public to contact their state officials and pressure them to challenge and overturn the results of the election.”The ads ran, Ms. Willis stated, “in the days leading up to Dec. 14, 2020, when both legitimate and, in several states, nonlegitimate electors met to cast electoral college votes, and they were purportedly personally approved by former President Donald Trump.”Mr. Thompson, in his letter, said that Mr. Gingrich was involved in the plan to put forward pro-Trump electors in states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Evans, Mr. Gingrich’s lawyer, was named ambassador to Luxembourg by Mr. Trump and is also mentioned by name in the court documents filed by Ms. Willis.The prosecutor noted that on or around Nov. 12, 2020, Mr. Gingrich wrote an email to Pat Cipollone, then the White House counsel, and to Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, who has also been ordered to testify in the Atlanta investigation.“Is someone in charge of coordinating all the electors?” Mr. Gingrich wrote, according to Ms. Willis. She added that Mr. Gingrich then wrote that Mr. Evans had made the point “that all the contested electors must meet on Dec. 14 and send in ballots to force contests which the House would have to settle.” More

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      What if Every Moment Since Jan. 6 Was Just the Calm Before the Storm?

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      Richard Ringer, a 69-year-old Democratic state House candidate in Pennsylvania, is an early riser, and on Monday he was up before 5 a.m. when he heard someone at his garage door. He looked out the window, saw a man with a flashlight, and assumed it was the same person who had twice vandalized his house in the past month.Just a couple of weeks earlier, Ringer says, he found a message spray-painted on his garage door; though the rain partly rinsed it off, the words “Your Race” and “Dead” were visible. Then, last Thursday night, he says he came home to a brick thrown through his window.So when Ringer saw the intruder on Monday, he says, he ran outside and tackled him. But the man was quickly able to pin Ringer down, and beat him unconscious. Ringer doesn’t know for certain that the violence was political — the police are investigating — but given the graffiti, and the fact that his neighborhood in Fayette County, in southwestern Pennsylvania, is usually quiet and safe, he suspects it was. “I’m not really surprised that this is happening locally, and is happening to me, just because of what has been going on and the enthusiasm for Trump around here,” he told me.Ringer’s assault made the local news, but hasn’t been much of a story nationally. Perhaps that’s because it’s just a small detail in a growing tapestry of menace. All over this febrile country, intimations of mayhem are gathering. Vigilantes in Arizona, some armed and wearing tactical gear, have harassed and intimidated voters at the sites of ballot drop boxes, cheered on by Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state. In Nevada, where a millionaire far-right Republican official named Robert Beadles has systemically targeted election workers, Reuters reported that the top election officials in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have resigned, retired or declined to run again.And, most notably, a MAGA fanatic named David DePape broke into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home and assaulted her 82-year-old husband with a hammer, leaving him unconscious in a pool of his own blood. More shocking than the attack itself has been the response to it from the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party. Some officials spread lurid lies that Pelosi was attacked by a gay lover. Others jeered about it. “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection,” Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican candidate for governor, said to laughter at a campaign event. Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”It’s hard to feel sanguine about a society whose political class cannot muster the solidarity to universally condemn the terroristic bludgeoning of an old man. It’s why Joe Biden’s speech on Wednesday night, in which he spoke about the attack on Pelosi and the role that Trump’s big lie is playing in the midterms, was at once so necessary and so unpromising. He was trying to appeal to a patriotic consensus about democracy that simply no longer exists.“Disunion and chaos are not inevitable,” said Biden, standing at a podium in Union Station. “There’s been anger before in America. There’s been division before in America. But we’ve never given up on the American experiment. And we can’t do that now.”Biden wasn’t warning that America might spiral into either autocracy or low-level civil war. He was trying to offer hope that it might not. The very fact that he had to insist there’s an alternative to disunion and chaos is a sign of how bad things have gotten.Political violence is not exclusively perpetrated by conservatives. The recent beating in Florida of a Marco Rubio canvasser — a man who turned out to have ties to white supremacists — appears to have been motivated by anti-Republican animus. But, as my colleagues on the editorial board wrote on Thursday, the right is far more violent than the left, and Republicans wink at assaults committed by extremists in a way that Democrats do not.The message of all the chuckling about Paul Pelosi is clear: The right believes its enemies have no rights, and no longer sees the need to pretend otherwise. Donald Trump taught the Republican Party that it needn’t bother with hypocritical displays of decency, that it can revel in cruelty, transgression and the thrill of violence. Now it’s taking that lesson into the first post-Jan. 6 election. The tense calm of the last 20 months has often felt like being in the eye of a hurricane. Now the terrible weather is coming back.In a widely cited essay, the centrist pundit Josh Barro criticized Biden’s speech because it implied that voters concerned about democracy must vote for Democrats whatever their policy preferences. “The message is that there is only one party contesting this election that is committed to democracy — the Democrats — and therefore only one real choice available,” he wrote, adding, “This amounts to telling voters that they have already lost their democracy.” I find this argument bizarre. It is simply a fact that only one party tried to overturn the 2020 election, and only one party is trying to insulate itself from the will of voters in future elections. As the Wisconsin Republican candidate Tim Michels put it recently, “Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor.”It may be that Biden’s efforts to alert the country about what’s coming are doomed. In a recent CBS poll, 56 percent of likely voters said they believe that if Republicans win in the midterms, they will try to overturn Democratic election victories. The same poll showed that, if the election were held today, 47 percent plan to vote for Republicans, and only 45 percent for Democrats. Those who prioritize the preservation of democracy in America are probably already Democratic voters. Still, Biden had an obligation to try to focus our attention on a mounting threat.Though Republicans are likely to do well on Tuesday, many elections will probably remain unsettled. Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state, wrote that because of a state law prohibiting the counting of mail-in ballots before Election Day, results there will probably take several days. Nevada will also take several days after the election to count mail-in ballots. Some Republicans, including Lake and Finchem, won’t commit to accepting the result if they lose. We can expect others to sow doubt about the process if they start falling behind as mail-in votes come in.As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer put it, “When it comes to the postelection crisis, 2020 was like the beginning of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ and 2022 will be more like the part where the walking mops multiply out of control.” We should be ready for what could soon be unleashed.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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      in Elections

      America Can Stop Violent Extremism

      by

      Americans are right to be nervous about the coming midterm elections, and not only about the results. It will be the first time that the nation’s electoral machinery will be tested after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.I’m nervous for another reason as well: the embrace of violent extremists by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party. Today’s editorial, the first in a series on violent extremism, will explore this peril and what we can do about it.During the past five years, incidents of political violence have soared. Last month’s attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the speaker of the House of Representatives, is just the most recent example, and federal officials are deeply worried about the threat of violence around the midterms.That’s why it is so alarming to read about far-right extremists and paramilitary and anti-government groups planning to act as poll watchers. Masked, armed people in military gear were spotted last month in a parking lot in Arizona where early voting has been underway. This kind of intimidation is illegal under the Voting Rights Act, but it appears extremist poll watchers are undeterred even as they face lawsuits and restraining orders.It’s an ill omen that it has become routine to see heavily armed extremists at political events or harassing librarians or poll workers or members of Congress. It is even more concerning that some Republican politicians, in their own coded and not so coded ways, are encouraging it.To be clear, the overwhelming number of incidents of political violence in recent years has come from the right. Most Republicans oppose it without reservation, and we have seen conservatives targeted. Yet one faction of Republicans is using the threat of violence not only against their opponents on the left, but also in their battle to win control of the G.O.P.There are things we can do to push this violent extremism offstage, as the arrest of more than 900 people for the attack on Jan. 6 shows. Every state, for instance, has laws banning private paramilitary groups — they just rarely use them, as the editorial explains.In the past few years, there have been plenty of points at which it feels as if the future of the nation hangs in the balance. Peaceful politics are all we have to manage our deeply divided democracy. Lose that and the country is headed for a dark place — that’s what this series of pieces on extremism is trying to help avoid. More