Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)
Subterms
More stories
- in Elections
Will Trump Get Indicted for Jan. 6?
More from our inbox:The Russia-Iran AllianceAn Unreal Foreign PolicyWhen I Realized That ‘Youth Is a Members-Only Club’A Good Divorce Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Has Told Americans Exactly Who He Is,” by Jesse Wegman (Opinion, Oct. 15):I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Wegman’s essay on Donald Trump and his blatant misdeeds, as so masterfully presented by the Jan. 6 committee. But we are approaching two years from Jan. 6 and there are still no indictments resulting from clear evidence of overwhelming criminal conduct by Mr. Trump.The mantra that no one is above the law rings hollow, as any normal person engaging in such Trumpian conduct would be wearing an orange suit by now. What more does the Justice Department or the Georgia prosecutor possibly need to take the action the evidence so clearly demands?I thought that when New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, filed a complaint accusing Donald Trump and his business of fraud that it would give courage to weak-kneed prosecutors to follow suit. Yet we wait and doubt whether the Teflon man will ever be brought to justice. Without such action, future leaders will feel no risk in taking actions that could destroy our democracy.We need indictments and justice, and we need them now!Richard GoetzDelray Beach, Fla.To the Editor:Jesse Wegman is correct to say that the Republican Party “is now infected from coast to coast with proudly ignorant conspiracymongers, wild-eyed election deniers and gun-toting maniacs.”About half of Americans are willing to allow that party to return to power. That half includes not just the unreachable Trump base but also millions of Americans who know that President Biden won the election, are probably opposed to political violence and likely support representative democracy. It is these Americans, who are not deep into delusions, lies and conspiracies, but nonetheless willing to hand power to a Republican Party that is, who currently pose the greatest threat to American democracy.Richard SeagerNew YorkTo the Editor:“Trump Has Told Americans Exactly Who He Is” is true today and has been true ever since he was first a candidate in the 2016 election. He has never shown, or aspired to be, more than what he has shown us right from the start. Sadly, many who follow him think this is fine, and perhaps the Jan. 6 committee’s report illuminating his actions may change some minds. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.As the very wise Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I did, and I haven’t changed my mind.Cathy PutnamConcord, Mass.The Russia-Iran AllianceA drone believed to be Iranian-made nearing its target in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Monday.Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Deadly Message Sent by Drones: It’s Russia and Iran vs. the West” (front page, Oct. 18):Reprising the alliance that killed tens of thousands of noncombatants in Syria, Iran is now supplying Russia with drones used to attack Ukrainian cities and murder their inhabitants. The collaboration between these two vile dictatorships is based only on a mutual contempt for human life, abhorrence of freedom and hatred of the United States.What will it take for the Biden administration to break off its efforts to revive President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran, which would only delay, not prevent, the Islamic Republic’s emergence as a nuclear-armed power?Howard F. JaeckelNew YorkAn Unreal Foreign Policy Jhonn Zerpa/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:In “The U.S. Cannot Uphold the Fiction That Juan Guaidó Is the President of Venezuela,” (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Oct. 8), William Neuman makes a blunt, but accurate, observation about U.S. policy in Venezuela: It’s incoherent and frankly detached from reality.But Venezuela is hardly an anomaly. U.S. foreign policy is often stuck in an immovable vortex, with inertia and an unwillingness to admit failure the defining features. The foreign policy establishment is either incapable of adapting to situations or is too confident of its ability to will things into existence.While it doesn’t hurt to be ambitious, it also doesn’t hurt to understand the limits of your power. The U.S. remains the most powerful nation in the world, with boundless economic potential and a military second to none, but other countries have independent agency, their own core interests and the resiliency to ensure that those interests are protected.The result is a wide divergence between the grand objectives the U.S. hopes to accomplish and the reality the U.S. operates in. Thus, we see Nicolás Maduro still running Venezuela, Bashar al-Assad sitting comfortably in the presidential palace in Syria and Kim Jong-un of North Korea the leader of a nuclear-weapons state.Instead of seeking to transform the world to its liking, a mountainous undertaking if there ever was one, the U.S. should work within the world that exists. Otherwise, failure is all but assured.Daniel R. DePetrisNew Rochelle, N.Y.The writer is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington.When I Realized That ‘Youth Is a Members-Only Club’ Irving Browning/New-York Historical Society, via Bridgeman ImagesTo the Editor:Pamela Paul’s delightful Oct. 20 column, “Wait, Who Did You Say Is Middle-Aged?,” made me remember the afternoon I drove my two sons — teenagers then — home from school. A song blending Southern and garage rock was playing on the radio.“Mom, bet you don’t know who’s singing,” they dared.“That’s easy,” I said. “It’s Kings of Leon.”My older son gaped at his brother. “How could she know that?” Both were flummoxed, even offended, that I, a woman then in her 50s, got the answer right. Suddenly Kings of Leon, a band they followed, became uncool.I realized then and there that youth is a members-only club. And no amount of worldly knowledge — not even a gentle bribe of chocolate chip cookies, perhaps — could win me the price of admission.Reni RoxasEverett, Wash.A Good Divorce David HuangTo the Editor:Re “A Cure for the Existential Crisis of Married Motherhood,” by Amy Shearn (Sunday Opinion, Oct. 9):Ms. Shearn nails it in her tribute to happy divorced motherhood. The key to that freedom, I would assert, is a good divorce, meaning one that puts children first.It has been my mission since my own divorce 12 years ago to promote the concept of a good divorce, one that makes co-parenting the pinnacle of achievement for couples who must go through this difficult change.A good divorce means attending parent-teacher conferences with your ex, helping your child select a birthday gift for your ex-spouse, and relying on family and friends whenever possible to help ease the transition.My daughter, Grace, gave me the definition of a “good divorce” when she was only 8, saying, “A good divorce is when parents are nice to each other, like you and Daddy.”As Ms. Shearn acknowledges, some divorces are brutal, and for those parents a good divorce might not be realistic. For the rest of us, a good divorce is a goal divorced parents should aspire to, because it is an attainable outcome.Sarah ArmstrongSan FranciscoThe writer is vice president, global marketing operations, at Google and the author of “The Mom’s Guide to a Good Divorce: What to Think Through When Children Are Involved.” More
- in Elections
Judge Says Trump Signed Statement With Data His Lawyers Told Him Was False
The determination came in a decision by a federal judge that John Eastman, a lawyer for the former president, had to turn more of his emails over to the House Jan. 6 committee.Former President Donald J. Trump signed a document swearing under oath that information in a Georgia lawsuit he filed challenging the results of the 2020 election was true even though his own lawyers had told him it was false, a federal judge wrote on Wednesday.The accusation came in a ruling by the judge, David O. Carter, ordering John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who strategized with the former president about overturning the election, to hand over 33 more emails to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Judge Carter, who serves with the Federal District Court for the Central District of California, determined that the emails contained possible evidence of criminal behavior.“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Judge Carter wrote. He added in a footnote that the suit contained language saying Mr. Trump was relying on information provided to him by others.The committee has fought for months to get access to hundreds of Mr. Eastman’s emails, viewing him as the intellectual architect of plans to subvert the 2020 election, including Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, 2021. Repeatedly, the panel has argued that a “crime-fraud exception” pierces the typical attorney-client privilege that often protects communications between lawyers and clients.The emails in question, which were dated between Nov. 3, 2020, and Jan. 20, 2021, came from Mr. Eastman’s account at Chapman University, where he once served as a law school dean.Judge Carter wrote on Wednesday that the crime-fraud exception applied to a number of the emails related to Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman’s “efforts to delay or disrupt the Jan. 6 vote” and “their knowing misrepresentation of voter fraud numbers in Georgia when seeking to overturn the election results in federal court.”Judge Carter found four emails that “demonstrate an effort by President Trump and his attorneys to press false claims in federal court for the purpose of delaying the Jan. 6 vote.”In one of them, Mr. Trump’s lawyers advised him that simply having a challenge to the election pending in front of the Supreme Court could be enough to delay the final tally of Electoral College votes from Georgia.“This email,” Judge Carter wrote, “read in context with other documents in this review, make clear that President Trump filed certain lawsuits not to obtain legal relief, but to disrupt or delay the Jan. 6 congressional proceedings through the courts.”Another email was related to the lawsuit Mr. Trump and his lawyers filed in Fulton County, Ga., in December 2020, contending that thousands of votes had been improperly counted and citing specific numbers of dead people, felons and unregistered voters who had cast ballots.In one email ordered for release, Mr. Eastman made plain his view that Mr. Trump should not sign a document making specific claims about voter fraud in the county because his legal team had learned they were inaccurate.“Although the president signed a verification for [the state court filing] back on Dec. 1, he has since been made aware that some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts) has been inaccurate,” Mr. Eastman wrote. “For him to sign a new verification with that knowledge (and incorporation by reference) would not be accurate.”But Mr. Trump did sign a new verification, on Dec. 31, 2020, after the suit was moved to federal court. The suit included a caveat that the voter fraud figures it used were to be relied upon “only to the extent” that “such information has been provided” to Mr. Trump’s legal team; the suit also stated that such data was subject to “amendment” or “adjustment.”The episode was the latest example of how Mr. Trump was repeatedly told that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false and often pressed forward with them anyway. His attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, informed him at least three times that his accusations about fraud were unfounded, as did other top officials at the Justice Department, the White House Counsel’s Office and the Trump campaign.Judge Carter’s ruling came as part of a federal lawsuit Mr. Eastman filed at the beginning of the year, seeking to bar the committee from obtaining his emails as part of its inquiry into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.In a previous ruling, issued in March, Judge Carter offered a sweeping analysis of how Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman most likely committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress on Jan. 6 and conspiring to defraud the United States.Mr. Eastman has also been a focus of the Justice Department’s investigation into Jan. 6 and the months leading up to it.In June, federal agents seized Mr. Eastman’s phone as part of what appears to be a broad grand jury inquiry into Mr. Trump’s role in intersecting schemes to stay in power, including a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. A flurry of subpoenas issued by the grand jury, sitting in Washington, named Mr. Eastman and several other lawyers close to Mr. Trump as subjects of interest. More
- in Elections
Mastriano’s Time at War College Draws Scrutiny in Governor’s Race
The crowning chapter of Doug Mastriano’s military career — a stint on the faculty of the U.S. Army War College — has flared up in his campaign for Pennsylvania governor.Two former professors at the War College in Carlisle, Pa., publicly declared Mr. Mastriano unfit for public office. A photograph surfaced of Mr. Mastriano posing in a Confederate uniform with other faculty. And Mr. Mastriano’s Ph.D. dissertation has been criticized as deeply flawed, with a former academic adviser saying his doctorate rests “on very shaky grounds.”Mr. Mastriano — the Republican nominee for governor in a crucial battleground state — received his Ph.D. in history from the University of New Brunswick in Canada in 2013, the year after he joined the faculty of the War College. His research focused on a World War I hero, Sgt. Alvin York, who credited his exploits killing and capturing German soldiers to divine intervention and who inspired the 1941 Gary Cooper movie “Sergeant York.”“I think Mastriano really likes that story because York became the kind of spiritual warrior that Mastriano sees himself as being,” said Jeffrey Scott Brown, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick who advised Mr. Mastriano but objected to his academic techniques. Dr. Brown’s criticisms included Mr. Mastriano’s amateur archaeological sleuthing on a French battlefield and his credulity in accepting divine intervention to explain Sergeant York’s heroics.“I’ve been concerned about this for a decade,” Dr. Brown said in an interview.Mr. Mastriano, who has a policy of not interacting with the news media except for right-wing outlets, did not respond to detailed questions sent to his campaign.Struggling with poor fund-raising and a strategy of courting only the Trump-centric base, Mr. Mastriano is trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general, by double digits in polling.On Friday, Mr. Mastriano held a campaign rally in Erie, Pa., with Jack Posobiec, a far-right provocateur and Navy veteran who helped spread the “PizzaGate” hoax — the false rumor in 2016 that Hillary Clinton and other Democratic officials were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor. “We’re going to shock all the prognosticators,” Mr. Mastriano told a crowd of about 350, according to The Erie Times-News. He added, “We’re going to take our state back by storm.”Mr. Mastriano, 58, capped off a three-decade military career by teaching for five years at the War College, which educates top officers in graduate studies focused on leadership and military-civilian relations.Two former faculty colleagues said his role as a candidate and state senator in two areas — spreading lies about the results of the 2020 election, and marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — violated his military oath.“The officer corps is sworn to defend the Constitution rather than any one person or president,” Tami Davis Biddle, who was chair of the War College’s faculty council, wrote in an opinion article for a Harrisburg newspaper. “None of its members is entitled to toy with insurrection, treat Jan. 6 as legitimate protest, or follow election deniers who would undercut our most important political institutions.”In an interview, Dr. Biddle, who retired last year, said: “If you’re going to say the 2020 election was won by Trump, that was simply not true. To lobby for keeping Trump in office when he had lost an election was outrageous.”Mr. Mastriano, who led the charge in Pennsylvania to overturn President Biden’s election, pushed to have the State Legislature appoint a slate of false electors. He organized buses to take protesters to Washington on Jan. 6 and bypassed police barricades breached by other marchers. He has said that as governor he could decertify voting machines at will and might require all Pennsylvania voters to re-register in order to cast ballots.Another former War College faculty member, Rick Coplen, a West Point graduate and a combat veteran, said Mr. Mastriano had tried to “undermine our democracy.”Mr. Coplen was a professor of economic development at the War College for a decade. He accused Mr. Mastriano of “helping former President Trump in trying to overthrow the legitimate, clearly understood and agreed-upon electoral results.” His concerns were reported earlier by The Philadelphia Inquirer.Mr. Coplen ran unsuccessfully this year in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat in South Central Pennsylvania. He said his criticism of Mr. Mastriano was not motivated by partisanship.“This is about the fundamental stuff of American democracy,” he said in an interview. “When I was 18 years old, like my fellow West Point cadets, I raised my right hand and pledged the same oath to the U.S. Constitution. That’s most important, regardless of party.”Dr. Brown, at the University of New Brunswick, was a member of the examining board for Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation.He objected to Mr. Mastriano’s field research in France that claimed to precisely identify the location of Sergeant York’s heroics, which Dr. Brown said was conducted amateurishly with members of Mr. Mastriano’s son’s Boy Scout troop. He also objected to assertions in the dissertation that Sergeant York was protected by the hand of God. On Page 223 of his dissertation, Mr. Mastriano writes, “The idea that York survived the carnage because of Divine Intervention also speaks of a miracle.”Sgt. Alvin York in 1919.U.S. Army, via Associated PressDr. Brown said such a statement was unscholarly. “You’re allowed to discuss someone’s belief — that York believed there was literal divine intervention,” Dr. Brown said. “But to present it as settled historical fact is not acceptable for professional historians.”Another scholar, James Gregory, a history graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, has identified what he says are multiple errors in Mr. Mastriano’s treatise. After he reported 35 problematic passages to the University of New Brunswick, Mr. Mastriano added 21 corrections in 2021. But Mr. Gregory insisted there were many more issues that, in his view, added up to academic dishonesty.Dr. Brown shared documents he wrote in 2013 spelling out his own objections, including an email he said was sent to Mr. Mastriano’s dissertation supervisor raising “serious misgivings.” Nonetheless, the Ph.D. was granted. Dr. Brown’s name appears on the dissertation, which, he said, surprised him because he had been told he was no longer needed on the evaluation committee.The University of New Brunswick, which released the dissertation last month under pressure, said in a statement it could not discuss Mr. Mastriano’s degree without his consent. It added that two independent academics would review the university’s procedures to ensure that its granting of doctorates meets “the highest standard.” More
- in Elections
Threat to Democracy? Start With Corruption, Many Voters Say
In a Times/Siena survey, respondents’ concerns about democracy often diverged from typical expert analysis.A rally called Save America last week in Mesa, Ariz. People have very different ideas of what that term means. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesWhen we started our national poll on democracy last week, David Leonhardt’s recent New York Times front-page story on threats to democracy was at the top of my mind. His article focused on two major issues: the election denial movement in the Republican Party, and undemocratic elements of American elected government like the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the Senate.But when we got the results of our Times/Siena poll late last week, it quickly became clear these were not the threats on the minds of voters.While 71 percent of registered voters agreed that democracy was “under threat,” only about 17 percent of voters described the threat in a way that squares with discussion in mainstream media and among experts — with a focus on Republicans, Donald J. Trump, political violence, election denial, authoritarianism, and so on.Instead, most people described the threat to democracy in terms that would be very unfamiliar to someone concerned about election subversion or the Jan. 6 insurrection — and I’m not just talking about stop-the-steal adherents who think the last election already brought American democracy to an end.The poll results help make sense of how so many voters can say democracy is under threat, and yet rank “threats to democracy” low on the list of challenges facing the country.When respondents were asked to volunteer one or two words to summarize the current threat to democracy, government corruption was brought up most often — more than Mr. Trump and Republicans combined.For some of these voters, the threat to democracy doesn’t seem to be about the risk of a total collapse of democratic institutions or a failed transition of power. Or they may not view the threat as an emergency or a crisis yet, like being on the brink of sustained political violence or authoritarianism.Instead, they point most frequently to a longstanding concern about the basic functioning of a democratic system: whether government works on behalf of the people.Many respondents volunteered exactly that kind of language. One said, “I don’t think they are honestly thinking about the people.” Another said politicians “forget about normal people.” Corruption, greed, power and money were familiar themes.Overall, 68 percent of registered voters said the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites” rather than “ordinary people.”Another 8 percent of voters cited polarization as the major threat to democracy. Like corruption, polarization poses a threat to democracy but might not necessarily count as an imminent crisis.And perhaps most surprising, many voters offered an answer that wasn’t easily categorized as a threat to democracy at all. Inflation, for instance, was cited by 3 percent of respondents — about the same as the share citing political extremists and violence. For perhaps as many as one-fifth of voters, the “threat to democracy” was little more than a repackaging of persistent issues like “open borders” and “race relations” or “capitalism” and “godlessness.”The 17 percent of voters who cited something related to Mr. Trump and election denial seemed to elevate the issue of democracy the most: Overall, 19 percent of those respondents volunteered that the state of democracy was the most important problem facing the country — more than any other issue.Among everyone else: Just 4 percent stated that concern as the No. 1 issue.My colleagues have more on this story here. More
- in Elections
The House Jan. 6 Panel Has Set a High Bar: Showing Criminality
The committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has yet to decide on making criminal referrals. But its decision to subpoena Donald Trump is in keeping with its prosecutorial style.In the final moments of what will most likely be the last hearing for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, returned to a theme that has run through the committee’s work: criminality.Without naming names or providing any specifics, Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, asserted that the committee now has “sufficient information to consider criminal referrals for multiple individuals” to the Justice Department for prosecution.It is not clear whether the committee will follow through and take the largely symbolic step of issuing a criminal referral for former President Donald J. Trump or anyone who worked with him to overturn the election and encourage the mob of his supporters who entered the Capitol seeking to block or delay certification of his defeat.But throughout its investigation and hearings, the committee has operated with a prosecutorial style, using the possibility of criminality like a cudgel in extraordinary ways. It has penetrated Mr. Trump’s inner circle, surfaced considerable new evidence and laid out a detailed narrative that could be useful to the Justice Department in deciding whether to bring charges.The panel is expected to issue a subpoena as soon as Tuesday seeking to compel Mr. Trump to testify before it wraps up its investigation and issues a final report.The committee’s effects on related criminal investigations are clear to see. Federal prosecutors and authorities conducting a local investigation in Georgia have found themselves interviewing some of the same witnesses already interviewed by the committee and issuing subpoenas for some of the same evidence already obtained by Congress.But in suggesting that its goal is to spur criminal charges, the committee is setting a standard for success that is beyond its power to carry out — and one that could risk overshadowing the work it has done in documenting Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in power and marshal his supporters to help him.“People frequently walk up to me in the grocery store and they’re like, ‘Are you going to hold him accountable?’ That’s not Congress,” Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, said in a recent interview. “However, the Department of Justice can take the facts that we’ve outlined in our investigation and use them.”For all the focus that Ms. Cheney has put on producing criminal referrals, the committee has not been entirely cooperative with the Justice Department, slow-walking requests from the department for transcripts of the interviews it has conducted.The task of determining whether anyone broke the law is never mentioned in the resolution that led to the creation of the committee in June 2021. Its chief mission, according to a House resolution, is coming up with an authoritative account of what occurred, identifying failures by law enforcement and other causes of the violence, and providing recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But the committee has turned itself into an adjunct front loader to the Justice Department, developing new evidence, coming up with theories for laws that Mr. Trump and his aides might have broken and educating the public about them at nationally televised hearings that unfolded like an episodic running drama.Committee staff members — many of whom are former prosecutors — employed a strategy of highlighting a range of potential crimes or lanes for investigators to pursue at each of the panel’s public hearings.One hearing focused on how donors had been defrauded by being targeted for donations to help fight specious election fraud claims..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Other hearings focused on whether Mr. Trump and his aides committed the crimes of defrauding the American people or obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. At another, members raised the question of whether Mr. Trump or his aides committed witness tampering.“The purpose of this committee is to ensure that we tell the full truth, allow government officials to make changes to the system, to improve our guardrails, allow the American people to make better decisions about who they elect, and also to encourage D.O.J. to do their job,” Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.The committee’s work has already yielded two contempt of Congress prosecutions for failure to comply with subpoenas issued by the panel. The Justice Department has prosecuted two former aides to Mr. Trump — Stephen K. Bannon and Peter Navarro — on contempt charges.A jury convicted Mr. Bannon, who was pardoned by Mr. Trump in an unrelated crime and is now scheduled to be sentenced on Friday. The Justice Department recommended on Monday that he serve six months for the two misdemeanor contempt charges and pay a $200,000 fine.Mr. Navarro is scheduled to go on trial on the contempt charges next month.“Congress has always been a stalking horse for the Justice Department’s investigations, but this was done expressly, blatantly and without mincing words and without hiding their motives, in a magnitude greater than what I’ve ever seen,” said Stanley Brand, a Democrat who once served as the top lawyer in the House.Mr. Brand has strongly criticized the committee and now represents Mr. Navarro.In forming its staff, the committee took a different approach than previous congressional investigations, hiring several former federal prosecutors and putting a former United States attorney in charge of overseeing its day-to-day work.Some of the first public signs that the committee would be taking a different approach emerged last December when Ms. Cheney said the question of Mr. Trump’s criminality was one that the panel was investigating. She then began reading directly from the federal criminal code a law she believed he may have broken.“Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?” Ms. Cheney said.In March, in a civil court fight with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who helped advise Mr. Trump on how to overturn the election, the committee filed what amounted to a de facto indictment against Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman. Although the document held no criminal weight, the committee asserted that both men had engaged in criminal conduct in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack.“The select committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the president and members of his campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the filing said.The federal judge overseeing the case largely agreed, saying that it was “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had broken the law.Armed with the court’s ruling, Ms. Cheney took the lead in continuing to raise questions publicly about whether Mr. Trump broke the law. But it was the committee’s approach to its string of hearings that began in the late spring that provided a stark contrast to the Justice Department’s slow, methodical approach under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Speaking like prosecutors, members of the committee treated the American public at the hearings like it was a jury at a criminal trial as they methodically built a case that showed Mr. Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election, lied repeatedly to the public about it, amassed a crowd of his supporters who then stormed the Capitol and did nothing for hours to stop them.When a former West Wing aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, provided electrifying testimony in late June, she made a series of damaging disclosures that were new to the Justice Department and grabbed senior officials’ attention. The mounting public questions about the potential criminality of Mr. Trump and his allies raised questions about whether Mr. Garland was willing to take them on.As those questions crescendoed in the summer, reports emerged that federal prosecutors were indeed investigating them. Relying on the blueprint laid out by the committee, prosecutors in the months that followed subpoenaed many of the same witnesses who had testified before the committee.But the threshold for charging a former president or his top advisers is higher than for setting out a case at a congressional hearing with no one on hand to argue in Mr. Trump’s defense. Legal experts have a range of opinions about whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a case and whether Mr. Garland, who has the ultimate say, would make such a move, knowing how it could further divide the country, particularly if Mr. Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president in 2024. More
- in Elections
Oath Keepers Leader Bought Arsenal of Weapons Ahead of Jan. 6
The prosecution in the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes and other members of the militia introduced evidence that he spent as much as $20,000 on rifles, ammunition and other equipment.In the days before a pro-Trump mob — including members of his own organization — broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, went on a cross-country weapon-buying spree.Setting out for Washington from Texas, his home state, Mr. Rhodes stopped at least six times, bank records show, purchasing items like assault-style rifles, ammunition and scopes. Sometimes he dropped into gun shops and sometimes he conducted the transactions in parking lots with private sellers he met online.By the time he reached his destination, prosecutors said on Monday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates on seditious conspiracy charges, the Oath Keepers leader had spent as much as $20,000 on what amounted to a small arsenal that included at least three rifles and an Israeli-made semiautomatic shotgun.Prosecutors have not yet told the jury precisely what Mr. Rhodes did with the weapons he amassed as he and a lawyer for the Oath Keepers, Kellye SoRelle, made their way from Texas, through Mississippi and Tennessee, to the Hilton Garden Inn in Vienna, Va., where they stayed on Jan. 6.But the purchases took place as Mr. Rhodes was overseeing the creation of what he has called an armed “quick reaction force” that was staged in other hotel rooms in Virginia, ready to rush to the aid of Oath Keepers stationed at the Capitol if they found themselves in need.The armed contingent is central to the Justice Department’s case that Mr. Rhodes and his four co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — committed seditious conspiracy by plotting to use violence to stop the transfer of power from President Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.While the “quick reaction force” — often referred to as the Q.R.F. — was never deployed to Washington and its weapons remained in Virginia, prosecutors opened the trial two weeks ago by telling the jury that Mr. Rhodes and other Oath Keepers “concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy.”“The point of the Q.R.F. was to prevent Biden from taking power in whatever form that took,” an F.B.I. agent, Sylvia Hilgeman, testified on Monday. “I think the Q.R.F. was meant to occupy D.C.”The government has already described how several Oath Keepers stashed their weapons in rooms at the Comfort Inn in Ballston, Va., six miles from downtown Washington, leaving them in the care of compatriots who were prepared to ferry them across the Potomac River into the city.On Monday, prosecutors showed the jury surveillance camera footage from the Comfort Inn of various Oath Keepers wheeling rifle cases and duffel bags on luggage carts down the hotel’s hallways. The carts were at times so full that one member of the group, Edward Vallejo, had to get a running start to push a cart out of an elevator and move it around a corner.The prosecutors also showed the jury a map put together from cellphone data and credit card records that plotted the movements of more than two dozen Oath Keepers arriving in the Washington area from states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina and Arizona.“There were a lot of firearms cases,” a former Oath Keeper testified last week about the quick reaction force. “I had not seen that many weapons in one location since I was in the military.”The armed group is also key to the Oath Keepers’ defense.Phillip Linder, one of Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers, has told the jury that the force was never meant to be used as part of an offensive assault against the Capitol. Rather, Mr. Linder has said, the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, he claimed, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Mr. Rhodes did not enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, and none of the Oath Keepers defendants who went into the building that day were believed to have brought weapons.Prosecutors revealed on Monday that one day before the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes sent several night-vision devices he had bought to a woman named Marsha Lessard, who ran an organization called the Virginia Freedom Keepers.Ms. Lessard, an associate of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, had a permit with other organizers for a protest on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Members of her group also took part in a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020, during which Jason Sullivan, Mr. Stone’s onetime social adviser, urged listeners to “descend on the Capitol” on Jan. 6 and ensure that lawmakers inside “understand that people are breathing down their necks.”Earlier in the day, prosecutors showed the jury some sexually explicit text messages that Mr. Rhodes had swapped with Ms. SoRelle, the lawyer, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, suggesting that the two had more than the usual lawyer-client relationship.The messages were apparently introduced to chip away at one of the Oath Keepers’ possible defenses: that members of the group had been acting on Ms. SoRelle’s professional advice when they believed the “quick reaction force” could have been legally called up by Mr. Trump.Even after fleeing Washington on Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes continued buying stockpiles of guns and ammunition, the government has said in court papers filed before the trial began. As Mr. Biden’s inauguration neared, Mr. Rhodes — accompanied by Joshua James, an Oath Keepers member from Alabama — made multiple trips to purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of weapons, scopes, magazines, holsters and firearm maintenance equipment.Mr. James pleaded guilty in March to seditious conspiracy and has been cooperating with the government’s prosecution. The jury could soon hear from him and other Oath Keepers who have entered guilty pleas.If Mr. James does appear as a witness, he could tell the jury what he told prosecutors as part of his plea deal: that in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Rhodes told him and his fellow Oath Keepers to be prepared to secure the perimeter of the White House and use “lethal force” to stop anyone, including members of the National Guard, from removing Mr. Trump from the building.Mr. James could also testify that he stored some of Mr. Rhodes’s arsenal in a storage shed in Alabama after Mr. Rhodes instructed him that he should “be prepared for violence in the event of a civil war.”Under cross-examination by James Lee Bright, a lawyer for Mr. Rhodes, Ms. Hilgeman, the F.B.I. agent, acknowledged that as Jan. 6 came to an end, the Oath Keepers took the weapons that they had stashed with the quick reaction force home with them.“So the armed rebellion was unarmed?” Mr. Bright asked.“The armed rebellion wasn’t over,” Ms. Hilgeman said. More
