Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Kellye SoRelle’s Journey From Lawyer for Oath Keepers to Defendant

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      The lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, has been charged with working with the far-right militia to disrupt the 2020 election. Now, her text messages — and testimony — could emerge as evidence at their trial.In the normal course of business, lawyers like Kellye SoRelle wear a variety of hats for their clients: They might keep secrets for them, offer them advice or defend them against charges.But Ms. SoRelle has a far more fraught relationship with one of her biggest former clients: the Oath Keepers militia.Last month, Ms. SoRelle was indicted on conspiracy charges, accused of working with the far-right group in its monthslong plot to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election.Now, she has found herself at the center of a battle over whether her text messages — and testimony — can be used as evidence at the seditious conspiracy trial of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, and four of his subordinates.The struggle between the defense and prosecution over how to define Ms. SoRelle’s role at the trial revolves around the issue of attorney-client privilege, which generally bars lawyers from disclosing private information about their clients.The dispute has become more complicated because the Oath Keepers may seek to call Ms. SoRelle as a witness in the case and defend themselves against some of the charges they are facing by claiming they were merely following her instructions in what is known as an advice-of-counsel defense.The boundaries of attorney-client privilege often become a matter of legal dispute. Lawyers for former President Donald J. Trump are fighting to use the protections of attorney-client privilege — and executive privilege — to limit the scope of a grand jury investigation into the role that Mr. Trump played in seeking to overturn his defeat in the election. Other lawyers for Mr. Trump are facing the prospect of becoming witnesses against him in a separate Justice Department inquiry into his handling of classified documents.On Monday night, before the Oath Keepers trial resumed in Federal District Court in Washington on Tuesday, prosecutors filed court papers asking a judge to set aside attorney-client privilege and admit text messages that Ms. SoRelle had swapped with Mr. Rhodes in the days leading up to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.In one of the messages, from Dec. 29, 2020, Mr. Rhodes complained that he was getting tired of showing up at pro-Trump rallies in Washington where members of his group and other Trump supporters would simply “wave a sign, pray or yell.”“They won’t fear us,” Mr. Rhodes wrote to Ms. SoRelle, “till we come with rifles in hand.”Prosecutors argued that the incendiary message should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because Ms. SoRelle, despite having described herself as the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, did not perform any legal work for the group until after the Capitol was attacked.Ms. SoRelle also played “an active role in the conspiracy” to disrupt the certification of the election, prosecutors wrote, so any communications between her and the Oath Keepers should be exempt from privilege under what is known as the “crime-fraud exception.”Based in Texas, Ms. SoRelle first emerged into the public eye one day after Election Day when, as a member of a group called Lawyers for Trump, she raised claims in a widely seen video that election workers in Detroit had committed voter fraud. Around the same time, prosecutors say, the Oath Keepers began to work for her as bodyguards.By the following month, she had signed her name to two open letters to Mr. Trump that Mr. Rhodes had posted on the Oath Keepers website. The letters, introduced as evidence at the trial last week, called on Mr. Trump to take a series of aggressive steps to remain in power, including invoking the Insurrection Act, a move that Mr. Rhodes believed would have given Mr. Trump the authority to mobilize militias like his own to suppress the “coup” that was seeking to unseat him.While Mr. Rhodes has so far been the focus of the trial, testimony turned on Tuesday to one of his co-defendants, Jessica Watkins, an Ohio bar owner who ran her own militia in the state.Prosecutors introduced that evidence that Ms. Watkins had discussed cutting off pool cues to serve as “antifa smashers” at pro-Trump rallies in Washington and sought to recruit and train people to join the Oath Keepers at the events.One of the recruits sent a message to Ms. Watkins in mid-November of 2020 asking, “So should I get comfortable with the idea of death?”“That’s why I do what I do,” Ms. Watkins responded.Both defense lawyers and the government have claimed that Ms. SoRelle was, for a time, romantically involved with Mr. Rhodes, though she has said that is not true. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.Regardless of how she felt about Mr. Rhodes, there is no doubt that she did things for — and with — him that went beyond the typical services rendered to a legal client.The day before the Capitol attack, Ms. SoRelle accompanied Mr. Rhodes to a meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol where the two encountered Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, and Mr. Tarrio’s longtime associate, Bianca Gracia, the leader of a group called Latinos for Trump. Mr. Tarrio is facing seditious conspiracy and other charges in connection with the Capitol attack.On Jan. 6, Ms. SoRelle followed Mr. Rhodes into a restricted area on the Capitol grounds, giving a celebratory play-by-play of the mob breaching barriers at the building on a Facebook livestream.“That’s how you take your government back,” she said. “You literally take it back.”After Mr. Rhodes fled Washington that day, fearing the authorities were after him, Ms. SoRelle took possession of his cellphone, the government said in the papers filed on Monday. Prosecutors claim that within two days, she had started sending orders in Mr. Rhodes’s name to other Oath Keepers, telling them to delete any incriminating messages and to stop discussing their roles in the Capitol attack.“CLAM UP,” she wrote at one point. “DO NOT SAY A DAMN THING.”For more than a year after Jan. 6, it remained unclear whether Ms. SoRelle would be charged. Even though the F.B.I. seized her phone and eventually arrested more than 20 members of the Oath Keepers — including Mr. Rhodes — she remained at large.During that time, she often told reporters she was cooperating with the government’s inquiry into the group and also claimed to have spoken repeatedly to staff investigators working with the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have said that it was only after Ms. SoRelle agreed this summer to testify at the trial on his behalf that the F.B.I. arrested her.The lawyers have further said they may call Ms. SoRelle as a witness, hoping that she bolsters one of Mr. Rhodes’s chief defenses in the case.The government has accused Mr. Rhodes of staging a heavily armed “quick reaction force” in hotel rooms in Virginia that was poised to rush to the aid of their compatriots at the Capitol if things got out of hand.While Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers have not disputed that there was a quick reaction force, they have argued that if Mr. Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act, as Mr. Rhodes recommended, it would have given the Oath Keepers standing as a militia to use force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.Ms. SoRelle gave this legal strategy her professional stamp of approval, telling the Oath Keepers they could “lawfully assist” Mr. Trump in putting down an insurrection, Mr. Rhodes’s lawyers said in court papers last month.The lawyers have argued that if Mr. Rhodes was simply following legal advice, he could not be held accountable for showing “any unlawful intent.”The gambit, however, is far from certain to work. While no one knows what Ms. SoRelle will do if called to the witness stand, she has repeatedly told reporters that she will exercise her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. More

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      Christina Bobb, a Trump Lawyer, Is Under Justice Dept. Scrutiny

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      Christina Bobb is a former Marine and a fervent believer that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump. She went to work for him and quickly found herself enmeshed in an obstruction investigation.WASHINGTON — This spring, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization.The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met Ms. Bobb at the president’s residence and private club in Florida and asked her to sign a statement for the department that the Trump legal team had conducted a “diligent search” of Mar-a-Lago and found only a few files that had not been returned to the government.Ms. Bobb, a 39-year-old lawyer juggling amorphous roles in her new job, was being asked to take a step that neither Mr. Trump nor other members of the legal team were willing to take — so she looked before leaping.“Wait a minute — I don’t know you,” Ms. Bobb replied to Mr. Corcoran’s request, according to a person to whom she later recounted the episode. She later complained that she did not have a full grasp of what was going on around her when she signed the document, according to two people who have heard her account.Ms. Bobb, who relentlessly promoted falsehoods about the 2020 election as an on-air host for the far-right One America News Network, eventually signed her name. But she insisted on adding a written caveat before giving it to a senior Justice Department official on June 3: “The above statements are true and correct to the best of my knowledge.”Her sworn statement, hedged or not, was shown to be flatly false after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, which recovered about 100 additional highly sensitive government documents, including some marked with the highest levels of classification. And prosecutors are now investigating whether her actions constitute obstruction of justice or if she committed other crimes.On Friday, Ms. Bobb sat for a voluntary interview with Justice Department lawyers in Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation. She told them that another Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, contacted her the night before she signed the attestation and connected her with Mr. Corcoran. Ms. Bobb, who was living in Florida, was told that she needed to go to Mar-a-Lago the next day to deal with an unspecified legal matter for Mr. Trump.In her meeting with the department — a development reported by NBC News on Monday — Ms. Bobb, who was accompanied by her criminal defense lawyer, John Lauro, emphasized that she was working as part of a team rather than as a solo actor when she signed the statement attesting to the return of all the documents, the people said.Mr. Corcoran, she told the Justice Department, had walked her through how he had conducted a search of a storage facility at Mar-a-Lago for the documents. She said she had believed at the time she signed the attestation in June that it was accurate, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.Ms. Bobb has made clear that she is not taking an adversarial position toward Mr. Trump in answering the Justice Department’s questions. She told investigators that before she signed the attestation, she heard Mr. Trump tell Mr. Corcoran that they should cooperate with the Justice Department and give prosecutors what they wanted — an assurance that would come to ring hollow as the investigation proceeded and became a bitter court fight.The Justice Department declined to comment. Ms. Bobb, Mr. Corcoran and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Epshteyn did not respond to an email seeking comment.Ms. Bobb has been a fervent promoter of baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.Josh Ritchie for The New York TimesMs. Bobb’s trajectory is a familiar one in Mr. Trump’s orbit: a marginal player thrust by ambition and happenstance into a position where her profile and prospects are elevated, but at the cost of serious legal and reputational risk.But she stands out for a varied background — she is a former Marine who served in Afghanistan and a failed political candidate who jettisoned a conventional career to become a far-right cable news host — and for the tensile strength of her baseless conviction that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.More on the Trump Documents InquirySupreme Court Request: The Justice Department urged the justices to reject a request from former President Donald J. Trump asking the court to intervene in the litigation over documents seized from his Florida estate.Documents Still Missing?: A top Justice Department official told Mr. Trump’s lawyers in recent weeks that the agency believed he had not returned all the records he took when he left the White House, according to two people briefed on the matter.Deflecting Demands: Mr. Trump spent a year and a half deflecting, delaying and sometimes leading aides to dissemble when it came to demands from the National Archives and the Justice Department to return the material he had taken, interviews and documents show.Dueling Judges: The moves and countermoves by a federal judge and the special master she appointed reflect a larger struggle over who should control the rules of the review of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.In the past two years, Ms. Bobb has emerged as one of his truest of true believers, embracing conspiracy theories with a fervor that has at times seemed over the top even to her colleagues, according to interviews with a dozen people who have worked with her over the past several years.Ms. Bobb has not been shy about expressing her opinions on conservative news outlets, speaking expansively about the court-authorized F.B.I. search and her low opinion of those who executed it.“I don’t believe that there was any classified material in there, though I’m sure the F.B.I. will say that there is,” she said in an interview with the conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza two days after the warrant was executed.Another conservative activist, Mike Farris, asked if she was concerned by the Justice Department’s aggressive approach.“I’m not too worried about it,” she replied. “They are all a bunch of cowards; they don’t have anything.”Ms. Bobb was present in the pro-Trump “command center” at the Willard Hotel in Washington before the Capitol attack, along with Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump stalwarts.She acted as Mr. Giuliani’s go-between with state officials in Arizona and helped fund-raise for a recount in Maricopa County that Republican leaders called a “sham.” She drafted a memo and participated in meetings to discuss a plan to appoint alternate slates of electors to reverse legitimate state election results. And Ms. Bobb created the computer file used to draft a proposal, never carried out, for Mr. Trump to issue an executive order for the federal government to seize voting machines..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.Dominion Voting Systems is suing Ms. Bobb and OAN for promoting unsubstantiated claims that the company was part of a vote-switching scheme to favor Joseph R. Biden Jr. The House committee investigating the Capitol riot subpoenaed Ms. Bobb in March to testify about her “attempts to disrupt or delay” certification of the election and her reported involvement in drafting the executive order.She complied, but provided no proof when pressed on her claims about the election, according to a congressional aide with knowledge of her testimony.Ms. Bobb blurred the lines between covering Mr. Trump and working for him:She offered a dour after-action report of the failed attempt to appoint alternate electors to overturn the election in a previously undisclosed memo she sent to Mr. Trump on March 29, 2021, while working for OAN. The memo, obtained from a person to whom it was later forwarded, was marked “ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE” even though she was not on Mr. Trump’s legal team at the time.“If three states changed their electors, the result of the election would have flipped,” Ms. Bobb wrote, adding a caveat at the end: It was “unclear” whether the Supreme Court would have supported the elector scheme.It is not known if Mr. Trump read it. He seems to have a mixed opinion of Ms. Bobb’s on-air work, however, grousing that she was too flattering to him in several OAN interviews, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.After leaving the Department of Homeland Security, Ms. Bobb became a host on the far-right One America News Network.Gabby Jones/BloombergMs. Bobb, a standout soccer and volleyball player during her high school years in the Phoenix area, graduated with a joint business and law degree from San Diego State University and California Western School of Law in 2008.She joined the Marine Corps, going through officer candidate school and completing a grueling basic training course in May 2010 as one of 16 women in a class of 280. She served in the Judge Advocate General’s office, representing Marines in disciplinary hearings, and was assigned for a time in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as an operational law attorney consulting combat commanders on the legality of military operations.Those experiences, Ms. Bobb has suggested, were front of mind as she stood in the sweltering Mar-a-Lago parking lot angrily observing F.B.I. agents carrying out the search warrant. “Every service member can tell you that you have an affirmative obligation to disregard an unlawful order,” she told Mr. Farris in August.Ms. Bobb left the Marines after two years to work for a law firm in San Diego, where she served as a junior lawyer in three trademark infringement cases brought by CrossFit against local gym operators, according to court records.Ms. Bobb, second from right, during a meeting about a ballot review at the Arizona Senate in Phoenix in July 2021. In the postelection period, she blurred the lines between her work for One America News and her advocacy of Mr. Trump.Joseph Cooke/The Republic / USA TODAY NETWORKAround that time, she made her first foray into politics, running as an independent for a House seat in a predominantly Democratic district in San Diego. She kept a defiantly low profile, criticizing politicians who craved the “limelight,” maintaining a bare-bones website and raising no money.“I understand that it might not work, but it might,” she told a reporter covering the race in 2014.It did not. Ms. Bobb finished last in a field of eight, with 929 votes. She did not challenge the result.A few years later, she moved to Washington; in mid-2019, she was selected for an administrative job at the Department of Homeland Security — executive secretary. She served as a conduit for external correspondence, and her name was often attached to important memos, largely drafted by others, such as a list of locations where Mr. Trump’s border wall was to be built.The job also entailed another responsibility: ensuring compliance with federal records laws.Colleagues remember Ms. Bobb as hardworking and professional, with a bearing more military than political (she retained the habit of referring to superiors as “sir” and “ma’am”). But it soon became clear that the department’s leadership, while satisfied with her work, was not wowed with it and had no intention of promoting her, two former co-workers said.In late 2019, she requested a position in the policy unit of Customs and Border Protection but left after only a few months, they said.At that point, Ms. Bobb made an abrupt career shift, applying for a job with the San Diego-based OAN, where her connection to homeland security seemed to have been a selling point.The network’s conservative owners viewed immigration as their top priority and wanted to bolster their coverage. Ms. Bobb’s first on-air interview was with her former boss Chad Wolf, the acting homeland security secretary.It was after Election Day 2020 that she seemed to find her calling, airing multiple reports of unproven electoral fraud, culminating in a lengthy February 2021 segment, “Arizona Election Heist,” which promoted debunked and dubious claims about her home state.After the election, Ms. Bobb was also a fixture at meetings where Trump hard-liners like John Eastman and Sidney Powell discussed plans to reverse the results — which initially raised questions about whether she was embedded for reporting purposes or committed to the cause. Participants quickly concluded it was the latter, according to one of them.By December, she was back-channeling requests from Mr. Giuliani to Republican state officials in Arizona, pressuring them to authorize a recount of the Maricopa voting, despite a statewide canvass that confirmed Mr. Biden’s 10,000-vote margin of victory.“Mayor Giuliani asked me to send you these declarations,” Ms. Bobb wrote to one leader, accompanied by affidavits, according to an email obtained by American Oversight, a left-leaning watchdog group.By March 2022, Ms. Bobb decided to leave OAN and relocated to Florida to be closer to Mr. Trump and some of the senior leadership of the Trump-affiliated Save America PAC, taking a staff job that paid $144,600 a year, according to federal campaign finance records.While she has been a fixture on the airwaves and social media, Ms. Bobb requested that her name be redacted from the signed attestation about the documents when it was unsealed in late August, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.It leaked anyway.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Stewart Rhodes is Not the Only Oath Keeper on Trial

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      The stories of the four other members of the far-right militia also facing charges of seditious conspiracy help flesh out the group’s role around the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.When the seditious conspiracy trial of five members of the Oath Keepers militia opened last week in Federal District Court in Washington, prosecutors focused much of their attention on the organization’s founder and leader, Stewart Rhodes.That was for good reason: The government’s evidence suggests that Mr. Rhodes was the central force driving the far-right group to disregard the results of the 2020 election and to ultimately seek to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power from Donald J. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.But as the trial unfolds over the next several weeks, the spotlight will fall on Mr. Rhodes’s co-defendants: Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell. Their stories help to flesh out how the group came to play such a prominent role in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in the White House despite his loss in the election.Here is a look at each of them and what the jury may hear about their individual roles in the plot to storm the Capitol and disrupt the democratic process on Jan. 6, 2021.“Sir Yes Sir,” Kelly Meggs, one of Mr. Rhodes’s co-defendants, wrote in a Facebook message after President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesKELLY MEGGSMr. Meggs, a car dealer from Dunnellon, Fla., a small town north of Tampa, was the leader of the Oath Keepers’ Florida chapter on Jan. 6, having taken over the position two weeks earlier from its previous chief, Michael Adams. Mr. Adams, who testified at the trial last week, said he had resigned the post in protest over Mr. Rhodes’s increasingly violent language, including calls for a “bloody war” against the Biden administration.From an early stage, Mr. Meggs, outraged by the results of the election, seemed prepared to join that fray according to Facebook messages seized by the government. And after Mr. Trump posted a tweet on Dec. 19, 2020, inviting supporters to a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, Mr. Meggs reacted enthusiastically.“He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!!” he wrote. “Sir Yes Sir!! We are headed to DC.”Around the same time, Mr. Meggs claimed to have organized an “alliance” between the Oath Keepers and other far-right groups — among them, the Proud Boys and the Florida chapter of the Three Percenter militia movement, the Facebook messages show. While much of the planning seems to have revolved around efforts to combat leftist activists from antifa, who were expected to harass Trump supporters on Jan. 6, Mr. Meggs discussed bringing mace, gas masks and batons to Washington for the rally that day.Mr. Meggs also played an instrumental role in the Oath Keepers’ getting the job of providing security to Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser, who was scheduled to speak at rallies on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. Lawyers for the group have used the security job as part of their defense strategy, suggesting the Oath Keepers did not go to Washington to attack the Capitol, but rather to protect pro-Trump dignitaries.On Jan. 6 itself, Mr. Meggs was part of a military-style “stack” that entered the east side of the Capitol and, according to prosecutors, moved through the Rotunda toward the House of Representatives in search of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Should Mr. Rhodes testify at the trial, as expected, he is likely to say that Mr. Meggs went “off mission” by going into the building and that he did so without instructions from any Oath Keepers leaders.KENNETH HARRELSONTwo days before the Capitol attack, Mr. Meggs named Mr. Harrelson, a welder and Army veteran from Titusville, Fla., as the leader of his “ground team,” prosecutors say.But not much is known about Mr. Harrelson’s activities or beliefs in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, in large part because he had no social media accounts and deleted most of his cellphone messages after the Oath Keepers left Washington that day..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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.The jury will eventually hear evidence that Mr. Harrelson brought rifles to a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va., as part of a so-called “quick reaction force” designed to rush into Washington and aid the Oath Keepers at the Capitol if things went wrong.The jurors will also likely hear how Mr. Harrelson entered the building with one of the military “stacks” and joined Mr. Meggs in search of Ms. Pelosi.Mr. Harrelson’s lawyers chose not to give an opening statement to the jury, but they have said he had no idea the Oath Keepers intended to storm the Capitol and had only gone to Washington to take part in the group’s security work. The quick reaction force also never brought their weapons from Virginia into Washington.Jessica Watkins used a digital walkie-talkie app to communicate on Jan. 6, and prosecutors intend to play chatter from it to document how she marched to and then entered the Capitol.Jim Bourg/ReutersJESSICA WATKINSMs. Watkins, an Army veteran and bar owner from rural Ohio, ran her own militia in that state and joined up with the Oath Keepers around the time of the election. Like others in the group, she was disturbed by the results of the election and considered the prospect of a Biden presidency to be “an existential threat,” court papers say.“Biden may still be our President,” she wrote to an associate in November 2020. “If he is, our way of life as we know it is over.”She quickly added: “Then it is our duty as Americans to fight, kill and die for our rights.”On Jan. 6, Ms. Watkins used a digital walkie-talkie app called Zello to communicate with her fellow Oath Keepers and with dozens of others who were on the same channel, “Stop the Steal J6.” Prosecutors intend to play a recording of their chatter to the jury, providing a real-time, firsthand account of Ms. Watkins marching toward the Capitol and entering the building where she was met by paintballs and stun grenades from the police.As a transgender woman, Ms. Watkins may have the most interesting personal story of any of the Oath Keepers defendants, and her lawyer, Jonathan Crisp, said during his opening statement last week that he intends to use it to humanize her for the jury.While the details remain unclear, Mr. Crisp said that Ms. Watkins found it challenging to spend years in hypermasculine organizations like the Army and the Oath Keepers.Thomas Caldwell took charge of assembling the armed “quick reaction force” that the Oath Keepers stationed at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesTHOMAS CALDWELLThough he was not a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, Mr. Caldwell, a former naval officer who once held a top-secret clearance, was intimately involved with each of the Oath Keepers’ events in Washington after the election.He let several members of the group stay on his 30-acre property in Berryville, Va., while they attended the so-called Million MAGA March on Nov. 14, 2020.Then, in advance of a second pro-Trump rally in the city on Dec. 12, Mr. Caldwell — a self-described “crusty intel guy” — wrote an “ops plans,” advising his compatriots to bring “striking weapons” and possibly firearms to the event. The guns, and each of their bullets, he wrote, should be wiped down thoroughly before the gathering and discarded after use.As Jan. 6 approached, Mr. Caldwell took charge of assembling the armed “quick reaction force” that would be stationed at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, Va. At one point, he considered a plan to use a boat to ferry weapons across the Potomac River to his fellow Oath Keepers at the Capitol, evidence has shown. More

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      We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows

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      In August, President Biden met with several historians at the White House to discuss the threats facing American democracy.Most of the conversation, according to a report in The Washington Post, was about “the larger context of the contest between democratic values and institutions and the trends toward autocracy globally.” Those present were people who had “been outspoken in recent months about the threat they see to the American democratic project, after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, the continued denial by some Republicans of the 2020 election results and the efforts of election deniers to seek state office.”Now, I was obviously not at this meeting. But I have been thinking about what I would say to Biden about the threats to American democracy. The most acute threat, it’s true, comes from election deniers and the authoritarian mass movement led by the previous president, Donald Trump. But the long-term threat is less an imposition from bad actors and more a constitutive part of our political system. It is, in fact, the Constitution. Specifically, it is a set of fundamental problems with the structure of our government that flow directly from the Constitution as it currently exists.We tend to equate American democracy with the Constitution as if the two were synonymous with each other. To defend one is to protect the other and vice versa. But our history makes clear that the two are in tension with each other — and always have been. The Constitution, as I’ve written before, was as much a reaction to the populist enthusiasms and democratic experimentation of the 1780s as it was to the failures of the Articles of Confederation.The framers meant to force national majorities through an overlapping system of fractured authority; they meant to mediate, and even stymie, the popular will as much as possible and force the government to act with as much consensus as possible.Unfortunately for the framers, this plan did not work as well as they hoped. With the advent of political parties in the first decade of the new Republic — which the framers failed to anticipate in their design — Americans had essentially circumvented the careful balance of institutions and divided power. Parties could campaign to control each branch of government, and with the advent of the mass party in the 1820s, they could claim to represent “the people” themselves in all their glory.Americans, in short, had forced the Constitution to accommodate their democratic impulses, as would be the case again and again, up to the present. The question, today, is whether there’s any room left to build a truly democratic political system within the present limits of our constitutional order.In his new book “Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy says the answer is, essentially, no. “Our mainstream political language still lacks ways of saying, with unapologetic conviction and even patriotically, that the Constitution may be the enemy of the democracy it supposedly sustains,” Purdy writes.This is true in two ways. The first (and obvious) one is that the Constitution has enabled the democratic backsliding of the past six years. Founding-era warnings against demagogues — used often to justify our indirect system of choosing a president — run headfirst into the fact that Donald Trump was selected constitutionally, not elected democratically. (Alexander Hamilton wrote, in Federalist No. 68, “The choice of several to form an intermediate body of electors will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements than the choice of one who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.” This, it turns out, was wrong.)And consider this: In the 2020 presidential election, a clear majority of Americans voted against Trump in the highest turnout election of the 21st century so far. But with a few tens of thousands of additional votes in a few states, Trump would have won a second term under the Constitution. “A mechanism for selecting a chief executive among propertied elites in the late eighteenth century persists into the twenty-first,” Purdy writes, “now as a key choke point in a mass democracy.”The Constitution subverts democracy in a second, more subtle way. As Purdy notes, the countermajoritarian structure of the American system inhibits lawmaking and slows down politics, “making meaningful initiatives hard to undertake.” One result is that political campaigns have “shifted into a symbolic and defensive mode” where the move is not to promise a better world, but to impress on voters “the urgency of keeping the other candidate and party out of power.”“If enough people believe it is their responsibility to resist and disable any government they did not help to elect, self-rule can become impossible,” Purdy writes. “Donald Trump’s presidency,” he continues, “arose from all of these dysfunctions.”Even if you keep MAGA Republicans out of office (including Trump himself), you’re still left with a system the basic structure of which fuels dysfunction and undermines American democracy, from how it enables minority rule to how it helps inculcate a certain kind of political chauvinism — best captured in the hard-right mantra that the United States is a “Republic, not a democracy” — among some of the voters who benefit from lopsided representation in the Senate and the Electoral College.What makes this all the worse is that it has become virtually impossible to amend the Constitution and revise the basics of the American political system. The preamble to the Constitution may begin with “We the People,” but as Purdy writes, “A constitution like the American one deserves democratic authority only if it is realistically open to amendment.” It is only then that we can “know that what has not changed in the old text still commands consent.” Silence can have meaning, he points out, “but only when it is the silence of those free to speak.”There is much more to say about the ways that our political system has inhibited democratic life and even enabled forms of tyranny. For now, it suffices to say that a constitution that subverts majority rule, fuels authoritarian movements and renders popular sovereignty inert is not a constitution that can be said to protect, secure or even enable American democracy.In a speech in Philadelphia last month, Biden did speak publicly on the threats to American democracy. He focused, as almost any president would, on the Constitution. “This is a nation that honors our Constitution. We do not reject it. This is a nation that believes in the rule of law. We do not repudiate it. This is a nation that respects free and fair elections. We honor the will of the people. We do not deny it.”The problem, and what this country must confront if it ever hopes to turn its deepest democratic aspirations into reality, is that we don’t actually honor the will of the people. We deny it. And it’s this denial that sits at the root of our troubles.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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      Witness in Oath Keepers Sedition Trial Says Leader Promoted Violent Approach

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      “It sounded like we were going to war against the United States government,” a former member of the militia group testified.WASHINGTON — Two days after news organizations called the 2020 election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, held a video meeting with his members to discuss bringing weapons to a Stop the Steal rally in Washington that month and to urge them to “fight” on behalf of President Donald J. Trump.Listening to the meeting was Abdullah Rasheed, a Marine Corps veteran and a member of the far-right group from West Virginia. During testimony on Thursday at the trial of Mr. Rhodes and four of his subordinates, Mr. Rasheed told the jury that he was so disturbed by what he heard during the meeting that he recorded the conversation and ultimately called the F.B.I. to alert them about Mr. Rhodes.“The more I listened to the call,” he said, “it sounded like we were going to war against the United States government.”The testimony by Mr. Rasheed, a heavy-equipment mechanic, was clearly intended to bolster accusations by the government that Mr. Rhodes and his co-defendants — Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell — committed seditious conspiracy by using force to oppose Mr. Biden’s ascension to the White House.The five Oath Keepers are the first of nearly 900 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, to face trial on sedition charges, the most serious crime that prosecutors have brought against any of the defendants.Even as testimony proceeded, in another case in the same Federal District Court in Washington, Jeremy Bertino became the first member of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, to plead guilty to seditious conspiracy charges. As part of a deal with the government, Mr. Bertino agreed to testify against Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys’ former chairman, and four other members of the group at their upcoming trial.The Proud Boys trial, scheduled for December, is likely to feature accusations that members of the group were instrumental in several breaches of the Capitol’s defenses and helped to rile up other protesters in assaulting the police. Charles Donohoe, a Proud Boys leader from North Carolina, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and assault charges in April and has been cooperating with the government against others in the group.On Tuesday, prosecutors at the Oath Keepers trial played several clips of Mr. Rasheed’s recording for the jury. The jurors heard Mr. Rhodes make baseless claims about foreign interference in the election and declare that he would welcome violence from leftist antifa activists because that would give Mr. Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call on militias like his own to quell the chaos.“We’re not getting out of this without a fight,” Mr. Rhodes said. “There’s going to be a fight. But let’s just do it smart, and let’s do it while President Trump is still commander in chief.”While Mr. Rasheed initially called an F.B.I. tip line to complain about Mr. Rhodes not long after the meeting took place, the bureau did not reach out to him until March 2021, two months after the Capitol was attacked. He also tried to warn other law enforcement agencies, he testified, writing to the Capitol Police that Mr. Rhodes was “a friggin’ wacko that the Oath Keepers would be better without.”Mr. Rasheed’s turn on the witness stand came between testimony from two other former Oath Keepers: Michael Adams, the onetime leader of the group’s Florida chapter, and John Zimmerman, who once ran a chapter in Cumberland County, North Carolina.Both men told the jury how they became involved with the Oath Keepers amid the street protests in the summer of 2020 out of concern about the leftist antifa movement but eventually, like Mr. Rasheed, became disillusioned by Mr. Rhodes’s extreme rhetoric.Mr. Adams was the administrator of the video meeting that Mr. Rasheed recorded and told the jury that he was put off by Mr. Rhodes’s claims that the election had been stolen as well as by his personal attacks against Mr. Biden, who he repeatedly referred to as a “puppet” of the Chinese Communist Party.The Oath Keepers are accused of plotting to use violence to keep Mr. Trump in office after his defeat at the polls.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesIn December, after Mr. Rhodes wrote two open letters to Mr. Trump, urging the president to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up militias like the Oath Keepers to quell potential violence from the left, Mr. Adams was further disillusioned, he said. Unable to serve with a group that was considering using force in a manner he felt might be illegal, he left the Oath Keepers for good.Mr. Zimmerman, an Army veteran who once ran an emergency preparedness store, told the jury a similar story. He testified that shortly after the so-called Million MAGA March — a pro-Trump rally that took place in Washington in November 2020 — he was horrified when Mr. Rhodes proposed a brazen new plan for going after antifa.Because antifa often attacked the “weak and elderly,” Mr. Zimmerman said, Mr. Rhodes suggested that, at future pro-Trump rallies, the Oath Keepers should sucker their opponents into fighting by dressing up as old people or as parents pushing strollers.“If we could entice them to attack us,” said Mr. Zimmerman, who wore a mask reading “Front Toward Enemy” as he took the witness stand, “then we could give them a beat down.”Much of the testimony Thursday homed in on the ways that antifa loomed large in Mr. Rhodes’s imagination and how the leftist movement has played a central role in the arguments that he and his co-defendants have raised against the charges they used force to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.Since the trial began on Monday, lawyers for the Oath Keepers have told the jury that their clients never had a plan to use violence at the Capitol but instead took measures to prepare for violence from antifa, including the creation of an armed “quick reaction force” staged outside Washington in hotel rooms in Virginia.Mr. Zimmerman told the jury that during the Million MAGA March he helped to oversee a similar armed force that was staged at Arlington National Cemetery. Stashed in his oversized RAM ProMaster van, he said, were 12 to 15 assault-style rifles, a half-dozen handguns and several sawed-off pool cues that were to be used in case he needed to rush to the aid of his compatriots in the city.Mr. Rhodes talked incessantly about antifa, Mr. Zimmerman said, telling his fellow Oath Keepers that they had to prepare for violent attacks from the movement even before the election took place. At a pro-Trump rally in North Carolina in September 2020, Mr. Zimmerman recalled, Mr. Rhodes coordinated the militia’s efforts to protect Trump supporters with someone he claimed was in the Secret Service.One of the oddities of the Oath Keepers trial is that few of the facts presented so far are in dispute. That has allowed the defense and prosecution to effectively set aside the question about what the group did on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it and focus instead on the reasons that they did it.Central to this dispute about intent has been the purpose of the “quick reaction force” and the role that antifa played in Mr. Rhodes’s decision to employ them not only on Jan. 6, but also at the Million MAGA March in November and at another pro-Trump rally in December.Indeed, prosecutors began on Thursday by showing the jury an “ops plan” that Mr. Caldwell, a former naval officer, had drafted in advance of a rally in Washington on Dec. 12, 2020.Fearing there might be trouble from antifa, Mr. Caldwell advised his compatriots in the plan to bring “striking weapons” to the rally, suggesting a specific brand of tomahawk called the “Zombie Killer.”Mr. Caldwell also recommended the militia’s leaders should consider bringing firearms as well, especially those that could not be traced to any members. The guns — and each of their bullets — should be wiped down thoroughly before the event, Mr. Caldwell wrote, and discarded after use.While Mr. Caldwell’s plan clearly stated that it was meant to detail steps for confronting “antifa and other criminal elements,” prosecutors suggested that it showed a proclivity for violence that was ultimately turned on members of Congress.“If we’d had guns I guarantee we would have killed 100 politicians,” Mr. Caldwell wrote that evening in a Facebook message that prosecutors showed the jury Thursday. “They ran off and were spirited away through their underground tunnels like the rats they were.” More

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      Jan. 6 Defendant Coordinated Volunteers to Help Glenn Youngkin

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      In the election last fall that sent Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s office and propelled him to G.O.P. stardom, the state and local Republican Party tasked Joseph Brody with coordinating volunteers to knock on doors of potential Youngkin voters in the state’s strategically crucial northern suburbs.But eight months earlier, Mr. Brody had been immersed in the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol, according to the F.B.I., which said that he assaulted a police officer with a metal barricade and breached several restricted areas, including the Senate floor and the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Now, Mr. Brody, 23, who the F.B.I. said was associated with the white nationalist group America First, is facing felony and misdemeanor charges for his role. The candidate he would go on to help, Mr. Youngkin, tried during his campaign to keep himself at arm’s length from former President Donald J. Trump, and he called the Jan. 6 riot a “blight on our democracy.”Shortly after Mr. Brody’s arrest last month, an image scraped from the internet by online sleuths who call themselves “Sedition Hunters” showed a man in a MAGA hat holding a high-powered rifle in front of a Nazi flag, with a bandanna concealing his face. The group, which has provided information that has helped law enforcement officials make hundreds of arrests related to Jan. 6, said the man in the photo was Mr. Brody.A public defender listed for Mr. Brody did not respond to several requests for comment. Messages sent to an email account for Mr. Brody went unanswered. There was no answer at a phone number listed for him.Mr. Youngkin’s office referred questions about Mr. Brody to Kristin Davison, a political consultant for the governor, who said in an email on Friday that Mr. Brody “did not work for or with the Youngkin campaign.”The Fairfax County Republican Committee twice listed Mr. Brody, who is from Springfield, Va., in Fairfax, as helping to coordinate a volunteer effort to knock on doors for “Team Youngkin.” When asked about those online listings, Ms. Davison said, “Those are not posts from the Youngkin campaign.”.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-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs 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.Mr. Youngkin’s campaign logo appeared on both pages, which included an official email address associated with the Republican Party of Virginia for Mr. Brody.“Mr. Brody was employed by the party as a door-knocker for one month last fall,” Ellie Sorensen, a state G.O.P. spokeswoman, said in an email on Monday. “He has not been employed by the Republican Party of Virginia for over a year.”Ms. Sorensen did not comment further about the charges against Mr. Brody or what had led to the end of his employment with the party.The Fairfax Republicans did not respond to multiple requests for comment.According to a criminal affidavit, Mr. Brody recorded and photographed senators’ desks during the Capitol attack, in which he wore a neck gaiter with an American flag pattern. Later, he “assisted another rioter in using a metal barricade against a Capitol Police officer, knocking the officer back as he attempted to secure the north door,” an F.B.I. agent said in the affidavit.Federal investigators said Mr. Brody had previously met four other men who were recently charged in the attack at an event held by America First, whose followers are known as Groypers. The movement’s leader, Nicholas J. Fuentes, a white supremacist who has been denounced by conservative organizations as a Holocaust denier and a racist, was issued a subpoena by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.In one photograph that a group of Sedition Hunters said it had obtained of Mr. Brody, a young political canvasser holds a campaign sign for Mr. Youngkin. The group contrasted that image with other postings it said were from Mr. Brody’s social media accounts, some of which showed Nazi symbols and diatribes against women.Luke Broadwater More

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      They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election — and Reaped the Rewards

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      A majority of House Republicans last year voted to challenge the Electoral College and upend the presidential election. A majority of House Republicans last year voted to challenge the Electoral College and upend the presidential election. That action, signaled ahead of the vote in signed petitions, would change the direction of the party. That action, […] More

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      America Has a Ginni Thomas Problem

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      Clarence and Virginia (Ginni) Thomas don’t discuss their dueling efforts to destroy our democracy when they come home from a day of wreaking havoc.That’s what Ms. Thomas, a conservative activist and an adherent to the lie that Donald Trump won the last election, wants us to believe. That’s essentially what she told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol when it interviewed her last week.I don’t believe that any more than I believe Trump can declassify documents with his mind.Why does this matter? Because Ms. Thomas pressed the White House and various state legislators to overturn the 2020 election, and her husband has refused to recuse himself from election-related cases. In fact, Justice Thomas was the Supreme Court’s lone dissent when it rejected Trump’s efforts to withhold documents from the Jan. 6 committee.In March, The National Law Journal spoke with several experts who agreed that Justice Thomas should have recused himself from the case. One called his refusal to do so “arguably unprecedented.”Ms. Thomas didn’t just encourage people to overturn the election; she was at the Stop the Steal rally from which the insurrection sprang on Jan. 6, although she told The Washington Free Beacon that she returned home before Trump took the stage.In other words, Ms. Thomas is a one-woman constitutional crisis.According to The New York Times, during her testimony before the committee, Ms. Thomas repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. That is a lie. She knows it, and we know it.Because she is repeating this lie, I can’t believe anything she says without proof. Therefore, her claim that she never discussed her election subversion activities with her husband rings hollow.Did she also not share with him her seemingly deranged Facebook posts framing the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting as “dangerous to the survival of our nation” or espousing the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wiretapped Trump?Is the Thomas household just silent, filled only with the hum of grievance and betrayal? Or do these spend their time talking in trivialities, reminiscing about their polar opposite upbringings — him born in the predominately Black, Gullah community of Pin Point, Ga., her born in predominantly white Omaha, Neb., which at the time was facing its own racial tensions?Maybe they share maleficent chuckles recalling how he rebuffed questions at his confirmation hearing in 1991 over the allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill, calling it, absurdly, a “high-tech lynching,” or how Ms. Thomas in 2010 left a voice mail message for Hill, demanding that she apologize to her husband.According to The Times, the message was: “Good morning, Anita Hill. It’s Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.”What?! Ma’am, if you don’t stop playing on that lady’s phone!The ask was brazen. It was disrespectful. It was delusional. But that’s Ginni Thomas.Sure, maybe the woman with the audacity to call her husband’s accuser and ask that person to apologize to the man she says abused her is too bashful at home to raise her most recent antics with her husband. But it seems unlikely; for years, journalists have documented how close and forthright Justice and Ms. Thomas are with each other. As early as 1991, the year he was confirmed, one of his longtime friends, Evan Kemp, told The Washington Post that she was the one person he really listened to.In the same article, one of Ms. Thomas’s aunts is quoted as saying Justice Thomas “was so nice, we forgot he was Black.” She added, “And he treated her so well, all of his other qualities made up for his being Black.”Can you imagine? How must it feel to marry into a family where people think of your Blackness as a weight on the wrong side of the scales and you have to achieve at the highest level to balance it out? Of course, Justice Thomas may not object to that characterization. But he and his wife may still spend their quiet time unpacking it.Ms. Thomas is not a minor player and outside agitator. She is connected and influential. According to The Times, she led a group of hard-right activists in a White House meeting with Trump where “members of the group denounced transgender people and women serving in the military.”According to the paper, one of the people the group asked to have at the meeting was an assistant Ms. Thomas hired after the conservative group Turning Point USA fired the person for texting a colleague, “I hate Black people.”Since Ms. Thomas is married to a Black man, I can’t make any of that make sense. Maybe, like her aunt, she forgot Justice Thomas was Black.But the major issue remains: The wife of a Supreme Court justice has been actively engaged in trying to overturn an election, and the justice won’t recuse himself from any cases related to that issue. They are Mr. and Mrs. Mutiny.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 and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More