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

    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

    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

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    Ginni Thomas Repeats False 2020 Election Claim in Jan. 6 Interview

    In a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Thomas reiterated her false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a conservative activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election, told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that she never discussed those efforts with her husband, during a closed-door interview in which she continued to perpetuate the false claim that the election was stolen.Leaving the interview, which took place at an office building near the Capitol and lasted about four hours, Ms. Thomas smiled in response to reporters’ questions, but declined to answer any publicly.She did, however, answer questions behind closed doors, said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, who added that her testimony could be included in an upcoming hearing.“If there’s something of merit, it will be,” he said.During her interview, Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, repeated her assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Thompson said, a belief she insisted upon in late 2020 as she pressured state legislators and the White House chief of staff to do more to try to invalidate the results.In a statement she read at the beginning of her testimony, Ms. Thomas denied having discussed her postelection activities with her husband.In her statement, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, Ms. Thomas called it “an ironclad rule” that she and Justice Thomas never speak about cases pending before the Supreme Court. “It is laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence — the man is independent and stubborn, with strong character traits of independence and integrity,” she added.The interview ended months of negotiations between the committee and Ms. Thomas over her testimony. The committee’s investigators had grown particularly interested in her communications with John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who was in close contact with Mr. Trump and wrote a memo that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have likened to a blueprint for a coup.“At this point, we’re glad she came,” Mr. Thompson said.After Ms. Thomas’s appearance on Thursday, her lawyer Mark Paoletta said she had been “happy to cooperate with the committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections.”“She answered all the committee’s questions,” Mr. Paoletta said in a statement. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated. Beyond that, she played no role in any events after the 2020 election results. As she wrote in a text to Mark Meadows at the time, she also condemned the violence on Jan. 6, as she abhors violence on any side of the aisle.”A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.Ms. Thomas exchanged text messages with Mr. Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in which she urged him to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election, which she called a “heist,” and indicated that she had reached out to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, about Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the courts to keep himself in power. She even suggested the lawyer who should be put in charge of that effort..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.Ms. Thomas also pressed lawmakers in several states to fight the results of the election.But it was Ms. Thomas’s interactions with Mr. Eastman, a conservative lawyer who pushed Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, that have most interested investigators.“She’s a witness,” Mr. Thompson said Thursday. “We didn’t accuse her of anything.”The panel obtained at least one email between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman after a federal judge ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over documents to the panel from the period after the November 2020 election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.That same judge has said it is “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman committed two felonies as part of the effort, including conspiracy to defraud the American people.Mr. Paoletta has argued that the communications between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman contain little of value to the panel’s investigation.Ms. Thomas’s cooperation comes as the Jan. 6 committee is entering its final months of work after a summer of high-profile hearings and preparing an extensive report, which is expected to include recommendations for how to confront the threats to democracy highlighted by the riot and Mr. Trump’s drive to overturn the election.The interview came just days after the panel abruptly postponed a hearing scheduled for Wednesday, citing the hurricane bearing down on Florida. The hearing has yet to be rescheduled.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said Ms. Thomas’s interview showed that “people continue to cooperate with the committee and understand the importance of our investigation.”The panel has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and has received hundreds of thousands of documents and more than 10,000 submissions to its tip line since June.“There’s a lot more information coming in all the time,” Mr. Raskin said.He said the committee members have viewed thousands of hours’ worth of video images and tape but want to be “disciplined” about how they present them in the next hearing.“There are certain people who are going to denounce whatever we do, no matter what,” he said. “We just want to be able to complete the narrative and then deliver our recommendations about what needs to be done in order to insulate American democracy against coups, insurrection, political violence and electoral sabotage in the future.”Maggie Haberman More

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    Trump Lawyer Boris Epshteyn Appears Before Atlanta Grand Jury

    One of former President Donald J. Trump’s most prominent lawyers, Mr. Epshteyn was involved in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his loss in 2020. Boris Epshteyn, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most prominent lawyers, testified on Thursday before a special grand jury in Atlanta that has been convened as part of a criminal investigation into election interference by Mr. Trump and his allies.Mr. Epshteyn played a central role in efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his loss in the 2020 election. He now serves as an in-house counsel for the former president, helping coordinate the Trump team’s various legal defense efforts; a separate federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents is underway, along with the inquiry by the Congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.The grand jury appearance was the latest legal complication for Mr. Epshteyn — one of a number of Trump lawyers who have themselves faced an onslaught of criminal and civil exposure. Earlier this month, federal investigators seized Mr. Epshteyn’s cellphone as part of yet another federal investigation, this one into the attempts to overturn the election results and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. His lawyer did not return calls for comment.The investigation is being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Ms. Willis is weighing potential conspiracy and racketeering charges in the investigation, among others, documents have shown. Her office is known to have already identified nearly 20 targets who could face criminal charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer. It is not clear whether Mr. Epshteyn also faces potential legal jeopardy in the case or is appearing solely as a witness.As part of her investigation, Ms. Willis has examined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2, 2021, to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, imploring him to find nearly 12,000 votes, or enough to reverse the outcome in his favor. She is also seeking to question Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina about earlier calls he made to Mr. Raffensperger.The investigation is being conducted by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County.Audra Melton for The New York TimesAnd she is examining Republicans who assembled a bogus slate of electors in an effort to thwart the outcome of the popular vote in Georgia. Mr. Epshteyn played a leading role in that effort. In filings earlier this year that sought to compel his testimony, Ms. Willis’s office said that Mr. Epshteyn “possesses unique knowledge concerning the logistics, planning, and execution of efforts by the Trump Campaign to submit false certificates of vote to former Vice President Michael Pence and others.”Her office highlighted an interview that Mr. Epshteyn did with MSNBC in January, when he said he was “part of the process, to make sure there were alternate electors for when, as we hoped, the challenges to the seated electors would be heard and would be successful.”Mr. Epshteyn was also subpoenaed this year by the Jan. 6 committee, which noted that he had “participated in attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of the election results” and “participated in a call with former President Trump on the morning of January 6, during which options were discussed to delay the certification of election results in light of Vice President Pence’s unwillingness to deny or delay certification.” More

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    McConnell Endorses Electoral Count Overhaul, Lifting Chances of Enactment

    The Republican leader’s backing enhanced prospects for legislation drafted to prevent a repeat of the Jan. 6 assault, when rioters tried to pressure the vice president to overturn the election.WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell endorsed a bill on Tuesday to overhaul how Congress counts electoral votes to confirm the results of a presidential election, significantly enhancing the prospects of enacting the most substantial legislative response yet to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.The support from Mr. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, represented a substantial break with his party in the House, where all but nine Republicans opposed a similar measure that passed last week. It came as the Senate Rules Committee delivered an overwhelming bipartisan vote to send the legislation to the floor.“The substance of this bill is common sense,” said Mr. McConnell, a member of the Rules Committee, about the legislation negotiated in recent months by a bipartisan group led by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.One crucial piece of the measure spells out that the role of the vice president, who presides over the counting of the electoral votes as the president of the Senate, is strictly ceremonial. That provision is a direct response to the failed effort by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to reject presidential ballots cast in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as part of a scheme to invalidate his victory.The legislation also seeks to prevent state officials from submitting electoral votes that do not align with the popular vote in a state, another answer to Mr. Trump’s election subversion attempt, which included a bid to have allies submit slates of pro-Trump electors in states won by Mr. Biden. It would substantially increase the threshold for Congress to consider an objection to electoral votes, requiring that at least one-fifth of each chamber sign on to such challenges, which currently need only one senator and one House member.“Right now, just two people out of 535 members can object and slow down and gum up the counting,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chair of the panel. She said the legislation presented “an opportunity to take strong bipartisan action to protect the cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.”The Rules Committee incorporated some changes sought by election watchdogs, and Mr. McConnell warned that he would not back any final version if the authors went beyond narrow consensus changes. He also said he would not support the bill approved last week in the House. That legislation raises the threshold for objections even higher, to one-third of both chambers, and also includes provisions that Senate Republicans fear could lead to more court fights over the results — an outcome they are eager to avoid..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.“It is clear that only a bipartisan compromise originating in the Senate can actually become law,” Mr. McConnell said. “One party going it alone will be a nonstarter and, in my view, the House bill is a nonstarter. We have one shot to get this right.”Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and one of the senators who lodged objections to the electoral count in 2021, was the sole member of the Rules Committee to oppose the legislation.“This bill is all about Donald J. Trump, and in our lifetimes, no one has driven Democrats in this body more out of their minds than President Trump,” said Mr. Cruz. He said the legislation raised serious constitutional questions and was an attempt by Democrats to gain control over elections that should remain the responsibility of the states.“I don’t believe senators from this side of the aisle should be supporting a bill that enhances the federalization of elections and reduces the ability of Congress to respond to the very serious problem of voter fraud,” he said.Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, also made clear that he was behind the legislation. A spokesman said that Mr. Schumer “looks forward to continuing to have bipartisan, bicameral discussions about the best way to ensure Electoral Count Act reform legislation is signed into law soon.”Backers of the bill say it must be approved this year and would have no chance if Republicans claimed control of the House in the upcoming midterms. More

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    House Jan. 6 Panel Faces Key Decisions as It Wraps Up Work

    The committee investigating what led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its first hearing since July on Wednesday, entering the final stage of its inquiry.WASHINGTON — A day before resuming its televised hearings and with only months remaining before it closes up shop, the House Jan. 6 committee is wrangling over how best to complete its work, with key decisions yet to be made on issues that could help shape its legacy.The panel, whose public hearings this summer exposed substantial new details about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election, must still decide whether to issue subpoenas to Mr. Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.It has yet to settle on whether to enforce subpoenas issued to Republican members of Congress who have refused to cooperate with the inquiry, or what legislative recommendations to make. It must still grapple with when to turn its files over to the Justice Department, how to finish what it hopes will be a comprehensive written report and whether to make criminal referrals. It cannot even agree on whether Wednesday’s hearing will be its last.The panel has not disclosed the topics it intends to cover in the 1 p.m. hearing, its first since July. But it is still working to break new ground with its investigation.It recently had a breakthrough when Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, agreed to a voluntary interview about her role in seeking to keep Mr. Trump in office. That interview is expected to take place within weeks.The committee also issued a subpoena to Robin Vos, the Republican House speaker in Wisconsin whom Mr. Trump tried to pressure as recently as July to overturn the 2020 election, suggesting that the panel tracked Mr. Trump’s activities long after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his departure from office two weeks later. (Mr. Vos has sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena.)“Our hearings have demonstrated the essential culpability of Donald Trump, and we will complete that story,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.But the committee has debated whether and how to highlight certain information related to the Jan. 6 attack. For instance, some members and staff have wanted to hold a hearing to highlight the panel’s extensive work investigating the law enforcement failures related to the assault, but others have argued that doing so would take attention off Mr. Trump.And it has struggled in recent weeks with staff departures and is facing public criticism from a former aide, Denver Riggleman, who says it has not been aggressive enough in pursuing connections between the White House and the rioters.The final stages of its planned 18 months of work are playing out against a shifting political climate. Polls suggest that Democrats could lose control of the House in November’s midterm elections. Mr. Trump is showing every intention of seeking the presidency again, and the committee’s Republican vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who lost her primary in August, appears to be positioning herself as the party’s anti-Trump White House candidate for 2024, with the panel’s conclusions as part of her platform.Ms. Cheney on Saturday seemed to contradict other committee members by describing this week’s hearing as unlikely to be the last. Other members, including the committee’s chairman, have said it would likely be their final presentation.With that backdrop, Wednesday’s hearing could be seen as the first step in the closing stages of the committee’s work.“What they have to do is strategic,” said Norman L. Eisen, who was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including for the first impeachment and trial of Mr. Trump. “The first part of the end game is to close the deal with the American people.”The panel set high expectations for itself by revolutionizing what a congressional hearing could look like. Preparing for the hearing on Wednesday has consumed the committee’s focus in recent weeks..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.“They’ve pretty uniformly met and exceeded expectations,” Mr. Eisen said. “And when you’ve done that eight times, that suggests that you know what you’re doing. I suspect part of the reason that they took a lengthy hiatus — and by all reports worked very hard over the summer — was to be able to come back in September with a bang.”To some degree, the committee is now competing for attention with other investigations into Mr. Trump and his allies. The New York attorney general has filed a sweeping fraud suit against Mr. Trump and his family. Prosecutors in Georgia are conducting grand jury interviews about efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss there. And the Justice Department is now conducting criminal inquiries into both the events that led to the Jan. 6 attack and Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents he took with him upon leaving the White House.To help with its end game, the panel has quietly rehired John Wood, a former federal prosecutor who is close to Ms. Cheney. Before he left the panel for a brief, unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in Missouri, Mr. Wood led the committee’s “Gold Team,” which investigated Mr. Trump and his inner circle.It has also expanded its number of staff members from about 50 up to 57, according to Congress’s latest financial data, and has spent about $5.3 million over its first year in existence.But at the same time, the committee has had five staff members put in resignation notices in recent weeks. Among them is Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor who was featured in a committee hearing and led the panel’s “Green Team,” which investigated the money trail connected to Jan. 6, including political donations and the funding of the rallies that preceded the violence.The hearing on Wednesday is expected to feature new video of the Jan. 6 attack and also new clips of some of the committee’s hundreds of interviews with witnesses.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said the panel would focus some of its energy on ongoing threats to democracy, such as 2020 election deniers gaining power over election systems.“We have found additional information,” Ms. Lofgren said. “We worked throughout the summer.”The panel’s investigators pursued a number of topics this summer, traveling to Copenhagen, for example, to review footage shot by a documentary film crew of the political operative and Trump confidant Roger J. Stone Jr. Committee members have hinted that some of that material could turn up in Wednesday’s hearing.They held closed-door interviews with senior Trump administration officials in an effort to uncover more about the period between Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked Congress, and Jan. 20, when President Biden was sworn in, including talks about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.The panel at one point considered inviting generals who worked for Mr. Trump to deliver firsthand accounts of his behavior. (The idea has not moved forward.)Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said the panel recently received a trove of documents from the Secret Service in response to a subpoena it issued after the news that agents’ text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, had been lost.A spokesman for the agency said the Secret Service provided a “significant level of detail from emails, radio transmissions, Microsoft Teams chat messages and exhibits that address aspects of planning, operations and communications surrounding January 6th.” But the spokesman said the documents did not include any additional text messages, such as those sought by the committee that were erased during an upgrade of phones.Members of the committee had originally seen their investigation, and the possibility of a criminal referral, as a way of putting pressure on the Justice Department to pursue a criminal case. But with federal prosecutors now investigating elements of Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power despite losing at the ballot box, the House committee is considering a new suggestion for the information it uncovered about Mr. Trump and his allies raising money by promoting baseless assertions about election fraud: making a referral to the Federal Election Commission, a largely toothless body that can weigh abuses of campaign finance laws.“F.E.C. would be a good possibility,” Mr. Thompson said. “Obviously we looked seriously at some of the fund-raising that went on around Jan. 6.”Members have also been discussing what legislative recommendations they should make. Last week, to close off the possibility of another president trying to have a vice president block the certification by Congress of the Electoral College results, Ms. Cheney and Ms. Lofgren introduced an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which quickly passed the House. (A somewhat different version is awaiting action in the Senate.)Members are also discussing reforms to the Insurrection Act, legislation related to the 14th and 25th amendments and regulation of militia groups. Members also are likely to recommend improvements to Capitol security.Not all the panel’s recommendations have found agreement. Mr. Raskin, for instance, has pushed for recommending the Electoral College be eliminated, but that idea has been met with resistance from Ms. Cheney and others and is unlikely to be included in the final recommendations.Maggie Haberman More

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    The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie

    Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.Recent books like “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell” by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” by The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics. The big joke drains language of meaning, divorces action from responsibility and enables all manner of lies. “Getting the joke” means understanding that nothing you say need be true, that nobody expects it to be true — at least nobody in the know. “The truth of this scam, or ‘joke,’ was fully evident inside the club,” Leibovich writes. “We’re all friends here. Everyone knew the secret handshake, spoke the native language, and got the joke.”Without the big joke, the big lie would not merit its adjective. Its challenge to democracy would be ephemeral, not existential.The chroniclers of Donald Trump’s election lie typically seek out an origin story, a choose-your-own adventure that always leads to the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. In his book, “The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020,” Politico’s Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him. This, Lemire writes, was when “the seeds of the big lie had been planted.”Tim Alberta of The Atlantic starts six months earlier, when Trump accused Senator Ted Cruz of Texas of cheating in the Iowa caucuses. “That episode was a bright red, blinking light foreshadowing everything that was to come,” Alberta told PBS Frontline. In “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” the Washington Post columnist (and my former colleague) Dana Milbank offers a far longer accumulation of lies from the right: The notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in the death of the White House lawyer Vince Foster, the illusions behind President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the birther concoctions, the death-panel ravings — all building toward the big one. “The G.O.P.’s quarter-century war on facts had come to this, a gargantuan fabrication aimed at discrediting democracy itself,” Milbank sums up. And Leibovich quotes Representative Adam Schiff’s view of how his House colleagues slowly submitted to Trump’s fantasies. “It’s one small lie, followed by a demand for a bigger lie and a bigger concession, a bigger moral lapse, until, you know, these folks that I admired and respected, because I believe that they believe what they were saying, had given themselves up so completely to Donald Trump.”Such accounts reflect the common understanding that the big lie is really all the little lies we told along the way — a cycle of deceit and submission, culminating in a myth so powerful that it transcends belief and becomes a fully formed worldview. Lemire notes how Trump’s assertion that he had been wiretapped by President Barack Obama during the 2016 campaign seemed like a pretty gargantuan lie at the time, one that Trump tweeted “without any evidence.” (Journalists love to note that the former president utters falsehoods “without evidence,” an adorable euphemism for “making stuff up.”) But even this one dissipates in the wake of the big lie. After “big,” the term “unprecedented” may be the election lie’s most common descriptor.But it is not without precedent. After all, what was birtherism if not the same lie? Its underlying racism rendered the grotesque theory about Obama’s birthplace especially repugnant, but the basic assertion is familiar: that a president whom the American people lawfully chose is not legitimate, is something less than the real thing.The 2020 election lie is not bigger than birtherism. History should not remember the effort to delegitimize Obama’s presidency as just another rung on the ladder toward the big lie. The lies are akin even in their power of persuasion. Leibovich recalls how in 2016, 72 percent of Republicans said they believed Trump’s lies about Obama’s background. This figure is comparable with the 71 percent of Republicans who said in late 2021 that they believed President Biden was not a fully legitimate president. And much as support for the 2020 election lie provides a loyalty test in the Trumpified Republican Party, a willingness to believe the worst of Obama was a near-requirement in the party during his presidency. “A testing ground for Republican squishiness was how strongly, and how bitterly, one opposed Obama,” the historian Nicole Hemmer recalls in her new book, “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s,” on the rise of the post-Reagan right. “To match the response of the party’s base, politicians would need to reflect the emotions gripping it.” And they did.For Hemmer, the Republican Party’s evolution from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump began with Pat Buchanan, the White House aide, television pundit and authoritarian-curious presidential candidate who “fashioned grievance politics into an agenda,” she writes — a program that emphasized identity, immigration and race as its battlegrounds. For Milbank, it was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and the “savage politics he pioneered” in advance of the Republican Revolution of 1994. “There was nobody better at attacking, destroying, and undermining those in power,” Milbank writes. Gingrich made compromise a thought crime and labeled his opponents as sick and traitorous, tactics that should also sound familiar.You needn’t pick between Buchanan and Gingrich — it’s enough to say that Buchanan gave the modern Republican Party its substance and Gingrich provided its style. (I imagine they’d both be honored by the distinctions.) When Trump dispatched his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, telling them to “fight like hell,” urging them to preserve a country that was slipping away, calling them patriots who could take back an election stolen by the radical left, he was channeling both men. The big lie is part of their legacy, too.In his j’accuse-y yet semi-confessional “Why We Did It,” Miller, now a writer at large for the anti-Trump conservative forum The Bulwark, tries to grasp why his old colleagues followed Trump all the way to his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. “I needed to figure out where our parting had started,” he writes. Miller grasps the futility of seeking a single origin story — “I’m sure a student of history might be able to trace it back to the Southern Strategy or Lee Atwater or, hell, maybe even Mark Hanna (give him a Google),” Miller writes — but he does hazard some explanations. He points to Republicans’ ability to compartmentalize concerns about Trump. Their unquenchable compulsion to be in the mix. Their self-serving belief that they could channel dark arts for noble purposes. Their desire to make money. (Miller acknowledges his own paid work helping the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, a stint that makes Miller more of a Barely Trumper than a Never Trumper.) Most of all, his old colleagues succumbed to Trump because they believed they were playing “some big game devoid of real-world consequences.”Miller lingers on this game — the amoral world of tactics, messaging and opposition research, the realm of politics where facts matter less than cleverness and nothing matters more than results. He once thought of it as winning the race, being a killer, just a dishonest buck for a dishonest day’s work. “Practitioners of politics could easily dismiss moralistic or technical concerns just by throwing down their trump card: ‘It’s all part of the Game,’” Miller writes. He has a nickname for the comrades so immersed in the game that they are oblivious to its consequences: the LOL Nothing Matters Republicans. “The LOLNMRs had decided that if someone like Trump could win, then everything that everyone does in politics is meaningless.”The big lie thrives on LOL Nothing Matters.What Miller calls “the game” becomes “the joke” in Leibovich’s book, the depressing tale of the high-level supplicants who surrounded Trump during his presidency and continue to grovel in what they hope will be an interregnum. If the purely transactional nature of Washington power was the subject of Leibovich’s 2013 best seller, “This Town,” the mix of mendacity and subservience behind every transaction is the theme of his latest work. Reince Priebus, during his incarnation as Republican National Committee chairman before his six-month sojourn as Trump’s White House chief of staff, explained to Leibovich that of course, he got the joke. “This was his way of reassuring me that he understood what was really happening beyond his surface niceties about unity, tolerance, grace, or the idea that Trump could ever ‘pivot,’” Leibovich writes. In other words, don’t take his words seriously. “He got the joke and knew that I did, too.”The platonic ideal of the big joke was immortalized in The Washington Post the week after the 2020 election, uttered by an anonymous senior Republican official reflecting on Trump’s election claims. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20.” It was wrong in so many ways — the downside would prove enormous, the believers would become legion, the plotting was underway.The big lie is that the election was stolen; the big joke is that you can prolong that lie without consequence. The former is a quest for undeserved power; the latter is an evasion of well-deserved responsibility.Other renditions of the big joke were more subtle. A few days after the election, a reporter asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo if the State Department was preparing to work with the Biden team to facilitate a “smooth transition” of power. “There will be a smooth transition,” Pompeo responded, making the slightest of pauses before adding, “to a second Trump administration.” He then chuckled, a possible signal that he was aware of the truth, and that he “hoped that perhaps everyone understood his position,” Leibovich writes.Pompeo got the big joke about the big lie. Yet the man charged with representing American values to the world still felt he had to tell both.Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 Republican House members to vote in favor of Trump’s second impeachment, says the joke is well understood among his party colleagues. “For all but a handful of members, if you put them on truth serum, they knew that the election was fully legitimate and that Donald Trump was a joke,” Kinzinger told Leibovich. “The vast majority of people get the joke. I think Kevin McCarthy gets the joke. Lindsey gets the joke. The problem is that the joke isn’t even funny anymore.” Humoring Trump has grown humorless.There was a time when even Trump grappled with the truth. Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as communications director in the Trump White House, told PBS’s “Frontline” that the president admitted defeat in the days after the election was called for Biden. “There was one moment where in this period he was watching Joe Biden on TV and says, ‘Can you believe I lost to this (blank) guy?’”But what once may have sounded like a rhetorical lament — can you believe I lost? — now seems like a challenge to anyone questioning the big lie. Can you believe I lost? There is only one acceptable answer. In his rally last weekend in Youngstown, Ohio, Trump reiterated his commitment to the lie. “I ran twice. I won twice,” he declared. For a moment, when bragging about how many more votes he won in 2020 than in 2016, the veil almost fell. “We got 12 million more and we lost,” Trump said, before recovering. “We didn’t lose,” he continued. “We lost in their imagination.” It was a classic Trumpian projection: The lie is true and the truth is fake.The big lie appeared to crescendo on Jan. 6, 2021. The big joke, however, was retold during the early hours of Jan. 7, when the election results were certified, with 147 Republican lawmakers — more than half of the total — having voted to overturn them. As Milbank puts it, “once you’ve unhitched yourself from the truth wagon, there’s no limit to the places you can visit.” You can use exaggerated warnings of voter fraud to justify state-level initiatives tightening ballot access. (Lemire warns that the big lie has “metastasized” from a rallying cry into the “cold, methodical process of legislation.”) You can select election deniers to carry the party banner in midterm contests. And yes, you can visit the Capitol on the day the voters’ will is being affirmed, trash the place and tell yourself, as the Republican National Committee suggested, that you’re engaging in “legitimate political discourse.”The R.N.C.’s statement, part of a resolution censuring Kinzinger and Representative Liz Cheney for participating in the House’s Jan. 6 investigation, seemed to rebrand the assault as an exercise in civic virtue. The R.N.C. soon backtracked, professing that the resolution had not endorsed the violence at the Capitol.In a perverse sense, though, the R.N.C. was right. Not about the rioters, but about the discourse. Political debate has become so degraded that it includes every kind of offense, be it anonymous officials humoring the former president, QAnon conspiracists exalting him or frenzied die-hards perpetrating violence on his behalf. Together, the big joke and the big lie have turned the nation’s political life into a dark comedy, one staged for the benefit of aggrieved supporters who, imagining that the performance is real and acting on that belief, become its only punchline.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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    Virginia Thomas Agrees to Interview With Jan. 6 Panel

    The committee has sought for months to interview Ms. Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, about her involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a conservative activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election, has agreed to sit for an interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The development could represent a breakthrough for the committee, which for months has sought to interview Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, about her communications with a conservative lawyer in close contact with former President Donald J. Trump.“I can confirm that Ginni Thomas has agreed to participate in a voluntary interview with the committee,” her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, said in a statement. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity.”Her cooperation was reported earlier by CNN. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.The committee requested an interview with Ms. Thomas in June, after it emerged that she had exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in which she urged on efforts to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election. She also pressed lawmakers in several states to fight the results of the election.But it was Ms. Thomas’s interactions with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who pushed Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, that has most interested investigators.“We are specifically investigating the activities of President Trump, John Eastman and others as they relate to the Constitution and certain other laws, including the Electoral Count Act, that set out the required process for the election and inauguration of the president,” the committee’s leaders — Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming — wrote to Ms. Thomas. “The select committee has obtained evidence that John Eastman worked to develop alternate slates of electors to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6.”The panel obtained at least one email between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman after a federal judge ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over documents to the panel from the period after the November 2020 election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.That same judge has said it is “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman committed two felonies as part of the effort, including conspiracy to defraud the American people.Mr. Paoletta has argued that the communications between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman contain little of value to the panel’s investigation.Ms. Thomas’s cooperation comes as the Jan. 6 committee is entering its final months of work after a summer of high-profile hearings and preparing an extensive report, which is expected to include recommendations for how to confront the threats to democracy highlighted by the riot and Mr. Trump’s drive to overturn the election. Mr. Thompson, the chairman of the panel, said the next and likely final hearing would take place on Sept. 28.“We have substantial footage of what occurred that we haven’t used; we’ve had significant witness testimony that we haven’t used,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview. “This is an opportunity to use some of that material.” More