Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Mike Pence Was of Two Minds

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      Gail Collins: Bret, I never did like Mike Pence at all — his far-right social values would have turned me off even if he didn’t call his wife “Mother.”Bret Stephens: Well, it beats “Cousin.” Sorry, continue.Gail: And I’ve never forgotten the moment when Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” asked Pence if he ever thought he’d be able to tell Donald Trump he needed to apologize for having “crossed the line.” Pence just kinda babbled without answering until Trump interrupted. “Absolutely. I might not apologize,” Trump said. “But I would absolutely want him to come in.”But now, the worm has turned! Except I guess I shouldn’t be calling Pence a worm any more.Bret: I’m having a hard time joining the “Mike Pence the Hero” bandwagon that some of my old friends on the right have jumped aboard.Where was Pence in November when Trump started lying about the election the moment their defeat became clear? Where was he when the president enlisted the likes of Sidney Powell and John Eastman to peddle insane conspiracy theories about voting machines and preposterous interpretations of the Electoral Count Act? Where was he on invoking the 25th Amendment after the assault on the Capitol, or at least on supporting impeachment? Pence was a worm who, for a few hours on Jan. 6, turned into a glowworm.Gail: OK, I can’t top that.Still, I keep imagining what chaos the country would have fallen into if Pence had panicked and refused to count the election results back to the states instead of just certifying Joe Biden as president.Bret: Nancy Pelosi would have beaten him to a pulp with that giant gavel of hers before he could have done it.Gail: That’s an image I plan to carry around with me for a long time.Bret: Also, can I fume a bit about the so-called sane right’s position on all this? They’re busy trying to switch the subject to left-wing rioting, as if trashing a courthouse in Portland, bad as that is, is somehow an equivalent event to a sitting president inciting a violent mob to trash the Capitol in order to overturn a national election.Gail: Feel free to fume for both of us.Bret: OK, end of rant. What conclusions do you draw from the Jan. 6 committee hearings?Gail: Well, we certainly were reminded that Trump was totally complicit in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.Bret: Not complicit. Guilty.Gail: Yeah, thanks for the better word. And apparently when he insisted he won the election he was ignoring virtually everybody giving him advice except Rudy Giuliani.Wow, just imagine a defiant Trump telling his expert counselors: “That might be all your opinion — but Rudy was making some very good points before he passed out over there.”Bret: Some of our younger readers may not remember that Giuliani was Time’s Person of the Year in 2001 for his leadership after the attacks of Sept. 11. His fall from grace has been like a bungee jump minus the bungee.Gail: Giuliani’s role during Sept. 11 was … not what you imagine. He wouldn’t, for instance, have been dramatically marching around the streets after the attack if he hadn’t moved the critically important emergency command center into the World Trade Center, a well-identified terrorist target, because he wanted it within walking distance of his office.Could go on, but for me Rudy’s fall from heroic grace goes back a trillion years.Bret: I’m beginning to think you’re right. Never did like the way he went after Michael Milken.Gail: As for Trump, even if nothing we learned at the hearings has been a big surprise, it’s so, so very important to get all this stuff on the record in as public and evenhanded a way as possible.And again, I’ve gotta say: Good work, Mike Pence. You’re a terrible person, but you had a moment. If the vice president had panicked and gone to hide in a relative’s basement when it was time to certify the election, can’t imagine where we’d be now.Bret: Pass the peyote. Gail Collins has a better impression of Mike Pence than I do.Gail: Well, I’m giving him one good day.And what’s your prediction for what happens next to Trump? Presidential election bid in 2024 or the slammer?Bret: In a just world? I’d want one jury to indict him, another to convict him and a warden to lock him up — to borrow a phrase.What I don’t know is whether that’s the smart thing to do. On one hand, prosecuting him would be a good reminder that we’re a nation of laws. On the other, it would radicalize the right even further, turn him into a national martyr to about a third of the country if he goes to prison and make him a clear and present danger to everyone else if he doesn’t. And it would be the only thing the country could talk about for years while we have a few other problems to deal with.What say you?Gail: Prosecuting Trump would be righteous, but you’re right — it would leave him subject of still more right-wing hero-worship. My real dream is to see him go completely bankrupt.Bret: Once again.Gail: Permanently this time. First we have to get past 2024 and any chance he returns to the presidency, God help us. Then all the civil lawsuits and public investigations into his business dealings in New York come to fruition — and then he’s down to a basement apartment in Staten Island.Bret: Even Staten Island doesn’t deserve that. But I doubt Trump will be convicted or fined for all of his dodgy business deals. His crime is treason, in the Constitution’s precise definition: levying war against the United States or adhering to its enemies and giving them aid and comfort.Gail: I agree about what he deserves, but I’m still worried the long and unprecedented attempt to send him to jail would fail while splitting the country way more.And I’d love to dwell on my vision of Trump holding out an empty coffee cup on some corner, begging for change. Maybe not realistic, but so … sweet.Now we ought to talk some about Biden and the state of the economy. Feel free to vent.Bret: Many of our readers have fond feelings toward Jimmy Carter as a person, but the Biden administration increasingly feels like a rerun of the Carter years, complete with stagflation, an energy crisis and Moscow invading a neighboring country. The smartest thing Biden can do, politically and economically, is to stop blaming others — even genuine villains like Vladimir Putin — so that his administration doesn’t project an air of being at the mercy of events.Gail: Go on …Bret: As I was saying last week, he should fire Janet Yellen, preferably this week, and replace her with Larry Summers. It will create a sense of accountability and put energy in the executive, as Alexander Hamilton might have said. Work with Canada to import more oil, whether by rail or pipeline or truck: It beats getting our oil from Venezuela. Give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo or the infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu the job of anticipating and preventing consumer-goods shortages, from baby formula to tampons to whatever is next.If all this sounds extreme, consider what will happen if we just drift along until President DeSantis takes the reins in 2025. Or President Trump. But I’m always happy to hear of a better way.Gail: I don’t blame Yellen for our economic mess, although I’d sadly sacrifice her if it would move us forward. Your other ideas don’t sound extremely extreme — although if we’re going to start piping oil from Canada the plan needs to be married to the battle against global warming.Bret: Step One: Subsidize an accelerated transition to a hybrid- and electric-car vehicle fleet. Step Two: Build safer next-generation nuclear reactors to power more of the grid. Step Three: Blame Canada for any and all remaining issues.Gail: Well, giving you half a step for the electric cars.Back to the economy: If Biden had any prayer of getting Congressional support, I’d want him to return to his early-administration dreams. Invest in quality child care options to bring women back into the work force and reduce the labor shortage. Give lower- and middle-income workers a jolt of extra cash through tax rebates. Install his program to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. In a perfect world, fund a federal program to cut back on student debt.Bret: Nice to be reminded that in some post-Trump universe, there’s a lot we still disagree about.Gail: Of course, all this would cost money, and that’s why we’d need — yes! — tax hikes on the rich. Many of whom are making out like bandits in the current economy.Bret: Let’s fight about that later. In the meantime, our readers shouldn’t miss our former opinion-page colleague Clay Risen’s wonderful “Overlooked No More” obituary for William B. Gould, who in 1862 escaped slavery in North Carolina by commandeering a sailboat, joined the crew of a Union blockade ship, kept a meticulous diary, went on to prosperity in Massachusetts and lived to be 85. Next year Dedham, Mass., will unveil a statue in his honor on the centenary of his death. A great reminder of all that’s worth celebrating this Juneteenth.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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      ‘The Senate Needs a Soul’

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      Raphael Warnock claims he’s not a politician, though he certainly sounds like one and serves as one. The U.S. senator from Georgia, who has long been the pastor at Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church, says that his “entry into politics is an extension” of his work on a range of what he sees as moral issues, such as health care, criminal-justice reform and voting rights.Warnock became Georgia’s first Black senator in January 2021, when he narrowly beat the Republican incumbent, Kelly Loeffler, in a special runoff election. And he is set for yet another tough political battle ahead, against Herschel Walker, the former N.F.L. player, who in addition to his celebrity status also has an endorsement from Donald Trump. The stakes are high: “God knows these days, the Senate needs a soul,” Warnock says.[You can listen to this episode of “Sway” on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, Kara Swisher talks to Warnock about his path from the pulpit to the Senate and the religious journey he traces in his recent memoir, “A Way Out of No Way.” She presses him on whether he can beat his celebrity opponent and asks what shadow Trump casts on this election. And they discuss the contrast between the jubilation he felt on his history-making victory and the horror that unfolded less than 24 hours later, as a mob attacked his “new office,” the Capitol, on Jan. 6.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Keven LoweryThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Caitlin O’Keefe and Wyatt Orme, and edited by Nayeema Raza; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero; mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski. More

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      Despite Growing Evidence, a Prosecution of Trump Would Face Challenges

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      As House hearings highlighted testimony that could create more pressure to pursue a criminal case, the former president tried out a defense that strained credulity.As new questions swirled this past week about former President Donald J. Trump’s potential criminal exposure for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump issued a rambling 12-page statement.It contained his usual mix of outlandish claims, hyperbole and outright falsehoods, but also something that Trump allies and legal experts said was notable and different: the beginnings of a legal defense.On nearly every page, Mr. Trump gave explanations for why he was convinced that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and why he was well within his rights to challenge the results by any means available.What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump wrote, stemmed from an effort by Americans “to hold their elected officials accountable for the obvious signs of criminal activity throughout the election.”His statement, while unfounded, carried a particular significance given the intensifying focus on whether he could face criminal charges. If the Justice Department were to bring a case against him, prosecutors would face the challenge of showing that he knew — or should have known — that his position was based on assertions about widespread election fraud that were false or that his attempt to block the congressional certification of the outcome was illegal.As a potential defense, the tactic suggested by Mr. Trump’s statement is far from a guarantee against prosecution, and it presents obvious problems of credibility. Mr. Trump has a long history of saying whatever suits his purposes without regard for the truth. And some of the actions he took after the 2020 election, like pressing officials in Georgia to flip enough votes to swing the outcome in that state to his column, speak to a determined effort to hold on to power rather than to address some broader perceived vulnerability in the election system.But his continued stream of falsehoods highlights some of the complexities of pursuing any criminal case against him, despite how well established the key facts are at this point.And the statement also reflected steps Mr. Trump is taking behind the scenes to build a new legal team to deal with an array of investigations, including into his pressure campaign to change the outcome of the election in Georgia and his taking classified documents with him when he left office.M. Evan Corcoran, a white-collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor brought on by Mr. Trump, was involved in drafting the document, according to two people briefed on the matter. Mr. Corcoran has also represented Stephen K. Bannon, a Trump ally who has been indicted by the Justice Department for refusing to cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Mr. Corcoran and a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.The statement came during a week in which the House committee’s hearings drove home Mr. Trump’s potential criminal and civil legal exposure by highlighting testimony from aides and advisers documenting what he had been told, and when, about the validity of his election fraud claims and the legality of his strategy for hanging on to power.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.At its third hearing on Thursday, the committee built a case that Mr. Trump had plunged ahead with a scheme to have Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally overturn the 2020 election even though Mr. Trump had been told it had no legal basis.The Justice Department is investigating a number of elements of the Capitol riot and the broader effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to keep the White House despite Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has given no public indication that the department is building a case against Mr. Trump, who has long contended that the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack are partisan and unfounded and whose side of the story has not been presented in the House committee’s hearings.But the panel’s investigation has already generated evidence that could increase the pressure on Mr. Garland to move more aggressively, a course of action that would carry extraordinary legal and political implications. After prodding from the Justice Department, the House committee signaled in recent days that it would start sharing some transcripts of its witness interviews with federal prosecutors as early as next month.Greg Jacob, left, who had been chief counsel for Vice President Mike Pence, and J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former judge, at a hearing on Thursday held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn a civil case related to the committee’s work, a federal judge concluded in March that Mr. Trump and a lawyer who had advised him, John Eastman, had most likely committed felonies in their effort to overturn the election. “The illegality of the plan was obvious,” Judge David O. Carter of Federal District Court for the Central District of California concluded in that case.Judge Carter cited two crimes that he said the two men were likely guilty of committing: conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstructing a congressional proceeding. Members of the House committee have made similar suggestions, and some lawyers have contended that Mr. Trump could also be vulnerable to a charge of seditious conspiracy.But successfully prosecuting the potential charges suggested by Judge Carter and others could depend on establishing Mr. Trump’s intent — an issue that his statement this past week appeared to address with the argument that he believed his challenges to the outcome were grounded in legitimate questions about the conduct of the election.Daniel L. Zelenko, a white-collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said that in all of the potential crimes that were being looked at in connection with Mr. Trump’s conduct, the Justice Department would need to show that he had the intent to commit a crime. Mr. Zelenko said that while the new details revealed by the committee would help prosecutors in proving intent, the government still had a range of other issues to overcome in building any prosecution.“The key is having contemporaneous evidence that he was saying that he knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway,” said Mr. Zelenko, a co-chair of the white-collar defense practice at Crowell & Moring. “The problem with Trump is that you have to try and get inside his mind, and he has such a history of lying and pushing falsehoods that it makes it difficult to determine what he really believes.”Aside from the evidence the committee has already revealed, the panel has received other testimony that undermines Mr. Trump’s claim that he thought he really won the election. According to two people briefed on the matter, Alyssa Farah Griffin, the White House communications director in the days after the election, recently testified to the committee that Mr. Trump said to her in November 2020 words along the lines of: Can you believe I lost to Mr. Biden?At its hearing on Thursday, the House committee built a case that Mr. Trump had plunged ahead with a scheme to have Mr. Pence unilaterally overturn the election even though Mr. Trump had been told it had no legal basis.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn a television interview last fall, Ms. Griffin, who did not respond to a request for comment, acknowledged one of the complicating factors in determining what Mr. Trump may have believed. She said Mr. Trump might have changed his mind in the aftermath of the election.“He told me shortly after that he knew he lost, but then, you know, folks got around him,” Ms. Griffin said on CNN, referring to outside advisers who pushed false election-fraud claims. “They got information in front of him, and I think his mind genuinely might have been changed about that, and that’s scary, because he did lose, and the facts are out there.”Samuel W. Buell, a law professor at Duke University and former federal prosecutor, said any criminal case against Mr. Trump would have to start with establishing that he had been aware that what he was doing was improper.“You need to show that he knew what he was doing was wrongful and had no legal basis,” he said. “I’m not saying that he has to think: What I’m doing is a crime. It’s proving: I know I don’t have a legal argument, I know I’ve lost the election, but I’m going ahead with a known-to-be-false claim and a scheme that has no legal basis.”The House committee’s hearings are not a trial. The panel is free to be selective in what testimony it employs to build a case against Mr. Trump, and the former president has no allies on the committee who can question witnesses or provide information helpful to him.But the hearings have highlighted a series of witnesses who said that Mr. Trump had been told directly and repeatedly ahead of Jan. 6 that there was no basis to his claims that election fraud cost him re-election.And the committee presented brief but potentially crucial testimony from Mr. Pence’s chief counsel, Greg Jacob. In a deposition, Mr. Jacob told the panel that Mr. Trump had been told on Jan. 4, 2021, by Mr. Eastman — who was pushing a plan to have Mr. Pence block or delay certification of the Electoral College count — that the scheme would violate the Electoral Count Act, the federal law governing the process.In investigations that are focused almost exclusively on physical action, like assaults, muggings and murders, prosecutors do not need to focus on proving intent since the link between the action and the harm is typically clear.The question of intent, however, can be muddy when the crime under investigation involves an action in which the defendant’s state of mind can be hard to establish. The crimes that legal experts say Mr. Trump may have committed — obstructing Congress, defrauding the American people and seditious conspiracy — fall into that bucket.In those cases, the government faces a series of hurdles it needs to clear to prove intent. The cleanest way is finding evidence that the defendant knew he or she was doing something wrong.In Mr. Trump’s case, lawyers said, that could take the form of direct evidence that he knew his assertions of widespread election fraud were baseless or that he knew the strategy he was pursuing was illegal.If the Justice Department could not establish direct evidence of what Mr. Trump knew, prosecutors would need to turn to circumstantial evidence. To do that, they would typically rely on what experts and people of authority around him were telling him about whether the election had really been stolen or what kinds of strategies for fighting the outcome would be legal.Expert advice is often enough to show a jury what a defendant knew, lawyers said. But that may be more difficult with Mr. Trump because he has such a long history of disregarding experts and his own aides, they said.Given the challenge of showing what Mr. Trump actually knew, there is one other way prosecutors could show he had a corrupt intent: proving what is often called “willful blindness.”Under that principle, the government would need to show that Mr. Trump believed there was a high probability that the experts and his aides were telling him the truth when they said the election had not been stolen, but that he took deliberate actions to avoid learning more about why they believed that.Mr. Zelenko said he understood why many Americans watching the hearings would be convinced that building a criminal case against the former president was a strong possibility. But he cautioned that the standard for using evidence against a defendant is higher in court, where judges almost always insist that prosecutors rely on firsthand testimony, witnesses can be cross-examined and prosecutors need to prove their arguments beyond a reasonable doubt. More

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      Jan. 6 Hearings Underscore Hard Truths About Democracy

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      When political leaders face a constitutional crisis, like that of Jan. 6, the process of collectively deciding how to respond can be messy, arbitrary, and sometimes change the nature of the system itself.If you look for international parallels to the moment last year when Vice President Mike Pence refused to bow to pressure from President Donald J. Trump to help overturn their election defeat, something quickly becomes clear.Such crises, with democracy’s fate left to a handful of officials, rarely resolve purely on legal or constitutional principles, even if those might later be cited as justification.Rather, their outcome is usually determined by whichever political elites happen to form a quick critical mass in favor of one result. And those officials are left to follow whatever motivation — principle, partisan antipathy, self-interest — happens to move them.Taken together, the history of modern constitutional crises underscores some hard truths about democracy. Supposedly bedrock norms, like free elections or rule of law, though portrayed as irreversibly cemented into the national foundation, are in truth only as solid as the commitment of those in power. And while a crisis can be an opportunity for leaders to reinforce democratic norms, it can also be an opportunity to revise or outright revoke them.Amid Yugoslavia’s 2000 election, for example, the opposition declared it had won enough votes to unseat President Slobodan Milosevic, whose government falsely claimed the opposition had fallen short.Both sides appealed to constitutional principles, legal procedures and, with protests raging, public will. Ultimately, a critical mass of government and police officials, including some in positions necessary to certify the outcome, signaled that, for reasons that varied individual to individual, they would treat Mr. Milosevic as the election’s loser. The new government later extradited him to face war crimes charges at The Hague.Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, applauding during a passing-out ceremony of recruits at the military academy in Belgrade, in 2000. Mr. Milosevic was declared the loser of a disputed election, and later extradited to face war crimes charges at The Hague. Agence France-PresseAmericans may see more in common with Peru. There, President Alberto Fujimori in 1992 dissolved the opposition-held Congress, which had been moving to impeach him. Lawmakers across the spectrum quickly voted to replace Mr. Fujimori with his own vice president, who had opposed the presidential power grab.Both sides claimed to be defending democracy from the other. Both appealed to Peru’s military, which had traditionally played a role of ultimate arbiter, almost akin to that of a supreme court. The public, deeply polarized, split. The military was also split.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.At the critical moment, enough political and military elites signaled support for Mr. Fujimori that he prevailed. They came together informally, each reacting to events individually, and many appealing to different ends, such as Mr. Fujimori’s economic agenda, notions of stability, or a chance for their party to prevail under the new order.Peru fell into quasi-authoritarianism, with political rights curtailed and elections still held but under terms that favored Mr. Fujimori, until he was removed from office in 2000 over corruption allegations. Last year, his daughter ran for the presidency as a right-wing populist, losing by less than 50,000 votes.Modern Latin America has repeatedly faced such crises. This is due less to any shared cultural traits, many scholars argue, than to a history of Cold War meddling that weakened democratic norms. It also stems from American-style presidential systems, and deep social polarization that paves the way for extreme political combat.Presidential democracies, by dividing power among competing branches, create more opportunities for rival offices to clash, even to the point of usurping one another’s powers. Such systems also blur questions of who is in charge, forcing their branches to resolve disputes informally, on the fly and at times by force.Venezuela, once the region’s oldest democracy, endured a series of constitutional crises as President Hugo Chávez clashed with judges and other government bodies that blocked his agenda. Each time, Mr. Chávez, and later his successor, Nicolás Maduro, appealed to legal and democratic principles to justify weakening those institutions until, over time, the leaders’ actions, ostensibly to save democracy, had all but gutted it.Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, arriving at the National Assembly for his annual state of the union address in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2012. He and his successor appealed to legal and democratic principles to justify their weakening of democratic institutions.Ariana Cubillos/Associated PressPresidencies are rare in Western democracies. One of the few, in France, saw its own constitutional crisis in 1958, when an attempted military coup was diverted only when the wartime leader Charles de Gaulle handed himself emergency powers to establish a unity government that satisfied both civilian and military leaders.While other systems can fall into major crisis, it is often because, as in a presidential democracy, competing power centers clash to the point of trying to overrun one another.Still, some scholars argue that Americans hoping to understand their country’s trajectory should look not to Europe but to Latin America.Ecuador came near the brink in 2018 over then-President Rafael Correa’s effort to extend his own term limits. But when voters and the political elite alike opposed this, Mr. Correa left office voluntarily.In 2019, Bolivia fell into chaos amid a disputed election. Though the public split, political and military elites signaled that they believed that the incumbent, the left-wing firebrand Evo Morales, should step down, all but forcing him to do so.Still, when Mr. Morales’s right-wing replacement oversaw months of turmoil and then moved to postpone elections, many of those same elites pushed for a quick vote instead, which elevated Mr. Morales’s handpicked successor.Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, speaking to the press on election day in La Paz, Bolivia, in October 2019. The country fell into chaos after the election, which was disputed.Martin Alipaz/EPA, via ShutterstockThe phrase “political elites” can conjure images of cigar-chomping power-brokers, meeting in secret to pull society’s strings. In reality, scholars use the term to describe lawmakers, judges, bureaucrats, police and military officers, local officials, business chiefs and cultural figures, most of whom will never coordinate directly, much less agree on what is best for the country.Still, it is those elites who collectively uphold democracy day-to-day. Much as paper money only has value because we all treat it as valuable, elections and laws only have power because elites wake up every morning and treat them as paramount. It is a kind of compact, in which the powerful voluntarily bind themselves to a system that also constrains them.“A well-functioning, orderly democracy does not require us to actively think about what sustains it,” Tom Pepinsky, a Cornell University political scientist, told me shortly after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “It’s an equilibrium; everybody is incentivized to participate as if it will continue.”But in a major constitutional crisis, when the norms and rules meant to guide democracy come under doubt, or fall by the wayside entirely, those elites suddenly face the question of how — or whether — to keep up their democratic compact.They will not always agree on what course is best for democracy, or for the country, or for themselves. Sometimes, the shock of seeing democracy’s vulnerability will lead them to redouble their commitment to it, and sometimes to jettison that system in part or whole.The result is often a scramble of elites pressuring one another directly, as many senior Republicans and White House aides did throughout Jan. 6, or through public statements aimed at the thousands of officials operating the machinery of government.Scholars call this a “coordination game,” with all those actors trying to understand and influence how the others will respond until a minimally viable consensus emerges. It can resemble less a well-defined plot than a herd of startled animals, which is why the outcome can be hard to predict.Before Jan. 6, there had been little reason to wonder over lawmakers’ commitment to democracy. “It had not been a question of whether or not they supported democracy in a real internal sense — that had never been the stakes,” Dr. Pepinsky said.Now, a crisis had forced them to decide whether to overturn the election, demonstrating that not all of those lawmakers, if given that choice, would vote to uphold democracy. “I’ve been floored by how much of this really does depend on 535 people,” Dr. Pepinsky said, referring to the number of lawmakers in Congress.. More

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      Hence, Mike Pence

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      WASHINGTON — The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.Two new photos shown at a hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6 tell a shocking story — one of the most incredible in our nation’s history.In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong.Mike Pence in his office in the Capitol on Jan. 6, as his wife, Karen, closes the curtains to keep the rioters from looking in. The Pences, including his brother Greg and his daughter Charlotte, awaited the securing of the building.White HouseWe learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him.In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified.They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy.“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”Trump was still steaming from the contentious morning phone call when he failed to persuade the vice president to reject some of the states’ electors so they could be replaced with fake electors who supported Trump. He had railed at Pence with emasculating epithets.As Trump recalled in a speech on Friday in Nashville, “I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson.’ And then, after it all went down, I looked at him one day and said, ‘I hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’”In the same speech, Trump had another line that was strikingly delusional, even for him. “For the radical left,” he said, “politics has become their religion. It has warped their sense of right and wrong. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”Trump sparked the mob to seek vengeance against Pence the same way Henry II sparked a crew to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. According to legend, after Becket defied Henry by excommunicating bishops supportive of the king, Henry muttered something to the effect of, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights immediately rode to Canterbury Cathedral and sliced up Becket.The line became a famous example of directing loyalists with indirection, cloaking an order as a wish. Who will rid me of this meddlesome vice president?A Times video, showing how the Proud Boys breached the Capitol, underscored that within the confederacy of dunces, there was an actual organized conspiracy. The group began plotting even before the election to take up arms for Trump. When Trump barked “Stand back and stand by” about the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden, the Proud Boys felt as though they had received a directive, like Henry’s knights.With each hearing, it becomes clearer that Trump has no plausible deniability. He put the lives of the vice president and his family at risk, as well as the lives of lawmakers, by sending a crowd, stewing in lies, into a frenzy.Pence did not have the power to do what Trump wanted, and it’s good that he resisted the insane, illegal and unconstitutional plan of the narcissist in the Oval. But Pence still wants it both ways. He has steered clear of the committee. He wants to become president by staying on the good side of Trump supporters, but they’re never going to forgive him.At the end of the day of infamy, John Eastman, the nutty lawyer trying to help Trump overturn the election, sent an email imploring Pence to adjourn the congressional certification so sympathetic state legislators could help with Trump’s fairy tale of a rigged election.When Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, showed the email to the vice president, Pence said, “That’s rubber room stuff.”The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.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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      Amid Jan. 6 Revelations, Election Lies Still Dominate the G.O.P.

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      The hearings have demolished the myth of a stolen presidential election, but with the 2022 primary season in full tilt, the revelations have not loosened the grip of the lie on Republicans.WASHINGTON — It was all a lie, the tales of stuffed ballot drop boxes, rigged voting machines, and constitutional “flexibility” that would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the 2020 election results and send them back to Republican state legislatures.The first three hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee have deeply undercut, if not demolished, the postelection myths repeated incessantly by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and embraced and amplified by Republicans in Congress.A parade of Republican witnesses — his attorney general, William P. Barr, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — knew he had lost the election and told him so. Mr. Trump was informed that the demands he was making of Mr. Pence to block his defeat unilaterally were illegal. Even the most active coup plotter, the conservative lawyer John C. Eastman, conceded before Jan. 6 that his scheme was illegal and unconstitutional, then sought a presidential pardon after it led to mob violence.Yet the most striking revelation so far may be how deeply Mr. Trump’s disregard for the truth and the rule of law have penetrated into the Republican Party, taking root in the fertile soil of a right-wing electorate stewing in conspiracy theories and well tended by their media of choice. The Republican response to the hearings — a combination of indifference, diversion and doubling down — reflects how central the lie of a stolen election has become to the party’s identity.In Washington, Republicans in Congress have neither broken with Mr. Trump nor expended much energy trying to rebut the investigation’s findings. And from Nevada’s secretary of state race to Michigan’s contest for governor, Republican candidates have embraced the fictional conspiracy in their 2022 campaigns.“I have been fighting for safe, honest and transparent elections since before Jan. 6, and that fight continues,” said Michigan State Representative Steve Carra, whose re-election run has been blessed by Mr. Trump and who said Friday he has watched some but not much of the hearings. “Absentee ballots sent out unsolicited, signature verification relaxed, drop boxes all over the place, especially in Democratic area — it all deserves further scrutiny.”Like mint in the garden, the seeds that the Trump team planted between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, are now growing out of control, aided by the former president’s allies.Jarome Bell, a leading candidate to challenge Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia, has been traveling her Republican-leaning district showing voters a film by the right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza that pushes the bogus fraud claims. The hearings, he said on Friday, have had “no impact on me. ‘2000 Mules’ has a bigger impact on what truly happened.” He added, “the 1/6 commission is the cover-up.”Despite coverage of the hearings, at least one lawmaker lamented that his constituents were not paying much attention.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesJon Rocha, a candidate for state representative in Michigan who has Mr. Trump’s backing, also cited the film and bragged that he had watched none of the hearings, “not even a 30-second clip.”One reason the falsehoods have flourished is the failure of Republicans who do not believe them to push back. Before the Jan. 6 hearings began, Republican leaders promised a robust “rapid response” effort to counter the narratives that would emerge.The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.But there has been no such pushback from the Republican National Committee or any other organization to revelations that Mr. Trump continued to pressure Mr. Pence to overturn the election results, even after having been told doing so was illegal.No Republican leader offered a response to the testimony of retired federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig, a revered conservative, who said on Thursday that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence an order whose execution would have prompted “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”None bothered to counter the panel’s finding, revealed on Monday, that Mr. Trump and his campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters based on the false pretense of massive election fraud, using money collected for an election defense fund that did not exist.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, has chosen not to engage on the issue at all. And to the extent that they are trying to counterprogram the hearings, House Republicans have been prodding voters to look elsewhere — to rising gas prices, inflation and migrants at the southern border.Only Mr. Trump seems particularly irritated by the exercise, appalled by the testimony of his daughter, who shared details of his abusive phone call with Mr. Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 and said she trusted Mr. Barr’s judgment when he said that the 2020 election was not stolen.“It’s a one-way street, it’s a rigged deal, it’s a disgrace,” a thoroughly unrepentant Mr. Trump said on Friday at a speech in Nashville in which he called Jan. 6 “a simple protest that got out of hand” as he continued spinning out false claims and grand conspiracy theories of election fraud.But if his allies in Republican leadership are not countering the message that the attack was fueled by lies, neither are they acknowledging that the election was not stolen.And 50 years to the day after henchmen of Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, the hearings sparked by the two scandals are highlighting just how dramatically the Republican Party has changed. Then, key Republican leaders reacted to increasingly damning revelations about their president by siding with the Democrats and forcing Mr. Nixon from power. Today, Republican leaders are either silent or contemptuous of the committee uncovering a steady stream of misdeeds by Mr. Trump.Representatives Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney, and Adam B. Schiff “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, wrote on Twitter, referring to the Democratic chairman from Mississippi, Republican vice chairwoman from Wyoming and Democratic member from California.Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting Jan. 6, said the hearings have so far been “a reminder of how deeply divided, even from an information consumption standpoint, we are.”Many of his constituents have not even seen the videotaped testimony laying out the case against Mr. Trump — only footage of police removing barricades to let rioters into the Capitol on Jan 6. Some blame nonexistent F.B.I. provocateurs for the violence, in line with a debunked conspiracy theory embraced by the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others on the right.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California and other Republican leaders held a news conference in the Capitol on Thursday to attack the committee’s work.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesMr. Meijer said he has heard far more from constituents on the right lamenting the “Jan. 6 political prisoners” than those in the center demanding accountability for the attack.Most voters, though, are not paying attention, said Representative David Valadao of California, another Republican to vote for impeachment.“Talking to voters at home right now — I mean, the fuel prices, food prices, baby formula, you name it,” Mr. Valadao said. “There’s just so many things that people are focused on right now that they’re just not paying attention to the Jan. 6 stuff as much as I know a lot of folks would want them to.”Asked if the hearings might do Republicans a favor by making it easier to find an alternative presidential nominee in 2024 than Mr. Trump, he responded: “I don’t know if enough people are paying attention where it’ll have that big of an impact.”But in a Republican primary season fueled by pro-Trump fervor, many candidates have emerged as their party’s nominees for top offices in large part because they campaigned on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.The Republican nominees for governor in Pennsylvania, secretary of state in Nevada, Senate in Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, and attorney general in Texas all tried to overturn the 2020 election or embraced false claims of voter fraud.Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican who won a House seat in a special election on Tuesday, has declined to say whether Mr. Biden won in 2020, telling The San Antonio Express-News: “I’m speaking just in general. There is voter fraud.”And there is more to come. State Representative Ron Hanks, vying to challenge Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, in Colorado’s Republican primary June 28, marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and launched his campaign with an ad showing him shooting a fake Dominion voting machine, a device central to a sprawling conspiracy theory about votes purportedly stolen by foreign powers from Mr. Trump.On Monday, the committee showed a videotaped deposition in which Mr. Barr at one point could barely suppress his laughter at the absurdity of such stories and testified that Mr. Trump would have had to be “detached from reality” if he believed them.In Michigan, a wild contest to choose the Republican to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is narrowly led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riot. Mr. Rocha, the state house candidate in Western Michigan, said voters were far more concerned about gas prices and empty store shelves than the Jan. 6 hearings, then offered that voters in fact are still very angry about “election integrity.”“They did it in 2020. Now they’re finding new avenues to remove Republicans from the ballot this year,” he said.In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made her “stolen election” claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6. And Blake Masters, who hopes to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, suggested baselessly that “one-third of the people outside of the Capitol complex on Jan. 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”Annie Karni More

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      What Watergate Highlights About the Jan. 6 Hearings

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      On the anniversary of the June 17, 1972, break-in, alumni of the hearings gather for a reunion. They had it easier than the Jan. 6 committee, they say.WASHINGTON — In the grandly marbled space of the Russell Senate Office Building known as the Kennedy Caucus Room, where a bipartisan select committee held nationally televised hearings to investigate the burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate a half-century ago, alumni of that inquiry gathered Friday evening to reminisce — and issue warnings.Their remarks, somber and theatrical as the room itself, were pitched to a present-day investigative body: the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.“Some things change, and some things remain the same,” said a host of the gathering, Rufus L. Edmisten, the deputy chief counsel for the Senate select committee that investigated Watergate. “What hasn’t changed between Watergate and Jan. 6 is how money has stolen our democracy.”The Watergate inquiry, a more than two-year combined effort on the part of both Senate and House committees, the special prosecutor’s office, a federal grand jury and the media, has been widely hailed as an investigatory gold standard and potential model for the Jan. 6 committee.It is seen as a triumph of assiduous digging and partisan-free statesmanship with made-for-Hollywood heroes: There was the heavy-jowled Senate Watergate Committee chairman, Sam Ervin of North Carolina; John Dean, President Richard M. Nixon’s former counsel, an owlish figure whose riveting testimony thoroughly implicated the president in covering up the Watergate break-in that took place in the small hours of June 17, 1972; and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the story and became household names.But the committee’s work today faces hurdles that the Watergate investigators did not.The present-day panel is racing the clock, attempting to uncover all that it can with the recognition that Republicans may win back the House majority and pull the plug on the committee’s endeavors come January. Nixon was defiant, but not at the level of former President Donald J. Trump. And truth was not up for debate in 1973.A screen above the Jan. 6 committee showing former President Donald J. Trump and his family during Thursday’s hearing.Doug Mills/The New York Times“What we investigated was understood to be substantive and real,” said Gordon Freedman, who served as a staffer on Mr. Ervin’s committee. “We now live in an era where the truth has been eroded as a standard.”Watergate investigators also had the benefit of the secret recordings made by Nixon in the Oval Office. By contrast, Mr. Trump did not tape his private conversations and he shredded White House documents while in office. Several of his former aides have defied subpoenas issued by the Jan. 6 committee, some justifying their intransigence through “executive privilege,” a phrase that entered the lexicon in the Nixon era. But none of Nixon’s top advisers invoked it and instead elected to testify before Mr. Ervin’s committee — a reflection of a Republican Party far different from the one today.“It took a lot of guts for seven Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and three conservative Southern Democrats to do the right thing and vote to impeach Nixon,” said Elizabeth Holtzman, who 50 years after being elected to Congress and serving on the House Judiciary Committee is running for Congress again. “They didn’t do it to agree with me. They did it because they followed the truth. And they did it, really, because the American public forced them to.”The Themes of the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsMaking a Case Against Trump: The committee appears to be laying out a road map for prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump. But the path to any trial is uncertain.Day One: During the first hearing, the panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Day Two: In its second hearing, the committee showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers in declaring victory prematurely and relentlessly pressing claims of fraud he was told were wrong.Day Three: Mr. Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing.Nixon of course did use executive privilege to avoid handing over what would prove to be some of the most damning taped conversations. Only after Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, prevailed in the Supreme Court did Nixon acquiesce, resulting in his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.Mr. Jaworski, I should note, was my grandfather. I was two weeks shy of 15 when he was appointed by Nixon on Nov. 1, 1973, after Archibald Cox was fired on Nixon’s orders in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.As my grandfather would later maintain in his Watergate memoir, Nixon’s resignation proved that “no one — absolutely no one — is above the law.” That assessment deserves some qualification, however.Nixon was never indicted or much less convicted of any Watergate-related crimes. Against the wishes of the federal grand jury empaneled in the wake of the burglary, my grandfather declined to bring criminal charges against the president, and later signaled to the Ford administration that he would not challenge a presidential pardon.Nixon’s fate was an ignominious one, my grandfather insisted, saying, “A pardon isn’t just a beautiful document to frame and hand-hang on the wall.”Still, Nixon was free to write a best-selling memoir and to remain something of a Republican grandee all the way up to his death nearly two decades after he resigned in disgrace. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, remains the most influential member of his party after two impeachments and an electoral defeat he contests to this day.Despite the efforts of my grandfather and his investigators, and those of the media and Watergate committees, basic questions about the scandal remain unanswered. It is still unclear what, if any, advance knowledge Nixon had of the break-in. Though the president is on tape approving hush money payments to the defendants, it remains unknown whether he personally played a role in raising the funds. For that matter, the degree to which H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, and Attorney General John Mitchell directed illegal activities on a day-to-day basis has not come to light.Such questions, of course, are analogous to those currently faced by the Jan. 6 committee.Richard Ben-Veniste, one of my grandfather’s top deputies who was at the reunion, said he was asked by the Jan. 6 committee to offer advice. “Jan. 6 was the Saturday Night Massacre on steroids,” he said. “It was far more dangerous than what we thought was unthinkable: the appearance of a coup d’état when raw power replaced the rule of law. Nixon, for all his criminality and authoritarian sensibilities, possessed a sense of shame.”The continuum that stretches from Watergate to the present features a few ironies. During and after the Nixon scandals, congressional checks on executive power were enacted, including the War Powers Act of 1973 and modifications to the Federal Election Campaign Act. Those legislative initiatives led to charges of overreach and a counter-movement by some Republicans who wanted to restore power to the executive branch.One of them, a former Nixon White House aide named Dick Cheney, was elected to Congress four years after Nixon’s resignation. Mr. Cheney, of course, was vice president during the George W. Bush administration and his daughter, Liz Cheney, is the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee who has sharply criticized Mr. Trump as an abuser of executive power.An additional irony following Nixon’s secretive presidency was the push for greater transparency in government: more sunlight, less smoke-filled rooms. But that effort has not necessarily translated into more efficient governance. To take a recent example, House conservatives led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia freshman who was born three months before Nixon’s resignation, have used the virtue of legislative transparency as an argument for slowing the House Democrats’ agenda by insisting on roll call votes for everything on the legislative calendar.At the reunion, Representative Deborah Ross, a North Carolina Democrat, was mingling among the guests as she recalled listening to the Senate Watergate hearings at the age of 10 while driving cross-country in her family’s station wagon. Noting the coincidence of the Watergate anniversary taking place in the middle of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, Ms. Ross said that “the obvious thing the two scandals had in common was that we’re talking about two men who wanted to hang onto power no matter what. The irony is that Nixon would have won in 1972 anyway, if he hadn’t been so paranoid about the Democrats.”“And if not for the tapes!” chimed in Judi Dash, whose late father, Sam Dash, served as the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee.Two former members of the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, Jill Wine-Banks and George Frampton, were at the reunion discussing the work of the Jan. 6 committee over cocktails. “I was very skeptical at first about the committee only televising six or eight hearings,” Ms. Wine-Banks said. “But I think they’ve done an excellent job, even without having the narrator we had, John Dean.”Turning to Mr. Frampton, she said, “For all that Nixon did, I’m not sure I ever felt democracy was in danger like it is now. Did you?”“Oh, certainly a little bit,” Frampton said. More

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      How the Proud Boys Breached the Capitol on Jan. 6: Rile Up the Normies

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      Using evidence that’s hidden in plain sight, our investigative journalists present a definitive account of the news — from the Las Vegas massacre to a chemical attack in Syria.Using evidence that’s hidden in plain sight, our investigative journalists present a definitive account of the news — from the Las Vegas massacre to a chemical attack in Syria. More