Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Jan. 6 Panel Examining Trump’s Role in Proposals to Seize Voting Machines

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      The House committee is looking into efforts by the former president’s outside advisers to create a legal basis for national security agencies to help reverse his defeat in 2020.WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee is scrutinizing former President Donald J. Trump’s involvement in proposals to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, including efforts to create a legal basis for directing national security agencies to take such an extreme action, according to three people with knowledge of the committee’s activities.It is not clear what evidence the committee is examining as it looks at any role Mr. Trump might have played in encouraging or facilitating the drafting of a so-called national security finding, a type of document more typically used as the basis for a presidential order to an intelligence agency to take covert action. But the committee recently received documents from the Trump White House including what court filings described as a “document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions,” along with related notes.A document fitting that description circulated among Mr. Trump’s formal and informal advisers in the weeks following the election. It reflected baseless assertions about foreign interference in American voting systems that had been promoted most prominently by one of his outside lawyers, Sidney Powell.That document, dated Dec. 16, 2020, and titled “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election,” was published last month by Politico. It used the groundless assertions about foreign interference in the vote tally to conclude that Mr. Trump had “probable cause” to direct the military to begin seizing voting machines.“We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.”The New York Times reported on Monday that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals championed by outside advisers to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.Those attempts included directing his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states — Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the acting deputy secretary, said no — and raising with Attorney General William P. Barr the question of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a query that Mr. Barr rejected, according to people familiar with the episodes.Mr. Cuccinelli, who had told Mr. Giuliani that the Homeland Security Department did not have the authority to audit or impound the machines, later encountered Mr. Trump at a meeting on another topic. Mr. Trump again raised with him, in passing, the idea of the department seizing the machines, and Mr. Cuccinelli reiterated that there was no legal authority for doing so, according to a person familiar with the exchange.The outside advisers had earlier pushed a plan under which Mr. Trump would direct the Pentagon to seize the voting machines, an idea that was killed by White House officials and Mr. Giuliani.“It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and a member of the committee.The panel for weeks has been studying the actions of Michael T. Flynn, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump who investigators say was involved in discussions about seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers, including during a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18.Mr. Flynn also gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax a day earlier in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.At the Dec. 18 meeting, Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, said he, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell decided they would get into the White House without an appointment “by hook or by crook” to present their plans to Mr. Trump. He said a junior staffer let them in the building, and eventually they got close enough to the Oval Office that Mr. Trump saw them and called them in.Once inside, the group pitched Mr. Trump on their plans for him to sign an executive order for the National Guard to take control of voting machines and for Ms. Powell to be appointed a special counsel overseeing election integrity.“We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas,” Mr. Byrne wrote of the episode in a book, referring to portions of contested swing states that Mr. Trump had lost.Mr. Byrne wrote that Mr. Flynn had drafted a “beautiful operational plan” that just needed “one signature from the president.” He described various versions of the plan, including an option for the U.S. Marshals to intervene and another for Mr. Trump to “have the National Guard rerun the elections in those six states.”He described White House lawyers and officials as fighting the plans in the meeting, including the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, who thundered, “He does not have the authority to do this!”Representative Jaime Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said the panel is trying to understand the “whole picture” of the plan to seize voting machines and how it relates to other efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power, such as the former president’s pressure campaign on Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states won by President Biden.“His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend,” Mr. Raskin said of Mr. Trump. “He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.”Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said outsider advisers’ proposals to Mr. Trump to use federal agencies to seize voting machines were “the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMr. Raskin added: “It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.”The extraordinary plan to mobilize the country’s national security agencies to take control of voting machines required an equally extraordinary first step. Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who was an ally of Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell, revealed in a podcast interview last year that the gambit initially hinged on a report about foreign interference in the election that John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence at the time, was bound by congressional mandate to present to lawmakers by Dec. 18, 2020.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      Former Pence Chief of Staff Has Testified to the Jan. 6 Committee

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      Marc Short, who has firsthand knowledge of former President Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign on his vice president to throw out the election results, appeared under subpoena.WASHINGTON — Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, testified privately last week before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the latest turn in weeks of negotiations between the panel’s investigators and Mr. Pence’s team.Mr. Short appeared in response to a subpoena from the committee, according to three people with knowledge of the developments, making him the most senior person around Mr. Pence who is known to have cooperated in the inquiry.Investigators believe that participation by the former vice president and his inner circle is critical, because Mr. Pence resisted a pressure campaign by former President Donald J. Trump to use his role in presiding over Congress’s official count of electoral votes to try to overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Short was with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol, and has firsthand knowledge of the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to persuade the former vice president to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in favor of fake slates of pro-Trump electors.The people spoke on condition of anonymity about Mr. Short’s testimony, which was earlier reported by CNN.Investigators have been in high-stakes negotiations for months with Mr. Pence’s team about whether he would cooperate with the inquiry. In recent weeks, they have sought the cooperation of Mr. Short and Greg Jacob, Mr. Pence’s former lawyer.Mr. Short and Mr. Jacob were both closely involved in Mr. Pence’s consideration of whether to go along with Mr. Trump’s insistence that he try to block the official count of Electoral College results by a joint session of Congress. Three days before the proceeding, the two men met with John Eastman, a lawyer then advising Mr. Trump, about a memo Mr. Eastman had written setting out a case for why Mr. Pence had the power to hold off the certification.As a mob was attacking the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Eastman sent a hostile email to Mr. Jacob, blaming Mr. Pence for the violence.“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened,” the lawyer, Mr. Eastman, wrote to Mr. Jacob.Mr. Eastman has since invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to defy the committee’s subpoena.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 19The House investigation. More

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      The Democrats’ Use of Dark Money: Is It Hypocritical?

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      More from our inbox:Trump’s Big ‘If’Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Taking Cancel Culture Too FarEpilepsy and LEDs  Mark HarrisTo the Editor:“Denouncing Dark Money, Then Deploying It in 2020” (front page, Jan. 30) is one of many examples of attempts to gin up controversy over Democrats’ understandable reaction to Republican fund-raising operations.The piece details, at length, the many “dark money” activities of both Democrats and Republicans, while characterizing the Democrats’ behavior as exposing “the stark tension between their efforts to win elections and their commitment to curtail secretive political spending by the superrich.”Really? Is it valid to negatively judge Democrats for being forced to use dark money to level the playing field after Republicans’ long history of influencing elections with dark money? Dark money shouldn’t be legal, but it is. Until that changes Democrats can’t be held to a higher standard that puts their candidates at a serious disadvantage to Republicans.Gail M. BartlettChicagoTo the Editor:While your front-page story provided a great analysis of “dark money” spending in the 2020 election, it did not highlight who is working for and against regulation and transparency in campaign spending.For the past three years, my organization has been part of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition, working to pass the For the People Act. This legislation will reduce the influence of money in politics and create more robust ethics rules for elected officials.Almost every House and Senate Democrat has endorsed this legislation, and it has broad support from Democratic, independent and Republican voters. Conversely, every Republican member of Congress has voted against these bills when they’ve come up for a vote.I encourage all of us, when writing about subjects that significantly shape our elections, to think about who is working for the people and who is standing in the way of change.Alex MorganChicagoThe writer is executive director of the Progressive Turnout Project.To the Editor:While it would be healthy for the nation to regulate or eliminate dark money, I cannot criticize Democratic large donors for preserving their anonymity. There was a fair chance that Donald Trump, the most vengeful president in my time and probably in the nation’s history, was going to be re-elected. He has an enemies list a mile long, and I don’t envy anyone on it.Many of his supporters and fellow Republicans have been acting in like fashion. Respect for one’s opponents or their donors is a remnant of the past.George UbogySarasota, Fla.Trump’s Big ‘If’“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” former President Donald J. Trump said at a speech on Saturday in Conroe, Texas.Meridith Kohut for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Suggests He May Pardon Jan. 6 Rioters if He Has Another Term” (news article, Jan. 31):Former President Donald Trump said at a political rally on Saturday night that if he wins the White House back, he may pardon people sentenced for the Capitol riot. He said they “are being treated so unfairly.”These words are important on three levels. First, he’s seriously thinking about running in 2024. Second, stunningly, he would actually consider pardoning convicted insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.But most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that he said, “If I run and I win.” This man with a monstrous ego and narcissism said “if”! Who knew that word was even in his vocabulary?It’s telling as he consciously and steadfastly remains to this day true to his “Big Lie” that he actually won the 2020 election. His “if” he wins in 2024 suggests that he knows, at least subconsciously, that he truly lost in 2020 and could do so again, if he runs in 2024.When Mr. Trump rambles on long enough, the truth sometimes spills out, as it seems to have at this rally. Our truth is that it is incumbent on all of us who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 to not allow Donald Trump to ever disgrace the office of the presidency again!Ken DerowSwarthmore, Pa.Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Taking Cancel Culture Too FarJoni Mitchell was honored by the Kennedy Center last year.Pool photo by Ron Sachs/EPA, via ShutterstockDarren Hauck/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Joni Mitchell Plans to Follow Neil Young Off Spotify, Citing ‘Lies’” (Daily Arts Briefing, nytimes.com, Jan. 28):So Joni Mitchell and Neil Young don’t want their music played on Spotify because it also carries “The Joe Rogan Experience.” Am I now supposed to follow their example and cancel my cable TV subscription because Spectrum carries Fox News, an even greater source of misinformation?Once in a while, the radical right has a legitimate point about “cancel culture” going too far, and this is one of them.Lawrence PeitzmanStudio City, Calif.Epilepsy and LEDsDeborah Turner of Columbus, Ohio, found that her local dollar stores didn’t stock LED bulbs, which could have saved her hundreds of dollars in electricity bills.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:“Obsolete Bulbs Fill the Shelves at Dollar Stores” (front page, Jan. 24) ignores a critical problem with LED lighting: It’s making many people seriously ill. I am one. I have epilepsy, and even the briefest glimpse of an LED light instantly throws me into a seizure. It’s incredibly dangerous for me to be anywhere near LEDs.LED-triggered seizures have left me with broken teeth, bruises and excruciating pain that lingers for days. I need to be able to buy incandescent bulbs. I can’t enter LED-lit stores, doctor’s offices, hospitals or civic buildings. How am I supposed to live if no one can purchase incandescent light bulbs?Super-efficient incandescent bulbs were developed but put aside by the industry in favor of LEDs. For the tens of thousands of Americans with light-reactive conditions, having access to incandescent bulbs is no mere “consumer choice”; it is a medical necessity.MarieAnn CherryCambridge, N.Y. More

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      Trump Says He Would Consider Pardons for Jan. 6 Defendants if Elected

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      In a Texas speech, the former president also urged supporters to stage protests if prosecutors in Atlanta and New York take action against him.CONROE, Texas — Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that if elected to a new term as president, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for attacking the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year.He also called on his supporters to mount large protests in Atlanta and New York if prosecutors in those cities, who are investigating him and his businesses, take action against him. The promise to consider pardons is the furthest Mr. Trump has gone in expressing support for the Jan. 6 defendants.“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said, addressing a crowd at a fairground in Conroe, Texas, outside Houston, that appeared to number in the tens of thousands. “We will treat them fairly,” he repeated. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.”At least 700 people have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, including 11 who have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Some have said they believed they were doing Mr. Trump’s bidding.As president, Mr. Trump pardoned a number of his supporters and former aides, including Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., and Stephen K. Bannon, his onetime campaign manager, who was charged with defrauding donors to a privately funded effort to build a wall along the Mexican border.In his Saturday speech, Mr. Trump took aim at the New York State attorney general and the Manhattan district attorney, both of whom have been investigating his businesses for possible fraud, and at the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who is empaneling a special grand jury to investigate Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state.He urged his supporters to organize large protests in New York and Atlanta, as well as in Washington, if those investigations lead to action against him.“If these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or corrupt, we are going to have in this country the biggest protests we have ever had,” he said.The event in Conroe drew Trump supporters from across Texas and as far away as New Jersey and Washington State, some of whom had camped out at the fairground for several days. For much of Saturday, a festive atmosphere prevailed, with billowing flags and omnipresent T-shirts declaring “Trump 2024.” As his speech stretched on past an hour, Mr. Trump’s rhetoric grew more pointed, and his attacks on the news media more belabored. “The press is the enemy of the people,” he said, prompting angry boos, adding: “The corrupt media will destroy our country.” More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Fake Trump Electors

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      The panel demanded information from 14 people who were part of bogus slates of electors for President Donald J. Trump, digging deeper into an aspect of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack issued 14 subpoenas on Friday to people who falsely claimed to be electors for President Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., digging deeper into Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results.The subpoenas target individuals who met and submitted false Electoral College certificates in seven states won by President Biden: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“The select committee is seeking information about attempts in multiple states to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including the planning and coordination of efforts to send false slates of electors to the National Archives,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “We believe the individuals we have subpoenaed today have information about how these so-called alternate electors met and who was behind that scheme.”The so-called alternate electors met on Dec. 14, 2020, in seven states that Mr. Trump lost and submitted bogus slates of Electoral-College votes for him, the committee said. They then sent the false Electoral College certificates to Congress, an action Mr. Trump’s allies used to try to justify delaying or blocking the final step in confirming the 2020 election results — a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, to formally count the electoral votes.The 14 individuals subpoenaed on Friday were: Nancy Cottle and Loraine B. Pellegrino of Arizona; David Shafer and Shawn Still of Georgia; Kathy Berden and Mayra Rodriguez of Michigan; Jewll Powdrell and Deborah W. Maestas of New Mexico; Michael J. McDonald and James DeGraffenreid of Nevada; Bill Bachenberg and Lisa Patton of Pennsylvania; and Andrew Hitt and Kelly Ruh of Wisconsin.The subpoenas order the witnesses, all of whom claimed to be either a chair or secretary of the fake elector slates, to turn over documents and sit for depositions in February.Those who signed onto the fake slates of electors were mostly state-level officials in the Republican Party, G.O.P. political candidates or party activists involved with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. None of those who were subpoenaed responded on Friday to requests for comment.On Friday, the committee also issued a subpoena to Judd Deere, a former White House spokesman who interacted with Mr. Trump the day before the Capitol riot in a meeting in which Mr. Trump asked how to get Republicans in Congress he described as “weak” to overturn the election, according to a person familiar with the panel’s activities. That subpoena was reported earlier by CNN.The committee’s latest subpoenas came as the Justice Department said this week it was investigating the fake electors.The scheme to employ the so-called alternate electors was one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive efforts to overturn the election, beginning even before some states had finished counting ballots and culminating in the pressure placed on Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the joint congressional session. At various times, the gambit involved lawyers, state lawmakers and top White House aides.As early as Nov. 4, Mark Meadows, then Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, received a message from an unidentified Republican lawmaker proposing an “aggressive strategy” to maintain his grip on power. According to the strategy, Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania would “just send their own electors” to the Electoral College instead of those chosen by voters to represent Mr. Biden.Within a month, two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, spoke to Republican lawmakers in swing states like Michigan and Arizona, urging them to convene special sessions to choose their own electors.Around the same time, John Eastman, another lawyer who would ultimately work for Mr. Trump, spoke by video to lawmakers in Georgia, advising them to “adopt a slate of electors yourself.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      To Hell and Back, Then to CNN

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      Once an ordinary citizen stumbles into the culture war, it can be hard to get back out. Just ask Michael Fanone.Michael Fanone seemed very out of place. It was the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and CNN was commemorating the occasion with blanket coverage. A year earlier, Fanone was a 40-year-old Metropolitan Police Department (M.P.D.) officer trying to hold off an angry mob outside the United States Capitol. The rioters pulled him from a tunnel and down a set of steps, pummeled him with their fists and their feet and even the staff of an American flag and tased him numerous times; in the melee, he suffered both a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury. Now Fanone was outside the Capitol again, on the set of CNN’s “New Day” morning show, sitting next to its hosts, John Berman and Brianna Keilar. He wore faded jeans and a red-and-black plaid parka, in stark contrast to Berman’s and Keilar’s news-anchor attire. With his heavy beard and a turtleneck of tattoos peeking out from underneath his collar, he looked like some sort of punk lumberjack. He sounded like one too. When Keilar asked him to share some of the conversations he was having with police officers as the anniversary approached, Fanone acidly noted that the U.S. Capitol Police “have to walk the same halls as some of these insurrectionist members of Congress,” before adding, “I couldn’t imagine sharing a work space with those jackasses.”The good news for Fanone is he doesn’t have to. Despite the incongruity of his wardrobe and words, the cable-news set was now his work space, Berman and Keilar his colleagues. In late December, Fanone resigned from the M.P.D., after nearly 20 years on the force, and took a job as an on-air commentator on law-enforcement issues at CNN. In a way, the move only formalized a pre-existing relationship. A week after the storming of the Capitol, while still recovering from his injuries, Fanone gave interviews to CNN and a host of other news outlets, recounting the horrors of the event in vivid terms that spared no detail or person. (Addressing the handful of people in the mob who came to his aid that day, he told CNN, “Thank you, but [expletive] you for being there.”) He became a media star and, inevitably, a political star as well. In July, Fanone testified in front of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful,” he shouted, slamming his hand on the table. That evening, he appeared on Don Lemon’s CNN show to play a racist and homophobic voice mail message a Trump supporter left him. “This is what happens to people that tell the truth in Trump’s America,” he said. That Fanone himself was a self-described “redneck American” who voted for Trump in 2016 gave his words an added weight.They didn’t switch sides in the political battle so much as they simply stumbled into it.Apostates are rarely lonely in American politics. When a political figure switches sides — Whittaker Chambers naming Communist names and becoming a celebrated conservative intellectual, David Brock renouncing the vast right-wing conspiracy and starting liberal nonprofits — the drama of the act itself can earn more attention, and more followers, than if the person had started on that side to begin with. But in recent years, the act of apostasy has been defined down. Alexander Vindman, a by-the-book U.S. Army lieutenant colonel serving on Trump’s National Security Council, became a blue-state hero for having the temerity to suggest that it was improper of Trump to threaten to withhold U.S. military assistance to Ukraine unless it investigated Joe Biden. Nicholas Sandmann, a Kentucky teenager on a high-school field trip to Washington, became a conservative cause célèbre when a video of his encounter with a Native American political activist on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was misconstrued, in initial press reports, as a racist confrontation. Unlike Chambers or Brock, Vindman and Sandmann didn’t switch sides in the political battle so much as they simply stumbled into it — noncombatants who were drafted into the culture war. Once conscripted, though, each capitalized on his new status by parlaying it into political and media work. Sandmann landed a job with Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign and was given a prime-time speaking spot at the Republican National Convention. He’s now a frequent guest on Fox News, most recently showing up on Sean Hannity’s show to offer advice to Kyle Rittenhouse after his acquittal on murder charges in November. Vindman, meanwhile, wrote a book, “Here, Right Matters” — the title comes from a line in his testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearings — and even made a cameo on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” It’s not surprising that Fanone would follow the same path. He may have had little alternative. The flip side of apostasy, of course, is the enmity it earns you from your old comrades. Fanone’s outspokenness rapidly made him a target for conservative media figures: Greg Kelly of Newsmax dubbed him “that drama queen of a cop,” while Laura Ingraham of Fox mockingly awarded him a “best performance in an action role” trophy for his House testimony. Even worse, he became a target for his fellow law-enforcement officers. When he had recovered enough to return to the force in September, he has said, officers in his old district greeted him with taunts or simply shunned him; he now counts only two current Washington police officers as friends. “I had convinced myself, Mike, you’re vocalizing the opinions of thousands and thousands of police officers,” he later lamented to the Time correspondent Molly Ball. “But I’m starting to think I’m vocalizing the beliefs of just one.” In joining CNN, Fanone is merely going where he is wanted.Fanone has said that one reason he is so outspoken is he does not want anyone to whitewash, or to forget, what happened on Jan. 6. But that has trapped him in a “Groundhog Day”-like existence. In another appearance during CNN’s anniversary coverage, Fanone stood with Don Lemon in the Capitol tunnel from which rioters pulled him one year earlier. In an “exclusive” interview, he haltingly recalled how “it was like a war zone.” He went on: “It was just littered with weapons and debris, CS gas, residual gas just kind of floating in the air created this mist or haze. It was surreal.” Left unsaid was the surreality of Fanone’s having to relive the worst day of his life, yet again, for CNN’s cameras.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Madison Cawthorn Challenge Raises the Question: Who Is an ‘Insurrectionist’?

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      The challenge to Representative Madison Cawthorn’s re-election bid could set a precedent to challenge other Republicans who encouraged the Jan. 6 attack.WASHINGTON — A group of lawyers is working to disqualify from the ballot a right-wing House Republican who cheered on the Jan. 6 rioters unless he can prove he is not an “insurrectionist,” disqualified by the Constitution from holding office, in a case with implications for other officeholders and potentially former President Donald J. Trump.The novel challenge to the re-election bid of Representative Madison Cawthorn, one of the House’s brashest supporters of Mr. Trump and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, could set a precedent to challenge other Republicans who swore to uphold the Constitution, then encouraged the attack.While the House committee investigating the assault on the Capitol has so far been unsuccessful in its effort to force key members of Congress to cooperate with the inquiry, the North Carolina case has already prompted a legal discussion — one that is likely to land in court — about what constitutes an insurrection, and who is an insurrectionist.And for the first time, a lawmaker who embraced the rioters may have to answer for his actions in a court of law.“I don’t think we can have those persons who have engaged in acts of insurrection elected to office and serving in office in violation of their constitutional duties and oath,” said John R. Wallace, one of the lawyers on the case and a campaign finance and election law expert in Raleigh, N.C. He added, “It should not be difficult to prove you are not an insurrectionist. It only seems to be difficult for Madison Cawthorn.”Cases challenging the legitimacy of a candidate before election boards usually hinge on a candidate’s age, legal residency, place of birth or citizenship status, or the legitimacy of signatures in a candidacy petition.This case revolves around the little-known third section of the 14th Amendment, adopted during Reconstruction to punish members of the Confederacy who were streaming back to Washington to reclaim their elective offices — and infuriating unionist Republicans.That section declares that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath” to “support the Constitution,” had then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Mr. Cawthorn, 26, who is in his first term in Congress, has denounced the case as an egregious misreading of the 14th Amendment, but he has retained James Bopp Jr., one of the most prominent conservative campaign lawyers in the country, as counsel.Mr. Bopp, in an interview, declared the matter “the most frivolous case I’ve ever seen,” but allowed that what he called an “unethical” exploitation of North Carolina law by “competent” lawyers could pose a real threat to Mr. Cawthorn — and by extension, to others labeled “insurrectionists” by liberal lawyers.“This is the real threat to our democracy,” he said. “Just by bringing the complaint, they might jeopardize a member of Congress running for re-election.”“They have multiple targets,” he added. “It just so happens that Madison Cawthorn is the tip of the spear.”That is because North Carolina’s election statute offers challengers a remarkably low bar to question a candidate’s constitutional qualifications for office. Once someone establishes a “reasonable suspicion or belief” that a candidate is not qualified, the burden shifts to the officeseeker to prove otherwise.If Mr. Cawthorn is labeled an “insurrectionist,” that could have broader ramifications. Other Republican House members, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Paul Gosar of Arizona, and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, face similar accusations, but their state’s election laws present higher hurdles for challenges to their candidate qualifications. If one of their colleagues is disqualified for his role in encouraging the rioters, those hurdles might become easier to clear.The lawyers challenging Mr. Cawthorn’s eligibility are using an amendment last invoked in 1920, when Representative Victor L. Berger, an Austrian-American socialist, was denied his seat representing Wisconsin after criticizing American involvement in World War I.If nothing else, the lawyers, including two former justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court, want to depose Mr. Cawthorn as part of discovery to question his actions before, during and after the attack on the Capitol.“There is, of course, much that we don’t know, and the statute allows discovery by deposition and the production of records,” Mr. Wallace said.There is much that is known. Whether it makes Mr. Cawthorn an “insurrectionist” would have to be determined by North Carolina’s Board of Elections, or more likely, by the state’s courts, where the board might punt the matter.Weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Cawthorn told a conservative gathering to “call your congressman” to protest the results, adding, “you can lightly threaten them.” He promoted the “Save America” rally behind the White House on Jan. 6, writing on Twitter, “the future of this Republic hinges on the actions of a solitary few,” then adding “It’s time to fight.” At the rally, he riled the crowd from the stage with talk of election “fraud.”He later called those jailed for storming the Capitol “political hostages” and “political prisoners” that he would like to “bust” out of prison.A mob rushing the Capitol on Jan. 6 were met with tear gas.Kenny Holston for The New York Times“The Second Amendment was not written so that we can go hunting or shoot sporting clays. The Second Amendment was written so that we can fight against tyranny,” he would later say in Franklin, N.C. He added, “If our election systems continue to be rigged, and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and it’s bloodshed.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 17The House investigation. More

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      Justice Dept. Is Reviewing Role of Fake Trump Electors, Top Official Says

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      Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, told CNN that she could not “say anything more on ongoing investigations.”WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating the fake slates of electors that falsely declared Donald J. Trump the victor of the 2020 election in seven swing states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had in fact won, a top agency official said on Tuesday.“Our prosecutors are looking at those, and I can’t say anything more on ongoing investigations,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said in an interview with CNN.The false certificates appear to have been part of an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to reverse his defeat in the presidential election. Even as election officials in the seven contested states sent official lists of electors who had voted for Mr. Biden to the Electoral College, the fake slates claimed Mr. Trump was the winner in an apparent bid to subvert the election outcome.Lawmakers, state officials and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot have asked the Justice Department to look into the role played by those fake electors and the documents they submitted to the National Archives on Dec. 14, 2020.In some cases, top Republican Party officials in those seven states signed the false documents, according to copies posted online last March by American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group.“The phony electors were part of the plan to create chaos on Jan. 6, as a pretext for a contingent election,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee.“The fake electoral slates were an effort to create the illusion of contested state results,” Mr. Raskin said. That, he added, would have given Mike Pence, who as vice president presided over Congress’s count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, “a pretext for unilateral rejection of electors.”In Michigan, Dana Nessel, the attorney general, gave federal prosecutors information from her yearlong investigation into the matter. She has said that she believes there is enough evidence to charge 16 Republicans in her state with submitting the fake certificates and falsely claiming that they were official electors for the state.And Hector Balderas Jr., the attorney general of New Mexico, and a local prosecutor in Wisconsin also asked the Justice Department to review the matter.If investigators determine that Mr. Trump’s allies created the fake slates to improperly influence the election, they could in theory be charged with falsifying voting documents, mail fraud or even a conspiracy to defraud the United States.It is unclear whether the Republican Party officials and others who submitted the false documents did so on their own or at the behest of the Trump campaign.“The people who pretended to be official electors in states that were won by Biden were undoubtedly guilty of fraud on the Constitution and on the democracy,” Mr. Raskin said. “It’s a trickier question whether they are guilty of either common-law fraud, state statutory fraud, federal mail fraud or some other offense.”Luke Broadwater More