Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Rudy Giuliani and 3 Others Subpoenaed by Jan. 6 Committee

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      The House committee investigating the Capitol riot called for documents and testimony from Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday subpoenaed Rudolph W. Giuliani and other members of the legal team that pursued a set of conspiracy-filled lawsuits on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump in which they made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.In addition to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and a ringleader of the group, the panel subpoenaed three others who played central roles in his effort to use the courts, state legislatures and Congress to try to overturn his defeat.Jenna Ellis drafted a memo on how Mr. Trump could invalidate the election results by exploiting an obscure law. Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked on many of the lawsuits with Mr. Giuliani, ran an organization that raised millions of dollars based on false claims that election machines were rigged. Boris Epshteyn pursued allegations of election fraud in Nevada and Arizona and is said to have participated in a call with Mr. Trump on the morning of Jan. 6, “during which options were discussed to delay the certification of election results,” the committee said.“The four individuals we’ve subpoenaed today advanced unsupported theories about election fraud, pushed efforts to overturn the election results or were in direct contact with the former president about attempts to stop the counting of electoral votes,” Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement.The subpoena to Mr. Giuliani, obtained by The New York Times, seeks all documents he has detailing the pressure campaign he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials; the seizure of voting machines; contact with members of Congress; any evidence to support the bizarre conspiracy theories pushed; and any arrangements for his attorney’s fees.The panel instructed the four witnesses to turn over documents and submit to an interview in February.The latest subpoenas came as the committee, which has interviewed nearly 400 witnesses, has issued a wide range of demands for records, including to banks and phone companies. On Tuesday, CNN reported that the committee had also obtained logs of phone calls and text messages belonging to the former president’s son Eric Trump and to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of another son, Donald Trump Jr. The logs do not reveal the content of the messages.A committee spokesman declined to comment on that report.For weeks after the election, Mr. Giuliani and his team — which Ms. Ellis described as an “elite strike force” — promoted baseless claims of voter fraud through failed lawsuits, news conferences, media appearances and meetings with lawmakers.The committee said in a letter to Mr. Giuliani that its investigation had revealed “credible evidence” that he participated in attempts to “disrupt or delay the certification of the election results,” persuade state legislators to “take steps to overturn the election results” and urge Mr. Trump to order the seizure of voting machines.Mr. Giuliani claimed fraud at a series of unofficial state legislative hearings, and even argued one election fraud case himself, in federal court in Philadelphia, where he suffered a decisive defeat.“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” the court declared at one point.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, as the building was under siege, he called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.“Senator Tuberville, or I should say Coach Tuberville, this is Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer,” Mr. Giuliani said in a voice mail message intended for Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, but mistakenly left on the phone of Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. “I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down.”Ms. Ellis, the committee said, “prepared and circulated” two memos analyzing the constitutional authority for former Vice President Mike Pence to reject or delay counting electoral votes from states where Mr. Trump’s allies had attempted to arrange for the submission of an alternate slate of electors. In the memos, obtained by Politico, Ms. Ellis advised that Mr. Pence had the authority to not count electoral votes from six states in which the Trump campaign falsely alleged there was widespread fraud.Ms. Powell was among the leading promoters of some of the most far-fetched and fantastical claims of widespread voter fraud, including a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging a vast plot by China, Venezuela and the financier George Soros to hack into Dominion Voting Systems machines to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.She, too, urged Mr. Trump to seize voting machines, according to the committee.In December, Mr. Trump considered naming Ms. Powell to be a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, even after his campaign had sought to distance itself from her as she aired wild and baseless claims about Dominion voting machines.Her organization, Defending the Republic, raised $14.9 million between December 2020 and July. Ms. Powell’s group has more than $9.3 million in funds on hand, according to an independent audit filed with Florida, which investigated the organization and alleged multiple violations of state law.Mr. Epshteyn reportedly attended planning meetings at the Willard Hotel in the days leading up to Jan. 6, the committee said. The panel, citing reporting from The Guardian, said he also participated in a call with Mr. Trump the morning of Jan. 6 that included a discussion of Mr. Pence’s “unwillingness to deny or delay the certification.”Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 14The House investigation. More

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      Jan. 6 Committee Subpoenas Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit

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      The panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is demanding information from Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism. The committee said it had been investigating how the companies “contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps — if any — social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence.”“It’s disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions,” said the panel’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.After months of discussions with the companies, only the four large corporations were issued subpoenas on Thursday, because the committee said the firms were “unwilling to commit to voluntarily and expeditiously” cooperating with its work. A committee aide said investigators were in various stages of negotiations with the other companies.In the year since the events of Jan. 6, social media companies have been heavily scrutinized for whether their sites played an instrumental role in organizing the attack.In the months surrounding the 2020 election, employees inside Meta raised warning signs that Facebook posts and comments containing “combustible election misinformation” were spreading quickly across the social network, according to a cache of documents and photos reviewed by The New York Times. Many of those employees criticized Facebook leadership’s inaction when it came to the spread of the QAnon conspiracy group, which they said also contributed to the attack.Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, said the company relaxed its safeguards too quickly after the election, which then led it to be used in the storming of the Capitol.Critics say that other platforms also played an instrumental role in the spread of misinformation while contributing to the events of Jan. 6.In the days after the attack, Reddit banned a discussion forum dedicated to former President Donald J. Trump, where tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s supporters regularly convened to express solidarity with him.On Twitter, many of Mr. Trump’s followers used the site to amplify and spread false allegations of election fraud, while connecting with other Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists using the site. And on YouTube, some users broadcast the events of Jan. 6 using the platform’s video streaming technology.Representatives for the tech companies have been in discussions with the investigating committee, though how much in the way of evidence or user records the firms have handed over remains unclear.The committee said letters to the four firms accompanied the subpoenas.The panel said YouTube served as a platform for “significant communications by its users that were relevant to the planning and execution of Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol,” including livestreams of the attack as it was taking place.“To this day, YouTube is a platform on which user video spread misinformation about the election,” Mr. Thompson wrote.The panel said Facebook and other Metaplatforms were used to share messages of “hate, violence and incitement; to spread misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories around the election; and to coordinate or attempt to coordinate the Stop the Steal movement.”Public accounts about Facebook’s civic integrity team indicate that Facebook has documents that are critical to the select committee’s investigation, the panel said.“Meta has declined to commit to a deadline for producing or even identifying these materials,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More

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      We Need to Think the Unthinkable About Our Country

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      A year after the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, the United States seems perhaps even more alarmingly fractious and divided. Regrettably, the right has sustained its support for Donald Trump and continued its assault on American democratic norms.The next national election will almost inevitably be viciously (perhaps violently) contested. It is fair to say that the right-wing threat to the United States — and its apparent goal of laying the groundwork for a power grab, if necessary, in 2024 — is politically existential.Yet many Americans seem to be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. In particular, there seems to have been little effort so far at think tanks, professional military institutions and universities to build and contemplate the dire scenarios that have become increasingly plausible. And the worst-case scenario is this: The United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.The worst case isn’t necessarily the most likely, but there’s a natural tendency to assign a vanishingly low probability to events that appear to pose insoluble problems and catastrophic outcomes and thus to dismiss them as fanciful.In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off nuclear Armageddon. Herman Kahn’s clinical projections of nuclear devastation dazzled and horrified a growing audience — his warnings began with a series of Princeton lectures and eventually became the basis of his best seller “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” The eventual Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas C. Schelling used game theory to explore the risk that conventional conflict could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons; his work demonstrated the value of arms control and helped establish nuclear deterrence based, however perversely, on mutual assured destruction.In the 1980s, Jonathan Schell’s series of New Yorker essays (and subsequent book), “The Fate of the Earth,” reinvigorated popular alarm about nuclear war and stimulated calls for nuclear disarmament on both sides of the Atlantic. In line with dystopic novels like “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute and movies like “Fail-Safe,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Bedford Incident” and “The Day After,” worst-case thinking kept the prospect of nuclear holocaust real and the need to avoid it urgent. Clearly it influenced Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who seriously contemplated nuclear disarmament in 1986.This urgent brand of collective cultural alertness receded after the Cold War. On the left, worst-casing thinking was blamed for the expansive growth of nuclear arsenals and the ill-fated U.S. war in Vietnam. Now the Republican Party’s embrace of “alternative facts,” aided by the growth of conservative media, has effectively created a separate domestic reality for millions of Americans. Since Jan. 6, 2021, comedians, partisan journalists and public intellectuals have recognized, ridiculed and lamented the state of our democracy and raised the possibility of a “slow-moving coup” (Bill Maher) or a “worst-case scenario” for our politics (Robert Crawford in The Nation). Other columnists and historians (Chauncey DeVega and Max Hastings, for example) have casually mooted the possibility of secession or large-scale political violence in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. A few recent books, like the political scientist Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” and the journalist Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” have been discussed.But systematic and dispassionate analysis of such possibilities has not widely emerged. In June 2020, the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project — comprising over 100 former and serving government officials, academics, research analysts, journalists and other experts — held tabletop exercises on four different 2020 election crisis scenarios. Selected teams hypothesized moves and countermoves, responses and counter-responses, and in August 2020 published a broadly prescient report — which suggested that the election could be contested into 2021 and the transition process disrupted. It also included several preventive measures with an eye to 2024-25. Perhaps understandably, given the political climate, most participants were reluctant to identify themselves publicly and only a few talked to the media about the exercise. Two conservative outfits, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Claremont Institute, jointly gamed out similar scenarios, concluding that the constitutional order would hold. But these projects were short term and situationally limited and have not generated sustained open-source consideration of the more dire possibilities that have surfaced since Jan. 6.Predictably, far-right groups mobilized to dismiss the Transition Integrity Project’s activities as leftist “psychological warfare,” and some branded it a blueprint for a left-wing coup. That should not stop a reprise of the project’s efforts with respect to the 2024 election. In light of the lack of contingency planning for major violence on Jan. 6 by the Capitol Police and the Department of Homeland Security, such planning is presumably underway at federal law-enforcement agencies and the Pentagon. But that’s not enough.A right-wing minority — including many elected politicians — is now practicing a form of brinkmanship by threatening to unilaterally destroy American democracy, daring what they hope is a timid and somnolent majority to resist them. But that majority has the benefit of warning ahead of 2024.It behooves us to prepare our defenses for the worst. Understandably, the policy focus is now on pre-empting a right-wing steal in the next national election. But success will depend crucially on factors that are beyond control — the midterm elections this year and the identity of the Republican candidate in 2024 — which suggest that focus is misplaced. And even if a steal is thwarted, success might not preclude a coercive challenge of the election results; quite to the contrary, it would provoke one.War games, tabletop exercises, operations research, campaign analyses, conferences and seminars on the prospect of American political conflagration — including insurrection, secession, insurgency and civil war — should be proceeding at a higher tempo and intensity. Scholars of American politics need to pick up the torch from experts on the democratic decline in Europe, who first raised the alarm about growing dangers to American politics. The very process of intellectual interaction and collaboration among influential analysts of different political stripes could reconcile many of them to the undesirability of political upheaval, and thus decrease its likelihood.The overarching idea is, publicly and thoroughly, to probe just how bad things could get precisely to ensure that they never do, and that America’s abject political decay is averted.Jonathan Stevenson, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and managing editor of Survival, served on the National Security Council staff in the Obama administration and is the author of “Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable.” Steven Simon is a fellow at M.I.T. and a senior analyst at the Quincy Institute. He served in the State Department and on the National Security Council staff in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Obama administrations.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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      Trump Ends NPR Interview After Challenges to False Fraud Claim

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      Former President Donald J. Trump abruptly ended the interview after a lengthy back-and-forth over his claims of widespread election fraud.Former President Donald J. Trump abruptly ended an interview with NPR on Tuesday after he was pressed on his false claim of a stolen election in 2020 and how he was using that assertion to put pressure on Republicans before the 2022 midterm elections.In the interview with Steve Inskeep, a co-host of NPR’s Morning Edition, Mr. Trump discussed the coronavirus pandemic and his campaign to discredit results of the 2020 election, according to a transcript of the interview NPR posted on its website on Wednesday morning. At several points in the interview, Mr. Inskeep pushed back against false claims about the 2020 election, in one instance noting the failed lawsuits by Mr. Trump’s campaign and its allies. “Your own lawyers had no evidence of fraud, they said in court they had no evidence of fraud, and the judges ruled against you every time on the merits,” Mr. Inskeep said.After a lengthy back-and-forth over the election results, Mr. Trump asked how he could have lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, who he falsely claimed did not attract crowds during the campaign.Mr. Inskeep said: “If you’ll forgive me, maybe because the election was about you. If I can just move on to ask, are you telling Republicans in 2022 that they must press your case on the past election in order to get your endorsement? Is that an absolute?”Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Mr. Trump responded: “They are going to do whatever they want to do — whatever they have to do, they’re going to do.”He continued to speak about his false claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” while Mr. Inskeep tried to interject.Mr. Trump then abruptly ended the interview.“So Steve, thank you very much,” he said. “I appreciate it.”“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I have one more question,” said Mr. Inskeep, who began to ask about a court hearing on Monday related to the Capitol riot by a pro-Trump mob last year. He then stopped himself, saying, “He’s gone. OK.”At the Monday hearing in the U.S. District Court for Washington, lawyers argued that Mr. Trump, by inspiring the riot, was liable for major financial damages.It was not clear how much of the question Mr. Trump heard before ending the interview. Early in the interview, Mr. Inskeep asked Mr. Trump about the coronavirus pandemic and what the former president would tell people who have not been vaccinated. Mr. Trump, who said in December that he had received a Covid-19 vaccine booster shot, told Mr. Inskeep that he recommended that people take the vaccine but that he did not support vaccine mandates.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 12The House investigation. More

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      Let’s Not Invent a Civil War

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      “How Civil Wars Start,” a new book by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter, was cited all over the place in the days around the anniversary of last winter’s riot at the Capitol. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and my colleague Michelle Goldberg all invoked Walter’s work in essays discussing the possibility that the United States stands on the edge of an abyss, with years of civil strife ahead.The book begins with a story from the fall of 2020: the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, hatched by a group of right-wing militiamen who opposed Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions. Fortunately “the F.B.I. was on to them” and foiled the plot — but the alleged kidnapping conspiracy, Walter argues, is a harbinger of worse to come. Periods of civil war often “start with vigilantes just like these — armed militants who take violence directly to the people.”Here’s a skeptical question, though: When we say the F.B.I. was “on to” to the plotters, what exactly does that mean? Because at the moment the government’s case against them is a remarkable tangle. Fourteen men have been charged with crimes, based in part on evidence reportedly supplied by at least 12 confidential informants — meaning that the F.B.I. had almost one informant involved for every defendant.And according to reporting from BuzzFeed’s Jessica Garrison and Ken Bensinger, one of these informants, an extremely colorful convicted felon named Stephen Robeson, appears to have been a crucial instigator of the plot. He is alleged to have used government funds to pay for meals and hotel rooms, encouraged people “to vent their anger about governors who enacted Covid-19 restrictions” and “to plan violent actions against elected officials and to acquire weapons and bomb-making materials,” and followed up aggressively, calling potential plotters “nearly every day.”Robeson’s role has become enough of a headache for the prosecution, in fact, that they recently disowned him, declaring that he was actually a “double agent” (meaning triple agent, I think) who betrayed his obligations as an informant by trying to destroy evidence and seeking to warn one of the accused conspirators ahead of his arrest. Prosecutors had already ruled out testimony from an agent who ran one of their key informants, probably because he spent much of 2019 trying to drum up business for his private security firm by touting his F.B.I. casework.Presumably we’ll find out more about all this when the case comes to trial, but for now it’s reasonable to wonder whether Whitmer’s would-be kidnappers would have been prepared to go all the way with their vigilante fantasies, absent some prodding from the feds.And those doubts, in turn, might be reasonably extended to the entire theory of looming American civil war, which assumes something not yet entirely in evidence — a large number of Americans willing to actually put their lives, not just their Twitter rhetoric, on the line for the causes that currently divide our country.Overall, the academic and journalistic literature on America’s divisions offers a reasonably accurate description of increasing American division. The country is definitely more ideologically polarized than it was 20 or 40 years ago; indeed, with organized Christianity’s decline, you could say that it’s more metaphysically polarized as well. We are more likely to hate and fear members of the rival party, more likely to sort ourselves into ideologically homogeneous communities, more likely to be deeply skeptical about public institutions and more likely to hold conspiratorial beliefs — like the belief that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 election — that undercut the basic legitimacy of the opposition party’s governance.At the same time, the literature suffers from a serious liberal-bias problem, a consistent naïveté about the left and center’s roles in deepening polarization. For instance, in the Bush and Obama eras there were a lot of takes on the dangers of “asymmetric polarization” — the supposed ideological radicalization of the Republicans relative to the Democrats. Across most of the 2010s, though, it was clearly liberals who moved leftward much more rapidly, while Republicans basically stayed put — and yet somehow the perils of that kind of asymmetry get much less expert attention.Likewise the drama of protest politics in 2020 is often analyzed in a way that minimizes the revolutionary symbolism of the left’s protests — the iconoclasm and the toppled statues, the mayhem around federal buildings and the White House, the zeal to rename and rewrite — and focuses intensely on the right’s response, treating conservative backlash as though it emerges from the reactionary ether rather than as a cyclical response.The other bias in the civil-war literature is toward two related forms of exaggeration. First, an exaggerated emphasis on what Americans say they believe, rather than what (so far, at least) they actually do. It’s absolutely true that if you just look at polling data, you see a lot of beliefs that would seem to license not just occasional protest but some sort of continuing insurrection. This includes not only the Trumpist stolen-election theories but also popular beliefs about recent Republican presidents — that George W. Bush had foreknowledge and allowed Sept. 11 to happen or that the Russians manipulated vote tallies in order to place Donald Trump, their cat’s-paw, in the White House.However, an overwhelming majority of people who hold those kinds of beliefs show no signs of being radicalized into actual violence. For all the talk of liberal “resistance” under Trump, the characteristic left-wing response to the Trump administration was not to join Antifa but to mobilize to elect Democrats; it took the weird conditions of the pandemic and the lockdowns, and the spark of the George Floyd killing, to transmute anti-Trumpism into national protests that actually turned violent.Likewise, despite fears that Jan. 6 was going to birth a “Hezbollah wing” of the Republican Party, there has been no major far-right follow-up to the event, no dramatic surge in Proud Boys or Oath Keepers visibility, no campaign of anti-Biden terrorism. Instead, Republicans who believe in the stolen-election thesis seem mostly excited by the prospect of thumping Democrats in the midterms, and the truest believers are doing the extremely characteristic American thing of running for local office.This has prompted a different liberal fear — that these new officeholders could help precipitate a constitutional crisis by refusing to do their duty in a close election in 2024. But that fear is an example of the other problem of exaggeration in the imminent-civil-war literature, the way the goal posts seem to shift when you question the evocations of Fort Sumter or 1930s Europe.Thus we are told that some kind of major democratic breakdown is likely “absent some radical development” (as Beauchamp puts it); that we are already “suspended between democracy and autocracy” (as Remnick writes); that “the United States is coming to an end” and the only question “is how,” to quote the beginning of Stephen Marche’s new book, “The Next Civil War.” But then it turns out that the most obvious danger is an extremely contingent one, involving a cascade of events in 2024 — a very specific sort of election outcome, followed by a series of very high-risk, unusual radical choices by state legislators and Republican senators and the Supreme Court — that are worth worrying about but not at all the likeliest scenario, let alone one that’s somehow structurally inevitable.Similarly, we are first told that “civil war” is coming, but then it turns out that the term is being used to mean something other than an actual war, that the relevant analogies are periods of political violence like the Irish Troubles or Italy’s “Years of Lead.” And then if you question whether we’re destined to reach even that point, you may be informed that actually the civil war is practically here already — because, Marche writes, “the definition of civil strife starts at twenty-five deaths within a year,” and acts of anti-government violence killed more people than that annually in the later 2010s.That kind of claim strikes me as a ridiculous abuse of language. The United States is a vast empire of more than 330 million people in which at any given time some handful of unhinged people will be committing deadly crimes. And we are also a country with a long history of sporadic armed conflict — mob violence, labor violence, terrorism and riots — interwoven with the normal operation of our politics. If your definition of civil war implies that we are always just a few mass shootings or violent protests away from the brink, then you don’t have a definition at all: You just have a license for perpetual alarmism.I am very aware that I’m always the columnist making some version of this calm-down argument, sometimes to a fault. So I want to stress that the problems that undergird the civil-war hypothesis are serious problems, the divisions in our country are considerable and dangerous, the specific perils associated with a Trump resurgence in 2024 entirely real.But there are also lots of countervailing and complicating forces, and the overall picture is genuinely complex — at least as complex, let’s say, as the informant-riddled plot against Gretchen Whitmer. And as with that conspiracy, it’s worth asking whether the people who see potential insurrection lurking everywhere are seeing a danger rising entirely on its own — or in their alarm are helping to invent it.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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      Mike Pence Seen as Key Witness in Jan. 6 Investigation

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      Getting the former vice president to answer questions under oath could be crucial as the House panel focuses on Donald Trump’s responsibility for the Capitol riot.As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol rushes to gather evidence and conduct interviews, how far it will be able to go in holding former President Donald J. Trump accountable increasingly appears to hinge on one possible witness: former Vice President Mike Pence.Since the committee was formed last summer, Mr. Pence’s lawyer and the panel have been talking informally about whether he would be willing to speak to investigators, people briefed on the discussions said. But as Mr. Pence began sorting through a complex calculation about his cooperation, he indicated to the committee that he was undecided, they said.To some degree, the current situation reflects negotiating strategies by both sides, with the committee eager to suggest an air of inevitability about Mr. Pence answering its questions and the former vice president’s advisers looking for reasons to limit his political exposure from a move that would further complicate his ambitions to run for president in 2024.But there also appears to be growing tension.In recent weeks, Mr. Pence is said by people familiar with his thinking to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the idea of voluntary cooperation. He has told aides that the committee has taken a sharp partisan turn by openly considering the potential for criminal referrals to the Justice Department about Mr. Trump and others. Such referrals, in Mr. Pence’s view, appear designed to hurt Republican chances of winning control of Congress in November.And Mr. Pence, they said, has grown annoyed that the committee is publicly signaling that it has secured a greater degree of cooperation from his top aides than it actually has, something he sees as part of a pattern of Democrats trying to turn his team against Mr. Trump.For the committee, Mr. Pence’s testimony under oath would be an opportunity to establish in detail how Mr. Trump’s pressuring him to block the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory brought the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis and helped inspire the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.It could also be vital to the committee in deciding whether it has sufficient evidence to make a criminal referral of Mr. Trump to the Justice Department, as a number of its members have said they could consider doing. The potential charge floated by some members of the committee is violation of the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.Members of the House select committee on Jan. 6 have said they could consider criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump and others.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe combination of the pressure brought to bear on Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump’s repeated public exhortations about his vice president — “If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” he told supporters on the Ellipse just before they marched to the Capitol — could help the committee build a well-documented narrative linking Mr. Trump to the temporary halting of the vote certification through rioters focused, at his urging, on Mr. Pence.A criminal referral from the committee would carry little legal weight, but could increase public pressure on the Justice Department. The department has given little indication of whether it is seriously considering building a case against Mr. Trump.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said last week that federal prosecutors remained “committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.” But he did not mention Mr. Trump or indicate whether the department considered obstruction of Congress a charge that would fit the circumstances.There are nonetheless some early indications that federal prosecutors working on charging the Capitol rioters are looking carefully at Mr. Trump’s pressure on Mr. Pence — and his efforts to rally his supporters to keep up that pressure even after Mr. Pence decided that he would not block certification of the Electoral College results.In plea negotiations, federal prosecutors recently began asking defense lawyers for some of those charged in Jan. 6 cases whether their clients would admit in sworn statements that they stormed the Capitol believing that Mr. Trump wanted them to stop Mr. Pence from certifying the election. In theory, such statements could help connect the violence at the Capitol directly to Mr. Trump’s demands that Mr. Pence help him stave off his defeat.Gina Bisignano, a Beverly Hills beautician who helped her fellow Trump supporters smash at a window at the Capitol, noted in court papers connected to her plea that she had marched on the building specifically after hearing Mr. Trump encourage Mr. Pence “to do the right thing.”While in the crowd, the papers say, Ms. Bisignano filmed herself saying, “We are marching on the Capitol to put some pressure on Mike Pence.” The papers also note that once Ms. Bisignano reached the building, she started telling others “what Pence’s done,” and encouraged people carrying tools like hatchets to break the window.Similarly, Matthew Greene, a member of the Central New York chapter of the Proud Boys, said in court papers connected to his own guilty plea that he had conspired with other members of the far-right group to “send a message to legislators and Vice President Pence” who were inside the Capitol certifying the final stage of the election.“Greene hoped that his actions and those of his co-conspirators would cause legislators and the vice president to act differently during the course of the certification of the Electoral College vote than they would have otherwise,” the papers said.There are early indications that federal prosecutors working on charging the Capitol rioters are looking carefully at Mr. Trump’s pressure on Mr. Pence.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesMr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Mr. Pence has been well established in news reports and books over the past year. Mr. Trump, aided at times by a little-known conservative lawyer, John Eastman, repeatedly pressured Mr. Pence to intervene in Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election, saying he had the power to delay or alter the outcome.Mr. Pence consulted a variety of people in weighing what to do, and when he ultimately refused, Mr. Trump attacked him with harsh words.Once the mob stormed the Capitol, with some rioters chanting for Mr. Pence to be hanged, Mr. Trump initially brushed aside calls from aides and allies to call them off.In the last week, around the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, both the chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and its vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, have suggested they want Mr. Pence to testify voluntarily.On Friday, Mr. Thompson told NPR that the committee might issue Mr. Pence a formal invitation as soon as the end of the month. That same day, another committee member, Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, underlined Mr. Pence’s importance in a television interview, saying he viewed him “as an indispensable person to talk to.”A refusal by Mr. Pence to cooperate could lead the committee to take the highly unusual move of subpoenaing a former vice president, setting up a potential court fight that could delay a resolution for months as the committee tries to wrap up its work before the election.Mr. Pence’s personal lawyer, Richard Cullen, began discussions this summer with the top investigator on the House Jan. 6 committee, Timothy Heaphy, a former federal prosecutor. Mr. Cullen had worked alongside Mr. Heaphy at the same law firm several years ago.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      Covid 3.0, Biden 2.0 and Trump Number …

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      Bret Stephens: Happy ’22, Gail. Hope your year is off to a good start. Eager to get your thoughts on Covid 3.0, which nearly every other person I know seems to have.Gail Collins: Happy New Year, Bret. I had a nice long holiday with plane travel, visits to see family and friends, and a few other outings. No Covid interruptions whatsoever, but I have gotten warnings from friends whose friends are sick, and a neighbor who just had a really bad episode.But I remember other holidays in which the flu laid a bunch of people low. Still keep thinking that if everyone takes all the vaccine shots, wears masks in public and avoids scenes like, say, jam-packed bars, it’s still possible to live a pretty normal life.Do you disagree?Bret: I think we need to treat Omicron fundamentally differently than we did previous variants. Everyone should get triple vaxxed. But the idea that we can “stop the spread” or “flatten the curve” is unrealistic, probably unnecessary and possibly counterproductive.Boosted people can still get sick, though for the most part not too severely. More than half of the people in New York City hospitals who have Covid aren’t there because of Covid. Testing doesn’t always detect the virus, and when it does it’s often too late. Mask wearing hasn’t appreciably slowed it, at least not with the surgical or cloth masks most people prefer. And contact tracing is pointless with something that spreads this quickly. Maybe instead of trying to flatten the curve, we should accept the spike and think of Omicron as the coronavirus’s version of the old chickenpox party, the sort my mom took me to as a kid so I could get it over with and gain immunity.Gail: It’s been interesting hearing some of the anti-vaxxers also denouncing other vaccines against childhood diseases. Still haven’t heard any of them call for bringing back smallpox.Bret: A pox on them, metaphorically speaking. On a different subject, I bet you never found yourself being thankful to Dick Cheney for standing up for truth, decency and the American way.Gail: Fortunately his daughter already prepared me to cheer for people I totally disagree with. Liz Cheney is pretty far on the far right when it comes to everything from taxes to abortion to guns, but she’s a great example of how principled people can break with their party when it comes to other profound issues, like last January’s riot.Bret: Riot is too kind a word.Gail: I’ve run into the parents of childhood friends who I remembered as extremely cranky, but found them very charming at 80. So Cheney Sr.’s new look wasn’t so surprising. Although those were dads who used to yell about curfews, and that’s not quite the same as invading Iraq.But about Liz — I’ll bet a lot of Republicans in Congress agree with her deep in their little Trump-terrorized hearts. Don’t you think?Bret: I used to think that. But now I think they are in denial so deep it’s clinical. They’ve convinced themselves that the people who stormed the Capitol were misguided patriots, which is like saying that Harvey Weinstein was a clumsy romantic. They are keen to point fingers at Nancy Pelosi for not doing enough to secure the building, which amounts to indicting the victim for not doing enough to secure his possessions from thugs. They are upset that Democrats use the word “insurrection,” as if a violent attempt to overturn a democratic election ought better be described as a frat party that got a little outta hand. They fulsomely praise Mike Pence for doing his constitutional duty by refusing to interfere with the certification of the election, but say nothing of the 147 congressional Republicans who would not accept the result. They carry on about Stacey Abrams refusing to accept her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, while treating Donald Trump’s incessant, obsessive, demagogic, destructive lying about 2020 as just one of his exuberant personality quirks.Gail: It is amazing how we can come together on non-government-spending issues.Bret: There’s an old expression, from Poland I think, that goes, “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.” Unfortunately for the country, the G.O.P. has become our national circus, with Tucker Carlson as its scowling ringmaster. Now the question is whether Democrats can govern effectively to keep the clown show from coming back to power. Are you hopeful?Gail: You know, President Biden is the opposite of a crowd-rouser, but at this moment it might be OK to have a national leader who’s just … sane and normal and principled.He’s not going to lead the nation into any stupendous changes, but maybe right now the thing we’re looking for is “that good guy like my eighth-grade teacher.”Bret: Even better would be a good guy who loudly insists that eighth-grade teachers in Chicago show up to work. Sorry, you were saying ….Gail: My actual eighth-grade teacher, as I have alluded to earlier, was a nun, who told us, “Remember, the Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews.” The fact that I still recall that means it was an actual piece of information back then.Bret: I’m glad your nun cleared that up. My Hebrew forebears were far too busy controlling the Roman media, financing Roman conquests and manipulating the Roman Senate to waste their malice on an unconventional rabbi.Gail: And while we’re talking about cultural revolutions — I know this is before your time, but I remember as a teen hearing that Sidney Poitier won the Oscar for best actor and being so excited. I knew it was a big deal, and I guess the fact that the movie he won for, “Lilies of the Field,” was about this Black man helping a bunch of nuns meant a lot in our Catholic girlhood.It just reminded me of all the times when any acknowledgment of Black achievement seemed like big news to the country.Bret: A class act, as our colleague Charles Blow noted in a charming remembrance last week. For my generation, the corresponding analogy was the gay-rights movement in the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis. I remember watching the music video for a song called “Smalltown Boy” by the British band Bronski Beat, which made an impression. It was a small masterpiece of storytelling as well as a stunningly courageous and honest tale of coming out.But getting back to Biden, I don’t think sane, normal and principled will do. I’m kinda hoping for “effective” and “canny.” We’ve been a little lacking in that department ….Gail: Well, hey, I thought his speech about Jan. 6 was pretty powerful, don’t you agree?Bret: Up to a point, yes. It was eloquent. And I had no disagreement with the substance.I have a couple of worries, though. If Biden meant to commemorate an important anniversary, fine and good. But if he means for congressional Democrats to make “Remember Jan. 6” the organizing principle of their election campaigns, it’s political malpractice. It politicizes the event in a way that will diminish its significance and turn off wavering voters who feel they’re being talked down to. And it’s a distraction from the job Democrats should be doing, which is convincing the public that they’ve got their interests and concerns in mind. Elections are always about “What have you done for me, lately?” Democrats aren’t going to win on the promise of safeguarding abstract principles, important as that may be.Gail: I think you’re worried that the post-Jan. 6 ethos will include leftie opposition to the profitability obsession of big business. Like refusing to expand Medicaid, letting Big Pharma run amok on prescription drug prices and keeping a lid on Medicare.Bret: I just think Democrats need to be careful not to mix milk and meat, so to speak. The smart play is to let the Jan. 6 committee do its work and let the public draw its conclusions. In the meantime, fix the supply-chain bottlenecks. Pick a quarrel with any teachers union that tries to keep schools closed. Propose an immigration bill that funds border security in exchange for citizenship for Dreamers. Break Build Back Better into bite-size components and get its most popular parts passed with votes from Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and even a Republican or two, like Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins.To keep Trump and his epigones away from high office, it isn’t enough having the moral high ground. It’s like something Adlai Stevenson supposedly said once when a voter told him that every thinking person was on his side. “I’m afraid that won’t do,” he replied. “I need a majority.” Democracy needs a majority.Gail: Hey, my final mission today is clear. I want us to stop here so we can all remember the time we concluded with Adlai Stevenson.Till next week, Bret.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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      Jim Jordan Refuses to Cooperate With Jan. 6 Panel

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      The Republican congressman from Ohio, a close ally of former President Donald Trump’s, denounced the House investigation of the Capitol riot as one of the Democrats’ “partisan witch hunts.”WASHINGTON — Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, announced on Sunday that he was refusing to cooperate with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, joining a growing list of allies of former President Donald J. Trump who have adopted a hostile stance toward the panel’s questions.In an effort to dig into the role that members of Congress played in trying to undermine the 2020 election, the committee informed Mr. Jordan in December by letter that its investigators wanted to question him about his communications related to the run-up to the Capitol riot. Those include Mr. Jordan’s messages with Mr. Trump and his legal team as well as others involved in planning rallies on Jan. 6 and congressional objections to certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.Mr. Jordan — who in November told the Rules Committee that he had “nothing to hide” regarding the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation — on Sunday denounced the bipartisan panel’s inquiry as among what he called the Democrats’ “partisan witch hunts.”“It amounts to an unprecedented and inappropriate demand to examine the basis for a colleague’s decision on a particular matter pending before the House of Representatives,” Mr. Jordan wrote in a letter to Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and chairman of the committee. “This request is far outside the bounds of any legitimate inquiry, violates core constitutional principles and would serve to further erode legislative norms.”Mr. Jordan was deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to fight the election results, including participating in planning meetings in November 2020 at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., and a meeting at the White House in December 2020.Understand the Jan. 6 InvestigationBoth the Justice Department and a House select committee are investigating the events of the Capitol riot. Here’s where they stand:Inside the House Inquiry: From a nondescript office building, the panel has been quietly ramping up its sprawling and elaborate investigation.Criminal Referrals, Explained: Can the House inquiry end in criminal charges? These are some of the issues confronting the committee.Garland’s Remarks: Facing pressure from Democrats, Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed that the D.O.J. would pursue its inquiry into the riot “at any level.”A Big Question Remains: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?On Jan. 5, Mr. Jordan forwarded to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, a text message he had received from a lawyer and former Pentagon inspector general outlining a legal strategy to overturn the election.“On Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as president of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all — in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence,” the text read.Mr. Jordan has acknowledged speaking with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, though he has said he cannot remember how many times they spoke that day or when the calls occurred.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, has said that Mr. Jordan is a “material witness” to the events of Jan. 6.In Mr. Jordan’s letter on Sunday, he argued he had little relevant information to share with the committee and that its members should be investigating security failures at the Capitol instead of seeking to question Republican lawmakers.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More