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      G.O.P. Lawsuit Casts N.Y. Congressional Maps as Brazen Gerrymandering

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      A Republican-led legal effort faces an uphill battle to overturn newly drawn congressional districts, which Democrats have defended as lawful.A Republican-led group of voters filed a lawsuit late Thursday challenging New York’s freshly drawn congressional maps as unconstitutional, a day after Democratic lawmakers in Albany approved district lines that would heavily favor their party in its battle to retain control of the House.The 67-page suit argued that the new district lines violated a 2014 state constitutional amendment meant to protect against partisan district drawing, saying that Democrats had “brazenly enacted a congressional map that is undeniably politically gerrymandered in their party’s favor.”“This court should reject it as a matter of substance, as the map is an obviously unconstitutional partisan and incumbent-protection gerrymander,” said the lawsuit, which was brought by a group of 14 voters.The lawsuit, which was widely expected, is likely to face an uphill battle: State courts have traditionally been reluctant to reject maps drawn by lawmakers, and it can be difficult to prove that maps that favor one political party were drawn illegally.But the lawsuit was filed in State Supreme Court in Steuben County, a Republican stronghold in the state’s Southern Tier where judges may be more sympathetic to claims of Democratic political gerrymandering.The outcome of the challenge could hinge on how a state judge interprets an anti-gerrymandering provision in the 2014 amendment that has not been tested in court before, as well as the process lawmakers followed to draw the lines.“The question is whether the court will reject 50 years of precedent and reject the plan,” said Jeffrey Wice, a senior fellow at New York Law School’s Census and Redistricting Institute.Understand Redistricting and GerrymanderingRedistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.New York: Democrats’ aggressive reconfiguration of the state’s congressional map is one of the most consequential in the nation.Texas: Republicans want to make Texas even redder. Here are four ways their proposed maps further gerrymandered the state’s House districts.The judge could uphold or reject the maps, and potentially compel Democrats to redraw them — or appoint a special master to do so in a nonpartisan way should the Legislature prove unable to. The decision, if appealed, may eventually wind its way to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.Democrats have rejected the charge of gerrymandering, arguing that the new lines are a fair representation of a state that is overwhelmingly Democratic and where population changes over the last decade have only served to further depopulate conservative rural areas and grow urban and suburban communities that tend to be more favorable to their party.The newly drawn maps in New York position Democrats to potentially flip three House seats in November, the largest projected shift in any state.The challenge against the maps comes as both parties continue their attempts to leverage the redistricting process nationwide, with Republicans often doing so more effectively because of their majorities in large states like Texas. Republican maps are being challenged in several states.State lawmakers in New York had long been in charge of drawing the lines, but the 2014 amendment created a 10-member bipartisan redistricting commission tasked with drawing balanced maps devoid of the type of gerrymandering that had plagued the state over decades.But the commission, as many in Albany expected, became deadlocked and failed to agree on a single set of maps last month. That mean that, under the process outlined in the law, the power to redraw the maps was reverted to the Legislature, where Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers.Shortly after, Democratic lawmakers moved swiftly to draw and consider their own district lines. No public hearings were held, a move that was decried by Republicans and good-government groups, but which Democrats justified as necessary in order to comply with a time-sensitive electoral calendar.Democrats passed the maps on Wednesday and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, signed them into law the following day.“We are 100 percent confident that the lines are in compliance with all legal requirements,” said Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader in the State Senate. “They are a gigantic step forward for fairer representation and reflect the strength and diversity of New York like never before”Democrats in New York currently hold 19 seats, while Republicans control eight seats. The new maps, which include one less seat as a result of population loss, would favor Democrats in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts.The lawsuit filed on Thursday outlined instances, from Staten Island and Brooklyn to Long Island and the North Country, in which, the plaintiffs said, lawmakers deliberately redrew district lines to give Democrats an overall edge.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels and a Courtroom Time Capsule From 2018

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      In what may be the last chapter in their unlikely story, Mr. Avenatti cross-examined Ms. Daniels for several hours during his trial on Friday.In the hallowed halls of Manhattan’s two federal courthouses, where some of the nation’s most prominent and historic trials have been held, defense lawyers and prosecutors regularly deliver soaring oratory and witnesses testify with deep emotion.Then there is the trial of Michael Avenatti.Not so long ago, Mr. Avenatti was a high-flying lawyer representing the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels in litigation against then-President Donald J. Trump. But a lot can change in four years, and on Friday, the unlikely pair who had once teamed up to try to take down the president were instead trying to take down each other.Mr. Avenatti, who is representing himself in the trial, on charges that he stole nearly $300,000 from Ms. Daniels, had a lot of questions for his former client, a prosecution witness. Some of them were about ghosts.“How do you speak with the dead?” Mr. Avenatti asked at one point on Friday.“I don’t know,” Ms. Daniels replied. “It just happens sometimes.”“Do the dead speak back to you?” Mr. Avenatti asked.“Yes,” she responded.The bizarre spectacle — a disgraced lawyer who once thought he could be president grilling a pornographic film actress about her belief in the occult — was in some sense a fitting and perhaps final chapter in a deeply unlikely story.Pugnacious and direct in his bid to make Ms. Daniels seem like a crackpot, Mr. Avenatti asked whether she believed in a “haunted” doll that could talk and calls her “Mommy, Mommy.”Yes, she said.He asked whether she had said, in graphic and explicit terms, that she looked forward to Mr. Avenatti’s being raped in prison.She responded affirmatively.As she answered Mr. Avenatti’s questions, Ms. Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, spoke clearly, directly and without seeming defensive.Rounding out the courtroom time capsule of a peculiar moment in American politics, Michael D. Cohen — who, as Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to buy her silence about her claim that she had an affair with Mr. Trump — watched from the spectator gallery. (Mr. Trump has denied Ms. Daniels’s claim.)If Mr. Avenatti seemed less combative and energetic than he did when he was a regular on the cable news circuit several years ago, it could be because his next stop — regardless of the trial’s outcome — is prison.Last July, he was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars after being convicted in February 2020 on charges of trying to extort more than $20 million from the apparel giant Nike. He is to surrender to the authorities on Feb. 28.The voluble Mr. Avenatti, 50, rose to prominence in 2018 representing Ms. Daniels in her litigation against Mr. Trump. Ubiquitous on cable news shows, Mr. Avenatti missed no opportunity to torment the president and even flirted with the idea of running for president himself, galvanizing some Democrats who saw him as an able adversary to the president.“I’m strongly considering it,” Mr. Avenatti said in August 2018. “Democrats need to nominate somebody who can actually beat this guy.”At the time, Ms. Daniels fawned over her pitbull lawyer.“I’ll put it this way,” she told The New York Times that summer. “Every time I watch him work, I think, This is what it must have been like to see the Sistine Chapel being painted. But instead of paint, Michael uses the tears of his enemies.”But almost as rapidly, Mr. Avenatti crashed: He was arrested the following March in the Nike case; two months later, he was indicted again in the case involving Ms. Daniels. That same year, he was arrested in a fraud case in California.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      Flynn Sues Jan. 6 Committee as House Republican Rebuffs Investigators

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      The panel investigating the Capitol attack faced stonewalling from allies of former President Donald J. Trump on two new fronts.WASHINGTON — Two allies of former President Donald J. Trump took steps on Tuesday to try to stonewall the House committee investigating the Capitol attack as Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, filed a lawsuit against the panel, and a House Republican who played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election refused to meet with investigators.Mr. Flynn, who spent 33 years as an Army officer and has emerged as one of the most extreme voices in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election, filed suit against the committee in Florida, trying to block its subpoenas.“Like many Americans in late 2020, and to this day, General Flynn has sincerely held concerns about the integrity of the 2020 elections,” his lawsuit states. “It is not a crime to hold such beliefs, regardless of whether they are correct or mistaken.”The House committee has said it wants information from Mr. Flynn because he attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18 in which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers and continuing to spread the false idea that the election was tainted by widespread fraud. That meeting came after Mr. Flynn gave an interview to the right-wing media site Newsmax in which he talked about the purported precedent for deploying military troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.Read Michael Flynn’s Lawsuit Against the Jan. 6 CommitteeMichael T. Flynn, former President Donald J. Trump’s first national security adviser, sued the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, seeking to block the panel’s subpoenas.Read Document 42 pagesMr. Flynn’s suit comes as Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican closely involved in Mr. Trump’s push to undermine the election, said on Tuesday that he was refusing to meet with the Jan. 6 committee.Mr. Perry, the incoming chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, called the committee “illegitimate.”Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?“I decline this entity’s request and will continue to fight the failures of the radical Left who desperately seek distraction from their abject failures of crushing inflation, a humiliating surrender in Afghanistan, and the horrendous crisis they created at our border,” Mr. Perry wrote on Twitter.The committee on Monday sent a letter seeking testimony and documents from Mr. Perry, the first public step it has taken to try to obtain information from any of the Republican members of Congress who were deeply involved in Mr. Trump’s effort to stay in power.The committee asked Mr. Perry to meet with its investigators and voluntarily turn over all “relevant electronic or other communications” related to the buildup to the Capitol riot, including his communications with the president and his legal team as well as others involved in planning rallies on Jan. 6 and the objections in Congress to certify Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.To date, the panel has been reluctant to issue subpoenas for sitting members of Congress, citing the deference and respect lawmakers in the chamber are supposed to show one another. But Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, has pledged to take such a step if needed.“Representative Perry has information directly relevant to our investigation,” said Tim Mulvey, a committee spokesman. “The select committee prefers to gather relevant evidence from members cooperatively, but if members with directly relevant information decline to cooperate and instead endeavor to cover up, the select committee will consider seeking such information using other tools.”Representative Scott Perry speaking at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Pennsylvania last year.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesMr. Flynn and Mr. Perry are among a small number of witnesses who have not cooperated with the panel. More than 300 witnesses have met with investigators, most voluntarily without receiving a subpoena.There have been consequences for those who refuse.The House has voted twice to hold allies of Mr. Trump in criminal contempt of Congress, referring those cases to federal prosecutors. A grand jury indicted Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, who faces charges that carry up to two years in jail and thousands in fines. Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, awaits a decision from federal prosecutors.Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump have sued to block the release of thousands of records, after the former president asserted executive privilege over a vast array of documents.Some key witnesses have settled on the tactic of invoking their right against self-incrimination to avoid answering questions. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who participated in Mr. Trump’s plans to overturn the election, has said he would invoke the Fifth Amendment in response to questions.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Phil Waldron's Unlikely Role in Pushing Baseless Election Claims

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      Phil Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, is a case study in how pro-Trump fringe players managed to get a hearing for conspiracy theories at the highest level during the presidential transition.A few days after President Biden’s inauguration put to rest one of the most chaotic transitions in U.S. history, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare appeared on a Christian conservative podcast and offered a detailed account of his monthslong effort to challenge the validity of the 2020 vote count.In a pleasant Texas drawl, the former officer, Phil Waldron, told the hosts a story that was almost inconceivable: how a cabal of bad actors, including Chinese Communist officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros, had quietly conspired to hack into U.S. voting machines in a “globalist/socialist” plot to steal the election.In normal times, a tale like that — full of wild and baseless claims — might have been dismissed as the overheated rantings of a conspiracy theorist. But the postelection period was not normal, providing all sorts of fringe players an opportunity to find an audience in the White House.Mr. Waldron stands as a case study. Working in conjunction with allies of President Donald J. Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — and in tandem with others like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser and a retired lieutenant general — Mr. Waldron managed to get a hearing for elements of his story in the very center of power in Washington.Last week, the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a subpoena to Mr. Waldron, saying that it wanted to know more about his role in circulating an explosive PowerPoint presentation on Capitol Hill and to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff.The presentation, which Mr. Meadows gave to the committee (and which he said he never acted on), counseled Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency and to invalidate all digital votes in a bid to stay in power — the same advice that other election deniers gave him at the time.Committee officials have given Mr. Waldron, who retired from the military in 2016 and now owns a bar in Central Texas, until Jan. 10 to turn over any relevant documents. They have also tentatively set a deposition for the week after.When The New York Times sent a reporter last week to Mr. Waldron’s bar, outside of Austin, he told the reporter to leave his property immediately. He then called the local sheriff and described the reporter’s car, adding that the reporter was slurring his words and seemed impaired.Mr. Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, above, became part of a network of Trump supporters pushing election fraud claims.ReutersIt remains unclear whether Mr. Waldron will cooperate with the House committee. But the account he gave in January to the podcast, Flyover Conservatives, and in recent news articles, may give investigators plenty to work with.Mr. Waldron opened his story by saying that his “research” into the 2020 election began that summer, when he started to examine what he described as a network of nonprofit groups connected to Mr. Soros, an outspoken supporter of liberal causes who has long been at the center of right-wing, often antisemitic conspiracies.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Around that time, Mr. Waldron said, he and his associates — whom he has never named — developed a relationship with a Texas cybersecurity company, Allied Security Operations Group, which was co-founded by a man named Russell J. Ramsland Jr.According to Mr. Waldron, Mr. Ramsland and his team had made a startling discovery: that the Chinese Communist Party, through software companies it controlled, had developed a way to flip votes on American tabulation machines, particularly those built by Dominion Voting Systems. (Dominion has adamantly denied its machines have security flaws and has filed defamation suits against some of those who have repeated the claims, including Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.)Beginning in August last year, months before Election Day, Mr. Waldron started to “raise an alarm,” as he put it, and tried to get anyone he could interested in his claim that the country’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking.He told the podcast hosts that he and his partners had reached out to officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, all of which were run by Trump appointees at the time. Mr. Waldron said he also sent an email to Mr. Trump’s director of strategic communications, but all of it “fell on deaf ears.”But there was one person who listened, Mr. Waldron said: Mr. Gohmert, the Texas Republican and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that was traditionally loyal to Mr. Trump and ultimately played an outsize role in his efforts to overturn the election. By Mr. Waldron’s account, Mr. Gohmert promised to pass along his concerns about voting machines to the president, but apparently failed to do so until after the election. (Mr. Gohmert did not respond to questions seeking comment.)Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, expressed concern this month over the treatment of the Capitol rioters.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesOnce the votes were cast and Mr. Trump was declared the loser, Mr. Waldron embarked on what amounted to a two-pronged assault on the election. First, with Mr. Ramsland’s company, Allied Security, he funneled information about supposedly suspicious spikes in votes and other dirt on Dominion Voting Systems to Ms. Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who filed four unsuccessful lawsuits accusing Dominion of a conspiracy to hack the election.According to court papers filed by Dominion, Mr. Ramsland was hired that summer by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and a Trump supporter, to “reverse engineer” the evidence needed to “mislead people into believing” that the 2020 election had been rigged.When the legal challenges failed, Mr. Waldron took a new tack. He partnered with Mr. Giuliani, who was spearheading Mr. Trump’s attack on the election, and joined him at a series of unofficial election fraud hearings conducted by lawmakers in a handful of swing states. Mr. Giuliani did not respond to questions seeking comment on Mr. Waldron, but he has testified in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion that he not only knew and admired Mr. Waldron, but also had “substantial dealings” with him.Even as he toured the country with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Waldron appeared to have been working on a third attack on the election results: assembling the 38-slide PowerPoint presentation that ended up in Mr. Meadows’s possession. In his podcast interview, Mr. Waldron said that he and his associates had managed to get a nascent version of the proposal — to declare a national emergency and use the crisis to order a recount of paper ballots in eight key counties — to Mr. Trump around Thanksgiving, far earlier than public accounts had suggested.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Fox News’ Request to Dismiss Dominion’s Defamation Suit Is Rejected

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      A judge on Thursday rejected an attempt by the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Media to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s coverage of the company’s role in the 2020 presidential election.In the ruling, Judge Eric M. Davis of the Superior Court of Delaware, where Fox is incorporated, wrote that he had denied Fox News Media’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit because it was “reasonably conceivable that Dominion has a claim for defamation.”Dominion, an election technology company, sued Fox News Media in March, accusing it of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business. More than two dozen states, including several carried by former President Donald J. Trump, made use of Dominion, a Denver company founded in 2002, in last year’s election.Along with another vote tabulating company, Smartmatic, Dominion was at the center of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory about rigged voting machines that gave the election to President Biden. The false claims were promoted by the president and his advisers, including Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who appeared on Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network.In May, Fox filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that Dominion’s lawsuit threatened the news media’s First Amendment right to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims.Recent Developments at Fox NewsJan. 6 Texts: Three Fox News hosts texted Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6 riot urging him to tell Donald Trump to try to stop it.Chris Wallace Departs: The anchor’s announcement that he was leaving Fox News for CNN came as right-wing hosts have increasingly set the channel’s agenda.Contributors Quit: Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes quit the network in protest over Tucker Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” special.In his ruling, Judge Davis disputed the arguments put forth by Fox, including that its employees were reporting in a neutral manner on statements made by advisers of the then-president and that claims made on its channels were opinion, and thus constituted protected speech.The judge wrote that he was not persuaded by Fox’s “neutral reportage” and “opinion” arguments. He added that the company either “knew its statements about Dominion’s role in election fraud were false” or that it “had a high degree of awareness that the statements were false.”Judge Davis also noted that Dominion had objected in writing to Fox’s coverage, seemingly to no avail. The allegations made by Dominion in its complaint, he wrote, “support the reasonable inference that Fox intended to keep Dominion’s side of the story out of the narrative.”A Dominion spokeswoman said in a statement: “We are pleased to see this process moving forward to hold Fox accountable.”In a statement on Thursday, a Fox spokeswoman said, “We remain committed to defending against this baseless lawsuit and its all-out assault on the First Amendment.”The 52-page ruling included examples of statements made on shows hosted by Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business Network program was canceled in February.The judge wrote that those hosts had provided platforms to people who were spreading the false narrative of election fraud involving Dominion and that the hosts’ own statements sometimes lent weight to the baseless claims. Also figuring in the court’s decision to allow the case to go forward was the fact that other Fox journalists had publicly stated the claims of widespread vote fraud were false.“The nearby presence of dissenting colleagues thus further suggests Fox, through personnel like Mr. Dobbs, was knowing or reckless in reporting the claims,” Judge Davis wrote.Barring a successful appeal of the ruling, Dominion now has the power to compel Fox to produce internal documents related to the issues raised in the suit and to have its employees testify in deposition.Don Herzog, who teaches First Amendment and defamation law at the University of Michigan, said in an interview that Fox faced a decision: It could settle, which might be seen as an admission of wrongdoing, or it could go through the discovery process, which could eventually make its internal communications public.Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in First Amendment law, said that Fox would be more incentivized to settle the suit than it previously was. “The danger for them is that a lot of embarrassing email correspondence and other documents will come out, if they don’t settle the case,” he said. Mr. Zick added that Dominion might not be willing to settle.The prospect of the publication of Fox’s internal communications concerning its coverage of the 2020 election follows the recent disclosure of text messages sent by its hosts to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final White House chief of staff, during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. On their shows this week, the hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham vociferously defended the messages, which made vivid the close relationship between the network and Mr. Trump’s administration. Mr. Hannity and Ms. Ingraham said that nothing in their text messages differed from their public statements.Fox faces another high-stakes legal battle over its election coverage because of a defamation lawsuit filed in February by Smartmatic.The day after Smartmatic filed its suit, Fox Business Network abruptly canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” Mr. Dobbs, a loyal supporter of Mr. Trump, was the host of the channel’s most-watched show.In its suit, Smartmatic cited a false claim made by Ms. Powell on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, had a hand in the creation of Smartmatic technology, designing it so that the votes it processed could be changed undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.) Mr. Dobbs had also referred to the supposed vote conspiracy as “cyber Pearl Harbor,” borrowing a phrase that had been used by Ms. Powell. More

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      Defendant in Case Brought by Durham Says New Evidence Undercuts Charge

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      Lawyers for Michael Sussmann, accused by the Trump-era special counsel of lying to the F.B.I., asked for a quick trial after receiving what they said was helpful material from prosecutors.WASHINGTON — The defense team for a cybersecurity lawyer who was indicted in September by a Trump-era special counsel asked a judge on Monday to set a trial date sooner than the prosecutor wants — while disclosing evidence recently turned over to them that appears to contradict the charge.The materials could make it harder for the special counsel, John H. Durham, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cybersecurity lawyer, Michael Sussmann, is guilty of the charge against him: making a false statement to the F.B.I. during a September 2016 meeting about possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The newly disclosed evidence consists of records of two Justice Department interviews of the former F.B.I. official to whom Mr. Sussmann is accused of lying, each of which offers a different version of the key interaction than the version in the indictment. That official is the prosecution’s main witness.The existence of the evidence, which Mr. Durham’s team provided to Mr. Sussmann’s team last week, “only underscores the baseless and unprecedented nature of this indictment and the importance of setting a prompt trial date so that Mr. Sussmann can vindicate himself as soon as possible,” the defense lawyers wrote.While Mr. Durham wants to wait until July 25 to start the trial, they said, the defense team urged the judge to set a start date of May 2.A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.The indictment centered on a September 2016 meeting between Mr. Sussmann and James A. Baker, who was then the F.B.I.’s general counsel. Mr. Sussmann relayed analysis by cybersecurity researchers who cited odd internet data they said appeared to reflect some kind of covert communications between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution. (The F.B.I. briefly looked into the Alfa Bank suspicions, but dismissed them as unfounded.)Mr. Durham’s indictment accused Mr. Sussmann of falsely saying he was not there on behalf of any client. Through his lawyers, Mr. Sussmann has denied saying that to Mr. Baker.The indictment also said that Mr. Sussmann was in fact representing both a technology executive and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Mr. Sussmann has maintained he was only there on behalf of the executive, and not the Clinton campaign.Different statements by James Baker, a former F.B.I. general counsel, are at the heart of the legal battle.via C-SPANNo one else was present at the meeting, and if the trial boils down to pitting Mr. Baker’s memory against Mr. Sussmann’s, the newly disclosed evidence will provide fodder for the defense team to show that Mr. Baker’s accounts of that aspect of the meeting have been inconsistent, and to raise doubts about the reliability of the version cited by Mr. Durham.The newly disclosed evidence consists of partly redacted records of two of Mr. Baker’s interviews with the Justice Department. The court filing appended copies of several pages of a transcript and an interview report.In July 2019, Mr. Baker was interviewed by the Justice Department’s inspector general about the meeting. Mr. Baker stated, according to a two-page transcript excerpt, that Mr. Sussmann had brought him information “that he said related to strange interactions that some number of people that were his clients, who were, he described as I recall it, sort of cybersecurity experts, had found.”The newly disclosed evidence also includes a page of a report Mr. Durham’s team made to summarize an interview they conducted with Mr. Baker in June 2020. According to that report, Mr. Baker did not say that Mr. Sussmann told him he was not there on behalf of any client. Rather, he said the issue never came up and he merely assumed Mr. Sussmann was not conveying the Alfa Bank data and analysis for any client.“Baker said that Sussmann did not specify that he was representing a client regarding the matter, nor did Baker ask him if he was representing a client,” the Durham team’s report said. “Baker said it did not seem like Sussmann was representing a client.”Mr. Baker later told Bill Priestap, then the F.B.I.’s top counterintelligence official, about the meeting. According to the indictment, Mr. Priestap’s handwritten notes list Mr. Sussmann’s name and law firm and then, after a dash, states “said not doing this for any client.” (It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at a trial.)The former Trump administration attorney general, William P. Barr, appointed Mr. Durham to scour the Russia investigation for evidence of wrongdoing by government officials pursuing it. The Sussmann indictment, however, portrayed the F.B.I. as a victim.Mr. Durham used the narrow charge against Mr. Sussmann to put out, in a 27-page indictment, large amounts of other information.He showed that Mr. Sussmann had interacted about Alfa Bank with a colleague at his law firm who represented the Clinton campaign, and that in accounting for his own time on the Alfa Bank matter in law firm billing records, Mr. Sussmann listed the campaign as the client. (Mr. Sussmann had represented the Democratic Party about Russia’s hacking of its servers.)Mr. Durham also put out significant amounts of information about the technology executive and three other cybersecurity researchers who had discovered the odd internet data and developed the theory that it reflected some kind of hidden communications, including mining emails in which they discussed what it might mean.Although Mr. Durham did not charge the researchers with any crime, he insinuated that they did not really believe what they were saying. Mr. Trump and his supporters seized on the indictment, saying it showed the Alfa Bank suspicions were a hoax by Clinton supporters and portraying it as evidence that the entire Russia investigation was unwarranted.Lawyers for those data scientists have pushed back, saying their clients believed their theory was a plausible explanation for the odd data they had uncovered — and still do. They have also accused Mr. Durham of putting forward a misleading portrayal in his indictment by selectively excerpting fragments of their clients’ emails, omitting portions that showed their clients enthusiastically supported the final analysis.The transcript and statement add to materials already in the public record, in which Mr. Sussmann and Mr. Baker recalled that meeting in sworn testimony in ways that do not clearly dovetail with the indictment’s accusation.In a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he had sought the meeting on behalf of a client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data. And in a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann “specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client.” More

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      Swift Ruling in Jan. 6 Case Tests Trump's Tactic of Delay

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      The former president has leveraged the slow judicial process in the past to thwart congressional oversight, but the Jan. 6 case may be different.WASHINGTON — On the surface, a judge’s ruling on Tuesday night that Congress can obtain Trump White House files related to the Jan. 6 riot seemed to echo another high-profile ruling in November 2019. In the earlier matter, a judge said a former White House counsel must testify about then-President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation.In both cases, Democratic-controlled House oversight committees issued subpoenas, Mr. Trump sought to stonewall those efforts by invoking constitutional secrecy powers, and Obama-appointed Federal District Court judges — to liberal cheers — ruled against him. Each ruling even made the same catchy declaration: “presidents are not kings.”But there was a big difference: The White House counsel case two years ago had chewed up three and a half months by the time Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a 120-page opinion to end its first stage. Just 23 days elapsed between Mr. Trump’s filing of the Jan. 6 papers lawsuit and Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling against him.The case, which raises novel issues about the scope of executive privilege when asserted by a former president, is not over: Mr. Trump is asking an appeals court to overturn Judge Chutkan’s ruling and, in the interim, to block the National Archives from giving Congress the first set of files on Friday. The litigation appears destined to reach the Supreme Court, which Mr. Trump reshaped with three appointments.But if the rapid pace set by Judge Chutkan continues, it would mark a significant change from how lawsuits over congressional subpoenas went during the Trump era.The slow pace of such litigation worked to the clear advantage of Mr. Trump, who vowed to defy “all” congressional oversight subpoenas after Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterm. He frequently lost in court, but only after delays that ran out the clock on any chance that such efforts would uncover information before the 2020 election.So alongside the substantive issues about executive privilege, one key question now is whether Mr. Trump can again tie the matter up in the courts long enough that even a Supreme Court ruling against him would come too late for the special committee in the House that is seeking the Trump White House documents for its investigation into the Jan. 6 riot.Specifically, the Jan. 6 committee has demanded detailed records about Mr. Trump’s every movement and meeting on the day of the assault, when Mr. Trump led a “Stop the Steal” rally and his supporters then sacked the Capitol in an attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory.The chairman of the committee, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, has said he wants to wrap up by “early spring.” In that case, the committee would need access to the files it has subpoenaed by late winter for that information to be part of any report.Legally, the committee could continue working through the rest of 2022. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm election, the inquiry would very likely end.What happens next in the Jan. 6 White House files case may turn on the inclinations of whichever three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are randomly assigned to the panel that will hear Mr. Trump’s appeal.Of the court’s 11 full-time judges, seven are Democratic appointees — including Judge Jackson, whom Mr. Biden elevated earlier this year — and four are Republican appointees, including three named by Mr. Trump. The circuit also has five “senior status” judges who are semiretired but sometimes get assigned to panels; four of those five are Republican appointees.If the D.C. Circuit declines, as Judge Chutkan did, to issue a preliminary injunction, Mr. Trump will presumably immediately appeal to the Supreme Court via its so-called shadow docket, by which the justices can swiftly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.If a stay is granted at either level, the question would shift to whether the D.C. Circuit panel echoes Judge Chutkan’s decision to move quickly in light of the circumstances, or throttles back to the slower pace it tended to follow on such cases when Mr. Trump was president.Notably, in another Trump-era case, involving access to financial papers held by his accounting firm, Mazars USA, the Federal District Court judge assigned to that matter, Amit Mehta, was sensitive to the timing implications and took less than a month after the case was filed in April 2019 to hand down his opinion that Congress could get the records.But a D.C. Circuit panel took about five more months before reaching that same result — a nominal win for Congress — in October 2019. Mr. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which waited until July 2020 to send the case back down to Judge Mehta to start the litigation over again using different standards.Separately, House Democrats have introduced legislation in response to the Trump presidency that would, among many other things, speed up lawsuits to enforce congressional subpoenas for executive branch information. Two people familiar with the matter said House Democratic leaders have indicated they plan to hold a floor vote on that bill before the end of 2021, though no date has been set; its prospects in the Senate are unclear.A related important difference in secrecy disputes between the Trump era and the Jan. 6 White House papers case is that when Mr. Trump was president, his administration controlled the executive branch files Congress wanted to see.Today, President Biden has refused to join Mr. Trump in invoking executive privilege, instead instructing the National Archives to give Congress the files unless a court orders otherwise. As a result, when it comes to government files, the default has flipped from secrecy to disclosure.During the phase of the lawsuit before Judge Chutkan, she signaled that she was averse to judicial delay. During arguments last week, she rejected a suggestion by a lawyer for Mr. Trump that she examine each document before deciding whether executive privilege applied.Representative Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, has said he wants the investigation to wrap up by “early spring.”Al Drago for The New York Times“I don’t see any language in the statute or any case that convinces me that where a previous president disagrees with the incumbent’s assertion of privilege, that the court is required to get involved and do a document-by-document review,” she said, adding:“Wouldn’t that always mean that the process of turning over these records, where the incumbent has no objection, would slow to a snail’s pace? And wouldn’t that be an intrusion by this branch into the executive and legislative branch functions?”Understand the Claim of Executive Privilege in the Jan. 6. InquiryCard 1 of 8A key issue yet untested. More

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      Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers' Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows

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      Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false, court filings reveal.Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump.But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening.By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue.The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless.The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.According to emails contained in the documents, Zach Parkinson, then the campaign’s deputy director of communications, reached out to subordinates on Nov. 13 asking them to “substantiate or debunk” several matters concerning Dominion. The next day, the emails show, Mr. Parkinson received a copy of a memo cobbled together by his staff from what largely appear to be news articles and public fact-checking services.Even though the memo was hastily assembled, it rebutted a series of allegations that Ms. Powell and others were making in public. It found:That Dominion did not use voting technology from the software company, Smartmatic, in the 2020 election.That Dominion had no direct ties to Venezuela or to Mr. Soros.And that there was no evidence that Dominion’s leadership had connections to left-wing “antifa” activists, as Ms. Powell and others had claimed.As Mr. Coomer’s lawyers wrote in their motion in the defamation suit, “The memo produced by the Trump campaign shows that, at least internally, the Trump campaign found there was no evidence to support the conspiracy theories regarding Dominion” and Mr. Coomer.Read the Trump campaign’s internal memoLast November, communications staff members on the Trump campaign hastily assembled a memo examining outlandish election claims. The memo found that many of the allegations were baseless.Read DocumentEven at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later.It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign’s communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely.“The Trump campaign continued to allow its agents,” the motion says, “to advance debunked conspiracy theories and defame” Mr. Coomer, “apparently without providing them with their own research debunking those theories.”Eric Coomer, a former Dominion Voting Systems employee, was accused of playing a role in a conspiracy to breach voting machines and reverse the 2020 election’s outcome. Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via Associated PressMr. Coomer, Dominion’s onetime director of product strategy and security, sued Ms. Powell, Mr. Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others last year in state district court in Denver. He has said that after the election, he was wrongly accused by a right-wing podcast host of hacking his company’s systems to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat and of then telling left-wing activists that he had done so.Soon after the host, Joe Oltmann, made these accusations, they were seized upon and amplified by Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani, who were part of a self-described “elite strike force” of lawyers leading the charge in challenging Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.On Nov. 19, for example, Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani appeared together at the news conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters and placed Mr. Coomer at the center of a plot to hijack the election by hacking Dominion’s voting machines. By Ms. Powell’s account that day, the conspiracy included Smartmatic, Venezuelan officials, people connected to Mr. Soros and a “massive influence of communist money.”Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani did not respond to messages seeking comment on the documents. Representatives for Mr. Trump also did not respond to emails seeking comment.Mr. Trump continues to falsely argue that the election was stolen from him, and in recent months Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani have stuck by their claims that the election was rife with fraud. A lawyer for Mr. Giuliani said in a court filing last month that at least some of his claims of election fraud were “substantially true.”And as recently as three weeks ago, Ms. Powell told a reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the 2020 election was “essentially a bloodless coup where they took over the presidency of the United States without a single shot being fired.”It remains unclear how widely the memo was circulated among Trump campaign staff members. According to the court documents, Mr. Giuliani said in a deposition that he had not seen the memo before he gave his presentation in Washington, and he questioned the motives of those who had prepared it.“They wanted Trump to lose because they could raise more money,” Mr. Giuliani was quoted as saying in the deposition.Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More