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    Cassidy Hutchinson Told Jan. 6 Panel That Lawyer Tried to Influence Her Testimony

    Cassidy Hutchinson recounted to the House select committee how a lawyer with ties to former President Donald J. Trump said to her that she should “focus on protecting the president.”WASHINGTON — Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was a standout witness of the House Jan. 6 committee investigation, told the panel in an interview in September that a lawyer aligned with former President Donald J. Trump had tried to influence her testimony, the latest example of what the committee says was an effort to stonewall its inquiry.“We just want to focus on protecting the president,” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer who represented her during her early interactions with the committee, telling her.“We all know you’re loyal,” she said Mr. Passantino told her. “Let’s just get you in and out, and this day will be easy, I promise.”The revelation was included in transcripts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony the panel released on Thursday as it prepared to publish its lengthy final report into the Capitol riot and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The transcripts were of closed-door interviews Ms. Hutchinson conducted with the committee after she had parted ways with Mr. Passantino, whose legal fees were being covered by allies of Mr. Trump, and hired a different lawyer.Ms. Hutchinson would go on to provide the Jan. 6 committee with some of its most explosive testimony at a widely watched televised hearing during which she detailed — relying at times on secondhand accounts — how Mr. Trump raged against Secret Service agents, demanded to join a crowd of his supporters at the Capitol, showed approval for his supporters carrying weapons and endorsed chants of hanging his own vice president.Ms. Hutchinson told the committee that she had been told by several allies of Mr. Trump that he knew he had lost the election two weeks after Election Day but continued to push for any way he could try to overturn the results, first through lawsuits but then through increasingly extreme plans.Ms. Hutchinson testified that Mark Meadows, her boss and the White House chief of staff, spoke with her on Jan. 2, 2021, after Mr. Trump had sought to persuade Georgia election officials to swing the election in his favor.“He said something to the effect of: ‘He knows it’s over. He knows he lost. But we are going to keep trying,’” Ms. Hutchinson recalled Mr. Meadows saying, referring to Mr. Trump.Another time, Mr. Meadows described Mr. Trump as in a constant state of fury over his election loss.“Mark said something to the effect of: ‘He’s just so angry at me all the time. I can’t talk to him about anything post-White House without him getting mad that we didn’t win,’” she said Mr. Meadows told her.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.A lawyer for Mr. Meadows did not respond to a call seeking comment.Ms. Hutchinson also recalled John Ratcliffe, the former director of national intelligence, telling her Mr. Trump knew he lost but did not want to concede.The statements were among a batch of transcripts the committee released on Thursday that also included notable testimony from Sarah Matthews, a former White House deputy press secretary. Ms. Matthews told the committee that on Jan. 5, 2021, Mr. Trump asked his staff to provide ideas on persuading lawmakers he called RINOs, for “Republicans in name only,” to “do the right thing” and join him in overturning the election.Ms. Matthews recalled that, as crowds began to amass in Washington, eager to attend Mr. Trump’s rally the next day, he grew excited and opened the door of the Oval Office on a frigid night to hear them.“You could tell how excited he was that the crowd was already assembled and ready for the following day,” she said.But it was Ms. Hutchinson’s transcript release that captured the most attention on Capitol Hill. The document shows Mr. Passantino was not the only person who Ms. Hutchinson claimed wanted her to protect Mr. Trump.She told the committee that on the night before her initial interview, another aide to Mr. Meadows, Ben Williamson, called her with a message.“Mark wants you to know that he knows you’re loyal and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss,” she quoted Mr. Williamson as saying, in an apparent reference to Mr. Trump. “You know, he knows that we’re all on the same team and we’re all a family.”Mr. Williamson did not respond to a message seeking comment.Ms. Hutchinson said that Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff, described Donald J. Trump as in a constant state of fury over his election loss. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMs. Hutchinson also said Mr. Passantino was working to “protect” Eric Herschmann, another lawyer for Mr. Trump, who also emerged as a standout of the Jan. 6 committee hearings for his colorful and profane put-downs of the attempts to overturn the 2020 election.In a statement through a spokesman, Mr. Herschmann disputed parts of Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony.“She told Mr. Herschmann that she was desperate, had no money and needed to find a lawyer,” the statement said. “Mr. Herschmann never put her in contact with any lawyer. No one discussed her testimony with Mr. Herschmann, nor did anyone ever try to confirm with him whether her testimony was accurate. The only thing he ever said to her about her testimony was to be truthful.”In her two most recent interviews with the committee, Ms. Hutchinson repeatedly suggested that Mr. Passantino sought to shape her testimony and encouraged her to avoid mentioning events that might embarrass Mr. Trump. She said she was concerned in particular about being asked about an episode in which Mr. Trump was said to have lunged at a Secret Service agent who refused to take him to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.According to Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony, Mr. Passantino advised her to say that she did not recall the event if she was asked about it. “The less you remember, the better,” she quoted him as saying.Mr. Passantino left the White House Counsel’s Office midway through Mr. Trump’s term. But he maintained ties to Mr. Trump’s world, including appearing in court as a lawyer for the Trump Organization regarding some of Mr. Trump’s legal matters.His representation of Ms. Hutchinson was unorthodox from the start.According to her testimony, she hired him without a formal engagement letter — a move he told her that she did not have to worry about. “We have you taken care of,” she quoted him as saying.Mr. Passantino also told Ms. Hutchinson that she would not have to pay his bills. “We’re not telling people where funding is coming from right now,” he said by her account. “Don’t worry. We’re taking care of you.”Mr. Passantino took a leave of absence from his law firm this week and defended himself against what he said were false insinuations by the panel that he had interfered with his client’s testimony.In a statement, Mr. Passantino said he “believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”He added: “External communications made on Ms. Hutchinson’s behalf while I was her counsel were made with her express authorization. Unfortunately, the committee never reached out to me to get the facts.”In early March, on the day of her first closed-door appearance before the committee, Ms. Hutchinson said she was nervous, feeling as if “I had Trump looking over my shoulder.”She said her anxiety grew worse when the panel asked about the episode with Mr. Trump and the Secret Service agent and, following Mr. Passantino’s advice, she said on several occasions that she did not recall it.Seemingly in a panic, she took a break from the interview and told Mr. Passantino in a hallway that she felt as though she had lied to the committee by avoiding talking about the incident. Mr. Passantino tried to assuage her, she testified, arguing that saying she did not recall was not the same as lying.“They don’t know what you know, Cassidy,” she quoted him as saying. “They don’t know that you can recall some of these things.”After the interview, Ms. Hutchinson said, Mr. Passantino told her that he would help her get her “a really good job in Trump world.”“We’re going to get you taken care of,” she quoted him as saying. “We want to keep you in the family.”Still feeling as though she had lied to the committee, Ms. Hutchinson arranged for a friend from the White House, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Mr. Trump’s former director of strategic communications, to quietly reach out to the panel and have her return for another interview to explore the incident involving Mr. Trump and the Secret Service.After that interview, Ms. Hutchinson said, Mr. Passantino, who still represented her at that point, was stunned that investigators knew about the episode. He later related what had happened during the interview to Mr. Meadows’s lawyers even though Ms. Hutchinson had asked him not to.The committee has so far released transcripts of more than 40 of its hundreds of witness interviews. The transcripts are also going to the Justice Department, which has been pursuing a criminal investigation into the efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power despite his election loss. More

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    A Common Answer to Jan. 6 Panel Questions: The Fifth

    Transcripts released by the House Jan. 6 committee showed nearly two dozen witnesses invoking their right against self-incrimination, underscoring the hurdles to the investigation.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released a batch of 34 transcripts on Wednesday that showed witnesses repeatedly stymying parts of the panel’s inquiry by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.The conservative lawyer John Eastman, who advised former President Donald J. Trump on how to try to overturn the 2020 election, cited his Fifth Amendment right 155 times.The political operative Roger J. Stone Jr. did so in response to more than 70 questions, including ones regarding his communications with Mr. Trump and his role in the events of Jan. 6. The activist Charlie Kirk took a similar stance, citing the potential for self-incrimination in response to most of the committee’s questions, even about his age and education (he was willing to divulge the city in which he resides).Time and again, the panel ran into roadblocks as it tried to investigate the effort to overturn the election, the transcripts show.“Trump lawyers and supporters Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Phil Waldron and Michael Flynn all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the select committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen,” the committee wrote in an executive summary of its final report. “Not a single witness — nor any combination of witnesses — provided the select committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any state.”The transcripts released on Wednesday do shine some light on previously unknown aspects of the committee’s investigation. As part of their questioning, the committee’s lawyers referred to emails or text messages they had obtained through subpoenas, quoting aloud in hopes of eliciting more information from the recalcitrant witnesses.During the questioning of Mike Roman, director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign, a committee lawyer revealed communications that investigators said showed that Mr. Roman sent Gary Michael Brown, who served as the deputy director, to deliver documents to the Capitol related to a plan to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.After doing so, Mr. Brown sent a photo of himself wearing a suit and a mask with the U.S. Capitol over his shoulder. “Mission accomplished,” he wrote.Investigators also asked Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, who sued to try to block the committee’s subpoena, about a text she sent to a member of the Maricopa County board of supervisors that said: “We need you to stop the counting.”And investigators revealed how disputes broke out among organizers over the financing of the rally that preceded the violence on Jan. 6, including a payment of $60,000 to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., for her brief speech.“You’re done for life with me because I won’t pay you a $60,000 speaking fee for an event you aren’t speaking at?” Caroline Wren, a Trump fund-raiser, wrote, as she implored Ms. Guilfoyle to call and thank Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heir to the Publix supermarket fortune who had donated millions to put on the rally. “This poor woman has donated $1 million to Don’s Senate PAC and $3 million to this rally and you’ll can’t take five minutes out of your day to thank her. It’s so humiliating. And then you have the audacity to ask me why I won’t have her pay you $60,000?”The transcripts also show the combative stance some witnesses and their lawyers took during questioning. For instance, a lawyer for the white nationalist Nick Fuentes repeatedly challenged the committee’s investigators and accused them of grandstanding.“I will note the irony of an accusation of grandstanding in a deposition of Mr. Fuentes,” a lawyer for the committee shot back.Another time, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, asked Mr. Stone if he believed “coups are allowed in our constitutional system.”Mr. Stone replied: “I most definitely decline to respond to your question.”The release of the transcripts came a day ahead of the committee’s planned release of its more than 800-page final report, likely the final act of an 18-month investigation during which the lawmakers interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses.Hundreds more transcripts are expected to be released before the end of the year, including those in which witnesses provided extensive testimony used by the committee in reaching its decision to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump, Mr. Eastman and others involved in the effort to keep Mr. Trump in power after his 2020 election loss.In an attempt to rebut the committee’s final report, five House Republicans led by Representative Jim Banks of Indiana released their own report into the attack on the Capitol. That 141-page document criticizes law enforcement failures, accuses Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her senior team of bungling Capitol security and tries to recast Mr. Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6 as a voice for peace and calm.“Leadership and law enforcement failures within the U.S. Capitol left the complex vulnerable on Jan. 6, 2021,” the Republican report stated. “The Democrat-led investigation in the House of Representatives, however, has disregarded those institutional failings that exposed the Capitol to violence that day.”A bipartisan Senate report last year also detailed Capitol security failures but did not find any blame in the actions of Ms. Pelosi or her staff, who fled from a mob of Trump supporters chanting her name as the speaker tried to get the National Guard to respond to the violence.The Senate report found top federal intelligence agencies failed to adequately warn law enforcement officials before the Jan. 6 riot that pro-Trump extremists were threatening violence, including plans to “storm the Capitol,” infiltrate its tunnel system and “bring guns.”An F.B.I. memo on Jan. 5 warning of people traveling to Washington for “war” at the Capitol never made its way to top law enforcement officials.The Capitol Police failed to widely circulate information its own intelligence unit had collected as early as mid-December about the threat of violence on Jan. 6, including a report that said right-wing extremist groups and supporters of Mr. Trump had been posting online and in far-right chat groups about gathering at the Capitol, armed with weapons, to pressure lawmakers to overturn his election loss.A spokesman for the House Jan. 6 committee declined to comment.Catie Edmondson More

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    Gods Don’t Bleed. Trump is Bleeding.

    I wrote in 2019 that Donald Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who liked him, which meant that his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only did not damage him, they added to his legend.The folk hero is transcendent. He defies convention and defies gravity — in Trump’s case, political and cultural gravity. He overcomes the impossible, wins the improbable, evades authority.He was a classic trickster figure, common in folklore.For instance, for a Black child growing up in the American South, Stack-O-Lee (or, among other variations, Stagger Lee, as we pronounced it) was a folk hero. “Stack” Lee Shelton was a Black man, a pimp, who in 1895 shot another man dead for snatching his hat. The story became the subject of so-called murder ballads. Shelton bolstered his legend when, after being released from prison, he killed another man during a robbery.This man, this figure, who negotiated the space between slavery and freedom, between criminal and hero, “came to personify the collective feeling of blacks at the bottom of society, and it was in this sense that Stagolee became a symbol of the Black community,” as Cecil Brown wrote in his book “Stagolee Shot Billy.”Writing in Mother Jones in 2011, Joe Kloc described how Stack-O-Lee became a hero in Southern Black society by unapologetically breaking its rules. The murders he committed “only serve to illustrate the injustices of southern society,” Kloc wrote. “For all the myth surrounding him, there is something very rational about Stack-O-Lee’s character: Why follow some of society’s rules when so many others work against you?”This is why I so instinctively understood Trump’s appeal and heroizing.Years, decades, of twisted propaganda had turned working-class white people into a victimized class. These white people saw themselves as the new Negro, in a turned-tables alternate reality. Society’s rules threatened to — or, had already begun to — work against them.Trump, the trickster and rule-breaker, emerges as an amalgamation of their anxieties and rebellion. He was a politician, but to them, above politics. The Donald was approaching deity. His followers embraced a cultish zealotry.But things have changed.Trump’s announcement of a third run for the White House landed with a thud. High-profile Republicans have refused to sign on as early endorsers. Trump himself is cloistered at Mar-a-Lago, having not held a single public campaign event since his announcement. In fact, he has been reduced to the low and laughable position of personally hawking digital trading cards of himself. (Trump has always seen his die-hard supporters as customers to whom he could sell a product, whether a candidacy or a card.)And a recent poll showed that Republican and Republican-leaning voters, at least at this point, prefer Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to Trump by double digits.So, what happened? In short, God bled. And once you see God bleed, you can no longer believe that someone is God.It is impossible to overstate how damaging the results of the midterms were, not just to Republicans, but to Trump himself.For years, Trump had been able to blame losses or defeats on other people, or even recast them as victories.Even though the Robert Mueller report was damning in many ways and went out of its way not to exonerate Trump, the fact that no charges were brought against Trump left him with the opening to claim total vindication.He wasn’t disgraced as much as a victim of a politically motivated plot. Impeachment, he told his supporters, driven by my political enemies, had twice failed to remove me. He wasn’t the most flawed president, but the most resilient.When Trump lost in 2020, he blamed corruption and a stolen election. That, of course, was another lie. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” and “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Nevertheless, Republican state legislatures across the country used Trump’s election fraud lie as a rationale to “fix” election systems that weren’t broken, to implement even more oppressive voting restrictions.But there was an unintended consequence: By boasting about making their electoral processes more secure, Republicans took away whatever latitude they had to lie about elections being stolen when they lost.And, in the midterms, they lost some major races, including in states that had implemented the most regressive voter laws, like Georgia and Arizona, where Democrats handily dispatched Trump’s anointed candidates. There was no way to wiggle out of the devastating truth of the cycle: The Trump brand was too tarnished and toxic to win in many battleground states. He was no longer able to defy political gravity.At the same time, Trump’s legal losses are mounting as multiple investigations close in on him. The man many had compared to Teflon is beginning to appear more like fly paper.Where some Republicans once saw invincibility, they now sense weakness and injury. And in the pack mentality of politics, this is the moment that they are most likely to turn on him.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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    An Early Trump Backer’s Message to the Republican Party: Dump Him

    Tom Marino, one of the first members of Congress to support Trump, now says the G.O.P. “has to do whatever it has to do” to get away from him.The greatest threat to Donald Trump’s grip on the Republican Party has always come from the ranks of his own supporters, rather than those who disliked him all along. So it’s significant that one of his earliest backers is coming out swinging against him.In February 2016, when Representative Tom Marino became one of the first Republican members of Congress to endorse Trump, he called the decision “one of my life-changing moments” and hailed the presidential candidate as a fresh voice who was not beholden to Wall Street.At the time, Trump was still locked in a tight nomination battle with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and he was struggling to attract support from elected officials. Marino, a former prosecutor who represented a rural district in northern Pennsylvania, didn’t just endorse him. He was a loud and proud Trump booster who helped steer his campaign in the state and joined his presidential transition team after he won.Trump expressed fondness for Marino and Lou Barletta, a fellow member of Congress and co-chairman of Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania, calling them “thunder and lightning.”As president, Trump tapped Marino to be director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, though Marino withdrew after questions about his record on opioids. He resigned from Congress in 2019 soon after beginning his fifth term, citing recurring kidney problems.During this year’s Republican primary for governor in Pennsylvania, Marino sharply criticized Trump for refusing to endorse Barletta, who lost that race to Doug Mastriano. Now, he is urging his fellow Republicans to move on.“I think the Republican Party has to do whatever it has to do to get away from Trump,” Marino said in an interview. “He certainly, I think, has cost the party losses in this election that we had in November. I’m deeply disappointed in him.”In an unpublished letter that he shared with The New York Times, Marino castigated Trump for “acting like a childish bully” by attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom the former president ripped as “Ron DeSanctimonious” as Republicans began to coalesce around a possible alternative for 2024.To secure his support, Marino wrote, Trump would have had to “grow up and act presidential and refrain from calling potential candidates derogatory names.”Trump, he added, “has thrown several people that were close to him under the bus”; “has no idea what loyalty means”; and “severely lacks character and integrity.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.“I will not support Trump, in fact, I will campaign against him,” Marino’s letter concluded. “Our country deserves a person who is mature, respects others and is honest to lead our nation.”Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Trump keeps sinkingThe evidence that Trump is getting weaker within the Republican Party is mounting by the day, and Marino’s letter is just the latest indicator.“G.O.P. primary voters are moving,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist, nodding to Trump’s worsening poll numbers in hypothetical 2024 matchups. “They are exhausted having to defend his every word and action,” he added, and want “similar policies and fight without all the drama.”Consider the party’s less-than-full-throated reaction to Monday’s big news: the Jan. 6 committee’s call to the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. The panel also issued a damning, 154-page executive summary of its final report, which comes out in full on Wednesday.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary reads. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”Trump responded with typical bluster. “These folks don’t get it that when they come after me,” he posted on Truth Social, “people who love freedom rally around me.”He went on: “It strengthens me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”There are no signs of that so far. As Maggie Haberman writes in assessing the damage wrought both by the former president’s recent actions and by the committee’s investigation, “Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape.”Two possible presidential contenders — former Vice President Mike Pence and Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas — took the position that Trump had acted recklessly on Jan. 6, though they argued that he should not be criminally prosecuted.In the Senate, Trump also didn’t get much political cover on Monday. Only one Republican senator, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, has endorsed his presidential bid.“The entire nation knows who is responsible for that day,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, told reporters at the Capitol. “Beyond that, I don’t have any immediate observations.”Senator John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, said the panel had “interviewed some credible witnesses.” Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, while criticizing what she called a “political process,” said that Trump “bears some responsibility” for the riot.And even in the House — which is still very much Trump country — the reaction was well short of thorough, orchestrated pushback.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House, perhaps mindful that he needs moderate Republicans to support his bid for speaker just as badly as he needs pro-Trump die-hards, said nothing.McCarthy’s lieutenants dutifully attacked the Jan. 6 panel, but there was no phalanx of pro-Trump surrogates holding court for reporters at the Capitol, no point-by-point rebuttal of the committee’s key findings.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is in charge of Republicans’ message, put out a single tweet calling the Jan. 6 investigation a “partisan charade.” Representative Jim Jordan, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, complained that McCarthy hadn’t been allowed to put his allies on the panel, which he boycotted after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected his first two choices. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia went after “communist” Democrats and attacked Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of just two Republicans on the committee, as “crybaby Adam.”More often, Republicans preferred to change the subject to anything else — the year-end spending bill that many on the right oppose, the recent surge of migrants along the border, Twitter’s handling of articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 or the effects of inflation.Trump appeared on a screen during the hearing of the Jan. 6 committee on Monday. A new poll suggested that the panel’s findings had at least some effect on the midterm elections.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesDid the Jan. 6 hearings hurt Trump?Democrats tend to view Republicans’ attitude toward Trump as cynical rather than principled in nature, remembering how a good chunk of the party rallied to his side in early 2021 — then eagerly sought his endorsement in 2022.“If the G.O.P. had won the House by a large margin and taken the Senate on the backs of Trump’s candidates, the reaction to these recent troubles would be very, very different,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for President Barack Obama, wrote Tuesday in his Substack newsletter.What this misses, though, is that the Jan. 6 committee — especially its slickly produced prime-time hearings over the summer, which riveted millions of viewers — does seem to have been at least a minor factor in Republicans’ losses this year.One of the few polls to try to isolate the question came out this week. In surveys commissioned by Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan watchdog group, 46 percent of voters in five battleground states said that the Jan. 6 hearings were a factor in their decision. And a larger group — 57 percent — said they had been at least some exposure to the hearings.The poll zeroed in on so-called ticket-splitters — Republicans and independents who voted for a Democrat in one race and a Republican in another. In Arizona, 20.9 percent of those ticket-splitters said that Jan. 6 was a top factor in their vote. In Pennsylvania, that number was just 8.5 percent. Those numbers are pretty modest, but every vote counts.When I recently asked Sarah Longwell, a Republican consultant who worked to defeat election deniers in places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, to assess the role democracy played in the midterms, she was cautious.“I do think we’ve just won an important battle and sent a message to Republicans that election denialism and extremism is a loser with swing/independent voters in states that hold the keys to political power,” she said in an email. But it was too soon, she said, to say that American democracy was “out of the woods.”So far, the most potent argument within the base of the Republican Party has not been Trump’s behavior in office, but the increasingly dominant view that his obsession with the 2020 election cost the G.O.P. crucial seats this year.That could be the most powerful anti-Trump argument of all, said John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University: that election denial is a political loser.“All that matters is the interpretation,” Sides said. “If that perception takes root, then it really doesn’t matter what the real reason is.”What to readTop lawmakers in Washington unveiled a sprawling spending package that would keep the government open through next fall after reaching a compromise on billions of dollars in federal spending, Emily Cochrane reports. Congress faces a midnight Friday deadline to fund the government or face a shutdown.The House Ways and Means Committee today is considering the release of Trump’s tax returns. Such a move would risk reprisals from Republicans, Alan Rappeport writes.Congress has proposed $1 billion to help poor countries cope with climate change, a figure that falls significantly short of what President Biden promised, Lisa Friedman reports.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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    Key Findings From the Jan. 6 Committee’s Report, Annotated

    The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol outlined 17 specific findings on Monday in the executive summary of its final report. Here are the findings, with additional context.1. Beginning election night and continuing through Jan. 6 and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on Jan. 6.Annotation: This reflects the committee’s finding that Mr. Trump’s repeated false claims that the election was rigged had both a political and financial motive. During its second hearing, the panel introduced evidence that Trump supporters donated nearly $100 million to Mr. Trump’s so-called Election Defense Fund but that the money flowed instead into a super PAC the president had created. It was not just “the big lie,” the committee said. It was also “the big rip-off.”2. Knowing that he and his supporters had lost dozens of election lawsuits, and despite his own senior advisers refuting his election fraud claims and urging him to concede his election loss, Donald Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election. Rather than honor his constitutional obligation to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” President Trump instead plotted to overturn the election outcome.Annotation: Mr. Trump and his allies filed more than 60 lawsuits challenging the results of the election and lost all but one of them. Many of the suits, the committee determined, were brought even after some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides — including his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and his attorney general, William P. Barr — told him that there was no fraud that could have changed the outcome of the race.3. Despite knowing that such an action would be illegal, and that no state had or would submit an altered electoral slate, Donald Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes during Congress’s joint session on Jan. 6.Annotation: The committee discovered that the lawyer John Eastman had advised Mr. Trump to undertake a campaign to push Mr. Pence into single-handedly deciding the election in his favor even though there was evidence that Mr. Eastman knew the plan was illegal. Some of Mr. Pence’s own aides told Mr. Trump the same, but he pressured Mr. Pence nonetheless.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.4. Donald Trump sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice by attempting to enlist department officials to make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the presidential election. After that effort failed, Donald Trump offered the position of acting attorney general to Jeff Clark knowing that Clark intended to disseminate false information aimed at overturning the election.Annotation: After leaders in the Justice Department — including Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, and Richard Donoghue, his deputy — told Mr. Trump that he was wrong about his claims concerning fraud in the election, Mr. Trump wanted to appoint Mr. Clark, a loyalist, to run the department. Mr. Clark had promised to send out letters to leaders in key swing states saying that prosecutors had in fact found fraud in the election. The president decided not to appoint Mr. Clark only after several senior department officials threatened to quit if he did.5. Without any evidentiary basis and contrary to state and federal law, Donald Trump unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.Annotation: In the weeks that followed the election, Mr. Trump and his allies had calls and meetings with local officials in key swing states like Michigan and Arizona in which they pressured the officials to use their powers to assign electors from the states to him. More famously, Mr. Trump also asked Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to help him “find” the 11,000 votes he needed to win the election there.6. Donald Trump oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.Annotation: This refers to one of Mr. Trump’s most expansive schemes to maintain his grip on power: a plan to have state officials create and submit fake electors pledged to him in seven swing states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.7. Donald Trump pressured members of Congress to object to valid slates of electors from several states.Annotation: The committee found that Mr. Trump also played a role in a plan closely related to the fake-electors scheme: He helped to persuade 139 House Republicans to dispute the Electoral College count on the day the Capitol was attacked.8. Donald Trump purposely verified false information filed in federal court.Annotation: In December 2020, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Fulton County, Ga., contending that thousands of votes had been improperly counted and citing specific numbers of dead people, felons and unregistered voters who had cast ballots. Mr. Trump signed an official attestation attached to the suit swearing that the data in it was accurate despite the fact that one of his own lawyers, Mr. Eastman, had determined it was false.9. Based on false allegations that the election was stolen, Donald Trump summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6. Although these supporters were angry and some were armed, Donald Trump instructed them to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6 to “take back” their country.Annotation: The committee determined that a tweet posted by Mr. Trump on Dec. 19, 2020, announcing a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6 was heard as a clarion call by both far-right extremists and ordinary Trump supporters who sprang into action preparing for the event. When they got to Washington for the rally, Mr. Trump’s speech calling on them to “fight like hell” was a central driver in sending them on toward the Capitol.10. Knowing that a violent attack on the Capitol was underway and knowing that his words would incite further violence, Donald Trump purposely sent a social media message publicly condemning Vice President Pence at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6.Annotation: The tweet the committee is referring to here said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” Court papers show that some rioters at the Capitol responded directly to it by pushing toward and ultimately into the building.11. Knowing that violence was underway at the Capitol, and despite his duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, Donald Trump refused repeated requests over a multiple-hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television. This failure to act perpetuated the violence at the Capitol and obstructed Congress’s proceeding to count electoral votes.Annotation: The committee accused Mr. Trump of “a dereliction of duty” for letting nearly three hours pass between learning that the Capitol was under siege and calling for his supporters to leave the Capitol grounds. During that time, several people close to him — including his daughter Ivanka — begged Mr. Trump to issue a statement that would calm down the crowd.12. Each of these actions by Donald Trump was taken in support of a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election.13. The intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol. As Jan. 6 approached, the intelligence specifically identified the potential for violence at the Capitol. This intelligence was shared within the executive branch, including with the Secret Service and the president’s National Security Council.14. Intelligence gathered in advance of Jan. 6 did not support a conclusion that antifa or other left-wing groups would likely engage in a violent counterdemonstration, or attack Trump supporters on Jan. 6. Indeed, intelligence from Jan. 5 indicated that some left-wing groups were instructing their members to “stay at home” and not attend on Jan. 6. Ultimately, none of these groups was involved to any material extent with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6.15. Neither the intelligence community nor law enforcement obtained intelligence in advance of Jan. 6 on the full extent of the ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates to overturn the certified election results. Such agencies apparently did not (and potentially could not) anticipate the provocation President Trump would offer the crowd in his Ellipse speech, that President Trump would “spontaneously” instruct the crowd to march to the Capitol, that President Trump would exacerbate the violent riot by sending his 2:24 p.m. tweet condemning Vice President Pence, or the full scale of the violence and lawlessness that would ensue. Nor did law enforcement anticipate that President Trump would refuse to direct his supporters to leave the Capitol once violence began. No intelligence community advance analysis predicted exactly how President Trump would behave; no such analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6.Annotation for 13, 14 and 15: The committee has faced criticism, especially from Republicans, for not focusing more attention on the failures by intelligence and law enforcement officials on Jan. 6 and in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack. But the panel did present some preliminary findings and may ultimately issue a separate report.16. Hundreds of Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers performed their duties bravely on Jan. 6, and America owes those individual immense gratitude for their courage in the defense of Congress and our constitution. Without their bravery, Jan. 6 would have been far worse. Although certain members of the Capitol Police leadership regarded their approach to Jan. 6 as “all hands on deck” the Capitol Police leadership did not have sufficient assets in place to address the violent and lawless crowd. Capitol Police leadership did not anticipate the scale of the violence that would ensue after President Trump instructed tens of thousands of his supporters in the Ellipse crowd to march to the Capitol, and then tweeted at 2:24 p.m. Although Chief Steven Sund raised the idea of National Guard support, the Capitol Police Board did not request Guard assistance prior to Jan. 6. The Metropolitan Police took an even more proactive approach to Jan. 6, and deployed roughly 800 officers, including responding to the emergency calls for help at the Capitol. Rioters still managed to break their line in certain locations, when the crowd surged forward in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet. The Department of Justice readied a group of federal agents at Quantico and in the District of Columbia, anticipating that Jan. 6 could become violent, and then deployed those agents once it became clear that police at the Capitol were overwhelmed. Agents from the Department of Homeland Security were also deployed to assist.17. President Trump had authority and responsibility to direct deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia, but never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on Jan. 6 or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the secretary of defense could, and ultimately did, deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.Annotation: The question of why it took so long to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol is one of the enduring mysteries of Jan. 6. While the committee sharply criticized Mr. Trump for failing to taking action that day, it also found that there was no evidence the deployment of the Guard was delayed for political reasons. More

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    A Diminished Trump Meets a Damning Narrative

    Former President Donald Trump’s current woes extend beyond the report by the House Jan. 6 committee, but the case the panel laid out against him further complicates his future.As the summer and the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearings began, former President Donald J. Trump was still a towering figure in Republican politics, able to pick winners in primary contests and force candidates to submit to a litmus test of denialism about his loss in the 2020 election.Six months later, Mr. Trump is significantly diminished, a shrunken presence on the political landscape. His fade is partly a function of his own missteps and miscalculations in recent months. But it is also a product of the voluminous evidence assembled by the House committee and its ability to tell the story of his efforts to overturn the election in a compelling and accessible way.In ways both raw and easily digested, and with an eye for vivid detail, the committee spooled out the episodic narrative of a president who was told repeatedly he had lost and that his claims of fraud were fanciful. But Mr. Trump continued pushing them anyway, plotted to reverse the outcome, stoked the fury of his supporters, summoned them to Washington and then stood by as the violence played out.It was a turnabout in roles for a president who rose first to prominence and then to the White House on the basis of his feel for how to project himself on television.Guided by a veteran television executive, the committee sprinkled the story with moments that stayed in the public consciousness, from Mr. Trump throwing his lunch in anger against the wall of the dining room just off the Oval Office to a claim that he lunged at a Secret Service agent driving his car when he was denied his desire to join his supporters at the Capitol.On Monday — the second anniversary of Mr. Trump’s Twitter post urging his followers to come to Washington to protest his loss, promising it “will be wild!” — the committee wrapped up its case by lending the weight of the House to calls for Mr. Trump to be held criminally liable for his actions and making the case that he should never again be allowed to hold power.“No man who would behave that way at that moment can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again,” said Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who served as the committee’s vice chairwoman, referring to Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to intervene to stop the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. “He’s unfit for office.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.To emphasize that point, the committee did something Congress had never done before: It referred a former president to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, a largely symbolic step but one that only added to the sense that Mr. Trump is starting his 2024 presidential campaign under a number of very dark legal clouds.Federal prosecutors are investigating not only Mr. Trump’s efforts to thwart the results of the election, but also his mishandling of presidential records and classified material that he took with him when he left the White House. A prosecutor in Georgia is barreling ahead with an investigation of his efforts to reverse his election loss in that state, and his company, the Trump Organization, was convicted in New York this month of tax fraud.Whether Mr. Trump’s legal woes and political missteps will keep him from winning his party’s nomination again is another matter.Mr. Trump still has a durable base of support within the party, though just how large it is at this point is up for debate after a handful of public polls have shown more Republican voters backing Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as an alternative. Other potential candidates are also watching carefully, weighing their chances if they get into a race with a weakened Mr. Trump.To some, the talk of Mr. Trump’s current fortunes is like a movie they have seen before, one in which the lead figure is left for dead only to rise again.“There’s still a lot of people that support Donald Trump; there’s just no question about that,” said Rob Gleason, the former chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. He pointed to stories that have dominated headlines, such as the number of Republicans whom Mr. Trump backed who lost their races, that he said simply have not seeped into the consciousness of his supporters.“We assume people know too much,” he said. “They’re not following a lot of this stuff.”Indeed, some Republicans said privately that the House select committee’s criminal referrals could serve to galvanize Mr. Trump’s supporters behind him, as was the case for a short time after the F.B.I. searched his club, Mar-a-Lago, in August, looking for additional classified documents.Some other Republicans are more skeptical.“I don’t think that anything can save Donald Trump,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida. “He’s decidedly on the path to irrelevance. He reduces himself by the day.”The rally speeches Mr. Trump gave at events during the midterm elections and his 2024 campaign announcement were largely centered on his grievances about 2020 or the investigations into his conduct — a formulation that some Republicans say is increasingly out of step with voters.“This time is different,” Mr. Curbelo said, adding that six years ago, Mr. Trump was “new and interesting” and that people were curious what kind of leader he would be. “Now Donald Trump is old, predictable, obviously petty.”Some of the candidates who most closely identified with Mr. Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election performed poorly in the midterm elections, and Republicans barely captured a House majority, despite a sitting Democratic president whose approval rating has been depressed.“I think he’s been a diminishing figure for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania and a longtime critic of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump insisted on declaring a 2024 presidential campaign a week after the midterms, against the advice of nearly all his aides and allies, delivering a lackluster speech he read with minimal emotion from a teleprompter. He has held no public political events in the nearly five weeks since.Instead, he has gotten attention for hosting a dinner at his members-only club and home in Florida with a Holocaust denier and Kanye West, the rap artist who has made a rapid descent into peddling antisemitism.For many members of a party that would like to recover from three bruising election cycles, Mr. Trump has never felt more like a product of the past.“Ironically, this is not too different from a reality TV series that’s run its course,” Mr. Curbelo said. “And people are just kind of over it, even his supporters.” More

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    Jan. 6 Panel Accuses Trump of Insurrection and Refers Him to Justice Dept.

    WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the referrals.Mr. Trump attacked the committee as “highly partisan” ahead of a final meeting the panel held on Monday to release an executive summary of its final report on the Capitol attack and to vote on referring the former president to the Justice Department.“It’s a kangaroo court,” Mr. Trump said Monday on “The Dan Bongino Show.” “The people aren’t going to stand for it.” He elaborated on that theme in a post on Truth Social, his social media network, after the meeting.“These folks don’t get it that when they come after me, people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens me,” he said, adding that he “told everyone to go home” on Jan. 6, but leaving out his hours of inaction before that while a mob of his supporters rampaged through the Capitol.Republicans, who have vowed to investigate the committee after they take control of the House in January, mounted a modest response. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, was one of the few to react with a statement, accusing the committee of staging a “partisan charade.” She promised that Republicans “will hold House Democrats accountable for their illegitimate abuse of power.”The executive summary, a 154-page narrative of Mr. Trump’s relentless drive to remain in power after he lost the 2020 election by seven million votes, identifies co-conspirators who aided Mr. Trump. But it singles out the former president as the primary cause of the mob violence.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the summary stated. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.The summary closely follows the evidence from the committee’s 10 previous public hearings, but the facts have been assembled into a readable narrative that amounts to an astonishing story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to effectively overthrow the government he led. The committee is expected to release a lengthy final report on Wednesday.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and vice chairwoman of the committee, said at the start of the meeting.Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, said of Mr. Trump: “Nothing could be a greater betrayal of this duty than to assist in insurrection against the constitutional order.”The action is the culmination of the committee’s intense 18-month investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe summary and referrals have now set up a dynamic without parallel in the annals of American campaigns: Congress asking the Justice Department of an incumbent president to consider criminal charges against the president’s potential opponent in the next election. President Biden has indicated his intent to run in 2024, and Mr. Trump announced his re-election campaign last month.The summary laid out step by step how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power, much as the committee did during its televised hearings in the summer. First, the summary said, Mr. Trump lied about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false. He then organized false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden as he pressured state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election. Finally, he amassed a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“Even key individuals who worked closely with President Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election on Jan. 6 ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful,” the committee wrote.“Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one,” said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe panel also referred four Republican members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee — including the man seeking to become the next speaker, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — because of their refusal to comply with the panel’s subpoenas.Mr. McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.The other Republicans referred were Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona.A spokesman for Mr. Jordan, Russell Dye, said in a statement that the referral was “just another partisan and political stunt.” A spokesman for Mr. Perry, Jay Ostrich, said the committee was engaged in “more games from a petulant and soon-to-be kangaroo court.’’Mr. Biggs said in a tweet that the referral was the committee’s “final political stunt” and that he looked forward to “reviewing their documents, publishing their lies and setting the record straight” in the next Congress.In its summary, the committee did not entirely resolve disputed accounts of what happened inside the presidential S.U.V. when Mr. Trump was told by his Secret Service agents that they could not take him to the Capitol to join the crowd on Jan. 6. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, testified under oath to the committee in public last summer that Anthony M. Ornato, a White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Mr. Trump grew so angry that he lunged at his Secret Service agent and tried to grab the steering wheel. The Secret Service denied that account anonymously.The summary said only that the “committee has now obtained evidence from several sources about a ‘furious interaction’” that occurred in the S.U.V. “The vast majority of witnesses who have testified to the select committee about this topic, including multiple members of the Secret Service, a member of the Metropolitan Police and national security officials in the White House, described President Trump’s behavior as ‘irate,’ ‘furious,’ ‘insistent,’ ‘profane’ and ‘heated.’”The committee’s summary also concluded that there was no nefarious reason for why the National Guard was delayed for hours in responding to violence of Jan. 6.“Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard,” the committee wrote. “The select committee recognizes that some at the department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”In its summary, the panel asked the Justice Department to investigate whether anyone had interfered with or obstructed the panel’s investigation, including whether any lawyers paid for by groups connected to Mr. Trump “may have advised clients to provide false or misleading testimony to the committee.”Among the committee’s findings, revealed at its meeting on Monday, was that lawmakers became concerned that lawyers who were paid by Trump associates may have tried to interfere with the panel’s investigation. The panel also learned that a client was offered potential employment that would make her “financially very comfortable” as the date of her testimony approached. But then offers were withdrawn or did not materialize as reports of the content of her testimony circulated, the committee said.The committee also chastised certain witnesses that it said had not been forthright with investigators. It said it had “significant concerns about the credibility” of the testimony of Mr. Ornato.The committee also said Kayleigh McEnany, one of Mr. Trump’s former press secretaries, and Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, had been less than forthcoming.The summary demonstrated, as the committee’s hearings did, how despite being told repeatedly that his claims of election fraud were false, Mr. Trump kept up the lies.Bill Stepien, a former White House political director, told the committee how he and others would investigate the claims, find them to be false, and report back to the president. “It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Mr. Stepien said. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, yeah, that wasn’t true.”The summary also contained evidence that certain White House aides had grown concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and urged Mr. Trump to make a pre-emptive statement calling for peace. No such statement was made.Hope Hicks, a former White House communications director, said she suggested “several times” on Jan. 4 and 5 that Mr. Trump “publicly state that Jan. 6 must remain peaceful, and that he had refused her advice to do so,” the panel wrote.The panel played new video from Ms. Hicks, who described a conversation with Mr. Trump.“I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy,” Ms. Hicks said she told the president.Mr. Trump’s response? “Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose, so that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning,” she recalled him saying.Supporters of Mr. Trump confronting Capitol Police officers outside the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhile the executive summary of the report focused heavily on Mr. Trump, it did conclude some findings about law enforcement failures, a topic not previously addressed at the panel’s hearings. “No analysis recognized the full scale and extent of the threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6,” the committee wrote, although the “intelligence community and law enforcement agencies did successfully detect the planning for potential violence on Jan. 6, including planning specifically by the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper militia groups who ultimately led the attack on the Capitol.”Over the past year and a half, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, obtained more than one million documents, issued more than 100 subpoenas and held hearings that drew millions of viewers.The House created the Jan. 6 committee after Senate Republicans used a filibuster to defeat a proposal to create an independent commission to investigate the attack.The committee — made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans — consistently broke new ground for a congressional investigation. Staffed with more than a dozen former federal prosecutors, the panel set a new production standard for how to hold a congressional hearing. It also got significantly ahead of a parallel Justice Department investigation into the events of Jan. 6, with federal prosecutors later interviewing many of the same witnesses Congress had spoken to.In recent weeks, federal prosecutors under the supervision of a special counsel have issued subpoenas to officials in seven states in which the Trump campaign organized electors to falsely certify the election for Mr. Trump despite the voters choosing Mr. Biden.Lawmakers on the panel also believe they played a significant role in elevating the issue of threats to democracy to voters, who rejected many election deniers in the November midterms.In terms of legislative recommendations, the panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Mr. Trump and his allies tried to exploit on Jan. 6 in an attempt to cling to power. Lawmakers have also discussed changes to the Insurrection Act and legislation to enforce the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on insurrectionists holding office. Those recommendations are expected to be detailed in the committee’s final report.Katie Benner More

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    6 Takeaways From the Final Jan. 6 Hearing

    The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Monday concluded a year and a half of work, finding that former President Donald J. Trump and some of his associates violated federal laws, conspired against the United States and should be prosecuted.At their final meeting, the bipartisan committee of nine House lawmakers released a 160-page summary of their findings, bringing to an end the most comprehensive examination of the violence aimed at stopping the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the 46th president.The panel voted 9 to 0 to accept the final report and to urge the Justice Department to consider criminal charges against Mr. Trump and his allies in four separate areas of the law.Here are some takeaways:The committee kept its focus on Trump.The committee’s hourlong presentation focused almost exclusively on Mr. Trump, essentially ignoring findings about intelligence and security failures at the Capitol before and during the attack. The committee also did not dwell on the information it collected about the rise of domestic extremism.The focus on Mr. Trump had been telegraphed for months as the committee drafted its final report, using it primarily as a means to hold Mr. Trump to account for his actions in trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power after a presidential election. As Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a Republican and the panel’s vice chairwoman, put it: “Every president in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one.”In one place, the report laid out the facts of how Trump attempted to stay in power.The summary of the committee’s final report is a remarkable account of a president’s desperate attempt to stay in office following his election loss to Mr. Biden in 2020.While it breaks no new ground since the panel’s series of public hearings this summer, the report for the first time brings together all the facts in one place.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.The report states that even people around Mr. Trump “ultimately admitted that they lacked actual evidence sufficient to change the election result, and they admitted that what they were attempting was unlawful.”The report laid out, step by step, how Mr. Trump sought to cling to power after losing the 2020 election: first, by lying about widespread fraud, despite being told his claims were false; by organizing false slates of electors in states won by Mr. Biden by pressuring state officials, the Justice Department and Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election; and finally, by amassing a mob of his supporters to march on the Capitol, where they engaged in hours of bloody violence while Mr. Trump did nothing to call them off.“That evidence has led to an overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the report states. “None of the events of Jan. 6 would have happened without him.”During the final day of hearings, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway were included in a projection of officials who told former President Trump that there was no election fraud.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe committee revealed new details from two top advisers: Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway.The committee revealed on Monday the investigative work it had done since the end of their previous hearings. That included the panel’s first interviews with two of the former president’s top advisers: Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway.Ms. Hicks, who served as a senior adviser in the White House, said that when she raised concerns with the former president about the actions on Jan. 6 affecting Mr. Trump’s legacy, he responded that “nobody will care about my legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters is winning.”The committee also revealed testimony from Ms. Conway, who described telling Mr. Trump that Jan. 6 was a “terrible day.” She recalled him responding: “No. People are upset. They are very upset.”The events of Jan. 6 hurt Trump but did not knock him out of 2024 contention.The work of the committee over the past year has already helped to chip away at Mr. Trump’s political standing and his reputation as the nation’s 45th president. Ms. Cheney said again on Monday that Mr. Trump should never “serve in any position of authority in our nation again. He is unfit for any office.”And yet, Mr. Trump already has announced his pursuit of the presidency again, hoping to reclaim the office he falsely asserts was stolen from him. Despite a rocky campaign announcement and a swirl of potential criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump remains a central figure in the Republican Party, with strong support across the country. And he has weathered setbacks, both political and legal, before.The committee’s legacy is still an open question.The legacy of the Jan. 6 committee is now out of the panel’s hands, and will most likely be determined by federal prosecutors in the coming months. It will be up to Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to oversee investigations into Mr. Trump’s actions, to determine whether the information sent over by the committee, along with the Justice Department’s own material, warrants charging the former president with any crimes.That remains an open question. Members of the committee were firm on Monday in their belief that Mr. Trump and the people around him violated four statutes in the planning and execution of the Capitol attack. They are: obstructing or influencing an official proceeding; conspiring against the U.S. government; making false statements to the government; and engaging in insurrection against the government.Pursuing those charges, or others, against Mr. Trump would be a historic effort to hold the nation’s top official accountable for his actions. But it will be up to the special counsel, and ultimately Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, to decide whether to move forward. Other Justice Department officials will have to decide whether to charge Mr. Trump’s aides as committee members called for.Meanwhile, Republicans are already gearing up to discredit the committee when they take control of the House in January. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who is seeking to become the speaker next year, has vowed to investigate the committee’s work and has demanded that the staff and lawmakers preserve records for that purpose.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack during the final meeting on Monday.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe committee has not been a political boon for many of its members.The end of the Jan. 6 committee is also the end of the House careers of four of the nine members of the panel.Two of them — Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, and Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — decided not to run for re-election in 2022. Mr. Kinzinger faced fierce opposition from within his own party because of his frequent criticism of Mr. Trump and his decision to be part of the Jan. 6 committee.Two others — Ms. Cheney and Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia — lost their House seats in 2022. Ms. Cheney was defeated in her primary campaign in Wyoming after drawing the ire of party officials and voters for her opposition to Mr. Trump and her determination to hold him accountable for Jan. 6. Ms. Luria was defeated in the general election in Virginia.All four have said they have no regrets about serving on the committee. But it is unlikely to serve as a political steppingstone for many of its members. More