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      Tom Rice, G.O.P. Congressman Who Voted to Impeach Trump, Stands by His Vote

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      CONWAY, S.C. — Tom Rice, the South Carolina congressman who was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6 attacks, has a catchall term to describe the former president’s crusade against him: Trump’s Very Presidential Traveling Revenge Circus.Mr. Trump has made unseating Mr. Rice, a five-term congressman, one of his top priorities in the state’s primary elections on Tuesday. He threw his support in the Republican primary for Mr. Rice’s seat behind State Representative Russell Fry, calling into a rally for Mr. Fry this week and describing Mr. Rice as a “back-stabbing RINO,” the acronym for Republican in name only, a conservative slur.“He lifted up his hand and that was the end of his political career — or we hope it was,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Rice’s vote to impeach him.In a 35-minute interview on Friday alongside his wife, Wrenzie, after a barbecue luncheon campaign event, Mr. Rice sounded every bit like a man in the fight for his political life. His campaign is not counting on an outright win against Mr. Fry but is instead bracing for a tough runoff with him.But while some, after crossing Mr. Trump, have tried to salvage their political careers by walking back their comments or retiring from Congress, Mr. Rice has doubled down.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsThe Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the House panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Donald Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Former president Donald J. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Liz Cheney: The vice chairwoman of the House committee has been unrepentant in continuing to blame Mr. Trump for stoking the attack on Jan. 6, 2021.“To me, his gross failure — his inexcusable failure — was when it started,” Mr. Rice said of the Jan. 6 riot. “He watched it happen. He reveled in it. And he took no action to stop it. I think he had a duty to try to stop it, and he failed in that duty.”Mr. Rice, a pro-business conservative and self-proclaimed Chamber of Commerce Republican, helped craft Mr. Trump’s sweeping new tax code in 2017. Five years after those reforms and 17 months after the Jan. 6 attacks, he argued that the former president had overstayed his welcome in the G.O.P.“He’s the past,” Mr. Rice said of Mr. Trump. “I hope he doesn’t run again. And I think if he does run again, he hurts the Republican Party. We desperately need somebody who’s going to bring people together. And he is not that guy.”Mr. Rice said the Jan. 6 prime-time hearing on Thursday night, which featured footage of the Capitol riots and incriminating testimony from close Trump associates, “puts an exclamation point on what we did,” referring to the 10 House Republicans who backed impeachment.In the days after the riot at the Capitol, Mr. Rice said, he considered voting to impeach Mr. Trump, and spent that Saturday and Sunday in his home congressional district reading the dozens of stories he had asked his staff to send him about the president’s whereabouts on Jan. 6. As he learned of the president’s refusal to stop the attack, he became incensed. When it came time for his vote, he said he had “zero question in my mind” about whether Mr. Trump should be held accountable.“I did it then,” he said. “And I will do it tomorrow. And I’ll do it the next day or the day after that. I have a duty to uphold the Constitution. And that is what I did.”Mr. Rice did not vote to certify the election, however, saying he had become concerned about ballot discrepancies in Pennsylvania that were outlined in a letter to House Republican leadership.During a House Republican meeting one month after the Capitol riots, he defended Liz Cheney for her vote to impeach and criticized Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, for his continued embrace of the former president, according to audio from the exchange.“Kevin went to Mar-a-Lago this weekend, shook his hand, took a picture and set up Trumpmajority.com. Personally, I find that offensive,” Mr. Rice said at the time.In the months following the vote, Mr. Rice has been made a pariah among those in Mr. Trump’s circle, as has his wife. “I don’t feel like I fit in with that group anymore,” Ms. Rice said on Friday, referring to the Republican base.Mr. Trump’s efforts to sway Republican primary voters and disparage Mr. Rice have left the congressman both frustrated and puzzled. He has come to view them as a political stunt.“Bring on the circus,” he said of Mr. Trump’s involvement in the primary. “You know, some people are afraid of clowns. I’m not afraid of clowns.”Jonathan Martin More

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      Trump Is Depicted as a Would-Be Autocrat Seeking to Hang Onto Power at All Costs

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      As the Jan. 6 committee outlined during its prime-time hearing, Donald J. Trump executed a seven-part conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election.In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.Other presidents have been accused of wrongdoing, even high crimes and misdemeanors, but the case against Donald J. Trump mounted by the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol described not just a rogue president but a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power at all costs.As the committee portrayed it during its prime-time televised hearing, Mr. Trump executed a seven-part conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election. According to the panel, he lied to the American people, ignored all evidence refuting his false fraud claims, pressured state and federal officials to throw out election results favoring his challenger, encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol and even signaled support for the execution of his own vice president.“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the select committee. “The violence was no accident. It represents Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”Representatives Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, led the first hearing on the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which included testimony from a Capitol police officer and a documentary filmmaker.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMost incriminating were the words of Mr. Trump’s own advisers and appointees, played over video on a giant screen above the committee dais and beamed out to a national television audience. There was his own attorney general who told him that his false election claims were “bullshit.” There was his own campaign lawyer who testified that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to change the outcome. And there was his own daughter, Ivanka Trump, who acknowledged that she accepted the conclusion that the election was not, in fact, stolen as her father kept claiming.Much of the evidence was outlined by the lead Republican on the committee, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has been ostracized by Mr. Trump and much of her own party for consistently denouncing his actions after the election. Unwavering, she sketched out the case and then addressed her fellow Republicans who have chosen to stand by their defeated former president and excuse his actions.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsThe Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the House panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Donald Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Former president Donald J. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: In videos shown during the hearing, Mr.Trump’s daughter and son-in-law were stripped of their carefully managed images.“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone but your dishonor will remain,” she said.Many of the details were previously reported, and many questions about Mr. Trump’s actions were left unanswered for now, but Ms. Cheney pulled together the committee’s central findings in relentless, prosecutorial fashion.People at a viewing party in Washington watching Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, speak during the hearing.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesSome of the new revelations and the confirmations of recent news reports were enough to prompt gasps in the room and, perhaps, in living rooms across the country. Told that the crowd on Jan. 6 was chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the vice president who defied the president’s pressure to single-handedly block the transfer of power, Mr. Trump was quoted responding, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” Mike Pence, he added, “deserves it.”Ms. Cheney, the panel’s vice chairwoman, reported that in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack, members of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office. She disclosed that Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and “multiple other Republican congressmen” involved in trying to overturn the election sought pardons from Mr. Trump in his final days in office.She played a video clip of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser who absented himself after the election rather than fight the conspiracy theorists egging on Mr. Trump, cavalierly dismissing threats by Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, and other lawyers to resign in protest. “I took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” Mr. Kushner testified.And she noted that while Mr. Pence repeatedly took action to summon help to stop the mob on Jan. 6, the president himself made no such effort. Instead, his White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, tried to convince Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to pretend that Mr. Trump was actively involved.“He said, ‘We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions,’” General Milley said in videotaped testimony. “‘We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge, and that things are steady or stable,’ or words to that effect. I immediately interpreted that as politics, politics, politics.”Mr. Trump had no allies on the nine-member House committee, and he and his supporters have dismissed the panel’s work as a partisan smear attempt. On Fox News, which opted not to show the hearing, Sean Hannity was busy changing the subject, attacking the committee for not focusing on the breakdown in security at the Capitol, which he mainly blamed on Speaker Nancy Pelosi even though Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the Republican majority leader, shared control of the building with her at the time.Before the hearing, Mr. Trump tried again to rewrite history by casting the attack on the Capitol as a legitimate manifestation of public grievance against a stolen election. “January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again,” he wrote on his new social media site.The panel played a video of Ivanka Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter and former White House adviser, testifying behind closed doors.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMr. Trump is hardly the first president reproached for misconduct, lawbreaking or even violating the Constitution. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were both impeached by the House, although acquitted by the Senate. John Tyler sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Richard M. Nixon resigned under the threat of impeachment for abusing his power to cover up corrupt campaign activities. Warren G. Harding had the Teapot Dome scandal and Ronald Reagan the Iran-contra affair.But the crimes alleged in most of those cases paled in comparison to what Mr. Trump is accused of, and while Mr. Tyler turned on the country he once led, he died before he could be held accountable. Mr. Nixon faced hearings during Watergate not unlike those that began on Thursday night and was involved in other scandals beyond the burglary that ultimately resulted in his downfall. But the brazen dishonesty and incitement of violence put on display on Thursday eclipsed even his misdeeds, according to many scholars.Mr. Trump, of course, was impeached twice already, and acquitted twice, the second time for his role in the Jan. 6 attack. But even so, the case against him now is far more extensive and expansive, after the committee conducted some 1,000 interviews and obtained more than 100,000 pages of documents.What the committee was trying to prove was that this was not a president with reasonable concerns about fraud or a protest that got out of control. Instead, the panel was trying to build the case that Mr. Trump was involved in a criminal conspiracy against democracy — that he knew there was no widespread fraud because his own people told him, that he intentionally summoned a mob to stop the transfer of power to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and that he sat by and did virtually nothing once the attack commenced.Whether the panel can change public views of those events remains unclear, but many political strategists and analysts consider it unlikely. With a more fragmented media and a more polarized society, most Americans have decided what they think about Jan. 6 and are only listening to those who share their attitudes. Still, there was another audience for the hearings as they got underway, and that was Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. If the committee was laying out what it considered an indictment against the former president, it seemed to be inviting the Justice Department to pursue the real kind in a grand jury and court of law.As she previewed the story that will be told in the weeks to come, Ms. Cheney all but wrote the script for Mr. Garland. “You will hear about plots to commit seditious conspiracy on Jan. 6,” she said, “a crime defined in our laws as conspiring to overthrow, put down or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.”But if Mr. Garland disagrees and the hearings this month turn out to be the only trial Mr. Trump ever faces for his efforts to overturn the election, Ms. Cheney and her fellow committee members were resolved to make sure that they will at least win a conviction with the jury of history. More

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      Jan. 6 Was a ‘War Scene,’ and Trump Was the Director

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      There is every reason to be skeptical, even cynical, about the effect and impact of the Jan. 6 hearings on the political landscape.For one thing, most of the details of what happened are already in the public record. We already know that Donald Trump and his allies were engaged in a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election and overturn the constitutional order. We already know that one of their plans was to derail certification of the election by Congress and use the resulting confusion to certify fraudulent electors for Trump instead. We already know that the “stop the steal” rally on the ellipse across from the White House was organized to put pressure on both Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to follow through and “do the right thing,” as Trump put it.We have the memos and emails and text messages from Trump’s allies in and outside of Congress, each person trying to do as much as possible to help the former president realize his autocratic dreams. We know that Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee corresponded with the White House, pledging their support and assistance for the president’s efforts to contest the election. We know that John Eastman, a prominent member of the conservative legal establishment, wrote detailed guidance for Trump and his team, giving step-by-step instructions on how Pence could abuse the process to keep Joe Biden from ever taking office.We already know about — we already saw with our own eyes — the assault on the Capitol, the threats against the vice president and the heroism of the Capitol Police. And we know, or at least some of us know, that Jan. 6 was just the beginning and that Trump has continued to use all the power and influence at his disposal to put pro-coup Republicans on the ballot in as many states as possible. The insurrection may be over, but the plot to steal the presidency is intact.If all of this is already in the public record — if all of it is already part of our public knowledge — why bother with hearings?The right answer, I think, is spectacle.Most political theater is tedious and partisan. Cheap meat for a hungry base. But there are times when these theatrics can serve a real purpose for the public at large.In an article in the Fordham Law Review, Josh Chafetz — a law professor at Georgetown — makes a novel distinction between traditional congressional oversight and what he terms congressional “overspeech.”Oversight is (or at least is supposed to be) about good-faith fact-finding for the sake of public accountability — a central part of Congress’s role as it has developed over time. In this view, Chafetz writes, oversight hearings should be “primarily receptive in nature,” aimed at “drawing out new facts or at least new implications of old facts.”Overspeech, by contrast, is the “use of the tools of oversight” for performance, spectacle and theatricality. Overspeech is used to communicate directly to the public, to make an argument and to shape its views. It is a form of mass politics, in which “overspeakers” tailor their approach “to the media environment in which they operate” and “shape their behavior as to increase the likelihood of favorable coverage.”If oversight is meant to be the bloodless investigation of facts, then overspeech, Chafetz writes, is defined by its “performative elements, ranging from casting to scripting, from scenery to costuming, all of it aimed at more effectively communicating a public message.”Because it is often partisan, overspeech is also intentionally and deliberately divisive. And while this might seem to put it in conflict with the goal of public persuasion, Chafetz argues that the reality isn’t so simple. “In October 1973, the first votes in the House Judiciary Committee on matters related to impeachment were strong party-line votes,” he writes. “Nine months later, six of the committee’s seventeen Republicans voted for the first article of impeachment.” What started as a partisan issue, he continues, “became something else over time.”The Jan. 6 hearings should be about more than the facts of the investigation. They should be about the performance of those facts. The hearings, in short, should be a show, aimed directly at the casual viewer who might be too preoccupied with the price of gas or food to pay attention to an ordinary congressional hearing. And Democrats inclined to make them “bipartisan” or evenhanded should reject the temptation; it might do more good — it might be more effective — if this spectacle is full of rancor and fireworks.Spectacle is what we need, and judging from the first night of televised hearings on Thursday, spectacle is what we’re going to get. The members of the committee were direct and sharp-tongued — “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone,” Representative Liz Cheney said to her Republican colleagues during her opening statement, “but your dishonor will remain” — and they did not shy away from the chaos, disorder and excruciating violence of the insurrection.At one point, a police officer who was injured at the Capitol, Caroline Edwards, testified to seeing “officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies.”There is a larger point to make here as well. For the past year, Democrats have struggled to break through to the public; they have struggled to sell their accomplishments, such as they are. The Biden administration, in particular, has made a conscious decision to stick to so-called kitchen table or pocketbook issues and let its actions speak for themselves. But passivity of this sort does nothing but cede the field to one’s opponents.Because they promise to be an event, the Jan. 6 hearings give Biden a chance to take another approach: to fan emotion and use conflict, not conciliation, to make his case. There are no guarantees of success, but at the very least, both he and the Democratic Party have a chance to seize the initiative. They should take it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      5 Takeaways From the First Jan. 6 Hearing

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      The opening House hearing into the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a compact and controlled two hours, designed as an overview of what was described as a methodical conspiracy, led and coordinated by President Donald J. Trump, to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and democracy itself.It was also an enticement to the American people to watch the next five scheduled hearings.Here are some takeaways:Trump was at the center of the plot.The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, began laying out what they described as an elaborate, intentional scheme by Mr. Trump to remain in power, one unprecedented in American history and with dangerous implications for democracy.“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Mr. Thompson said.Both leaders had blistering words for Mr. Trump and about the threat he poses to American democracy. They made it clear that, for all his ongoing bluster about stolen elections, Mr. Trump had knowingly spread claims about election fraud that people closest to him knew were false, tried to use the apparatus of government and the courts to cling to power, and then when all of that failed, sat back approvingly in the White House as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang his vice president.Key figures around Trump never believed his lie of a stolen election.The hearing used the videotaped testimony of some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides and allies to show that the Trump campaign and his White House — and perhaps the president himself — had known well that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election. It showed how Mr. Trump and his loyalists had used a calculated campaign of lies to bind his followers and build support for his attempt to stay in power, through extralegal means and violence.The committee played excerpts from videotaped interviews of former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump that the talk of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was “bullshit.” There was a clip of his daughter Ivanka Trump saying that she accepted Mr. Barr’s conclusions and of a campaign lawyer, Alex Cannon, who told Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, that Trump allies had found no election issues that could reverse the results in key states. “So there’s no there there?” Mr. Meadows responded, according to Mr. Cannon’s account.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsThe Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the House panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Donald Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Former president Donald J. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: In videos shown during the hearing, Mr.Trump’s daughter and son-in-law were stripped of their carefully managed images.At one point, in one of the most potentially damaging moments of the videotaped interviews, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is shown dismissing the threats of Pat A. Cipollone, then the White House counsel, to resign in the face of Mr. Trump’s machinations as “whining.”A Capitol Police officer who battled the rioters humanized the drama.Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who is believed to have been the first injured during the riot, testified in chilling detail about the first breach of police lines, in which she was crushed beneath bike racks that were pushed on her and a handful of other officers who had no chance to hold back the mob.“The back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me,” she testified, recounting the moment before she lost consciousness. Her testimony of continuing to fight off the rioters in efforts to protect the Capitol provided a striking contrast with the committee’s account of Mr. Trump sitting in the White House watching with apparent sympathy as the mob ransacked the building, yelling at aides who implored him to call off the violence and saying at one point, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.”Once she came to and beheld the scene from behind police lines, Officer Edwards said, her breath was taken away. She slipped in blood, saw fellow officers writhing in pain and suffering from bear spray and tear gas, and gazed out on what she described as a war scene unfolding outside the Capitol.“It was carnage,” she said. “It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw.”The Proud Boys mounted an organized effort.One of the witnesses, a British documentary filmmaker named Nick Quested who was embedded with the extremist Proud Boys, gave testimony that indicated that group’s leadership had conspired with another extremist organization, the Oath Keepers, well ahead of the riot to plan an attack that would breach the Capitol.Mr. Quested showed footage he had shot of the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, meeting clandestinely with Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers on Jan. 5, and he told of the group breaking away from a morning rally behind the White House on Jan. 6 to scout police defenses around the Capitol.“I am not allowed to say what is going to happen today because everyone’s just going to have to watch,” one woman said on video on the morning of Jan. 6, when no hint of an attack was evident.There is more to come on the role of Trump and RepublicansThe hearing concluded with a hint of what was to come in the next hearings, which committee members hope will show how Mr. Trump was personally responsible for the worst attack on the Capitol since the British ransacked it in 1814 and that he remains a threat to the American democratic experiment.The committee concluded with videos of the rioters themselves saying they believed they were invited to Washington that day by their president, who had asked them to fight for him.“He lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said of Mr. Trump.Ms. Cheney, whose insistence on condemning Mr. Trump and participation in the investigation have rendered her a pariah in her own party, said the case the panel would make would taint Republicans indelibly.“Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” she said. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” More

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      Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks

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      In stark videotaped interviews, Ivanka Trump accepted the notion that there had been no fraud in the 2020 election. Jared Kushner complained that a White House counsel had been “whining.”WASHINGTON — They were stripped of their White House backdrop, their power and their masks.In brief video clips, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared in the first of a half-dozen public hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.First up was Ms. Trump. Speaking in a soft voice and seemingly aware that the video might be made public someday, she said she believed the words of the former attorney general, William P. Barr, who on Dec. 1, 2020, said that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election that had taken place three weeks earlier.“It affected my perspective,” Ms. Trump said quietly, peering into a camera for a recorded interview that did not take place in person. “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying.”That was despite what her father, President Donald J. Trump, was claiming, and despite the fact that, according to several White House aides working alongside her, she did little to try to temper his false claims that he had won the 2020 election. She continued to travel with him as he vented his claims in public.Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible. Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”Mr. Kushner’s words enraged Mr. Cipollone’s former colleagues, many of whom traded messages as they complained to reporters and one another as the hearing went on that the former president’s son-in-law was “arrogant.”No two people had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White House as his daughter and his son-in-law, who came on as official advisers despite anti-nepotism laws and warnings from other aides that hiring family members can be fraught. Over four years, the two tended carefully to their images.Aides feared getting on the wrong side of the couple, who lived in Washington’s expensive Kalorama neighborhood and hosted dinners for the city’s political elite.The videos made clear that both were aware that things were going awry within the White House. But according to more than a half-dozen former Trump advisers, although both have attempted to distance themselves from that period, neither made much of an effort to pull Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in power.Instead, they left that task to the paid staff, who in turn kept waiting for the family to intervene more aggressively. Shortly after Election Day, most aides tried to avoid the Oval Office, fearful of having to listen to Mr. Trump vent. They were also eager to avoid the worst- case scenario: a directive from Mr. Trump that might have been illegal, and could have ensnared them in an investigation. More

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      Your Friday Briefing: A Crucial Moment in the Ukraine War

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      Plus the U.S. begins Jan. 6 hearings and Chinese pilots provoke U.S. allies.Good morning. We’re covering Ukraine’s fight for the Donbas and the start of Jan. 6 hearings in the U.S.A bridge, now destroyed by Russian forces, that once led into Sievierodonetsk.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesDonbas’s fate is ‘being decided’President Volodymyr Zelensky described the battle for Sievierodonetsk as a crucial moment in what is increasingly a war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. “The fate of our Donbas is being decided there,” he said.Ukrainian forces are outgunned by the Russians. The city is burning as the sounds of gunfire echo from vicious street-by-street combat. If Sievierodonetsk and its sister city Lysychansk fall, Russia will control all of Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbas region.Ukraine’s defense minister said his country “desperately needs heavy weapons, and very fast.”Both sides are still struggling to control what Zelensky has called “dead cities” as Russian bombardment further destroys the metropolises in the east. Here are live updates.Deaths: Ukraine is keeping its casualty numbers secret. But on the front lines, fresh graves show how relentless the fighting has become.Rep. Dan Kildee, a committee member, spoke before the start of the hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe U.S. begins Jan. 6 hearingsThe House panel investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol will open public hearings in Washington to begin setting out the findings from its nearly yearlong investigation.Lawmakers plan to start the session by presenting previously unreleased video testimony from people close to Donald Trump. They will also share footage revealing the role of the far-right group the Proud Boys in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The committee intends to paint a picture of Trump at the center of a coordinated effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election that led to the attack. We have live updates.“We’ll demonstrate the multipronged effort to overturn a presidential election, how one strategy to subvert the election led to another, culminating in a violent attack on our democracy,” said Representative Adam Schiff of California, a Democrat and a member of the committee.Details: The first hearing begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time (that’s 8 a.m. in Hong Kong). A total of six hearings are planned for this month.Resources: The Times has constructed an exhaustive timeline of the attack — the planning beforehand, the events at the Capitol and the preparation for the hearings.Trump: Lawyers plan to question the former president under oath as part of a separate investigation into his business practices led by the New York State attorney general’s office.A Chinese J-16 fighter jet.Taiwan Ministry of Defense, via Associated PressChinese pilots provoke U.S. alliesAustralia and Canada say Chinese military jets have harassed their planes in recent weeks, sometimes flying so close that the pilots could see each other.Beijing says the maneuvers are reasonable responses to foreign military patrols that threaten its security. But the two U.S. allies worry the pilots’ actions could lead to midair collisions.Any such mishap in the Asia Pacific could ignite an international incident at a time when tensions are rising between China and the West.Background: In 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane, leading to tense negotiations and an apology from the U.S. Beijing has honored the fallen pilot, Wang Wei, whose confrontational way of flying is held up as a model for new Chinese pilots to emulate, an expert said.Details: The Chinese pilots have repeatedly buzzed a Canadian plane monitoring North Korea in recent weeks, and one plane sprayed metallic chaff in the path of an Australian surveillance aircraft.THE LATEST NEWSAsiaSouth Korean rescue teams and firefighters on the scene yesterday.Lee Mu-Yeol/NEWSIS, via Associated PressAn explosion killed at least seven people at a law firm in Daegu, South Korea. The police suspect arson.Vietnam’s health minister and Hanoi’s mayor were arrested in connection with a corruption scandal involving coronavirus test kits.Thailand became the first Asian country to legalize growing and possessing marijuana, The Associated Press reported.World NewsThe U.S. House passed a package of gun control measures, but the bill stands no chance of becoming law because of Republican opposition in the Senate.President Biden opened the Summit of the Americas, which is focused on immigration and regional economic ties. Several prominent Latin American leaders are skipping the meeting. Here are live updates.As inflation continues to rise, the European Central Bank says that it will raise interest rates next month for the first time in 11 years.The Middle EastIran began dismantling the U.N. monitoring system of its nuclear program, just as the U.N. nuclear agency said it was only weeks away from producing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, made an impromptu visit to Abu Dhabi as his country and the U.A.E. presented a united front against Iran.What Else Is HappeningAn American tourist pushed an electric scooter down the Spanish Steps, causing 25,000 euros (about $27,000) in damage to the Roman landmark.Asteroid samples brought back to Earth by the Japanese space mission Hayabusa2 in December 2020 could shed new light on the chemistry of the solar system.The sale of single-use plastic products at U.S. national parks and on other public lands will be phased out over the next decade.A Morning ReadDom Phillips, center, interviewing Indigenous Brazilians in 2019.Joao Laet/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous groups, disappeared in the Amazon after facing threats. They had gone to interview Indigenous people who patrol parts of the dense jungle plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. They have not been seen since Sunday.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4The battle for Sievierodonetsk. More