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      Giuliani Meets With Jan. 6 Committee for Over 7 Hours

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      The onetime Trump lawyer was central to the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, who helped lead President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election as his personal lawyer, sat on Friday for a lengthy interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the closed-door interview.Mr. Giuliani’s interview, which was virtual, lasted for more than seven hours, the people said. The interview was transcribed, and he was under oath. He took a break in the middle of it to host his hourlong afternoon radio show.It was unclear what Mr. Giuliani told the committee, but his centrality to Mr. Trump’s various attempts to subvert the election made him a potentially pivotal witness for the panel, with knowledge of details about interactions with members of Congress and others involved in the plans.Mr. Giuliani, whose interview was reported earlier by CNN, had negotiated with the panel about testifying for months, and he reached an agreement to speak about matters other than his conversations with Mr. Trump or any other topic he believed was covered by attorney-client privilege.Earlier this month, he abruptly pulled out of a scheduled interview with the committee after the panel refused to let him record the session. He later dropped that objection and agreed to testify after the panel threatened to use its “enforcement options,” an implied referral to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress, the people said.The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and has recommended criminal contempt of Congress charges against four of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, who have refused to cooperate fully.Mr. Giuliani was one of the last major witnesses the committee had pressed to interview in the final weeks before it begins holding public hearings in June. Others include more than a half-dozen Republican members of Congress, such as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.The panel has not yet made final decisions about whether to call Mr. Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence or Virginia Thomas, a right-wing activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election and who is the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. The chairman of the panel, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, recently indicated the committee might not ultimately summon any of the three.Mr. Giuliani was a key figure in Mr. Trump’s attempts to stave off electoral defeat and was involved in plans to disrupt the normal workings of the Electoral College by persuading lawmakers in contested swing states to draw up alternate slates of electors showing Mr. Trump as victorious in states actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Giuliani was also instrumental in vetting a plan to use the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines and examine the data housed inside them for supposed evidence of fraud. At Mr. Trump’s direction, Mr. Giuliani asked a top homeland security official if the department could legally take control of the machines — a notion the official shot down. Mr. Giuliani later opposed an even more explosive proposal to have the military seize the machines.Mr. Giuliani was subpoenaed with other members of a legal team that billed itself as an “elite strike force” and pursued a set of lawsuits on behalf of Mr. Trump in which they promulgated conspiracy theories and made unsubstantiated claims of fraud in the election.The committee’s subpoena sought all documents that Mr. Giuliani had detailing the pressure campaign that he and other Trump allies initiated targeting state officials, the seizure of voting machines, contact with members of Congress, any evidence to support the conspiracy theories he pushed and any arrangements for his fees.On Jan. 6, speaking to a crowd of Trump supporters before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, Mr. Giuliani called for “trial by combat.” Later, after the building was under siege, both he and Mr. Trump called lawmakers in an attempt to delay the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. More

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      Ginni Thomas Urged Arizona Lawmakers to Overturn Election

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      The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote to legislators in a crucial swing state after the Trump campaign’s loss in 2020.In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, twice lobbied the speaker of the Arizona House and another lawmaker to effectively reverse Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s popular-vote victory and deliver the crucial swing state to Donald J. Trump.Ms. Thomas, known as Ginni, a right-wing political activist who became a close ally of Mr. Trump during his presidency, made the entreaties in emails to Russell Bowers, the Republican speaker, and Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative. Ms. Bolick’s husband, Clint, once worked with Justice Thomas and now sits on the Arizona Supreme Court.The emails came as Mr. Trump and his allies were engaged in a legal effort to overturn his defeats in several battleground states. While the Arizona emails did not mention either presidential candidate by name, they echoed the former president’s false claims of voter fraud and his legal team’s dubious contention that the power to choose electors therefore rested not with the voters but with state legislatures.“Do your constitutional duty,” Ms. Thomas wrote the lawmakers on Nov. 9. On Dec. 13, with Mr. Trump still refusing to concede on the eve of the Electoral College vote, she contacted the lawmakers again.“The nation’s eyes are on you now,” she warned, adding, “Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.”After she sent her first round of emails, but before the second round, Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, more directly pressured Mr. Bowers. They called him and urged him to have the state legislature step in and choose Arizona’s electors.Mr. Bowers could not be reached for comment on Friday. In a statement to The Arizona Republic, a spokesman said that Mr. Bowers never saw Ms. Thomas’s email. He ended up rebuffing all the requests to intervene, even in the face of protests outside his house.Ms. Bolick, who did not return requests for comment and is now running to become Arizona’s next secretary of state on a platform to “restore election integrity,” proved more of an ally. She thanked Ms. Thomas for reaching out, writing that she hoped “you and Clarence are doing great!” Among other things, she would go on to urge Congress to throw out Arizona’s presidential election results and award the state’s Electoral College votes to Mr. Trump.The emails, reported earlier by The Washington Post and obtained by The New York Times, were part of a letter-writing campaign hosted on FreeRoots, a political advocacy platform. On Friday, Mark Paoletta, a lawyer and close friend of the Thomases, said on Twitter that Ms. Thomas “did not write the letter and had no input in the content,” but rather merely “signed her name to a pre-written form letter that was signed by thousands of citizens.”“How disturbing, what a threat!” he wrote, dismissing the revelations as a “lame story.” He added: “A private citizen joining a letter writing campaign, hosted by a platform that served both conservative and liberal causes. Welcome to America.”In fact, the emails are a reflection of the far broader and more integral role that Justice Thomas’s wife played in efforts to delegitimize the election and install Mr. Trump for a second term — efforts that culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, with a protest called the “March to Save America” that turned into a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.As a string of revelations by The Times and other outlets in recent months has demonstrated, Ms. Thomas actively supported and participated at the highest levels in schemes to overturn the election. Those efforts have, in turn, cast a spotlight on her husband, who from his lifetime perch on the Supreme Court has issued opinions favoring Mr. Trump’s efforts to both reverse his loss and stymie a congressional investigation into the events of Jan. 6.This February, The New York Times Magazine reported on Ms. Thomas’s role on the board of C.N.P. Action, a conservative group that had instructed members to adopt letter-writing tactics — of the kind she personally used in Arizona — to pressure Republican lawmakers in swing states to circumvent voters by appointing alternate electors.C.N.P. Action had also circulated a newsletter in December 2020 that included a report targeting five swing states, including Arizona, where Mr. Trump and his allies were pressing litigation. It warned that time was running out for the courts to “declare the elections null and void.” The report was co-written by one of Mr. Trump’s leading election lawyers, Cleta Mitchell, a friend of Ms. Thomas.And in the lead-up to the rally on Jan. 6, Ms. Thomas played a mediating role, uniting feuding factions of planners so that there “wouldn’t be any division,” one of the organizers, Dustin Stockton, later told The Times.Ms. Thomas declined to speak to The Times for that article, but a few weeks later, in an interview with a friendly conservative outlet, she denied playing any role in the organization of the rally, even as she acknowledged attending it. (She said she left before Mr. Trump addressed the crowd.)But she has adamantly opposed a fuller inquiry into the insurrection. Last December, she co-signed a letter calling for House Republicans to expel Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from their conference for joining the committee investigating the Capitol riot, saying it brought “disrespect to our country’s rule of law” and “legal harassment to private citizens who have done nothing wrong.”And in late March, The Post and CBS reported that she had sent a series of text messages to Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, imploring him to take steps to reverse the election. Ms. Thomas urged him to “release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” invoking a slogan popular on the right that refers to a set of conspiratorial claims that Trump supporters believed would overturn the vote. In the text messages, she also indicated that she had been in contact with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about a post-election legal strategy.Democrats expressed outrage. In a letter after the text messages were reported, two dozen Democrats, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, wrote: “Given the recent disclosures about Ms. Thomas’s efforts to overturn the election and her specific communications with White House officials about doing so, Justice Thomas’s participation in cases involving the 2020 election and the January 6th attack is exceedingly difficult to reconcile with federal ethics requirements.”Still, it remains an open question whether the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack will seek an interview with Ms. Thomas. In March, people familiar with the committee’s work signaled a desire to ask Ms. Thomas to voluntarily sit for an interview. But the committee has yet to do so, and its chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, told reporters that Ms. Thomas had not come up recently in the panel’s discussions.Justice Thomas has remained defiant amid questions about his own impartiality, resisting calls that he recuse himself from matters that overlap with his wife’s activism. Earlier this year, when the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to allow the release of records from the Trump White House related to Jan. 6, Justice Thomas was the sole dissenter. In February last year, he sharply dissented when the court declined to hear a case brought by Pennsylvania Republicans seeking to disqualify certain mail-in ballots.The latest revelations about his wife follow a speech last week in which he lambasted protests in front of the houses of justices after a draft opinion was leaked that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case. “I wonder how long we’re going to have these institutions at the rate we’re undermining them,” he told a conference of fellow conservatives. “And then I wonder when they’re gone or destabilized, what we’re going to have as a country.”And he flashed at his own partisanship in claiming that the left’s protests lacked the decorum of the right — while failing to mention last year’s attack on the Capitol, or protests like those in front of Mr. Bowers’s house.“You would never visit Supreme Court justices’ houses when things didn’t go our way,” he said. “We didn’t throw temper tantrums. It is incumbent on us to always act appropriately and not to repay tit for tat.”Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife have frequently appeared at political events despite longstanding customs of the Supreme Court.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe Thomases have long defied norms of the high court, where justices often avoid political events and entanglements and their spouses often keep low profiles. No spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice has ever been as overt a political activist as Ms. Thomas. C.N.P. Action, where she sits on the board, is a branch of the Council for National Policy, a secretive conservative organization that includes leaders from the National Rifle Association and the Family Research Council, a Christian advocacy group. Ms. Thomas also founded an organization called Groundswell that holds a weekly meeting of influential conservatives, many of whom work directly on issues that have come before the Supreme Court.Justice Thomas, for his part, has frequently appeared at political events hosted by advocates hoping to sway the court. He and his wife sometimes appear together at such events, and often portray themselves as standing in the breach amid a crumbling society.“It’s very exciting,” Ms. Thomas said during a 2018 Council for National Policy meeting, “the fact that there’s a resistance on our side to their side.”Luke Broadwater More

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      In Georgia, a G.O.P. Primary Tests the Power of a Trump Vendetta

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      Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is fending off a challenger fueled by Donald J. Trump’s election lies. But do voters still care about 2020 as much as the former president does?ATLANTA — An anti-Trump Republican advocacy group recently organized a focus group of G.O.P voters in Georgia to get their take on perhaps the most competitive and consequential primary election in the state. They heard a lot of indecision.Most of the voters, convened by the group, the Republican Accountability Project, knew little about the race between Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and his leading challenger, Representative Jody Hice. Mr. Raffensperger seemed to get the benefit of the doubt — until the voters were reminded of the back story.As the state official responsible for certifying the 2020 presidential election results, Mr. Raffensperger rejected President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Hice to seek revenge.“Go Jody, I guess?” said one voter.Three out of six others agreed.The exchange offered a glimpse into why the Republican primary race for the office that oversees elections remains a dogfight just days from Election Day, on May 24. Two years after Mr. Trump lost Georgia by the slimmest of margins and Democrats captured both of the state’s open Senate seats, wounds from the 2020 election have still not completely healed for some partisans.But marshaling that residual anger to unseat an incumbent is not an easy feat. Mr. Raffensperger has worked to win back Republicans by casting himself as a defender of “election integrity,” even as he has spent hours debunking a laundry list of false claims about the 2020 election. Some voters’ memories and passions have faded. Many never had strong opinions about their secretary of state.It all has made the race one of the purest tests yet of whether the 2020 election lie can be weaponized to win elections. While polls have shown that leagues of Republican voters in Georgia and elsewhere largely embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was “stolen” in its immediate aftermath, it is not clear those concerns alone, or Mr. Trump’s personal vendetta, are enough to drive voters’ choices.“I think 2020 was really a turning point in how closely people looked at things,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party. “Before, people might not have even realized that the secretary of state was in charge of running the elections for the state. But now they’re keenly aware of it.”Mr. Hice, whom Mr. Trump endorsed last year, is one of more than a dozen candidates running for secretary of state under the America First banner, alongside others in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Ohio. They share an unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump and a belief that the 2020 election was marred. Some are calling for a law enforcement arm to more aggressively prosecute violators of election laws.Representative Jody Hice, who is running to be Georgia’s secretary of state, at an event of Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesPolls show large numbers of undecided voters in the race, with Mr. Hice and Mr. Raffensperger neck and neck, each with about one-third of the vote. Both campaigns are braced for a runoff.Mr. Trump’s attempt at payback for 2020 in Georgia is floundering in the state’s other marquee primary on Tuesday. Former Senator David Perdue, his pick to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp after the governor refused to overturn the election results, is trailing Mr. Kemp in polls and fund-raising. Mr. Trump has hardly weighed in publicly on Mr. Perdue’s prospects since hosting a “tele-rally” for the former senator in April. His former vice president, Mike Pence, is set to visit the state to campaign for Mr. Kemp on the eve of the primary election.Mr. Kemp has been adept at using his office to win over skeptical Republicans, passing a slew of conservative policies on elections, law enforcement and education. For voters still enthralled with false claims of fraud, Mr. Kemp can point to the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which limits provisions like ballot drop boxes and mobile voting centers.“When voters see that kind of activity around the concern they have, it just becomes difficult to drive an argument that people who are in office are being inattentive to the issue,” said Brad Alexander, an Atlanta-based political consultant and Raffensperger supporter, who was among several who argued that the potency of the “stolen” election debate has started to wane.In January, 43 percent of Georgia Republican voters said they were confident that the November elections would be fair and accurate, according to a University of Georgia poll. By April, that number had increased to nearly 60 percent. And a record number of voters have already participated in the state’s primary elections, topping more than 700,000 voters on the final day of early voting.Mr. Hice, a four-term congressman, was one of the 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the election results for President Joe Biden. He later took part in a White House meeting alongside Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to try to determine how the election results could be flipped in Mr. Trump’s favor. He has claimed, falsely, that Mr. Trump would have won in Georgia if the election had been “fair.”At a meeting with the Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday, Mr. Hice made unsupported claims about “ballot harvesting,” said he no longer wanted to use Dominion Voting machines and slammed Mr. Raffensperger for sending out unsolicited absentee ballots ahead of the last election. The voice of the people had been “violated” in 2020, he said.County officials in Georgia identified 64 cases of potential fraud out of the state’s roughly 5 million votes in the 2020 election, according to an Associated Press survey of all but 11 of the state’s 159 counties.Fulton County election workers in Atlanta counting ballots after the 2020 election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBut Mr. Hice has tried to make his case about more than just 2020 — raising the prospect of fraud in the future.“The issue is not who wins an election, but the issue is absolutely, Was it a fair election?” he said. “If the election itself is compromised or violated, then all the effort out there really doesn’t matter anymore. And that’s what we’ve got to defend. That’s what we’ve got to protect at all costs.”Most of the young Republicans in the room said they wanted to hear what Mr. Hice would do differently from Mr. Raffensperger in elections should he be elected.“Even if you’re not a dogmatic, election-was-stolen person, there are a lot of people with reasonable doubt, and that reasonable suspicion is fair,” said Chris Campbell, 39, a national accounts manager at SmartFeeds. “Raffensperger didn’t address those concerns well, and people don’t have confidence in him. But I do have confidence in Hice and trust that he would run the office with integrity.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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      Attack ads have fueled sharp ups and downs in the Alabama G.O.P. Senate race.

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      The three leaders of Alabama’s Republican Senate race have experienced giddy ascents and, in some cases, steep plunges, with the result that Representative Mo Brooks and two first-time candidates, Katie Britt and Mike Durant, enter Tuesday’s primary election tightly bunched together in recent polling. Unless one tops 50 percent, which seems unlikely, there will be a runoff between the top two.One factor driving the ups and downs in the race is a flood of attack ads from deep-pocketed outside groups aligned with the candidates, which have spent freely to drive up negative impressions of their rivals. When voters say they aren’t swayed by TV ads, Alabama is Exhibit 1 that that is not the case.Mr. Brooks, who jumped to a lead in the race last year and was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, was attacked by a super PAC that received $2 million from the Senate Leadership Fund, which is aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell. The Senate G.O.P. leader, who is often at odds with Mr. Trump for influence in the party, doesn’t want the hard-right Mr. Brooks to join his caucus next year.An attack ad paid for by the super PAC funded partly by the McConnell group dredged up old clips of Mr. Brooks — a leader of Mr. Trump’s crusade to reverse the 2020 election — disparaging him in 2016. “I don’t think you can trust Donald Trump with anything he says,” Mr. Brooks said then.During the time the ad was on the air, Mr. Brooks saw his support plunge to 16 percent in one poll. Shortly afterward, Mr. Trump withdrew his endorsement. Mr. Brooks has since regained a competitive footing, thanks in no small part to attack ads aimed at his two rivals.Mr. Durant, a retired Army pilot who figured in the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” episode in Somalia, appeared to lead the race in the spring. But lately he has faltered, after being raked over the coals by a group calling itself Alabama RINO PAC, which is funded in part by the McConnell-aligned group. One ad, quoting without context remarks that Mr. Durant once delivered at the U.S. Army War College, includes him saying, “The first thing that needs to be done is to disarm the population.”Another ad went after a supporter of Mr. Durant’s as “a top Never Trumper.”The money behind both the anti-Brooks and anti-Durant ads comes from supporters, in state and out, of Ms. Britt, a former chief of staff of Senator Richard C. Shelby, whose retirement has opened the seat.But Ms. Britt has hardly gotten off unscathed. The Club for Growth, the powerful anti-tax group based in Washington, which supports Mr. Brooks, is trying to undermine Ms. Britt. One ad says she is “really a lobbyist” because of a prior job leading a business group in Alabama; it goes on to quote a tweet from Donald Trump Jr. in 2021 — back when his father liked Mr. Brooks — calling her “the Alabama Liz Cheney.”Many of the attacks seemed to have landed with voters, but also apparently confused them. There is no clear leader in the latest polls. More

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      John Eastman Says He Dealt Directly With Trump Over Jan. 6 Plans

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      John Eastman said in a court filing that he had received handwritten notes from President Donald J. Trump as they strategized about how to keep him in power.WASHINGTON — The conservative lawyer John Eastman, the architect of a strategy to overturn the 2020 election, dealt directly with President Donald J. Trump and received handwritten notes from him as the men sought to keep Mr. Trump in power, according to a new court filing.The filing underscored how instrumental Mr. Eastman was in devising ways to fight Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, and how personally involved Mr. Trump was in the attempt to keep the presidency in his hands. It also provided further documentation of how members of the Trump campaign and White House aides were involved in the plans.The filing came as the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is preparing for public hearings in June about the attempt to overturn the election, and as more information has emerged about Mr. Eastman’s role in advising state officials in Pennsylvania to reject votes cast in favor of Mr. Biden.Mr. Eastman did not release the contents of his communications with Mr. Trump and others in the White House and the Trump campaign, but he described them in general terms in a filing in his federal lawsuit in California against the House committee. He is fighting the release of hundreds of documents that the panel has demanded via subpoena, including by arguing that some of them are protected by attorney-client privilege.In the filing on Thursday, Mr. Eastman argued that some of his emails with the White House and Trump campaign were covered by attorney-client privilege because, he said, the people he communicated with were functioning as “conduits” for or “agents” of Mr. Trump. He said he mostly communicated with Mr. Trump using six intermediaries, three of whom worked for the Trump campaign and three of whom worked directly for Mr. Trump while he was in office.But Mr. Eastman said he also spoke directly to Mr. Trump, and the filing stated that Mr. Eastman received two “handwritten notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation.”“While Dr. Eastman could (and did) communicate directly with former President Trump at times, many of his communications with the president were necessarily through these agents,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers, Anthony T. Caso and Charles Burnham, wrote, referring to the six intermediaries.The documents Mr. Eastman is seeking to block from release include the two handwritten notes from Mr. Trump; communications with what he called “potential clients,” including seven state legislators, who were seeking advice about how to challenge their states’ election results; a document discussing “various scenarios for Jan. 6”; and another discussing the “need to pursue election integrity litigation even in the event of Trump loss for the good of the country.”In March, the federal judge in the case ruled that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had most likely committed felonies as they pushed to overturn the election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States. The actions taken by Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman, the judge found, amounted to “a coup in search of a legal theory.”At the time, the judge, David O. Carter of Federal District Court for the Central District of California, ordered the release of more than 100 of Mr. Eastman’s emails; Mr. Eastman turned them over to the House committee as he continued to fight the release of others.Among the documents that Mr. Eastman turned over was a draft memo written for Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, that recommended that Vice President Mike Pence reject electors from contested states in his role overseeing the certification by Congress of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.In their filing, Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote that their client disagreed with Judge Carter’s conclusion that he had undermined democracy, arguing that Mr. Eastman truly believed the election was stolen. The filing cited the work of conservative media figures — including the new film “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, which fact checkers have described as misleading — as evidence that widespread fraud occurred in the election.“If, as seemed clear to Dr. Eastman and his client at the time, there was illegality and fraud in the election of sufficient magnitude to have altered the outcome of the election, then far from ‘undermining’ democracy, Dr. Eastman’s actions and advice must be seen for what they were — a legitimate attempt to prevent a stolen election,” Mr. Eastman’s lawyers wrote. “Perhaps Dr. Eastman was wrong about that. But even if he was, being wrong about factual claims is not and never has been criminal.”They added, “Dr. Eastman’s position remains that his legal theories, controversial though they may have been, were not unlawful.”In the filing, Mr. Eastman said he began working for Mr. Trump two months before the 2020 election at the invitation of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who the Jan. 6 committee said “promoted false claims of election fraud to members of Congress” and participated in a call in which Mr. Trump tried to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to “‘find’ enough votes to reverse his loss there.”Mr. Eastman, Ms. Mitchell and others began preparing to fight the election results well before Election Day, but the effort “kicked into high gear” on Nov. 7 — four days after the election — when Mr. Eastman met with Mr. Trump’s campaign team in Philadelphia to assist with the preparation of an election challenge, the filing said.In deciding in March that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman had “more likely than not” broken the law, Judge Carter noted that Mr. Trump had facilitated two meetings involving Mr. Eastman in the days before Jan. 6 that were “explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the joint session of Congress.”At the first meeting, on Jan. 4, Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman invited Mr. Pence and two of his top aides, Greg Jacob and Marc Short, to the Oval Office. There, Judge Carter wrote, Mr. Eastman “presented his plan to Vice President Pence, focusing on either rejecting electors or delaying the count.”That meeting was followed by another, Judge Carter wrote, on Jan. 5, during which Mr. Eastman sought again to persuade Mr. Jacob to go along with the scheme. More

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      It’s Trump’s Party, and He’ll Lie if He Wants To

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      To win a Republican primary in 2022, you’ll probably need to support a coup attempt.It’s not sufficient — David Perdue, a former senator, looks like he’s going to lose to the incumbent governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, in next week’s primary, despite his support for the “big lie” — but it makes a difference.The Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, won his race on the strength of his enthusiastic support for Donald Trump’s effort to subvert and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As a state senator, Mastriano demanded that lawmakers invalidate Joe Biden’s electoral votes. He attended the “stop the steal” rally on Jan. 6 and has continued to accuse Democrats of fraud. Mastriano has not commented on the 2024 election, but he has let it be known that he supports the view that state legislatures can assign electoral votes against the will of the voting public.The Republican nominee for the Senate in North Carolina, Ted Budd, was similarly committed to Trump’s effort to keep himself in office. He was among the 139 House members who objected to certifying the presidential election in Biden’s favor.J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Ohio, has not endorsed the claim that Biden stole the election from Trump, but he did play footsie with the idea during his campaign. “I think we’ve got to investigate as much as possible,” Vance said of the 2020 election results. “I believe sunshine is the best disinfectant. And we’re going to learn a lot about what happened. But, you know, I think at a basic level we already know mostly what happened.”Overall, there are hundreds of Republican candidates in races across the country who have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat. Many, like Budd, voted against Biden’s Electoral College victory. Some, like Mastriano, attended the “stop the steal” protest in Washington on Jan. 6. And others signed legal briefs or resolutions challenging Biden’s victory.The extent to which election denialism and pro-insurrectionism are now litmus tests for Republican politicians is clearly attributable to Trump’s huge influence over the Republican Party. Despite his defeat, he is still the leader. But even if that were not true — if, instead of the boss, Trump were only one influential figure among many — there would still be reason for Republicans to embrace this view.That’s because Republican election denialism is simply the strongest form of a belief that has defined the Republican Party since at least the Newt Gingrich era in the 1990s. For many Republicans, theirs is the only legitimate political party and their voters, irrespective of their actual numbers, are the only legitimate voters — and the only legitimate majority. Democrats, from this vantage point, are presumptively illegitimate, their victories suspect, their policies un-American, even when they have the support of most people in the country.You see this in the years of voter fraud hysteria that preceded Trump’s claim, after the 2016 election, that he had been cheated of millions of votes. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he said, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”In 2001, for example, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced a crackdown on voter fraud, accusing unnamed actors (presumably Democrats) of manipulating elections. “Votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed,” he said at a news conference that year. “The polling process has been disrupted or not completed. Voters have been duped into signing absentee ballots believing they were applications for public relief. And the residents of cemeteries have infamously shown up at the polls on Election Day.”After the 2008 election, Republicans went into a frenzy over the group ACORN, accusing it of perpetrating fraud on a national scale. How else, after all, could you explain Barack Obama’s unexpected victories in traditionally Republican states like Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina?The obsession with nonexistent voter fraud is hard to ignore. But there were other ways that Republicans expressed their belief that they were the only legitimate members of the political community.Sarah Palin’s rhetoric about the “real America,” very much in evidence during the 2008 presidential campaign — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America” — was one of these ways. So was the Tea Party movement, whose members understood themselves as a disenfranchised majority, under siege by a Democratic Party of burdensome illegal immigrants, ungrateful minorities and entitled young people. The Fox News commentator Glenn Beck captured some of this feeling during a 2010 broadcast. “This is the Tea Party. This is you and me,” he said. “You are not alone, America. You are the majority.”Mitt Romney’s infamous claim that there are “47 percent of the people” who are “dependent upon government,” “believe they are victims” and are unable to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives” was condemned as classist and prejudiced during the 2012 presidential election. But you can also read it as an expression of the belief that there are some Americans who count — the “makers,” in the language of his vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan — and some Americans who don’t.Yes, the Republican Party’s present-day election denialism is much more extreme than the rhetoric surrounding voter fraud or the idea that there is a “real America.” But the difference is ultimately one of degree, not kind: Republicans have been trying to write Democrats out of the political community in one way or another for decades. It was only a matter of time before this escalated to denying that Democrats and Democratic voters can win elections at all.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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      Group Chat Linked to Roger Stone Shows Ties Among Jan. 6 Figures

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      The roster of participants highlights how Mr. Stone, the pro-Trump political operative, was involved with a strikingly large number of people who sought to overturn the 2020 election.It was known as F.O.S. — or Friends of Stone — and while its members shifted over time, they were a motley cast of characters.There were “Stop the Steal” organizers, right-wing influencers, Florida state legislative aides and more than one failed candidate loyal to former President Donald J. Trump. One participant ran a website that promoted disinformation about the Capitol attack. Another was an officer in the Army Reserve allied with Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.At least three members of the group chat are now facing charges in connection with the riot at the Capitol in January 2021. They include Owen Shroyer, the right-hand man of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones; Enrique Tarrio, the onetime chairman of the Proud Boys; and Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia.But the focus of the chat was always the man whose photo topped its home page: Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime political operative and adviser to Mr. Trump.While little is known about what was said on the chat, the membership list of Friends of Stone, provided to The New York Times by one of its participants, offers a kind of road map to Mr. Stone’s associations, showing their scope and nature in the critical period after the 2020 election. During that time, Mr. Stone was involved with a strikingly wide array of people who participated in efforts to challenge the vote count and keep Mr. Trump in the White House.Some of the 47 people on the list are identified only by nicknames or initials, and Mr. Stone had pre-existing political ties with many of them. Still, as prosecutors deepen their inquiry into the storming of Capitol, the list suggests that Mr. Stone had the means to be in private contact with key players in the events of Jan. 6 — political organizers, far-right extremists and influential media figures who subsequently played down the attack.Reached by email, Mr. Stone said that he did not control who was admitted to the group chat and noted that Stop the Steal activities were protected by the First Amendment.“There is no story,” he wrote. “Just harassment.”Enrique Tarrio, the onetime chairman of the Proud Boys, maintained close ties to Mr. Stone.Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the origins of the group chat remain somewhat obscure, Friends of Stone has existed since at least 2019, when Mr. Stone was indicted in connection with the Russia investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, said one of its participants, Pete Santilli, a veteran right-wing radio host. According to Mr. Santilli, the group chat — hosted on the encrypted app Signal — was a kind of safe space where pro-Stone figures in politics and media, many of whom were banned from social media, could get together and trade links and stories about their mutual friend.“The primary reason for the chat was to have a place for supporters to share stuff,” Mr. Santilli said. “You drop a link and everyone shares it on their nontraditional channels.”But after Mr. Trump’s defeat, Friends of Stone seemed to assume another purpose as Mr. Stone found himself in the middle of the accelerating Stop the Steal movement devised to challenge the results of the election. The Washington Post, citing footage from a Danish documentary film crew that was following Mr. Stone, said that in early November 2020, he asked his aides to direct those involved in the effort to monitor the chat for developments.In recent weeks, the Justice Department has expanded its investigation of the riot from those who physically attacked the Capitol to those who were not at the building but may have helped to shape or guide the violence. Investigators appear to be interested in finding any links between organizers who planned pro-Trump rallies at the Capitol that day and right-wing militants who took part in the assault.The group chat’s membership list includes several people who fit that description.Named on the list are activists like Marsha Lessard and Christina Skaggs, leaders of a group called the Virginia Freedom Keepers who helped to organize an anti-vaccine rally scheduled for the east side of the Capitol on Jan. 6. Ms. Lessard and Ms. Skaggs worked with another anti-vaccine activist, Ty Bollinger, who was also on the list.Members of the group were among those who took part in a conference call on Dec. 30, 2020, when a social media expert who formerly worked for Mr. Stone urged his listeners to “descend on the Capitol” one week later, promising that Joseph R. Biden Jr. “will never be in that White House.”Ms. Lessard, Ms. Skaggs and Mr. Bollinger did not return phone calls seeking comment.Ali Alexander, one of the most prominent Stop the Steal organizers who planned his own event at the Capitol that day, was on the list as well. His lawyer did not return a phone call seeking comment.In the days leading up to Jan. 6, Mr. Stone was scheduled to speak at both Mr. Alexander’s event and the rally hosted by Ms. Lessard, Ms. Skaggs and others, including Bianca Gracia, the leader of a group called Latinos for Trump, according to permits and event fliers. Mr. Stone never spoke at those events, however, and hurried out of Washington even as the police were still securing the Capitol, according to the film footage cited by The Post.Ali Alexander planned his own event at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesMr. Stone’s connections to Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers were based, at least in part, on the fact that the militia group provided security for him on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. The Oath Keepers also protected Mr. Alexander and his entourage on Jan. 6 and served as security at the events hosted by Ms. Skaggs, Ms. Lessard and Ms. Gracia, court papers say.At least one of Mr. Stone’s Oath Keeper bodyguards, Joshua James, has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges in the Capitol attack and is cooperating with the government’s inquiry. Kellye SoRelle, a lawyer for the Oath Keepers, was part of the Friends of Stone chat as well and is also said to be cooperating with prosecutors in the riot investigation.Mr. Stone, a Florida resident, has long maintained close ties to the Proud Boys, especially to Mr. Tarrio, who lived in Miami before his arrest. Members of the Proud Boys have acted as bodyguards for Mr. Stone and have served as some of his most vocal supporters.In 2019, after Mr. Stone was indicted by Mr. Mueller on charges including obstruction and witness tampering, Mr. Tarrio responded by wearing a T-shirt reading “Roger Stone Did Nothing Wrong” at one of Mr. Trump’s political rallies. At one point, Mr. Tarrio’s personal cellphone had a message recorded by Mr. Stone.Nayib Hassan, Mr. Tarrio’s lawyer, declined to comment on his client’s role in the chat.During his prosecution, Mr. Stone posted an image on social media of the federal judge in his case, Amy Berman Jackson, with cross hairs next to her head. When questioned in court about the image, he acknowledged that he had been sent a series of photos by Mr. Tarrio and two other Florida Proud Boys whose names appear on the Friends of Stone membership list: Jacobs Engels and Tyler Ziolkowski.Mr. Engels was with Mr. Stone in Washington on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He initially agreed to talk about the group chat but then did not return a phone call seeking comment.Another person who appeared on the Friends of Stone list — under the name “Ivan” — was Ivan Raiklin, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who promoted a plan after the election to pressure Vice President Mike Pence not to certify electors from several disputed swing states. This plan, which Mr. Raiklin called the “Pence Card,” was ultimately taken up by Mr. Trump and some of his legal advisers, like the lawyer John Eastman.Mr. Raiklin, who did not return phone calls seeking comment, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but showed no sign of entering the building. Closely aligned with Mr. Flynn, he has continued to question the results of the 2020 vote, appearing at so-called election integrity events and arguing that Mr. Trump was set up by members of the “deep state.”While the government has gathered thousands of pages of private messages in its vast investigation of the Capitol attack, it remains unclear if prosecutors have gotten access to the Friends of Stone group chat. Along with the membership list, The Times was given images of a few snippets of conversations to verify the chat’s authenticity.In one of them, Ms. Skaggs told the group that she had just spoken with the pro-Trump lawyer L. Lin Wood, who took part in the effort to overturn the election. Ms. Skaggs’s message, which does not bear a date, said Mr. Wood was claiming that the Insurrection Act — a form of martial law — had been invoked the night before.Responding to her message, Mr. Rhodes, who had repeatedly urged Mr. Trump to use the Insurrection Act to stay in power, answered incredulously.“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he wrote, dismissing the account with an obscenity. More

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      Key Witness in Durham Case Offers Detailed Testimony of 2016 Meeting

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      A former F.B.I. official said Michael Sussmann, a lawyer accused of lying to the F.B.I., told him he was reporting Trump suspicions on his own, not on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.WASHINGTON — A former F.B.I. official testified on Thursday that when he met in 2016 with Michael Sussmann, a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Mr. Sussmann told him that he had come to the F.B.I. on his own.The testimony bolsters the case brought by the special counsel, John H. Durham, against Mr. Sussmann, who has been accused of lying about his reason for bringing his suspicions to the F.B.I. about a possible secret communications channel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Russian financial firm with ties to the Kremlin.The case centers on whether Mr. Sussmann sought to conceal his ties to Mrs. Clinton in the meeting with the F.B.I., so as not to seem as if he were coming for partisan reasons on behalf of a political opponent of Donald J. Trump.While the Sussmann case is a narrow false statement charge, Mr. Durham’s filings have broadly insinuated that the Clinton campaign tried to get the F.B.I. to investigate Mr. Trump over his ties with Russia, and to persuade reporters to write stories about the matter.The former F.B.I. official, James A. Baker, who in 2016 was the agency’s general counsel, was adamant that Mr. Sussmann had told him he was representing no one but himself during the meeting. “I’m 100 percent confident that he said that,” Mr. Baker said. “Michael’s a friend of mine and a colleague, and I believed it and trusted that the statement was truthful.”Mr. Baker’s testimony was not a surprise. It dovetailed with a text message Mr. Sussmann had sent to him the night before, and underscored that the case may turn on what it means to be somewhere “on behalf” of a client.Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers have acknowledged that he was working for the campaign when he tried to get reporters to write about the Alfa Bank matter. But they maintain he separately brought the matter to the F.B.I. when he thought a news article was about to be published on the topic so that the bureau would not be caught flat-footed.Still, on Thursday, they also sought to raise doubts about whether Mr. Baker accurately recalled what their client said at the six-year-old meeting and subsequent events.Sean Berkowitz, one of Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, asked questions that seemed to indicate that Mr. Baker had to have known that Mr. Sussmann was working with the Clinton campaign.On the stand, Mr. Baker offered a detailed account of their meeting, and the steps he took to share the matter with top F.B.I. officials who could swiftly investigate the concerns, which had been raised by internet data and cybersecurity research. The F.B.I. would later conclude that the concerns about Alfa Bank were unsubstantiated.He would have “made a different assessment” if he had thought Mr. Sussmann had approached him on behalf of a client, particularly if that client were Mr. Trump’s political opponent, Mr. Baker said.“It would have raised very serious questions,” Mr. Baker added, about “the credibility of the source.”The Sussmann trial, which began this week, is the first case to be developed by Mr. Durham, a special counsel appointed during the Trump administration by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to examine the origins of the F.B.I.’s investigation into ties between Mr. Trump and Russia.Believing that the bureau had limited time to act, Mr. Baker told top F.B.I. officials about the evidence, encouraging them to take it seriously because it originated with Mr. Sussmann.Mr. Baker said the F.B.I. spoke with two New York Times reporters, one of whom was working on an article about the possible communications channel, to say that the bureau needed time to start an investigation before an article was published.In that light, Mr. Baker said he would have also rethought his dealings with the news media. He said the F.B.I. was “aware of and wary of” the fact that the existence of an F.B.I. investigation could be used by reporters as a way to report on something that is “flawed or incomplete.” More