Author Archives: Warren Stewart

Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that if elected to a new term as president, he would consider pardoning those prosecuted for attacking the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 last year. He also called on his supporters to mount large protests in Atlanta and New York if prosecutors in those cities, who are investigating him and his businesses, took action against him. The promise to consider pardons is the furthest Mr. Trump has gone in expressing support for the Jan. 6 defendants. “If I run and I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he said, addressing a crowd at a fairground in Conroe, outside Houston, that appeared to number in the tens of thousands. “We will treat them fairly,” he repeated. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons, because they are being treated so unfairly.” At least 700 people have been arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, including 11 who have been charged with seditious conspiracy. Some have said they believed they were doing Mr. Trump’s bidding. As president, Mr. Trump pardoned a number of his supporters and former aides, including Michael T. Flynn, his first national security adviser, who twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., and Stephen K. Bannon, his former campaign strategist and White House adviser, who was charged with defrauding donors to a privately funded effort to build a wall along the Mexican border.

Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit or impound the machines. Mr. Trump pressed Mr. Giuliani to make that inquiry after rejecting a separate effort by his outside advisers to have the Pentagon take control of the machines. And the outreach to the Department of Homeland Security came not long after Mr. Trump, in an Oval Office meeting with Attorney General William P. Barr, raised the possibility of whether the Justice Department could seize the machines, a previously undisclosed suggestion that Mr. Barr immediately shot down. The new accounts show that Mr. Trump was more directly involved than previously known in exploring proposals to use his national security agencies to seize voting machines as he grasped unsuccessfully for evidence of fraud that would help him reverse his defeat in the 2020 election, according to people familiar with the episodes. The existence of proposals to use at least three federal departments to assist Mr. Trump’s attempt to stay in power has been publicly known. The proposals involving the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security were codified by advisers in the form of draft executive orders.

Among the thousands of mail-in ballots that were rejected in Washington State during the 2020 election, auditors have found that the votes of Black residents were thrown out four times as often as those of white voters. The rejections, all of them because of problematic signatures, disqualified one out of every 40 mail-in votes from Black people — a finding that already is causing concern amid the national debate over voter access and secure balloting. Washington, a state with broad experience in mail-in balloting, found that rejection rates were also elevated for Native American, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander voters. State officials said there were no signs that ballots cast by Black or other minority voters were knowingly singled out by poll workers, or that any of the ballots were deliberately falsified; the rejections were a result of signatures that were missing or did not match those on file, a possible result, the officials said, of voter inexperience, language problems or other factors. “It’s not acceptable, quite frankly,” said State Auditor Pat McCarthy, a Democrat, whose office conducted the audit. She urged election officials to take steps to address the disparities. The findings in Washington State mirror mail-ballot research that has been conducted in other states in recent years, including Georgia and Florida. But they are crucial in a state like Washington, which in 2011 became the second state to adopt all-mail balloting, behind Oregon. Mail-in voting has been an option for all statewide elections since 1991.

Law enforcement officials, members of Congress and the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol are digging deeper into the role that fake slates of electors played in efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. In recent days, the state attorneys general in Michigan and New Mexico have asked the Justice Department to investigate fake slates of electors that falsely claimed that Mr. Trump, not Joseph R. Biden Jr., had won their states. Representative Mark Pocan, Democrat of Wisconsin, wrote to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday demanding an investigation into the same issue in his state. And this week, members of the House committee scrutinizing the Jan. 6 riot said that they, too, were examining the part that the bogus electoral slates played in Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the election. “We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates, and then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “There’s no doubt that those people were engaged in a constitutional fraud on the public and on the democracy,” he added in a separate interview, referring to the bogus electors.