Untersuchung vom 6. Januar: Trump droht möglicherweise Anklage wegen Untersuchung des Angriffs auf das Kapitol

Jun 17, 2024

The former president said he received a second target letter from the special counsel, a sign that he could be indicted again. Days after receiving the first letter, Mr. Trump was charged with 37 criminal counts tied to the handling of classified documents.

Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, Adam Goldman and Alan Feuer

Former President Donald J. Trump has been informed that he could soon face federal indictment for his efforts to hold onto power after his 2020 election loss, potentially adding to the remarkable array of criminal charges and other legal troubles facing him even as he campaigns to return to the White House.

Mr. Trump was informed by his lawyers on Sunday that he had received a so-called target letter from Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating his attempts to reverse his defeat at the polls, Mr. Trump and other people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. Prosecutors use target letters to tell potential defendants that investigators have evidence tying them to crimes and that they could be subject to indictment.

“Deranged Jack Smith” sent Mr. Trump a letter on Sunday night informing him he was a “TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury” investigation, Mr. Trump said in a post on his social media platform.

Such a letter “almost always means an Arrest and Indictment,” wrote Mr. Trump, whose campaign is rooted in accusations of political persecution and a promise to purge the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation of personnel he sees as hostile to him and his agenda.

Mr. Smith’s spokesman had no comment.

An indictment of Mr. Trump would be the second brought by Mr. Smith, who is also prosecuting the former president for risking national security secrets by taking classified documents from the White House and for obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim the material.

Mr. Trump is also under indictment in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments to a porn star before the 2016 election. And he faces the likelihood of charges from the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who has been conducting a wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election loss in that state.

The target letter cited three statutes that could be applied in a prosecution of Mr. Trump by Mr. Smith’s team, a person briefed on the matter said. They include a potential charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States and a broad charge related to a violation of rights, the person said.

Whether Mr. Smith and his prosecutors will choose to charge Mr. Trump on any or all of those statutes remained unclear, but they appear to have assembled evidence about an array of tactics that Mr. Trump and his allies used to try to stave off his election defeat.

Those efforts included assembling slates of so-called fake electors from swing states that Mr. Trump lost; pressuring state officials to block or delay Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victories; seeking to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to impede congressional certification of the Electoral College outcome; raising money based on false claims of election fraud; and rallying supporters to come to Washington and march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

It also remains unknown whether others might be charged along with Mr. Trump. Several of his closest allies during his efforts to remain in office, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was serving as his personal lawyer, and John Eastman, who promoted the idea that Mr. Pence could keep Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory, said through their lawyers that they had not received target letters.

Just hours after Mr. Trump disclosed his receipt of the target letter, the Michigan attorney general announced felony state charges against 16 people for their involvement in an attempt to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state by convening a slate of pro-Trump electors.

The news of another potential indictment of Mr. Trump underscored the stakes of an intensifying legal and political battle whose consequences are both incalculable and unpredictable.

Mr. Trump remains a dominant front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, in spite of — or to some degree because of — the growing list of charges and potential charges against him.

His campaign strategy has been to embrace the investigations as evidence of a plot by a Democratic administration to deny him and his supporters a victory in 2024, a message that continues to resonate among his followers. He was raising money off news of the target letter within hours of disclosing that he had received it.

But for Mr. Trump, the stakes are deeply personal, given the serious threat that he could face prison time if convicted in one or more of the cases. In that sense, a winning campaign — and the power to make at least the federal cases go away by pardoning himself or directing his Justice Department to dismiss them — is also a battle for his liberty.

At a Fox News town hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Tuesday night, the host, Sean Hannity, asked Mr. Trump how he appeared unbothered by the investigations. But Mr. Trump pushed back.

“It bothers me,” Mr. Trump said. He accused the Biden administration of trying to intimidate him but said, “They don’t frighten us.”

Mr. Trump spent much of Tuesday promoting a scorched-earth political strategy, consulting with allies in Washington including Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican and onetime critic who has become one of his staunchest defenders. Mr. Trump urged Ms. Stefanik to go “on offense” during a lengthy call from his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., according to a person with knowledge of the conversation.

His main rival at the moment for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, said Mr. Trump was a victim of the “politicization” of the Justice Department, continuing a pattern in which prominent figures in his party remain leery of criticizing him and drawing the ire of his supporters.

At least two grand juries in Washington have been hearing matters related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to stay in office. A trial, if it comes to that, would likely be held in Federal District Court in Washington, where many of the Jan. 6 rioters and leaders of two far-right groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, have been prosecuted.

Based on the outcomes of those trials, the jury pool in Washington would likely be less favorable to the former president than the one that would be empaneled from a largely pro-Trump region around Fort Pierce, Fla., where the classified documents trial is currently scheduled to take place.

Two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher M. Kise, briefly mentioned the new target letter at a pretrial hearing in Florida on Tuesday on the documents case. While Mr. Kise and Mr. Blanche gave no details about what the letter said, they used it to argue that Mr. Trump was essentially being besieged by prosecutors and that the trial in the classified documents case should be delayed until after the 2024 election.

In disclosing that he had received the target letter, Mr. Trump said he was given four days to testify before a grand jury if he chooses. He is expected to decline. The timetable suggested by the letter suggests that he will not be charged this week, according to people familiar with the situation.

Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who has pressed ahead with her own investigation of Mr. Trump and his allies, could bring charges as early as next month. If she were to proceed first, that could complicate Mr. Smith’s case. Accounts of witnesses called to testify both cases could vary slightly, seeding doubts about their testimony, for instance — which might explain why Mr. Smith is moving fast, according to former federal prosecutors.

Federal investigators were slow to begin investigating all the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, overwhelmed with prosecuting the hundreds of rioters who illegally entered the Capitol. The initial plan for investigating the attack’s planners, drafted by the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Washington and later adopted by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, did not include any explicit reference to the former president. The F.B.I. took a similar tack.

However, in the months leading up to Mr. Smith’s appointment as a special counsel last fall, there were strong indications that federal prosecutors were pivoting to examine whether Mr. Trump and his allies may have committed crimes.

The F.B.I.’s Washington field office opened an investigation in April 2022 into electors who pledged fealty to Mr. Trump in states he had lost. Earlier, the authorities had seized the cellphones of Mr. Eastman, a legal architect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, and Jeffrey Clark, a lawyer whom Mr. Trump had tried to install as the acting attorney general.

Among the crimes that prosecutors and agents intended to investigate were mail and wire fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding before Congress.

By late last year, the various investigations were brought under Mr. Smith, who moved quickly with a flurry of activity, including subpoenas and witness interviews.

Mr. Smith and his team do not appear to be done. A spokesman for former Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona said that Mr. Smith’s team reached out to him after The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had tasked Mr. Pence with pressuring Mr. Ducey to overturn Mr. Biden’s narrow victory there.

The spokesman said that Mr. Ducey will do “the right thing” and that he had done so since the election. It was unclear whether the contact was to request a voluntary interview by Mr. Ducey or a grand jury appearance.

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, appeared before one of the grand juries in June, according to people familiar with his appearance. Mr. Giuliani had a recent interview with prosecutors.

Ben Protess, Jonathan Swan and Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

Danny Hakim

Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, has announced charges against 16 fake electors who tried to help Donald Trump in his efforts to reverse the 2020 presidential election results in that state. Each was charged with eight felonies, mostly related to forgery and conspiracy. “The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” she said in a statement.

Danny Hakim

Federal prosecutors are not the only worry for former President Donald J. Trump.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he had received what is known as a target letter from the special counsel, Jack Smith, in connection with the federal investigation into his efforts to hold onto power after he lost the 2020 election, signaling that he could be indicted in the case.

But he and his allies are also facing a number of criminal investigations at the state and local levels. While prosecutors in Manhattan have already charged Mr. Trump with financial crimes related to hush money payments to a porn star, there are criminal investigations underway in three states into whether crimes were committed related to fake slates of electors used by Mr. Trump and his allies in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The inquiries pose considerable legal risks for Mr. Trump; among other things, if he is elected to another term as president, he cannot pardon himself from state and local charges.

On Tuesday, the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced charges against 16 bogus electors who tried to help Mr. Trump in his efforts to reverse the election results in the state. They were charged with eight felonies, mostly related to forgery and conspiracy.

“The false electors’ actions undermined the public’s faith in the integrity of our elections, and, we believe, also plainly violated the laws by which we administer our elections in Michigan,” Ms. Nessel said in a statement.

She also said “this remains an ongoing investigation, and our department has not ruled out potential charges against additional defendants.”

A day earlier, the Georgia Supreme Court rejected a long-shot attempt by Mr. Trump’s legal team to scuttle an investigation into election interference in that state, weeks before indictment decisions are expected. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., has been investigating election interference for more than two years and has said she is weighing racketeering charges. She has indicated that she will go before a grand jury in Atlanta next month to seek indictments.

Mr. Trump’s legal team appears to be taking it as a foregone conclusion that their client will face charges; in a recent filing, it wrote that Ms. Willis “now seeks an indictment.” The team has more generally assailed the Georgia inquiry. “It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” his lawyers said in another recent filing. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.”

In Arizona, the attorney general, Kris Mayes, said earlier this year that she would investigate the fake electors situation.

“I will take very seriously any effort to undermine our democracy. Those are the cases that I will take most seriously,” she said.

Her communications director, Richie Taylor, confirmed on Tuesday that there is an active and ongoing investigation into the situation, but declined to comment further.

The three electors investigations in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona are led by Democrats, who are sure to be a line of attack for the former president. He has already assailed Ms. Willis and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney and a Democrat who brought the case against him in the hush-money payments case. Mr. Trump has promised what he has called “sweeping civil rights investigations” into local district attorneys’ offices if he is re-elected.

“These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people,” Mr. Trump said at a rally last year. “They’re racist, and they’re very sick. They’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights by the Supreme Court or most other courts.”

Ms. Willis’s investigation is by far the most sprawling. It started soon after Mr. Trump made a call in which he urged the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he would have needed to overcome President Biden’s lead there. As part of the inquiry, a special grand jury heard evidence for roughly seven months and recommended indictments of more than a dozen people; its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.

But a special grand jury, which can be convened for long periods of time, is only advisory in nature. To bring any charges, Ms. Willis must seek indictments from a regular grand jury. The actions of a number of senior Trump advisers have been scrutinized in the inquiry, including those of Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff.

By Dmitriy Khavin, Haley Willis, Evan Hill, Natalie Reneau, Drew Jordan, Cora Engelbrecht, Christiaan Triebert, Stella Cooper, Malachy Browne and David Botti

transcript

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” [cheering] They came from all 50 states out of some sense of patriotic duty … “It’s so much more than just rallying for President Trump. It’s really rallying for our way of life. The American dream, against fake news.” … to protest an election they believed had been stolen. “Stop the steal! Stop the steal!” “We’re here, patriots. We’re in Washington D.C. Capitol building dead in front of us.” Their day of action would be Jan. 6 … “The House comes to order.” … when Congress would count electoral ballots and ratify the 2020 election results. For some, it was just a rally for their president. For others, it was a call to arms. “We have the power in numbers. March on Congress directly after Trump’s speech.” In the weeks beforehand, there were over a million mentions on social media of storming the Capitol. Maps were shared of the building’s layout. There was talk of bringing weapons and ammunition, and discussion over which lawmakers should be targeted first. This anger was based on a lie. “This election was a fraud.” A lie that had grown more frenzied after the election. “President Trump won this election.” “They were flipping votes.” “Steal the election in Philadelphia.” “When you win in a landslide and they —” “Steal the election in Atlanta —” “And it’s rigged —” “Steal the election in Milwaukee —” “It’s not acceptable.” “This is outrageous.” A lie spread by the president and his closest allies. “Let’s call out cheating when we find it.” Some of whom stoked calls for violence. “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.” “Everyone’s going to remember who actually stands in the breach and fights tomorrow. And who goes running off like a chicken.” “We bleed freedom.” “This will be their Waterloo.” “And we will sacrifice for freedom.” “This will be their destruction.” “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” What happened next was chaos. “They broke the glass?” Insurrection. “Take it now!” “Treason! Treason!” Death. Then, there began a campaign to whitewash history, starting at the top. “It was a zero threat. Right from the start, it was zero threat.” And spreading throughout the Republican Party. “Even calling it an insurrection, It wasn’t. By and large, it was peaceful protest.” One lawmaker, who helped barricade the House doors, now suggests there was barely any threat. “If you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.” A tourist visit this was not. And the proof is in the footage. As part of a six-month investigation, The New York Times has collected and forensically analyzed thousands of videos, most filmed by the rioters themselves. We obtained internal police radio traffic … … and went to court to unseal police body-cam footage. Our reconstruction shows the Capitol riot for what it was, a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect. We’ll chart how police leaders failed to heed warnings of an impending attack, putting rank-and-file officers in danger. We’ll track key instigators in the mob taking advantage of weaknesses in the Capitol’s defenses to ignite a wave of violence that engulfed the building. We’ll show, for the first time, the many simultaneous points of attack, and the eight breaches of what appeared to be an impenetrable institution of government. We’ll show how the delay to secure Congress likely cost a rioter her life. And how for some, storming the Capitol was part of the plan, all along. “In fact, tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested.” “Well, let’s not say it. We need to go — I’ll say it.” “All right.” “We need to go in to the Capitol.” “Let’s go!” It’s the morning of Jan. 6, and thousands are filling the National Mall in Washington. Trump will speak here at the Ellipse, a large park near the White House and a half-hour walk to the U.S. Capitol where the election will be certified. Who is actually in this crowd? Most are ordinary citizens who believe Trump’s lie that the election was stolen. “It’s going to be a great day. It’s going to be wild, as Trump says.” But we also see more extreme groups who’ve gained a following during Trump’s presidency. There are followers of the QAnon conspiracy … “Drinking their blood, eating our babies.” … who believe that Trump is facing down a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Q posts often invoked notions of patriotism and predict a coming storm. And ahead of Jan. 6, some supporters call for violence. The Oath Keepers, a far-right paramilitary group, are also here. “We have men already stationed outside D.C. —” Their leader has said the group is ready to follow Trump’s orders and take members of what they call the “Deep State” into custody. They’re organized, staging their military-style equipment neatly on the ground. And later, they put on body armor, talk on radios, and chat with their supporters on a walkie-talkie app called Zello. “We have a good group. We got about 30, 40, of us who are sticking together and sticking to the plan. Y’all, we’re one block away from the Capitol, now. I’m probably going to go silent when I get there because I’m going to be a little busy.” Another group is the Proud Boys. They’re far-right nationalists who flashed white power signs throughout the day. “Check out all this testosterone.” They became a household name when Trump invoked them during a presidential debate. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” And that’s what they did. They have a history of street violence and will be key instigators of the riot. We’ll return to them soon. Although the rally is billed as a political protest, some make calls to storm the Capitol even before Trump speaks. And later, when Trump does take the stage … “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol.” … some hear his words as a call to action. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building.” Two hours before this, the Proud Boys were already heading for the Capitol. They’re clearly spoiling for a fight with far-left agitators like antifa, who they believe are in D.C. But there are moments that suggest another motive. “Come on, tighten up.” “Come on, boys. They’re organized, too. Many are marked with orange tape or hats. They’re wearing body armor, carrying baseball bats and using radios. “That’s affirmative. Jesse, this is Tucker” Leading them is Ethan Nordean, who’s been entrusted with so-called war powers. He’s joined by other well-known Proud Boys like Joe Biggs, an organizer from Florida, Dominic Pezzola, a former Marine, and Billy Chrestman. They will be among the first rioters inside the Capitol building. “Proud Boys.” As Trump is speaking, some of his other supporters also head to the Capitol. Chanting: “Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!” And the tone is becoming menacing. “And we’re going to storm the [expletive] Capitol. [expletive] you, [expletive].” “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Just ahead, officers guarding the building are understaffed and ill-equipped for what’s coming their way. “You going to stop us?” The building is more than two football fields in length. And barricades erected on the east side are defended by just a few dozen officers. The west side, facing Trump’s rally, is even lighter. The fencing has been extended and on the northwest approach, only five officers stand guard. Around five also defend the southwest approach, a few more dot the lawn and about a dozen officers are behind them. Plans to storm the Capitol were made in plain sight, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security did not deem those threats as credible. “We will take that building!” “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Capitol Police leaders and Washington’s mayor were warned at least three times of violent threats, but also didn’t take them seriously or circulate that information. And they declined offers of security personnel from federal and other agencies. They could have enlisted several hundred more Capitol police for duty on Jan. 6, but did not. And none of the officers on the barricades have protective gear or crowd-control equipment. As a result, the Capitol is sparsely defended. “Whose House? Our House! Whose House? Our House!” It’s 12:50 p.m. and a large group of Proud Boys is with other protesters right by the Capitol Police line. Joe Biggs is rallying them. When he’s approached by Ryan Samsel, a Trump supporter from Pennsylvania. They chat, we don’t know about what. But a minute later, Samsel is the first to approach the police line. And it’s now that the protest turns violent. “U.S.A.!” Without hesitation, the crowd overpowers the police. Nearby, a second group breaks through on another approach. Others jump fences. And now hundreds of rioters rush forward on several fronts. “D.C. is a [expletive] war zone.” Police retreat to the Capitol building where it’s becoming more threatening. “This is what we came for! Yeah!” A mob mentality begins to take hold. Police are so outnumbered, they’re forced to retreat again to more tightly defend access points to the Capitol. It’s now five minutes into the siege that the Capitol Police chief calls for backup from local law enforcement, known as the Metropolitan Police, and asks other Capitol leaders to mobilize the National Guard. “You took an oath! Does that not mean a damn thing to you, does it?” Metro Police will arrive within 15 minutes. But for reasons we’ll explain later, the National Guard won’t arrive for over four hours. “Back up! Back up!” Meanwhile, more Capitol Police come to reinforce the line. It’s the first time we see officers in riot gear. But most are missing their shields because they had not prepared to unlock the storage area where that equipment is kept. Proud Boys like Billy Chrestman keep rallying the mob. And again, they start brawling with the police. Minutes later, reinforcements from the Metro Police arrive. A high-ranking Metro officer immediately calls for more backup. They struggle to subdue rioters who respond with their own chemical spray. And within 30 minutes, the police already have casualties. [shouting] This first wave of rioters battling police has paved the way across Capitol grounds for others to follow. And after Trump finishes speaking, thousands more now fill the space. Meanwhile, inside the Capitol, Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence have begun certifying the 2020 presidential election results. Certification will happen on both sides of the building, in the House and the Senate. And this is what the rioters want to stop. An hour into the assault, the mob is battling a police line here, along the west face of the Capitol. But that violence is now going to spread to multiple points of attack, as west side rioters stream around the Capitol and incite the crowd on the east. Here’s what that crowd looks like on the east. “Stop the steal! Stop the steal! Stop the steal!” They’re aware of the siege happening on the west side, and some are emboldened by it. But up until now, they’ve been kept behind the barricades. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Then this group from the west storms around to the building and pushes right through the barriers. The police here barely put up a fight. And it’s now that protesters, all along the east barricades, surge forward. [cheering] Officers are overwhelmed from several directions, and retreat to guard Capitol entrances. But these rioters believe they’ve been deputized by their president to stop a crime. And now, they start trying to get into the building itself. [shouting] [glass breaking] [pounding on door] The Capitol is now surrounded. Rioters haven’t made it inside yet, but around the time that the mob on the east pushed forward, rioters on the west were making a pivotal move. This scaffolding was erected for the upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden. It covers a staircase that gives direct access to an upper level, and dozens of doors and windows. Three police lines guard that route. But at ground level, officers are so overwhelmed that just a few cover this crucial access point. Several Proud Boys see the weakness. Proud Boys start fighting the police, and with others in the mob, they push through the line. Over several minutes, it’s a brutal fight on these steps. At one point, the rioters are held back. [groaning] But they make a final push up the flight of stairs. [cheering] At the top, they scuffle again with a small group of officers … … who give in after barely a minute. The mob now has direct access to Capitol entrances. “I can’t believe this is reality. We accomplished this [expletive].” And hundreds more protesters below, surge forward. “Let’s go! The siege is ours.” It’s utter mayhem, and it’s about to get worse. This scene is being filmed from countless angles allowing us to piece together, moment by moment, what comes next. Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola uses a police shield he stole to bash in a window. And at 2:13 p.m., the Capitol is breached. Michael Sparks, a Trump supporter from Kentucky, is the first person inside. A police officer seems unsure of what to do and backs off. Sparks is followed by Proud Boys and other far-right extremists, one carrying a Confederate flag, another armed with a baseball bat. When rioters break open the locked doors, hundreds more rush in. [shouting] [glass breaking] This is a critical moment. Officers must now defend the outside and inside of the building, stretching them even further. Simultaneous events now happen that are critical to lawmakers’ safety. Rioters head straight for the Senate, and will be at its doors in two minutes. Above them, the Senate is called into recess. “We’ll pause.” Members will evacuate down these stairs. In this hallway, directly overhead the rioters, Officer Eugene Goodman is sprinting to overtake them. He passes Mitt Romney, who he warns to turn around. Reinforcements are following behind. Goodman overtakes the mob, goes downstairs and intercepts them. He holds them off while backup arrives upstairs. Behind these rioters, and just feet away, is an escape route where the lawmakers and Senate staff are now fleeing. Just one officer stands guard. Keeping his composure, Goodman draws the mob away from that escape route to where reinforcements are waiting. Goodman: “Second floor!” He glances toward the Senate, and realizes the door is unguarded. Goodman shoves the protester again, lures the mob away, and brings them into that line of fellow officers. Again, the rioters here are convinced it’s their duty to defend democracy. “We’re not [expletive] around! Because we are mad!” [shouting] The officers hold them off here, for now. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, a few political leaders are evacuated from the House of Representatives. But despite a lockdown alert, proceedings here will resume. “The House will be in order.” We’ll go there soon. First, we’ll go to the Crypt in the center of the Capitol below the Rotunda. The mob is already at its entrance. If they get through here, they will more easily fan out across the building. Rioters jostle with police here for six minutes, and then flood through. It’s now 2:24 p.m., some 90 minutes after the siege began, and the mob is about to overrun the building. “Stop the steal! Stop the steal!” As this is happening, and as thousands more swell outside, Trump composes a tweet. Not to calm his supporters, but to blame his vice president. He writes: At this very time, Pence and his family are being taken to safety, along with an aide who’s carrying the country’s nuclear launch equipment. “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave?” At 2:25 p.m., there’s another major breach on the opposite side of the building, the east side. Rioters have been battling a handful of officers at these doors for almost half an hour. The tide turns when rioters who came through the Crypt, reach these doors and pull them open. Then an active-duty Marine Corps officer, Christopher Warnagiris, keeps that door open for the mob to flood in. Just as elsewhere, this crowd is a mix of die-hard Trump supporters, but also more organized groups like the Oath Keepers, who move in formation here toward that east side entrance. The Oath Keepers and their supporters continue to update each other on the Zello chat app. The group enters the Capitol together. Proud Boys are near them, including Joe Biggs, the organizer we saw earlier. He’s entering the building for a second time. The Oath Keepers fill the Rotunda along with hundreds of other rioters. “Took over the Capitol. Overran the Capitol.” “We’re in the [expletive] Capitol, bro.” Now the police inside the building are completely outnumbered and call for backup. “It’s our House!” “Whose House?” “Our House!” Throughout the Capitol, staffers have barricaded doors to keep the mob out. In Nancy Pelosi’s chambers, staffers rush inside a conference room and lock two doors behind them. Just 12 minutes later, rioters outside head straight for her offices. “Nancy! Nancy!” And pile in. Huddled together under a table, Pelosi’s staff record what’s happening. One rioter tries to break into that same room. Inside, staffers are silent as they record him pounding. [loud banging] He gets through the first door, but the second door keeps him out. It’s a scene that, again, shows just how compromised the U.S. government has become. “I think I like my new dining room.” By 2:30 p.m., the Senate evacuation is well underway. But even though a lockdown was called over 15 minutes ago, the House is still in session. “Do not accept Arizona’s electors as certified.” Representative Jim McGovern is chairing. He told us he wanted to finish hearing objections to the election results by Paul Gosar. House staff and security gave McGovern the all-clear to continue. It’s a delay that likely cost someone their life. Suddenly, staff are now pointing at the chamber’s doors. Just outside, a mob of 100 or more is baying to get into them. These rioters pay little heed to the thin line of police. “They’re going. Yeah, I would just stop — bro.” And in moments, are pushing against the doors into the House. “Stop the steal!” On the other side, Capitol Police erect a barricade and draw their guns. “You’re a traitor.” On the floor, lawmakers are evacuated to the rear of the chamber, where in a few minutes a rioter will be shot and killed. Part of the mob outside now peels off in that direction to find a different way in. Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and QAnon supporter, is among the first to arrive at the rear of the House. “Open the door.” They see the lawmakers escaping. That lobby might have been clear had the House been evacuated sooner. But the rioters now become incensed. Zachary Alam, a Trump supporter from Pennsylvania, punches in the glass panels with his bare fists. [pounding on door] “Open the door.” Police are stretched extremely thin. Just three officers and a security staffer stand guard. None are wearing riot gear, and they keep their weapons holstered. “It’s going to get worse.” “Open the door.” When a team of heavily armed police now arrives, the three officers step aside. “Go! Let’s go! Get this.” This creates a crucial gap that allows rioters to smash in the glass. A warning — what happens next is graphic. It’s 2:44 p.m., and behind the door, a police officer draws his handgun. Babbitt vaults into the window and the officer shoots her once. [gunshot] “Oh! Oh!” It’s a fatal wound through the upper chest. Inside the chamber, the floor is clear, but lawmakers in the balcony are sheltering in place. [gunshot] “The [expletive]?” “Take your pins off.” “Pins off.” They now remove the breast pins that identify them as members of Congress. A group of rioters who almost made it to the balcony are held at gunpoint as it’s finally evacuated. Now Trump supporters have achieved their goal, stopping the election certification. And while the House is evacuated, at the other side of the building, the Senate is occupied. “Treason! Treason! Treason!” On the Senate floor, they leaf through lawmakers’ files. “There’s got to be something in here we can [expletive] use against these scumbags.” Mug for photos. “Jesus Christ —” Pray. “We invoke Your name. Amen!” “Amen!” And leave a message for Mike Pence. “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming.” As rioters inside have been rampaging throughout the Capitol, the crowd outside has grown. And that first battle has continued raging. [horn blowing] For almost two hours, officers face off with rioters who say they support the police … … but assault them, anyway. We’re going to show what happened here because it demonstrates, yet again, how failures by Capitol Police leaders to prepare put the safety of these officers at risk. “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” Capitol Police had been ordered to withhold some of their stronger weapons. But as soon as Robert Glover, a Metro Police inspector arrives, he calls for his munitions team to help. When the building is breached, Glover knows he needs to retreat and seeks advice from Capitol leaders. [shouting] When Capitol don’t respond, he asks four times. “Push! Push! Push! Push!” Then, the police lose the line. “We the people, we are the storm!” Rioters knock an officer over, throw a fire extinguisher. “U.S.A.!” Glover issues a 10-33, the call of last resort. Crazed rioters hound the police even as they retreat to the upper level. Police now begin to guard this doorway, an iconic centerpiece of presidential inaugurations. But for another two hours, the same pattern will repeat. Rioters fill the terrace. Instigators trigger a frenzy. And tragically, someone will die. A brutal fight erupts in the doorway. The mob heaves in a coordinated scrum. [screaming] “Help!” When police finally push them out, they face even worse violence. They are tased, gassed and robbed of their equipment. They’re beaten with a crutch, a hockey stick and even an American flag. At least four officers are pulled into the crowd. One dragged by his own helmet, face down. And again, the frenzy turns fatal. Rosanne Boyland, a Trump supporter who has been swept up by QAnon conspiracies, is moving toward the door. But amid the scrum, she collapses and is lying unconscious beneath the mob. [crowd chants] “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” As the crowd sarcastically chants a Black Lives Matter slogan, Boyland’s friend, Justin Winchell, tries to pull her to safety. He screams for help. But instead, fellow rioters trample over Boyland and charge at the police again. Boyland will be pronounced dead at a local hospital in the evening. By the end of the day, rioters have breached and entered the building in at least eight locations. There’s the first breach, which we’ve seen, when rioters smashed through two windows and a door. Beside that, a rioter with a crowbar smashes in a second door, and then opens it to hundreds of people. Others smash a window next to the Inauguration door and climb inside. “Patriots, we need people to stand up for our country and our Constitution.” At this entrance, police stand aside and allow rioters to stream in, unchallenged. On the north side of the building, police in riot gear yield and let the crowd in. Another three breaches are on the east side, two by the central doors into the Rotunda, and this southeast door leading to the House chamber. It’s the arrival of more Metropolitan Police and other agencies that finally turns the tide. When those officers enter the Rotunda, they clear it in just 20 minutes. As the mob is pushed back through the east doors, their rage turns to Mike Pence, who Trump attacked earlier. Metro officers also stop other rioters from entering on the west side, where the mob first broke in. But here, too, we see a crowd empowered by the belief that they’re carrying out some patriotic duty. Over the course of the day, 150 police officers are injured. After 4 p.m., Metro and Capitol Police regain control of the upper levels. The final parts of the interior are cleared by other law enforcement, including federal agencies. Tear gas and flash bangs disperse the crowd on the Inauguration terrace. The Virginia State Police and Arlington County Police help to reclaim that area. Then rioters are swiftly pushed off Capitol grounds by a reinforced police line. Only now, more than three hours after Capitol police first called them, do National Guard soldiers arrive. “You can diffuse and turn down, right now.” Troops were staging just 20 minutes away. But a recent procedural change meant the highest level of the Pentagon had to approve deployment. And Pentagon officials delayed the decision, partially in fear of bad optics, even as the Capitol was being overrun. As calm returns, the president tweets again. He repeats that the election had been stripped away, calls his supporters great patriots, and says: The aftermath of Jan. 6 has been as divisive as the lie that launched it. Even as one arm of government has indicted hundreds of rioters, Republican lawmakers continue efforts to normalize what happened with a mix of denials and conspiracy theories. “Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters.” “I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break a law. And so I wasn’t concerned.” They include Paul Gosar, who’d been at the Trump rally. “The D.O.J. is harassing peaceful patriots across the country.” And Andrew Clyde, who we saw earlier, standing just a few feet from rioters. “There was no insurrection. And to call it an insurrection, in my opinion, is a bald-faced lie.” Republican leaders have blocked an independent investigation that could have brought new details to light. “I’ve made the decision to oppose the House Democrats’ slanted and unbalanced proposal for another commission to study the events of January the 6th.” And in May, a top Republican was ousted from the party’s leadership after blaming Trump for inspiring the riot. “And I think that the party is in a place that we’ve got to bring it back from.” None of what happened on Jan. 6 would have been possible without a huge mass of ordinary people who were proud of what they achieved. “We made it!” “Yeah! We stopped the vote!” Millions around the country still believe the violence was not only justified, but necessary. And the forces that brought them there have not gone away. “Yeah, the patriots are coming back, y’all. Hopefully, y’all will be on our side when that happens.”

Charlie Savage

In the two and a half years since a mob laid siege to the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory, a wealth of evidence has emerged about Donald J. Trump’s bid to stay in power after the 2020 election.

Mr. Trump and his allies peddled spurious claims of voter fraud, pressured officials in states he narrowly lost and recruited false slates of electors in those states. He urged Vice President Mike Pence to delay certification of Mr. Biden’s win. And he called on a huge crowd of his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

Now, Mr. Trump appears almost certain to face criminal charges for some of his efforts to remain in office. On Tuesday, he disclosed on social media that federal prosecutors had sent him a so-called target letter, suggesting that he could soon be indicted in the investigation into the events that culminated in the riot.

Mr. Trump did not say what criminal charges, if any, the special counsel, Jack Smith, had specified in issuing the letter.

But since the Capitol attack — in part because of revelations by a House committee investigation and news reports — many legal specialists and commentators have converged on several charges that are particularly likely, especially obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the government.

A person briefed on the matter said the target letter cited three statutes that could be applied in a prosecution of Mr. Trump by the special counsel, Jack Smith, including a potential charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Norman Eisen, who worked for the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment and contributed to a prosecution memo modeling potential Jan. 6-related charges, said that the target letter suggested the special counsel “has more than enough evidence” to bring a case against the former president.

“By leading the effort to procure fraudulent electoral certificates across the nation, Trump helmed a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.,” Mr. Eisen said. “And by using those false documents to press Mike Pence to disrupt the Jan. 6 meeting of Congress, Trump attempted to obstruct an official proceeding.”

There have also been signs that prosecutors have explored potential charges involving wire or mail fraud related to Mr. Trump’s fund-raising efforts in the name of overturning the election results.

Any charges in the District of Columbia — where federal grand juries have been hearing evidence — would raise additional legal peril for Mr. Trump. Already, the Justice Department has won guilty pleas or convictions in hundreds of cases related to the riot, suggesting that a pool of jurors may be less receptive toward him than in Palm Beach County, Fla., where he faces charges over his hoarding of sensitive government documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

These are some of the charges Mr. Trump could face in the Jan. 6 case.

Both the House committee that scrutinized Jan. 6 and a federal judge in California who intervened in its inquiry have said that there is evidence that Mr. Trump tried to corruptly obstruct Congress’s session to certify Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory. Under Section 1512(c) of Title 18 of the United States Code, such a crime would be punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors have already used that law to charge hundreds of ordinary defendants in Jan. 6 cases, and in April, a federal appeals court upheld the viability of applying that charge to the Capitol attack. Still, unlike ordinary rioters, Mr. Trump did not physically participate in the storming of the Capitol.

In issuing criminal referrals as it ended its investigation, the Jan. 6 committee argued that Mr. Trump should be charged under the statute based on two sets of actions. By summoning supporters to Washington and stoking them to march on the Capitol, lawmakers argued, Mr. Trump had violated that law. Mr. Trump’s lawyers would likely raise doubts over whether he intended for his supporters to riot in part because he also told them to protest “peacefully.”

The committee also cited Mr. Trump’s participation in the fake electors scheme as a reason to issue charges, pointing to his effort to strong-arm Mr. Pence to cite the existence of slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in seven states that Mr. Biden had actually won as a basis to delay certifying the election. The panel stressed how Mr. Trump had been told that there was no truth to his claims of a stolen election, which it said showed his intentions were corrupt.

Both the federal judge in California and the Jan. 6 committee also said there was evidence that Mr. Trump violated Section 371 of Title 18, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, to conspire with another person to defraud the government.

The basis for such a charge would be similar: Mr. Trump’s interactions with various lawyers and aides in his effort to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s electoral victory, even though Mr. Trump was repeatedly told that his allegations of widespread voter fraud were baseless.

In his ruling last year in a civil lawsuit over whether the Jan. 6 committee could obtain the emails of John Eastman, a legal adviser to Mr. Trump in his fight to overturn the election results, Judge David O. Carter ruled that it was more likely than not that the communications involved crimes, so qualified for an exception to attorney-client privilege.

“The illegality of the plan was obvious,” he wrote. “Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the vice president to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election.”

A conspiracy to submit false electors to Congress could also implicate Section 1001, which makes false statements a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. In the documents case, Mr. Trump is charged under this statute, accused of having caused his lawyer to lie to the Justice Department.

A constellation of other potential crimes has also surrounded the Jan. 6 investigation. One is wire fraud. Section 1343 of Title 18 makes it a crime, punishable by 20 years in prison, to cause money to be transferred by wire across state lines as part of a scheme to obtain money by means of false or fraudulent representations. A similar fraud statute, Section 1341, covers schemes that use the Postal Service.

Subpoenas issued by Mr. Smith suggest that he has been scrutinizing Mr. Trump’s political action committee, Save America PAC. It raised as much as $250 million, telling donors the money was needed to fight election fraud even as Mr. Trump had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those claims.

The House Jan. 6 committee had also suggested that Mr. Trump and his associates had defrauded his own supporters. It described how after the election, they appealed to donors as many as 25 times a day to help fight the results in court and contribute to a defense fund. But no such fund existed, and they used the money for other purposes, including spending more than $200,000 at Trump hotel properties.

“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, said during one hearing. “So not only was there the big lie. There was the big rip-off.”

The Jan. 6 committee and some legal commentators have also suggested Mr. Trump could be charged under Section 2383 of Title 18, which makes it a crime to incite, assist, “aid or comfort” an insurrection against the authority and laws of the federal government. That offense, however, is rarely charged and has not been leveled against any Jan. 6 defendant to date.

In its final report, the committee singled out five of Mr. Trump’s other allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff; and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation.

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

Maggie Haberman

Our colleague, Alan Feuer, reports from Fort Pierce, Fla., following a hearing in the documents case in which Trump has been indicted:

Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche and Christopher Kise, briefly mentioned the new target letter at a hearing in Florida on Tuesday related to the other case brought against for the former president by Mr. Smith’s office – the one in which he stands accused of illegally holding on to more than 30 classified documents after leaving office. While Mr. Kise and Mr. Blanche gave no details about what the letter said, they used it to argue that Mr. Trump was essentially being besieged by prosecutors and that the trial in the classified documents case should be delayed until after the 2024 election.

Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon and Maggie Astor

The Michigan attorney general announced felony charges on Tuesday against 16 Republicans for falsely portraying themselves as electors from the state in an effort to overturn Donald J. Trump’s 2020 defeat there.

Each of the defendants was charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery, on accusation that they had signed documents attesting falsely that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.

“They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said in announcing the charges. “They carried out these actions with the hope and belief that the electoral votes of Michigan’s 2020 election would be awarded to the candidate of their choosing instead of the candidate that Michigan voters actually chose.”

The charges, the first against false electors in a sprawling scheme to hand the electoral votes of swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. Trump, add to the rapidly developing legal peril for Mr. Trump and those who helped him try to overturn the results of the election. They came the same day that Mr. Trump said federal prosecutors had told him that he is a target of their investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and other schemes he and his allies used to try to maintain power.

Those charged in Michigan included Meshawn Maddock, 55, who went on to serve for a time as the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Ms. Maddock, who has close ties to former President Donald J. Trump and is married to Matt Maddock, a state representative, accused Ms. Nessel of “a personal vendetta.”

“This is part of a national coordinated” effort to stop Mr. Trump, she added.

Wright Blake, a lawyer representing Mayra Rodriguez, 64, another elector who is a lawyer, said in an interview: “I’m very disappointed in the attorney general’s office. This is all political, obviously. If they want to charge my client, how come they didn’t charge Trump and the Trump lawyers that he sent here to discuss with the delegates what to do?”

While a similar investigation in Atlanta has pulled in witnesses from across the country and has led to legal battles with Mr. Trump himself, thus far the Michigan inquiry has focused on residents of the state. It is not clear whether that will remain the case.

“This remains an ongoing investigation, and our department has not ruled out potential charges against additional defendants,” Ms. Nessel said Tuesday of her inquiry.

Others among the electors who were charged included Kathy Berden, 70, a member of the Republican National Committee, and Marian Sheridan, 69, the state party’s grass-roots vice chair. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Documents released Tuesday by Ms. Nessel’s office laid out a scheme in which many of the Trump electors convened at the Republican Party state headquarters on Dec. 14, 2020, after being turned away from the State Capitol. The real electors who were certified by the Board of State Canvassers did meet at the Capitol, as required by law. Yet the Republican group falsely claimed they were the rightful electors and had met at the Capitol.

Michigan is one of three states, along with Georgia and Arizona, where there are ongoing investigations relating to the use of false electors by the Trump team in 2020. Another investigation in Michigan, being conducted by a special prosecutor, concerns a network of right-wing activists — including Matthew DePerno, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully against Ms. Nessel last year — who are suspected of breaching voting machines in search of evidence of election fraud.

In total, allies of Mr. Trump pushed to convene slates of fake electors in seven swing states that Mr. Biden won. The plan was to create the illusion of a dispute over which slates — the fake Trump ones or the real Biden ones — were legitimate, and to have members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence certify the fake Trump slates, thus handing the election to Mr. Trump in defiance of the will of voters.

Ms. Nessel began investigating the matter in early 2021, but referred it to the Justice Department in January 2022. She said at the time that while there were grounds to bring criminal charges, because there appeared to be “a coordinated effort between the Republican parties in various different states, we think this is a matter that is best investigated and potentially prosecuted by the feds.”

A few months later, she posted on Twitter: “If we don’t hold the people involved in the alternate elector scheme accountable, there is literally nothing to stop them from doing this again because there will have been no repercussions for it.”

But by January of this year, federal prosecutors had taken no apparent action. So Ms. Nessel announced that “we are reopening our investigation, because I don’t know what the federal government plans to do.”

In recent weeks, investigators have collected evidence and interviewed witnesses who have been affiliated with the state party.

Since Ms. Nessel reopened her investigation, federal prosecutors have become increasingly active in Michigan and appear to be treading similar ground. A number of elections officials and lawmakers — including the secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson — have reportedly been interviewed in recent months by federal prosecutors.

Both the federal and Michigan investigations are part of a reckoning over the conspiracy theories Mr. Trump and his allies have promoted about the election.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified when Meshawn Maddock served as a co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party. It was after she served on the false slate of electors, not during that time.

How we handle corrections

Maggie Haberman

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, said he believed the United States was going down the road of “criminalizing” political differences, adding that he hoped Trump isn’t charged because it wouldn’t be good for the country. He sidestepped a question about whether that meant the special counsel should ignore specific evidence of criminal behavior.

Maggie Haberman

In the two-and-a-half years since former President Donald J. Trump left office, he has gone from keeping relatively quiet about the events of Jan. 6, 2021, to attempting to revise the history of the violence of that day and even spin it as a positive part of his record.

Some in the pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 as President Biden’s Electoral College victory was being certified by Congress smashed windows, chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and assaulted law enforcement officers. Hundreds of rioters have pleaded guilty or been convicted of charges stemming from their actions that day.

But just two months after a riot that resulted in some of his supporters being sentenced to prison for sedition, Mr. Trump was describing the day as a “love fest” in an interview with Fox News and boasting about the size of the crowd he addressed before the assault on the Capitol.

Mr. Trump gave several interviews to book authors in which he either defended or outright lied about his actions that day. He refused to condemn the violent chants about Vice President Mike Pence to the ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl, saying his supporters had been justifiably angry. To another interviewer, he maintained that he wasn’t watching television coverage of what was happening throughout the attack, even though multiple witnesses told House investigators that he had done so.

By early 2022, as he was plainly preparing for a third presidential run, Mr. Trump began to talk openly about how unfairly he believed his jailed supporters were being treated, and he mused about possible pardons for them. It was around that time that he unveiled his own social media website, Truth Social, on which he has continued to insist that Jan. 6 had been something other than it was.

More recently, Mr. Trump has begun to describe the forced entry into the Capitol by his supporters as an act of patriotism.

Earlier this year, Mr. Trump spoke at a fund-raiser for Jan. 6 defendants, and in recent months he recorded a song with some of the prisoners, known as the “J6 choir.” The song soared on Billboard charts, and featured a version of the national anthem along with Mr. Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Luke Broadwater

Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the No. 3 House Democrat and a member of the now-defunct House Jan. 6 committee, said he believes federal prosecutors are following a roadmap that the committee laid out for prosecuting Mr. Trump when the panel issued a series of criminal referrals against the former president.

“We clearly identified the role that Donald Trump played in January 6,” Mr. Aguilar said. “We also said that this is about accountability and seeking the truth and that the D.O.J. had tools that we didn’t have as a committee that could help them in those endeavors. And so, we hope that D.O.J. uses those tools.”

Luke Broadwater

“We wanted things to happen," Mr. Aguilar said, adding, "Ultimately, at the end of the day, we just want to make sure it’s done right. And so as long as it’s done right, that’s all we care about.”

Alan Feuer

Reporting from Fort Pierce, Fla.

The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case expressed skepticism on Tuesday about the government’s request to go to trial as early as December, but she also seemed disinclined to accede immediately to Mr. Trump’s desire to have the trial put off until after the 2024 election.

Appearing for the first time at a hearing in the case, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, came to no decision about when to schedule the trial, saying she would issue a written order “promptly.”

The question of the trial’s timing could be hugely consequential, given that the legal proceeding is intertwined with the calendar of a presidential campaign in which Mr. Trump is now the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

For nearly two hours in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, peppered prosecutors and the former president’s lawyers with questions that suggested she was in command of her courtroom and well-versed in the facts of the case.

Her decision about when to schedule the trial will be an early test for the judge, who came under widespread criticism last year after she rendered some decisions in a related case that were favorable to Mr. Trump at an early stage of the investigation.

At one point, Judge Cannon directly asked one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Christopher Kise, if he wanted to put off the trial until after the election. When Mr. Kise said he did, Judge Cannon told him that she wanted to focus on near-term issues like the amount of discovery evidence the defense had to review and the types of motions the lawyers planned to file.

As the hearing came to end, Todd Blanche, another one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, asked Judge Cannon if the defense could return to court in November and reassess the trial schedule then. Appearing to pick up on the judge’s desire to create what she called “a road map” for the case, Mr. Blanche said that if a trial date absolutely had to be chosen, he would ask for one in mid-November 2024, after the election.

Timing is particularly important in this case because if the trial is delayed until after votes are cast and Mr. Trump wins the race, he could try to pardon himself or have his attorney general dismiss the matter entirely.

The hearing in Fort Pierce, two and a half hours north of Miami, came a little more than a month after the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, filed an indictment against Mr. Trump accusing him of holding on to 31 individual classified documents after he left office in violation of the Espionage Act.

Mr. Trump has also been charged with a co-defendant, Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, of a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to reclaim the documents.

While Mr. Nauta was in court on Tuesday with his lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., Mr. Trump was not. Still, he was the main subject of discussion as the two sides in the case went beyond the question of the trial’s schedule and engaged in an almost philosophical debate about the inherent tensions of putting on trial a former president who was running to reclaim the White House.

David Harbach, one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, told Judge Cannon that the rule of law should be applied to Mr. Trump as it would be to any criminal defendant.

“Mr. Trump is not the president,” Mr. Harbach said. “He is a private citizen who has been lawfully indicted by a grand jury in this district and his case should be guided by the federal code and the rules of this court like anyone else.”

But Mr. Blanche disagreed, arguing that it was not appropriate for Judge Cannon to “ignore” that Mr. Trump was running for office.

“It is intellectually dishonest to stand up in front of this court and say this case is like any other,” Mr. Blanche said. “It is not.”

Moments later, adding to those remarks, Mr. Kise sought to frame the classified documents prosecution as something like the legal version of the political contest between Mr. Trump and President Biden. He added — with rhetorical exaggeration — that the “two candidates were squaring off in this courtroom.”

That assessment seemed to offend Mr. Harbach, who pointed out that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland had appointed Mr. Smith as special counsel specifically to avoid the “specter of political influence” and that the case was being handled by career prosecutors who were not biased by politics.

“The government says that claim is flat-out false,” Mr. Harbach said in response to Mr. Kise’s assertion.

The hearing on Tuesday was initially put on the calendar to discuss issues related to the handling of classified materials in the case under a law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act. But most of the questions regarding classified documents were either relegated to the background of the proceeding or couched in terms of how they might affect the trial schedule, a matter that was clearly in the front of Judge Cannon’s mind.

The hearing opened with Judge Cannon pressing the government on why it believed the case could go to trial this winter when the discovery evidence was voluminous, the defense’s legal motions were potentially expansive and the issues involving classified materials exceedingly complex.

Jay Bratt, one of the prosecutors, admitted that the government had laid out an “aggressive schedule” for the case but told Judge Cannon that he and his team were “committed to doing the work to achieve it.”

Both Mr. Bratt and Mr. Harbach seemed concerned when the judge raised the possibility of declaring the case “complex”— a designation that could considerably slow its pace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers quickly seized that opportunity, saying they wanted a complex-case designation even if they had not formally made the request in court papers filed before the hearing.

There was a final squabble over whether Mr. Trump could have a fair jury seated to hear his trial while he was running for office.

Mr. Kise noted that the publicity surrounding the case was inherently prejudicial to Mr. Trump and that the trial should be delayed until after the election when, as he put it, “the threat abates.”

But Mr. Harbach, noting “the divisions of opinion in our country over Mr. Trump,” argued there was no reason to believe that the media furor would be any less once the election had passed.

“The publicity surrounding Mr. Trump is chronic and in some sense permanent,” he said.

Maggie Haberman

In other news, a spokesman for former Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona confirms reports that Ducey has been contacted by Smith’s office. Ducey was the focus of a recent Washington Post article on whether Trump tried to get Vice President Mike Pence to persuade him to help question the validity of the outcome of the election in that state.

Kayla Guo

Republicans in Congress reacted with outrage on Tuesday to the news of a possible second federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, claiming that he was being unfairly targeted by the Biden administration for political reasons.

The response to Mr. Trump’s announcement that he’d received a target letter as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was in keeping with the G.O.P.’s longstanding penchant for defending Mr. Trump unquestioningly. That approach took hold shortly after his supporters stormed the building in an effort to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president and has persisted as Mr. Trump has risen to become the front-runner in the Republican presidential field for 2024.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, said that the news was the latest example of President Biden using the Justice Department to go after Mr. Trump.

“President Trump went up in the polls and was actually surpassing President Biden for re-election, so what do they do now? Weaponize government to go after their Number One opponent,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol.

In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy had said Mr. Trump “bears responsibility” for the riot, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, privately expressed outrage at the events. Shortly after, though, most Republicans backed off their critiques and rallied to the defense of the former president, playing down what happened on Jan. 6 and Mr. Trump’s role in spreading the election lies that led to the attack.

In the Senate, Republicans blocked the creation of an independent inquiry into the attack. In the House, they boycotted the yearlong investigation by a special committee that ultimately recommended that Mr. Trump be criminally prosecuted for charges including inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an act of Congress.

On Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York and the chair of the Republican Conference, called a possible indictment of Mr. Trump evidence of a “two-tiered, fundamentally un-American system of justice.”

“There cannot be one set of laws if your last name is Biden and another set of laws for law abiding Americans,” Ms. Stefanik said, referring to the plea deal Hunter Biden reached with the Justice Department on two misdemeanor tax charges and a separate gun charge after a yearslong investigation by a Trump-appointed prosecutor.

Hard-right Republicans also chimed in to defend Mr. Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said on Twitter that Democrats “want to arrest every one of their political opponents,” and that the investigations into the former president were intended to “cover up the crimes of Joe & Hunter Biden and their entire criminal family.”

Congressional investigators have yet to produce evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden despite a monthslong inquiry and frequent claims by top Republicans that Mr. Biden had engaged in potentially criminal behavior.

Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who has been a main architect of investigations into the Biden family as the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called the pursuit of the former president proof of a “double standard” that victimizes Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump has already been indicted twice. A federal indictment last month relates to his handling of classified documents containing national defense material and his alleged obstruction of efforts to recover them, and an indictment in New York in April involves his role in a scheme to pay hush money to a porn star.

A prosecutor in Georgia is also investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse election results in that state.

Karoun Demirjian

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the Democrat who led the prosecution of Trump on impeachment charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, said “it would not surprise me in the least” if the former president were the target of a criminal investigation “based on everything that he did.”

Mr. Raskin said in the years since Trump’s second impeachment trial, he had heard from many Americans “who felt that the little guys would end up facing criminal justice and accountability but the people at the top would not.”

Karoun Demirjian

“If this is where the evidence takes the prosecutors, then I’m glad that our justice system is working,” Mr. Raskin concluded, adding it would be important to demonstrate that no one escaped justice “just because of an office they once held or a certain kind of privilege they think they enjoy.”

Luke Broadwater

Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio and chairman of the judiciary committee, tells me he plans to meet with the committee’s lawyers to determine how to respond to the target letter.

“It’s ridiculous," he said. "There are all kinds of ridiculous things happening at the Justice Department.”

Luke Broadwater

Lawyers for John Eastman, the conservative lawyer who produced a plan to try to throw out President Biden’s electoral victory, said he has not received a target letter.

“Our client has received no target letter," they said, "and we don’t expect one since raising concerns about illegality in the conduct of an election is not now and has never been sanctionable.”

Benjamin Protess

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who served as Trump’s personal lawyer and led much of the effort to challenge the 2020 election results, has not received a target letter, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Prosecutors recently interviewed Giuliani as part of the investigation, and it is unclear whether he or others could face charges.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien

Shortly after disclosing that he'd received a target letter from the Justice Department, Donald Trump was using it to solicit campaign donations. “Please make a contribution to show that you will NEVER SURRENDER our country to tyranny as the Deep State things try to JAIL me for life,” he said in an email to supporters. Similar appeals have been successful: His joint fund-raising committee said it raised $4 million in the 24 hours after he was indicted in late March by New York prosecutors, and $6.6 million in the days after his indictment in June by the special counsel.

Maggie Astor

As news broke Tuesday morning that former President Donald J. Trump was likely to be indicted in a third criminal case, the reaction from his rivals in the 2024 Republican primary was notably muted.

Mr. Trump still had defenders — including his top competitor in polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who cast him as a victim of “politicization” of the Justice Department. But the tenor was subtly different. Some candidates seemed visibly tired of having to continually respond to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles at the expense of talking about anything else, and some did not say anything at all.

Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump and is now running against him, sounded exasperated when asked on Fox News about the investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She called it a “distraction” from important issues like foreign policy, border security and the national debt.

“The rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump: it’s going to be about lawsuits; it’s going to be about legal fees; it’s going to be about judges; and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction,” Ms. Haley said. “And that’s why I am running, is because we need a new generational leader. We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”

She notably did not repeat what she said when Mr. Trump was indicted last month for his retention of classified documents: that the charges were evidence of “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”

Mr. DeSantis, for his part, said that any indictment would be part of “an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” while also saying that Mr. Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking before a campaign event in New Hampshire, denounced what he described as “the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political enemies,” he quickly turned to naming non-Trump-related examples. Pressed further on Mr. Trump, he said, “The voters will decide the next president of the United States.”

In other corners, silence reigned. The campaigns of Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota did not respond to requests for comment. And a spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence — who, by certifying the election results on Jan. 6, made an enemy of his former boss — said that Mr. Pence had nothing to say Tuesday morning.

But, in a nod to the political inescapability of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the spokesman, Devin O’Malley, added that Mr. Pence would be making television appearances later in the day and would probably be asked about it then.

The restraint was not universal.

A candidate who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most forceful defenders, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, went so far last month as to urge every 2024 contender to pledge to pardon him if elected. On Tuesday, he initially took a less fiery tack, saying he “would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime.” But not long after, he issued a conspiratorial statement, suggesting without evidence that the possible indictment was part of a plot to disqualify Mr. Trump from office under the 14th Amendment.

“It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its chief political rivals,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. He added that he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence for his belief that President Biden ordered the Justice Department and the special counsel to indict Mr. Trump. He ended the statement by promoting an upcoming campaign event.

Three other low-polling candidates who, unlike Mr. Ramaswamy, have sought out the anti- Trump lane of the primary field reacted predictably.

Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Twitter that he would not comment on the potential legal case until an indictment was released, but that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 proved “he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.” And former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas reiterated his call for Mr. Trump to suspend his campaign.

“I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a statement. He added, “Anyone who truly loves this country and is willing to put the country over themselves would suspend their campaign for president of the United States immediately.”

The third candidate, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, was scathing: “Losing to Joe Biden was so humiliating to Donald Trump that he was willing to let people die for his lies about a stolen election,” he said in a statement. He added, “Trump’s inaction then, and now being a target in the investigation, proves he’s not fit for office.”

Charlie Savage

Any charges in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia — where the Jan. 6 grand jury has been operating — would obviously not just raise additional legal peril for Trump, but would come in a jurisdiction where the jury pool may be less friendly toward him on average than in the area around Palm Beach County, Fla., where Smith brought charges over Trump's hoarding of sensitive government files at his Florida club and estate, Mar-a-Lago.

Jonathan Weisman

Trump's top rival for the 2024 nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, said Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop the Jan. 6 riot, but added that any charges against the front-runner would be part of a pattern of weaponization of political institutions against conservatives. “I think what we’ve seen in this country is an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” he said during a campaign stop in South Carolina.

Maggie Astor

Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate who has declared that every candidate should pledge to pardon Mr. Trump if elected, defended him again Tuesday — but not in such fiery words as before. “I would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime,” he said through a spokeswoman. “It’s a mistake to say he was responsible for Jan. 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship in the lead-up to those events.”

Glenn Thrush

In a brief statement issued when he was hired last November, Jack Smith said he would “move the investigations forward expeditiously.” If anything that was understatement. In under nine months, he has delivered one Trump indictment, with a second one likely on the way.

Maggie Haberman

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who has repeatedly run point for Trump on the investigations Trump is facing, recently told reporters at the Capitol that the latest news is an example of a “weaponized” government and suggested it’s happening because Trump is rising in the polls. It’s worth recalling that McCarthy condemned Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6 on the House floor shortly after it happened.

Maggie Haberman

It’s worth bearing in mind that as time has gone on, Trump has leaned into the events of that day and a whitewash of what took place, describing the violence as a love-fest and incorporating some of the detained or charged rioters into his campaign by recording a song with them.

Maggie Haberman

When Trump was indicted in March, his allies squeezed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trump’s main rival, to defend him, and they succeeded. DeSantis promptly sounded a muted but critical note when Smith indicted Trump in June. It will be interesting to see how he responds to the latest news.

Remy Tumin

Former President Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that he had received a target letter from the special counsel investigating the Jan. 6 riot, the second time he has been notified that he is a target in a federal investigation.

A target letter is an official piece of correspondence from the Justice Department informing someone that he or she is being investigated. It does not formally charge a person, but indicates that an investigation is nearing its end and that the department is actively considering charging them.

Typically, such a letter provides the recipient the opportunity to testify before a grand jury but does not obligate them to appear. Mitchell Epner, a former assistant United States Attorney for the district of New Jersey, said targets of investigations rarely avail themselves of that opportunity.

“I would be very surprised if Mr. Trump were to testify before the grand jury,” he said.

Regardless of whether Mr. Trump testifies, Mr. Epner said that he expected the Justice Department to present a potential indictment to the grand jury soon and that a charging decision would be made quickly. Of a minimum 16 grand jurors, at least 12 votes are needed to indict Mr. Trump.

“It could be as little as days but more typically weeks, sometimes months,” Mr. Epner said, adding that a decision would almost certainly be made this year.

Mr. Trump has not released his target letter. But a sample letter from a Justice Department manual for prosecutors describes how one would read.

Among other things, the sample letter says: “You are advised that you are a target of the grand jury’s investigation. You may refuse to answer any question if a truthful answer to the question would tend to incriminate you. Anything that you do or say may be used against you in a subsequent legal proceeding. If you have retained counsel, who represents you personally, the grand jury will permit you a reasonable opportunity to step outside the grand jury room and confer with counsel if you desire.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

Glenn Thrush

An obvious but important point: A Jan. 6-related indictment of Trump would be much harder to prove than his mishandling of government documents. But the issue it targets — his attempt to subvert the results of a free and fair election — is central to the democratic process and less easy to dismiss by critics of Jack Smith who thought indicting Trump over a paperwork fight was frivolous.

Maggie Haberman

When Trump was indicted the first two times — in March in a Manhattan state court on charges stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star, and then by Smith in June — his primary poll numbers and fundraising got a bump. That has been distressing to his Republican rivals, many of whom had privately hoped the investigations would serve as freight.

Maggie Haberman

It remains to be seen how much the special counsel’s investigation overlapped with the work of House select committee investigators who were examining Trump’s efforts to cling to power. The committee held public hearings, most of them in 2022, and they were perceived at the time as damaging to Trump.

Glenn Thrush

Jack Smith, appointed in November to investigate former President Donald J. Trump, is a hard-driving, flinty former prosecutor chosen for his experience in bringing high-stakes cases against politicians in the United States and abroad.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland tasked him with overseeing two investigations: one into Mr. Trump’s retention of classified materials at his residence in Florida, which resulted in an indictment last month, and the other into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which appears to be heading toward an indictment.

“The right choice to complete these matters in an evenhanded and urgent manner,” Mr. Garland said in announcing the appointment of Mr. Smith, who had been serving as the top prosecutor investigating war crimes in Kosovo at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Here’s what to know about Mr. Smith:

Mr. Smith was born on June 5, 1969, and grew up in a suburb of Syracuse. He graduated from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1991 before attending Harvard Law School.

In the 1990s, he was a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and soon moved to a similar job at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Over the next decade, he rose to a series of supervisory positions, including chief of criminal litigation, overseeing dozens of prosecutors pursuing cases involving gangs, violent crime, financial fraud and public corruption.

During that time, he met Marshall Miller, now the top adviser to Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco, and the two men worked closely during an investigation into the brutal assault of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant who was sexually assaulted by the police with a broomstick inside a Brooklyn precinct in 1997.

Mr. Miller was instrumental in Mr. Smith’s selection as special counsel, telling Ms. Monaco and Mr. Garland that his independence and aggressiveness made him the ideal person for the job, according to several people with knowledge of the situation.

From 2010 to 2015, Mr. Smith led the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which investigates politicians and other public figures accused of corruption.

When he took over, the unit was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In Mr. Smith’s first few months on the job, he closed several prominent investigations into members of Congress without charges.

At the time, Mr. Smith brushed off the suggestion that he had lost his nerve.

“If I were the sort of person who could be cowed,” he said, “I would find another line of work.”

Among his more notable corruption cases was a conviction of Robert McDonnell, the Republican former governor of Virginia, that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a conviction of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, whom Mr. Trump pardoned during his final hours as president.

Mr. Smith has assembled a team that includes career prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the department’s national security division who were already working on the Trump investigations, along with several trusted aides.

Veteran prosecutors in the department said that the image Mr. Trump and his rivals had projected of Mr. Smith — as a gung-ho prosecutor eager to bring charges — missed the mark. They said he was committed to making decisions, no matter the outcome, without delay and in line with his mandate to act before the 2024 campaign hits full stride.

Former colleagues said Mr. Smith’s most memorable attribute was a stripped-down management style that put a premium on gathering enough information to make a charging decision as swiftly as possible.

“He doesn’t like to sit there, playing with his food,” said one person who worked with him for several years.

Adam Goldman

Last year, the Justice Department set up special teams — under a project code-named “Coconut” — to handle electronic communications between Trump and others that were seized as part of the Jan. 6 investigation. Known as filter teams, prosecutors have been sorting through emails and texts to determine what is confidential legal advice, making it off-limits to the special counsel. What started with a handful of prosecutors grew to more than 20 as more devices were legally seized with search warrants.

Charlie Savage

Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, one of Trump’s (single-digit-polling) rivals for the 2024 Republican nomination, has issued a statement saying Trump should suspend his campaign, a call he has made before.

See my statement on the news that Donald Trump is a target of the #January6th Investigation: pic.twitter.com/jeor7zoUMi

Maggie Haberman

If Trump is indeed indicted in connection with his efforts to stay in power, as the receipt of a target letter typically indicates, he will be facing two indictments directly related to how he handled himself in office. One is the documents investigation, in which he is alleged to have housed hundreds of classified documents at his private club in Florida, and the other would be whatever Smith’s latest is.

Glenn Thrush

If the federal indictment of Trump related to Jan. 6 comes before his expected indictment in Georgia for attempting to overturn the 2020 election it will have a significant impact on both: Former prosecutors have predicted DOJ would want to go first — to avoid damaging discrepancies in testimony that could arise in competing cases covering similar events.

Maggie Haberman

Trump is simultaneously likely to be an at least thrice-indicted candidate for president who is leading the Republican primary polls by at least twenty points and in most surveys by thirty points. We are in uncharted territory.

Maggie Astor

Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump but is now running against him in the Republican presidential primary, sounded exasperated when asked about the target letter on Fox News, calling it a “distraction” from important issues like foreign policy, border security and the national debt. “And that’s why I am running, is because we need a new generational leader,” she said. “We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”

Alan Feuer, Luke Broadwater, Maggie Haberman, Katie Benner and Michael S. Schmidt

Like 9/11, Jan. 6 needs no year attached to convey its dark place in American history. On that Wednesday afternoon, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump assaulted the Capitol, resulting in what Vice President Mike Pence had refused to do: disrupting the ceremonial certification of the electoral votes confirming that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would be the next president of the United States.

But Jan. 6 has also become a somewhat misleading shorthand for something bigger: a monthslong campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to subvert American democracy and cling to power by reversing an election. The story so far has been pieced together through the prosecutions of rioters, a broader Justice Department investigation, the work of the House select committee examining the attack and its origins, and the work of journalists.

Charlie Savage

Target letters often list at least some of the possible violations of federal criminal laws that a grand jury is investigating. If the Jan. 6-related target letter to Trump and his legal team followed that practice, it is possible that word of any specific potential charges it flags will surface before long.

Alan Feuer

The hearing today in Florida could help flesh out more details about when Mr. Trump’s trial on charges of violating the Espionage Act will take place. The government has requested a date in December. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for an indefinite postponement.

Maggie Haberman

Even as Trump received a target letter, witnesses have still been interviewed in the last few weeks by Smith’s team and before one of the grand juries.

Michael D. Shear

White House officials declined to comment Tuesday on Trump’s claim that he is a target in the Jan. 6 investigation, citing a decision by President Biden — who could face Mr. Trump in a 2024 rematch — to keep Justice Department investigations independent from White House interference.

Charlie Savage

The news of the target letter over Jan. 6 matters comes as Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors from Smith’s office are expected to convene this afternoon before a judge in Florida in the separate criminal investigation into his hoarding of sensitive government documents.

Charlie Savage

Trump has not released his target letter. But a sample letter from a Justice Department manual for prosecutors suggests what he might have received. Among other things, the sample letter says: “You are advised that you are a target of the Grand Jury’s investigation. You may refuse to answer any question if a truthful answer to the question would tend to incriminate you. Anything that you do or say may be used against you in a subsequent legal proceeding. If you have retained counsel, who represents you personally, the Grand Jury will permit you a reasonable opportunity to step outside the Grand Jury room and confer with counsel if you desire.”

Adam Goldman

As part of the F.B.I. and Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, federal investigators have seized the phones of advisors to Mr. Trump, including Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020. Federal investigators also seized the cellphone of John Eastman, a legal architect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss,and the phone of another lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, whom Mr. Trump had sought at one point to install as the acting attorney general.

Adam Goldman

Although it remains unclear what charges could be connected to the target letter, one element of the sprawling investigation -- into efforts to create slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in states he had lost in 2020 -- has been gathering momentum since it was officially opened by the F.B.I.’s Washington field office in April 2022 and approved by top bureau and Justice Department officials.

Maggie Haberman

As we and others have reported, some Trump aides have told investigators that Trump seemed to know he had lost, based on things he was saying shortly after election day.

Maggie Haberman

The grand juries investigating aspects of Trump’s efforts to stay in power have heard from a number of witnesses. That has included Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who appeared in June, and was asked several questions about Trump’s mindset, according to people familiar with the appearance. Kushner is said to have told them it was his sense Trump believed he had won.

Alan Feuer

While it’s impossible to say at this point precisely when the Jan. 6 charges may be filed, it could be instructive that Mr Trump received a target letter in the special counsel’s investigation into his handling of classified documents about three weeks before an indictment in that case was returned.

Charlie Savage

Trial scheduling is getting more complex, even before taking into account that Trump is running for president again. If a grand jury in D.C. does indict Trump over Jan. 6 matter, he will be facing criminal charges in three separate jurisdictions — with a fourth potential case looming in Georgia. Defendants have a right to be in the courtroom for criminal trials, so none can overlap.

Ben Protess, Alan Feuer and Danny Hakim

Former President Donald J. Trump has been facing a wave of legal scrutiny, at both the state and federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Those investigations have now led to Mr. Trump’s being indicted in four cases in four months: two brought by the special counsel Jack Smith, one by the Manhattan district attorney and the latest coming from local prosecutors in Georgia.

The Georgia case, filed on Aug. 14, leveled the most extensive accusations yet against the former president, who was charged with orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse Georgia’s results in the 2020 election and subvert the will of voters. He was charged alongside 18 of his lawyers, advisers and supporters as part of a sweeping racketeering case.

The case, brought by the Fulton County district attorney, Fani T. Willis, was the fourth and perhaps final indictment of Mr. Trump.

The indictments began in March, when the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, filed 34 felony charges against Mr. Trump related to what prosecutors described as a hush-money scheme to cover up a potential sex scandal and clear his path to the presidency in 2016.

The first federal case came in June as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents and whether he obstructed the government’s efforts to recover them after he left office.

In that case, Mr. Trump faces 40 criminal counts: 32 related to withholding national defense information, five related to concealing the possession of classified documents, one related to making false statements and two related to an effort to delete security camera footage at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where he stored the documents.

On Aug. 1, the special counsel filed another case against him, this time stemming from an investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat in the 2020 election.

The flurry of activity means that Mr. Trump very well could face four criminal trials next year, all in the thick of the presidential campaign.

See a guide to the major criminal cases involving the former president.

Here is where the notable cases involving the former president stand:

Ms. Willis, a Democrat, brought the sweeping case against Mr. Trump over his efforts to interfere with the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state.

The 41-count indictment also brought charges against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who served as his personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff at the time of the election.

All 19 defendants — a cross-section of conservative operatives that also includes a former senior Justice Department official, the former chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and lawyers who were part of the “elite strike force team” who amplified Mr. Trump’s claims — were charged under the state’s racketeering statute. That law was originally designed to dismantle organized crime groups, and in essence, prosecutors asserted that Mr. Trump sat atop a criminal enterprise designed to keep him in power. (Mr. Trump is facing 13 counts, including racketeering and conspiracy to commit forgery).

The indictment outlined eight ways the defendants were accused of obstructing the election, including by lying to the Georgia state legislature about claims of voter fraud and creating fake pro-Trump electors.

Mr. Trump and the other defendants, prosecutors wrote, “knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump.”

Mr. Trump and his associates had numerous interactions with Georgia officials after the election, including a now-infamous call in which he urged the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes,” the number he would have needed to overcome Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead there.

A special grand jury was impaneled in May of 2022 in Fulton County, and it heard testimony from 75 witnesses behind closed doors over a series of months. The jurors produced a final report, but the most important elements of it — including recommendations on who should be indicted and on what charges — remained under seal.

The forewoman, Emily Kohrs, had said that indictments were recommended against more than a dozen people, and she strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was included among those names. “You’re not going to be shocked,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.”

Mr. Trump has assailed the proceedings in Georgia, and his lawyers have referred to them as a “clown show.”

He tried another tactic in mid-July, asking the Georgia Supreme Court to throw out the special grand jury’s work and disqualify Ms. Willis. But the high court swiftly rejected the request.

In the hours after the indictment was unsealed, Mr. Trump denounced the case in a post on his social media platform, saying that he would release an “Irrefutable” report that would somehow prove his false claims of election fraud in Georgia.

Two weeks before the Georgia indictment was unveiled, Jack Smith, the special counsel who took over the Justice Department’s inquiries into Mr. Trump last year, brought four charges related to the former president’s efforts to remain in office after his election loss in 2020 and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The two cases cover some of the same ground.

But Mr. Smith’s indictment, handed up in Federal District Court on Aug. 1, charged a narrower case, indicting only Mr. Trump with three conspiracy charges in connection with his effort to stay in power: one to defraud the United States, a second to obstruct an official government proceeding and a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution. Mr. Trump was also charged with attempting to obstruct an official proceeding — the certification of the election results by Congress.

The scheme charged by Mr. Smith played out largely in the two months between Election Day in 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. During that period, Mr. Trump took part in a range of efforts to retain power despite having lost the presidential race to Mr. Biden.

“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment said

The indictment said Mr. Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators had pushed state legislators and election officials to change electoral votes won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. to votes for Mr. Trump. Among other things, the scheme involved convening fake slates of electors who supported Mr. Trump and sending those illegitimate tallies to Congress to muddy the waters.

“That is, on the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the defendant,” the indictment said.

Prosecutors also accused the former president of recruiting fake electors in swing states won by Mr. Biden, trying to use the power of the Justice Department to fuel election conspiracy theories, and pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election or reject legitimate electors.

Finally the indictment accused Mr. Trump and others of exploiting the Jan. 6 riot to redouble his “efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.”

The federal judge overseeing the case set a trial date for March 4, 2024, laying out a schedule that was close to the government’s initial request of January and rebuffing Mr. Trump’s proposal of April 2026.

A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol spent a year and a half examining the role that Mr. Trump and his allies played in his efforts to hold on to power after his electoral defeat in November 2020.

In December, the committee issued an 845-page report concluding that Mr. Trump and some of his associates had devised “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and disclosing in exhaustive detail the events that led to the attack on the Capitol.

The panel also accused Mr. Trump of inciting insurrection and conspiracy to defraud the United States, among other federal crimes, and referred him and some of his allies to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

Mr. Smith’s office conducted its own investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, building on months of work by other federal prosecutors in Washington who have also filed charges against nearly 1,000 people who took part in the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Smith also led the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of sensitive government documents he took with him when he left office and whether he obstructed efforts to recover them.

For more than a year, Mr. Trump repeatedly resisted the federal government’s efforts, including a subpoena, to retrieve classified and sensitive material still in his possession, according to government documents.

In August 2022, acting on a court-approved search warrant, the F.B.I. descended on his Mar-a-Lago residence and club in Palm Beach, Fla., and discovered about 100 documents bearing classification markings.

The 49-page indictment unsealed in June said the documents held onto by Mr. Trump included some involving sensitive nuclear programs and others that detailed the country’s potential vulnerabilities to military attack.

In some cases, prosecutors said, he displayed them to people without security clearances and stored them in a haphazard manner at Mar-a-Lago, even keeping a pile of boxes in a bathroom.

The indictment included evidence vividly illustrating what prosecutors said was Mr. Trump’s effort to hide the material from prosecutors and obstruct their investigation.

In one of the most problematic pieces of evidence for the former president, the indictment recounted how at one point during the effort by the government to retrieve the documents, Mr. Trump, according to an account by one of his lawyers, made a “plucking motion” that implied, “Why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room, and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out.”

Mr. Trump was initially charged with 37 criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law, alone or in conjunction with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, who was also named in the indictment. In late July, Mr. Smith’s office filed an updated indictment adding three new charges against Mr. Trump and for the first time naming the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, Carlos De Oliveira, as a defendant in the case.

The July indictment accused Mr. Trump, Mr. De Oliveira and Mr. Nauta of trying to delete Mar-a-Lago security footage. It describes how in June 2022, just days after prosecutors issued a subpoena for footage from the cameras, Mr. De Oliveira approached an employee in Mar-a-Lago’s I.T. department to say that the “‘boss’ wanted the server deleted” — a reference to the computer server housing the footage. When the employee refused, Mr. De Oliveira repeated the orders from “the boss,” according to the indictment. “What are we going to do?” Mr. De Oliveira asked.

Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty during his arraignment on June 13. The judge overseeing the case has indicated that a trial will begin in May 2024. The government had requested a trial date in December, while Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked for an indefinite postponement.

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, brought the case over Mr. Trump’s role in a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels, who was poised during the campaign to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with him.

Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s fixer at the time, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet. Once he was sworn in as president, Mr. Trump reimbursed Mr. Cohen.

While paying hush money is not inherently criminal, Mr. Bragg accused Mr. Trump of falsifying records related to the payments and the reimbursement of Mr. Cohen, who is expected to serve as the prosecution’s star witness.

In court papers, prosecutors also cited the account of another woman, Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model. Ms. McDougal had tried to sell her story of an affair with Mr. Trump during the campaign and reached a $150,000 agreement with The National Enquirer.

Rather than publish her account, the tabloid suppressed it in cooperation with Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, prosecutors say. (Mr. Trump has denied having affairs with either Ms. Daniels or Ms. McDougal.)

The court papers also referred to a payment to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed that Mr. Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock. The National Enquirer paid $30,000 for the rights to his story, although it eventually concluded that his claim was false.

Mr. Trump is running for president again, and the case is scheduled to go to trial in March, when the campaign will be in full swing.

Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Bragg, who is Black and a Democrat, as a “racist” who is carrying out a politically motivated “witch hunt.” Before the indictment, he made threatening statements reminiscent of his posts in the days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Hours after his arraignment, Mr. Trump delivered a meandering, rally-style speech at Mar-a-Lago during which he lashed out at Mr. Bragg and Mr. Bragg’s wife as well as the judge overseeing the case, Juan M. Merchan, whom he called “Trump-hating.”

Mr. Trump’s lawyers failed in an attempt to move the case out of Justice Merchan’s courtroom, with a federal judge saying that its proper home was state court.

Mr. Bragg’s investigation into Mr. Trump once appeared to be at a dead end. Under Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the district attorney’s office had begun to present evidence to an earlier grand jury about Mr. Trump’s business practices, including whether he had fraudulently inflated the value of his real estate to secure favorable loans and other financial benefits. (Mr. Vance’s prosecutors were also investigating the hush money.)

In the early weeks of his tenure last year, Mr. Bragg developed concerns about the strength of that case. He decided to abandon the grand-jury presentation, prompting the resignations of the two senior prosecutors leading the investigation.

But last summer, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors returned to the hush-money case, seeking to jump-start the inquiry.

The first visible sign of progress for Mr. Bragg came in January, when Mr. Cohen met with prosecutors at the district attorney’s Lower Manhattan office — the first such meeting in nearly a year. Mr. Cohen returned for several additional interviews with the prosecutors and testified before the grand jury.

After Mr. Bragg impaneled the grand jury in January, it heard testimony from Mr. Cohen as well as two former National Enquirer executives who had helped broker the hush-money deal. Ms. Daniels’s former lawyer also testified, as did two senior officials from Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, Hope Hicks and Kellyanne Conway. The grand jury also heard testimony from employees of Mr. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization.

In late 2022, Mr. Bragg’s prosecutors won a conviction of the Trump Organization when a jury found the business guilty of multiple felonies related to a long-running tax fraud scheme. The company’s veteran chief financial officer, Allen H. Weisselberg, pleaded guilty in the scheme and served time at the Rikers Island jail complex.

Mr. Trump faced a second criminal investigation in New York related to financial dealings at a Trump Organization golf course in Westchester County. As part of the inquiry, the Westchester County district attorney’s office subpoenaed records from the course, Trump National Golf Club Westchester, in 2021.

The district attorney, Mimi E. Rocah, announced in June 2023 that she was closing the investigation. No charges were brought against Mr. Trump or his company.

In a September lawsuit, the New York attorney general, Letitia James, accused Mr. Trump of lying to lenders and insurers by fraudulently overvaluing his assets by billions of dollars.

Ms. James is seeking to bar the Trumps, including Mr. Trump’s older sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, from running a business in New York again. Mr. Trump’s older daughter, Ivanka Trump, was also one of the targets of the suit, but she was dropped from it in June after an appeals court found that the attorney general had missed a legal deadline for bringing claims against her.

Ms. James successfully prompted the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization’s use of its annual financial statements — in which, the attorney general says in her suit, the company overvalued its assets.

In January, a New York judge declined to dismiss the attorney general’s suit against Mr. Trump, increasing the likelihood that he would face a trial in the matter this fall.

Because Ms. James’s investigation is civil, she cannot file criminal charges. She could opt to pursue settlement negotiations in hopes of obtaining a swifter financial payout. But if she were to prevail at trial, a judge could impose steep financial penalties on Mr. Trump and restrict his business operations in New York.

Ms. James’s investigators questioned Mr. Trump under oath in April. A trial is scheduled for October.

On July 18, the Michigan attorney general announced felony charges against 16 Republicans for falsely portraying themselves as electors from the state in an effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat there.

Each of the defendants was charged with eight felony counts, including forgery and conspiracy to commit forgery, on accusations that they had signed documents attesting falsely that they were Michigan’s “duly elected and qualified electors” for president and vice president.

“They weren’t the duly elected and qualified electors, and each of the defendants knew it,” Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said in announcing the charges. “They carried out these actions with the hope and belief that the electoral votes of Michigan’s 2020 election would be awarded to the candidate of their choosing instead of the candidate that Michigan voters actually chose.”

Those charged in Michigan included Meshawn Maddock, 55, who went on to serve for a time as the co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Ms. Maddock, who has close ties to Mr. Trump and is married to Matt Maddock, a state representative, accused Ms. Nessel of “a personal vendetta.”

“This is part of a national coordinated” effort to stop Mr. Trump, she added.

Wright Blake, a lawyer representing Mayra Rodriguez, 64, another elector who is a lawyer, said in an interview: “I’m very disappointed in the attorney general’s office. This is all political, obviously. If they want to charge my client, how come they didn’t charge Trump and the Trump lawyers that he sent here to discuss with the delegates what to do?”

In Arizona, the attorney general, Kris Mayes, said earlier this year that she would investigate the fake electors situation. “I will take very seriously any effort to undermine our democracy. Those are the cases that I will take most seriously,” she said.

Her communications director, Richie Taylor, confirmed in July that there is an active and ongoing investigation into the situation, but declined to comment further.

Reporting was contributed by Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, Jonah E. Bromwich, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Michael Gold, Michael Rothfeld, Ed Shanahan, Richard Fausset and Ashley Wong.

Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg and Michael S. Schmidt

By Thursday the 12th of November, President Donald J. Trump’s election lawyers were concluding that the reality he faced was the inverse of the narrative he was promoting in his comments and on Twitter. There was no substantial evidence of election fraud, and there were nowhere near enough “irregularities” to reverse the outcome in the courts.

Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by “a lot” or even a little. His presidency would soon be over.

Allegations of Democratic malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion. A supposed suitcase of illegal ballots in Detroit proved to be a box of camera equipment. “Dead voters” were turning up alive in television and newspaper interviews.

The week was coming to a particularly demoralizing close: In Arizona, the Trump lawyers were preparing to withdraw their main lawsuit as the state tally showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. leading by more than 10,000 votes, against the 191 ballots they had identified for challenge.

As he met with colleagues to discuss strategy, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, was urgently summoned to the Oval Office. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, was on speaker phone, pressing the president to file a federal suit in Georgia and sharing a conspiracy theory gaining traction in conservative media — that Dominion Systems voting machines had transformed thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes.

Mr. Clark warned that the suit Mr. Giuliani had in mind would be dismissed on procedural grounds. And a state audit was barreling toward a conclusion that the Dominion machines had operated without interference or foul play.

Mr. Giuliani called Mr. Clark a liar, according to people with direct knowledge of the exchange. Mr. Clark called Mr. Giuliani something much worse. And with that, the election-law experts were sidelined in favor of the former New York City mayor, the man who once again was telling the president what he wanted to hear.

Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.

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Weeks later, Mr. Trump is the former President Trump. In coming days, a presidential transition like no other will be dissected when he stands trial in the Senate on an impeachment charge of “incitement of insurrection.” Yet his lie of an election stolen by corrupt and evil forces lives on in a divided America.

A New York Times examination of the 77 democracy-bending days between election and inauguration shows how, with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.

In the aftermath of that broken afternoon at the Capitol, a picture has emerged of entropic forces coming together on Trump’s behalf in an ad hoc, yet calamitous, crash of rage and denial.

But interviews with central players, and documents including previously unreported emails, videos and social media posts scattered across the web, tell a more encompassing story of a more coordinated campaign.

Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.

Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.

In the Senate, he got early room to maneuver from the majority leader, Mitch McConnell. As he sought the president’s help in Georgia runoffs that could cost him his own grip on power, Mr. McConnell heeded misplaced assurances from White House aides like Jared Kushner that Mr. Trump would eventually accede to reality, people close to the senator told The Times. Mr. McConnell’s later recognition of Mr. Biden’s victory would not be enough to dissuade 14 Republican senators from joining the president’s last-ditch bid to nullify millions of Americans’ votes.

Likewise, during the campaign, Attorney General William P. Barr had echoed some of Mr. Trump’s complaints of voter fraud. But privately the president was chafing at Mr. Barr’s resistance to his more authoritarian impulses — including his idea to end birthright citizenship in a legally dubious pre-election executive order. And when Mr. Barr informed Mr. Trump in a tense Oval Office session that the Justice Department’s fraud investigations had run dry, the president dismissed the department as derelict before finding other officials there who would view things his way.

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne, who warned of “fake ballots” and voting-machine manipulation from China on One America News Network and Newsmax, which were finding ratings in their willingness to go further than Fox in embracing the fiction that Mr. Trump had won.

As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.

As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.

In the days before Nov. 3, polls strongly indicated that election night would show Mr. Trump in the lead, as his voters were less concerned about the coronavirus and more likely to vote in person. Those tallies would register first on the network television scoreboards.

But the polls also indicated that the president’s apparent lead would diminish or disappear overnight, as more mail-in ballots, favored by Biden voters, were added to the official counts.

As Election Day approached, Mr. Trump and those closest to him believed that his lead would be insurmountable, their views swayed by the assurances of pro-Trump pundits and the unscientific measure of the size and excitement of the president’s rally crowds. Yet for months he had also been preparing an argument to dispute a possible loss: that it could only be due to a vast conspiracy of fraud. (A spokesman for the former president declined to comment for this article.)

Flying home on Air Force One from the final campaign event in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the early hours of Nov. 3., Mr. Trump’s son Eric proposed an Electoral College betting pool.

He wagered that the president would win at least 320 electoral votes, according to a person present for the exchange. “We’re just trying to get to 270,” an adviser more grounded in polling and analytics replied.

The polls, in fact, had it right.

Gathered in the East Room of the White House on election night, Mr. Trump and his entourage fell into enraged disbelief as his lead inexorably dissipated, even in formerly red states like Arizona, which Fox called for Mr. Biden at 11:20 in what the president took as a stinging betrayal. Eric Trump goaded him on — a dynamic that would play out in the weeks to come. There would be no early victory speech that evening.

Instead, in a brief televised address shortly before 2:30 a.m., Mr. Trump furiously laid down his postelection lie.

“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election — frankly, we did win this election,” the president declared. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.”

Leading Republicans quickly fell in line.

On Fox, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, predicted that Mr. Trump’s supporters would erupt in rage “as they watch Joe Biden’s Democratic Party steal the election in Philadelphia, steal the election in Atlanta, steal the election in Milwaukee.”

On Thursday night, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, told Laura Ingraham on Fox: “Everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet, do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.”

Online, the disinformation floodgates opened still further, their messages frequently landing on local and cable news. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram filled with videos alleging that a dog had voted in Santa Cruz, Calif. Fears that thousands of Trump votes would be thrown out in Arizona — because voters had been forced to use felt-tipped Sharpie pens that scanners could not read — rocketed across conservative social media accounts and the QAnon network before informing two lawsuits, one filed by Mr. Trump’s campaign. (The ballots were readable; both suits were dropped.)

But another, more enduring conspiracy theory was gaining momentum, one that would soon be taken up by Mr. Giuliani.

On Oct. 31, an obscure website, The American Report, had published a story saying that a supercomputer called the Hammer, running software called Scorecard, would be used to steal votes from Mr. Trump.

The story’s authors had spent years spreading false claims that the Obama administration had used the Hammer to spy on the 2016 Trump campaign — in their telling, a central part of the deep-state conspiracy that spawned the Russia investigation and Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.

Their reports were sourced to Dennis Montgomery, a onetime national security contractor described by his former lawyer as a “con man,” and were often backed by Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general whose military résumé could lend credibility to the fantastical tales.

Mr. McInerney was just emerging from conservative media purgatory. Two years earlier, Fox had banned him after he falsely stated that Senator John McCain had shared military secrets while he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. But he was finding new exposure through social media and new outlets, like One America News and Mr. Bannon’s podcast and radio show, “War Room: Pandemic,” that had elastic ideas about journalistic standards of verification.

The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”

The Hammer and Scorecard story came together with disparate conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems that had been kicking around on the left and the right, most forcefully on the Twitter feed of a Republican congressman from Arizona, Paul Gosar. In a post on Nov. 6, he called on Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, to “investigate the accuracy and reliability of the Dominion ballot software and its impact on our general election.”

The tweet helped set off a social media wildfire, drawing intense interest from accounts that regularly circulate and decode QAnon-related content.

A day later, The Associated Press and the major television networks declared that Mr. Biden would be the 46th president of the United States.

For decades, leaders of both parties have treated the TV network and Associated Press election calls as definitive, congratulating the president-elect within hours. Despite record reliance on mail voting because of the pandemic, there was nothing especially unusual about the outcome in 2020: Mr. Biden’s margins in key Electoral College states were similar to Mr. Trump’s four years before.

This time, Republican leaders in Congress broke with the norm.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Nov. 8, the senior Republican senator overseeing elections, Roy Blunt of Missouri, declared that the old rules no longer applied. “The media can project, but the media doesn’t get to decide who the winner is,” he said. “There is a canvassing process. That needs to happen.”

The senator who mattered most, whose words would have the greatest bearing on Mr. Trump’s odds-against campaign, was the majority leader, Mr. McConnell of Kentucky.

Mr. McConnell was playing a long game.

The leader and the president had been in regular contact in the days since the election, according to several people with knowledge of their conversations. But the publicly bellicose president rarely confronted Mr. McConnell in one-on-one calls and avoided making any specific demands. He did not threaten retribution should Mr. McConnell follow tradition and congratulate Mr. Biden.

But Mr. McConnell knew that by doing so, he would endanger his own overriding political goal — winning the two runoffs in Georgia and maintaining Republican control of the Senate, which would allow him to keep his power as majority leader. If he provoked Mr. Trump’s anger, he would almost certainly lose the president’s full support in Georgia.

So as Mr. Trump would rant about voter fraud as if he were making an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Mr. McConnell would try to redirect the discussion to a specific court case or the runoffs, according to party officials familiar with the calls. “They were talking past one another,” one of them said.

The senator was also under a false impression that the president was only blustering, the officials said. Mr. McConnell had had multiple conversations with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and the senator’s top political adviser, Josh Holmes, had spoken with Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Both West Wing officials had conveyed the same message: They would pursue all potential avenues but recognized that they might come up short. Mr. Trump would eventually bow to reality and accept defeat.

The majority leader rendered his verdict on Nov. 9, during remarks at the first postelection Senate session. Even as he celebrated Republican victories in the Senate and the House — which in party talking points somehow escaped the pervasive fraud that cast Mr. Biden’s victory in doubt — Mr. McConnell said, “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.” He added, “A few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.”

That left the Senate with only a handful of Republicans willing to acknowledge the president’s loss: established Trump critics like Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

That night, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, then the Judiciary Committee chairman, went on Sean Hannity’s program to share an affidavit from a postal worker in Erie, Pa., who said he had overheard supervisors discussing illegally backdating postmarks on ballots that had arrived too late to be counted. He had forwarded it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“They can all go to hell as far as I’m concerned — I’ve had it with these people. Let’s fight back,” Mr. Graham said. “We lose elections because they cheat us.”

Earlier that day, however, the postal worker had recanted his statement in an interview with federal investigators — even though he continued to push his story online afterward. His affidavit, it turned out, had been written with the assistance of the conservative media group Project Veritas, known for its deceptive tactics and ambush videos.

The attorney general, Mr. Barr, arrived at the White House on the afternoon of Dec. 1 to find the president in a fury.

For weeks, Mr. Trump had been peppering him with tips of fraud that, upon investigation by federal authorities, proved baseless. That morning, after the president complained to Fox that the Justice Department was “missing in action,” Mr. Barr told The Associated Press that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome.”

But another allegation had just captured the presidential imagination: A truck driver on contract with the Postal Service was claiming that he had delivered many thousands of illegally filled-out ballots to Pennsylvania from a depot on Long Island.

Federal investigators had determined that that one, too, was bunk. Court records showed that the driver had a history of legal problems, had been involuntarily committed to mental institutions several times and had a sideline as a ghost hunter, The York Daily Record reported.

Now, with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”

Mr. Trump paused, thought about it and said, “Maybe.”

But before Mr. Barr left the building, the president tweeted out the truck driver’s account, which quickly gained 154,000 mentions on Twitter, according to an analysis by Zignal Labs. The driver would appear on Newsmax, Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” and “Hannity,” among the most-watched programs on cable.

Days later, that allegation was featured in a lawsuit with an extraordinary request: that the court decertify the Pennsylvania result and strip Mr. Biden of the state’s delegates — a call to potentially disenfranchise nearly seven million voters.

The legal group behind the suit, the Amistad Project, was part of the Thomas More Society, a conservative law firm historically focused on religious liberty issues. It was now working with Mr. Giuliani and had as a special counsel a Trump campaign legal strategist, Jenna Ellis. A judge dismissed the suit as “improper and untimely.”

It was exactly the sort of lawsuit Mr. Trump’s more experienced election lawyers viewed as counterproductive and, several people involved in the effort said in interviews, embarrassing.

In the run-up to the election, the legal team, led by Mr. Clark and Matt Morgan, had modeled its strategy on the disputed election of 2000, when only a few hundred votes separated Al Gore and George W. Bush in Florida. Mr. Bush had benefited from a combination of savvy lawyering and ugly political tactics that included the riotous “Brooks Brothers” protest over specious allegations of Democratic fraud.

Twenty years later, the margins were far too large to be made up by recounts or small-bore court maneuvers.

Even after a recount in the tightest state, Georgia, found some 2,000 lost Trump votes, Mr. Biden led by nearly 12,000. And Mr. Giuliani’s arguments that the Trump campaign could prove Dominion voting machines illegally made the difference were summarily dismissed by Mr. Trump’s other lawyers, who were carefully tracking a recount of the machines’ paper receipts.

“There was a literal physical hand count of every single one of those five million pieces of paper, and they matched almost identically, and we knew that within a week,” said Stefan Passantino, a Trump lawyer who helped oversee the initial strategy in the state. “We are not going to participate in bringing allegations about the sanctity of this machine.” (Dominion has sued Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for defamation.)

But the Trump election lawyers were looking to another lesson from 2000. In a Supreme Court opinion in Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had argued that Florida court orders dictating recount procedures violated the constitutional clause that gives state legislatures the power to set the terms for selecting electors.

Many of the early Trump campaign suits had adopted that approach. Contradicting the president, the campaign lawyers — and even Mr. Giuliani — had in several cases acknowledged in court that they were not alleging fraud. Rather, they argued that in bending rules to make mail voting easier during the pandemic — extending deadlines, striking requirements for witness signatures — secretaries of state or state courts or election boards had improperly usurped their legislatures’ role.

Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.

As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.

If the theory was short on legal or factual merit, it was rich in the sort of sensational claims — the swirl of forged ballots and “deep state” manipulation of voting machines — that would allow Mr. Trump to revive his fight, give his millions of voters hope that he could still prevail and perhaps even foment enough chaos to somehow bring about an undemocratic reversal in his favor.

Before Thanksgiving, a team of lawyers with close ties to the Trump campaign began planning a sweeping new lawsuit to carry that argument.

One of them, Kris Kobach, a former Kansas secretary of state, had been a central player in some of the harshest recent moves to restrict voting, leading to frequent pushbacks in court. He had also helped lead Mr. Trump’s “election integrity” commission, created after the president claimed he had lost the 2016 popular vote because of fraud; it had ended with litigation, internal strife and no evidence of fraud.

Another member of the team, Mark Martin, a former North Carolina chief justice, was now a law school dean and informal Trump adviser. A third, Lawrence Joseph, had previously intervened in federal court to support Mr. Trump’s efforts to block the release of his income-tax returns.

According to lawyers involved in the conversations, the group determined that the fast-approaching Electoral College vote did not leave time for a series of lawsuits to work their way through the courts. They would need to go directly to the Supreme Court, where, they believed, the conservative majority would be sympathetic to the president, who had appointed three of its members. The team quickly began working on a draft complaint.

Only one type of lawyer can take a case filed by one state against another directly to the Supreme Court: a state attorney general. The president’s original election lawyers doubted that any attorney general would be willing to do so, according to one member of the team, speaking on the condition of anonymity. But Mr. Kobach and his colleagues were confident. After all, nine attorneys general were on the Trump campaign’s lawyers group, whose recruitment logo featured the president as Uncle Sam, saying: “I want you to join Lawyers for Trump. Help prevent voter fraud on Election Day.”

Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?

In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).

“If one player in a game commits a penalty and no penalty is called by the referee, that is not fair,” he said.

The obvious choice to bring the suit was Ken Paxton of Texas, an ardent proponent of the president’s voter-fraud narrative who had filed a number of lawsuits and legal memos challenging the pandemic-related expansion of mail-in voting. But he was compromised by a criminal investigation into whether he had inappropriately used his office to help a wealthy friend and donor. (He has denied wrongdoing.)

The Trump allies made a particularly intense appeal to Louisiana’s attorney general, Jeffrey M. Landry, a member of Lawyers for Trump and, at the time, the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association.

He declined. Mr. Paxton would be the one. He decided to carry the case forward even after lawyers in his own office argued against it, including his own solicitor general, Kyle D. Hawkins, who refused to let his name be added to any complaint.

On Dec. 7, Mr. Paxton signed an unusual contract to hire Mr. Joseph as a special outside counsel, at no cost to the State of Texas. Mr. Joseph referred questions about his role to the Texas attorney general; Mr. Paxton declined to comment.

The same day the contract was signed, Mr. Paxton filed his complaint with the Supreme Court. Mr. Joseph was listed as a special counsel, but the brief did not disclose that it had been written by outside parties.

The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.

Condemnation, some of it from conservative legal experts, rained down. The suit made “a mockery of federalism” and “would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles,” read a brief from a group of Republican office holders and former administration officials. Putting a finer point on it, Richard L. Hasen, an election-law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, called it “a heaping pile of a lawsuit.”

One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”

Even the Republican attorney general of Georgia, Chris Carr, said it was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”

That prompted a call from the president, who warned Mr. Carr not to interfere, an aide to the attorney general confirmed. The pressure campaign was on.

The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.

On Fox, Sean Hannity, who spoke regularly with the president, declared that “tonight, every decent Republican attorney general with a brain needs to get busy working on their amicus briefs to support this Texas suit.”

In fact, the Missouri solicitor general, D. John Sauer, was already circulating an email, giving Republican attorneys general less than 24 hours to decide whether to join a multistate brief.

And once again, red flags were going up among the attorneys generals’ staff, emails obtained by The Times show.

“The decision whether we join this amicus is more political than it is legal,” James E. Nicolai, North Dakota’s deputy solicitor general, wrote to his boss.

“I still think it is most likely that the Court will deny this in one sentence,” Mr. Nicolai wrote in a follow-up email, which was also sent to the attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem.

But the brief was gaining momentum, closing in on support from two-thirds of the Republican attorneys general, 18 in all. At the last minute, Mr. Stenehjem decided to become one of them, leading Mr. Nicolai to send another email.

“Wonder what made Wayne decide to sign on?” he wrote.

At Mr. Trump’s urging, the Republican Attorneys General Association made one final play, asking Mr. Barr to back the suit. He refused.

On Dec. 11, the court declined to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no right to challenge other states’ votes.

If the highest court in the land couldn’t do it, there had to be some other way.

And so they came the next day, by the thousands, to a long-planned rally in Washington, filling Freedom Plaza with red MAGA caps and Trump and QAnon flags, vowing to carry on. The president’s legal campaign to subvert the election might have been unraveling, but their most trusted sources of information were glossing over the cascading losses, portraying as irrefutable the evidence of rampant fraud.

“The justice system has a purpose in our country, but the courts do not decide who the next president of the United States of America will be,” the freshly pardoned former national security adviser, Mr. Flynn, told the crowd. “We the people decide.”

There was encouragement from figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the conspiracy theorist just elected to Congress from Georgia, and Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, beamed in on a giant video screen.

“Hey there, all of you happy warrior freedom fighters,” Ms. Blackburn said. “We’re glad you’re there standing up for the Constitution, for liberty, for justice.”

The rally had been planned by Women for America First, which was quietly becoming the closest thing Mr. Trump had to a political organizing force, gathering his aggrieved supporters behind the lie of a stolen election.

The group’s founder, Amy Kremer, had been one of the original Tea Party organizers, building the movement through cross-country bus tours. She had been among the earliest Trump supporters, forming a group called Women Vote Trump along with Ann Stone, ex-wife of the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone.

With donors including the Trump-affiliated America First Policies, Women for America First had rallied support for the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and defended Mr. Trump during his first impeachment.

The group’s executive director was Ms. Kremer’s daughter, Kylie Jane Kremer, who recently worked on Sean Hannity’s radio show. Two organizers helping the effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Mr. Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Mr. Trump’s border wall. (In August, federal prosecutors accused Mr. Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Mr. Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president.)

A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Mr. Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group. He had an online newsletter, Tyrant’s Curse, whose credo was, “A well-armed and self-reliant populace, who take personal responsibility and put their faith in God, can never be oppressed and will never be ruled.” One post featured a photo from the Dec. 12 rally — Mr. Stockton posing with several Three Percenter “brothers” in military-grade body armor.

Ms. Lawrence had personal ties to Mr. Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Mr. Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Mr. Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions,” she said in an interview. She also knew Mr. Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank, she said.

Within hours of the last poll closings on election night, Women for America First had started organizing, forming one of the first major “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups — shut down within 22 hours for posts that the platform said could lead to violence — and holding the first major rally on the Mall, on Nov. 14. The rally permit predicted 10,000 protesters; the crowd was far larger.

“The letdown of the election was kind of put aside,” Mr. Stockton said in an interview. “It was like, ‘We have a new fight to engage in.’”

For the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton, the instrument of that fight would be a reprise of the Tea Party Express, a bus tour to enlist state and federal lawmakers in Mr. Trump’s effort to keep states from certifying results ahead of the Electoral College vote. Equally important, it would be a megaphone to rally the dejected faithful.

The group tapped new veins of financing, with sponsorships from Mr. Bannon’s “War Room,” which paid $5,000, and Mr. Lindell, who said he believed he gave $50,000. It helped the group lease the bus and paint it MAGA red, with a huge photo of Mr. Trump and the logos of MyPillow, “War Room” and other sponsors emblazoned on the sides.

As they made their way across the country, they reached out to local elected officials and branches of the Republican National Committee. But with the social media platforms starting to block groups promoting the stolen-election theory, Ms. Lawrence explained, the bus tour would also give “people the outlet that if they’d been de-platformed, they were able to come out and be around like-minded people.”

Early on, the “Trump March” website had included promotion for banned extremists and conspiracy theorists like the white supremacist Mr. Taylor, various QAnon “decoders” and the “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys, according to a version saved by the Internet Archive. (The promotion was taken down ahead of the bus tour).

There were early warning signs of the explosion to come.

In Tennessee, a church that was to host a rally canceled after threats of violence. An evangelical pastor, Greg Locke, who had gained national attention for calling Covid-19 a “fake pandemic,” offered them his church and joined the tour as a speaker.

Following a rally in Des Moines, an armed and armored protester shot a Black teenager in the leg after she and some friends drove by taunting the crowd. An Army veteran named Michael McKinney who followed the Proud Boys on his Facebook page, The Des Moines Register reported, was later charged with attempted murder. (He has pleaded not guilty; his lawyer says he was acting in self-defense as the teenagers menaced the crowd with their car.)

The tour was otherwise doing what it was intended to do. Large crowds often turned out, drawn in part by Mr. Lindell. He had emerged as a star of the Trump media universe in part by standing firm as a major sponsor of Tucker Carlson on Fox when other advertisers deserted over, among other things, Mr. Carlson’s remarks that white supremacy was “a hoax.”

In an interview, Mr. Lindell said he had sponsored the bus tour so that he could share the findings of investigations he was financing — he was spending $1 million in all — to produce evidence of voter fraud, including for Ms. Powell’s Dominion lawsuits.

“Donald Trump got so many votes that they didn’t expect, it broke the algorithms in the machines,” he told the crowd in Des Moines. “What they had to do was backfill the votes.” Ms. Powell, he said, had “the proof, 100 percent the proof.”

Mr. Trump was watching and, seeing the tour’s success, even helicoptered above the Dec. 12 rally on Marine One.

But after the 12th, the group found itself in limbo — leading a restive movement without a clear destination.

The day after the Electoral College certified the votes as expected, Mitch McConnell moved to bring the curtain down. He called the president’s chief of staff, Mr. Meadows, to say that he would be acknowledging Mr. Biden as president-elect that afternoon on the Senate floor.

Mr. McConnell had been holding off in part because of the earlier assurances from Mr. Meadows and Mr. Kushner, and he had been inclined to believe them when Mr. Trump finally freed the General Services Administration to begin the transition. Yet even now, the president was refusing to concede. “This fake election can no longer stand,” he wrote on Twitter. “Get moving Republicans.”

Perhaps most important in Mr. McConnell’s evolving calculus, internal polls were showing that the Republicans’ strongest argument in the Georgia runoffs was that a Republican-led Senate would be a necessary check on a new — and inevitable — Democratic administration.

Mr. McConnell did not call the president until after his speech congratulating Mr. Biden. It was a perfunctory conversation, with the president expressing his displeasure. The men have not spoken since.

At the White House, Mr. Trump was still searching for ways to nullify the results, soliciting advice from allies like Mr. Flynn, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.

On Dec. 18, he met with Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell in a four-hour session that started in the Oval Office and ended in the White House residence, where Swedish meatballs were served, Mr. Byrne later recalled.

With a team of “cybersleuths,” Mr. Byrne was working with Mr. Flynn and Ms. Powell to develop and promote theories about Dominion and foreign interference. Earlier, Mr. Flynn had publicly raised the notion that the president should use martial law to force a revote in swing states.

The meeting descended into shouting as a group that included Mr. Cipollone, who had absorbed most of Mr. Trump’s frustrations for weeks as he tried to stop a number of legally questionable ideas, tried to dissuade the president from entertaining a range of options the visitors were proposing. “It was really damned close to fistfights,” Mr. Byrne recalled on the “Operation Freedom” YouTube show.

By then, even Mr. Bannon had turned on the Dominion theory he’d helped push — it was time to present “evidence” or move on, he said on his show a few days later. And ultimately Mr. Trump agreed, at least for the moment, to focus on a different goal: blocking congressional certification of the results on Jan. 6.

Mr. Meadows had connected the president to Mr. Martin, the former North Carolina justice, who had a radical interpretation of the Constitution: Vice President Mike Pence, he argued, had the power to stop the certification and throw out any results he deemed fraudulent.

In fact, under the Constitution and the law, the vice president’s role is strictly ministerial: He “shall” open envelopes from each state, read the vote count and ask if there are objections. Nothing more.

But that process, at the very least, gave Mr. Trump and his congressional allies an opening to stir up trouble — and a cause to energize the base. If one senator and one House member object to a state’s results, the two chambers must convene separately to debate, then reconvene to vote. Rejection of the results requires majority votes in both chambers.

Now, Women for America First had a purpose, too. Objectors were already lining up in the House. So the group planned a new bus tour, this one to travel from state to state helping to sway persuadable senators — 11 by their count.

The cavalry “is coming, Mr. President,” Kylie Kremer tweeted to Mr. Trump on Dec. 19.

This tour took on an edgier tone. Before heading out, the Kremers, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Stockton visited the Tactical Response marksman training center in Nashville. Its owner, James Yeager, had had his gun permit suspended in 2013 after posting a video in which he threatened to “start killing people” if the Obama administration banned assault rifles.

At the training center, Kylie Kremer and Ms. Lawrence taped an episode of Mr. Yeager’s “Tactical Response” YouTube show, promoting their tour. They also documented the afternoon with a campy Facebook video of themselves cradling assault weapons and flanking Mr. Stockton, who narrated.

“See, in America, we love our Second Amendment like we love our women: strong. Isn’t that right, girls?”

Ms. Lawrence whooped. “That’s right,” she replied. “Second Amendment, baby.”

By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.

The emcee of the Louisiana stop, the Tea Party activist James Lyle, announced that the next day’s event in Missouri was now going to be a thank-you — Senator Josh Hawley had just become the first senator to announce that he would object. “You’ve got to thank them when they do the right thing,” Mr. Lyle said.

But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.

“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”

The next day, Mr. Kennedy announced that he would sign on, too.

On Saturday, Jan. 2, Kylie Kremer posted a promotional video for Wednesday’s rally on Twitter, along with a message: “BE A PART OF HISTORY.”

The president shared her post and wrote: “I’ll be there! Historic day.”

Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.

There were new donors, including the Publix supermarket heiress Julie Jenkins Fancelli. She gave $300,000 in an arrangement coordinated through the internet conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who pledged $50,000 as well, The Wall Street Journal reported.

New planners also joined the team, among them Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump fund-raiser and partner of Donald Trump Jr. The former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson was the liaison to the White House, a former administration official said. The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations.

For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office.

That Saturday, Mr. Trump had called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and pressed him, unsuccessfully, to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to win the state.

Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.

That left the congressional certification as the main event.

Mr. McConnell had been working for weeks to keep his members in line. In a mid-December conference call, he had urged them to hold off and protect the two Republican runoff candidates in Georgia from having to take a difficult stand.

When Mr. Hawley stepped forward, according to Republican senators, Mr. McConnell hoped at least to keep him isolated.

But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.

Mr. McConnell knew that Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, among the most conservative Republicans, had been planning to come out publicly against the gambit. Now the majority leader called Mr. Cotton, according to a Republican familiar with the conversation, and urged him to do so as soon as possible. Mr. Cotton quickly complied.

It was coming down to a contest of wills within the Republican Party, and tens of thousands of Trump supporters were converging on Washington to send a message to those who might defy the president.

The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.

Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.

The president’s involvement also meant that some speakers from the original Women for America First lineup would be dropped from the main event. So, Mr. Stockton said, he arranged to have them speak the night before at a warm-up rally at Freedom Plaza.

That event had been planned by a sister group, the 80 Percent Coalition, founded by Cindy Chafian, a former organizer with Women for America First.

“What we’re doing is unprecedented,” Ms. Chafian said as she kicked off the rally. “We are standing at the precipice of history, and we are ready to take our country back.” Addressing Mr. Trump, she said: “We heard your call. We are here for you.”

One scheduled speaker would not be in Washington that night: the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio. A judge had banished him from the city after his arrest on charges of destruction of property and illegal weapons possession.

Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”

“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”

As the rally wound down in a cold drizzle, groups of young men wearing Kevlar vests and helmets began appearing toward the back of the plaza. Some carried bats and clubs, others knives. Some were Proud Boys, but more sported the insignia of the Three Percenters.

One of the men, with a line of stitches running through his ear, told a reporter: “We’re not backing down any more. This is our country.” Another, holding a bat, cut the conversation short. “We know what to do with people like you,” he said.

Mr. Trump took the stage at the Ellipse the next day shortly before 1 p.m., calling on the tens of thousands before him to carry his message to Republicans in the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness.”

As he spoke, some protesters, with Proud Boys helping take the lead, were already breaching the outer security perimeter around the Capitol. Inside, when Mr. Gosar stood to raise the first objection, to results in his home state of Arizona, several Republican lawmakers gave him a standing ovation.

Less than an hour later, the lawmakers would flee to a secure location as the mob streamed into the building.

By that point, with “all hell breaking loose,” as Mr. Stockton put it, he and Ms. Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and, “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”

Women for America First put out a statement. “We are saddened and disappointed at the violence that erupted on Capitol Hill, instigated by a handful of bad actors, that transpired after the rally,” it read. (The Kremers did not provide comment for this article.)

At least one of those actors had been part of their tour — Mr. Griffin, the Cowboys for Trump founder, who was later arrested and charged with knowingly entering a restricted building. The federal charging documents cited a Facebook post in which he vowed to return and leave “blood running out of that building.” Others arrested included members of the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters.

On Jan. 15, Mr. Trump acquiesced to an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Lindell, who arrived with two sets of documents. One, provided by a lawyer he would not name, included a series of steps Mr. Trump could take, including “martial law if necessary.” The other, Mr. Lindell claimed in an interview the next day, was computer code indicating that China and other state actors had altered the election results — vetted by his own investigators after he found it online.

“I said: ‘Mr. President, I have great news. You won with 79 million votes, and Biden had 68 million,’” he recalled. (Mr. Biden had more than 80 million votes, to Mr. Trump’s 74 million; Homeland Security officials have rejected the allegations of foreign meddling.)

A couple of minutes later, Mr. Trump directed his national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, to escort Mr. Lindell upstairs, to Mr. Cipollone’s office. He told the MyPillow founder to come back afterward.

After a perfunctory discussion, aides directed Mr. Lindell to the exit. “I say it loud, ‘I’m not leaving,’” he recalled telling them. He eventually left when an aide made it clear there would be no Oval Office follow-up. The president was done.

The violence at the Capitol, and Congress’s eventual certification of Mr. Biden’s victory that day, may have spelled the end of Mr. Trump’s postelection campaign. The same cannot be said about the political staying power, the grip on the Republican faithful, of the lie he set in motion.

In the Senate, Mr. McConnell, who lost his majority leader’s gavel with dual defeats in Georgia, initially indicated that he might vote against Mr. Trump in an impeachment trial. But amid rising fury in the Republican ranks, he ultimately voted with most of his colleagues in an unsuccessful attempt to cancel the trial altogether. With only five defectors, though, any thought of a conviction seemed dead on arrival.

In the House, moves were afoot to recruit primary challengers to the 10 Republicans who had voted for impeachment.

It was all as Ms. Lawrence had predicted. “The MAGA movement is more than just Donald Trump,” she said in an interview. “This is not going to go away when he leaves office.”

Mr. Lindell now says he has spent $2 million and counting on his continuing investigations of voting machines and foreign interference.

And Mr. Stockton recently announced a new plan on his Facebook page: a “MAGA Sellout Tour.”

“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”

Mark Walker contributed reporting.

Photographs in illustration by: Ben Margot/Associated Press (Sidney Powell); Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times (rally); Doug Mills/The New York Times (Donald Trump); Samuel Corum/Getty Images (Trump supporters at the Capitol); Erin Schaff/The New York Times (Mike Pence); Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times (ballots); David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire (Ted Cruz); Pool photo by John Bazemore (Georgia Electoral College).

An earlier version of this article misstated the state where D. John Sauer is solicitor general. It is Missouri, not Mississippi.

An earlier version of this article misidentified a man charged in the shooting of a Black teenager in Des Moines. His name is Michael McKinney, not William McKinney.

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