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Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay

but there is no chance that the review will be completed before Election Day, several law enforcement officials said.

disgraced former congressman Anthony D. Weiner — opened Mr. Comey up to fierce criticism not only from Democrats but also from current and former officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, including Republicans.

The letter is also the latest example of an at-times strained relationship between the Justice Department and Mr. Comey, who technically answers to the attorney general but who — on issues of race, encryption, policing and, most notably, the Clinton investigation — has branded himself as someone who operates outside Washington’s typical chain of command.

about the new emails far outweighed concerns about the department guidelines, one senior law enforcement official said.

Under Justice Department policy, restated each election cycle, politics should play no role in any investigative decisions.

Mr. Weiner had sent illicit text messages to a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, top prosecutors in Charlotte and Manhattan jockeyed for the case

F.B.I.’s New York field office understood that the Weiner investigation could possibly turn up additional emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server, according to a senior federal law enforcement official. Mr. Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, is a top adviser to Mrs. Clinton.

During the course of searching the seized devices, the F.B.I. discovered thousands of emails, according to senior law enforcement officials, some of them sent between Ms. Abedin and other Clinton aides.

The government has not yet concluded that the new emails contain classified information, but investigators felt obligated to look.

which said emails had surfaced in a case unrelated to the Clinton case. Mr. Comey said that the F.B.I. would review the emails to determine if they improperly contained classified information, adding that the emails “appear to be pertinent.”

They charged that just 11 days before an election, he was unnecessarily inserting himself into politics.

“I have known and worked with Ms. Gupta for several years, and have been extraordinarily impressed by her seriousness, her honesty and her capacity to engage in fruitful and productive dialogue regarding policing and criminal justice,” David J. Mahoney, the president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, said in a letter to the Judiciary Committee.

he Judicial Crisis Network campaign, standing in opposition to the support of Ms. Gupta by mainstream law enforcement groups, shows a split among some conservatives over their willingness to work with the Biden administration on issues like criminal justice reform that have had bipartisan support. Former President Donald J. Trump signed a broad overhaul of the criminal justice system in 2018 that expanded job training and early-release programs and modified sentencing laws.

While the Judicial Crisis Network is not known for taking a strong stance on policing issues, it is little surprise that Ms. Severino would oppose Ms. Gupta’s nomination. The group has pushed for the Supreme Court to rule against measures that would expand gay rights, and Ms. Gupta was the head of the Civil Rights Division in the final years of the Obama administration while the department broadly supported extending those protections. The Trump administration pared back those protections, but that could be reassessed under the Biden administration.

House Democrats are examining in part whether his pressure on Ukraine to open investigations into theories about the 2016 election constituted an abuse of power.Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa LererA spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.Sign Up* Captcha is incomplete. Please try again.Thank you for subscribingYou can also view our other newsletters or visit your account to opt out or manage email preferences.An error has occurred. Please try again later.You are already subscribed to this email.View all New York Times newsletters.The move also creates an unusual situation in which the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into itself.

It was not clear what potential crime Mr. Durham is investigating, nor when the criminal investigation was prompted.

Mr. Trump is certain to see the criminal investigation as a vindication of the years he and his allies have spent trying to discredit the Russia investigation.

Federal investigators need only a “reasonable indication” that a crime has been committed to open an investigation, a much lower standard than the probable cause required to obtain search warrants.

However, “there must be an objective, factual basis for initiating the investigation; a mere hunch is insufficient,” according to Justice Department guidelines.

Mr. Barr expressed skepticism of the Russia investigation even before joining the Trump administration. Weeks after being sworn in this year, he said he intended to scrutinize how it started and used the term “spying” to describe investigators’ surveillance of Trump campaign advisers.

F.B.I. agents discovered the offer shortly after stolen Democratic emails were released, and the events, along with ties between other Trump advisers and Russia, set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia’s interference.

The C.I.A. did contribute heavily to the intelligence community’s assessment in early 2017 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and tried to tip it in Mr. Trump’s favor, and law enforcement officials later used those findings to bolster their application for a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page.

Mr. Mueller said that he had “insufficient evidence” to determine whether Mr. Trump or his aides engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians but that the campaign welcomed the sabotage and expected to benefit from it.

Law enforcement officials suspected Mr. Page was the target of recruitment by the Russian government, which he has denied.Mr. Durham has also asked whether C.I.A. officials might have somehow tricked the F.B.I. into opening the Russia investigation. Mr. Durham has indicated he wants to interview former officials who ran the C.I.A. in 2016 but has yet to question either Mr. Brennan or James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly attacked them as part of a vast conspiracy by the so-called deep state to stop him from winning the presidency.

Mr. Durham has delved before into the secret world of intelligence gathering during the Bush and Obama administrations. He was asked in 2008 to investigate why the C.I.A. destroyed tapes depicting detainees being tortured. The next year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Mr. Durham to spearhead an investigation into the C.IA. abuses.

After nearly four years, Mr. Durham’s investigation ended with no charges against C.I.A. officers, including two directly involved in the deaths of two detainees, angering human rights activists.

The remarks were met with approval by committee members, who agreed that the department had been improperly wielded for political gain — even as Democrats and Republicans disagreed about whether such politicization occurred under the Trump or the Obama administration.

Ms. Monaco said the Justice Department’s efforts to combat domestic extremism would be among her top priorities, especially in light of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. She said the department needed to understand how “we could have such an attack that I personally never thought I would see in my lifetime.”

She pledged to deploy law enforcement resources to learn what motivated the insurrectionists and to prevent a repeat, calling the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation into the attack “nothing less than the defense of our democracy.”

And civil libertarians have raised questions about how the F.BI. will investigate extremists for activities protected by the First Amendment.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for Mr. Trump who has been at the forefront of promoting his election conspiracy theories, said that his team had gathered evidence of illegal voting in six states, backed up by sworn witness statements, and that the Justice Department had failed to investigate what the team had uncovered. 

There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the D.H.S. and D.O.J. have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,” Mr. Barr said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security and his own department.

Mr. Barr had been mostly silent since the election, but some Republicans privately pushed him to publicly rebut Mr. Trump, according to a person told of those conversations. His comments may have been prompted by Mr. Trump’s increasingly specious election claims; the president suggested on Sunday that the Justice Department and the F.B.I. may have played a role in an election fraud.

Mr. Barr had given prosecutors the authority to examine allegations by Mr. Trump’s allies of voter ineligibility in Nevada and improperly dated mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. The results of those investigations have not been publicly disclosed, but Mr. Barr’s remarks suggested that any impropriety was too insignificant to change the election results.

“Most claims of fraud are very particularized to a particular set of circumstances or actors or conduct. They are not systemic allegations, and those have been run down; they are being run down,” he said. “Some have been broad and potentially cover a few thousand votes. They have been followed up on.”

But none, at least so far, have won Mr. Trump anything more significant than the ability to move his poll observers from 10 feet to six feet away from workers counting votes in Pennsylvania.

The campaign and its allies have now lost nearly 40 cases across the country as judge after judge — including some appointed by Mr. Trump — discredited the efforts as lacking both legal merit and convincing proof.

In the months before the November election, Mr. Barr had been one of the loudest voices sounding alarms about widespread fraud, claiming repeatedly in speeches and interviews that the potential for it was high and that it posed a grave danger to the election. Mr. Barr’s claims were often false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.

In the end, the new emails that the F.B.I. reviewed

proved irrelevant.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have interpreted that policy broadly to prohibit taking any steps that might even hint at an impression of partisanship.

Mr. Horowitz has the authority to recommend a criminal investigation if he finds evidence of illegality

there has been no suggestion that Mr. Comey’s actions were unlawful

The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have a longstanding policy against discussing criminal investigations

Michael Horowitz, said he would also be examining other issues, including whether the deputy director of the F.B.I., whose wife ran as a Democrat for the Virginia State Senate, should have recused himself from any involvement in the Clinton email investigation

It is extraordinarily rare for the inspector general to publicly disclose its investigations, particularly in such detail

Mr. Comey’s actions attracted criticism from members of both parties.

Donald J. Trump, on the other hand, accused him of being part of a rigged system because the F.B.I. cleared Mrs. Clinton of criminal liability

Since the election, Mr. Trump has not indicated whether he intends to keep Mr. Comey in his job

“This is highly encouraging and to be expected, given Director Comey’s drastic deviation from Justice Department protocol. A probe of this sort, however long it takes to conduct, is utterly necessary in order to take the first step to restore the F.B.I.’s reputation as a nonpartisan institution.”

also investigating whether the Justice Department’s top congressional liaison, Peter Kadzik, had improperly provided information to the Clinton campaign.

WikiLeaks showed that Mr. Kadzik alerted the campaign about an upcoming congressional hearing that would most likely raise questions about Mrs. Clinton.

The bureau., which usually keeps its distance from presidential campaigns, found itself much more centrally involved this time because of its yearlong investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email server.

Mr. Comey announced that the F.B.I. would not seek criminal charges against Mrs. Clinton. But he said she had been “extremely careless” in her handling of sensitive national security information during her time as secretary of state, from 2009 to 2013.

The suit reflects the pushback against the power of the nation’s largest corporations, and especially technology giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple. Conservatives like President Trump and liberals like Senator Elizabeth Warren have been highly critical of the concentration of power in a handful of tech behemoths.

set off a cascade of other antitrust lawsuits

A victory for the government could remake one of America’s most recognizable companies and the internet economy that it has helped define since it was founded by two Stanford University graduate students in 1998.

The company says it has strong competition in the search market, with more people finding information on sites like Amazon. It says its services have been a boon for small businesses.

The lawsuit comes two weeks after Democratic lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee released a sprawling report on the tech giants that accused Google of controlling a monopoly over online search and the ads that come up when users enter a query.

It controls 90 percent of the market for online searches, according to one estimate.

Google last faced serious scrutiny from an American antitrust regulator nearly a decade ago, when the Federal Trade Commission investigated whether it had abused its power over the search market. The agency’s staff recommended bringing charges against the company, according to a memo reported on by The Wall Street Journal. But the agency’s five commissioners voted in 2013 not to bring a case.

European Union has brought three antitrust cases against Google in recent years, focused on its search engine, advertising business and Android mobile operating system. Regulators in Britain and Australia are examining the digital advertising market, in inquiries that could ultimately implicate the company.

But Mr. McConnell, who said last year that he would support Judge Garland to serve as attorney general, was among the Republicans who voted for his confirmation and a day earlier to end debate over his nomination, paving the way for the full Senate to vote.

He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.

The Capitol riot investigation has grown closer to Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s allies, and the F.B.I. has found evidence of communications between right-wing extremists and White House associates, underscoring how closely Mr. Trump had aligned himself with such groups during his presidency.

“I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

But Mr. McConnell refused to consider his nomination, and Mr. Trump selected Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat in 2017. Judge Garland stayed on at the appeals court.

Nearly every faith group was on board, as were the American Civil Liberties Union and conservative Christians like me. We all embraced one view. The free exercise of religion was for every person of every faith.

The most controversial part of Barr’s presentation was his strong rebuke of the modern progressive movement and its increasingly shrill demand that all voices that dissent from its articles of belief be silenced, shamed and shunned.

His final words on this historic occasion were a ringing endorsement of Barr’s central thesis: “But let us never believe that the freedom of religion imposes on any of us some responsibility to run from our convictions. Let us instead respect one another’s faiths, fight to the death to preserve the right of every American to practice whatever convictions he or she has.”

Those who advocate silencing their opponents seem hell-bent on engulfing us in strife and increasingly heavy coercion to achieve their policy objectives. They call themselves the forces of tolerance, but they bear torches that have the stench of Smithfield rising from their flames.

Among them are variations on a proposal that exploded in Indiana last year, when controversy over a so-called religious freedom law became a flashpoint in the ongoing debate over religious belief and legal equality. The Hoosier State’s measure led to an estimated $60 million in lost revenue, and after weeks of economic and political pressure, Indiana Governor Mike Pence approved revisions to the law clarifying that businesses couldn’t use it to turn away LGBT patrons.

To many supporters, these bills are necessary to protect deeply held religious beliefs and are worth the controversy and lost revenue. To critics, however, the measures seemed aimed at allowing people to treat LGBT citizens differently, based on moral opposition to homosexuality and transgenderism, and serve as a reminder that the lessons of the Indiana fight were fleeting.

The fight in South Dakota echoes earlier clashes over gender identity and bathroom use of transgender people. The sponsor of the South Dakota bathroom measure, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, has argued in committee testimony that it is necessary to protect the “bodily privacy rights” of “biologic boys and girls” and that transgender students should be offered alternate accommodations if they do not wish to use the facilities that correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

The fight has played out at the state level largely because there is no federal law that bans discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The Equality Act, a federal bill that would create such protections, is unlikely to go anywhere in a Republican-controlled Congress.

Rebecca Dodds, the mother of a transgender son who recently graduated from high school in the state’s famed Black Hills, said compelling students to use a separate facility could force them to out themselves to their peers, which could lead to harassment or violence.

Though the bill does not specify what those accommodations would be, schools that have dealt with conflicts over bathroom use have often instructed transgender students to use staff or nurse facilities, or facilities in buildings separate from their peers. The Department of Justice has issued several rulings and opinions that say such treatment of transgender students amounts to sex discrimination under Title IX, though federal courts are still weighing the issue.

It extends protections for people with three moral beliefs that are laid out in the bill’s text: (1) Marriage is or should only be recognized as the union of one man and one woman (2) Sexual relations are properly reserved to marriage (3) The terms male or man and female or woman refer to distinct and immutable biological sexes that are determined by anatomy and genetics by the time of birth.

While critics worry about such bills being used to turn away LGBT people from housing, jobs or businesses, they also worry it could open the door to a broader insertion of personal morality in the public sphere. A pharmacist might, for instance, refuse to fill a birth control prescription for an unmarried woman or a child care agency might refuse to look after a boy or girl with gay parents, without risk of losing their state licenses.

Speaking in support of the bathroom bill, a representative from South Dakota Citizens for Liberty said the measure offers a good compromise: “It allows for the sensitive accommodation of students who are experiencing personal trials,” Florence Thompson testified at a hearing of the Senate education committee on Feb. 11. “And does so without giving preferential treatment to a tiny segment of the student population at the expense of the privacy rights of the vast majority.”

Meanwhile, the majority of states lack LGBT non-discrimination laws, although a bill in Pennsylvania will likely add sexual orientation and gender identity to the state’s non-discrimination protections.

In Georgia, where lawmakers are considering at least four religious freedom bills, a group of businesses—including Coca-Cola, AT&T and Delta—has formed to promote “inclusive” policies, explicitly mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity as qualities that should be respected.

In South Dakota, dollars and cents may determine whether the bathroom bill passes too, with the ACLU arguing that the passage of such a law would put the state in direct conflict with federal policy—and therefore all but guarantee costly litigation for school districts that are forced to choose to follow one or the other. Failing to comply with guidance from the Department of Education, which has said that students’ gender identities must be respected, could run the risk of costing local districts hundreds of millions in federal funds.

Yet supporters like Deutsch say that the guidance coming from the federal government is the reason such bills are needed, so that South Dakota won’t be pressured into providing facility access for transgender students that is not yet explicitly laid out in federal law.

During that time, Mr. Garland led the investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, then the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Mr. Garland vowed during his confirmation hearing, weeks after the riot at the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, to use the full force of the department to combat domestic extremism.

Mr. Garland was ceremonially sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris at the Main Justice Building later in the day.

“Whose agents do you think you are?” Barr had asked rhetorically.

“I’m not familiar with that particular comment by the attorney general,” Wray told Demings, but added, “We, the FBI, work for the American people.”

From the start of the investigation, agents and prosecutors have focused on the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, if for no other reason than the two groups both sent large contingents of members to the Capitol. The organizations have a history of working and appearing together at right-wing street events dating to the early days of the Trump administration.

This week, The New York Times published an article saying that federal prosecutors were weighing sedition charges against some of the Oath Keepers arrested in connection with the Capitol attack — a rare crime that has not been successfully prosecuted in more than 20 years. The article came on the heels of an unusual interview that Michael R. Sherwin, the prosecutor who until recently was leading the riot inquiry, gave to “60 Minutes” in which he said that evidence obtained by the government investigators almost certainly meets the bar needed to file sedition charges.

In a separate filing issued on Wednesday, prosecutors revealed evidence that two of Mr. Meggs’s co-defendants in the Oath Keepers case, Jessica Watkins and Donovan Crowl — both Ohio residents — swapped messages on Facebook just days after the Capitol attack, discussing a “bugout plan” if then-President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. actually took office.