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She now faces up to 20 years in prison for each count, although legal experts say she is unlikely to receive the maximum sentence.

The jury deadlocked on three remaining charges, which a federal judge anticipates dismissing as part of a mistrial ruling that could come as early as next week. The split verdicts are “a mixed bag for the prosecution, but it’s a loss for Elizabeth Holmes because she is going away to prison for at least a few years,” said David Ring, a lawyer who has followed the case closely.

"Seafood is an industry that is wrought with not necessarily fraud but opacity or darkness within the supply chain," says the company's CEO and co-founder Sean Dennis."It is very difficult for buyers to know where they're getting their seafood from," he adds.

The code links to a web page that tells them when and where their fish was caught, how it was transported, and provides necessary certifications to verify it was sustainably sourced.

he kitchen's executive sous chef Marco Acquaroli says there is a lot of "fake product or fake naming" on menus around the world. "Here we are looking for freshness, quality, sustainability and traceability."

Because Seafood Souq tracks every point on the supply chain, Dennis says it can provide accurate data. "Traceability ... really addresses the inefficiencies within the supply chain," he says.

"We're very happy now," says Acquaroli. "Our guests (are) 100% sure where the fish was in the last 24 hours."

Chertoff told Biern, according to attendees, that if the Justice Department “can’t bring these cases because it may bring harm, then maybe these banks are too big.” In the end, though, Chertoff and the Justice Department blinked.

From 2004 to 2012, the Justice Department reached 242 deferred and nonprosecution agreements with corporations, compared with 26 in the previous 12 years, according to a study by David M. Uhlmann, a former prosecutor and law professor at the University of Michigan. And while companies paid large sums in the settlements — the days of $7 million cost-of-doing-business fees were over — several veteran Justice Department officials told me that these settlements emboldened defense lawyers.

Indeed, the department now effectively outsources many of its investigations of corporate executives to outside firms, which invariably produce reports that exculpate those at the top.

Over the years, the KPMG debacle and the corporate revolt would lead the Justice Department to roll back the Thompson memo to nearly the point of reversal. Today prosecutors are prohibited from even asking companies to waive their attorney-client privilege. They are also prohibited from pushing a company to cut off the legal fees for indicted executives or pressuring it to forgo joint defense agreements.

In the decade since, the courts dulled other prosecutorial tools.

Breuer may have come with the right pedigree, but he now faced troubles that hurt as much as the debacles of Arthur Andersen and KPMG, or the retreat from the Thompson memo: austerity. The department faced periodic hiring freezes. The F.B.I., which assigned dozens of agents to Enron, had shifted resources to terrorism. The Postal Service wound down an elite unit that had specialized in complex financial investigations. President Obama’s Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, which was designed to give hundreds of millions to prosecute financial criminals, was able to deliver only $65 million in 2010 and 2011. Prosecutors reporting to Breuer proposed setting up a mortgage-fraud initiative, a “Prosecutorial Strike Force,” as one July 2009 memo put it, but the Justice Department dithered. Finally it set up the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, an enormous coordinating committee with essentially no investigative operation.

That profit, however, was built on fraud, as the jury unanimously found.

"never hesitate to go to trial to expose fraudulent corporate conduct and to hold companies accountable, particularly when it has caused such harm to the public".

The US economy witnessed a big boom in its housing market in the lead up to the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

Since then, banks have been under pressure to resolve claims on potentially faulty mortgages. The US Department of Justice is investigating at least nine banks over their sales of mortgage-backed securities.

A famous example involves Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor whose father, then a wealthy real-estate developer, in 1998 pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University. Kushner—who, the investigative reporter Daniel Golden notes in his 2006 book The Price of Admission, was described by administrators at his high school as a mediocre student—was admitted to the school shortly after that

fraud and bribery’s lawful cousins—legacy preferences, athletic recruitment, and other admissions practices that lower the bar for progeny of the rich and famous—are ubiquitous.

At elite colleges, athletic recruitment is arguably another form of affirmative action for the wealthy. As my colleague Saahil Desai has written, Harvard’s admissions office, for instance, gives a major boost to athletes with middling academic qualifications. Athletes who score a four (out of six) on the academic scale Harvard uses to score applicants were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent, Desai reported; the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score, on the other hand, was 0.076 percent.

as 40 percent of Harvard’s white students are legacies or recruited athletes.

Today, legacy students account for an estimated 14 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population, and applicants who enjoy such alumni connections are accepted at five times the rate of their non-legacy peers (a nearly 34 percent acceptance rate, versus just under 6 percent for those lacking those coveted alumni connections)

the U.S. attorney perhaps unintentionally emphasized this irony when he said: “We’re not talking about donating a building … We’re talking about fraud.”

His comment highlighted the mundanity of admissions favors for upper-crust children—when executed legally

The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.

What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.

Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind

In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them.

The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.

When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system.

Trump is president in large part because of his ability to speak to this insecurity.

During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam

The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans.

Democrats often accuse Republicans of deliberately making it hard to vote in order to keep minorities, immigrants, young people and other groups from the polls. And Republicans often say they oppose voting reforms because of concerns of voter fraud – which is extremely rare – or concerns over having the federal government run elections.

But Trump’s remarks reveal how at least some Republicans have long understood voting barriers to be a necessary part of their political self-preservation.

“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Trump’s Monday comments showed he saw voter suppression as part of his re-election strategy, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a statement Monday. “Ensuring that Americans can vote during the Covid-19 crisis is fundamental to maintaining our democracy. It is shocking that Trump is essentially admitting that when the American people vote, Republican lose,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a DNC spokeswoman. “Trump knows that suppressing the vote is the only way he and Republicans win in November.”

The $400m that Congress allocated so far is just a small fraction of what the Brennan Center for Justice estimated election officials need to run elections in November if coronavirus still lingers. Officials need that money to pay for postage, personnel and equipment to process an influx of mail-in ballots.

“What cannot be lost in all the back and forth among politicians is that election administrators at the state and local level need substantial resources now to ensure that the elections in November go off smoothly and safely,” she said.

Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in one Ohio county sought to block the county election board's purchase of new Dominion equipment. A Dominion employee who was forced into hiding due to death threats has sued Giuliani, Powell and the Trump campaign. Another voting systems company, Smartmatic, has also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that's already starting to show some results although some journalists are uneasy that a news organization could be targeted.

Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning.

The number of defamation lawsuits and the large damage claims associated with them is novel, said journalism and public policy professor Bill Adair, head of the journalism program at Duke University.

He does worry that using defamation suits to combat untruths spread by media outlets could become a weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. "As a journalist, I'm a little bit nervous. The idea of using defamation lawsuits makes us a little bit concerned."But even with that discomfort, Adair has come to believe the lawsuits do have a role to play.

The defamation suits already do appear to be having an effect. An anchor for Newsmax walked out on a live interview with My Pillow CEO Lindell when he started making unsubstantiated claims about Dominion voting machines. Fox News, the Fox Business Network and Newsmax also aired segments that contradicted the disinformation their own hosts had amplified.

Last month, Fox Business also cancelled a show hosted by Trump ally Lou Dobbs, who had amplified the conspiracy theories and interviewed Powell and Giuliani about them.

One challenge for the plaintiffs is that defamation lawsuits are difficult to win. They need to show the person they're suing knew a statement was false when she made it, or had serious doubts about its truthfulness.

Media organizations have a First Amendment right to report the news, and that includes repeating what important people say, even if those statements are false, said George Freeman, the former in-house counsel for The New York Times, who now heads the Medial Law Resource Center.

Pro-Trump outlets are likely to claim that constitutional protection for their defense but Freeman believes they may have crossed a legal line in their presentation of election fraud claims and in some instances applauding obvious falsehoods.

Still Freeman said he thinks the strongest defamation cases aren't against the media companies, but against one of the people they gave a lot of airtime to, Rudy Giuliani.

In a January call announcing the lawsuit against Giuliani, Dominion's attorney, Tom Clare, said that the court can consider circumstantial evidence too. The complaint includes a detailed timeline that shows Giuliani continued to make his claims in the face of public assurances from election security experts, hand recounts, and numerous court rulings rejecting fraud cases.

While the current lawsuits could have an impact in this instance, experts on misinformation say there are several reasons why defamation cases aren't a central tool in the fight against falsehoods.

Many conspiracy theories don't target a specific person or company, so there's no one to file a lawsuit against. Legal action is also expensive. Coomer's legal team expects his bills will exceed $2 million. And when a victim does sue, a case can take years.

The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones of the conspiracy site, InfoWars. But after numerous challenges and delays, the cases are all still in the pre-trial phase. With Dominion and Smartmatic vowing not to settle before they get their day in court, this approach to fighting election misinformation may still be grinding forward even as the country enters the next presidential election. But for Adair and others, any effort to discourage future misinformation campaigns is worth pursuing.

As the justices have turned away challenges to state policies, they have expressed sympathy for local officials who face potentially intrusive federal regulation and protracted litigation. Led by Roberts, the court has also dismissed concerns about the consequences for minority voters as it has curtailed the reach of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

That case from Shelby County, Alabama, centered on a provision of the 1965 act that required states with a history of discrimination to seek approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court before changing electoral policy. By a 5-4 vote, the court invalidated the provision that still covered nine states, including Georgia.

The justices are now considering, in a recently argued Arizona case, the strength of a separate Voting Rights Act provision that prohibits any measure that denies someone the right to vote because of race. Unlike the "pre-clearance" provision previously in dispute, this section of the law comes into play after legislation has taken effect and puts the burden on those protesting the law to initiate a lawsuit.

Resolution of that Arizona case, known as Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, will have repercussions for controversy over laws like Georgia's, which were immediately challenged Thursday night by advocates who say they will disproportionately hurt Blacks.

Across the country, Republican legislators have proposed voting changes that would reverse the pandemic-era steps that made it easier for people to vote last November, especially by mail, and led to record numbers of votes cast.

Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act soon after the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Alabama. The law reflected the reality of the time that although the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial bias in voting, Blacks were still deterred from casting ballots through poll taxes, literacy tests and other rules.

Roberts has also made clear that he abhors remedies tied to race, saying in a 2006 voting-rights case: "It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race." Yet in the aftermath of the polarizing 2020 election, the country and the high court may be headed for a new chapter of voting-rights cases of a deeper partisan character, intensifying concerns about the future of the Voting Rights Act, as well as First Amendment guarantees of free speech and association.

Georgia's law, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday, emerges from Republican efforts nationwide, particularly in battleground states that experienced record turnout and Democratic victories last November. Among its myriad provisions, the Georgia law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots and empowers state officials to take over local election boards.

The three voting rights groups that sued - the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise Inc. -- grounded their complaint in the Voting Rights Act and in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

The challengers emphasized Georgia's history of racial discrimination. "(V)oting in Georgia is highly polarized, and the shameful legacy of racial discrimination is visible today in Georgia's housing, economic, and health disparities," they wrote, adding that the new law "interacts with these vestiges of discrimination" to deny equal opportunity in the political process. Lower federal court judges have struggled over the standard for assessing the denial of voting rights, and that dilemma is at the heart of the Supreme Court's new Arizona controversy.

In dispute are laws require ballots cast by people at the wrong precinct to be discarded and bar most third parties -- beyond a relative or mail carrier -- from collecting absentee ballots, for example, at a nursing home.

During oral arguments, Roberts and fellow conservatives focused on potential voter fraud and highlighted state authority for overseeing elections. Arizona officials argued that the measures would help prevent voter coercion and other irregularities, as the challengers contended that the new requirements would especially disenfranchise Native Americans and other minorities.

The high court's resolution of the Arizona controversy could have a dramatic impact on the raft of new legislation and ultimately how easy it is for minorities to register and vote. Resolution is expected by the end of June.

Republican grassroots activists mounted a weekend campaign to ensure the bill's passage

The efforts to restrict voting come after the traditionally red state backed Democrat Joe Biden for the presidency last year and sent two Democrats to the US Senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

The ACLU of Georgia executive director Andrea Young said her group would use "every tool" available to block the voting restrictions, including taking the fight to the state's corporate interests.

Lauren Groh-Wargo -- the CEO of Fair Fight Action, the voting rights group founded by former Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams -- promised to "fight in Georgia, in the courts and in Congress to make sure that Georgians' voting rights are not infringed."

"The Lt. Governor has been crystal clear that he does not support the roll-back of absentee voting, and instead believes that modernizing and updating the system is more appropriate," McFall said in a statement to CNN.

The state's Republican Gov. Brian Kemp has not declared whether he would sign the bill in its current form into law

More broadly, Kemp wants to "ensure Georgia's elections are secure, accessible, and fair -- and that it must be easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia," Blount added, echoing Kemp's standard line about voting.Leading up to Monday's vote, Georgia Republicans faced pressure from grassroots GOP activists to pass voting restrictions. Former President Donald Trump has made repeated and baseless claims that election fraud contributed to his defeat in Georgia and elsewhere. And Trump has lashed out against Kemp, who is up for reelection in 2022, and other Republicans in the state who refused to back his fraud claims.

there's no evidence of widespread fraud that would have overturned the election's outcome in Georgia or anywhere else, federal and state officials have said.

"The Republican base is united in this, and I dare Brian Kemp to veto a strong election security bill that comes to his desk," she said. "He's in enough trouble as it is. I know a lot of Republicans that have pledged not to support him under any circumstance."

The bill aims to dismantle a 2005 Republican-backed law allowing no-excuse absentee voting. Georgia is one of 34 states that do not currently require an excuse to vote by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Under the measure approved Monday, to qualify for an absentee ballot, voters must be 65 years old or older, absent from their precinct, observing a religious holiday, required to provide constant care for someone with a physical disability, or required to work "for the protection of the health, life, or safety of the public during the entire time the polls are open," or be an overseas or military voter.

"It's an example of how a 'race neutral policy' can end up having racially disparate impacts," said Kevin Morris, a Brennan Center researcher. "You don't have to use the word 'race' to carve up the electorate in racially disparate ways."

Texas is the last big battleground in the GOP's nationwide efforts to tighten voting laws, driven by former President Donald Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Georgia and Florida have also passed new voting restrictions, and President Biden on Saturday unfavorably compared Texas' bill to election changes in those states as "an assault on democracy."

The bill would newly empower partisan poll watchers by allowing them more access inside polling places and threatening criminal penalties against elections officials who restrict their movement. Republicans originally proposed giving poll watchers the right to take photos, but that language was removed from the final bill that lawmakers were set to vote on this weekend.

Another new provision could also make it easier to overturn an election in Texas, allowing for a judge to void an outcome if the number of fraudulent votes cast could change the result, regardless of whether it was proved that fraud affected the outcome.

GOP legislators are also moving to prohibit Sunday voting before 1 p.m., which critics called an attack on what is commonly known as "souls to the polls" — a get-out-the-vote campaign used by Black church congregations nationwide.

Major corporations, including Texas-based American Airlines and Dell, have warned that the measures could harm democracy and the economic climate. But Republicans shrugged off their objections, and in some cases, ripped business leaders for speaking out.

Texas already has some of the country's tightest voting restrictions and is regularly cited by nonpartisan groups as a state where it is especially hard to vote. It was one of the few states that did not make it easier to vote by mail during the pandemic.

"Even as the national media minimizes the importance of election integrity, the Texas Legislature has not bent to headlines or corporate virtue signaling," they said in a joint statement.

Since Trump's defeat, at least 14 states have enacted more restrictive voting laws, according to the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice. It has also counted nearly 400 bills filed this year nationwide that would restrict voting.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who chaired Trump's presidential campaign in Texas, offered a $1 million reward to anyone who could produce evidence of voter fraud. Nonpartisan investigations of previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare. State officials from both parties, including in Texas, as well as international observers have also said the 2020 election went well.

The revisions also come in the wake of a massive Vatican report last fall that found that the former Washington, D.C., archbishop, ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, had abused his authority to force seminarians to sleep with him

In a letter accompanying the document, Pope Francis reminded bishops that one of the aims of the revisions was "to reduce the number of cases in which the imposition of a penalty was left to the discretion of authorities."

In the new version, sexual abuse of minors – which previously had been included under the grouping of sins committed "against the sixth commandment," which prohibits sexual misconduct – has been placed under a new section, "Offenses against human life, dignity and liberty."

New articles stipulate that abuse can extend to adults, not just minors, and that laypeople in church offices can be punished for abusing minors as well as adults; forbid the possession of child pornography; and establish a newly defined crime of "grooming" of minors or vulnerable adults for sexual abuse.

the penalties include deprivation of office and potentially defrocking, one of the most severe punishments in canon law.

While the church has for centuries banned women from becoming priests, the previous code of 1983 said only that priestly ordination is reserved for a "baptized male." Now, there is a code that stipulates specifically that both the person who attempts to confer ordination on a woman and the woman herself incur automatic excommunication and that the cleric risks being defrocked.

In response, Kate McElwee, executive director of the Women's Ordination Conference, said in a statement that while not surprising, spelling it out as a new code is "a painful reminder of the Vatican's patriarchal machinery, and its far-reaching attempts to subordinate women."

The new Code of Canon Law will go into effect on Dec. 8.

The new possible criminal exposure comes on top of ongoing New York state investigations into the President's finances and multiple defamation lawsuits related to Trump denying sexual assault accusations by women.

He is also facing a civil investigation from the New York attorney general's office, which is looking at whether the President improperly inflated the value of his assets to obtain loans or favorable tax benefits

Lawyers have speculated the court may be waiting for Trump's term to end next week before ruling.

Sandick and other lawyers, however, say that as alarming as Trump's recent statements have been, there are multiple hurdles for prosecutors to prove that the President violated election laws or those relating to incitement or sedition.

The New York criminal investigation has been slowed by a fight over the President's tax records, a scrum that is again before the Supreme Court.

Prosecutors have also not been in contact with Rosemary Vrablic, Trump's private banker at Deutsche Bank, which has loaned the President more than $300 million dollars, people familiar with the investigation said.

The President's actions this past week have already cost him financially -- the PGA of America said on Sunday night it would not hold its championship in 2022 at the Trump golf course in New Jersey and Deutsche Bank said it would not do business with him -- and the specter of ongoing criminal investigations may have a longer-term impact on his business prospects. New York City announced Wednesday that it is taking steps to cancel contracts with Trump Org for the Ferry Point golf course and carousel and ice skating rink in Central Park.

Trump's recent statements will present the Biden administration, which has made calls for unity, and his Justice Department with the dilemma of potentially prosecuting a former president.

"There's a long precedent of not prosecuting former presidents over policy differences," said Elliot Williams, a CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor. "The difference is we're not talking about policy difference here, and this is perhaps the most egregious conduct we've ever seen from a president while in office

Some former prosecutors say that a lot of the conduct is morally reprehensible, but it isn't clear if it will cross the line into violating the law. Investigators will need to prove the President intended to commit crimes, a high bar in criminal cases, not that he was encouraging lawful protests or truly believed that he won the election.

Like the riot, the legal liability for Trump's call to Georgia election officials will turn on his statements. Trump called the Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, imploring him to "find" 11,780 votes to give him the edge to overturn the election. It followed a call in December in which Trump told a Georgia elections investigator he would be a "national hero" if he would "find the fraud," a source told CNN.

As the end of Trump's presidency nears, sources tell CNN Trump has considered pardoning himself, his family members and other allies from federal charges. Lawyers say it is not clear whether a self-pardon would hold up in court, but a presidential pardon has no bearing on state investigations.

But the most important, most dangerous part of all this was Trump’s successful attempt to convince millions of his supporters that he’d won and was being cheated out of his win—and the fact that many leaders of the Republican Party, at all levels, went along. That claim is somewhat akin to a charge of child abuse—the very accusation is also a demand for immediate action to stop it. The mob that gathered last Wednesday took that accusation seriously, and acted to “stop the steal.”

There is a great desire to blame Trump—who is certainly very much to blame—and move on, without recognizing and responding to the dire reality: that much of the GOP enlisted in his attempt to steal an election.

The legislators were there to count the votes certified by the states—after months of review by election officials, and after endless court challenges were rebuffed—and, instead, they voted to throw them out. They did this after months of lying to the public, saying that the election had been stolen. They crossed every line a democracy should hold dear. To my knowledge, not one of them has yet apologized or recanted for their participation in what even some Republican senators are openly calling the “big lie.”

Some, like Senator Ted Cruz, have tried to cover up their attempt to overturn the election by saying that their constituents (and indeed tens of millions of Americans) believe that the election was stolen, and that they were merely honoring their beliefs. However, it was they, along with the president, who convinced those millions of people that the election was stolen in the first place, and that Joe Biden was not the legitimate president-elect

Some legislators have since tried to argue that they didn’t mean to “overturn” the election, that their action was more akin to a protest vote. This cannot be taken seriously. That’s like pulling a gun on somebody, walking away with their wallet, and then claiming that you never intended to shoot them if they hadn’t turned over their wallet.

A mugging is a mugging, and a mass of legislators claiming that the election was stolen and rejecting the results is an attempt to overturn the election. When the president himself refuses to concede, voting against the recognition of electoral votes cannot simply be a protest, and we don’t have to accept such absurdity at face value.

Already, there are signs that many in the GOP intend to respond to their loss in the Senate by doubling down on disenfranchising voters in the name of fighting the “election fraud” they falsely convinced millions is widespread

Today, by contrast, many GOP legislators have claimed for months that the election was fraudulent or stolen, and have explicitly and repeatedly called on their supporters to stop this fraud. The president not only refused to concede before they took their vote, but even as the storming of the Capitol was still under way, he once again claimed that he had won in a landslide.

A great misunderstanding about democracy is that it can be stolen or damaged only if formal rules are suspended or ignored. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are sticklers about formal rules, even as they undermine their meaning

We’ve already witnessed the hollowing out of some of the core tenets of liberal democracy—equal representation of voters, unimpeded access to the ballot—in many aspects of our electoral system. Republicans have pursued a project of minority rule for decades, exploiting structural features of American politics and opportunistically shaping rules in their own favor.

The Senate is structurally dominated by a minority—less than 20 percent of the population elects a majority of its members. Through gerrymandering and the uneven distribution of the population, the GOP does about 6 percent better in the median House district than it does in the national popular vote.

Some Republicans have raised the fact that the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, referred to Trump’s presidency as “illegitimate.” That may well be, but that happened long after the election was over and the transition was complete. She called Trump to concede less than 12 hours after the polls closed, and the Obama administration immediately started the transition process. There was no formal challenge that required suspending the session to debate whether to accept the actual results.

The Republicans who backed Trump’s effort to overturn the election may have known that it didn’t have a high chance of success, but that doesn’t change the nature of the attempt, especially given their lack of remorse or apology. Unless they are convinced that it was a mistake—unless they pay such a high political price for it that neither they nor anyone else thinks of trying again—they are likely to seize the next available opportunity to do the same. If a future election comes down to one state instead of three, if a future presidential candidate uses lawsuits and coercion more competently, or if a few election officials succumb to threats more easily, they’ll be in the game.

A line must be drawn. The increasing entrenchment of minority rule and democratic backsliding in almost every level of government was terrible enough, but now we’ve even moved past that.

Democrats will soon control the House, the Senate, and the presidency, making it possible for them to undertake crucial reforms on voting rights and electoral integrity. Perhaps some Republicans will decide to join them; if there ever were a time for putting country over party, this is surely it.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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).

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

In a national television address on Wednesday, Morales lashed out at his opponents, declaring that "a coup d'etat is under way." "The right wing prepared the coup with international support," he said.

The leftist leader did not elaborate on where the international support was coming from, but he has frequently railed against what he says is U.S. imperialism.

The country's constitution limits the presidency to two terms, but Morales has won permission from the Constitutional Court to stay in office until 2025.

Confusion over the count has sparked outrage among many Bolivians, who say the results were rigged.

Amid accusations of fraud, the vice president of the Bolivian Supreme Electoral Court, Antonio Costas, announced his resignation Tuesday night.

Election observer, the Organization of American States (OAS), has expressed "deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed" after polls closed on Sunday.

It said the change in results "drastically modifies the fate of the election and generates a loss of confidence in the electoral process."

Bolivia Foreign Affairs Minister Diego Pary Rodriguez sent a letter to the Secretary-General of OAS, Luis Almagro, on Tuesday urging him to audit every single one of the voting ballots. Almagro agreed to the invitation in order to verify the transparency and legitimacy of the electoral process.

President Morales, who is seeking his fourth term in office, claimed victory over the weekend and is expected to make televised remarks on Wednesday morning local time.