Today’s Politics News: Live Updates

Two congressional committees on Tuesday plan to hold simultaneous hearings digging into the attack on the U.S. Capitol by at mob of Trump supporters, asking questions of generals and law enforcement leaders about the security failures that helped led to violence and death on Jan. 6.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, said she planned to unveil her committee’s research into the delayed response of the National Guard, showing that Capitol Police and D.C. officials made 12 “urgent requests” for Guard support during the attack and that Army leaders told the National Guard to “stand by” five times as the violence escalated.

“That response took far too long,” Ms. Maloney said in a statement. “This is a shocking failure, and today we intend to get to the bottom of why it happened.”

Beginning at 2 p.m., members of House Oversight and Reform Committee plan to question Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director; General Charles Flynn, who commands the U.S. Army Pacific; and Lieutenant General Walter Piatt, director of the Army staff.

General Flynn and General Piatt were involved in a key mid-riot call with police leaders in which Army leaders worried about the “optics” of sending in the Guard, according to those involved in the meeting. It is the first time lawmakers will hear testimony from either man.

General Piatt has defended his caution in advising against sending in the National Guard. “The last thing you want to do is throw forces at it where you have no idea where they’re going, and all of a sudden it gets a lot worse,” he told The New York Times in January.

General Flynn is the brother of Michael T. Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump who has emerged as one of the ex-president’s biggest promoters of the lie of a stolen election.

Documents obtained by the committee show that beginning at 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, top officials at the Defense Department received at least 12 urgent requests for help from the Capitol Police chief, the mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, and other officials. But the National Guard did not arrive until 5:20 p.m., more than four hours after the Capitol perimeter had been breached.

The panel will not hear testimony from the acting chief of the Capitol Police, Yogananda D. Pittman, who declined to attend, citing her need to hear testimony at the other committee hearing.

In that hearing, also Tuesday afternoon, the Committee on House Administration plans hear testimony from the Capitol Police inspector general, Michael A. Bolton, and Gretta L. Goodwin, director of Homeland Security and Justice for the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Mr. Bolton intends to testify about his fourth investigative report into the failures of Jan. 6, which found that the department’s tactical unit did not have access to “adequate training facilities”; did not have adequate policies for securing ballistic helmets and vests (two dozen were stolen during the riot); and the agency’s First Responder Unit was not equipped with adequate less-lethal weapons, among other findings.

His previous reports have found that the Capitol Police had clearer warnings about the Jan. 6 attack than were previously known, including the potential for violence in which “Congress itself is the target.” But officers were instructed by their leaders not to use their most aggressive tactics to hold off the mob.

About 140 officers were injured during the attack, and seven people died in connection with the siege, including one officer who suffered multiple strokes after sparring with members of the mob.

“It is our duty to honor those officers who have given their lives but also ensuring the safety of all those working and visiting the Capitol Complex by making hard changes within the department,” Mr. Bolton said in written testimony.

At a previous hearings on the attack, some House Republicans have used the venue to attempt to rewrite the history of what happened on Jan. 6, downplaying or outright denying the violence and deflecting efforts to investigate it.

Republicans signaled Monday that they planned to focus on Chief Pittman’s lack of attendance.

In response, the Capitol Police cited Chief Pittman’s need to hear from the inspector general, and said she would testify before the committee another time when there wasn’t a conflict. She has testified in previous committee hearings reviewing the attack, including when she apologized on behalf of the department.

An hour before President Donald J. Trump announced in December that William P. Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Mr. Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.

Mr. Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.

Another email from Mr. Trump to Mr. Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.

The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Mr. Trump to speak with him.

The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results.

They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s frenzied drive to subvert the election results in the final weeks of his presidency, including ratcheting up pressure on the Justice Department. And they show that Mr. Trump flouted an established anticorruption norm that the Justice Department act independently of the White House on criminal investigations or law enforcement actions, a gap that steadily eroded during Mr. Trump’s term.

The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, asking Mr. Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.

Tuesday’s weekly Senate Democratic lunch will be a homecoming of sorts — but not necessarily a comfortable one for Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia.

For the first time in a year, Senate Democrats — newly freed from pandemic precautions that prevented such gatherings for more than a year — will convene in the ornate room in the Capitol named after a former majority leader, Mike Mansfield, just off the Senate floor, to hash out the issues facing the caucus. Front and center will be the escalating pressure from Democrats nationwide for them to push forward with sweeping voting-rights legislation to counter restrictive ballot access laws that are streaming through Republican-held state capitals.

Mr. Manchin could be in the hot seat during the session, as the only Democrat in the Senate who has refused to sign on to the bill.

As part of a series of meetings designed to rally support for the legislation, Senate leaders have invited Democratic members of the Texas legislature to make the case on Tuesday for why it is urgently needed. The Texans managed to stave off passage of a voter restriction bill in their state legislature last month with a dramatic late-night walkout, but that stunt cannot prevent the new rules from going into effect forever, as long as majority Republicans in Austin remain united. Many Democrats argue that only the enactment of superseding federal legislation mandating extended voting hours and mail-in balloting, as the party’s far-reaching For the People Act would do, could accomplish that.

Texas Democrats have pleaded for the federal cavalry to ride in, and they largely will be preaching to the converted. Forty-nine Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have signed on as co-sponsors of the measure, also known as S1, the broad voting rights, presidential ethics and campaign finance bill that is slated to face a test vote in the Senate later this month.

The 50th vote is the problem; Mr. Manchin has said in no uncertain terms that he will not vote for the bill, nor will he vote to end the legislative filibuster in the Senate, an equally necessary step, since the voter protection measure will never get enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster with 60 votes.

Other senators have expressed qualms as well. Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, said he had issues with the breadth of the bill, and would favor jettisoning some parts of it, especially a provision that would begin taxpayer financing of elections. Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat who could face a tough re-election fight next year if the state’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu, challenges her, has also been mum about a final vote.

But Democrats say first things first, and the first step is to try to get Mr. Manchin to co-sponsor the bill and present at least the veneer of a united Democratic front.

Of course, there is no guarantee he will show up to the luncheon.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night will throw a private dinner party at the Naval Observatory for the 16 Democratic and eight Republican female senators, a gathering that comes at a tense moment in negotiations on a number of the Biden administration’s biggest ambitions.

The bipartisan dinner is the first social event Ms. Harris has hosted since coming into office six months ago — her move to the official vice-presidential residence was delayed for three months because of renovations — and the outreach to her former Senate colleagues comes as Ms. Harris has taken the lead on the administration’s push to pass voting rights legislation.

All 24 women in the Senate were invited, according to an administration official. It was not clear how many planned to attend. Senators Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, both said they planned to attend.

With just six weeks left before Congress’s August recess, the Biden agenda appears to be stalled while Republicans try to derail the president’s economic plans and delay any Democratic changes past the point where they can be implemented before the 2022 elections.

There are intraparty fights to deal with, as well. Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia announced his opposition to the voting rights legislation that Ms. Harris was championing for the administration, and he was expected to be in the hot seat Tuesday afternoon during a caucus luncheon. And a group of bipartisan senators, including two Democrats who were invited to the dinner, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, has unveiled an alternative to the president’s infrastructure plan that does not address key Democratic priorities, like climate change. The plan does not have the support of a majority of Republicans, and progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, have already come out against it.

Ms. Harris has not been a key player in infrastructure negotiations and was not known for her close relationships with colleagues on Capitol Hill during her four years in the Senate, a chunk of which she spent running for president.

But as vice president — and the tiebreaking vote in the evenly divided Senate — she has taken on some of the administration’s most difficult goals. Besides the voting rights push, Ms. Harris has also been tasked with stemming the flow of migrants to the U.S. border with Mexico by addressing the root causes in countries like Guatemala that push migrants north.

The Biden administration is aiming to bolster information sharing with technology companies, potentially expand hiring of intelligence analysts and improve screening of government employees for ties to domestic terrorism as part of a much-anticipated plan expected to be released on Tuesday detailing how the federal government should combat extremism.

President Biden ordered the review of how federal agencies addressed domestic extremism soon after coming into office, part of an effort to more aggressively acknowledge a national security threat that has grown since the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.

The 32-page plan synthesizes steps that have been recommended by national security officials — including bolstering relationships with social media companies and improving information sharing among law enforcement agencies — into one blueprint on how to more effectively identify extremists in the country after years of heightened focus on foreign terrorists.

“We cannot ignore this threat or wish it away,” Mr. Biden wrote in the strategy document. “Preventing domestic terrorism and reducing the factors that fuel it demand a multifaceted response across the federal government and beyond.”

But the plan, titled “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism” and issued by the National Security Council, also left some questions unanswered.

The new strategy was widely expected to detail a position on whether the government should establish a domestic terrorism law that prosecutors could use to investigate and charge homegrown extremists instead of relying on assault, murder and hate crime charges. The strategy instead indicates that the administration is focused for now on bolstering methods of combating extremism already used by the government, despite Mr. Biden calling for such a law during the presidential campaign.

While there is increasing bipartisan support to equip prosecutors with more laws to crack down on extremists, civil rights advocates have expressed concern that new statutes would lead to government overreach and infringements on privacy rights. The administration referred the issue to the Justice Department for further review, according to the planning document.

“New criminal laws, in particular, should be sought only after careful consideration of whether and how they are needed to assist the government in tackling complex, multifaceted challenges like the one posed by domestic terrorism and only while ensuring the protection of civil rights and civil liberties,” according to the strategy document.

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Biden Criticizes Trump at NATO Summit

President Biden criticized his predecessor on Monday at a press conference after a one-day NATO summit, accusing former President Donald J. Trump of “phony populism.”

The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers. The leadership of the Republican Party is fractured, and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party but it makes up a significant minority of the American people. It is a shock and surprise that what’s happened in terms of consequence of President Trump’s phony populism has — has happened. And it is disappointing that so many of my Republican colleagues in the Senate, who I know know better, have been reluctant to take on, for example, an investigation because they’re worried about being primaried. But at the end of the day, we’ve been through periods like this in American history before, where there has been this reluctance to take a chance on your re-election because of the nature of your party’s politics at the moment. I think this is passing — I don’t mean easily passing. That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda. The agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure, it’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.

BRUSSELS — President Biden lashed out Monday at what he called former President Donald J. Trump’s “phony populism,” using the global platform of his first NATO summit to criticize his predecessor. But he expressed optimism that the Republican party is beginning to reject the political dominance Mr. Trump has exerted for the past four years.

“I think this is passing,” Mr. Biden told reporters after being asked about the reaction from foreign leaders to the Republican embrace of Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods. “I don’t mean easily passing. That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda.”

Mr. Biden’s willingness to directly call out his predecessor is a departure from his usual tendency to ignore Mr. Trump. And it came during Mr. Biden’s first foreign trip, just two days before he is set to meet one of Mr. Trump’s biggest boosters, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In his remarks, Mr. Biden also took aim at Republican senators who he said “know better” about opposing an investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying many are doing so because they are worried about being opposed by a more conservative primary opponent.

But he said he did not feel the need to talk with foreign leaders about Mr. Trump’s grip on the Republican Party in the United States, because he does not believe the former president’s influence will hurt his ability to stand by his global commitments.

“The Republican Party is vastly diminished in numbers,” Mr. Biden said. “The leadership of the Republican Party is fractured and the Trump wing of the party is the bulk of the party, but it makes up a significant minority of the American people.”American officials in the past have typically made a point of leaving domestic politics behind when traveling abroad. But the outdated saying that politics stops at the water’s edge was blown to shred by Mr. Trump, who often used foreign trips to rail against his political enemies at home. Mr. Biden’s comments about the opposing party were tame, by comparison, but still marked an unusual breach of norms by a president intent on restoring them at home and abroad.

Mr. Biden’s optimism about the future of the Republican party is not shared by many in his party, who have publicly expressed fear that Republicans are increasingly in thrall to Mr. Trump, making them unwilling to take part in the give-and-take of governing in Washington.

And officials throughout Europe have said they are still braced for a return of Trumpism if Republicans take over the Congress in 2022 or if someone like Mr. Trump — or Mr. Trump himself — wins the White House again in 2024. That fear makes some political leaders around the world nervous about whether America’s long-term commitments can be sustained.

Mr. Biden said he did not worry about that.

“I’m not making any promises to anyone that I don’t believe are overwhelmingly likely to be kept,” he insisted.

He also said the Republican party seemed to be changing.

“I think you’re going to see that, God willing, we’re going to be making progress,” he said. “And there’s going to be a coalescing of a lot of Republicans, particularly younger Republicans, who are coming up in the party.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and minority leader, threatened on Monday to block any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Biden in 2024 if Republicans regain control of the Senate next year.

“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled,” Mr. McConnell said in a radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt. “So I think it’s highly unlikely.”

His position is no surprise since it is in line with his refusal in 2016 to consider President Barack Obama’s high court nomination of Merrick B. Garland, now the attorney general, saying it was too close to the presidential election even though the vacancy occurred in February.

As for what would happen if a seat became open in 2023 and Republicans controlled the Senate, Mr. McConnell did not declare that he would prevent Mr. Biden from advancing a nominee, but left the door open to the possibility. “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens,” said Mr. McConnell.

Stonewalling a nominee in the year before a presidential election would amount to a significant escalation in the judicial confirmation wars.

Mr. McConnell’s pronouncements will likely amplify calls from progressive activists for Justice Stephen G. Breyer to retire while Democrats still hold the Senate and can move through a successor. Justice Breyer, 82, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, has resisted calls to step aside. Justices often time their retirements to the end of the court’s term, which comes in two weeks.

On Sunday, even before Mr. McConnell’s statement, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, joined those urging Justice Breyer’s retirement, saying on CNN that she was “inclined to say yes” to the question of whether the justice should leave the bench while Democrats were still assured of Senate control.

Mr. McConnell’s position in 2016 stood in stark contrast to last year when Senate Republicans, still in control of the Senate, rushed through the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett just days before the presidential election following the death in September of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“What was different in 2020 was we were of the same party as the president,” Mr. McConnell told Mr. Hewitt. “And that’s why we went ahead with it.” Mr. McConnell also gave himself a pat on the back for the way he handled the Barrett nomination, saying that it “took a great deal of priority and, I think, skill to get Amy Coney Barrett through.”

He also again called denying Mr. Obama a third pick on the court “the most consequential thing I’ve done in my time as majority leader of the Senate.”

Mr. McConnell’s decision to block Mr. Obama from filling the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia was widely credited with encouraging conservatives to rally around Donald J. Trump for the presidency, allowing Mr. Trump to ultimately name three justices to the court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority.

The Biden administration announced Monday that it will speed the process of issuing temporary work permits to some undocumented immigrants who are victims of crime in the United States and who agree to cooperate with law enforcement, giving thousands of people faster access to temporary protections while they wait for a final visa determination.

The change will benefit immigrants who have applied for the U visa, a program that currently has a backlog of 270,000 applications, a number that grew significantly during the Trump administration. The average wait just to get placed on an official waiting list for temporary work authorization is now at least five years, up from about 11 months during the 2015 spending year.

The U visa provides a path to citizenship for victims of certain crimes, including domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. Congress only allows the government to issue 10,000 such visas a year, leaving many other applicants on a waiting list for future years and vulnerable to deportation.

Under the new policy, the government will make faster decisions about whether to grant four-year work permits to immigrants waiting for U visa determinations. This will give applicants the ability to “work and remain safely in the United States while they provide valuable support to law enforcement to detect, investigate or prosecute the serious crimes they have survived or witnessed,” the acting director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Tracy Renaud, said in a statement on Monday.

The work permits will not be granted to everyone who applies, and will require registering fingerprints and other biometrics with the government. It was not immediately clear how quickly applicants would receive temporary permission to work once the government believes they are applying in good faith.

The change is part of President Biden’s efforts to roll back the restrictive measures of the last administration and make it easier to immigrate to the United States, with shorter and simpler forms.

State and local law enforcement officials have cheered the U visa program, which started in 2000, but have raised concerns in recent years about the delay in granting protections to undocumented immigrants whom they rely on for help in investigations.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which promotes limits on immigration, has said the U visa program is already vulnerable to fraud and abuse, and fast-tracking work permits will only make that worse.

“That’s going to be a huge incentive for people to apply, knowing that they’re only getting a cursory review and a four-year work permit,” Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the center, said.