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A Justice Department watchdog has opened an investigation into whether any current or former officials tried improperly to wield the powers of the department to undo the results of the presidential election.
The investigation, which was announced by the office of the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, followed a New York Times article that detailed efforts by Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division, to push top leaders to falsely and publicly assert that ongoing election fraud investigations cast doubt on the Electoral College results. That standoff prompted President Donald J. Trump to consider replacing the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey A. Rosen, and install Mr. Clark at the top of the department to carry out that plan.
“The inspector general is initiating an investigation into whether any former or current D.O.J. official engaged in an improper attempt to have D.O.J. seek to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. Horowitz said in a statement.
The investigation will encompass all allegations concerning the conduct of former and current department employees, though it would be limited to the Justice Department because other agencies do not fall within Mr. Horowitz’s purview. He said he was announcing the inquiry to reassure the public that the matter is being scrutinized.
On Saturday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, urged Mr. Horowitz to open an investigation, saying that it was “unconscionable that a Trump Justice Department leader would conspire to subvert the people’s will.”
This is the second known investigation into the actions of top Justice Department officials during the final weeks of the Trump administration. Earlier this month, Mr. Horowitz opened an investigation into whether Trump administration officials improperly pressured Byung J. Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who abruptly resigned after it became clear to Mr. Trump that he would not take actions to cast doubt on or undo the results of the election, according to a person briefed on the inquiry.
Separately, the Senate Judiciary Committee said this weekend that it has initiated its own oversight inquiry into officials including Mr. Clark.
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to the Justice Department saying that he would investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark to use the agency “to further Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
Mr. Durbin asked the acting attorney general, Monty Wilkinson, to preserve documents, emails and messages related to meetings between top Justice Department officials, the White House and Mr. Trump, as well as any communications related to Mr. Pak’s resignation.
The House is poised to deliver to the Senate on Monday its article of impeachment charging former President Donald J. Trump with “incitement of insurrection,” formally advancing the process even as the trial itself has been delayed.
At 7 p.m., the House impeachment managers will march the charge across the Capitol. That is the official, if ceremonial, start of the Senate trial process, during which the managers are expected to make their case that Mr. Trump should be held accountable for his role in inciting the deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead impeachment manager, will read the article on the Senate floor.
Senate leaders last week struck a deal to pause the trial until the week of Feb. 8 to give the prosecution and the defense time to draft and exchange legal briefs, a timetable that also allows President Biden time to install members of his cabinet. Senators will be sworn in as jurors on Tuesday.
“During that period, the Senate will continue to do other business for the American people, such as cabinet nominations and the Covid relief bill, which would provide relief for millions of Americans who are suffering during this pandemic,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader.
The looming trial has already sent lawmakers burrowing into dueling positions, deepening the schisms in an already divided Senate. As some Republicans in the chamber, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have grown increasingly worried that failing to distance themselves from Mr. Trump could damage the party for years to come, others have made clear that they oppose even the idea of a trial and will try to dismiss the charge before it begins.
In a Monmouth University poll released on Monday, 52 percent of Americans said they wanted the Senate to convict Mr. Trump, compared with 44 percent who did not. But the poll found overwhelming opposition among Republicans, with only 11 percent saying they wanted him to be convicted and 85 percent opposing it.
Impeachment managers have signaled that they intend to present a straightforward case focused on the storming of the Capitol, which played out in public view and left many of the senators who will serve as jurors in the trial cowering for safety. Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania and one of the impeachment managers, said on Sunday that she expected the trial to “go faster” than Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020, which lasted 21 days.
“Some people would like us to turn the page: ‘Oh, let’s move on,’” Ms. Dean said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We must remember, I believe, that this impeachment trial, I hope conviction, ultimate disqualification, are the very first powerful steps toward unity.”
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Senate president pro tempore, is expected to preside over former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial when it formally begins on Tuesday, assuming a role filled last year by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., aides and other officials said on Monday.
The Constitution states that the chief justice of the United States presides over any impeachment trial of the president or vice president. But it does not explicitly give guidance on who should oversee the proceeding for others, including former presidents, and it appeared that Chief Justice Roberts was uninterested in reprising a time consuming role that would insert him and the Supreme Court directly into the fractious political fight over Mr. Trump.
Mr. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, recently reclaimed the mantle of president pro tempore — the position reserved for the longest-serving member of the majority party — when Democrats took control of the Senate. Mr. Leahy, 80, has been in office since 1974.
The role was largely ceremonial in the first impeachment trial of Mr. Trump a year ago. But as the presiding officer, Mr. Leahy could issue rulings on key questions around the admissibility of evidence and whether a trial of a former president is even allowed under the Constitution.
The job could also have gone to Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as president of the Senate. But there were clear drawbacks for Ms. Harris in overseeing what is likely to be a divisive proceeding that is all but certain to be regarded by some as an effort by Democrats to use their newfound power to punish the leader of the rival political party.
Mr. Leahy’s presence on the dais could open Democrats to similar charges from the right, particularly if he issues a contentious ruling, but officials said there was no clear alternative without the chief justice.
Senate aides suggested Ms. Harris may still be able to intervene to break a tie if the trial ever deadlocked 50-50, as she can in the Senate’s normal course of business.
It would take two-thirds of the Senate, 67 votes, to convict Mr. Trump, but if he were convicted, only a simple majority would be needed to bar him from holding office again.
The chief justice declined through a spokeswoman to comment.
President Biden reversed his predecessor’s ban on transgender troops serving in the military, administration officials announced Monday, moving swiftly into a social issue that has tangled the Pentagon over the past five years.
With Lloyd J. Austin III, his new defense secretary, by his side in the Oval Office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order restoring protections first put in place by former President Barack Obama that opened up the ranks of the armed services to qualified transgender people.
“What I’m doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform,” Mr. Biden said from behind the Resolute Desk moments before putting his signature on the document.
The move was expected, as Mr. Biden indicated in November that he would work to restore the protections, which were reversed by former President Donald J. Trump.
But the swiftness signaled a willingness by the new Biden administration to put its own stamp on Defense Department social issues. It follows an announcement from Mr. Austin on Saturday that he was ordering up a review of how the Pentagon has been handling sexual assault issues.
Mr. Biden and the Defense Department leadership will also have to wrestle with a reckoning on race that is facing the Pentagon, where officials have had to confront a stark fact: close to one in five of the protesters who have been arrested for breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6 — many of them with links to white supremacist organizations — have ties to the American military.
On the transgender issue, advocacy groups that have been fighting the ban since it was announced three years ago — in a tweet from Mr. Trump — have argued that the Pentagon does not need to spend months studying how to allow transgender people to serve because it had already done so. One such group, the Palm Center, said in a policy memo last summer that the military could reopen to transgender people rapidly if ordered to do so.
“A big ship can take time to turn around, so often the Pentagon needs to study policy changes and move cautiously,” Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center, said last July in an interview. “But this is the rare case where, since the military left inclusive policy for already-serving transgender personnel in place even as it implemented its ban, the switch is just waiting to be flipped.”
The Trump ban had essentially ended an Obama administration initiative to allow transgender troops to serve openly in the military.
Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a Republican with deep ties to the former party establishment, announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2022, voicing frustration with the deep polarization and partisanship in Washington.
“It has gotten harder and harder to break through the partisan gridlock and mark progress on substantive policy, and that has contributed to my decision,” Mr. Portman said in a statement disclosing what was viewed as a surprise announcement coming so soon after the last election.
Mr. Portman, a former top trade and budget official in the administration of George W. Bush, was once regarded as a conservative stalwart, but as his party has shifted to the right in recent years, he has come to be seen as one of the few centrist Republican senators interested in striking bipartisan deals. He was one of the lawmakers responsible for pushing through the new North American trade deal in 2019 and was part of a bipartisan coalition that pushed the House and Senate leadership late last year to embrace a pandemic relief measure after months of delay.
His decision to step aside illustrates how difficult it has become for more mainstream Republicans to navigate the current political environment, with hard-right allies of former President Donald J. Trump insisting that Republican members of Congress side with them or face primary contests.
Mr. Portman called it a “tough time to be in public service.”
“We live in an increasingly polarized country where members of both parties are being pushed further to the right and further to the left, and that means too few people who are actively looking to find common ground,” he said.
Mr. Portman, who also served 12 years in the House, would have been seeking his third Senate term. He said he made his decision public now to give others time to prepare for a statewide race.
President Biden will sign an executive order on Monday intended to strengthen “Buy American” provisions that encourage the federal government to purchase goods and services from U.S. companies, administration officials said Sunday evening.
Existing law already requires the government to contract with American companies when possible, but there are many exceptions and waiver opportunities that for years have frustrated advocates for small and medium-size businesses.
Previous administrations, including that of President Donald J. Trump, have tried to clamp down on the process in the hopes of directing more federal money toward an American work force that sometimes struggles to compete with goods and services imported from abroad.
Biden administration officials said on Sunday that the president’s executive order would go further than previous efforts by reducing opportunities for waivers from the Buy American requirements and by tightening standards that would result in fewer federal contracts being awarded to overseas companies.
But the officials acknowledged that the changes would take time. Mr. Biden’s executive order will direct agencies to re-evaluate the current Buy American procedures and will set a deadline by which they are required to report their findings back to the White House for consideration.
An administration official who briefed reporters on Sunday evening described the effort as one aimed at improving the economic situation for Americans over the longer term, after the country emerges from the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The official declined to be identified because the president had not formally announced the policy.
The official said Mr. Biden’s order would create a position at the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to oversee the revisions to the Buy American requirements. He said such oversight would “bring more accountability” to the process.
He said the order would also require a review of the waiver process that grants companies exemptions from the provisions. And he said it would examine the way in which a company’s “domestic content” is measured in the hopes of closing loopholes that companies use to claim that their goods and services are made in America.
With the House poised to transmit the article of impeachment to the Senate on Monday, Republicans are finding themselves in dueling positions over the impending trial of former President Donald J. Trump.
Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the only Republican who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial, said on Sunday that he believed the former president had committed an impeachable offense, and that the effort to try him even after he left office was constitutional.
“I believe that what is being alleged and what we saw, which is incitement to insurrection, is an impeachable offense,” Mr. Romney said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “If not, what is?”
But even as Mr. Romney signaled his openness to convicting Mr. Trump, other Senate Republicans made clear that they opposed even the idea of a trial and would try to dismiss the charge before it began. Taken together, the comments underscored the rift that the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and the ensuing fallout have created in the Republican conference, as senators weighed whether they would pay a steeper political price for breaking with the former president or for failing to.
Some Senate Republicans, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have grown increasingly worried that if they do not intervene to distance themselves from Mr. Trump, their ties to the former president could hurt the party’s political fortunes for years. Others, skirting the question of whether Mr. Trump committed an impeachable offense, have argued that holding a Senate trial for a president who has already left office would be unconstitutional, and would further divide the nation.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, called holding a trial “stupid” and “counterproductive,” likening it to “taking a bunch of gasoline and pouring it on top of the fire.”
“The first chance I get to vote to end this trial,” he said, “I’ll do it because I think it’s really bad for America.”
Asked if he thought Mr. Trump had committed an impeachable offense, Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, called it “a moot point” and argued that pursuing an impeachment trial against a former president would be both unconstitutional and a waste of time.
Mr. Romney, citing both the Capitol riot and an hourlong call Mr. Trump placed to the Georgia secretary of state pressuring him to overturn the election results, said the allegations already in the article of impeachment “themselves are of a sufficient nature that the American people are outraged.”
In his first 48 hours in office, President Biden sought to project an optimistic message about returning the nation’s many homebound students to classrooms. “We can teach our children in safe schools,” he vowed in his inaugural address.
The following day, Mr. Biden signed an executive order promising to throw the strength of the federal government behind an effort to “reopen school doors as quickly as possible.”
But with about half of American students still learning virtually as the pandemic nears its first anniversary, the president’s push is far from certain to succeed. His plan is rolling out just as local battles over reopening have, if anything, become more pitched in recent weeks.
Teachers are uncertain about when they will be vaccinated. With alarming case counts across the country and new variants of the coronavirus emerging, unions are fighting efforts to return their members to crowded hallways.
The Chicago Teachers Union told members to defy orders to return to the classroom on Monday and to begin working remotely. The teachers say the district has not done enough to keep students and teachers safe during the pandemic. Students are supposed to come back to classrooms on Feb. 1.
Given the seemingly intractable health and labor challenges, some district officials have begun to say out loud what was previously unthinkable: that schools may not be operating normally for the 2021-22 school year. And some labor leaders are seeking to tamp down the expectations Mr. Biden’s words have raised.
“We don’t know whether a vaccine stops transmissibility,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.
Some virus experts, however, have said there is reason to be optimistic on this question.
Ms. Weingarten said a key to returning teachers to classrooms in the coming months would be promises to allow those with health conditions, or whose family members have compromised immune systems, to continue to work remotely; the collection of centralized data on the number of coronavirus cases in specific schools; and assurances from districts that they would shut down schools when cases occur.
Fights over those very demands have slowed and complicated reopenings across the country.
Mr. Biden’s executive order directs federal agencies to create national school reopening guidelines, to support virus contact tracing in schools and to collect data measuring the impact of the pandemic on students. The White House is also pushing a stimulus package that would provide $130 billion to schools for costs such as virus testing, upgrading ventilation systems and hiring staff members.
Research has pointed to the potential to operate schools safely before teachers and students are vaccinated, as long as practices like mask wearing are adhered to, and especially when community transmission and hospitalization rates are controlled.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as a White House press secretary under former President Donald J. Trump, announced her candidacy for governor of Arkansas on Monday, running for a seat her father, Mike Huckabee, once held.
Ms. Sanders is seen as Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate for the election, which will be held in 2022, and her candidacy will serve, to some extent, as a test of Mr. Trump’s remaining strength in the Republican Party. The party has found itself divided after the tumultuous final weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency, his false claims of widespread voter fraud and his role in igniting a riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
She announced her run in a video posted on her website Monday morning.
The Supreme Court on Monday put an end to two lawsuits that had accused President Donald J. Trump of violating the Constitution’s emoluments clauses by profiting from his hotels and restaurants in New York and Washington.
In brief orders, the court wiped out rulings against Mr. Trump in the two cases and dismissed them as moot. There were no dissents noted.
The move means that there will be no definitive Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of the two provisions of the Constitution concerning emoluments, a term that means compensation for labor or services. One provision, the domestic emoluments clause, bars the president from receiving “any other emolument” from the federal government or the states beyond his official compensation.
The other provision, the foreign emoluments clause, bars anyone holding a federal “office of profit or trust” from accepting “any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state” without the consent of Congress.
Federal appeals courts in New York and Virginia ruled against Mr. Trump on the preliminary issue of whether the plaintiffs were entitled to sue the president.
The New York case was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represented competitors of Mr. Trump’s businesses that said they had been disadvantaged by the payments he received.
The other case was brought by Maryland and the District of Columbia, which accused Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by profiting from his Washington hotel.
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