WARREN, Mich. (AP) — Paige Cole is one of the “Anons.” The mother of three from Eastpointe, Michigan, says Joe Biden is a sham president and believes Donald Trump will soon be reinstated to the White House to finish the remainder of Biden’s term.

“His whole inauguration was fake. He didn’t have real military people. He had, like, fake badges, fake people. And Trump is actually our president,” she said while waiting in line for his latest rally on Saturday at Macomb Community College. Wearing a pink “Trump 2024” hat and draped in a large “TRUMP WON” flag, Cole — a former Democrat who says she voted twice for Barack Obama — began to cry as she described the significance of Trump’s return and the 1,000 years of peace she believes will be ushered in with it.

“It’s gonna change everything,” she says, “like we have never in humanity seen before.”

Trump’s rallies have always attracted a broad swath of supporters, from first timers taking advantage of their chance to see a president in person, to devotees who camp out for days and follow him around the country like rock band groupies. But after spending much of the last two years obsessively peddling false claims of a stolen election, Trump is increasingly attracting those who have broken with reality, including adherents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy, which began in the dark corners of the internet and is premised on the belief that the country is run by a ring of child sex traffickers, satanic pedophiles and cannibals that only Trump can defeat.

As he eyes another White House bid, Trump is increasingly flirting with the conspiracy. He’s reposted Q memes on his social media platform and amplified users who have promoted the movement’s slogans, videos and imagery. And in recent weeks, he has been closing out his rally speeches with an instrumental song that QAnon adherents have claimed as their anthem and renamed “WWG1WGA” after the group’s “Where we go one, we go all” slogan.

Trump and his allies often dismiss suggestions that he advances conspiracy theories or condones violence. “The continued attempts by the media to invent and amplify conspiracies, while also fanning the flames of division, is truly sick,” his spokesperson, Taylor Budowich, said in a statement. “America is a nation in decline and our people are suffering, President Trump and his America First movement will not be distracted by the media’s nonsense, and he will instead continue fighting to Make America Great Again.”

But interviews with more than a dozen Michigan rallygoers Saturday underscore his influence and serve as a reminder that many cling to his every word and see his actions as validation.

Several of those interviewed said they only began attending Trump’s rallies after the 2020 election, when they said they had become more politically engaged. Several, like Virginia Greenlee, of Holland, Michigan, said they had been in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, trying to halt the peaceful transition of power by disrupting the certification of Biden’s win.

“President Trump really woke people up because I didn’t even know there was a deep state or fake media, fake news, until he started bringing light,” said Greenlee, who said she did not go inside the building but watched from outside. She blamed the violence on leftist protesters masquerading as Trump supporters, though there is no evidence to support that claim.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to elevate those who peddle conspiracies. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow salesman who has spent millions trying (and failing) to prove the election was stolen, spoke twice Saturday — once outside to attendees waiting in line to enter and again during the rally program. Also in attendance was Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia congresswoman who told the crowd that “Democrats want Republicans dead. And they’ve already started the killings.”

Trump has long used angry and violent rhetoric to rile up his supporters, even after Jan. 6 made clear that some may act on that anger. As he inches closer to a possible announcement, Trump has leaned into the kind of racist and violent language that helped him clinch victory in 2016, when his ever-more-shocking statements — and the inevitable backlash — helped him dominate the news.

On Friday, he again attacked Mitch McConnell, this time in a racist post on his social media site that accused the Senate Republican leader of having a “death wish” and derided McConnell’s wife, who was born in Taiwan and served in Trump’s administration as a Cabinet secretary.

On Saturday, the crowd cheered enthusiastically as Trump touted plans to use the death penalty to kill drug dealers and traffickers if he returns to the White House, emulating the strongman leaders he’s often admired. And again, he empathized with the Jan. 6 defendants who have been jailed for their role in the insurrection, casting the rioters — whom he has already pledged to pardon if he runs and wins — as “political prisoners” and accusing authorities of “persecuting people who just happened to be there, many of them didn’t even go in.”

The crowd in turn, broke into numerous “Lock her up!” chants directed at Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as the state’s Democratic governor, secretary of state and attorney general, whom his endorsed candidates are trying to unseat.

Still, Trump aides seem to want to have it both ways. As he began to wrap up his speech, some in the crowd raised their index fingers in what has been described as a QAnon salute. But for the second week in a row, burly event staff with tattoos carefully scanned the crowd, quickly asking those who raised their fingers to put them down.

“They said they didn’t want hands in the air,” one of them explained he’d been told.

Still, Trump’s nods to QAnon are encouraging to people like Cole, who said Trump had opened her eyes “to everything, to the evil in the world.”

A 55-year-old semi-retired certified nursing assistant who relies on a bevy of fringe podcasts for information since eschewing cable news, Cole believes “our money’s no good because it was controlled by the Rothschilds,” an anti-Semitic trope, and that the Supreme Court has “already overturned” the 2020 election, but “they’re just sitting on it and they’re waiting for things to come about.”

“We have to listen to underground news to get the truth of what’s going on, really,” she said.

Trump’s decision to play the song, she said after the rally, shows the American people “and all those affiliated and committed in with the WWG1WGA bond and mission, that President Trump, too, is doing his best to help all involved to eradicate worldwide evil and helping to make the world better for all. It brings me strength in my mind to hold onto the hope and promises for a better life for all.”

But some in the crowd voiced discomfort.

Christina Whipkey, 50, who lives in Warren, Michigan, said she found Trump’s flirtations with QAnon “kind of weird” and “odd” and worried their presence at his rallies was playing into negative stereotypes.

“I didn’t like that,” she said. “It’s telling people what they said about us all along, that we’re all just a bunch of QAnon supporters.”

“You don’t want people to think just because you support him that you’re that far into it, that you’re one of those people,” she went on. “You don’t want people to think that about you.”

A longtime Trump supporter who remembers talking about him running for president while playing his board game in high school, Whipkey also said she thinks it’s time for Trump to move on from the 2020 election, even if she has concerns about the vote.

“I just wish he’d let that go now. Focus more on the future than on the past,” she said, worried he was turning off potential voters. “They’re tired of hearing it … You get to a point where it’s like, ‘All right, buddy. We heard it enough. We got it. We know.’”

Laurie Letzgus, 51, a machine operator from Port Huron, Michigan, and another longtime supporter, agreed.

“It is time to move on, I think,” she said. “Let’s look forward. And let’s look to 2024.”

But Sharon Anderson, a member of the “Front Row Joes” group that travels the country to see Trump and who was attending her 29th rally Saturday, including the one held Jan. 6, disagreed. While she doesn’t “put a lot of faith in some of their beliefs,” she took no issue with QAnon’s growing presence at the rallies.

“There’s a lot of people, a big group that comes to his rallies. And they are for him, too. They’re for his policies. Now whether they are trying to push their beliefs, I don’t know,” said Anderson, who lives in East Tennessee. “But I do know that everybody here that I’ve encountered supports Donald J. Trump. That’s what matters.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Stark repudiation by federal judges he appointed. Far-reaching fraud allegations by New York’s attorney general. It’s been a week of widening legal troubles for Donald Trump, laying bare the challenges piling up as the former president operates without the protections afforded by the White House.

The bravado that served him well in the political arena is less handy in a legal realm dominated by verifiable evidence, where judges this week have looked askance at his claims and where a fraud investigation that took root when Trump was still president burst into public view in an allegation-filled 222-page state lawsuit.

In politics, “you can say what you want and if people like it, it works. In a legal realm, it’s different,” said Chris Edelson, a presidential powers scholar and American University government professor. “It’s an arena where there are tangible consequences for missteps, misdeeds, false statements in a way that doesn’t apply in politics.”

That distinction between politics and law was evident in a single 30-hour period this week.

Trump insisted on Fox News in an interview that aired Wednesday that the highly classified government records he had at Mar-a-Lago actually had been declassified, that a president has the power to declassify information “even by thinking about it.”

A day earlier, however, an independent arbiter his own lawyers had recommended appeared perplexed when the Trump team declined to present any information to support his claims that the documents had been declassified. The special master, Raymond Dearie, a veteran federal judge, said Trump’s team was trying to “have its cake and eat it” too, and that, absent information to back up the claims, he was inclined to regard the records the way the government does: Classified.

On Wednesday morning, Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, accused Trump in a lawsuit of padding his net worth by billions of dollars and habitually misleading banks about the value of prized assets. The lawsuit, the culmination of a three-year investigation that began when he was president, also names as defendants three of his adult children and seeks to bar them from ever again running a company in the state. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

Hours later, three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit — two of them Trump appointees — handed him a startling loss in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.

The court overwhelmingly rejected arguments that he was entitled to have the special master do an independent review of the roughly 100 classified documents taken during last month’s FBI search, and said it was not clear why Trump should have an “interest in or need for” those records.

That ruling opened the way for the Justice Department to resume its use of the classified records in its probe. It lifted a hold placed by a lower court judge, Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee whose rulings in the Mar-a-Lago matter had to date been the sole bright spot for the former president. On Thursday, she responded by striking the parts of her order that had required the Justice Department to give Dearie, and Trump’s lawyers, access to the classified records.

Dearie followed up with his own order, giving the Justice Department until Sept. 26 to submit an affidavit asserting that the FBI’s detailed inventory of items taken in the search is accurate. Trump’s team will have until Sept. 30 to identity errors or mistakes in the inventory.

Between Dearie’s position, and the appeals court ruling, “I think that basically there may be a developing consensus, if not an already developed consensus, that the government has the stronger position in a lot of these issues and a lot of these controversies,” said Richard Serafini, a Florida criminal defense lawyer and former Justice Department prosecutor.

To be sure, Trump is hardly a stranger to courtroom dramas, having been deposed in numerous lawsuits throughout his decades-long business career, and he has demonstrated a remarkable capacity to survive situations that seemed dire.

His lawyers did not immediately respond Thursday to a request seeking comment.

In the White House, Trump faced a perilous investigation into whether he had obstructed a Justice Department probe of possible collusion between Russia and his 2016 campaign. Ultimately, he was protected at least in part by the power of the presidency, with special counsel Robert Mueller citing longstanding department policy prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president.

He was twice impeached by a Democratic-led House of Representatives — once over a phone call with Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the second time over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol — but was acquitted by the Senate on both occasions thanks to political support from fellow Republicans.

It remains unclear if any of the current investigations — the Mar-a-Lago one or probes related to Jan. 6 or Georgia election interference — will produce criminal charges. And the New York lawsuit is a civil matter.

But there’s no question Trump no longer enjoys the legal shield of the presidency, even though he has repeatedly leaned on an expansive view of executive power to defend his retention of records the government says are not his, no matter their classification.

Notably, the Justice Department and the federal appeals court have paid little heed to his assertions that the records had been declassified. For all his claims on TV and social media, both have noted that Trump has presented no information to support the idea that he took any steps to declassify the records.

The appeals court called the declassification question a “red herring” because even declassifying a record would not change its content or transform it from a government document into a personal one. And the statutes the Justice Department cites as the basis of its investigation do not explicitly mention classified information.

Trump’s lawyers also have stopped short of saying in court, or in legal briefs, that the records were declassified. They told Dearie they shouldn’t be forced to disclose their stance on that issue now because it could be part of their defense in the event of an indictment.

Even some legal experts who have otherwise sided with Trump in his legal fights are dubious of his assertions.

Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who testified as a Republican witness in the first impeachment proceedings in 2019, said he was struck by the “lack of a coherent and consistent position from the former president on the classified documents.”

“It’s not clear,” he added, “what Jedi-like lawyers said that you could declassify things with a thought, but the courts are unlikely to embrace that claim.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — More witnesses are coming forward with new details on the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot following former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s devastating testimony last week against former President Donald Trump, says a member of a House committee investigating the insurrection.

The panel already has subpoenaed former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who investigators remain hopeful will appear Wednesday for a deposition, and said it would also welcome follow-up details from Secret Service members with Trump that day.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., cited Hutchinson’s testimony that Trump wanted to join an angry mob of his supporters who marched on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Capitol, where they rioted, as particularly valuable in “inspiring” more people to step forward as the committee gets set for at least two public hearings this month.

“Every day we get new people that come forward and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think maybe this piece of the story that I knew was important,’” he said Sunday. “There will be way more information and stay tuned.”

The committee has been intensifying its yearlong investigation into the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The next hearings will aim to show how Trump illegally directed a violent mob toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 and then failed to take quick action to stop the attack once it began. Over the weekend, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the committee’s vice chair, made clear that criminal referrals to the Justice Department, including against the Republican former president, could follow.

The committee also has been reviewing new documentary film footage of Trump’s final months in office, including interviews with Trump and members of his family.

Kinzinger, in a television interview, declined to disclose the new information he referred to and did not say who had provided it. He said nothing had changed the committee’s confidence in her credibility.

“There’s information I can’t say yet,” he said. “We certainly would say that Cassidy Hutchinson has testified under oath, we find her credible, and anybody that wants to cast disparagements on that, who were firsthand present, should also testify under oath and not through anonymous sources.”

In a separate interview, another committee member, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said: “We are following additional leads. I think those leads will lead to new testimony.”

In Hutchinson’s appearance before the committee, she painted a picture of Trump as an angry, defiant president who was trying to let armed supporters avoid security screenings at a rally on the morning of Jan. 6 to protest his 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

According to Hutchinson, Cipollone was concerned that Trump would face criminal charges if he joined his supporters in marching to the Capitol.

Legal experts have said Hutchinson’s testimony is potentially problematic for Trump as federal prosecutors investigate potential criminal wrongdoing.

Cheney said in an interview aired Sunday that the committee was still considering whether to issue recommendations to the Justice Department, indicating “there could be more than one criminal referral.”

Committee members said they are hopeful Cipollone will come forward.

“He clearly has information about concerns about criminal violations, concerns about the president going to the Capitol that day, concerns about the chief of staff having blood on his hands if they didn’t do more to stop that violent attack on the Capitol,” Schiff said. “It’s hard to imagine someone more at the center of things.”

In her testimony, Hutchinson recounted a conversation with Tony Ornato, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, who, she testified, said Trump later grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to let him go to the Capitol after the rally.

That account was disputed, however. Bobby Engel, the Secret Service agent who was driving Trump, and Ornato are willing to testify under oath that no agent was assaulted and Trump never lunged for the steering wheel, a person familiar with the matter said. The person would not discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“We had interviewed Mr. Ornato several times,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and member of the panel. “His memory does not appear to be as precise as hers. We certainly would welcome them to come back if they wish to do that.”

The committee has also been working on setting up an interview with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She was asked to speak to the committee after disclosures of her communications with Trump’s team in the run-up to and on the day of the insurrection at the Capitol.

Kinzinger appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schiff was on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Cheney appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and Lofgren spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden rarely mentions his predecessor by name. But as he spoke to a nation processing a seismic shift in the rights of women, he couldn’t ignore Donald Trump’s legacy.

“It was three justices named by one president — Donald Trump — who were the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country,” Biden said Friday after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling from 1973 that provided constitutional protections for women seeking abortions.

The abortion decision marked the apex in a week that reinforced the former president’s ongoing impact in Washington more than a year and a half after he exited the White House.

A court that includes three Trump-appointed conservatives also decided to weaken restrictions on gun ownership. And across the street at the Capitol, which was ravaged by a mob of Trump supporters in the final days of his presidency in 2021, new details surfaced of his gross violations of democratic norms. The House’s Jan. 6 committee used a public hearing last week to spotlight the intense pressure that Trump put on top Justice Department officials to overturn the 2020 election, along with discussions of blanket pardons for cooperative members of Congress.

The developments were a reminder of the awkward political bargain social conservatives embraced to achieve their grandest ambitions. In refusing to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee during the final year of his presidency, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., ensured that the next president would be able to make his mark on the court. As Trump pledged to transform the Supreme Court’s ideological leanings —- even providing a list of the judges he would choose from — reluctant conservative Republicans and evangelical Christians rallied behind Trump, a thrice-married man who had previously described himself as “very pro-choice.”

“When he ran in 2016, he promised that he would appoint conservative and pro-life judges to the federal courts starting with the U.S. Supreme Court. And he kept his word,” said Ralph Reed, an evangelical leader and chair of the The Faith and Freedom Coalition, who was criticized in some corners for his embrace of Trump. “Those in the faith community that felt it was worth taking a chance on Donald Trump in 2016 have been vindicated.”

The GOP is now at something of a turning point in its relationship with a man who has fundamentally transformed the party with his populist, “Make America Great Again” agenda and his fight against the establishment Republicans who used to control the party. There’s a growing debate within the party about whether Trump’s resonance is beginning to fade as he lays the groundwork for a third presidential run in 2024.

Other leading Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence, and Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are taking increasingly bold steps toward White House bids of their own. And many of Trump’s own supporters are eagerly embracing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as Trump’s natural successor as they look to the future.

Pence, Pompeo and DeSantis are among those who have made clear that a Trump candidacy would not influence their own decisions about whether to run. If they do run, they will all be competing for support from the same conservatives who fueled Trump’s rise.

Trump himself seems somewhat uncertain about how to navigate the political fallout from the past week, particularly the abortion ruling. He has privately expressed concern to aides that the decision could energize Democrats going into the November elections, The New York Times first reported.

Indeed, in a Fox News interview after the abortion opinion was released, Trump said that, “in the end, this is something that will work out for everybody.”

Asked about his own role in the eventual decision, Trump responded that, “God made the decision.”

Trump grew more emboldened as Friday unfolded, raising money off the decision and issuing a statement in which he took full credit for what he called “the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation.”

He said that it and “other decisions that have been announced recently, were only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court. It was my great honor to do so!”

At a Saturday night rally, Trump took another victory lap to cheers from the crowd.

“Yesterday the court handed down a victory for the Constitution, a victory for the rule of law, and above all, a victory for life,” he told supporters, who broke into a chant of “Thank you Trump!.”

While Democrats are hoping the decision will galvanize its voters heading into November’s midterm elections, Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign and White House adviser, argued the decision would be beneficial to Trump’s future political prospects, helping to cement his standing with conservative voters if he runs again.

“President Trump has been accepting his share of the credit for the Trump Court’s decision, as he should,” Caputo said. “This is yet another confirmation of his transformational presidency. Suburban Republican angst is a progressive myth; real suburban Republicans know their handwringing is performative: This decision simply moves the abortion issue to the states where it has always belonged.”

Meanwhile, the Jan. 6 committee and related investigations, including a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, looking at whether Trump and others illegally meddled in the 2020 election, continue to loom.

As the committee has held a series of public hearings, few Republicans have surfaced to defend Trump’s actions, which increasingly drew comparisons to President Richard Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal 50 years ago.

The committee last week showed how a defeated Trump tried to use the Justice Department for his own political ends, much the way Nixon fired his top ranks in the “Saturday Night Massacre” before his resignation.

John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Nixon and famously testified against Nixon in hearings about the scandal, said that watching the three Trump-era Justice Department officials recount how Trump pressured them to investigate baseless allegations and threaten mass resignations brought him back to conversations he had had with Nixon.

“I did fall back and was reminiscent of my March 21 ‘Cancer on the presidency’ conversation with Nixon where I kept pushing and escalating the problems. And he clearly had made up his mind,” he recounted. “Nothing I could say seemed to get through.”

He said he hoped the Jan. 6 hearings would help the public “understand the seriousness of what Trump tried to do, that he is a threat to democracy and those who support him are a threat to democracy. Authoritarianism and democracy just don’t work together.”

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NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge said Wednesday he will lift Donald Trump’s contempt of court order if the former president meets conditions including paying $110,000 in fines he’s racked up for being slow to respond to a civil subpoena issued by the state’s attorney general.

Judge Arthur Engoron said he will end his contempt finding if Trump submits additional paperwork by May 20 detailing efforts to search for the subpoenaed records and explaining his and his company’s document retention policies.

Engoron declared Trump in contempt on April 25 and fined him $10,000 per day for not complying with a subpoena in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ long-running investigation into Trump’s business practices.

James, a Democrat, has said her three-year investigation uncovered evidence that Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, misstated the value of assets like skyscrapers and golf courses on financial statements for over a decade.

Trump, a Republican, denies the allegations. He has calling James’ investigation “racist” and a politically motivated “witch hunt.” James is Black. Trump’s lawyers have accused her of selective prosecution.

Trump’s lawyers contend James is using her civil investigation to gain access to information that could then be used against him in a parallel criminal investigation being conducted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, also a Democrat.

Engoron ordered Trump to pay $110,000 because that is the total amount of fines he accrued through May 6, when Trump’s lawyers submitted 66 pages of court documents detailing the efforts by him and his lawyers to locate the subpoenaed records.

The judge required a company hired by Trump to aid in the search, HaystackID, finish going through 17 boxes kept at an off-site storage facility, and for that company to report its findings and turn over any relevant documents.

Engoron said he could reinstate the fine, retroactive to May 7, if his conditions aren’t met. He told Trump to pay the money directly to James’ office and for the attorney general to hold the money in an escrow account while Trump’s legal team appeals the original contempt finding.

In a statement Wednesday, James praised Engoron’s handling of the contempt allegation.

“For years, Mr. Trump and the Trump Organization have tried to thwart our lawful investigation, but today’s decision makes clear that no one can evade accountability,” James said in a statement.

A message seeking comment was left with Trump’s lawyer.

The legal battle between James and Trump also played out Wednesday in a midlevel state appeals court, which heard arguments in a related matter: Trump and his two eldest children’s appeal of Engoron’s Feb. 17 ruling requiring them to answer questions under oath in the civil investigation.

Trump lawyer Alan Futerfas said James was engaging in a trick to get around a state law that requires immunity for people testifying before a criminal grand jury. He also criticized Engoron for not holding a hearing to explore the nature of coordination between James’ office and the district attorney’s office.

Judith Vale, arguing on behalf of James’ office, countered there was ample evidence from the civil investigation to support subpoenas for the Trumps’ testimony. She also cited legal precedent allowing the attorney general’s office to do so, and said the Trumps could always invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination — as Trump’s son Eric did hundreds of times in a 2020 deposition.

“I agree that it is proper for courts to protect against the evisceration of the privilege against self-incrimination. But what prevents you from invoking that privilege?” appellate court Judge Rolando T. Acosta, one of four judges on the panel, asked Futerfas. “Why do we need to intervene in this case, and interfere or constrain the ample discretion and authority given by statute to the attorney general?”

The court did not give a timetable for a decision.

James had asked Engoron to find Trump in contempt of court after he failed to produce any documents to satisfy a March 31 deadline to meet the terms of her subpoena. She sought documents pertaining to his annual financial statements, development projects, and even communications with Forbes magazine, where he sought to burnish his image as a wealthy businessman.

One of Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, said in a May 6 court filing that the former president responded to the subpoena completely and no relevant documents were withheld. She said Trump’s team looked for records at his offices and private quarters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and his residence in Florida but didn’t find anything relevant that hadn’t already been produced. Her filing also detailed searches of other locations including file cabinets and storage areas at the Trump Organization’s offices in New York.

In a separate sworn affidavit included with the filing, Trump said he’d turned over all the relevant documents.

He added he owns two cell phones: an iPhone for personal use that he submitted in March to be searched as part of the subpoena, then submitted again in May; plus a second phone he was recently given that’s only used to post on Truth Social, the social media network he started after his ban from Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has identified an almost 8-hour gap in official White House records of then-President Donald Trump’s phone calls as the violence unfolded and his supporters stormed the building, according to two people familiar with the probe.

The gap extends from a little after 11 a.m. to about 7 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and involves White House phone calls, according to one of the people. Both spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.

The committee is investigating the gap in the official White House log, which includes the switchboard and a daily record of the president’s activities. But it does not mean the panel is in the dark about what Trump was doing during that time.

The House panel has made broad requests for separate cell phone records and has talked to more than 800 witnesses, including many of the aides who spent the day with Trump. The committee also has thousands of texts from the cell phone of Mark Meadows, who was then Trump’s chief of staff.

The committee’s effort to piece together Trump’s day as his supporters broke into the Capitol underscores the challenge that his habitual avoidance of records laws poses — not only to historians of his tumultuous four years but to the House panel, which intends to capture the full story of the former president’s attempt to overturn the election results in hearings and reports later this year.

The committee has trained a particular focus on what the president was doing in the White House as hundreds of his supporters beat police, broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory. The missing records raise questions of whether Trump purposefully circumvented official channels to avoid records.

Trump was known to use other people’s cell phones to make calls, as well as his own. He often bypassed the White House switchboard, placing calls directly, according to a former aide who requested anonymity to discuss the private calls. It is not unusual for presidential calls to be channeled through other people.

It is unclear whether the committee has obtained records of cell phone calls made that day. The panel issued a broad records preservation order in August to almost three dozen telecommunications and social media companies, demanding that the companies save communications for several hundred people in case Congress decided to issue subpoenas for them. Individuals included in that request included Trump, members of his family and several of his Republican allies in Congress.

The committee also is continuing to receive records from the National Archives and other sources, which could produce additional information and help produce a full picture of the president’s communications.

While hundreds of people have cooperated with the probe, in some cases the panel has been hampered by Trump’s assertions of executive privilege over material and interviews. Courts have overruled his efforts to block some documents, but many witnesses who are still close to the former president — and several who were in the White House that day — have declined to answer the committee’s questions.

Biden, who has authority as the sitting president over his predecessor’s White House privilege claims, said Tuesday he would reject Trump’s claims concerning the testimony of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner.

Kushner, who was one of Trump’s top White House aides, is scheduled for an interview with the panel on Thursday. The committee has requested an interview with Ivanka Trump as well, but has not said whether she will comply.

During the roughly eight hours on Jan. 6, Trump addressed a huge crowd of supporters at the nearby Ellipse, repeated falsehoods about his election defeat and told them to walk to the Capitol, make their voices heard and “fight like hell.” He then returned to the White House and watched as the mob broke into the Capitol. More than 700 people have been arrested in the violence.

Several of Trump’s calls that day are already publicly known. He spoke to Vice President Mike Pence between 11 a.m. and 11:30, according to a person familiar with that conversation, as he had been lobbying Pence publicly and privately to object while presiding over the certification. He also spoke with several GOP members of the House and Senate as his allies in Congress were preparing to challenge the official vote count.

He had a tense conversation with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who asked him to call off the mob, according to Republican Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state, who shared McCarthy’s account shortly after the insurrection. Trump responded that the rioters must be “more upset about the election than you are,” according to Herrera Beutler.

Trump also talked to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, among other lawmakers. Tuberville has said he spoke to the president while the Senate was being evacuated. Utah Sen. Mike Lee has said that Trump accidentally called him when he was trying to reach Tuberville.

The White House log does show calls Trump made before that time period, as he was preparing to speak at the rally. That log shows calls with his former aide Steve Bannon, conservative commentator William Bennett and Sean Hannity of Fox News, according to one of the people familiar with the records.

The gap in the phone records was previously reported by the AP. The exact length of time of the gap was first reported jointly by The Washington Post and CBS News.

Trump had no immediate comment Tuesday, but he has previously disparaged the investigation and sued to stop records production.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump sued New York Attorney General Letitia James on Monday, resorting to a familiar but seldom successful strategy as he seeks to end a yearslong civil investigation into his business practices that he alleges is purely political.

In the lawsuit, filed in federal court two weeks after James requested that Trump sit for a Jan. 7 deposition, Trump contends the probe into matters including his company’s valuation of assets has violated his constitutional rights in a “thinly-veiled effort to publicly malign Trump and his associates.”

The lawsuit describes James, a Democrat, as having “personal disdain for Trump” and points to numerous statements she’s made targeting him in recent years, including her support of “die-in” protests against him, her boast that her office sued his administration 76 times and tweets during her 2018 campaign that she had her “eyes on Trump Tower” and that Trump was “running out of time.”

“Her mission is guided solely by political animus and a desire to harass, intimidate, and retaliate against a private citizen who she views as a political opponent,” the former president’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Trump and his company, the Trump Organization.

In a statement, James said: “The Trump Organization has continually sought to delay our investigation into its business dealings and now Donald Trump and his namesake company have filed a lawsuit as an attempted collateral attack on that investigation.”

“To be clear, neither Mr. Trump nor the Trump Organization get to dictate if and where they will answer for their actions. Our investigation will continue undeterred because no one is above the law, not even someone with the name Trump.”

James had announced a run for New York governor in late October, but earlier this month, she suspended that campaign and cited ongoing investigations in her decision to instead seek reelection as state attorney general.

News of the lawsuit, filed in upstate New York, was first reported by The New York Times. The case is assigned to Judge Brenda Sannes in Syracuse, who was appointed in 2014 by Trump’s predecessor President Barack Obama, a Democrat, but preliminary proceedings will be handled by a magistrate judge in Albany, which isn’t unusual for federal court.

Trump, a Republican, seeks a permanent injunction barring James from investigating him and preventing her from being involved in any “civil or criminal” investigations against him and his company, such as a parallel criminal probe she’s a part of that’s being led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. Trump also wants a judge to declare that James violated his free speech and due process rights.

New York University law professor Stephen Gillers said that while it’s clear James “gave Trump ammunition to argue that she has a vendetta against him,” the lawsuit remains a longshot for Trump, who has lost multiple lawsuits aimed at foiling investigators, including a multiyear U.S. Supreme Court fight that ended in February with Vance obtaining his tax records.

“During her campaign for attorney general, James foolishly stressed her intent to target Trump and his businesses if elected,” Gillers said. “Nonetheless, I think a federal court will want stronger proof of James’ partiality than Trump can muster. It’s very hard to get a federal court to stop a state investigation when state courts are available to review any misconduct.”

James has spent more than two years investigating whether the Trump Organization misled banks or tax officials about the value of assets — inflating them to gain favorable loan terms or minimizing them to reap tax savings.

Last year, James’ investigators interviewed one of Trump’s sons, Trump Organization executive Eric Trump. Her office went to court to enforce a subpoena on the younger Trump, who’s listed as president of a Trump company that controls one of the assets James has been scrutinizing, and a judge forced him to testify after his lawyers abruptly canceled a previously scheduled deposition.

Trump’s lawsuit didn’t explicitly mention James’ request for his testimony, aside from a brief reference. But it’s clear he won’t be showing up Jan. 7, James’ requested date, to answer questions voluntarily. As with Eric Trump, James’ office will now likely have to issue a subpoena and go to a judge to order the former president to cooperate.

It is rare for law enforcement agencies to issue a civil subpoena for testimony from a person who is also the subject of a related criminal probe, in part because the person under criminal investigation could simply invoke the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. It is unlikely that Trump’s lawyers would allow him to be deposed unless they were sure his testimony couldn’t be used against him in a criminal case.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office is conducting a parallel criminal investigation into Trump’s business dealings. Although the civil investigation is separate, James’ office has been involved in both.

Vance, a Democrat who is leaving office at the end of the year, recently convened a new grand jury to hear evidence as he weighs whether to seek more indictments in the investigation, which resulted in tax fraud charges in July against the Trump Organization and its longtime CFO Allen Weisselberg.

Weisselberg pleaded not guilty to charges alleging he and the company evaded taxes on lucrative fringe benefits paid to executives.

Both investigations are at least partly related to allegations made in news reports and by Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, that Trump had a history of misrepresenting the value of assets.

James’ office issued subpoenas to local governments as part of the civil probe for records pertaining to Trump’s estate north of Manhattan, known as Seven Springs, and a tax benefit Trump received for placing land into a conservation trust. Vance later issued subpoenas seeking many of the same records.

James’ office has also been looking at similar issues relating to a Trump office building in New York City, a hotel in Chicago and a golf course near Los Angeles. Her office also won a series of court rulings forcing Trump’s company and a law firm it hired to turn over troves of records.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump now has a Dec. 23 deadline to undergo questioning in a former “Apprentice” contestant’s defamation lawsuit over what he said in denying her sexual assault allegations, a court said Monday.

The new deadline for Trump’s deposition — a legal term for out-of-court, pretrial questioning under oath — comes as Summer Zervos’ 2017 lawsuit emerges from a more than yearlong freeze.

“The defendant is now a private citizen, and he just cannot delay this litigation any longer,” Zervos attorney Moira Penza said told a Manhattan judge’s law clerk during the teleconference.

Then-President Trump was weeks away from a January 2020 deposition deadline when he won a delay to ask the New York’s top court to consider holding off the case entirely until he was out of office. He argued that sitting presidents couldn’t be sued in state courts.

After he left office this year, the state high court — called the Court of Appeals — said the question was moot. The case returned to a Manhattan trial court for both sides to continue gathering evidence.

Depositions of both Trump and Zervos are now due by Dec. 23. Their lawyers have two weeks to try to nail down specific dates, or the court will set them.

Zervos, a California restaurateur, appeared on “The Apprentice” in 2006. Trump was then the host.

A decade later, he was the Republican presidential nominee, and she was among a series of women who publicly accused him of sexual assaults or harassment years before. Zervos said he subjected her to unwanted kissing and groping during what she thought would be career-advice meetings in 2007 at his New York office and at a California hotel where he was staying.

He denied her allegations, retweeted a message that called her claims “a hoax” and described the women who accused him of sexual assault and harassment as “liars” trying to hurt his 2016 campaign’s chances.

Zervos then sued, saying he hurt her reputation. She is seeking a retraction, an apology and unspecified damages.

Former Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz called Zervos’ claims meritless and said Trump’s statements were true and protected by free speech rights.

Trump’s new lawyer, Alina Habba, said Monday she plans to expand the former president’s response to the case. She said she planned to draw on a 2020 New York law meant to protect people from frivolous lawsuits launched by the powerful to squelch criticism.

The law expanded an existing statute, making it easier to fight defamation claims when they center on communication in public “in connection with an issue of public interest,” defined as “any subject other than a purely private matter.”

Trump previously raised a somewhat similar California law among his defenses in Zervos’ suit. Still, Habba said drawing on the New York statute would make a difference.

“With the new law in place, I think this case will be wrapped up very quickly,” she said after court.

When the measure was making its way through the state Legislature last year, a sponsor pointed to Trump himself as a rationale.

“For decades, Donald Trump, his billionaire friends, large corporations and other powerful forces have abused our legal system by attempting to harass, intimidate and impoverish their critics with strategic lawsuits against public participation,” Democratic state Sen. Brad Hoylman said in a July 2020 statement.

Trump and his campaign have sued a number of media outlets over their coverage of him, including a lawsuit he filed last month against his estranged niece and The New York Times over a 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices. Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoads Ha called it “an attempt to silence independent news organizations.”

The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted, unless they come forward publicly as Zervos has.

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The officials, including the former chief of the Capitol Police, pointed their fingers at various federal agencies — and each other — for their failure to defend the building as supporters of then-President Donald Trump overwhelmed security barriers, broke windows and doors and sent lawmakers fleeing from the House and Senate chambers. Five people died as a result of the riot, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman who was shot as she tried to enter the House chamber with lawmakers still inside.

Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who resigned under pressure after the attack, and the other officials said they had expected the protests to be similar to two pro-Trump events in late 2020 that were far less violent. He said he hadn’t seen an FBI field office report that warned of potential violence citing online posts about a “war.” And he and a House official disputed each other’s versions of decisions that January day and in advance about calling for the National Guard.

Sund described a scene as the mob arrived at the perimeter that was “like nothing” he had seen in his 30 years of policing and argued that the insurrection was not the result of poor planning by Capitol Police but of failures across the board. Trump had rallied the invaders to protest his election loss at the Capitol, and the House later impeached him on a charge of “incitement of insurrection.” But he noted that he had asked the crowd to protest “peacefully,” and the Senate acquitted him.

Sund insisted the invasion was not his or his agency’s fault. “No single civilian law enforcement agency – and certainly not the USCP – is trained and equipped to repel, without significant military or other law enforcement assistance, an insurrection of thousands of armed, violent, and coordinated individuals focused on breaching a building at all costs,” he testified. The joint hearing, part of an investigation by two Senate committees, was the first time the officials testified publicly about the events of Jan. 6. In addition to Sund, former Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger, former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving and Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, testified.

Like Sund, Irving and Stenger resigned under pressure after the deadly attack. They were Sund’s supervisors and in charge of security for the House and Senate. “We must have the facts, and the answers are in this room,” Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar said at the beginning of the hearing. The Rules panel is conducting the joint probe with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Much remains unknown about what happened before and during the assault. How much did law enforcement agencies know about plans for violence that day, many of which were public? How did the agencies share that information with each other? And how could the Capitol Police have been so ill-prepared for a violent insurrection that was organized online? Sund told the lawmakers that he learned only after the attack that his officers had received a report from the FBI’s field office in Norfolk, Virginia, that forecast, in detail, the chances that extremists could bring “war” to Washington the following day.

The head of the FBI’s office in Washington has said that once he received the Jan. 5 warning, the information was quickly shared with other law enforcement agencies through a joint terrorism task force. Sund said Tuesday that an officer on the task force had received that memo and forwarded it to a sergeant working on intelligence for the Capitol Police but that the information was not sent on to other supervisors. “How could you not get that vital intelligence?” asked Senate Homeland Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich., who said the failure of the report to reach the chief was clearly a major problem. “That information would have been helpful,” Sund acknowledged. Sund said he did see an intelligence report created within his own department warning that Congress could be targeted on Jan. 6.

But he said that report assessed the probability of civil disobedience or arrests, based on the information they had, as “remote” to “improbable” for the groups expected to demonstrate. Contee, the acting city police chief, also suggested that no one had flagged the FBI information from Norfolk, Virginia, which he said came in the form of an email. He said he would have expected that kind of intelligence “would warrant a phone call or something. ” Two officials disagreed on when the National Guard was called and on requests for the guard beforehand. Sund said he spoke to both Stenger and Irving about requesting the National Guard in the days before the riot, and that Irving said he was concerned about the “optics” of having them present. Irving denied that, saying Sund’s account was “categorically false.” Safety, not optics, determined the security posture, he said, and the top question was whether intelligence supported the decision.

“We all agreed the intelligence did not support the troops and collectively decided to let it go,” Stenger said. He added that they were satisfied at the time that there was a “robust” plan to protect Congress. After smashing through the barriers at the perimeter, the invaders engaged in hand-to-hand combat with police officers, injuring dozens of them, and broke into the building. Once the violence had begun, Sund and Irving also disagreed on when the National Guard was requested — Sund said he requested it at 1:09 p.m., but Irving said he didn’t receive a request until after 2 p.m., right as rioters breached the Capitol’s West side. Contee said he was “stunned” over the delayed response.

He said Sund was pleading with Army officials to deploy National Guard troops as the rioting rapidly escalated. Police officers “were out there literally fighting for their lives” but the officials on the call appeared to be going through a ”check the boxes” exercise, he said. Pentagon officials have said it took time to put the troops in position, and there was not enough contingency planning in advance.

They said they offered the assistance beforehand but were turned down. The hearing was the first of many examinations of what happened that day, coming almost seven weeks after the attack and over a week after the Senate voted to acquit Trump of inciting the insurrection by telling his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat. Fencing and National Guard troops still surround the Capitol in a wide perimeter, cutting off streets and sidewalks that are normally full of cars, pedestrians and tourists.

Congress is also considering a bipartisan, independent commission, and multiple congressional committees have said they will look at different aspects of the siege. Federal law enforcement has arrested more than 230 people who were accused of being involved in the attack, and President Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, Judge Merrick Garland, said in his confirmation hearing Monday that investigating the riot would be a priority. A second hearing, expected next week, will examine the response of the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

The panels may also hold closed-door interviews. Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, the top Republican on the Rules Committee, said they might want to ask for phone records to clear up some of the discrepancies between officials.

Associated Press writers Lolita Baldor in Washington and Nomaan Merchant in Houston contributed to this report.

MARY CLARE JALONICK, MICHAEL BALSAMO and LISA MASCARO • AP News

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COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — In a text message, a radicalized Trump supporter suggested getting a boat to ferry “heavy weapons” across the Potomac River into the waiting arms of their members in time for Jan. 6, court papers say.

It wasn’t just idle talk, authorities say. Investigators found invoices for more than $750 worth of live ammunition and for a firearm designed to look like a cellphone at the Virginia home of Thomas Caldwell, who’s charged with conspiring with members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group in one of the most sinister plots in the U.S. Capitol siege.

Right-wing extremists, blessed by Donald Trump, were unleashed last month, and their menacing presence has reignited the debate over domestic extremism and how law enforcement should be handling these groups.

Their talk of civil war, traitors and revolution mirrored fighting words echoed by right-wing social media personalities and websites for months as Trump spread bogus claims about a rigged presidential election.

In nearly half of the more than 200 federal cases stemming from the attack on the Capitol, authorities have cited evidence that an insurrectionist appeared to be inspired by conspiracy theories or extremist ideologies, according to an Associated Press review of court records.

The FBI has linked at least 40 defendants to extremist groups or movements, including at least 16 members or associates of the neo-fascist Proud Boys and at least five connected to the anti-government Oath Keepers. FBI agents also explicitly tied at least 10 defendants to QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that has grown beyond its fringe origins to penetrate mainstream Republican politics.

In at least 59 other cases, authorities link defendants to violent or extremist rhetoric, conspiracy theories or other far-right connections on social media and other forums before, during or after the Jan. 6 siege, a deeper review by the AP found.

The AP’s review found that in many of those cases the defendants repeated false claims, made by Trump for months of his presidency, that the U.S. election was rigged. Some broadcast death threats at Democrats on their social media accounts or in messages. Others were deeply entwined in a world of far-right conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic. And dozens of the alleged rioters echoed words used by QAnon supporters, who push a baseless belief that Trump is a secret warrior fighting to expose a cabal of Satan-worshipping bureaucrats and celebrities who traffic children.

On Saturday, the Senate acquitted Trump in his second impeachment trial. A leading liberal advocacy group is urging its supporters to call on attorney general nominee Merrick Garland to “investigate and prosecute Trump and his entire criminal network for law breaking.”

The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington has assigned a special task force of prosecutors examining whether to bring sedition charges against some of the rioters, as prosecutors and federal agents across the country develop more cases against extremists who plotted to attack the Capitol. Prosecutors have another task force examining attacks targeting journalists.

President Joe Biden, in office not yet a month, has already ordered law enforcement and intelligence officials to investigate domestic terrorism. But increased enforcement is not so simple. Much of the inflammatory rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment.

And some civil rights groups have expressed hesitation over any expansion by law enforcement, because Black and Latino communities have born the brunt of security scrutiny and they fear new tools to target extremism will end up tracking them.

Meanwhile, conspiracy theories proliferate. Conservative social media app Parler doubled its userbase, adding 8.7 million users, after the election when Facebook and Twitter cracked down on accounts spreading misinformation about the election.

Calls on the conservative platform for users to revolt or launch a war over the election results also grew, according to the AP’s analysis of an archived Parler dataset of 183 million posts and 13 million user profiles.

The archive, which was captured between August 2018 and Jan. 10, when Parler was taken offline, was provided in advance of publication to the AP by researcher Max Aliapoulios at New York University.

Parler posts containing the word “revolution” grew by five times as much as the overall rate of message traffic after the election, the analysis found.

About 84% of posts referring to the hashtag ”#1776″ occurred on or after Election Day, according to AP’s analysis. Post-election references to “treason” and the QAnon slogan “trust the plan” both increased by about 10 times the overall rate, the data showed.

From Jan. 6 through Jan. 8 the terms “civil war,” “trust the plan” and “hold the line” were mentioned more than 250,000 times across online media, including Twitter, Redditt and Instagram, according to an analysis by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

As well, Trump supporters who flooded the Capitol were quick to co-opt lingo from the American Revolution and the nation’s founding documents to paint themselves as patriots instead of extremists. In the federal cases, the FBI quotes at least 11 defendants referring to “we the people,” at least 10 referring to “1776,” at least nine using “revolution” and at least eight using some variation of “traitor” or “treason.”

“Everybody in there is a treasonous traitor,” defendant Peter Stager, a resident of Arkansas, said of the Capitol, on a video posted on Twitter. “Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.” A lawyer for Stager did not respond to a request for comment.

A Georgia lawyer’s Parler posts became increasingly paranoid and angry after the presidential election began to shift to Biden’s favor. William Calhoun of Americus, Georgia, posted about storming the Capitol on the eve of the insurrection, warned of an impending “civil war” and threatened to “slaughter” Democrats.

“For my part, I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” he wrote.

Calhoun returned home after the siege and resumed representing clients at court hearings. Federal agents say he had at least two rifles, four shotguns, a pistol and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in his possession when they arrested him. A magistrate judge ordered Calhoun detained in custody. His lawyer had no comment.

The Oath Keepers prepared in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 as if they were going to war, investigators say. One advised another extremist to be “fighting fit” by the inauguration and discussed holding “2 days of wargames” as part of a larger “combat” training for “urban warfare, riot control, and rescue operations,” according to court papers.

A judge late last week ruled against releasing Caldwell, who authorities say conspired with members of the Oath Keepers to undo Biden’s victory. In urging the judge to keep Caldwell locked up, the prosecutor said authorities found a “death list” at his Virginia home with the name of an election official in another state who gained notoriety around the presidential election.

Caldwell’s lawyer said prosecutors have no evidence that his client, who denies being a member of the Oath Keepers, ever entered the Capitol. He called the indictment “imaginative.”

“These things were taken out of context!” Caldwell interjected at the hearing.

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