In Rural America, Covid Hits Black and Hispanic People Hardest

“At the peak of the Omicron wave, Covid killed Black Americans in rural areas at a rate roughly 34 percent higher than it did white people.

July 28, 2022, 3:02 a.m. ET

Racial disparities in coronavirus deaths appear to be most pronounced when health systems are stretched, raising concerns about an even more severe fall or winter wave.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

The coronavirus pandemic walloped rural America last year, precipitating a surge of deaths among white residents as the virus inflamed longstanding health deficits there.

But across the small towns and farmlands, new research has found, Covid killed Black and Hispanic people at considerably higher rates than it did their white neighbors. Even at the end of the pandemic’s second year, in February 2022, overstretched health systems, poverty, chronic illnesses and lower vaccination rates were forcing nonwhite people to bear the burden of the virus.

Black and Hispanic people in rural areas suffered an exceptionally high toll, dying at far higher rates than in cities during that second year of the pandemic.

In towns and cities of every size, racial gaps in Covid deaths have narrowed. That has been especially true recently, when major gains in populationwide immunity have tempered the kind of pressure on health systems that appears to hurt nonwhite Americans the most.

With coronavirus deaths climbing, though, and health officials bracing for an even deadlier winter, scientists warned that efforts so far to close the racial gap in vaccination rates had not been enough to insulate nonwhite people from the ravages of major Covid waves.

Nowhere were those difficulties more pronounced than in rural areas. Black, Hispanic and Native American people in those places recorded the deadliest second year of the pandemic of any large racial or ethnic groups anywhere in the United States, according to the new research, which was led by Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor of global health at Boston University.

In those communities, the Biden administration’s reassurances that every Covid death is now preventable jar with the difficulties of obtaining medical care.

Rural pharmacies are often few and far between, making it difficult for poorer and less mobile residents to receive critical antiviral pills.

Doctors said that some Black patients, especially those who are uninsured or far from hospitals, wait too long before seeking help to benefit from new treatments.

And Black and Hispanic people have received booster shots at lower rates, a consequence of what some physicians describe as a lack of awareness stemming from cutbacks to public messaging, especially in conservative states.

“The national vibe is that everyone should now be in a position to do what they need to protect themselves from the virus,” said Bobby Jenkins, the mayor of Cuthbert, Ga., a mostly Black town whose only hospital closed six months into the pandemic. “But not everyone’s in a position to do that yet.”

Racial disparities in Covid deaths have narrowed for several reasons, scientists said. The early vaccine rollout prioritized older Americans, who are disproportionately white. But over the last year, primary vaccinations for Black and Hispanic people climbed at roughly double the pace of white rates.

The rate for Hispanic people, 54 percent, now exceeds that for white people, which is 50 percent. The Black vaccination rate, 43 percent, still lags, but the gap has diminished.

Patients waited for Covid testing at the North Sunflower Medical Center in Ruleville, Miss.Rory Doyle for The New York Times

The virus also infected and killed Black and Hispanic people at such greater rates in the pandemic’s first year — at one point in 2020, Black rural dwellers were dying at roughly six times the rate of white dwellers — that it may have had fewer targets by Year 2.

Those changes have been so profound that among the oldest Americans, white Covid death rates have recently exceeded those of Black people, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

But the shrinking of the racial gap is partly because of a worsening of the pandemic for white people rather than serious advances for Black or Hispanic Americans. White Covid death rates climbed by 35 percent from the first to second year of the pandemic, the C.D.C. found. Over that period, death rates fell by only 1 percent in Hispanic people and 6 percent in Black people.

“It’s not a movement toward equity,” said Alicia Riley, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It’s that white people started getting and dying of Covid more.”

The national picture has also disguised a shift that has as much to do with geography as with race, Dr. Stokes said. As the brunt of the pandemic shifted in late 2020 from big cities to rural areas, which have a bigger share of white residents, the national tally of Covid deaths naturally came to include more white people.

But within rural areas, Covid deaths were apportioned at greater rates to nonwhite people, just as they were in big cities and in small or medium ones, Dr. Stokes’s team found. He used C.D.C. counts of Covid death certificates up until February, avoiding more recent and potentially incomplete data, and took into account the older age of the white population.

At the worst of the Omicron wave this winter, Black and Hispanic death rates exceeded those of white people in towns and cities of every size, just as they had at the peak of every previous virus outbreak.

Black death rates at this winter’s peak were greater than those of white people by 34 percent in rural areas, 40 percent in small or medium cities and 57 percent in big cities and their suburbs. The racial gap was so large in cities because white urbanites have died from Covid at vastly lower rates than white people in rural areas for most of the pandemic.

COVID-19 DEATH RATES IN

LARGE CITIES AND SUBURBS

60 deaths

per 100,000

MEDIUM AND SMALL CITIES

Dr. Stokes said that the findings demonstrated that whether people lived in a big city or small town sometimes had as much to do with their experience of Covid as the part of the country where they lived. In the pandemic’s second year, ending in February 2022, rural parts of the West, South and Northeast all experienced surging white Covid deaths, despite stark differences in those regions’ containment strategies.

“It’s not enough to look at Massachusetts versus Texas,” Dr. Stokes said. “You have to look at rural Massachusetts versus rural Texas.”

Heading into a critical fall booster campaign, Dr. Stokes said, the results spoke to a need for much more proactive vaccination plans tailored to Black Americans, especially rural ones. “Adopting equitable vaccine strategies requires us to go above and beyond simply making them available,” he said.

In small and medium cities and rural areas across the South, where protective policies were rare, Black people suffered among the highest Covid death rates of any racial or ethnic group in any region in the second year of the pandemic, Dr. Stokes found.

Among those killed was Jackqueline Lowery, 28, a middle school science teacher and single mother of two in Darlington, S.C., a mostly Black city of 6,000. Having just given birth to a son, Ms. Lowery hesitated to be inoculated because she worried — without needing to — that the vaccine would contaminate her breast milk.

When she called a cousin, Jessica Brigman, a nurse, in September to say that she had fallen ill, Ms. Brigman urged her to see a doctor. But Ms. Lowery, who had obesity and gestational diabetes, had another priority: She had not yet tested positive for the virus, and she needed to before she could qualify for Covid pay from her employer. In the meantime, she was using up valuable sick days.

“She was the sole provider, and she had to pay bills, and she wasn’t going to get paid because she’d missed a solid week of school,” Mrs. Brigman said of her cousin’s worries. “They kept telling her she needed proof of positive Covid status.”

By the time she got a positive Covid result, Ms. Lowery was hospitalized, Mrs. Brigman said. About a week later, with blood clotting near her lungs, she died from Covid as she was being transported to a better-equipped North Carolina hospital. Mrs. Brigman remembered her cousin’s anxiety about qualifying for Covid-related time off as she weakened.

“She was like, ‘I need to get a positive test, I need to get a test,’” Mrs. Brigman said. “She never was focused on anything else.”

Dr. Morris Brown III, who practices primary care nearby, said that financial worries often kept patients from seeking care in a state that has refused to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income people.

A booster dose of the Covid vaccine was administered at Gurley’s Pharmacy in Durham, N.C., earlier this year.Veasey Conway for The New York Times

Even deciding to seek treatment, though, does not guarantee finding it. Dr. Toney Graham III, a South Carolina hospitalist, said that his orders for Paxlovid antiviral pills were rejected until he found the single rural pharmacy nearby that stocked it. Whatever Covid-related public education campaigns once existed have dried up, he said, leaving people in the dark about boosters and treatments.

“There’s been a big drop-off in communication,” Dr. Graham said.

Nonwhite people have generally faced the most severe disadvantages in surviving Covid at young and middle ages, partly because of differences in the burden of chronic illness and workplace risks.

A return to workplaces by white people may be helping to diminish the racial gap in infections across age groups, said Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California. But as long as nonwhite workers are in closer contact with customers and colleagues and can less afford to stay home sick, she said, workplace-related disparities will persist.

Black people have also kept masking at greater rates, national polls indicate, a split that rural residents said was still on sharp display. “It’s more the Black who wear their masks,” said Roy Lee McKenzie, 78, of South Carolina, who is still recovering from a 2020 Covid case.

In rural areas, hospital closures, job losses, low vaccination rates and health problems stemming from poorer medical access have all exacerbated the effects of the pandemic. Inoculation rates were much lower in rural counties that voted more for Donald Trump, research has shown, but also in rural areas with health worker shortages and with more Black residents.

Janice Probst, who studies rural health at the University of South Carolina, said that the state’s strategy of funneling vaccines first through hospitals, and then through large chain pharmacies, had the effect of leaving behind more disadvantaged rural residents whose towns had neither.

In some places, though, even progress in vaccinating nonwhite communities has not been enough.

In Minnesota, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults under 65 were more highly vaccinated than white residents during the first Omicron wave, according to research led by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. But middle-aged nonwhite people were killed more often by Covid anyway. Black people suffered double the death rate of white people.

“The whole way that the pandemic is framed now from political leaders is very much that people can choose their level of risk,” Dr. Wrigley-Field said. But, she said, “the risk that social groups have does not fall in lock step with their vaccination. It’s decoupled from that because of all the other things in our society that put some people at more risk than others.”

Garland Vows Everyone Responsible For Jan. 6 Will Be Held Accountable

‘Kind of Wild/Creative’: Emails Shed Light on Trump Fake Electors Plan

“Previously undisclosed communications among Trump campaign aides and outside advisers provide new insight into their efforts to overturn the election in the weeks leading to Jan. 6.

July 26, 2022Updated 2:15 p.m. ET

One Arizona Republican involved in the effort to reverse the election outcome advocated keeping a key element of the strategy quiet “so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it” on Jan. 6, 2021.Ash Ponders for The New York Times

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Previously undisclosed emails provide an inside look at the increasingly desperate and often slapdash efforts by advisers to President Donald J. Trump to reverse his election defeat in the weeks before the Jan. 6 attack, including acknowledgments that a key element of their plan was of dubious legality and lived up to its billing as “fake.”

The dozens of emails among people connected to the Trump campaign, outside advisers and close associates of Mr. Trump show a particular focus on assembling lists of people who would claim — with no basis — to be Electoral College electors on his behalf in battleground states that he had lost.

In emails reviewed by The New York Times and authenticated by people who had worked with the Trump campaign at the time, one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word “fake” to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide Vice President Mike Pence and Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome. And lawyers working on the proposal made clear they knew that the pro-Trump electors they were putting forward might not hold up to legal scrutiny.

“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted,” Jack Wilenchik, a Phoenix-based lawyer who helped organize the pro-Trump electors in Arizona, wrote in a Dec. 8, 2020, email to Boris Epshteyn, a strategic adviser for the Trump campaign.

In a follow-up email, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes,” adding a smiley face emoji.

The emails provide new details of how a wing of the Trump campaign worked with outside lawyers and advisers to organize the elector plan and pursue a range of other options, often with little thought to their practicality. One email showed that many of Mr. Trump’s top advisers were informed of problems naming Trump electors in Michigan — a state he had lost — because pandemic rules had closed the state Capitol building where the so-called electors had to gather.

The emails show that participants in the discussions reported details of their activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and in at least one case to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. Around the same time, according to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, Mr. Meadows emailed another campaign adviser saying, “We just need to have someone coordinating the electors for states.”

Many of the emails went to Mr. Epshteyn, who was acting as a coordinator for people inside and outside the Trump campaign and the White House and remains a close aide to Mr. Trump.

Mr. Epshteyn, the emails show, was a regular point of contact for John Eastman, the lawyer whose plan for derailing congressional certification of the Electoral College result on Jan. 6, 2021, was embraced by Mr. Trump.

Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 Hearings

---

Mr. Epshteyn not only fielded and passed along to Mr. Giuliani the detailed proposal for Jan. 6 prepared by Mr. Eastman, he also handled questions about how to pay Mr. Eastman and made the arrangements for him to visit the White House on Jan. 4, 2021, the emails show.

That was the day of the Oval Office meeting in which Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman unsuccessfully pressured Mr. Pence to adopt the plan — an exchange witnessed by Mr. Pence’s two top aides, Marc Short and Greg Jacob, both of whom testified last week to the federal grand jury investigating the assault on the Capitol and what led to it.

The emails highlight how much of the legwork of finding ways to challenge Mr. Trump’s losses in the battleground states was done by Mike Roman, director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Roman, the emails show, coordinated with others who played roles in advising Mr. Trump. Among them were the lawyers Jenna Ellis and Bruce Marks; Gary Michael Brown, who served as the deputy director of Election Day operations for Mr. Trump’s campaign; and Christina Bobb, who at the time worked for One America News Network and now works with Mr. Trump’s PAC.

The emails were apparently not shared with lawyers in the White House Counsel’s Office, who advised that the “fake electors” plan was not legally sound, or other lawyers on the campaign.

Some of the participants also expressed approval in the emails for keeping some of their activities out of the public eye.

For instance, after Mr. Trump hosted Pennsylvania state legislators at the White House in late November to discuss reversing the election outcome, Mr. Epshteyn celebrated when news of the meeting didn’t quickly leak. “The WH meeting hasn’t been made public, which is both shocking and great,” he wrote to Ms. Ellis.

Jenna Ellis, at left, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn, at right, were involved in the coordinated effort to overturn the 2020 election result. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

On Dec. 8, 2020, Mr. Wilenchik wrote that Kelli Ward, one of the Republicans in Arizona participating in the fake electors plan, recommended trying “to keep it under wraps until Congress counts the vote Jan. 6th (so we can try to ‘surprise’ the Dems and media with it) — I tend to agree with her.”

Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Wilenchik, Mr. Roman, Mr. Eastman, Ms. Bobb and James Troupis, another lawyer involved in the plan, either declined to comment or did not respond to emails or calls seeking comment.

Mr. Marks, in an email, disputed that there was anything inappropriate or improper at work.

“I do not believe there was anything ‘fake’ or illegal about the alternate slates of delegates, and particularly Pennsylvania,” he said. “There was a history of alternate slates from Hawaii in 1960. Nothing was secret about this — they were provided to the National Archives, as I understand the procedure, and then it was up to Congress to decide what to do.”

Mr. Marks added: “I had no involvement with Professor Eastman’s advice regarding the vice president’s role, which I only learned about after the fact, and do not support.”

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has produced evidence that Mr. Trump was aware of the electors plan. Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said in a deposition to the panel that Mr. Trump had called her and put Mr. Eastman on the phone “to talk about the importance of the R.N.C. helping the campaign gather these contingent electors.”

The panel has also heard testimony from Mr. Jacob, who was Mr. Pence’s counsel in the White House, that Mr. Eastman admitted in the Jan. 4 Oval Office meeting — with Mr. Trump present — that his plan to have Mr. Pence obstruct the electoral certification violated the Electoral Count Act.

The emails show less than lawyerly precision at times. Mr. Marks repeatedly referred to Cleta Mitchell, another lawyer helping Mr. Trump, as “Clita” and “Clavita,” prompting Mr. Epshteyn to reply: “It’s Cleta, not Clavita.”

Another time, Mr. Epshteyn wrote to Mr. Marks: “Do you mean Arizona when you say Nevada???”

By early December, Mr. Epshteyn was seemingly helping to coordinate the efforts, conferring repeatedly with Mr. Marks and others. Mr. Wilenchik told his fellow lawyers he had been discussing an idea proposed by still another lawyer working with the campaign, Kenneth Chesebro, an ally of Mr. Eastman’s, to submit slates of electors loyal to Mr. Trump.

“His idea is basically that all of us (GA, WI, AZ, PA, etc.) have our electors send in their votes (even though the votes aren’t legal under federal law — because they’re not signed by the Governor); so that members of Congress can fight about whether they should be counted on January 6th,” Mr. Wilenchik wrote in the email on Dec. 8, 2020, to Mr. Epshteyn and half a dozen other people.

“Kind of wild/creative — I’m happy to discuss,” Mr. Wilenchik continued. “My comment to him was that I guess there’s no harm in it, (legally at least) — i.e. we would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted.”

Supporters of President Donald J. Trump protested in Phoenix two days after Election Day. Arizona was one of the states targeted in the fake electors scheme.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

As they organized the fake elector scheme, lawyers appointed a “point person” in seven states to help organize those electors who were willing to sign their names to false documents. In Pennsylvania, that point person was Douglas V. Mastriano, a proponent of Mr. Trump’s lies of a stolen election who is now the Republican nominee for governor.

But even Mr. Mastriano needed assurances to go along with a plan other Republicans were telling him was “illegal,” according to a Dec. 12 email sent by Ms. Bobb that also referred to Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City.

“Mastriano needs a call from the mayor. This needs to be done. Talk to him about legalities of what they are doing,” she wrote, adding: “Electors want to be reassured that the process is * legal * essential for greater strategy.”

The emails showed the group initially hoped to get Republican state legislatures or governors to join their plans and give them the imprimatur of legitimacy. But by December, it was clear no authorities would agree to go along, so the Trump lawyers set their sights on pressuring Mr. Pence, who was scheduled to preside over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6.

On Dec. 7, Mr. Troupis, who worked for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, wrote to Mr. Epshteyn that there was “no need for the legislators to act.” He cited Mr. Chesebro’s legal analysis that the key to Mr. Trump’s hopes was not blocking state certification of the electors on Dec. 14, but creating a reason for Mr. Pence to block or delay congressional certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.

“The second slate just shows up at noon on Monday and votes and then transmits the results,” Mr. Troupis wrote of organizing Republican slates of electors to cast ballots for Mr. Trump on Dec. 14. “It is up to Pence on Jan 6 to open them. Our strategy, which we believe is replicable in all 6 contested states, is for the electors to meet and vote so that an interim decision by a Court to certify Trump the winner can be executed on by the Court ordering the Governor to issue whatever is required to name the electors. The key nationally would be for all six states to do it so the election remains in doubt until January.”

The documents also demonstrated the legal team had relied on widely debunked information to point to broad claims of election fraud. On Dec. 17, Mr. Epshteyn wrote to Mr. Giuliani that a document on election fraud created by Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro — which has been discredited in public reporting, by state officials and courts — “appears to be the most comprehensive summary of voter fraud from this election season.”

The lawyers were aware their legal efforts were being ridiculed. On Dec. 23, Mr. Marks wrote: “You folks are getting killed in the media on litigation strategy, even on Fox and among conservatives.”

But they were undeterred.

By Christmas Eve, Mr. Eastman seemed to want to harness the power of Mr. Trump’s millions of supporters.

At 8:04 p.m. that night, Mr. Eastman sent Mr. Epshteyn an email that he had received in which a woman implored him to ask Mr. Trump “to put out what he would like his 74 million followers to do to help.” She added: “We need to be one voice, with laser focus, SPEAKING AS 74 MILLION STRONG.”

A video clip of John Eastman, left, invoking the Fifth Amendment during a deposition for the House Jan. 6 committee.Doug Mills/The New York Times

In his email to Mr. Epshteyn, Mr. Eastman wrote, “Thought I’d forward this. 74 Million strong. Let’s figure out a targeted way to deploy them. Rolling thunder? One legislature at a time? The others can see it coming.”

Days earlier, Mr. Trump had told his supporters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6 for a “protest” that he promised would “be wild.”

On Dec. 27, Mr. Epshteyn wrote that Mr. Trump “liked” an aggressive approach being proposed by the lawyers, and that Mr. Eastman would be the “face of the media strategy” along with Mr. Giuliani.

“We need one voice out there,” Mr. Epshteyn wrote of Mr. Eastman, saying he’s “already been out/liked by POTUS.”

Jan. 6 was just days away“

Justice Dept. investigating Trump’s actions in Jan. 6 criminal probe

“People familiar with the probe said investigators are examining the former president’s conversations and have seized phone records of top aides

Carol D. Leonnig

Former president Donald Trump in Washington on July 26. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses before a grand jury — including two top aides to Vice President Mike Pence — have asked in recent days about conversations with Trump, his lawyers, and others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 and January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers and advisers about fake electors and sending electors back to the states, the people said. Some of the questions focused directly on the extent of Trump’s involvement in the fake-elector effort led by his outside lawyers, including John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, these people said.

In addition, Justice Department investigators in April received phone records of key officials and aides in the Trump administration, including his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to two people familiar with the matter. That effort is another indicator of how expansive the Jan. 6 probe had become, well before the high-profile, televised House hearings in June and July on the subject.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol built their case over a series of eight public hearings. Here’s how they did it. (Video: Blair Guild/The Washington Post)

The Washington Post and other news organizations have previously written that the Justice Department is examining the conduct of Eastman, Giuliani and others in Trump’s orbit. But the degree of prosecutors’ interest in Trump’s actions has not been previously reported, nor has the review of senior Trump aides’ phone records.

A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesman and a lawyer for Meadows both declined to comment.

Trump didn't want to call for Jan. 6 rioters' prosecution, new video shows

The revelations raise the stakes of an already politically fraught probe involving a former president, still central to his party’s fortunes, who has survived previous investigations and two impeachments. Long before the Jan. 6 investigation, Trump spent years railing against the Justice Department and the FBI; the investigation moving closer to him will probably intensify that antagonism.

Federal criminal investigations are by design opaque, and probes involving political figures are among the most closely held secrets at the Justice Department. Many end without criminal charges. The lack of observable investigative activity involving Trump and his White House for more than a year after the Jan. 6 attack has fueled criticism, particularly from the left, that the Justice Department is not pursuing the case aggressively enough.

In trying to understand how and why Trump partisans and lawyers sought to change the outcome of the election, one person familiar with the probe said, investigators also want to understand, at a minimum, what Trump told his lawyers and senior officials to do. Any investigation surrounding the effort to undo the results of the election must navigate complex issues of First Amendment-protected political activity and when or whether a person’s speech could become part of an alleged conspiracy in support of a coup.

Many elements of the sprawling Jan. 6 criminal investigation have remained under wraps. But in recent weeks the public pace of the work has increased, with a fresh round of subpoenas, search warrants and interviews. Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, and lawyer, Greg Jacob, appeared before the grand jury in downtown Washington in recent days, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Both men declined to comment.

The Justice Department efforts are separate from the inquiry underway by the House committee, which has sought to portray Trump as responsible for inciting the Capitol riot and for being derelict in his duty for refusing to stop it. Both Short and Jacob have testified before the committee, telling lawmakers that Pence resisted Trump’s attempts to enlist him in the cause.

Unlike the Justice Department, the House panel does not have the power to launch criminal investigations or charge anyone with wrongdoing.

More than 840 suspects have been charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot

The Justice Department probe began amid the smoke, blood and chaos at the Capitol and has led to criminal charges against more than 840 individuals, expanding to include an examination of events that occurred elsewhere in the days and weeks before the attack — including at the White House, in state capitols and at a D.C. hotel.

There are two principal tracks of the investigation that could ultimately lead to additional scrutiny of Trump, two people familiar with the situation said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

The first centers on seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct a government proceeding, the type of charges already filed against individuals who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and on two leaders of far-right groups, Stewart Rhodes and Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who did not breach the Capitol but were allegedly involved in planning the day’s events.

The second involves potential fraud associated with the false-electors scheme or with pressure Trump and his allies allegedly put on the Justice Department and others to falsely claim that the election was rigged and votes were fraudulently cast.

Recent subpoenas obtained by The Post show that two Arizona state legislators were ordered to turn over communications with “any member, employee, or agent of Donald J. Trump or any organization advocating in favor of the 2020 re-election of Donald J. Trump, including ‘Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.’ ”

No former president has ever been charged with a crime in the country’s history. In cases when investigators found evidence suggesting a president engaged in criminal conduct, as with Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton, investigators and successive administrations concluded it was better to grant immunity or forgo prosecution. One goal was to avoid appearing to use government power to punish political enemies and assure the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has vowed that the Jan. 6 investigation will follow the facts wherever they lead and said that no one is exempt or above scrutiny, while refusing to divulge information outside of court filings.

Garland told NBC News in a Tuesday interview that the department pursues justice “without fear or favor. We intend to hold everyone, anyone, who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6th, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable — that’s what we do. We don’t pay any attention to other issues with respect to that.”

Biden slams Trump for watching Capitol riot on television as police faced 'medieval hell'

The Jan. 6 investigation is by some measures the largest ever undertaken by the Justice Department. While investigators in nearly every part of the country have been involved, the lion’s share of the work is being done by three offices: the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, and the criminal and national security divisions at department headquarters.

In the probe’s first year, prosecutors focused largely on the people who breached the Capitol, some of them violently, charging hundreds with interfering with or assaulting police or obstructing an official proceeding.

This year, the fake-elector scheme has become a major focus of the Justice Department inquiry. After Trump lost the election, lawyers and others close to him urged GOP officials in key states to submit alternate and illegitimate slates of electors to reject the results of the state vote totals. Those would-be electors were aided in their effort by Trump campaign officials and Giuliani, who said publicly that the rival slates were necessary and appropriate, and has been described as overseeing the strategy.

Jeffrey Clark taken to the street in pajamas while federal agents searched his home

Last month, federal agents fanned out in multiple states to serve grand jury subpoenas, execute search warrants and interview witnesses — a significant escalation of overt investigative activity. As part of that effort, agents searched Eastman’s electronic devices, and conducted a search at the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who enthusiastically embraced some of Trump’s last-ditch efforts to stop Biden from becoming president. Many of those who received subpoenas were told specifically to turn over their communications with Giuliani.

The Justice Department inspector general is also an important player in the investigation, as it examines Clark’s role as a department official in allegedly furthering the efforts.

In a call on Dec. 27, 2020, witnesses have said, Trump told acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen that he wanted his Justice Department to say there was significant election fraud, and said he was poised to oust Rosen and replace him with Clark, who was willing to make that assertion.

Rosen told Trump that the Justice Department could not “flip a switch and change the election,” according to notes of the conversation cited by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I don’t expect you to do that,” Trump responded, according to the notes. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

The president urged Rosen to “just have a press conference.” Rosen refused. “We don’t see that,” he told Trump. “We’re not going to have a press conference.”

Jacqueline Alemany and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.“