The group that took credit for Friday’s deadly terrorist attack in Moscow is the Islamic State in Afghanistan, called Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.

ISIS-K was founded in 2015 by disgruntled members of the Pakistani Taliban, who subsequently embraced a more violent version of Islam. The group saw its ranks roughly halved to around 1,500 to 2,000 fighters in 2021 due to a combination of US airstrikes and Afghan commando raids that killed many of its leaders.

The group got a dramatic second wind shortly after the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government that year. During the US military withdrawal from the country, ISIS-K carried out a suicide bombing at Kabul International Airport in August 2021, killing 13 US troops and as many as 170 civilians.

The attack raised ISIS-K’s international profile and positioned it as a major threat to the Taliban’s ability to rule.

Since then, the Taliban have been waging battles against ISIS-K in Afghanistan. So far, Taliban security forces have prevented the group from seizing territory or recruiting large numbers of former Taliban fighters who were bored in peacetime – one of the worst-case scenarios laid out after Afghanistan’s Western-backed government collapsed .

President Biden and his top commanders have said the United States will launch “over-the-horizon” strikes from a base in the Persian Gulf against ISIS and Qaeda insurgents who threaten the United States and its interests abroad.

Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of the Army’s Central Command, told a House committee on Thursday that ISIS-K “retains the ability and will to destroy American and Western interests abroad in just six months.” to fall with little to do.” no warning.”

Earlier this month, the US government had information about a planned terrorist attack in Moscow – possibly targeting large gatherings, including concerts – prompting the State Department to issue a public advisory to Americans in Russia. The US government also shared this information with Russian authorities, in accordance with its long-standing ‘duty to warn’ policy.

ISIS is clearly trying to project its external operations far beyond its home territory. Counterterrorism officials in Europe say they have foiled several nascent ISIS-K plots to attack targets there in recent months.

In a post on its official Telegram account in January, ISIS-K said it was behind a bombing that killed 84 people in Kerman, Iran, during a memorial parade for Major General Qassim Suleimani, a respected Iranian commander who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in 2020.

ISIS-K, which has repeatedly threatened Iran over what it says is its polytheism and apostasy, has claimed responsibility for several previous attacks there.

And now the group has claimed responsibility for the attack in Moscow.

“ISIS-K has been fixated on Russia for the past two years” and regularly criticizes President Vladimir V. Putin in its propaganda, said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consultancy based in New York. “ISIS-K accuses the Kremlin of running Muslim blood, citing Moscow’s interventions in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria.”

California most conservative congressional district just experienced his own version of the “Groundhog Day” time loop. After two elections, two weeks apart, the same two candidates have advanced to two subsequent elections.

Vince Fong and Mike Boudreaux, both Republicans, have qualified for a runoff election in the state’s 20th Congressional District to determine who will complete the term of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who resigned last year from Congress, not long after he was removed from leadership. after.

Both Mr. Fong and Mr. Boudreaux had already won a bid to run in the November general election for a full two-year term starting in January 2025. That was determined in an earlier primary on March 5, Super Tuesday.

But in a special election on Tuesday, Mr. Fong, a state lawmaker and former aide to Mr. McCarthy who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, won more than 42 percent of the vote. Mr. Boudreaux, the longtime sheriff of Tulare County, finished with about 26 percent of the vote. If the top two winners — with neither candidate receiving 50 percent of the vote — they will compete again on May 21 to determine who completes Mr. McCarthy’s term.

Marisa Wood, a Democrat, finished third Tuesday, with about 23 percent of the vote. (Ms. Wood also finished third in the primary on March 5.) The race was not called until Friday by The Associated Press.

Voters in the district, which is in California’s Central Valley, now have two months before they are asked to cast their ballots again for Mr. Fong or Mr. Boudreaux. They will then have a break of more than five months before voting for one of the Republicans in November. Whoever wins the runoff in May will enter the November election with the incumbency advantage, even if this is a relatively new advantage.

Turnout in Tuesday’s special election was significantly lower than on March 5, with tens of thousands of voters opting to stay home, but that appeared to do little to change the outcome.

Georgia, with its long history of black voter suppression, has been ground zero for fights over voting rights laws for decades. The state has often seen stark disparities in turnout between white and non-white communities, with the latter typically voting at a much slower rate.

But not always: In the 2012 election, when Barack Obama won a second term in the White House, the turnout rate for black voters under 38 in Lowndes County—a Republican-leaning county in south Georgia—was actually four percentage points higher than the turnout of black voters under 38. rate for white voters of a similar age.

It turned out to be temporary. Turnout for younger white voters in Lowndes was 14 percentage points higher in 2020 than for Black voters of the same age, according to new research from Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO.

What happened in between? It’s impossible to say for sure because there are many variables, including the fact that Obama is no longer on the ballot.

But a growing body of evidence points to a pivotal 2013 Supreme Court decision, Shelby County v. Holder, that overturned a core part of the Voting Rights Act. The court effectively struck down a provision that required counties and states with a history of racial discrimination in elections — including all of Georgia — to obtain permission from the Justice Department before changing voting laws or procedures.

The result was a slew of laws that imposed restrictions on voting, such as limiting voting by mail and adding voter identification requirements. (One new provision in Georgia, which prohibits most people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line within 50 yards of a polling place, was featured on a recent episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”)

Connecting the dots

For years, political scientists and civil rights leaders argued that the Supreme Court’s decision would lead to a resurgence of suppression of historically marginalized voters because local and state governments, many in the South, would no longer need federal permission to change voting laws and regulations. Two new studies support that theory.

This month, research from the Brennan Center found that the gap in turnout rates between white and nonwhite voters “grew nearly twice as fast in previously covered jurisdictions as in other parts of the country with similar demographic and socioeconomic profiles.”

In other words, the turnout gap tended to grow fastest in areas that lost federal control after 2013.

Podhorzer’s research analyzed turnout at the provincial level. He found that the growing disparity in racial turnout since the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby was felt most acutely by younger voters across the country.

These are trends that worry Democrats when it comes to areas like Lowndes, home to Valdosta State University, with more than 12,000 students.

Podhorzer discovered that older voters are more resistant to voting changes because they have developed a fixed voting behavior. But it is much more likely that younger or new voters will be discouraged or prevented from voting.

It is “a kind of generational replacement, with older and established voters maintaining their voting habits, while new restrictions hinder younger voters,” Podhorzer said in his report, which will be released this weekend.

In Bulloch County, Ga., Winston County, Miss., and Newberry County, S.C., the racial turnout gap among young voters grew by 20 percentage points or more between the 2012 and 2020 elections. In each of these counties, the gap for both Gen X and even older voters has never grown by more than 11 percentage points.

Emergence in 2024

The youth vote in November will be critical, especially for President Biden. He won 60 percent of voters under 30 in 2020, as exit polls show, an important part of his coalition. But the 2022 midterm elections saw that a downward trend in the youth vote, and young voters have expressed exasperation with the president heading into this year’s elections.

A caveat: Using turnout to assess the impact of changes in voting laws is an imperfect assessment at best because it does not take into account other motivating factors, such as close races or polarizing candidates. It also ignores aspects of the cost of voting, such as the time it takes.

Seeing a more substantial racial turnout gap among young voters goes against some conventional wisdom about recent changes in voting laws. Political experts have often argued that limiting access to mail-in voting or reducing the number of polling stations is likely to impact older voters, who are often less mobile.

But Bernard Fraga, a professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, noted that seeing a wider racial turnout gap among young voters was “fairly consistent with the previous literature on who should be most affected by these types of laws.”

“For populations that have historically been disenfranchised or less likely to vote, small changes in voting bills can have a much larger impact,” Fraga said, “because they are less resilient to this type of oppression. ”

Are you an undecided voter? We want to hear from you

By all estimates, a relatively small number of voters in just a few states are likely to decide this year’s presidential election: the undecided voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

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Republicans in Congress continue to sprint for the exit.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, announced Friday afternoon that he would resign from Congress months earlier than expected on April 19, bringing the already minuscule Republican majority to one vote.

After his departure next month, Republicans will hold 217 seats in the House of Representatives compared to Democrats’ 213, meaning the Republican Party can afford only a single deviation from the party line when it comes to voting when all members are present .

Mr. Gallagher, the four-term lawmaker who chairs the Special Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, gave no reason for his early departure in the brief statement announcing his plans. He simply said that “after discussions with my family, I have made the decision to resign from my position,” and that he has “worked closely with the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives on this timeline.”

But the leaders did not expect this. It came on a day that highlighted Republican disarray and division, as Speaker Mike Johnson pushed through a $1.2 trillion spending bill that sparked an uprising on his right flank and at least one of its members to begin the process of declaring of a vote to impeach him.

After Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, surprised Mr. Johnson this month with the announcement that he would soon resign, the speaker said he did not expect more members to follow suit.

“I think, I hope and believe that this is the end of exits for the time being,” he said less than two weeks ago.

Mr. Gallagher, one of three Republicans who voted against the ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas, announced after that vote that he did not intend to seek another term — already an unusual move for a young committee chairman. It reflected the frustration many Republicans in the House of Representatives felt in what they described as a dysfunctional governing body.

Mr. Gallagher’s early departure will make it even more difficult for Mr. Johnson to pursue legislation that cannot deliver Democratic votes, and will give any Republican more leverage as the chairman tries to guide his uncontrollable majority through an election year.

On Friday, for example, with a majority of Republicans opposed to the spending measure, Mr. Johnson was forced to rely primarily on Democratic votes to pass it.

The current makeup of the House of Representatives leaves Republicans with virtually no buffer to deal with the inevitable absences caused by illness, travel delays, weddings, funerals and unforeseen events that could keep their members away from voting.

Next month, Democrats are likely to fill a safe seat occupied by Rep. Brian Higgins of New York, who left Congress to become president of Shea’s Performing Arts Center. In late spring and early summer, Republicans are likely to fill two solidly Republican seats vacated by Reps. Bill Johnson of Ohio, who left Congress to become president of Youngstown State University, and Kevin McCarthy, who resigned from his post. seat in California. late last year after he was removed from the speakership.

Mr. Gallagher’s announcement came on the same day that Mr. Buck was packing up the last of his belongings in his bare office on his last day in the House of Representatives, following his recent announcement that he too would shorten his final term.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, took the first step toward impeaching House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday by introducing a resolution calling for his removal after passing bipartisan legislation. had pushed through $1.2 trillion that enraged the far right.

“Today I filed a motion to evict after Speaker Johnson betrayed our conference and broke our rules,” Ms. Greene said shortly after passing the package, which was needed to end a partial government shutdown after midnight. prevent.

Although Ms. Greene said she would not immediately vote to impeach Mr. Johnson, her move presented an extraordinary challenge to his leadership and the second time in less than six months that divided Republicans in the House of Representatives have made an effort to fire their own chairman.

“It’s more of a warning than a pink slip,” Ms. Greene told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “We need a new speaker.”

Ms. Greene’s resolution, introduced while the spending bill was still being voted on, was a major test for Mr. Johnson’s leadership and was yet another tumultuous moment in the rancorous year the House has endured under a fractured Republican majority .

Ms. Greene declined to say Friday whether she would try to invoke a privilege available to any member of the House of Representatives to force a quick vote on Mr. Johnson’s resignation, leaving lawmakers with a number of questions and uncertainty remain when they leave for a planned two weeks. -week break. But her resolution at least raised the possibility that Mr. Johnson could become the second Republican speaker to face impeachment by his colleagues, less than six months after Republican Party rebels jettisoned former Chairman Kevin McCarthy , making him the first ever expelled from the Republican Party. function.

Before voting began Friday, Ms. Greene rose in the House of Representatives to attack the spending bill, calling it a victory for Democrats and attacking measures she said funded progressive policies.

“This is not a Republican bill; this is a Democratic-controlled Chuck Schumer bill,” Ms. Greene said on the House floor Friday morning.

She expressed outrage that Mr. Johnson, in passing the measure, had violated an unwritten but sacred rule among Republicans against introducing legislation that does not receive support from a majority of their members.

Ms. Greene’s move was the culmination of months of dissatisfaction among right-wing lawmakers over the leadership of Mr. Johnson, an ultraconservative Republican who won unanimous support to become chairman in October but has angered his right flank by cutting a number of deals with Democrats want to keep the government funded.

Ms. Greene told Stephen K. Bannon, a former adviser to the Trump administration, on his “War Room” program on Friday morning that she was considering minute by minute whether or not to call for Mr. Johnson’s impeachment. .”

“Our majority has been completely handed to the Democrats,” Ms Greene said on the floor shortly before introducing her motion, echoing complaints from fellow far-right members of her party that the spending packages Mr Johnson had agreed to represented a failure. their majority.

“This was our strength. This was our leverage. This was our chance to secure the border and he didn’t do that,” Ms. Greene told reporters on Friday before leaving the Capitol. “It’s treason.”

Lucas Broadwater reporting contributed.

As the Biden administration increasingly clashes with Israeli leaders over the war in Gaza, the question often arises as to whether U.S. officials will try to exert some form of tougher influence if Israel ignores their pleas.

They could do this, critics say, to try to get Israel to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza teetering on the edge of famine, to scale back its military campaign or to refrain from invading the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, where many civilians have fled.

Since Hamas’ terrorist attacks on October 7, which killed about 1,200 Israelis and took about 240 hostage, Israel’s attacks have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry. President Biden has tried behind the scenes to influence Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while showing strong support for Israel. Yet confrontations are lurking.

Israeli officials are expected to meet their American counterparts in Washington next week to express opposing views on plans to invade Rafah. And a growing number of former US officials say Biden must exert influence to distract Israel from what they call its disastrous war.

The Biden administration has done that increasingly spoken of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and mentioned this, among other things, in a draft resolution on the war that the country presented to the United Nations Security Council this week. The resolution called for an “immediate and lasting ceasefire” if Hamas releases all hostages – repeating the government’s position but with stronger language. Russia and China vetoed the resolution on Friday. Many countries have called for a ceasefire without conditions.

Mr. Biden would not be the first president to use hard levers if he chooses. Four administrations, from Gerald R. Ford’s to George HW Bush’s, have all withheld some form of aid or diplomatic agreement or strongly threatened that they would, said Martin S. Indyk, a special envoy to Israel -Palestinian negotiations in the Obama administration.

“In recent years, the willingness to use the aid relationship as leverage has declined dramatically,” he said. “The dependency relationship is there, ready to be used.”

American influence on Israel falls into three main categories. We’ll start with gun assistance, the most important.

Shipments of weapons

The United States is by far the largest supplier of military aid to Israel. In 2022, aid amounted to $3.3 billion. Since the war began, the Biden administration has urged Congress to pass funding legislation that would include $14 billion in additional aid, but that has been halted mainly for reasons unrelated to the war.

Israel is running out of much of its ammunition and needs the American shipments. The US government is working to approve new weapons orders and has accelerated orders that were in the pipeline before the start of the war.

Between October and around December 1, 2023, the United States transferred about 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells to Israel, US officials said late last year. From Dec. 1 to now, those total transmission numbers have increased by about 15 percent, a U.S. official said.

There have been more than a hundred transfers since October, but almost all of them have taken place without notice Congress over loopholes in disclosure rules.

Last December, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken twice invoked rarely used emergency authority to send tank munitions and artillery shells to Israel without congressional review. These were the only two times the administration has publicly reported government-to-government military sales to Israel since October.

If Mr. Biden were to order a slowdown or halt some or most arms transfers, Israeli leaders would get the message, current and former U.S. officials said.

Mr. Biden has indicated he is aware of the concerns. He issued a memorandum in February, it established standards for compliance by all countries receiving US weapons, including compliance with international humanitarian law, and required countries to submit signed letters to the State Department pledging to commit would follow the rules.

Some supporters of the tougher approach argue that Biden should declare that Israel is violating a section of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which states that the United States cannot provide weapons or other assistance to a country that “directly prohibits or otherwise restricts” it . or indirectly, the transportation or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” Eight Democratic senators sent a letter to Mr. Biden on March 11, urging him to do so.

They noted that the law does not prevent the U.S. government from providing defensive supplies to a country that violates the law, such as interceptor missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome.

Josh Paul, a former official at the State Department’s political-military bureau, which oversees arms transfers, said that if Mr. Biden were to take this action, Israel would face a difficult choice between continuing his campaign in Gaza or the stockpiling of ammunition for deterrence. must maintain against other hostile forces, especially Hezbollah and Iran.

“Cutting off certain weapons would force Israel to think about what the urgent needs are for its national security – is it using as many weapons as possible in Gaza?” said Mr Paul, who resigned in October in protest against the government’s war policy.

The State Department has not approved a request from Israel for 24,000 assault rifles, an order that The New York Times reported in November was being scrutinized by some U.S. lawmakers and State Department officials because of the potential for guns would fuel extremist settler violence against Palestinians. in the West Bank.

Many arms transfers involve weapons systems that Israel bought and paid for years ago and will soon be delivered, a former U.S. official and a current U.S. official said. At any given time, there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of open contracts for sale to Israel, the current US official said. The two Americans argued that it could be difficult to slow or suspend specific sales, and that such actions could expose the U.S. government to legal liability under contract law.

The former US official argued that halting the transfers could send a message to Iran and its partners that the United States is willing to abandon Israel in times of need. But this official was not aware of any formal intelligence assessment of the effect of such action.

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, made clear this week that he opposed putting conditions on military aid to Israel to try to influence its operations in Gaza.

“This is not the time to talk about conditioning,” Mr. Reed said. “We are Israel’s ally. They are our ally.”

The diplomatic shield

The United States has been a staunch ally of Israel in international institutions, where many countries have expressed outrage over civilian casualties in Gaza.

This is especially true at the UN. The Biden administration has shielded Israel from diplomatic condemnations and from resolutions calling on Israel to immediately end or suspend its war.

Less American support for Israel would open the country to stronger formal charges in the UN

Since the start of the war, the United States, as a member of the UN Security Council, has used its veto power to block three council resolutions calling for an immediate ceasefire without conditions.

Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations called the US-backed resolution a “hypocritical initiative” before blocking it on Friday.

The United States has also been outspokenly critical of the genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The court issued an interim ruling in January calling on Israel to prevent its armed forces from engaging in acts that would violate the 1948 Genocide Convention.

Sanctions

The Biden administration has refrained from imposing sanctions on Israeli officials but may be giving itself more leeway to do so. Such measures would likely be more aimed at curbing Israel’s policies and actions in the West Bank, where the current government has encouraged settlement expansion at the expense of Palestinians, than at curbing military operations in Gaza.

In late February, Mr. Blinken announced that the Biden administration deemed new Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories “contrary to international law” — a reversal of Trump administration policy and a return to a long-standing legal review by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On March 14, the ministry imposed sanctions on three Israeli settlers in the West Bank, accusing them of “extremist violence” against Palestinians. The Biden administration took similar action against four Israelis on February 1.

Tough US sanctions have failed to change the behavior of leaders in a range of countries, from Russia to Iran and North Korea. But sanctions against Israeli officials, or the threat thereof, could have a greater impact because Israel is a U.S. partner, and because many Israeli officials have assets and family members in the United States and travel there frequently.

Farnaz Fassihi contributed UN reporting

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, has always had the luxury of running for election for his party in remarkably good years. He won his seat in 2006, amid opposition to the Iraq War, won reelection in 2012, the last time a Democrat took over the state, and did so again in 2018, amid a national reckoning over Donald’s presidency J Trump.

His 2024 campaign will be different, and most likely the toughest of his career, with a Republican Party determined to win his seat and a Democratic president hanging on him like one of his signature rumpled suits. In an election year when control of the Senate hinges on the Democratic Party’s ability to win every competitive race, there is an enormous weight on the slumped shoulders of the famously confused 71-year-old.

“I’m fighting for the people of Ohio,” Mr. Brown said in an interview Wednesday. “There’s a reason I’m winning in a state that’s a little more Republican.”

Mr. Brown’s tousled hair and gravelly voice have appealed to working-class voters since he was elected Ohio secretary of state in 1982. His arms may be clutched tightly around his chest, but he exudes a casual confidence that he can win again in a tough fight. red Ohio, where he is the last Democrat to hold statewide office.

But beneath that image there are problems. On Monday, he had just received a message of support from the 100,000-strong Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council when a retired mason, Jeff King, pulled him aside in a weathered union hall in Dayton.

Mr. Brown has had numerous successes, Mr. King, who made the trip from his hometown of Cincinnati, told the senator. But, he wondered, would workers in a blue-collar state that twice delivered Trump victories of eight percentage points understand who should get the credit?

“That’s the mission,” Mr. Brown said, leaning forward. “They don’t know enough.”

The party and its union allies have made the re-election of Ohio’s senior senator their top priority — “the absolute top,” said Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the chairman of the AFL. The CIO Political Committee.

The election could get in Mr. Brown’s way. With Trump’s support — and a push from a Democratic super PAC — Democrats’ Republican opponent Bernie Moreno easily prevailed in the Republican Senate primaries on Tuesday, handing the incumbent president a setback with dizzying wealth, little political experience and the imprimatur. from a former president who could prompt some voters to split their tickets.

The next day, the Biden administration announced an $8.5 billion deal to finance Intel Corporation’s semiconductor production, much of it destined for Ohio, thanks to legislation that Mr. Brown helped secure. Thanks to Mr. Brown, that law, the Chips and Science Act, requires so-called project labor agreements to be entered into between management and union workers before construction of the plants can begin. So 7,000 union workers will be employed in the huge Intel complex outside Columbus.

On Wednesday, the government finalized stringent new emissions standards for cars and trucks that would increase electric vehicle production at the Stellantis Jeep complex in Toledo and car battery factories around Youngstown.

Finally, construction should begin around election time on a long-sought replacement for the Brent Spence Bridge, connecting Cincinnati to the Kentucky suburbs. That too was partly supplied by Mr Brown.

Yet Republicans are most confident for a much simpler reason: political seriousness. In March polls, Mr. Trump leads Mr. Biden in Ohio by as few as nine percentage points and as many as 18 percentage points. Mr. Brown will most likely lead Mr. Biden in the state, Republicans say, but not by enough to win.

“We now have the opportunity to retire the old commission,” Mr. Moreno proclaimed at his victory party on Tuesday, referring to Mr. Brown.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Brown emphasized that his toughest Senate race was his first, when he unseated Mike DeWine, who went on to win two terms as Ohio’s governor.

And Mr. DeWine reaffirmed that confidence Monday night, imploring Columbus voters to cast their votes for the candidate he thought could defeat Mr. Brown, State Senator Matt Dolan.

“This isn’t going to be an easy race, folks,” Mr. DeWine advised at the Hey Hey Bar & Grill in Columbus’s German Village. “I bumped into this guy.”

This year it could be different.

“Nothing can save Sherrod Brown from voting with Joe Biden 99 percent of the time,” Moreno said.

Compared to Mr. Moreno, a political newcomer, Mr. Brown is a fixture in Ohio. “People just know I’m standing up for them,” he said.

Two years ago, Tim Ryan, then a U.S. representative, ran for Senate as a Mahoning Valley Democrat cut from Mr. Brown’s mold. Although he ran a campaign that is almost universally praised as a textbook one, he lost to J.D. Vance by six percentage points.

But Mr. Ryan said he lacked something Mr. Brown has: a steady identity across the state. To win as a Democrat in Ohio, he said, “all you have to do is have the name Sherrod Brown.”

This fight will be about Mr. Moreno’s attempt to define Mr. Brown’s policy agenda — and the Democrat removing Mr. Biden’s name from it. Mr. Brown talks about his action to save more than 1,460 union officials’ pensions in Ohio through the Butch Lewis Act, a retirement provision named in memory of an Ohio teamster and included in the massive Covid relief bill, the American Rescue Plan.

He tells the audience about his role in the massive bill signed by Mr. Biden that expanded veterans health care to former service members exposed to toxic “burn pits” in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also named after an Ohioan, Sgt. First Class Heath Robinson, who died of lung cancer at age 39.

He speaks glowingly about the CHIPS Act, which would ensure that the two new semiconductor factories being built in Ohio with federal money will employ union-trained workers.

But even he said he understood the road ahead, especially when Mr. Moreno called his record “job-killing, Green New Deal radicalism.”

“They know the performance,” Mr Brown said. “They just don’t really know who did it.”

The sitting president will almost certainly be able to match the Republicans dollar for dollar and then some. Between the loyalty he built in the labor movement and corporate interests with cases before the Senate Banking Committee, which he chairs, Mr. Brown has built a formidable war chest: $33.5 million raised since 2019, and $13.5 million dollar cash on hand at the end of last month.

Mr. Moreno emerged from a brutal three-way primary with $2.4 million in cash, according to federal campaign finance records from late February.

And Mr. Brown said that beneath Ohio’s pro-Trump tilt was a state that was less conservative than Republicans believe. Last August, Ohioans crushed a ballot measure designed by Republicans to make it more difficult for future ballot measures, a transparent attempt to defeat an upcoming vote on abortion rights. Three months later, they enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution by 13 percentage points. On the same day, they voted to legalize marijuana – by 14 points.

“That should scare them,” Mr. Brown said of his Republican opponents. “They have to figure out how to win over those voters.”

Exactly how much Mr. Brown can continue to perform against national Democrats is a subject of debate in Ohio. David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, said the senator outperformed the rest of the Democratic ticket by more than 10 percentage points in 2018, beating Republican James B. Renacci by 7 percentage points when Mr. DeWine defeated his Democratic opponent defeated. ahead of Governor Richard Cordray by 3.7 points.

“The question is: To what extent is Biden competing here?” said David Pepper, a former chairman of the Democratic Party of Ohio. “If he competes hard, he keeps it within reach of Brown.”

In the union hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 82 in Dayton, it was impossible to find anyone who was not firmly in Mr. Brown’s camp.

“As many pensions as he has saved, absolutely” he will win, said David Bruce, the chairman of the Dayton Building Trades Council.

But beneath the bravado was a recognition of the work ahead.

“That’s our fight,” said retired bricklayer Mr. King, citing the flood of right-wing information consumed by many of his union brethren. “As union leaders, we are called to better communicate our message. The problem is that we are masons. We do not understand the messages.”

Congressional leaders scrambled Friday to crush a conservative uprising and pass a $1.2 trillion bipartisan bill needed to fund the government through the fall. They are rushing to push through the measure before the midnight deadline to avoid a partial shutdown.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives scheduled a mid-morning vote on the legislation, which would fund the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, the State Department and health agencies. But they were still working to stem defections in their ranks among Republicans, who were angered by a deal that critics say did not make deep enough spending cuts and did not include enough conservative policy mandates, moving through Congress with unusual speed was piloted.

Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies are relying on the same coalition of lawmakers that has passed every spending bill so far in the past year — almost all Democrats and a slim majority of Republicans — to expedite the bill through the House of Representatives under a special procedure called requires a two-thirds supermajority, or 290 votes. But with hours to go before the vote, it was not clear whether Mr Johnson could muster even half of his members to support the measure, potentially putting that threshold out of reach.

If the legislation, which rolls together six spending bills into one package, were to fail in the House of Representatives on Friday, lawmakers would be sent back to the drawing board just hours before government spending would virtually expire at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. guaranteeing at least partial closure.

Should this pass in the House of Representatives, it remains to be seen whether Senate conservatives will agree to quickly put the measure to a vote in that chamber, where any senator can delay consideration of legislation.

“Democracy is messy,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview on CNBC on Thursday. “It’s particularly messy at the moment, and at a time like this, but we have to get the job done and there are some very substantial wins in here.”

Democrats and Republicans have both highlighted victories in the hard-negotiated legislation. Republicans cited as victories the funding for 2,000 new Border Patrol agents, additional detention beds managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a provision cutting off aid to the main U.N. agency providing aid to the Palestinians. Democrats provided increases in funding for federal child care and education programs, cancer and Alzheimer’s research.

But the legislation has created a furor among ultraconservatives both inside and outside Capitol Hill, who have called on their supporters to lobby lawmakers to vote against it.

“America is being robbed with open borders and $2 trillion deficits – and there are blue AND red fingerprints on the knife,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, an influential conservative who led opposition to the legislation, wrote on social media Thursday evening.

By the time his ambitious health care legislation was introduced and chopped up and cursed and left for dead and revived and compromised and passed and finally signed into law, the entire process had taken its toll on President Barack Obama.

Passing the Affordable Care Act would be his signature legislative achievement, but it propelled Republicans to a landslide midterm election victory and control of the House of Representatives. And Mr. Obama thought he might be the next to pay the price at the ballot box. “This will be a one-term presidency,” he told an aide in late 2010.

He turned out to be wrong, but the fatalism Obama expressed privately that day reflected the dire consequences of one of Washington’s most consequential legislative battles in modern times. A new series of oral histories released Fridayon the eve of its 14th anniversary on Saturday, documents the behind-the-scenes struggle to transform the nation’s health care system to cover tens of millions of Americans without insurance.

The interviews with key players in the drama were conducted by Incite, a social science research institute at Columbia University, and were made public as the second phase of a yearslong effort to document the eventful times under the country’s 44th president. The transcripts, posted online Friday, include recollections from 26 members of the White House staff, his Cabinet and Congress, as well as activists, advocacy group figures and a handful of Americans who made their voices heard, but not the former president himself or, for example, what matters, his Republican opponents.

The oral histories chronicle Obama’s journey from an uninformed candidate embarrassed by the banalities he uttered during his campaign to a beleaguered president who gambled his political future on all-or-nothing legislative mismanagement. They also paint a portrait of Mr. Obama as a steadfast, hyper-disciplined but not particularly warm policy man who searched the Brookings Institution website for ideas and had to overcome his own political mistakes.

The story of the Affordable Care Act, in a sense, began at a candidate forum on health care in 2007, when Obama faced off against Senators Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Joseph R. Biden Jr., among others. for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Senator Obama was terrible,” recalls Neera Tanden, who worked for Clinton at the time. ‘He was faint. He had no experience with this issue, so he kept talking about, “This is why we need to come together.”

Obama knew he had done a bad job, and it made him take the issue more seriously, she said. “I honestly think if he hadn’t been kicked in the ass, he wouldn’t have put together such a detailed plan,” Ms. Tanden said.

After Mrs. Clinton lost and Mrs. Tanden joined the Obama campaign in 2008, she said, “A lot of his advisers said, ‘We should just drop this health care thing.’ He said very clearly, “I’ll do health care when I’m president. You have to figure out how we succeed in the campaign to build a mandate, but I will.’”

Upon taking office in January 2009, Obama tackled a challenge that had irked presidents of both parties, most recently Bill Clinton, whose first term nearly collapsed after he himself failed to pass sweeping health care legislation. Mr. Obama’s advisers were determined to learn from the mistakes of the past.

By developing their own plan publicly and involving major players with stakes in the issue, such as insurance companies and congressional leaders, the Obama administration hoped to build support rather than simply adopt a secretly crafted plan to Congress, as the Clintons had done in the 1990s.

“The Clinton administration was focused inward on the perfect policy — and I was part of that, so I don’t want to sound ‘alien’ about it,” says Nancy-Ann DeParle, a Clinton administration veteran turned director of the Clinton administration. Obama’s Office for Health Reform in the White House. “The Obama administration was the opposite. It focused much more on stakeholders and people and made Congress do the work of debating policy and passing a bill.”

But Mr. Obama made his own misjudgments. Ms. Tanden, who became a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services and admired Mr. Obama’s determination to make sweeping reforms, said his team nevertheless spent “an inordinate amount of time” on smaller issues rather than systemic issues and that she didn’t. initially expected abortion to become a “big problem.”

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a special adviser on health care who also appreciated that Mr. Obama “never wavered,” said the White House should have sent members of Congress home for their summer recess in 2009 with a slide deck to describe the plan components. “We didn’t do our job, and I think that was a big mistake,” recalled Dr. Emanuel himself. “They needed better tools to explain it to people.”

Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, got a taste of the plan’s misunderstandings and distortions while vacationing in Maine that summer, where he saw signs in front of stores falsely warning of “death panels.” that would supposedly arise through the legislation.

“That was probably the first time it really hit me,” he said, “just seeing board after board after board about things that — you can see why people might think that’s where it would go.”

Hopes for Republican support then virtually evaporated, leaving Obama only able to work with the Democrats. He was deeply involved in negotiating. Kathleen Sebelius, then secretary of Health and Human Services, recalled a key meeting in January 2010 to reconcile different versions of the plan. “The president led these negotiations from start to finish,” she said. “He was the chief negotiator.”

It would eventually pass, but not without painful concessions and legislative machinations. Mrs. Sebelius talked about the champagne party on the Truman Balcony in the White House the night it passed. Mr. Biden, then vice president, told her: “This is the most important thing the president will do for the international community.”

She asked what he meant. “The world will now know when this young president says, ‘I will do something,’ he will do it,” Mr. Biden responded.

Yet Mr. Obama did not know how much time he would have to do anything else. Ms. DeParle was the aide who recalled Obama musing about just one term as he tried to persuade her to stay in the White House after health care.

“That’s fine with me,” he said of a possible four-year presidency, “as long as we can do the things that I think are important.” But Ms. DeParle found his comment “very surprising” and thought to herself, “Gosh, this is my fault.”

Mrs. DeParle made some of the most personal observations of the ascetic president. She said, among other things, that he refused to eat in public and only ate at his regular times every day. When he ate with his staff, you “eat with him in silence” while he read or prepared for his next event. And his meal was almost always the same: salmon or dry chicken breast, brown rice and broccoli.

“Trust me,” she said. “That was it.” His only nod to taste? “Add lemon juice, or some lemon.” And never dessert. “To him, eating is like putting a coin in the meter,” she said. He wouldn’t even eat cake even though he said he liked cake. “He has no weaknesses that I can see,” she said.

Ms. DeParle found him a mystery and only came to understand Mr. Obama when she accompanied him to his home state of Hawaii. “The waves come in and go out,” she said. “He has a calm demeanor, which is the same for me. He doesn’t worry about anything. And the fact that he was in a place that was as close to Tokyo as it was to New York – he has an international point of view,” she added. “He sees the world differently than many American presidents.”

It turned out that he obviously had two terms for that. And the Affordable Care Act, for all its birth pangs and flaws and Republican efforts to repeal it, remains the law of the land.

After being sworn in as attorney general in March 2021, Merrick B. Garland gathered his closest aides to discuss a topic too sensitive to broach in bigger groups: the possibility that evidence from the far-ranging Jan. 6 investigation could quickly lead to former President Donald J. Trump and his inner circle.

At the time, some in the Justice Department were pushing for the chance to look at ties between pro-Trump rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, his allies who had camped out at the Willard Hotel, and possibly Mr. Trump himself.

Mr. Garland said he would place no restrictions on their work, even if the “evidence leads to Trump,” according to people with knowledge of several conversations held over his first months in office.

“Follow the connective tissue upward,” said Mr. Garland, adding a directive that would eventually lead to a dead end: “Follow the money.”

With that, he set the course of a determined and methodical, if at times dysfunctional and maddeningly slow, investigation that would yield the indictment of Mr. Trump on four counts of election interference in August 2023.

The story of how it unfolded, based on dozens of interviews, is one that would pit Mr. Garland, a quintessential rule follower determined to restore the department’s morale and independence, against the ultimate rule breaker — Mr. Trump, who was intent on bending the legal system to his will.

Mr. Garland, 71, a former federal judge and prosecutor, proceeded with characteristic by-the-book caution, pressure-testing every significant legal maneuver, demanding that prosecutors take no shortcuts and declaring the inquiry would “take as long as it takes.”

As a result, prosecutors and the F.B.I. spent months sticking to their traditional playbook. They started with smaller players and worked upward — despite the transparent, well-documented steps taken by Mr. Trump himself, in public and behind the scenes, to retain power after voters rejected his bid for another term.

In trying to avoid even the smallest mistakes, Mr. Garland might have made one big one: not recognizing that he could end up racing the clock. Like much of the political world and official Washington, he and his team did not count on Mr. Trump’s political resurrection after Jan. 6, and his fast victory in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which has complicated the prosecution and given the former president leverage in court.

In 2021 it was “simply inconceivable,” said one former Justice Department official, that Mr. Trump, rebuked by many in his own party and exiled at his Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, would regain the power to impose his timetable on the investigation.

“I think that delay has contributed to a situation where none of these trials may go forward,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, said in a recent interview on CNN, citing the Justice Department’s approach as a factor. “The department bears some of that responsibility.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to review Mr. Trump’s claims of presidential immunity in the case has now threatened to push the trial deep into the campaign season or beyond, raising the possibility that voters will make their choice between Mr. Trump and President Biden in November without Mr. Trump’s guilt or innocence being established.

It has resurfaced a question that has long dogged Mr. Garland: What took so long?

It would take the department nearly a year to focus on the actions contained in the indictment ultimately brought by Jack Smith, the special counsel Mr. Garland later named to oversee the prosecution: systematic lies about election fraud, the pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence, the effort to replace legitimate state electors with ersatz ones.

Officials in the Biden White House have long expressed private consternation with Mr. Garland’s pace. The select committee established by the House in 2021 to investigate what led to the Jan. 6 riot made it an all-but-explicit goal to force the Justice Department to pursue the case more aggressively, and in Georgia, a local prosecutor was going head-on at Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss even before Mr. Garland was sworn in.

People around Mr. Garland, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Justice Department affairs, say there would be no case against Mr. Trump had Mr. Garland not acted decisively. And any perception that the department had made Mr. Trump a target from the outset, without exploring other avenues, would have doomed the investigation.

“Don’t confuse thoughtful with unduly cautious,” said a former deputy attorney general, Jamie S. Gorelick, who sent Mr. Garland, then her top aide, to oversee the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. “He was fearless. You could see it then, and you could see it when he authorized the search at Mar-a-Lago.”

Mr. Garland’s allies point to how, by the summer of 2021, the attorney general and his powerful deputy, Lisa O. Monaco, were so frustrated with the pace of the work that they created a team to investigate Trump allies who gathered at the Willard Hotel ahead of Jan. 6 — John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Roger J. Stone Jr. — and possible connections to the Trump White House, according to former officials.

That team would lay the groundwork for the investigation that Mr. Smith would take over as special counsel a year and a half later.

But a host of factors, some in Mr. Garland’s control, others not, slowed things down.

Department leaders believed that the best way to justify prosecuting Mr. Trump and the Willard plotters was to find financial links between them and the rioters — because they thought it would be more straightforward and less risky than a case based on untested election interference charges, according to people with knowledge of the situation. But that conventional approach, rooted in prosecutorial muscle memory, yielded little.

There were also problems inside the part of the Justice Department leading the investigation, the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. The office was racked by personnel issues and buckling under the weight of identifying and prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters — an investigation that became the largest ever undertaken by the department.

Mr. Garland and his team decided early on not to take direct control of the investigation themselves, as the department had done after the Oklahoma City bombing.

And for much of 2021, the U.S. attorney’s office at first prioritized indicting key members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, far-right groups that played a crucial role in the assault, on charges of seditious conspiracy.

Time will tell whether Mr. Garland and Ms. Monaco made the right calls in the period before they turned the investigation over to Mr. Smith, who within eight months brought not only the election-case indictment but the separate charges against Mr. Trump for mishandling classified documents.

But like many before them, Mr. Garland and his team appear to have underestimated Mr. Trump’s capacity for reinvention and disruption, in this case through delay.

A shaky start: January to March 2021

On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Garland was in his attic office in suburban Maryland, drafting remarks he would deliver the next day in Delaware when Mr. Biden was to introduce him as his pick for attorney general.

The speech was to center on re-establishing “normal order” after four chaotic Trump years. Mr. Garland took a break, clicked on a livestream of rioters breaching the Capitol and realized, in a flash, that he would need to revise not only his speech, but his approach to the job.

He was still fine-tuning his language as his wife drove him to Wilmington the next morning.

The rule of law is “the very foundation of our democracy,” said Mr. Garland as Mr. Biden, whom he barely knew, looked on.

In February, while Mr. Garland awaited Senate confirmation, J.P. Cooney, a veteran prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office who ran the group investigating the riot’s ringleaders, drafted a proposal to fast-track elements of the investigation. It would also include seizing the phone of Mr. Stone, a longtime Trump associate who was part of the group that had been camping out at the Willard Hotel before Jan. 6 strategizing about how to keep Mr. Trump in office.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department balked at Mr. Cooney’s plan.

Mr. Cooney had prosecuted Mr. Stone in 2019 for obstructing a congressional investigation, only to have Trump appointees intervene to reduce the sentence — before Mr. Trump wiped it away. Some at the department worried Mr. Cooney might be trying to settle unfinished business, according to two former officials who now believe those doubts were misplaced.

For the next several months, the Willard inquiry, led by Mr. Cooney, took a back seat to another high-profile, high-risk effort: drafting novel seditious conspiracy charges against the leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys for their roles in the Capitol attack.

Moving up the ladder: April to October 2021

Mr. Garland, like most attorneys general, did not weigh in himself on day-to-day decision-making. Instead, he would transmit his preferences on the Jan. 6 investigations every Thursday evening during a briefing with a half dozen aides. The team included L. Rush Atkinson, a senior counselor to Mr. Garland whose work for the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III offered valuable insight.

The meetings often lasted hours as Mr. Garland rattled off questions. One early query: Had Mr. Trump made incriminating statements during an Oval Office meeting in December 2020 when his team discussed overturning Mr. Biden’s electoral victory?

Ms. Monaco, 56, a former national security official in the Obama White House, was confirmed in April 2021. While she embraced her boss’s cautious, stepwise approach, she also had a keener awareness of political optics and was so trusted by Mr. Biden’s transition team she was chosen for her job weeks before Mr. Garland was selected for his.

She made it clear that the Willard investigation was a priority.

Anxiety about the investigation was growing among some prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office, some at Justice Department headquarters and eventually in the White House.

Then came a public warning shot. On June 30, the Democratic majority in the House voted to create a Jan. 6 committee, with teams assigned to investigate the fake electors plot and Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

This was no bottom-up, follow-the-money exercise: They aimed straight for Mr. Trump’s inner circle, issuing one of their first subpoenas to his final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. By late in the year, the committee was making clear that one of its goals was to force Mr. Garland to bring more urgency to the Justice Department investigation, suggesting it could make a criminal referral to the department on election interference charges.

Justice Department officials vehemently deny that external pressure spurred them to move faster and maintain that their decisions were prompted solely by the collection of evidence.

Nonetheless, their pace accelerated.

By the third week of June 2021, Mr. Garland had decided investigators had accumulated enough evidence to justify channeling more resources into the Willard investigation, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Internal communications showed that Oath Keepers leaders were trying to contact the White House in the days leading up to the attack. Mr. Giuliani, whose phones had been seized by the F.B.I. in April in an unrelated investigation, seemed to be involved. Department leaders were recognizing that a Trump Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, whose pivotal role had already been well documented in news reports months earlier, was a central figure.

But the U.S. attorney’s office, which was supposed to be coordinating the investigation, did not have the bandwidth to do it, in Mr. Garland’s view, according to people he spoke with.

He groused about a lack of updates on the inquiry. During one meeting, an impatient Ms. Monaco interrupted prosecutors to ask, “OK, but where are we going to be on all this by Labor Day?”

In late June, Mr. Garland, Ms. Monaco and several aides decided they needed to take a dramatic step: creating an independent team, separate from Mr. Cooney’s original group, tasked with investigating the Willard plotters, with no restriction on moving up the ladder to Mr. Trump if the evidence justified it.

They did not want too many people knowing about it. So they gave it a vanilla name: the “Investigations Unit.”

Then things appear to have stalled.

Many veteran prosecutors were already being deployed on rioter cases, and recruiting for the team took longer than expected. In the meantime, Ms. Monaco turned her attention to reorganizing an overwhelmed U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, according to former officials.

Mr. Garland worked in a corner office, deliberating on an issue that was critical but not directly focused on Mr. Trump: whether to employ the symbolically powerful but little-used seditious conspiracy law against the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. After weeks of internal debate, he signed off.

The investigations unit would not begin operating until November 2021, more than four months after its creation.

The turning point: October to December 2021

The man selected to run the unit was Thomas P. Windom, a career federal prosecutor in Maryland who had recently notched a pair of impressive victories in high-profile cases against white supremacists.

Mr. Windom was aggressive, tight-lipped and, in Mr. Garland’s view, somewhat impervious to partisan attacks — his father had been the Republican lieutenant governor of Alabama.

His arrival is now regarded as a major turning point. Back then, it was not clear to his colleagues what he was supposed to be doing.

Mr. Windom showed up at the U.S. attorney’s office without any fanfare or much explanation. He did not even have an office. Few of his new colleagues knew who he was. Agents in the F.B.I.’s field office learned of his existence when he began requesting files.

He was vague about his mission and chipper, if a bit chilly — with a habit of correcting people who called him “Tom” instead of “Thomas.” But it soon became clear that Mr. Windom was asking big-picture questions about Mr. Trump and his circle, and that he had the support of the department’s leaders.

He adopted the follow-the-money directive used in most organized crime and white-collar cases, including the Enron prosecution of the early 2000s that defined Ms. Monaco’s early career.

Yet the deeper prosecutors dug, the less about money they seemed to find.

It had initially appeared that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, in cahoots with some in Mr. Trump’s circle, bankrolled travel and lodging for allies, with the intention of blocking certification of the election. Mr. Windom was intent on finding out whether Mr. Stone and the Infowars founder Alex Jones were involved in a broader funding conspiracy, according to people familiar with the situation.

The reality was more mundane. Most rioters drove themselves to Washington, paid their airfare and hotel bills out of pocket, slept on couches, or set up crowdfunding sites.

As the year came to a close, the department’s leadership had no alternative but to steer the investigation into choppy, uncharted waters: They shifted focus to election fraud.

End game: January to November 2022

In January 2022, Mr. Garland announced his intention to pursue anyone involved in Jan. 6 “whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.” Ms. Monaco publicly confirmed the department was investigating the mailing of fake elector certificates.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Windom had begun joining with investigators from other agencies, including the Postal Service, to track the trail of fake electors. He also teamed up with the Justice Department’s inspector general who had begun investigating Mr. Clark.

Until that point, the F.B.I. had mostly remained on the sidelines, leaving much of the initial work to state officials. But by late 2021, Paul M. Abbate, the F.B.I. deputy director, told senior law enforcement officials that the bureau was, in general, supportive of the inquiry.

Then Mr. Windom’s former boss in Maryland, Jonathan Lenzner, was named as chief of staff to the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, giving the prosecutor a direct line to the highest echelons of the bureau. Mr. Wray also instructed deputies to ensure that Mr. Windom had everything he needed.

By April, the Washington field office finally drafted an investigative memo required to open the fake electors case, with Mr. Wray and Mr. Garland signing off.

The first telltale signs Mr. Windom was homing in on Mr. Trump and the half-dozen allies who would later be listed in the indictment as uncharged co-conspirators was a series of subpoenas issued by a grand jury in Washington.

Over the next few months, federal agents and prosecutors obtained search warrants and seized the phones of Mr. Clark and Mr. Eastman as well as Mr. Epshteyn and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020.

It is not clear when Mr. Garland formally approved the investigation of Mr. Trump. But Mr. Windom’s team began issuing subpoenas, including a request for presidential phone logs, schedules and drafts of speeches by May 2022, and possibly sooner. By the summer, the department was directly asking witnesses about the president’s actions.

But by this time, Mr. Trump’s strategy of block and delay was being deployed. The process was slowed by the necessities of dealing with complex legal issues, in particular claims of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege when it came to material on the seized phones of Mr. Trump’s allies. The Justice Department set up a secret team of prosecutors, eventually employing more than a dozen lawyers to review the potentially protected materials, including emails.

It was known internally by the code name “Coconut” and, according to people familiar with the planning, led by a prosecutor from Portland, Ore., who was the only person authorized to talk to Mr. Windom’s team.

The department’s actions, significant and far-reaching as they were, were overshadowed by the Jan. 6 committee in the summer of 2022, which presented a firsthand and well-documented narrative of the effort to overturn the election.

Prosecutors, accustomed to working in the shadows and at their own pace, watched some potential witnesses answer questions on camera.

Mr. Garland has said, time and again, that the hearings had no impact on the Trump investigation. The department was motivated only by the need to “get it right,” which entailed “imagining the mistakes that we could make, and making sure that we don’t make them,” as he told a bar association conference recently.

But the pressure was clearly building. What Mr. Windom’s team wanted most were hundreds of raw transcripts of committee interviews, something the panel refused to turn over quickly.

The committee did not immediately make a criminal referral, but members were hardly shy about passing the torch to Mr. Garland. “The Justice Department doesn’t have to wait,” Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, a vocal advocate of prosecuting Mr. Trump, said at the time.

But wait it would. Mr. Windom’s team was hitting legal roadblocks set up by Mr. Trump and his allies. An intense series of legal battles would play out over the ensuing months with 25 witnesses called by the federal grand jury in the case. Those witnesses asserted executive privilege or other reasons for not testifying — by far the most time-consuming and frustrating element of the investigation, in the view of current and former officials.

There was another surprise. Despite the blockbuster hearings by the House panel, Mr. Trump was gaining political strength. On Nov. 15, 2022, he formally announced that he would be a candidate to recapture the presidency.

Three days later, Mr. Garland, following rules intended to insulate political appointees from accusations of election interference, announced his selection of Mr. Smith as a special counsel. By now, the department was in a race for time.

A few weeks earlier, Mr. Smith was driven into the department’s cobbled courtyard and whisked up to Mr. Garland’s office, where he was asked how quickly he could start.

Mr. Smith let Mr. Garland know he wanted to move fast, and signaled his intention to enlist Mr. Windom, which would save time and effort.

After returning to The Hague, where he served as a war crimes prosecutor, Mr. Smith was struck by a scooter while biking and fractured his leg. For a few anxious days, there was serious concern whether he would recover in time to take the job. But he rallied and was in Washington by Christmas, leg propped on a walker.

About seven months later, Mr. Windom, a half-smile on his face, took the measure of Mr. Trump, who scowled at him across a scuffed courthouse table as he was arraigned on charges of plotting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power.

Mr. Smith watched from a nearby bench, occasionally peeking at the clock on the wall.