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.

Ashleigh Merchant, an Atlanta attorney representing one of Donald J. Trump’s co-defendants, demanded “justification” Friday for her efforts to try Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis on the election interference case. to have Georgia rejected.

“The judge clearly agreed with the defense that Willis’ actions are the result of her poor judgment,” Ms. Merchant said in a statement, “and that there is a risk to the future of this case if she does not act quickly . to heal her conflict.”

Ms. Merchant was the main force behind the effort to disqualify the district attorney on the grounds that her relationship with Nathan J. Wade, the lawyer she hired to handle the Trump case, posed a financial conflict of interest.

Although Judge Scott McAfee ruled on Friday that Ms. Willis could remain on the case, he sharply criticized her ruling and said Mr. Wade must recuse himself or Ms. Willis would have to resign. But he also said defense lawyers had failed to prove a conflict — and had only shown the appearance of a conflict. Ms Willis and Mr Wade have not yet commented on the ruling.

Ms. Merchant, 46, threw the Trump case into turmoil in early January when she revealed the relationship between the plaintiffs in a court filing. That set off a series of hearings that turned the table on the accusers, forcing them to take their stand and ask pointed questions about their relationship and finances.

Ms. Merchant, a graduate of the University of Florida and its law school, who represents Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official charged in the election interference investigation, emerged from the hearings with a national profile and appeared in court as intense and unyielding. with a quick questioning style.

She and her husband, John Merchant, have their own office, and Mrs. Merchant recently became president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. She is well connected in local legal circles and used those connections to depose Ms. Willis.

Ms. Merchant knew that Mr. Wade was friends with his former partner and divorce lawyer Terrence Bradley, whom she called to testify. Although Mr. Bradley proved to be an extremely reluctant witness, text messages between Ms. Merchant and Mr. Bradley discussing the plaintiffs’ romantic relationship were among the most scrutinized evidence in the disqualification efforts.

As the hearings progressed, the prosecution team launched scathing attacks on Ms Merchant; Ms. Willis said in her testimony: “Ms. The interests of the merchant are contrary to democracy.” During one of the hearings, Ms Merchant told the judge: “They have far from called me a liar today.”

The Service Employees International Union said Wednesday it would spend $200 million to reach and mobilize working-class voters to support President Biden and other Democrats.

The union, which represents about two million health care, service and government workers, hopes to capitalize on the upswing in union activity not only among industrial unions such as the United Automobile Workers, but also among less traditional workers such as nurses, Hollywood workers writers and actors. students and employees of Starbucks.

The SEIU said it hoped to reach six million voters of color in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

“Workers walked the picket lines for better wages and better jobs, and we will vote for the same reasons,” the union’s secretary-treasurer, April Verrett, said in a statement. “Workers of all races know what is at stake in this election.”

The $200 million effort would be the largest investment ever for the union, which spent about $150 million in the 2020 presidential cycle. Mr. Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in history, as have some of his allies in organized labor, and Rocio Sáenz, the executive vice president of the SEIU, cited the fact that the president teamed up with the UAW to picket line and other efforts. to help unions as a reason to mobilize.

Working-class voters, especially Black and Latino workers, will be a key constituency in the upcoming presidential campaign. Mr. Biden believes his policies have benefited such voters, especially those in unions. But former President Donald J. Trump has made inroads into the traditional Democratic voting bloc, which has expressed frustration with inflation and could prove receptive to his anti-immigration message.

A number of groups have pledged financial firepower to Mr. Biden’s reelection efforts. That includes VoteVets, which supports veterans running for office, with a $45 million plan to support Mr. Biden and other Democrats. Future Forward, the main Democratic super PAC supporting Biden’s bid, plans to spend $250 million on advertising. And MoveOn has announced a $32 million program.

Organizers in several Super Tuesday states are calling on voters to oppose President Biden at the ballot box over his stance on the war in Israel and Gaza, building on the momentum that started in Michigan last month.

More than 101,000 Michiganders voted “uncommitted” in the state’s Democratic primary after a group of young Arab Americans launched a campaign to encourage voters to protest Biden’s alliance with Israel — prompting two delegates to the Democratic National Convention yielded.

Inspired by the campaign, pro-Palestinian groups across the country began similar efforts to push the president to call for a permanent ceasefire.

In Colorado, a group of Palestinian activists tried to mount a social media campaign for the state “non-committed delegate” option while returns from Michigan were still coming in last week. In Minnesota, organizers came knocking and held events to promote the vote the ‘non-committed’ category, helping Muslim Somali Americans and young voters. And in Massachusetts thousands of demonstrators at a meeting in Cambridge chanted “no preference,” the equivalent protest option.

The campaigns were fragmented and organized with far less time and resources than the Michigan operation. Many were scheduled within days, long after early voting had already begun, and several organizers declined to set specific benchmarks for what would constitute success on Tuesday night, beyond the goal of seeing Mr. Biden change his position. (Organizers in Minnesota said they were aiming for 5,000 “Unpledged” votes, a low target that was about double what the category received in the 2020 Democratic primaries).

The other states also lack Michigan’s position in the broader response to Mr. Biden’s policies: The state has a sizable Arab-American population, for whom the issue has been particularly painful, and ahead of the vote, prominent Democrats in the represents the potential for political danger. The “unstaffed” effort received the support of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a member of the group of House liberals known as the Squad.

Mr. Biden is expected to win all the primary contests where activists have launched “uncommitted” efforts, including Colorado, Massachusetts and Minnesota, states he won in 2020, and North Carolina, a battleground state that Mr. Biden narrowly lost from former President Donald J. Trump. But the prospect of a close election in November means any loss of support could damage his re-election prospects.

“What we face in November is a truly dangerous candidate in Donald Trump, who will cause enormous damage to our communities, and poses a real existential threat to our democracy – that is real and we see it,” says Elianne Farhat, one of the organizers with Uncommitted Minnesota. “But right now we’re focused on sending a message to President Biden, who is currently in control.”

The Biden administration has become more forceful in recent weeks in pushing Israel and Hamas, which attacked Israel on Oct. 7, to agree to a pause in fighting and more aid to Gaza.

The United States on Saturday airlifted 38,000 meals to the region, which is facing a humanitarian crisis. Vice President Kamala Harris on Sunday called for an “immediate ceasefire for at least the next six weeks.” And on Monday, Mr. Biden wrote on X that he “would not stop pushing for an agreement that would secure the release of Hamas’s remaining hostages, establish an immediate ceasefire in Gaza for at least six weeks and allow for a wave of aid to the entire Gaza Strip. ”

“The president is hearing from voters who are participating in the uncommitted campaigns,” said Lauren Hitt, spokeswoman for the Biden campaign. “He shares their goal for an end to violence and a just, lasting peace – and he is working tirelessly toward that goal.”

But organizers opposing Biden said in interviews that these steps were not enough. Several countries credited the Michigan campaign for the recent policy changes and said they hoped to further strengthen the administration’s position.

“We know how much anger is out there, and we have known it for months, but it was inspiring for everyone to see how it translated into effective political results,” said Cole Harrison, executive director of Massachusetts Peace Action, an anti-war organization. group. “We want to show that the anger is not just limited to Michigan.”

Some of Mr. Biden’s allies worry that continued efforts to oppose the president will weaken him in the general election against Mr. Trump. “Elections have a certain amount of momentum,” said Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, who voted for Biden.

Mr. Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress in 2006, said: “There must be a ceasefire now.” But he argued that Mr. Trump was a threat to American democracy and must be fought at all costs — something that Mr. Biden’s opponents say is up to the Democratic Party to fix.

“If Joe Biden thinks that giving people crumbs, as he has done in the past, is going to work for him, he is in for a very rude awakening,” said Abdullah Elagha, organizer of the Colorado Palestine Coalition. approximately 30,000 calls.

Outreach was put together in a short time by groups already organizing pro-Palestinian protests – in Massachusetts and Colorado, organizers used already planned weekend rallies to promote protest votes. Uncommitted Minnesota said it has spent about $20,000 on the campaign since it started last Monday. Most of the outreach in other states has been virtual: Mr. Harrison said the Massachusetts operation, which launched Saturday, raised about $4,000 on Sunday to power their text messaging outreach.

The efforts have not received significant support in many of these states. In Minnesota, Representative Ilhan Omar, another member of the team, did so accused the Biden administration of “giving the green light to the mass murder of Palestinians,” but did not call on Democrats to vote uncommitted. (Ms. Omar’s office declined an interview request.)

The Super Tuesday effort is also being promoted by the national Abandon Biden campaign, a group that does just that December started made up of voters and organizers who have pledged not to vote for Biden in November regardless of whether he changes his position.

“What is a sham is that the Democratic Party thinks they can bully us with the Republican Party,” said Rania Masri, an activist who supports that campaign in North Carolina. “We’re not just going after the president — we’re going after every congressional official who supports this genocide, and we promise we won’t vote for any of them.”

The issue could plague Biden’s campaign last Tuesday. In Georgia, organizers are encouraging voters to leave the presidential option blank ahead of the March 12 primary. The organizers are in Washington undertake similar efforts to vote “not on record” in the state’s primary next week.

“Listening to Michigan has been an inspiration for many movements across the country,” said Rami Al-Kabra, a city council member in Bothell, Washington. “This is an anti-war effort. It was not our first choice, but we must let President Biden know that our votes cannot be taken for granted.”

Nicholas Nehamas contributed reporting from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Defense attorneys in the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump say they want to put someone on the stand whose testimony could support it their claim that Terrence Bradley, a witness in their effort to disqualify the prosecutors who led the case, gave misleading testimony.

The new information comes from Cindi Lee Yeager, a deputy district attorney in neighboring Cobb County, Georgia, with whom defense attorneys said they spoke on Friday about conversations she has had with Mr. Bradley.

At issue is a key issue in the disqualification efforts: the timing of the romantic relationship that developed between Fani T. Willis, who as a Fulton County prosecutor is leading the prosecution of Mr. Trump, and Nathan Wade, the defense attorney from the Atlanta area. she hired to manage the business.

Ms Willis and Mr Wade have said a romance developed between them after she hired him in November 2021. But defense attorneys have tried to prove the romantic relationship began earlier.

If they are correct that Ms. Willis hired a boyfriend for a lucrative, high-profile job, it could strengthen their argument that she engaged in “self-dealing” when she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade, thus creating a relationship. conflict of interest that should result in her removal from the case.

Defense lawyers believed that Mr. Bradley, a former partner of Mr. Wade who also served for a time as Mr. Wade’s divorce lawyer, could provide some clarity about when the romance began. But that didn’t happen. In a text message exchange in January, he told one of the lawyers on the case that he “absolutely” thought the romance began before Ms. Willis hired Mr. Wade.

But when he was called to the witness box last week, Mr Bradley said he was ‘speculating’.

In a filing on Monday, lawyers for David J. Shafer, a co-defendant in the case, said they spoke with Ms. Yeager, who said Mr. Bradley told her the relationship with prosecutors began before Mr. Wade left . to work for Mrs. Willis.

The filing stated that according to Ms. Yeager, Mr. Bradley told her that “Mr. Wade had definitively begun a romantic relationship with Ms. Willis around the time Ms. Willis was running for district attorney in 2019 through 2020.

According to the filing, Ms. Yeager said she also heard Ms. Willis call Mr. Bradley last September, following a news article that reported how much her office paid Mr. Wade and his legal partners. (Mr. Bradley’s work for the firm was not related to the Trump case.)

“They’re coming after us,” Ms. Willis told Mr. Bradley during the conversation, according to Ms. Yeager’s account detailed in the defense filing. “You don’t have to talk to them about us.”

The context of Ms Willis’ alleged phone call to Mr Bradley is not clear; In any event, it would have occurred before the disqualification began in January and before it was known that Mr. Bradley would be subpoenaed to testify.

Last month, Mr. Bradley was on the stand testified that he “did not know Ms Willis personally”. “My interaction with Ms. Willis was never a matter of picking up the phone to talk to her,” he said.

It is also unclear what impact Ms. Yeager’s statement might have on a judge’s decision whether to disqualify the plaintiffs. The judge, Scott McAfee of the Fulton County Superior Court, has already completed his testimony on the disqualification question; On Friday he said he would rule on the matter within two weeks.

In their filing on Monday, Mr. Shafer’s lawyers asked the judge to allow them to put Ms. Yeager on the stand “in the event that the court reopens the hearing to receive additional evidence.” They noted that Mr. Trump and Ms. Willis’ office also asked the judge to allow additional testimony.

At a hearing on Friday, Judge McAfee heard final legal arguments from both sides, but said he could hold another hearing if evidence emerged that required it.

A lawyer for Mr. Bradley did not return a call seeking comment. Ms. Yeager, who previously ran for local office as a Republican — but says she currently considers herself a Democrat — declined to comment on the filing Monday. A spokesperson for the public prosecutor The office did not comment Monday, but Ms. Willis and her office have described the disqualification effort as legally baseless and an attempt to generate salacious headlines.

If successful, the effort to oust Ms. Willis would throw the criminal case against Mr. Trump into turmoil, forcing a government agency to find another prosecutor to take on the case. A new prosecutor could move to preserve, amend or drop the case against Mr. Trump, who was indicted in August along with 18 allies on charges of conspiring to overturn the former president’s 2020 election loss in Georgia to make.

Since then, four suspects have pleaded guilty.

Two daily workouts of 45 minutes. One gallon of water. 10 pages of a non-fiction book. A diet. No “cheat meals” or alcohol. For 75 days.

And if you mess up, you have to start from the beginning.

Sounds like a lot? It should be so. The program, called 75 Difficult, is intended to build mental resilience. Some say rigidity makes it great, and others say that makes it problematic.

Since its founding in 2019, 75 Hard has developed something of a cult following, with practitioners posting daily photos and videos of their progress, sometimes racking up millions of views on TikTok And Instagram. One of Reddit's biggest subredditswith over 44,000 members, is committed to the program.

But is it useful and are the changes sustainable? Psychologists say that while the program may provide mental health benefits, certain vulnerable groups may be pushing themselves too far without reaping the benefits. Exercise experts also say the regimen could be too taxing for those who are not yet young and active, and could lead to physical harm.

“It may sound really cool and exciting and useful, but is this something that is actually ultimately useful, sustainable and good for the person?” asked Dr. Thea Gallagher, a clinical psychologist and director of wellness programs at New York University.

“It would be great to see more and more rigorous research around these exciting programs-slash-challenges,” she said.

Andy Frisella, the creator of 75 Hard and a motivational speaker, encourages people to talk to a medical professional before starting the program. His team did not respond to a request for comment.

Why do people do 75 Hard?

According to Mr. Frisella, who said in a 2022 episode of his podcast that he spent twenty years developing 75 Hard, tens of thousands of people have completed the program, which is intended to help people build resilience, grit and perseverance, among other things.

“This is the Iron Man equivalent of climbing Mount Everest,” Mr Frisella said on the podcast. “Whatever it is that you see all these other people doing that they're so proud of – this is the equivalent of that for your brain.”

People who have completed the program have said on social media that it helped them boost their confidence, lose weight, try new workouts and continue with what they set out to do. Many complete it in the first 75 days of the year, while others start it when they need a reset.

Outdoor workouts, no 'cheat meals', no alcohol

What is most difficult about the program varies from person to person. But many have taken issue with the requirement of two daily 45-minute workouts and the avoidance of “cheat meals” (that is, deviating from the diet you have chosen for yourself) and alcohol for the duration of the program.

Mr. Frisella explained that the workouts can be at any intensity level, even a walk. At least one of the two daily workouts should be performed outdoors.

One participant on TikTok went during a walk outside during a snowstorm, another completed a strength training session training in the rainwhile another was jumping rope 45 minutes outside at night. Others varied their indoor workouts by alternating running, strength training, yoga and more.

By getting outside, the program reinforces the lesson that “conditions are not always going to be perfect,” Mr. Frisella said in a 2019 episode of his podcast.

The daily workouts must be kept at a distance with at least three to four hours.

The program notably lacks built-in rest days.

The program also urges participants to follow a diet – for example a vegetarian, vegan or ketogenic diet – but Mr Frisella doesn't give much advice on what it should be, only that people should choose 'a diet that promotes the health of improves people'. your physical health.”

Participants must follow their chosen diet without deviation, or else restart the program.

Alcohol is strictly prohibited.

Accomplishing tasks can build trust

“Something like that could boost someone's self-confidence or mental strength,” says Dr. Kate Gapinski, an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of San Francisco.

“When you see that you are able to complete something so difficult, and actually stick with it for 75 days, which is quite a long time for a significant habit change, I saw that inspiring confidence about other difficult tasks to come,” she said.

The program promotes certain behaviors that psychologists encourage their patients to engage in.

The tasks that can be completed quickly – namely the ten pages of reading a nonfiction book – are exactly the kind of bite-sized tasks that experts say can encourage people to create change in their lives.

But challenges can arise when tasks are too big or feel unmanageable. “If you do something that requires a lot of energy, motivation and dedication, the problem is that if you don't succeed, people sometimes end up feeling demoralized and worse off than when they started,” said Dr. Gallagher. .

Is the rigidity of the program harmful?

Some participants take the program very seriously. The program “is difficult for a reason,” according to one poster wrote on the subreddit. “If you don't like that, go somewhere else, or at least don't be angry when people call you out on your changes to the program.”

But several health experts raised concerns about such strict regimes.

The exercise requirements can be concerning for inactive or weak people, says Patrick J. O'Connor, a professor of kinesiology at the University of Georgia.

“Ninety minutes a day would be excessive for some people and for some people it could cause injury,” he said. “Often the greatest risk of injury is when someone goes from very little to quite a lot.”

Mr O'Connor pointed out that the program required a total of 630 minutes of exercise per week – more than four times as much as recommended by federal officialswhich amounts to 150 minutes of 'moderate intensity physical activity' and two days of strength training.

There are also concerns about the mental health impact of such a program without exceptions.

“I would not recommend the program to people with an active eating disorder,” says Dr. Gapinski. “With eating disorders, we're actually trying to increase comfort about the types of foods that are consumed,” she said, adding that treatment emphasizes moderation.

It may be more helpful for people to find small tasks that are meaningful to them, rather than choosing a prescriptive program, said Dr. Alexandra Gold, a clinical psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

“I think if someone just gets a prescription like, 'Oh, you do these things,' it doesn't necessarily come from them, and that's also a big factor in consistency and sustainability,” said Dr. Gold.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of modified versions of the plan have emerged, including 75 Soft. In that version, the water requirement is lower and only one daily workout of 45 minutes is required.

Google, whose work in artificial intelligence has helped make AI-generated content much easier to create and distribute, now wants to ensure that such content is also traceable.

The tech giant said Thursday that it was collaborating on the development of digital content credentials, a kind of “food label” that identifies when and how a photo, a video, an audio clip or other file was produced or modified – also with AI The company will collaborate with companies such as Adobe, the BBC, Microsoft and Sony to refine technical standards.

The announcement follows a similar pledge announced on Tuesday by Meta, which like Google has enabled the easy creation and distribution of artificially generated content. Meta said it would promote standardized labels that identified such material.

Google, which has poured money into its artificial intelligence initiatives for years, said it would explore how to integrate the digital certification into its own products and services, although it did not specify the timing or scope. The Bard chatbot is connected to some of the company's most popular consumer services, such as Gmail and Docs. On Google-owned YouTube, which will be included in the digital identification effort, users can quickly find videos with realistic digital avatars pontificating about current events in voices supported by text-to-speech services.

Recognizing where online content comes from and how it changes is a high priority for lawmakers and technology watchdogs in 2024, when billions of people will vote in major elections around the world. After years of disinformation and polarization, realistic images and audio produced by artificial intelligence and unreliable AI detection tools made people even more doubtful about the authenticity of the things they saw and heard on the internet.

Configuring digital files with a verified record of their history could make the digital ecosystem more trustworthy, according to those who support a universal certification standard. Google is joining the steering committee of one such group, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, or C2PA. The C2PA standards are supported by news organizations such as The New York Times, but also by camera manufacturers, banks and advertising agencies.

Laurie Richardson, Google's vice president of trust and security, said in a statement that the company hoped its work would “provide important context to people, helping them make more informed decisions.” She noted Google's other efforts to give users more information about the online content they encountered, including tagging AI material on YouTube and offering details about images in Search.

Attempts to link references to metadata – the underlying information embedded in digital files – are not flawless.

OpenAI said this week that its AI image generation tools would soon add watermarks to images as per C2PA standards. Starting Monday, images generated by online chatbot ChatGPT and standalone image generation technology DALL-E will include both a visual watermark and hidden metadata designed to identify them as created by artificial intelligence. However, this move is “not a silver bullet to address provenance issues,” OpenAI said, adding that the tags “can easily be removed accidentally or intentionally.”

(The New York Times Company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using Times articles to train AI systems.)

According to the report, there is “a shared sense of urgency” to strengthen trust in digital content a blog post last month from Andy Parsons, the senior director of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe. The company released artificial intelligence tools last year, including the AI ​​art generation software Adobe Firefly and a Photoshop tool known as generative fill, which uses AI to expand a photo beyond its boundaries.

“The stakes have never been higher,” Mr. Parsons wrote.

Cade Metz reporting contributed.