A committee investigating the October mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, questioned colleagues of the shooter, Robert R. Card Jr., at an Army Reserve hearing and pressed for answers about their failed efforts to prevent he would cause harm and provoke some of the violence. most detailed accounts yet of the months leading up to the disaster.

Committee members delved into key moments of inaction by military supervisors who were aware of the shooter’s threats, erratic behavior and access to weapons, and sought accountability from the many law enforcement agencies and military personnel who raised concerns about Mr Card, as his mental condition deteriorated last year.

“Since families cannot control their own guns, was it a very good plan that relied on the family removing its guns?” George Dilworth, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Maine and a member of the committee, asked Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer, who was involved in the response to Mr. Card’s troubling behavior.

After a failed attempt by the local sheriff’s office to check on Mr. Card’s welfare in September, authorities consulted with his family on a plan to secure his firearms.

“I didn’t know the family dynamics, so I can’t comment on that, but it was a plan, and in my experience, a viable plan,” said Captain Reamer, his voice soft and his demeanor solemn as he sat. alone at the witness table.

On the night of Oct. 25, Mr. Card, a 40-year-old Army Reserve grenade instructor, shot and killed 18 people at two popular Lewiston recreation spots, a bowling alley and a bar where cornhole enthusiasts gathered to relax. After a two-day manhunt for the missing gunman, he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The seven-member Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Lewiston Tragedy did not discuss Thursday an autopsy report released this week detailing the findings of Boston University scientists who examined the gunman’s brain and found significant identified damage. The trauma they found was similar to damage found in the brains of veterans exposed to weapon explosions, the researchers said. A spokesperson for the committee did not immediately respond when asked whether it wanted to hear testimony from the scientists.

The findings shed new light on the symptoms of mental illness that Mr. Card began exhibiting last year, a year after he began losing his hearing and nearly a decade after he began teaching summer courses for the Army Reserve. This included live grenade training for military cadets, work that exposed him to thousands of blasts.

A 2020 study by Army researchers found rampant abnormalities in the brains of grenade and explosives instructors. But the military has been slow to investigate more deeply or implement changes that could help protect personnel from harm.

Mr Card’s family made the autopsy findings public on Wednesday, along with an apology to the victims’ families. The gunman’s sister, Nicole Herling, said in an interview that the additional insight had allowed her to forgive her brother, whose exposure to the explosion and resulting trauma may have been a factor in his actions.

During previous sessions, the committee heard from local, state and federal law enforcement officials, as well as family members of the dead, who struggled to understand how the gunman was able to keep his weapons despite being considered a threat.

At times, the testimonies offered glimpses of a stop-and-start response to widespread concerns about the troubled Army reservist, with moments of intense intervention followed by missed opportunities and lost momentum.

The committee, which has met six times since January, planned to issue an interim report with its findings later this month, the spokesperson said.

Questions to the five witnesses on Thursday focused on their failure to monitor the gunman’s mental health after his release from a two-week stay in a psychiatric hospital last summer and after a colleague expressed concerns to superiors in mid-September that Mr. Card would “go shooting and do a mass shooting.”

One witness, Army Reserve First Sgt. Kelvin Mote recalled an interaction in which Mr. Card looked blankly through him with a “thousand-yard stare,” a moment that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Sergeant Mote also described his urgent and successful effort to have Mr. Card committed to a New York psychiatric hospital in July after hearing him describe himself as “capable” of harming others.

Sergeant Mote said he tried to call Mr Card three times after his release to follow up, but was unable to reach him. And when the local police’s attempt to check on his welfare failed because Mr. Card was not home or did not answer the door, Sergeant Mote said, “There was nothing I could do.”

“You could have contacted the Army Reserve psychiatric program, the resources that were available to members and their families,” said Paula Silsby, a committee member and a former U.S. attorney, said.

“Yes, on paper,” he said.

“But you didn’t,” said Mrs. Silsby.

Dave Phillips reporting contributed.

Mainstream Democrats, seeing the politics of Israel’s war in Gaza shifting against them, are urging President Biden to become much more outspoken in his criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and to be much more outspoken in his demands for a long-term solution to the conflict. the conflict that includes a Palestinian state.

At the start of the war, with memories fresh of Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel that claimed some 1,200 lives, Jewish Democrats, who had grown restless over Netanyahu’s rule more than a year ago, largely rallied behind Biden, while firmly siding with Israel. .

But as the death toll in Gaza rises inexorably, many are urging the president not so much to change policy but to become the voice of his administration’s own demands for a Ramadan ceasefire, more humanitarian aid, greater reductions in Jewish settler violence, and long-term peace that includes a Palestinian state.

“We hope that a strategy for peace and an end to this nightmare will be laid out in the State of the Union,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a prominent Jewish Democrat, said Wednesday. “No one can question Biden’s commitment to Israel’s security, and no one can question his career-long commitment to human rights and international law. This is the moment when the world needs American leadership for peace.”

Mr. Raskin returned to earlier criticism of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, adding: “Democrats believe that we do not take orders from right-wing politicians in America, and neither should we should do.” orders from right-wing politicians in another country.”

Well over a dozen Jewish Democrats in the House of Representatives were in charge a critical letter at the end of last month He demands that Mr Biden will “redouble” his efforts to reach a ceasefire that will allow more humanitarian aid to Gaza’s starving residents. Many of the same lawmakers warned Wednesday of an Israeli attack on the town of Rafah, along the Gaza-Egypt border, where hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have taken shelter.

Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Michael Bennet of Colorado returned from the region on Wednesday and spoke out in opposition “extremist settler violence against Palestinian civilians” in the West Bank and the “urgent need for much more robust and consistent” humanitarian assistance to Gaza.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, took to the Senate to name far-right Israeli cabinet members Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for blocking food aid. Mr Van Hollen invoked federal law that says military aid must be withheld from a government that blocks US humanitarian aid. On Wednesday, he emphasized that such a blockade would exclude air and missile defense systems, and he reiterated his demand for an answer from the State Department on why the law has not yet been invoked.

The leaders of these efforts come not from the party’s far left, which has been critical of the Gaza war almost from the start, but from the Democratic mainstream.

“I want the president to use his power to broker a ceasefire and bring in much-needed humanitarian aid,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, a veteran lawmaker from Massachusetts. “Some of us are frustrated. We have more influence here than we use.”

Patrick Gaspard, former Obama administration ambassador to South Africa and now head of the Center for American Progress, the Democratic establishment think tank, used social media this week to say that the federal government should “drop aid to Gaza because Netanyahu’s government is not allowing food to its starving population while shooting hundreds of civilians.”

Mr Gaspard added: “This is the surreal, powerless and cruel reality.”

That’s partly because the political risks for Democrats are clear. Tuesday night’s celebration for Rep. Adam Schiff, a Jewish Democrat who finished first in the race to capture an open Senate seat in California, was marred by noisy demonstrators who shouted ‘Liberate Palestine’ and ‘Let Gaza live’.

Even critics of Israel, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, are battle with squatters They demand that they take stronger positions against Israel. Biden endured another embarrassment Tuesday night when “uncommitted” won nearly 46,000 votes — 19 percent of the total — in the Minnesota primary, amid a campaign by Democrats protesting his policies in Gaza.

Democrats say they are not looking for large-scale shifts in U.S. policy. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has made clear that the administration only sees long-term peace through the creation of an autonomous Palestinian state. The State Department is seeking new entry points for much more humanitarian aid to starving Gazans, and ministry officials have singled out “Israeli government ministers” for blocking the release of flour and supporting protests that threaten the stopped the flow of food aid.

And Vice President Kamala Harris was more forceful last weekend in her demand for an “immediate ceasefire” during Ramadan this month, placing responsibility on both Hamas and Israel.

“It is imperative that the United States fulfill our commitment to end this conflict,” Mr. Booker said on Wednesday after returning from consultations in Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. “We must remember that the path to a just and lasting peace depends on our renewed commitment to a comprehensive two-state solution.”

But Democrats say Mr. Biden should be the face of such policies.

“Most Democrats would like to see President Biden, whose emotional intelligence is soaring, recognize and acknowledge the humanity of everyone caught up in this nightmare in Israel and Gaza,” Mr. Raskin said.

Mr. McGovern was more blunt with his State of the Union demands: “I want him to say that the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza is unacceptable and that I am going to do something about it,” he said, “and I intend to do something about it.” I’m going to do more than just issue a statement.”

The tension will almost certainly be reflected during the State of the Union address on Thursday evening. Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has made a show of inviting Mia Schem, a released Jewish hostage captured by Hamas on October 7. The families of no fewer than seventeen hostages will be present Thursday evening to remind Biden of their continued captivity, as guests of Republicans and Democrats.

“As Hamas’s propagandists and unwitting proxies attempt to turn the world against Israel, it is critical that we stand firm, remember who started this war, and not forget the hostages and their loved ones,” Representative Mike Lawler said, Republican of New York, to The New York Times. Jewish insider.

On the other hand, Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri and an outspoken critic of Israel and the Biden administration, will bring Intimaa Salama, a Palestinian dentist and graduate student from St. Louis University.

“Thirty-five family members of Dr. Salama have been murdered in the last 150 days,” Mrs. Bush said in announcing her guest. “This is an incalculable loss.”

Most Democrats are careful to say their demands are in line with the administration, not in opposition to it. More than thirty Democrats from the House of Representatives on Wednesday released a letter “to express our deep sense of urgency and concern about the potentially devastating consequences for innocent civilians of an Israeli military ground invasion of Rafah.”

The letter also denounced “calls by members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government for illegal policies such as the expulsion and transfer of civilians.”

But Democrats insisted they were merely “supporting the warnings of Biden administration officials.”

More than three years after a whirlwind of conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the originators of many of the false allegations are now being forced to admit — some under oath — that is no evidence to support their bizarre claims.

Lawyers from the conservative group True the Vote spoke on Wednesday admitted to a state court in Georgia that they had no evidence to support their claim of illegal “ballot trafficking” in the state during the 2020 election and the 2021 Senate runoff.

And earlier this month, former Project Veritas leader James O'Keefe said: issued a statement after one of his sources recanted his story about fraud in Erie, Pa. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred at the Erie Post Office during the 2020 presidential election,” Mr. O’Keefe said.

The recordings are known. Nor could the conspirators of many other false theories about the 2020 election when forced to provide evidence that would hold up in court.

In the days immediately following the 2020 election, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a lawyer for Mr. Trump, claimed that the election was “an absolute fraud.” Days later, under questioning by a Pennsylvania judge, he admitted: “This is not a fraud case.” Last year, Mr. Giuliani admitted that public comments he made saying two election workers in Georgia had committed voter fraud were false.

The untruths have had consequences. Former President Donald J. Trump and 19 of his allies were indicted on multiple charges over their efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle defamation claims over the network's promotion of misinformation about Dominion election machines during the 2020 election. Mr. Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million in damages to the two election workers.

Mr. Giuliani was among several election deniers who privately admitted that evidence was lacking.

“We have a lot of theories,” he told the leader of the Arizona Legislature after the 2020 election, according to Jan. 6 committee testimony. “We just don't have the evidence.”

True the Vote's admission that it did not have any evidence of ballot trafficking further undermined the claims that formed the basis for the debunked voter fraud film “2,000 Mules.” The film, despite its false claims, reached a wide audience.

And while the false conspiracy theories continue to be dismissed, Trump continues to perpetuate the election lies in his campaign speeches and public appearances.

The mess of conspiracy theories about a stolen and rigged election has become dogma for a large faction of the conservative base, irreparably damaging their confidence in the nation's electoral system and creating an election denial movement that has overwhelmed large parts of the Republican Party apparatus .

In August, nearly 70 percent of Republican voters did not believe President Biden's 2020 victory was legitimate. from a CNN poll. An opinion poll was published in June Monmouth University found that 30 percent of Americans believe Biden won in 2020 only because of voter fraud.

The two polls were conducted after numerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were proven false by the courts, making it unlikely that further rejection of the 2020 falsehoods will have a major effect on the 2024 election.

That may be partly because voters in today's hyper-polarized climate are attracted to excuses for losses, such as cheating, said Matthew Germer, board director of the R Street Institute, a conservative organization. Another factor: these lies make money for the liars.

“Conspiracy theories are great for fundraising, but terrible for democracy,” Mr. Germer said. “And that again preys on our tendency to want to be on the winning side.”

He added: “I am optimistic that the more of these conspiracies crumble, it will undermine the credibility of those who peddle them.”

“People can only really take so much,” he said. “But I think the question remains where those limits are and how long this can last.”