"I just want to find 11,780 votes"
The full hour of the January 2, 2021 call, in which the President of the United States worked through his numbers with Georgia's Secretary of State, who kept telling him the numbers were wrong.
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Internal Politics
A prelaunch, document-based narrative archive of consequential moments in American political life.
18 document-grounded files · 106 quoted exchanges
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Two Senate committees questioned Mark Zuckerberg for nearly five hours about Cambridge Analytica. He answered almost every demand for new privacy rights by explaining that users already had them.
The Deposition: 'This Woman Is Not My Type'
Under oath in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, Donald Trump confirmed he wrote and stood behind his statements calling her accusation a hoax. Every quoted line is from the October 19, 2022 deposition transcript.
"If You Can't Say 100 Percent Certain, I Take That as a No"
TikTok's chief executive faced five hours of questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The chair opened by asking for yes-or-no answers, and kept reclaiming her time when they did not arrive.
"I Have Lied. But I Am Not a Liar"
Michael Cohen came to the House Oversight Committee two months before reporting to federal prison, called his former client a racist and a cheat, and then sat while Jim Jordan read his own words back to him.
"But You Do Not Know How Many?"
Nine days after a gunman fired on a former President from a roof 150 yards from the stage, the Director of the Secret Service sat before the House Oversight Committee and declined, question after question, to supply a number.
"My Loyalty Is to the Constitution"
Four months after Christopher Wray replaced the FBI director Trump had fired, the House Judiciary Committee asked him who he reports to, whether he had been asked for loyalty, and about the agent removed from the Mueller team.
"It Is a Context-Dependent Decision"
The presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn were each asked the same question by the same member of Congress. None of them said yes. Two resigned within a month.
"It Just Sort Of Appeared"
Anthony Fauci's first public testimony after retiring. The subcommittee chairman asked where the six-foot rule came from, whether NIAID money reached a Chinese military scientist, and what changed between calling the lab leak a conspiracy theory and not.
"They Set the Scope"
Christopher Wray returned to House Judiciary in an election year. The chairman asked who decides what an FBI background check covers, and a member asked whether the Russians were interfering right then.
"Two Productions in One Day Would Be Outstanding"
The House Judiciary Committee had been issuing subpoenas for months. It called the agency officials responsible for answering them to explain, in public, why so little had arrived.
"Who Made the Decision?"
One month after the last plane left Kabul, the Secretary of Defense and the two generals who ran the war sat before the House Armed Services Committee and were asked, over and over, whose choice the withdrawal had been.
"I Do Now Recall"
Three weeks after George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty, Jeff Sessions came before House Judiciary to explain why he had told the Senate under oath that he knew of no contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
"I Cannot Tell You Why"
A week after his report on the Carter Page surveillance warrants, Inspector General Michael Horowitz spent an afternoon explaining to senators of both parties what one sentence in it actually meant.
"The Buck Stops With Mark"
Frances Haugen brought tens of thousands of pages of Facebook's own research to a Senate subcommittee and spent five hours being asked what the company knew about teenagers, elections and Ethiopia, and when it knew it.
"Everything Is on the Table, Sir"
Five weeks after a Norfolk Southern train derailed and burned in East Palestine, Ohio, the railroad's chief executive spent a morning in front of the Senate environment committee being asked to say yes or no.
"I Don't Think It Is a Problem"
With shelves empty across the country, the FDA commissioner and an Abbott executive appeared on the same day before a House oversight subcommittee to account for the four months between the first report of a sick infant and the inspection of the plant.
"Look at Your Own Damn Balance Sheet"
Two members of the Sackler family and the chief executive of Purdue Pharma appeared before House Oversight a month after the company pleaded guilty to three federal felonies, and were asked what they had taken out and whether they were sorry.
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