Tag: NYT

OAK GROVE, Ky. — Go out Gate 5 at Fort Campbell and Jenna’s Adult Superstore is right across the street. On either side are easy ways to lose your shirt.

Turn left and there’s a casino. Turn right and there are miles of businesses catering to — or preying on — financially inexperienced soldiers with money in their pockets for the first time.

The wide boulevard along Fort Campbell’s front wall is lined with places to get into debt or worse. There are used car lots galore and Cash America Pawn. Then, Omni Military Loans, various check-cashers and a storefront that invites soldiers to sell their plasma. On it goes along the main thoroughfare named for the Army post — the center of an ecosystem that thrives on government paychecks and not knowing how to manage them.

For soldiers sometimes still in their teens, the dozens of financial services operators that surround Fort Campbell and other military outposts are a gantlet to run every time they step off government property. The results are alarming: The post’s own newspaper reported that in recent years, 40 percent of its soldiers had at least one predatory loan. Often, they owe the loans to business owners who were once in the military themselves.

The Department of Defense, regulators and elected officials are well aware of the perils. Financially troubled soldiers may not be at their best, and money problems can cost them security clearances that are crucial to their jobs. So for decades, the government has fought to fend off cheaters, charlatans and others who wish to get their claws into military paychecks.

And while there have been victories, many continue to thrive.

Watchdogs are deeply concerned. This month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a warning about so-called allotments, a system that allows lenders to siphon money directly from soldiers’ paychecks. It also published a report noting that service member complaints rose 19 percent from 2019 to 2021, the majority of them related to debt collection and the credit reporting that tracks those debts.

With prices rising for almost everything, including cars and food and gas, the opportunities for lenders to profit from military personnel have only grown. And such customers are becoming even more enticing as branches of the armed forces increase sign-up bonuses to better attract recruits.

Attempts to address the problem run into one unavoidable obstacle: Young and financially inexperienced members of the military are ideal clients. They are not highly paid, but their jobs are all but guaranteed — so their paychecks arrive like clockwork.

The driver’s seat and the road to ruin

Fort Campbell straddles the Kentucky-Tennessee border near Oak Grove, Ky., and is home to the 101st Airborne Division, a unit renowned for its service from the beaches of Normandy to the streets of Falluja. Just under 30,000 soldiers are stationed there.

It’s not just the businesses lining Fort Campbell Boulevard that can imperil a soldier’s finances, it’s using the road at all. Just under half of U.S. soldiers are 25 or younger, and many are at outposts like Fort Campbell, where having a life requires having a car — a major purchase that they often pursue without much guidance.

“I was like, ‘Man, I don’t need my parents,’” said Jhett Florip, who joined the Army right out of high school about an hour north of Chicago. “I was out on my own, doing my own thing.”

He found a dealer who sold him a used Ford Escape — and set him up with a loan that had an extremely high interest rate. Between the payment and insurance costs associated with being a young male driver, Mr. Florip was soon spending a significant portion of his take-home pay on the vehicle alone.

He eventually found his way to Navy Federal Credit Union, the country’s largest credit union. The deal wasn’t much better there; he refinanced the loan for a few percentage points of savings.

“They explained to me: You’re a new person to our company buying a car with a big loan. You don’t have credit history,” he said. “So we’re going to jack it up.”

Mr. Florip’s mother ultimately set him straight: You can refinance without changing lenders, she told him. He eventually went back to Navy Federal and qualified for a much better rate.

Now Mr. Florip sees many soldiers doing exactly what he did when they see a vehicle that catches their eye.

“I’d call it a rite of passage, and I’d also just call it being naïve,” he said. “The first offer they get for the car they want is the best offer, and they just want to get it done.”

Buy now, and pay for it later

Whether their tastes skew toward hulking trucks, sleek imports or American muscle, soldiers at Fort Campbell don’t want for choice. And their buying experience can vary just as widely.

There are at least three ways to finance a car around these parts, from most desperate to least desperate: a buy-here-pay-here loan, in which the dealer takes all the risk (and does the repossessions); a sort of dealer-run installment plan; and a third-party loan obtained through the dealership.

At Nash Auto Sales, there’s no credit check — not that many of its customers would pass one — and high interest rates reflect its highly risky clientele. At BW’s Preowned Autos, across the boulevard from the post, cars come with two prices, one for cash and a higher one for a 12- to 18-month payment plan.

Adopt an Auto is the third kind, where soldiers’ information is plugged into a computer that spits out offers from willing lenders.

BW’s and Nash are both owned by military veterans, and until recently Vicky Salesky, who runs Adopt an Auto, had a partner who was a veteran.

Ms. Salesky said she tried to be one of the good guys, talking sense into younger soldiers who might qualify — just barely — for a loan with a double-digit interest rate. Many of the soldiers who come in are only a little older than her three teenagers.

“I hope they’re listening to me,” she said.

The veteran voice of experience

Terrence Jones hopes they’re listening, too.

An Army veteran himself, Mr. Jones once had to reassemble his own finances. Now he’s one of a group of financial counselors at Fort Campbell, doing standard-issue training, plus frequent one-on-one sessions that are both preventive and restorative.

His colleague Loreta Guzman said many of the soldiers who came in for advice were teenage novices. But other new enlistees are in their 30s.

“Maybe they couldn’t make it outside of the military, or they needed health care or housing,” she said. “They’re clueless. They don’t know where to start.”

Mr. Jones can tell the soldiers that he has been in their shoes.

“I got comfortable going to loan companies,” he said. “I was in a hole so deep, the daytime was dark. They say you cannot borrow your way to success, but I felt like I could prove them wrong.”

Now a kindly grandfather with a necktie and hair twists, he preaches a mantra: Financial literacy is not a skill, it’s a lifestyle.

Soldiers had best recite it daily. Mr. Jones once counted 31 storefronts nearby where inopportune financial choices were available to all.

A dynamic that breeds secrecy

Too often, those poor choices can fester in silence, thanks to a culture of self-sufficiency and the threat they pose to military career prospects.

Navy Federal, despite its name, is open to all branches of the military. Plenty of veterans and spouses of active service members work there — and its intimacy with the armed forces has been used for good and ill.

Navy Federal’s employees understand how its customers live and work — and some knew the frightening forms of leverage that exist in the military.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2016 accused Navy Federal employees of falsely threatening to alert service members’ commanders about past-due debts. That year, Navy Federal paid $23 million in compensation to consumers in addition to a $5.5 million civil penalty. (A Navy Federal spokeswoman said the lender had made “necessary changes” in response to the regulatory action.)

The credit union’s threats were not empty: Security clearances are often required for work that even relatively young soldiers do.

“In the military, there is very strong pressure to say, ‘Yes, I’m OK, don’t worry about me,’” said Clay Stackhouse, regional outreach manager at Navy Federal who was a Marine Corps aviator and rose to the rank of colonel. “I thought, ‘I got this.’ Lord knows I wasn’t going to tell anyone about my finances.”

That can make it easy for scams of all sorts to proliferate. In 2020, the Tennessee attorney general blew the whistle on a move that a national chain, Harris Jewelers, was pulling repeatedly at the local mall.

According to the attorney general’s office, Harris’s stores were “strategically located near military installations” and urged members of the military to borrow for its high-priced baubles. A bonus, according to the jeweler’s pitch, was that customers would be building or repairing their credit with the new debt, an arrangement that the state called “unlawful.”

“There’s money to be made,” Mr. Stackhouse said. “And we’re dealing with young people who have money for the first time.”

Fortunately, certain kinds of businesses don’t bother trying to pitch their wares to soldiers now. The federal Military Lending Act caps the interest that a lender can charge an active-duty soldier at 36 percent annually.

To civilians paying 6 percent on a mortgage and 18 on a credit card, that’s shocking. But payday lenders and others say even 36 percent is essentially uneconomical, given the risk profile of their customers.

As a result, payday, pawn and car title lenders that line Fort Campbell Boulevard have a policy of steering clear of military families.

Stay humble and hustle hard

But that doesn’t mean those families don’t seek these businesses out anyhow.

When Ashley Larson arrived in town, she was neither a soldier nor a spouse — but she was young and financially vulnerable.

Ms. Larson moved to the area to be with her boyfriend, an enlisted soldier she has since married. She was the victim of financial abuse when, she said, someone wrote bad checks against her bank account, which blacklisted her from many banking services.

That meant turning to a check-cashing operation not long after arriving in town, which took a chunk of money in return for doing business with her. “I’m still trying to navigate the process of not looking like I robbed a bank,” she said.

True to the “Stay Humble, Hustle Hard” tattoo on her forearm, she filled many hours when she first arrived with part-time micro businesses like selling baked goods to other military families. She had relatives in Florida ship her guava for her tres leches cake.

“My husband is working 70 hours a week, and I’m basically doing a bake sale,” she said.

Only recently did she find a reasonably well-paying job. It’s out of state, so her mother-in-law comes to watch the children during the week. Local help, she said, is expensive.

‘Soldiers helping soldiers,’ if they ask

Army pay doesn’t go very far. Military compensation starts at $1,695 per month in basic pay, before any other allowances.

So on a flier that all the new arrivals receive — the Fort Campbell Help Flow Chart — food assistance and financial assistance are two of the 11 categories, alongside abuse and addiction.

The seven entries under financial assistance include Army Emergency Relief, a nonprofit closely affiliated with the military that bills itself as “soldiers helping soldiers.” It’s a lifeline: The fund helped nearly 26,000 soldiers last year, handing out $44.8 million in loans and grants.

At Fort Campbell, officials there said, soldiers often sought assistance with getting a new place — first and last month’s rent — or with car repairs.

Although a commander need not be involved when military personnel initiate an application, several soldiers who asked not to be identified had convinced themselves that even inquiring about a loan could lead to a superior’s finding out about their problem — and any errors in judgment that led up to it.

That makes it tempting to head away from the post for extra money.

A few miles south of Fort Campbell’s gates, Nicole Allen was working the front desk at Grifols Biomat USA Plasma Center, which had a “Welcome Home Troops” sign over the entry. About 20 percent of the people who come in to sell that part of their blood are enlisted men and women, she said. New donors can earn up to $1,100 in their first month.

A donor referral program can yield even more. “That’s how we see the military,” Ms. Allen said. “They tell the whole company.”

But what if you need more than that?

The lender at the front of the line

The founding mythos of Omni Military Loans begins with Staff Sgt. Fred Nives. After World War II, he wanted a car but couldn’t get a loan.

The firm that he started decades ago has a branch near Fort Campbell, a prime corner spot in a well-kept strip mall. Accolades cover the walls, including a years-old Better Business Bureau “torch” award: Omni had been a local semifinalist for ethics.

The company offers a simple product — installment loans of $500 to $10,000 that last up to 36 months. The term length is no accident. Most people stay in the Army for at least that long but often go delinquent on consumer debts when they leave the service.

Omni makes it very easy to pay, with a set-it-and-forget-it system that other lenders can only dream of. Decades before automatic payments from checking accounts were common, the Department of Defense gave soldiers the ability to pay bills through its allotment system. Soldiers divvy up their paychecks before they hit their bank accounts, sending some back home or, in the case of Omni, to pay off a loan.

The system effectively puts Omni ahead of any other creditor. Nearly all Omni borrowers sign up for allotment, though for years they had no choice, according to the federal consumer bureau. The agency said in a 2020 consent order that Omni illegally mandated that customers pay via allotment.

Sheryl Smith, its chief risk and compliance officer, maintained in an interview that the company had never required paying by allotment and added that the consumer bureau had not asked the company to pay restitution. When it complied with the agency’s instructions to remind all borrowers that using allotments was optional, she added, there was “very, very little” response from people who wanted to pay some other way.

Those borrowers can take comfort that they’re not being cheated, according to Omni. The company’s site boasts that people with good credit “may receive a very competitive rate,” while adding that its loans top out at 35.95 percent. That’s just under the cap that the federal government imposes.

A battle that never ends

The continuing tussle — military counselors, the Department of Defense and regulators on one side, local lenders charging 20- or 30-some percent on the other, military-focused credit unions trying to wear the white hat — doesn’t have a winner yet. There may never be one.

Holly Petraeus saw the back and forth up and down Fort Campbell Boulevard up close. She lived at Fort Campbell twice while her husband, retired Gen. David H. Petraeus, rose up the Army ranks.

And eventually, off-property temptations were no longer only by the side of the road.

“I remember talking to a very frustrated platoon sergeant,” said Ms. Petraeus, who worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in a senior role protecting soldiers and veterans before she retired in 2017. “He said, ‘I can hang over that guy 23 hours per day, but in the 24th hour, he’s on the computer and taking out a loan on the shady website that he found.’”

Ms. Petraeus expressed the highest admiration for people like Ms. Guzman and Mr. Jones, the Fort Campbell counselors. They are, in their defense of our defenders, soldiers of a sort. But theirs is also a job that will probably never end.

“You get a whole new crop of recruits in every year,” she said. “And every year, you have to push that rock up the hill one more time.”

Audra Melton contributed reporting.

In May 1972, the Chicago police raided a high-rise apartment where a group called the Jane Collective was providing abortions. It was the year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision gave women the constitutional right to decide whether to give birth, and abortion was a criminal offense in Illinois.

Seven women were arrested, including two who had the names and addresses of patients on index cards in their purses. According to a history written by a member of the collective, “The Story of Jane,” the women destroyed the cards in the police van on the way to the station, tearing them into small pieces and eating some of them. They didn’t know what the police might do with the information, so they got rid of it.

Fifty years later, the Supreme Court has overturned the Roe decision. Abortions will be banned or seriously limited in much of the country. But now, thanks to the digital trails left behind in the modern technological age, it will be far harder to hide incriminating data about a decision to end a pregnancy.

When a draft of the court’s decision was first leaked in May, and then when the ruling became official last week, people focused on these digital trails, specifically the information that millions of women share about their menstrual cycles on period tracker apps. The knee-jerk advice was simple and direct: Delete them all. Immediately.

“Delete those fertility apps now,” tweeted Gina Neff, a sociologist and director of the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. In an interview over Zoom, Dr. Neff said the apps contained “powerful information about reproductive choices that’s now a threat.”

These apps allow users to record the dates of their menstrual cycles and get predictions about when they are ovulating and most fertile. The apps can also serve as digital diaries for sexual activity, birth control methods and conception attempts. Some women use the apps when they are trying to get pregnant, others to avoid it and many just to know when their next period is coming.

The exhortations to get rid of them seem to have had the opposite effect. According to Data.ai, which monitors app store activity, the downloads of period tracking apps doubled in the days since Roe was overturned, compared with average weekly downloads in the three previous months.

The biggest gainers were Clue and a little-known astronomy-based period tracker, Stardust, both of which made public commitments to data protection after the Supreme Court’s decision. A spokeswoman for Clue said the company, which is based in Europe, would not comply with requests for users’ health information from U.S. law enforcement.

While period trackers seem like an obvious source of information about reproductive health decisions, experts say other digital information is more likely to put women at risk. Cynthia Conti-Cook, a civil rights lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation, researched prosecutions of pregnant people accused of feticide or endangering their fetuses, cataloging the digital evidence used against them in an academic paper she published in 2020.

“We should start with the types of data that have already been used to criminalize people,” said Ms. Conti-Cook, who previously worked in a public defenders’ office in New York. “The text to your sister that says, ‘Expletive, I’m pregnant.’ The search history for abortion pills or the visitation of websites that have information about abortion.”

One of the cases Ms. Conti-Cook highlighted was that of Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman who was charged with second-degree murder after a stillbirth at home in 2017. According to a local report, investigators downloaded the contents of her phone, including her internet search history, and she “admitted to conducting internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage” and how to buy pregnancy-terminating medicine like mifepristone and misoprostol online. After significant public attention, the case against Ms. Fisher was dropped.

In another case, in Indiana, text messages to a friend about taking abortion pills late in a pregnancy were used to convict Purvi Patel, who successfully appealed and reduced a 20-year-sentence for feticide and neglect of a dependent.

“Those text messages, those websites visited, those Google searches are the exact type of intent evidence that prosecutors want to fill their bag of evidence,” Ms. Conti-Cook said.

Investigators could also potentially use smartphone location data if states pass laws forbidding women to travel to areas where abortion is legal. Information about people’s movements, collected via apps on their phones, is regularly sold by data brokers.

When The New York Times investigated the supposedly anonymized data on the market in 2018, it was able to identify a woman who had spent an hour at a Planned Parenthood in Newark. In May, a journalist at Vice was able to buy information from a data broker about phones that had been carried to Planned Parenthoods over the course of a week for just $160. (After Vice’s report, the data broker said it planned to cease selling data about visits to the health provider.)

In the past, anti-abortion activists have “geofenced” Planned Parenthoods, creating a digital border around them and targeting phones that enter the area with ads directing owners to a website meant to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies.

There are similar attempts to capture the attention of people who go online to seek help with abortions. “Pregnancy crisis centers” aim to be at the top of Google search results when people seek information about how to end a pregnancy. When someone clicks through to such a website, it will sometimes try to collect information about the person.

Given the many ways in which people’s movements, communications and internet searches are digitally tracked, the bigger question may be just how zealous law enforcement will be in states with abortion bans. Those advising against the use of period trackers appear to fear the worst: dragnet-style searches for anyone who was pregnant and then ceased to be.

“It’s hard to say what will happen where and how and when, but the possibilities are pretty perilous,” Ms. Conti-Cook said. “It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities, which is why I try to emphasize focusing on what we have seen used against people.”

She added: “Google searches, websites visited, email receipts. That’s what we’ve seen.”

WASHINGTON — He flung his lunch across the room, smashing the plate in a fit of anger as ketchup dripped down the wall. He appeared to endorse supporters who wanted to hang his own vice president. And in a scene laid out by a former aide that seemed more out of a movie than real life, he tried to wrestle away the steering wheel of his presidential vehicle and lunged at his own Secret Service agent.

Former President Donald J. Trump has never been seen as the most stable occupant of the Oval Office by almost anyone other than himself, but the breathtaking testimony presented by his former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, at Tuesday’s House select committee hearing portrayed an unhinged commander in chief veering wildly out of control as he desperately sought to cling to power and egged on armed supporters to help make it happen.

The president that emerged from her account was volatile, violent and vicious, single-minded in his quest to overturn an election he lost no matter what anyone told him, anxious to head to the Capitol to personally disrupt the constitutional process that would finalize his defeat, dismissive of warnings that his actions could lead to disaster and thoroughly unbothered by the prospect of sending to Congress a mob of supporters that he knew included people armed with deadly weapons.

A president who liked to describe himself as a “very stable genius” was anything but that as Ms. Hutchinson observed in those final, frenzied days of his time in office. Hers was not a description that surprised many of those who worked for Mr. Trump and had seen him up close in the preceding four years, or for that matter, many who had known him in the decades that preceded his life in politics. But hearing her recount it all under oath, on live television, brought home how much Mr. Trump and his White House spiraled in its perilous last chapter.

“This is f-ing crazy,” Pat A. Cipollone, his White House counsel, declared at one point on Jan. 6, 2021, as Ms. Hutchinson recalled it, when Mr. Trump was busy castigating Vice President Mike Pence rather than trying to call off the attack on the Capitol.

Mr. Cipollone was not the only one who thought so. By Ms. Hutchinson’s account, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other members of the Cabinet were so concerned about Mr. Trump’s behavior that they discussed invoking the 25th Amendment, used to remove a president deemed unable to discharge his duties.

Mr. Trump, who regularly accuses his critics of being “crazy” and “psycho,” bombarded his new social media site during the hearing on Tuesday with posts assailing Ms. Hutchinson and denying the most sensational anecdote she provided to the committee.

“Her Fake story that I tried to grab the steering wheel of the White House Limousine in order to steer it to the Capitol Building is ‘sick’ and fraudulent, very much like the Unselect Committee itself,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social website. “Her story of me throwing food is also false.”

A Secret Service spokesman said in a statement that the agency would respond on the record to the House committee about Ms. Hutchinson’s account of what happened in the armored car.

Secret Service officials who requested anonymity to discuss the potential testimony said that both Robert Engel, the head of Mr. Trump’s protective detail, and the driver of Mr. Trump’s sport utility vehicle were prepared to state under oath that neither man was assaulted by the former president and that he did not reach for the wheel. The officials said the two men would not dispute the allegation that Mr. Trump wanted to go to the Capitol.

Ms. Hutchinson did not witness the scene in the vehicle herself but said she was informed about it moments later by Anthony Ornato, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a former Secret Service agent, with Mr. Engel present in the room and not disputing it.

Either way, other veterans of the Trump White House who have broken with the former president said Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony resonated with their own experiences. Mr. Trump was prone to temper tantrums, slamming his hands down on his desk and screaming at advisers he considered insufficiently loyal. As Ms. Hutchinson said, his destruction of dishware during an outburst following the election was hardly the first time he had taken his wrath out on the White House china.

“His temper was scary. And swift,” Stephanie Grisham, who served as his White House press secretary and communications director and as Melania Trump’s chief of staff, said after the hearing on Tuesday. “He’d snap and almost lose control.”

She related a number of examples in her tell-all book published after she left office, and noted that when Mr. Trump descended into rage, his staff resorted to summoning an aide, nicknamed the Music Man, to play favorite show tunes they knew would soothe him, including “Memory” from the Broadway musical “Cats.”

Live Updates: Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsUpdated June 28, 2022, 8:20 p.m. ETA lawyer for Virginia Thomas said she would not testify to the House panel for now.Cassidy Hutchinson provides stunning testimony about Trump on Jan. 6.What are magnetometers, or mags?

Other presidents have exhibited erratic behavior behind the scenes, from Andrew Jackson to Lyndon B. Johnson. Richard M. Nixon threw an ashtray across the room upon learning of the Watergate break-in, and on another occasion was seen shoving his own press secretary. In the days of scandal that led up to his resignation, Nixon drank, talked to the paintings of past presidents and seemed so unstable that his defense secretary ordered generals not to carry out any orders he issued without checking with him or the secretary of state first.

Even so, it’s hard to imagine any other president accosting his own Secret Service agent, in a vain attempt to turn his vehicle toward the Capitol, so that he could march into the House chamber to object to his own election defeat.

“We never know everything that goes on behind closed doors at the White House, and presidential history is replete with boorish behavior,” said Jeffrey A. Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. “But I’m hard pressed to think of any previous instance when a president physically assaulted, or even threatened, someone charged with keeping them safe.”

Mark K. Updegrove, president of the L.B.J. Foundation and author of “Incomparable Grace,” a new book about John F. Kennedy, said he was unable to come up with a historical comparison. Johnson and Nixon “could be volatile emotionally, but nothing approaching physical violence,” he said. “Like almost everything else with Trump, this is utterly unprecedented.”

One who might know would be John Dean, the White House counsel whose own testimony during the Watergate era helped bring down Nixon. “Cassidy‘s testimony makes clear that Trump is prone to tantrums, like an undisciplined child,” he said after the hearing. “I can’t tell from her testimony if they’re controlled or uncontrolled. I suspect at his age they’re controlled tantrums.”

Mr. Trump’s mental state was a regular issue throughout his four years in office and the notion of declaring him unfit to serve through the application of the 25th Amendment came up inside his own administration even in its early months.

Bookshelves were filled with volumes speculating about his psychological health. His speech patterns were analyzed for signs of dementia. His own niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist, declared that he had “so many pathologies” and “demonstrates sociopathic tendencies.” At one point during the 2020 campaign, he took a cognitive test to prove his mental acuity, reciting in order, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”

Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7

Making a case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so far:

An unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.

Creating election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers as he declared victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.

Pressuring Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.

Fake elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.

Strong arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.

Trump’s rage. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, delivered explosive testimony during the panel’s sixth hearing, saying that the president knew the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed, but wanted to loosen security. She also revealed that Mr. Trump, demanding to go to the Capitol, tried to grab his vehicle’s steering wheel from a Secret Service agent.

Some advisers came to the conclusion that Mr. Trump deteriorated after losing the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Nov. 3. Former Attorney General William P. Barr, whose public statement on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence the election was stolen prompted Mr. Trump to attack his lunch, told the House committee that the president seemed increasingly unbalanced.

“I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he’s become detached from reality,” Mr. Barr testified.

The reality conveyed by Ms. Hutchinson, a top aide to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, became more disturbing on the day that Congress convened to count the Electoral College votes confirming Mr. Trump’s defeat. He lashed out and gave every indication that he knew the crowd of supporters he had gathered on the Ellipse included some bent on violence. Told that some trying to attend his rally were armed, he snapped that the Secret Service should remove its magnetometers and let them in.

“You know, I don’t f-ing care that they have weapons,” Mr. Trump said in Ms. Hutchinson’s telling of the episode. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the f-ing mags away.”

The fact that he then told them to march to the Capitol, knowing they were armed, did not daunt him in the least, as far as she could tell.

He wanted to go with them and told the crowd that he would, even though advisers had pronounced it a phenomenally bad idea. “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” if he headed to the Capitol, Mr. Cipollone had warned a few days earlier.

When Mr. Trump climbed into the armored presidential sport utility vehicle after his speech on the Ellipse, the Secret Service began to take him back to the White House, prompting him to erupt. “I’m the f-ing president. Take me up to the Capitol now,” he ordered.

Robert Engel, the lead agent, told him he had to go back to the West Wing. At that point, according to the account Ms. Hutchinson later heard, the president reached up toward the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm. “Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel,” the agent reportedly said. “We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.”

According to the version relayed to Ms. Hutchinson, Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge toward the agent at his clavicle. But it did not make a difference.

The president was taken back to the White House, where he watched the action of the rest of the day on television — upset not at the violence unleashed in his name but at its failure to change the election outcome.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

It was one of the most dramatic moments in a presentation filled with them: Just before President Donald J. Trump went onstage near the White House last year and urged his supporters to “fight like hell” and march on the Capitol, an aide testified on Tuesday, he was told that some of them were armed.

It was also a potentially consequential moment for any prosecution of Mr. Trump, legal experts said. Knowing that his crowd of supporters had the means to be violent when he exhorted them to march to the Capitol — and declared that he wanted to go with them — could nudge Mr. Trump closer to facing criminal charges, legal experts said.

“This really moved the ball significantly, even though there is still a long way to go,” said Renato Mariotti, a legal analyst and former federal prosecutor in Illinois.

The extent to which the Justice Department’s expanding criminal inquiry is focused on Mr. Trump remains unclear. But the revelations in the testimony to the House select committee by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, both provided new evidence about Mr. Trump’s activities before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and chipped away at any potential defense that he was merely expressing well-founded views about election fraud.

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the question of criminal intent when it comes to a president, but what just happened changed my bottom line,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. “I have gone from Trump is less than likely to be charged to he is more than likely to be charged.”

A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland declined to comment on Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony — although one of Mr. Garland’s predecessors did weigh in.

“The department is clearly looking into all this, and this hearing definitely gave investigators a lot to chew on,” said William P. Barr, who resigned as attorney general under Mr. Trump after saying publicly weeks after Election Day that there was no evidence of fraud widespread enough to have changed the race’s outcome.

During her testimony to the panel, Ms. Hutchinson recounted a conversation she had on Jan. 3, 2021, with Pat Cipollone, the top lawyer in the White House. Ms. Hutchinson described how Mr. Cipollone worriedly pulled her aside that day after learning that Mr. Trump was considering marching with his supporters to the Capitol after his speech near the White House on Jan. 6 — a decision, he suggested, that could have major consequences.

“We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” Mr. Cipollone said, by Ms. Hutchinson’s account.

One of the crimes Mr. Cipollone was concerned about, Ms. Hutchinson recounted, was the same one the committee had accused Mr. Trump of committing in a court filing this spring: the obstruction of a congressional proceeding — namely, the certification of the Electoral College vote inside the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A federal judge in a civil suit related to the House committee’s work also concluded this year that Mr. Trump and one of his legal advisers, John Eastman, most likely had committed felonies, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the United States, through their efforts to block certification of the Electoral College results.

According to Ms. Hutchinson, another potential crime that worried Mr. Cipollone was incitement to riot. That offense, while simpler in theory than obstruction, requires prosecutors to reach a high threshold of evidence and prove that a defendant’s words presented an immediate threat of lawlessness or danger.

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Some legal scholars said Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony made the best case to date that Mr. Trump had in fact incited the crowd.

“Until this point, we had not seen proof that he knew about the violence,” said Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who served as the lead counsel during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “The testimony made very clear he was not only entirely aware of the threat, but wanted armed people to march to the Capitol. He was even willing to lead them.”

This winter, a federal judge in Washington, ruling that a group of civil lawsuits claiming that Mr. Trump was liable for the violence on Jan. 6 could go to trial, also suggested that the former president had incited the crowd that heard his speech.

In his ruling, Judge Amit P. Mehta found that after months of creating an “air of distrust and anger” by relentlessly claiming that the election had been stolen, Mr. Trump should have known that his supporters would take his speech not merely as words, but as “a call to action.”

Judge Mehta also ruled that Mr. Trump could reasonably be held accountable for having aided and abetted those who assaulted police officers during the Capitol attack.

After 18 months, the Justice Department’s investigation of the Capitol attack has resulted in more than 840 criminal cases being filed against rioters on charges ranging from misdemeanor trespass to seditious conspiracy.

In recent days, the inquiry has accelerated with a flurry of search warrants and subpoenas going out, implicating some of Mr. Trump’s top allies in key swing states and at least two lawyers, Jeffrey Clark and Mr. Eastman, who worked on separate but related plans to stave off his defeat in the 2020 election.

Still, it remains unknown if prosecutors are looking directly at Mr. Trump’s own involvement in subverting the election or inspiring the mob that wreaked havoc at the Capitol.

Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 7

Making a case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears to be laying out evidence that could allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so far:

An unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.

Creating election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored aides and advisers as he declared victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.

Pressuring Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal, according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.

Fake elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.

Strong arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.

Trump’s rage. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, delivered explosive testimony during the panel’s sixth hearing, saying that the president knew the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed, but wanted to loosen security. She also revealed that Mr. Trump, demanding to go to the Capitol, tried to grab his vehicle’s steering wheel from a Secret Service agent.

While the House committee has always reserved the right to recommend that Mr. Trump be charged, it was revealed this month that the panel and the Justice Department have been at odds over the transcripts of interviews with witnesses like Ms. Hutchinson, with top department officials complaining that by withholding as many as 1,000 transcripts the committee was hampering the work of making criminal cases.

Another matter that remains unknown is whether Ms. Hutchinson has spoken with federal prosecutors about what she saw and heard inside the White House on Jan. 6 and the days leading up to it.

The Justice Department has already charged more than 220 rioters with the obstruction count, which requires proving that a defendant knowingly and corruptly interfered with the work of Congress.

Some legal scholars have suggested that Mr. Trump could defend himself against the charge by arguing that he did not intend to disrupt the work of Congress through any of his schemes, but rather was acting in good faith to address what he sincerely believed was fraud in the election.

But even those experts who once gave credence to this defense felt that the new accounts revealed on Tuesday chipped away at the possibility that Mr. Trump could claim willful blindness.

All month, the House committee has been laying out a detailed argument for why Mr. Trump should be charged with crimes at a series of public hearings. The presentations have depicted Mr. Trump as being personally involved in multiple efforts to strong-arm state lawmakers, Justice Department officials and even Mike Pence, his own vice president, into machinations that would have kept him in the White House.

Those machinations included a plot to create false slates of electors declaring that Mr. Trump had won the election in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and a subsequent effort to persuade Mr. Pence to use the phony slates on Jan. 6 to subvert the normal workings of the Electoral College and single-handedly declare Mr. Trump to be the victor.

What Tuesday’s hearing added was a cinematic account of Mr. Trump’s connection to the violence at the Capitol.

“This is a dramatic last piece that enriches the story,” said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University. “But it’s not clear that it changes the fundamental question of criminal liability.”

For the past two years, anyone who had a home to sell could get practically any asking price. Good shape or bad, in cities and in exurbs, seemingly everything on the market had a line of eager buyers.

Now, in the span of a few weeks, real estate agents have gone from managing bidding wars to watching properties sit without offers, and once-hot markets like Austin, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, are poised for big declines.

The culprit is rising mortgage rates, which have spiked to their highest levels since the 2008 housing crisis in response to the Federal Reserve’s recent efforts to tame inflation. The jump in borrowing costs, adding hundreds of dollars a month to the typical mortgage payment and coming on top of two years of home price increases, has pushed wishful home buyers past their financial limits.

“We’ve reached the point where people just can’t afford a house,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a national real estate brokerage.

More than any other part of the economy, housing — a purchase that for most buyers requires taking on huge amounts of debt — is especially sensitive to interest rates. That sensitivity becomes even more pronounced when homes are unaffordable, as they are now. As a result, home prices and new construction are a central component of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow rapid inflation by raising interest rates, which the central bank has done several times this year. But the Fed’s moves come with an inherent risk that the economy will spiral into a recession if they stifle home purchases and development activity too much.

While housing does not account for a huge amount of economic output, it is a boom-bust industry that has historically played an outsize role in downturns. The sector runs on credit, and new home purchases are often followed by new furniture, new appliances and new electronics that are important pieces of consumer spending.

“We need the housing market to bend to rein in inflation, but we don’t want it to break, because that would mean a recession,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Home prices are still at record levels, and they are likely to take months or longer to fall — if they ever do. But that caveat, which real estate agents often hold up as a shield, cannot paper over the fact that demand has waned considerably and that the market direction has changed.

Sales of existing homes fell 3.4 percent in May from April, according to the National Association of Realtors, and construction is also down. Homebuilders that had been parsing out their inventory with elaborate lotteries now say their pandemic lists have shriveled to the point that they are lowering prices and sweetening incentives — like cheaper counter and bathroom upgrades — to get buyers over the line.

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“There was this collective belief that housing was invincible — that it was so undersupplied and demand so high that nothing could stop price growth,” said Ali Wolf, chief economist with Zonda, a housing data and consulting firm. “A very rapid increase in interest rates and home prices has proven that theory to be false.”

It is a stark change for a market that blossomed soon after the initial shock of the pandemic, which for many people turned out to be a perfect time to buy a home. Rock-bottom mortgage rates lowered borrowing costs, while the shift to home offices and Zoom meetings opened up new swaths of the country to buyers who had been struggling to penetrate the market near the jobs they once commuted to.

That caused prices to explode in far-flung exurbs and once-affordable places like Spokane, Wash., where a crush of new home buyers decamped from pricey West Coast cities. People became so willing to move long distances to buy a home that “the normal laws of supply and demand didn’t apply,” Mr. Kelman said.

After two years of swift price increases, however, places that once seemed cheap no longer are. Home values have risen about 40 percent over the past two years, according to Zillow, forcing buyers to stretch ever further in price even as they run out of geography.

Now add in mortgage rates, which have nearly doubled this year. And inflation, which is eating into savings for some families as it increases household expenses. And a wobbly stock market, which has reduced the value of portfolios that many buyers intended to tap for a down payment.

Larisa Kiryukhin and her family were long ago priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area, where they had lived for decades. Ms. Kiryukhin, 44, is a medical assistant who was tied to her hospital, but the pandemic gave her husband, who works in information technology, the flexibility to move to a more affordable city. So Ms. Kiryukhin switched jobs, and this year the couple and their two children moved to Tampa, Fla., in hopes of buying a home.

Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5

What is inflation? Inflation is a loss of purchasing power over time, meaning your dollar will not go as far tomorrow as it did today. It is typically expressed as the annual change in prices for everyday goods and services such as food, furniture, apparel, transportation and toys.

What causes inflation? It can be the result of rising consumer demand. But inflation can also rise and fall based on developments that have little to do with economic conditions, such as limited oil production and supply chain problems.

Is inflation bad? It depends on the circumstances. Fast price increases spell trouble, but moderate price gains can lead to higher wages and job growth.

How does inflation affect the poor? Inflation can be especially hard to shoulder for poor households because they spend a bigger chunk of their budgets on necessities like food, housing and gas.

Can inflation affect the stock market? Rapid inflation typically spells trouble for stocks. Financial assets in general have historically fared badly during inflation booms, while tangible assets like houses have held their value better.

In April, the family went into contract on a $425,000 house and was quoted an interest rate of 4 percent. Then the closing date was extended because the seller wanted time to find a new home. Then interest rates jumped, adding about $700 to the monthly payment, and the family backed out.

“I moved here just to buy a house, and here we go: The prices got so high we can’t afford it,” Ms. Kiryukhin.

The typical home buyer makes about $70,000 a year, according to Moody’s Analytics. A $600-a-month increase in housing costs — about how much rising interest rates have added to the typical mortgage payment — is more than most people can shoulder.

Steve Silbar, a real estate agent in Spokane, Wash., said he had seen a sharp deterioration in interest among buyers looking for homes under $500,000. Those buyers typically have less cash, so rising mortgage rates “have moved them out of the market,” he said.

Heather Renz and her husband, clients of Mr. Silbar’s, were preparing to buy a home for $360,000. Ms. Renz is her mother’s caregiver. To qualify for a mortgage, her husband, who works as a technician at an aerospace company, was going to pull money out of his retirement account and bolster their down payment. But the recent stock market declines pushed the amount he could withdraw below what they needed to qualify.

“We were three-quarters of the way through the process,” Ms. Renz said.

The interest rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage has risen to 5.81 percent from 3.22 percent in the first week of January, according to the mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Some of that adjustment anticipated future Fed interest rate increases. Officials raised rates by three-quarters of a percentage point in June alone, the largest increase since 1994, and have signaled that a similarly large move is on the table in July. Any further surprises could push mortgage rates even higher.

Inflation is running at the fastest pace in 40 years, forcing the Fed to stake out an aggressive policy response to try to bring it under control.

Because higher interest rates slow down big purchases made on credit, from homes and cars to business equipment, they can limit demand and allow supply to catch up, tempering price increases across the economy.

Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.