Michmutters

WASHINGTON — The No. 2 Senate Democrat on Wednesday called for an inspector general investigation into missing text messages from top Defense Department officials in the Trump administration related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he was sending a letter to Sean O’Donnell, the Defense Department’s inspector general, seeking an investigation into the disappearance of text messages from the phones of at least five former Trump administration officials, including Christopher C. Miller, the acting defense secretary; Kash Patel, the Pentagon’s chief of staff; and Ryan D. McCarthy, the Army secretary.

The officials were involved in discussions about sending the National Guard to the Capitol during the mob violence.

“The disappearance of this critical information could jeopardize efforts to learn the full truth about Jan. 6,” Mr. Durbin said in a statement. “I don’t know whether the failure to preserve these critical government texts from Jan. 6 is the result of bad faith, stunning incompetence or outdated records management policies, but we must get to the bottom of it.”

A spokeswoman for the inspector general said he was awaiting Mr. Durbin’s letter and would “review the letter once we receive it.”

Mr. Durbin’s call for an investigation into the missing texts from the Pentagon came on the same day the Justice Department filed a civil suit against a former White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Peter Navarro, saying that Mr. Navarro had failed to preserve messages from a private email address he used in conducting government business.

In the suit, the Justice Department said that it had reached out to Mr. Navarro about providing the emails, but that he had declined to provide the records “absent a grant of immunity for the act of returning such documents.”

Mr. Navarro was indicted in June on two charges of contempt of Congress after failing to comply with subpoenas from the House Jan. 6 committee seeking his testimony and documents.

Mr. Navarro’s lawyers, John Irving and John Rowley, said that he had “never refused to provide records to the government.”

“As detailed in our recent letter to the Archives, Mr. Navarro instructed his lawyers to preserve all such records, and he expects the government to follow standard processes in good faith to allow him to produce records,” the lawyers said in a statement. “Instead, the government chose to file its lawsuit today.”

In the case of the missing Pentagon texts, Mr. Durbin wrote to the inspector general a day after the watchdog group American Oversight sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland calling for an investigation. CNN reported earlier on the agency’s missing texts.

American Oversight discovered the issue in March through litigation over the Defense Department’s response to public records requests it filed related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a court filing, lawyers for the Defense Department and the Army told the group that the government could not produce certain communications because when an administration official leaves a post, “he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped .”

“For those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved,” the lawyers wrote, although they added that they would try to retrieve the texts through other means.

American Oversight had been seeking senior officials’ communications with Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6.

The group has specifically asked for the communications of Mr. Miller; Mr Patel; Mr McCarthy; Paul Ney, the general counsel for the Defense Department; Gen. James McConville, the Army chief of staff; James E. McPherson, the general counsel of the Army; and Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, the director of the Army staff.

Mr. Miller, Mr. Patel, Mr. Ney, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McPherson all left the Defense Department or the Army by the end of the Trump administration.

Mr. Durbin’s letter came after he called on Mr. Garland last week to take over an investigation into missing Department of Homeland Security text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, including those on the phones of Secret Service agents. Also missing were the texts of Mr. Trump’s homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, his deputy.

Two influential House Democrats have also called for two officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog to testify to Congress about the agency’s handling of missing Secret Service texts from Jan. 6, accusing their office of engaging in a cover-up.

“The court practically dared women in this country to go to the ballot box to restore the right to choose,” President Biden said by video Wednesday, as he signed an executive order aimed at helping Americans cross state lines for abortions. “They don’t have a clue about the power of American women.”

In interviews, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, urged Democrats to be “full-throated” in their support of abortion access, and Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm, said the Kansas vote offered a “preview of coming attractions” for Republicans. Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a highly competitive district, issued a statement saying that abortion access “hits at the core of preserving personal freedom, and of ensuring that women, and not the government, can decide their own fate.”

Republicans said the midterm campaigns would be defined by Mr. Biden’s disastrous approval ratings and economic concerns.

Both Republicans and Democrats caution against conflating the results of an up-or-down ballot question with how Americans will vote in November, when they will be weighing a long list of issues, personalities and their views of Democratic control of Washington.

“Add in candidates and a much more robust conversation about lots of other issues, this single issue isn’t going to drive the full national narrative that the Democrats are hoping for,” said David Kochel, a veteran of Republican politics in nearby Iowa. Still, Mr. Kochel acknowledged the risks of Republicans’ overstepping, as social conservatives push for abortion bans with few exceptions that polls generally show to be unpopular.

“The base of the GOP is definitely ahead of where the voters are in wanting to restrict abortion,” he said. “That’s the main lesson of Kansas.”

Polls have long shown most Americans support at least some abortion rights. But abortion opponents have been far more likely to let the issue determine their vote, leading to a passion gap between the two sides of the issue. Democrats hoped the Supreme Court decision this summer erasing the constitutional right to an abortion would change that, as Republican-led states rushed to enact new restrictions, and outright bans on the procedure took hold.

The Kansas vote was the most concrete evidence yet that a broad swath of voters — including some Republicans who still support their party in November — were ready to push back. Kansans voted down the amendment in Johnson County — home to the populous, moderate suburbs outside Kansas City — rejecting the measure with about 70 percent of the vote, a sign of the power of this issue in suburban battlegrounds nationwide. But the amendment was also defeated in more conservative counties, as abortion rights support outpaced Mr. Biden’s showing in 2020 nearly everywhere.

After months of struggling with their own disengaged if not demoralized base, Democratic strategists and officials hoped the results signaled a sort of awakening. They argued that abortion rights are a powerful part of the effort to cast Republicans as extremists and turn the 2022 elections into a choice between two parties, rather than a referendum just on Democrats.

“The Republicans who are running for office are quite open about their support for banning abortion,” said Senator Warren. “It’s critical that Democrats make equally clear that this is a key difference, and Democrats will stand up for letting the pregnant person make the decision, not the government.”

A Kansas-style referendum will be a rarity this election year, with only four other states expected to put abortion rights directly to voters in November with measures to amend their constitutions: California, Michigan, Vermont and Kentucky. However, the issue has already emerged as a defining debate in some key races, including in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Democratic candidates for governor have cast themselves as bulwarks against far-reaching abortion restrictions or bans. On Tuesday, Michigan Republicans nominated Tudor Dixon, a former conservative commentator, for governor, who has opposed abortion in cases of rape and incest.

And in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, the far-right Republican nominee for governor, said, “I don’t give a way for exceptions” when asked whether he believes in exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the mother. Governor’s contests in states including Wisconsin and Georgia could also directly affect abortion rights.

Other tests of the impact of abortion on races are coming sooner. North of New York City, a Democrat running in a special House election this month, Pat Ryan, has made abortion rights a centerpiece of his campaign, casting the race as another measure of the issue’s power this year.

“We have to step up and make sure our core freedoms are protected and defended,” said Mr. Ryan, the Ulster County executive in New York, who had closely watched the Kansas results.

Opponents of the Kansas referendum leaned into that “freedom” message, with ads that cast the effort as nothing short of a government mandate — anathema to voters long mistrustful of too much intervention from Topeka and Washington — and sometimes without using the word “abortion” at all.

Some of the messaging was aimed at moderate, often suburban voters who have toggled between the parties in recent elections. Strategists in both parties agreed that abortion rights could be salient with those voters, particularly women, in the fall. Democrats also pointed to evidence that the issue may also drive up turnout among their base voters.

After the Supreme Court’s decision, Democrats registered to vote at a faster rate than Republicans in Kansas, according to a memo from Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. Mr. Bonier said his analysis of him found roughly 70 percent of Kansans who registered after the court’s decision were women.

“It is malpractice to not continue to center this issue for the remainder of this election season — and beyond,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic strategist. “What Democrats should say is that for Americans your bedroom is on the ballot this November.”

Inside the Democratic Party, there has been a fierce debate since Roe was overturned over how much to talk about abortion rights at a time of rising prices and a rocky economy — and that is likely to intensify. There is always the risk, some longtime strategists warn, of getting distracted from the issues that polls show are still driving most Americans.

Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said he understood the hesitancy from party stalwarts.

“The energy is on the side of abortion rights,” he said. “For decades that hasn’t been true so it’s difficult for some people who have been through lots of tough battles and lots of tough states to recognize that the ground has shifted under them. But it has.”

He urged Democrats to ignore polling that showed abortion was not a top-tier issue, adding that “voters take their cues from leaders” and Democrats need to discuss abortion access more. “When your pollster or your strategist says, ‘Take an abortion question and pivot away from it’ you should probably resist,” he said.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this week showed that the issue of abortion access had become more salient for women 18 to 49 years old, with a 14-percentage-point jump since February for those who say it will be very important to their vote in midterm elections, up to 73 percent.

That is roughly equal to the share of voters overall who said inflation would be very important this fall — and a sign of how encouraging abortion has become for many women.

Still, Republicans said they would not let their focus veer from the issues they have been hammering for months.

“This fall, voters will consider abortion alongside inflation, education, crime, national security and a feeling that no one in Democrat-controlled Washington listens to them or cares about them,” said Kellyanne Conway, the Republican pollster and former senior Trump White House adviser.

Michael McAdams, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said that if Democrats focused the fall campaign on abortion they would be ignoring the economy and record-high prices: “the No. 1 issue in every competitive district.”

One of the most endangered Democrats in the House, Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey, agreed that “the economy is the defining issue for people.”

“But there is a relationship here, because voters want leaders to be focused on fighting inflation, not banning abortion,” he said. Mr. Malinowski, who said he was planning to advertise on abortion rights, said the results in Kansas had affirmed for him the significance of abortion and the public’s desire to keep the government out of such personal decisions.

“There is enormous energy among voters and potential voters this fails to make that point,” he said.

peter baker contributed reporting from Washington.