James' World 2

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One of the most notable chapters in the history of NASA is coming to something like a close: after calling for an unprecedented medical evacuation of four astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS), these space farers are safely home. The episode has left myriad unanswered questions about what exactly happened to prompt the stunning decision to end their mission early—a first in the history of the ISS.

When asked at a Thursday press conference if NASA planned to release further information about the medical situation that prompted the evacuation, agency chief Jared Isaacman said it is “very committed to being transparent.”

“There are some medical privacy considerations here. That said, to the extent that we are in a position to share more information publicly and have the necessary consent, we would do so,” he said.

“Obviously, we took this action because it was a serious medical condition,” Isaacman said. “The astronaut in question is fine right now, in good spirits and going through the proper medical checkouts.”

Crew-11 splashed down in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule off the coast of California at approximately 3:41 A.M. EST. The evacuating Crew-11 includes NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. NASA has not identified which of these astronauts experienced the medical issue. “The crew member of concern is doing fine. We will share updates on their health as soon as it’s appropriate to do so,” Isaacman said on Thursday.

The crew is undergoing medical evaluation on a receiver ship and is headed to a hospital in San Diego, Calif., for further investigation and care, said Joel Montalbano, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Missions Directorate, at the same conference.

Whatever happened to Crew-11 could influence how the agency prepares for future human spaceflight missions, including the upcoming Artemis II moon flyby. NASA will conduct a full debrief and review of the Crew-11 mission, Isaacman said.

“When we go through the debrief on this, we’re going to learn a lot about the things we got right and did it very well and make sure we apply that in other applications going forward,” Isaacman said.

The ISS is equipped with an array of medical equipment, drugs, and diagnostic tools—all of which the station’s crew know how to use. That means most minor ailments can be dealt with onboard: wounds can be sutured, blood can be taken and ultrasounds can be done. But NASA evidently decided that whatever occurred was serious enough that the ISS was not the place to keep the ailing astronaut. The agency plans for these contingencies on every mission, Isaacman said.

“There are early return options on Artemis II. There are options to bring astronauts back from the space station in hours, not days. So I think that the fact that we did take some extra time here does speak to the stability of the situation,” he said.

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NASA/Bill Ingalls

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Hmmmm … You have what you voted for, be happy!

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In the week and a half since Renee Good’s killing, the Trump administration has committed itself to a sinister new philosophy in Minneapolis.

In the wake of the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross on Jan. 7, the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers, and ICE officers have adopted the position that the American people must either accept Trump’s rule by force or face death. Their unofficial motto: Live unfree or die.

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The pardons, most of which have not been previously reported,

were supported by people with close ties to Mr. Trump’s orbit, including lawyers who had worked for him.

They continue a trend in which Mr. Trump has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation. The approach stands in contrast to Justice Department guidelines that prioritize the clemency applications of people who have completed their prison sentences or demonstrated remorse and a lower likelihood of recidivism.

The pardons, several of which forgave white-collar crimes and frauds by affluent perpetrators, strike a discordant note with the Trump administration’s announcement that it was suspending federal funding for programs intended to serve poor people in Minnesota in order to root out fraud.

A White House official justified the clemency grants in a statement as rectifying excessive sentences or prosecutions that were politically motivated to target Trump supporters. The official, who was not authorized to discuss the clemency grants on the record, suggested that Mr. Trump made the clemency decisions based on the merits, not whether the recipients had political connections or had made donations to groups he supports.

Three of the recipients were scheduled to be sentenced this month in a political corruption case related to accusations that former Gov. Wanda Vázquez of Puerto Rico had accepted bribes from Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, in 2020.

In late 2024, while Mr. Herrera was facing felony bribery and other charges in the case, his daughter, Isabela Herrera, donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump and run by his allies.

In May, her father’s lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, who had served on Mr. Trump’s legal defense team, negotiated an unusually lenient deal with the Justice Department. Under the deal, which was authorized by a top Trump appointee, Mr. Herrera agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor campaign finance charge, disappointing career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence.

In July, Ms. Herrera donated another $1 million to MAGA Inc. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump this week pardoned Mr. Herrera, Ms. Vázquez, and Mark Rossini, a former F.B.I. agent who had worked as a consultant for Mr. Herrera. All three had pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor campaign finance charges.

The White House official denied that Ms. Herrera’s donations had played any role in her father’s pardon. Instead, the official suggested that pardon and the others related to the Puerto Rico case were motivated by a belief that the investigation into the matter was retribution for Ms. Vázquez’s endorsement of Mr. Trump in 2020.

Mr. Herrera “is profoundly grateful” to Mr. Trump, Mr. Kise said in a statement.

Lawyers for Ms. Vázquez and Mr. Rossini did not respond to requests for comment.

As for Ms. Camberos, she was among a number of people granted clemency by Mr. Trump who have been charged with new crimes after receiving a second chance.

Ms. Camberos began serving a 26-month prison sentence in December 2019 for her role in a scheme to sell millions of counterfeit bottles of the caffeinated drink 5-Hour Energy. Mr. Trump commuted her sentence in the final days of his first term after she enlisted two lawyers with connections in his orbit. One of them, Stefan C. Passantino, had been a deputy White House counsel in the first Trump administration. Another, Adam Katz, represented Rudolph W. Giuliani in a defamation case related to his effort to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

But soon after her release from prison, she and her brother Andres embarked on a new fraud, federal prosecutors in California said. The siblings were charged in 2023 in a complicated scheme: They bought consumer goods from manufacturers at a steep discount, purportedly to sell them in Mexico — a legal practice. Instead, prosecutors said, the siblings sold the goods in the United States at higher prices and then committed bank and mail fraud to cover their tracks.

They were convicted in 2024. In April, Ms. Camberos was sentenced to more than one year in prison — 12 months for the new conviction and additional months for violating her probation on her earlier conviction — and Andres Camberos was given one year of home confinement. Ms. Camberos had begun serving her sentence.

They were ordered to pay millions of dollars in restitution to the companies they defrauded.

The White House official did not respond to a question about whether the pardon would wipe away the Camberos siblings’ restitution payments, but pardons typically erase financial penalties.

The siblings’ supporters had argued privately that they were targeted by prosecutors because Mr. Trump had wiped away Ms. Camberos’s sentence from her earlier conviction — a claim echoed by the White House official.

Mr. Passantino and Mr. Katz had worked to secure pardons for the siblings, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The two lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Marcus Bourassa, another lawyer for Ms. Camberos, said in a statement that his client was wrongfully convicted and is grateful to the President and others for their support.

Mr. Katz also had supported clemency for Terren S. Peizer, a former business executive who had been convicted in 2024 of insider trading and sentenced last year to 42 months in prison. Mr. Peizer was also ordered to pay a fine of $5.25 million and forfeit more than $12.7 million. He was pardoned this week by Mr. Trump.

David Willingham, a lawyer for Mr. Peizer, said in a statement that the case was a “massive overreach” by the government.

Another statement issued on behalf of Mr. Peizer himself said that “there aren’t enough words to express the gratitude and appreciation I have for the compassion and recognition of this unfair process by the most accomplished president of my lifetime, and perhaps beyond.”

The White House official said that Mr. Peizer’s case was an example of excessive prosecution and that he had properly disclosed the trades.

Mr. Trump also commuted the sentence of Jacob Deutsch, who had been sentenced to 62 months in prison in 2024 for his role in a mortgage fraud scheme.

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The pardons from President Trump continue a trend in which he has used the unfettered presidential clemency power to reward allies and those who have paid his associates or donated to his political operation. Credit…Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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When the 47th solar panel exploded, Henrik Eskilsson began to fear he’d signed on with a madman.

In his SUV, he and Anders Olsson were accelerating across Sweden’s Lunda Airfield, towing a trailer fitted with a steel mast that suspended the panel. As they gained speed, the panel did something unusual: it floated, catching the wind like a hang glider while staying anchored to the mast. The speedometer crept toward 100 kilometers per hour. Behind them, the device began vibrating. Suddenly, it snapped free, tumbled through the air, and shattered on the runway.

Eskilsson, who’d previously founded a company that makes eye-tracking software, stopped the car and contemplated why he’d committed to this quixotic project: to revolutionize solar power for more than half of the people living on Earth. Many areas in the Northern Hemisphere and some in the Southern lie in zones where traditional solar fields are inefficient, especially in winter—but also in the morning and evening. When the sun sits low, its rays hit horizontal panels at a shallow, grazing angle, delivering little energy. Vertical solar panels that track the sun even as it barely clears the tree line have proved too expensive, requiring multiple motors to rotate them, too much concrete to anchor them, and too much steel to keep the wind from tearing them apart.

The shattered prototype was part of Olsson and Eskilsson’s effort to solve this: Vaja, the vertical-tracking start-up they had co-founded in 2023. For years, Olsson had envisioned building solar systems that moved with the wind like leaves in a storm. He and Eskilsson had consulted with mechanical engineers, who said this design would be impossible. Olsson disagreed. Eskilsson trusted him, although he wondered how many more panels would first have to be destroyed.

They got out of the SUV, took brooms from the back and, in the brisk winter afternoon, began sweeping the runway.

Solar is the fastest-growing source of global electricity, accounting for 7 percent of the world’s generation in 2024, up from roughly 1 percent a decade earlier. In the 2010s, utility companies invested heavily in solar farms with fixed-tilt panels—stationary solar arrays oriented toward the equator to catch the sun’s light. Such systems produce the most electricity in the middle of the day. In markets with many solar farms, this is when electricity prices are lowest, making the panels less profitable. Then, as the sun goes down and electricity demand spikes, the panels cease to be productive.

Horizontal trackers address such limitations by following the sun. Mounted on a north-south spine, the panels tilt like a seesaw, turning east at dawn, lying flat at midday, and facing west at sunset. They can deliver up to 35 percent more energy than fixed-tilt systems for a modest bump in cost. Horizontal tracking has “basically exploded over the past 10 to 15 years,” Eskilsson says.

But horizontal trackers suffer from the same latitudinal shortcomings as fixed-tilt: travel north or south from the equator, and the benefits diminish. Between the 30th and 40th parallels north—roughly aligned with Houston and Philadelphia, respectively—the equation shifts to favor vertical trackers: systems designed to intercept the light of a low-hanging sun that would otherwise skim over a horizontal array.

A handful of companies offer static vertical panels. In Europe, Norway’s Over Easy Solar and Germany’s Next2Sun and SOLYCO Solar provide a variety of vertical solar panels that harvest morning, evening, and winter light. Making vertical trackers, which pivot around an upright axis like a revolving door, is far more challenging. All vertical panels catch the wind like sails. Stationary setups can be made to resist powerful gusts, but vertical trackers are more fragile because they are mobile and mounted on a single post. Imagine a heavy roadside sign perched on a pole: the wind doesn’t just push against the sign; it tries to twist the pole, too. Torsion around a vertical post is nastier than around a horizontal tracker’s low-slung backbone, leading more easily to broken panels and motors. Efforts at beefing them up priced them out of existence. “These kinds of vertical trackers, even today, cost like four times as much as horizontal trackers,” Eskilsson says. Developers in the north stuck with static systems, using more panels to make up for lost productivity.

Olsson, now 51 years old, became interested in solar in 2017, before it was common in his country. On a ski trip, he told a friend that Sweden didn’t receive enough sunlight for the technology to work. The friend disagreed and showed him the math. “I realized when I saw the numbers that solar does make sense,” Olsson says. The moment sparked his love for a challenge, and he spent the train ride home writing a business plan.

Soldags, Olsson’s first solar panel company, took off installing panels for consumers, usually on roofs. But two years in, he landed a contract to install panels on the ground, which required anchoring them with concrete blocks. “These things weighed 10 times more than the solar panels,” Olsson says. An engineering physicist by training and a recreational sailor, he knew how much torque wind could exert. Yet nature thrived in it—trees flexed, leaves feathered. Why did he have to burn money to hold panels still?

He shared his thoughts with his friend and fellow sailor Fredrik Lundell, a fluid dynamics professor and aerodynamics expert. As they spoke, they made sketches of a pivoting mount that might allow panels to feather in the wind.

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How to Combat Perfectionism

Since perfectionism is associated with negative outcomes, what can someone with perfectionist tendencies do to change their behavior? Although people are sometimes hesitant to give up their perfectionist tendencies, psychologists point out that giving up on perfection doesn’t mean being less successful. In fact, because mistakes are an important part of learning and growing, embracing imperfection can actually help us in the long run.

One possible alternative to perfectionism involves developing what psychologists call a growth mindset. Researchers at Stanford University have found that cultivating a growth mindset is a crucial way to help us learn from our failures. Unlike those with fixed mindsets (who see their skill levels as innate and unchangeable), those with growth mindsets believe they can improve their abilities by learning from their mistakes. Psychologists point out that parents can play a crucial role in helping their children develop healthier attitudes towards failure: they can praise their children for making an effort (even if their results were imperfect) and help children learn to persevere when they make mistakes.

Another potential alternative to perfectionism is to cultivate self-compassion. To understand self-compassion, think about how you would respond to a close friend if they made a mistake. Odds are, you’d probably respond with kindness and understanding, knowing that your friend meant well. The idea behind self-compassion is that we should treat ourselves kindly when we make mistakes, remind ourselves that mistakes are part of being human, and avoid being consumed by negative emotions. As Ruggeri points out for BBC Future, self-compassion can be beneficial for mental health, but perfectionists tend not to treat themselves in compassionate ways. If you’re interested in trying to foster more self-compassion, the researcher who developed the concept of self-compassion has a short exercise you can try.

Psychologists have also suggested that cognitive behavioral therapy can be a way to help people change their beliefs about perfectionism. Although perfectionism is linked to lower mental health, the good news is that perfectionism is something you can change. By working to see mistakes as learning opportunities, and replacing self-criticism with self-compassion, it’s possible to overcome perfectionism and develop a healthier way of setting goals for yourself.

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The instructions to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents explain in clear terms how to defuse dangerous encounters: Use “minimal force” when trying to remove people from cars. Issue commands in “professional,” “firm,” “courteous” voices.

“First step in arresting an occupant of a vehicle is NOT to reach in and grab him, unless there are specific circumstances requiring that action,” reads one internal ICE document providing legal guidance for uses of force during vehicle stops. It was reviewed by The New York Times, along with other training materials. ICE officials will thoroughly investigate any encounter, but “deadly force” is allowed only when agents believe lives are in danger.

The fatal shooting of Renee Good last week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the quick reaction by Trump administration officials to declare the agent a hero and Ms. Good a villain — has put a new focus on whether federal agents enforcing President Trump’s deportation drive have been properly prepared for confrontations on city streets. The response of Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants to the killing has also underscored how they have embraced what is supposed to be a last resort under the written standards: using lethal force in self-defense.

Rather than encourage agents to de-escalate combustible encounters, as the agency guidelines emphasize, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have provided tacit approval for more aggressive tactics.

Several weeks before the shooting, a top ICE official told officers to take “decisive action” if threatened. Immediately after, Mr. Trump and other administration officials said Ms. Good had tried to run the agent over, although a Times video analysis found that she appeared to have turned her vehicle away from him.

“That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vice President JD Vance said last week of the ICE agent who killed Ms. Good, 37. “He was doing his job.”

On Tuesday, the Homeland Security Department reiterated that sentiment to its agents, posting a clip on social media of Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, saying, “You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one — no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist — can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Tensions in Minneapolis have boiled over in the days since Ms. Good’s death. On Wednesday night, a federal agent in the city shot and wounded a man who was attacking him, officials said. The episode led to hours of clashes between protesters and law enforcement officers.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said ICE agents were using appropriate tactics.

“The entire Trump administration stands behind our heroic ICE officers who are conducting themselves with the utmost professionalism and integrity, while making American communities safer,” Ms. Jackson said in a statement. “It is not an ‘aggressive tactic’ to defend yourself from an individual using their car as a deadly weapon — ICE officers have a right to self-defense.”

Tricia McLaughlin, a homeland security spokeswoman, said that “ICE law enforcement officers are trained to use the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations to prioritize the safety of the public and our officers” and are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics.”

The Minneapolis shooting has also revealed the risks of Mr. Trump’s decision to send ICE on large-scale sweeps through cities, a move that has thrust agents into confrontations with hostile crowds. Most ICE agents are not trained to handle crowd control, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office. That is in part because ICE has historically focused on targeted arrests that attract less attention and rarely put its officers in conflict with the public.

Moreover, the agency is rapidly expanding its ranks, already more than doubling its number of law enforcement personnel, after an infusion of $75 billion in new funding over four years. It has expedited its training programs to accommodate the new recruits, including reducing training on how to handle vehicle stops, according to a former official at the federal government’s law enforcement academy who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal homeland security policies.

Ms. McLaughlin said there had been no reduction in training on vehicle stops.

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Newly recruited Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a training center last year. President Trump and administration officials have given tacit approval for more aggressive tactics by the agency.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times

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Of all the nonstop talk about artificial intelligence at CES this year, the most useful thing I heard came from Stevie Wonder.

I spotted him moving through the expo floor—handlers tight by his side, fans threading in and out—and sidled up long enough to ask a few questions. Wonder isn’t new to this world. He’s always treated technology as part of his craft—as something to be shaped, tested, and tuned. Long before AI became an unavoidable buzzword, he worked with synth pioneers on the sounds that defined songs like “Superstition” and “Living for the City.” He’s been attending CES for more than a decade.

Wonder is working on his first album in more than 20 years, so I asked what he made of AI in the creative process. He did not equivocate. “I will not let my music be programmed,” he told me. “I’m not going to use it to do me and do the music I’ve done.” He wasn’t rejecting technology. He was protecting what he considers human territory. “We can go on and on talking about technology,” he said. But he was concerned with a different question. “Let’s see how you make things better for people in their lives—not to emulate life but to make life better for the living.”

Among the health-tech exhibitors, a common theme emerged: the always-on AI companion, one that can help make care decisions, locate services, and navigate daily life. Dominic King, vice president of health at Microsoft AI, told me people already use Copilot and Bing to ask roughly 50 million health-related questions every day.

Yet the promise felt realest only in smaller tools with clearer stakes—especially the ones built for people who are blind or have limited vision. With accessibility tech, both the problem and the upside felt obvious.

After a few hours on the floor, a pattern emerged. Some of the most compelling accessibility tech didn’t try to fix vision so much as translate the visual world into something usable. EchoVision, a pair of smart glasses from California-based AGIGA—developed with input from Wonder—let a wearer point their head toward a sign, a doorway or another object and hear a description about it. In a hall full of gadgets that felt like solutions in search of problems, narration that eases a person’s day made good sense.

But description doesn’t always solve the full problem.

“I’m not so sure it does you much good to know that in this direction is where the restrooms are,” a representative from Seattle-based Glidance told me, “if you don’t already have the navigation skills to dodge all the people in the way.” The world isn’t just a picture frozen in time. It’s movement. It’s crowds. It’s columns, curbs, chaos.

Glidance’s answer was Glide, a two-wheeled device that would roll along in front of you with a grip attached, sort of like a handlebar on wheels. Stereo cameras spotted obstacles and hazards. The device then steered and braked to help keep you moving in the direction you wanted to go.

Glidance kept the guide in your hand; .lumen put it on your forehead. The Romanian start-up’s founder, Cornel Amariei, described his glasses as “a self-driving car that sits on your head.” At CES, the company won an accessibility award in a pitch competition for assistive-tech start-ups that came with an oversize $10,000 check. (“Now we have money for the return tickets,” Amariei said.)

Many CES demos relied on bulky sensor rigs. But .lumen kept the hardware of its glasses simple and tried to do the rest with software. Six cameras create stereoscopic vision—depth perception built from slightly different angles, the way two eyes triangulate a curb. And the team made a key design choice: the glasses don’t require an Internet connection. All the compute is in the device itself.

Amariei explained that geometry alone isn’t enough. A lake is perfectly flat. A system that only understands “flat” will steer you right into it. The harder part is recognizing safe surfaces from dangerous ones—then translating that into something your body can use. When .lumen’s glasses find a clear route, they don’t announce directions one step at a time. They guide you there with haptics, nudging your head toward the open path.

All the sensor talk and the demos were fascinating, but the human payoff is what has stayed with me. These tools aim to let someone move through a lobby, down a sidewalk, through a crowded hall, without having to stop and reassess every few feet.

The best accessibility tech I saw at CES pushed back against the show’s most annoying habit: making sweeping promises when what people need are reliable, specific tools. Some of these devices will cost a lot. Some will take longer to mature than their demos suggested. Some will stumble in the real world. But they point in a direction that Stevie Wonder would recognize: tools that make life better for the living.

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If hitting “submit” on yet another job application feels like you’re tossing your resume into a black hole, you’re not the only one feeling that way. A recent Glassdoor poll of over 2,500 U.S. professionals shows that more than 70% of workers don’t feel hopeful about their job search this year. That feeling stems from perceiving the process as beyond their control.  

Glassdoor’s analysis, released on Monday, shows that online applications still generate 66% of interviews and 60% of job offers, but their dominance has slipped as AI and easier application tools have flooded employers with candidates.

At the same time, interviews initiated through referrals are 35% more likely to result in an offer, and recruiter-sourced candidates now represent a growing share of hires. About 40% of offers come from human connection through referrals, recruiters, and in-person applications. 

“The job search used to be a reliable numbers game, with more applications translating to more interviews and offers,” Chris Martin, Glassdoor’s lead researcher, said in a statement. “As hiring rates have fallen over the past two years, however, many job-seekers are struggling to make progress even after hundreds of applications.”Glassdoor’s new report shows that the problem is less about effort and more about where to direct that effort. The report found five concrete strategies that tap into the hidden 40% of job offers that did not start with an online application. 

1. Formulate a 20-company list

Instead of blanketing the market with applications, the report recommends identifying about 20 target employers and following them on social media. In addition, write thoughtful comments under each company’s social media posts and set up job alerts for these firms. 

2. Showcase your expertise online

Glassdoor’s experts emphasize that your online footprint can now be a direct path around traditional gatekeepers. They recommend consistently posting professional content in an area of expertise to promote a visible online presence. 

3. Consider networking as a research project

The report identified another strategy as reframing networking. Instead of looking at it as a direct job ask, consider it a research project and schedule conversations to learn more about how others are navigating the market. These discussions often surface opportunities that never make it to job boards. 

4. Become more visible

Deliberately connect with people inside target companies so that your name feels more familiar when your application appears. This tactic prioritizes visibility over volume of applications. 

5. Tap into casual connections

Finally, the report emphasized the surprising power of casual connections — your “weak ties.” Glassdoor community members note that friends of friends and old coworkers have often been more effective at opening doors than close contacts, especially for employee referrals. 

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Opal Lee and her family never returned to their Fort Worth home after a white mob forced them to flee 85 years ago. Today, with the help of community members Opal owns the land and a brand new home.

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Juneteenth

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The testimony, part of the derailed Georgia election interference case, makes clear how dismissive some senior Republicans were of claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina found President Trump’s claims of election fraud in 2020 “unnerving.” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia described Mr. Trump’s efforts to get his state’s lawmakers to intervene a “fruitless exercise.” David Ralston, a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, called the plan to create slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states he had lost “the craziest thing I’ve heard.”

Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by The New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president’s efforts to overturn an American presidential election. The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election.

He has also said he wanted to “lead a movement” to ban voting machines and mail-in ballots in time for the midterm elections this year.

The transcripts were part of the investigative file in the case brought by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., who obtained indictments of Mr. Trump and 18 of his allies on election interference charges in 2023. The case was dismissed in November after Ms. Willis was removed from prosecuting the case.

The interviews were conducted by a special purpose grand jury that was convened in Atlanta as part of Ms. Willis’s investigation. In Georgia, these kinds of grand juries are somewhat rare. Unlike ordinary grand juries, the special-purpose kind do not issue indictments; rather, they allow prosecutors to present everyday citizens with testimony and documents and receive recommendations before seeking an indictment. In this case, the special-purpose grand jury recommended indicting more than twice as many Trump allies as Ms. Willis eventually charged.

The skepticism that some of Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans expressed in their testimony about his claims is probably something that Georgia prosecutors would have emphasized to a trial jury if their case against Mr. Trump had not been derailed.

Senator Graham, the veteran South Carolina lawmaker, recently called Mr. Trump “the greatest president of all time.” But his 2022 testimony came at a time when Mr. Trump’s political future was uncertain. At that time, Mr. Graham expressed exasperation over the president’s baseless 2020 election fraud claims, telling the grand jurors, “I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short,” and that “if you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it.”

He called the Trump campaign’s plan to enlist fake electors in swing states where the president had lost the election “weird — I don’t know what to tell you, just weird.” He attributed Mr. Trump’s 2020 defeat in Arizona not to fraud, as Mr. Trump and his allies claimed, but rather to Mr. Trump’s bashing of the state’s longtime senator, John McCain. And he said that weakness with suburban voters had hurt Mr. Trump in a number of swing states.

“The McCain effect in Arizona was real,” Senator Graham told the grand jurors. “And when you look through the suburbs in the states in question, you sort of had a common pattern where President Trump ran behind other Republicans. I was trying to convey that to him.”

“I’m sorry he lost,” Mr. Graham added. “But he lost it.”

Mr. Ralston, the powerful Georgia House speaker from 2010 through 2022, testified a few months before his death. In December, The Times obtained and released a recording of a call Mr. Trump made to Mr. Ralston in late 2020, urging him to call a special session of the state legislature to overturn Georgia’s election results.

Mr. Ralston recounted the call in his testimony, saying that “right off the bat, I’ve got to tell him I disagree with him.”

In addition to Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Ralston, some other details from the grand jury testimony have previously been reported by The Times and other news outlets, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as in books like “Find Me the Votes,” by the journalists Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.

The Times obtained the transcripts after the judge who presided over the Georgia case, Scott McAfee of Fulton County Superior Court, lifted an order that had barred defense lawyers from disclosing much of the material they had received as part of the discovery process.

Mr. Kemp, now in his final year as governor because of term limits, became known for refusing to bend to Mr. Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election. In his testimony before the special grand jury, he said Mr. Trump urged him to convene a special legislative session, and to order an audit of ballot signatures.

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Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony indicate that President Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election exasperated and alarmed a number of senior Republicans. Credit…Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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