After meeting with Hegseth, Republican senators rally behind Trump’s defense secretary pick.

In announcing his withdrawal a day after visiting the Senate, Mr. Gaetz insisted that he had strong support among fellow Republicans. But two people with direct knowledge of Mr. Gaetz’s thinking said he made the decision to pull out after concluding that he would not have the votes in the Senate for confirmation. The people asked for anonymity to discuss his private decision-making.

“While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Mr. Gaetz wrote on social media. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”

He added, “I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

Mr. Trump responded with his own social media post expressing appreciation for Mr. Gaetz. “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do,” the president-elect wrote. Mr. Trump did not indicate who he might select as attorney general instead.

The collapse of Mr. Gaetz’s selection underscored the haphazard way that Mr. Trump has gone about assembling his new administration. He picked Mr. Gaetz almost on a whim last week without extensive vetting, knowing that allegations were out there, but essentially daring Senate Republicans to accept him anyway.

Mr. Gaetz told people close to him that he concluded after conversations with senators and their staffs that there were at least four Republican senators who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Curtis of Utah, who will be seated in January.

Ms. Murkowski declined to answer any questions about his withdrawal from consideration. Ms. Collins said that it was “the best decision that Mr. Gaetz could have made.”

What remained unclear on Thursday was whether Mr. Gaetz’s withdrawal will embolden Senate Republicans to challenge other contentious cabinet choices, such as Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host tapped for defense secretary, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic selected for secretary of health and human services. Mr. Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault, but denies it, while Mr. Kennedy has been accused of groping a family babysitter, which he has said he does not remember doing.

The storm surrounding Mr. Gaetz had drawn attention away from some of the other contested picks. Mr. Gaetz, who represented Florida in the House until being tapped by Mr. Trump, had been one of the most unpopular Republicans in the Capitol, particularly after instigating the far-right revolt that toppled Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Jonathan Swan and Maya C. Miller contributed reporting.

Murkowski declined to answer any questions about his withdrawal from consideration.

Hegseth’s comment came as he was leaving Vice President-elect JD Vance’s Senate office after finishing meetings today with a handful of senators. When a reporter asked the Fox News anchor if he had sexually assaulted a woman in California, he responded: “As far as the media is concerned, I’ll keep this very simple. The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m gonna leave it.”

Gaetz said: “While the momentum was strong, it is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition.”

After finishing meetings with senators in Mr. Vance’s office, Mr. Hegseth, a Fox News anchor, emerged from behind closed doors and told reporters that he looked forward to the confirmation process. A reporter immediately brought up the 2017 allegations of sexual misconduct, asking: “Did you sexually assault a woman in Monterey, California?”

“As far as the media is concerned, I’ll keep this very simple,” Mr. Hegseth replied. “The matter was fully investigated, and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m going to leave it.”

Concerns about Mr. Hegseth’s path to confirmation grew on Wednesday night when a newly released police report provided graphic details about a 2017 sexual encounter, which Mr. Hegseth maintains was consensual.

On Thursday, some Republican senators defended Mr. Hegseth, emphasizing that no charges were filed in the case. After meeting with him in Mr. Vance’s Senate office, Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee attributed the allegations to “the media’s focus on personal attacks,” calling Mr. Hegseth “the right guy to inspire the Pentagon.”

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, referred to accusations as “press reports.”

“I think he’s going to be in pretty good shape,” Mr. Wicker said after meeting with Mr. Hegseth for roughly 20 minutes.

Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a member of the Armed Serves Committee, said that Mr. Hegseth was “going to be just fine.”

“There’s a reason why President Trump trusts him,” Mr. Mullin told reporters after his meeting. “As he goes through this process, you’re going to hear more and more about actually what took place and you guys will find out that the guy is a solid, solid individual.”

And Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, elected to serve as the No. 2 Republican in the next Congress, said in a statement that after meeting with Mr. Hegseth he had found him to be “a strong nominee to lead the Department of Defense.”

“I look forward to Pete’s hearing and a vote on the floor in January,” Mr. Barrasso said.

Several Republicans shrugged off the 2017 police report. “That’s hearsay,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said of the report, adding: “We’re not going to decide based on pieces of the story.”

Asked if he was concerned about the details in the police report, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said: “Listen, he denies it; he says there’s been no wrongdoing.”

Cabinet nominees are subject to approval by the Senate, and Republicans will control the chamber in the new Congress starting in January, though Mr. Trump has suggested he would like to circumvent the confirmation process by using recess appointments. It is not clear whether senators will concede to that plan or whether Mr. Trump might resort to a novel maneuver to force it.

Mr. Trump has told advisers he is standing by Mr. Hegseth as his pick despite the sexual assault allegation. Mr. Hegseth’s lawyer said Sunday that in 2020, his client had paid the woman an undisclosed amount because Mr. Hegseth was afraid he would lose his job at Fox News if the allegation became public.

Karoun Demirjian, Catie Edmondson and Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.

But then Mr. Trump was elected president. And suddenly, what most Democrats had initially regarded as a tool for targeting terrorist groups began to be seen as a potentially dangerous weapon ripe for abuse by a president bent on kneecapping his rivals.

An array of nonprofit groups on the left began an intensive lobbying campaign to kill the measure, convinced that Mr. Trump would try to use it to wipe them out. Democrats took up the refrain and most dropped their support for the legislation, which passed largely along party lines on Thursday.

“This is the death penalty bill that we’re considering today, the bill that empowers Donald Trump to extinguish the life of any nonprofit, of any civil society group, which happens to be on his enemies list,” Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, said on Thursday, warning that Mr. Trump would “use it as a sword against those he views as his political enemies.”

Republican lawmakers argued that Democrats’ fears were overblown, insisting that the bill was necessary to choke off financing for terrorist entities and frequently citing the example of Hamas.

“This bill is desperately needed to end the tax-exempt status to organizations that have provided material support to terrorists,” Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and chairman of the Ways and Means committee, said on Thursday.

The legislation passed by a vote of 219-184, with all but one Republican in support and all but 15 Democrats opposed. The margin reflected how significantly Democratic sentiments on the measure had changed since Mr. Trump’s election: The vast majority of Democrats voting against the bill on Thursday backed identical legislation earlier this year.

The bill faces stiff headwinds in the current Congress. The Democratic-led Senate has already unanimously passed the provision that delays tax liability for hostages in captivity. But a spokesman for Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, declined to say whether he would bring up the terror financing language, either on its own or as part of a bigger bill, before the end of the year.

In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, the House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill to bar U.S. funds from being spent in Gaza that would in any way benefit Hamas or any other organization designated as a terrorist group.

That bill was rolled into the measure the House passed on Thursday, but the new version is much broader. It would revoke the tax-exempt status of any “terrorist-supporting organization,” meaning any group that the Treasury Department finds has given “material support or resources” to a group designated as a terrorist entity.

For weeks, a coalition of nonprofit groups — including environmental, immigration and Palestinian rights groups as well as the American Civil Liberties Union — has been sounding the alarm about the bill. They argue it lacks due process and is unnecessary because laws banning material support for terrorism already exist.

“A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, railed on the floor. “This is an unlawful power to vest in any president, and a dangerous power to vest in a president who shows no qualms about leveling threats of retribution and revenge against his enemies.”

Proponents have defended the bill and accused critics of drumming up excuses to justify their turnabout on the legislation.

“There are still robust due process protections in this bill,” Mr. Smith said, noting that Mr. Raskin and other Democrats who were raising alarms had previously supported the bill.

“This is the most bizarre argument that I’ve heard since I’ve been in Congress,” Representative Lloyd Smucker, Republican of Pennsylvania, said. Referring to Democrats, he added: “They’ve completely reversed their vote in just a few months.”

But some Democrats who previously supported the bill had been public about their concerns.

“I don’t think this is a realistic possibility, but let’s suppose we had an administration that vowed to wreak vengeance on its opponents, prosecute lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters and corrupt election officials to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Doggett said in September, when the Ways and Means Committee met to consider the bill.

He asked if there would be any limit to the new power granted in the bill, and was told there would not be. Mr. Doggett voted in favor of sending the bill to the full House anyway. On Thursday, he voted to oppose it.

On the floor, Mr. Doggett explained his turnabout by saying: “We listened to our constituents.”

According to the report, the woman, whose name was withheld, told the police that she ended up in Mr. Hegseth’s hotel room after he spoke at the conference in October 2017 hosted by the California Federation of Republican Women at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa.

The woman, referred to throughout the report as Jane Doe, said Mr. Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her, ejaculating on her stomach. She said that her memory was hazy, and that she had drunk far more alcohol than usual throughout the day.

Mr. Hegseth told the police that he repeatedly sought the woman’s consent for sex, making sure “she was comfortable with what was going on,” including the fact he was not using a condom. Video footage at the hotel earlier that evening showed them at one point leaving a hotel bar with their arms locked together, the report said.

Mr. Hegseth said that he believed the woman led him to his room, and that he had no plans to have sex with her, the report said. “He might have thought that with someone else, but not Jane Doe,” it said.

The woman’s allegation, the outlines of which surfaced last week, have complicated Mr. Trump’s intention to have Mr. Hegseth lead the Defense Department next year.

Mr. Hegseth’s lawyer said Sunday that his client had paid the woman an undisclosed amount after she threatened to file a lawsuit against Mr. Hegseth in 2020 simply because he feared he might lose his job as a Fox News anchor if the allegation became public. Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is standing behind Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In an emailed response to the report, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s transition team, said it corroborated what Mr. Hegseth’s lawyers had maintained: that the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed. The statement described Mr. Hegseth as a highly respected combat veteran and said Mr. Trump “knows Pete will honorably serve our country as the secretary of defense.”

The Monterey city attorney’s office released the police report in response to public information requests from news media organizations. The city attorney said that because the report had been released to Mr. Hegseth in March 2021, it was no longer private. The name of the complainant and others interviewed by the police were redacted.

The woman claimed she was introduced to Mr. Hegseth at the end of the conference. She told the police that she had observed him acting inappropriately, including rubbing women’s legs. In a text message, she told someone whose name was redacted that Mr. Hegseth “was giving off a ‘creeper’ vibe,” the report said.

She said she went with a group of women to the Knuckles Sports Bar, attached to the hotel, and “that’s when things got fuzzy.” Mr. Hegseth was also at the bar, and she said she told him that she did not like how he had treated women at the conference.

The woman told the police that she did not remember how many alcoholic drinks she had there, but recalled the bartender handing her a drink. She later told a hospital nurse that she believed that “something” might have been slipped into her drink, because her memory of the night’s events was so hazy.

One witness told the police that the complainant was flirting with Mr. Hegseth. But another woman told the police that Mr. Hegseth acted aggressively toward her, and that she hoped that the presence of the complainant would deter him. This other woman said Mr. Hegseth put his hand on her knee, and despite her objections, invited her back to his hotel room.

After leaving Knuckles, Mr. Hegseth and the complainant walked together to the pool. Video footage showed their arms were locked and she was smiling, the report said. Later, other hotel guests complained about a disturbance at the pool.

A hotel staff member said Mr. Hegseth was cursing, “very intoxicated” and insistent he was exercising his right to freedom of speech. The woman, who did not seem drunk, put her hand on Mr. Hegseth’s back and escorted him back into the hotel, the staff member said.

The complainant told authorities that she could not recall how she got to Mr. Hegseth’s hotel room or whether intercourse occurred. “Jane Doe remembered saying ‘no’ a lot,” the police report said. “Jane Doe stated that she didn’t remember much else.”

The woman told police that she remembered seeing Mr. Hegseth’s dog tags hanging around his neck as he was over her. After Mr. Hegseth ejaculated, she said, he told her to “clean it up,” and she found her way back to her hotel room.

Mr. Hegseth told the police that he was “buzzed” but not intoxicated that night. He said he did not remember the interaction with the hotel staff member. He said he found it “odd” that she remained there because he had no intention of having sex with her.

As the sexual encounter progressed, he told the police, there was “always” conversation. “He did not want Jane Doe to get in trouble,” the report said he told the police.

He said that the woman stated that she would tell her husband, who was also staying at the hotel, that she had fallen asleep on a couch in someone else’s room. Mr. Hegseth said he told the woman that she did not have to worry about him saying anything about the encounter and that she “showed early signs of regret.”

The complaint initially came from a Kaiser Permanente hospital that the woman visited four days after the sexual encounter, requesting a sexual assault examination. Because of the nature of the allegations, the attending nurse was required to report the visit to law enforcement authorities.

The police report described the alleged offense as “Rape: Victim unconscious of the nature of the act,” and recommended that the case be forwarded to the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office for review.

Orlando Mayorquín contributed reporting.

Ms. Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, staked her campaign on her working-class appeal and presented herself as a solutions-focused pragmatist fighting for the state’s future. She first won the seat in a special election after the death in 2022 of Representative Don Young, the longest-serving Republican in the House. Before Ms. Peltola, the last Democrat to represent Alaska in the House was Nick Begich Sr., Mr. Begich’s grandfather.

During his first run for Congress, the younger Mr. Begich, who once worked for Mr. Young, drew a backlash from Republicans for challenging the congressman in a primary shortly before Mr. Young’s death at the age of 88. Former Young aides called Mr. Begich deceitful and disloyal to their boss and chose to back Ms. Peltola instead.

That was not the case this year. The party united behind Mr. Begich after his top Republican rival, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, withdrew from the race after placing behind him in the late-August primary. Ms. Dahlstrom had the backing of both former President Donald J. Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson.

Mr. Begich has said he wants to decrease federal spending, a touchy subject in Alaska, where the U.S. government employs more than 16,000 people and federal spending pays for almost half the state’s budget.

Mr. Trump issued the edict in a post on his Truth Social platform Wednesday afternoon. Citing a “PBS NewsHour” report about the federal shield legislation, he wrote: “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!”

Mr. Trump has exhibited extreme hostility to mainstream news reporters, whom he has often referred to as “enemies of the people.” In his first term as president, he demanded a crackdown on leaks that eventually entailed secretly seizing the private communications of reporters, including some from The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

After those subpoenas came to light early in the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a rule that banned prosecutors from using compulsory legal processes like subpoenas and search warrants to go after reporters’ information — including by asking third parties, like phone and email companies, to turn over their data — or to force them to testify about their sources. But a future administration could rescind that regulation.

The PRESS Act would codify such limits into law.

Trevor Timm, the co-founder and executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said he hoped Mr. Trump would reconsider, arguing that it would protect all journalists, including those who primarily reach conservative audiences.

“The PRESS Act protects conservative and independent journalists just as much as it does anyone in the mainstream press,” Mr. Timm said. “Democratic administrations abused their powers to spy on journalists many times. The bipartisan PRESS Act will stop government overreach and protect the First Amendment once and for all.”

Mr. Timm cited support for the bill by Republican allies of Mr. Trump like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, and Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Senate Judiciary Committee member.

Mr. Timm also noted that Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who is influential in Mr. Trump’s circle, endorsed the PRESS Act in an interview with Catherine Herridge, a former Fox News reporter facing fines for contempt of court over her refusal to identify her sources for stories about a scientist who was investigated by the F.B.I. for ties to the Chinese military. The scientist, who was not charged, has sued the government for allegedly disclosing private information about her from the investigation, leading to a subpoena to Ms. Herridge.

The legislation has had broad support across party lines, and passed the House without opposition in January. But it has been stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The committee, under the leadership of its chairman, Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has primarily been focused on approving as many of President Biden’s judicial nominees as it can before the session ends and Republicans take over leadership of the chamber next year.

The bill has also run into skepticism from several Republican senators, which makes it harder to bring it up for quick passage or to attach it to some other bill, like the annual defense authorization act.

According to congressional staff, the bill’s primary adversary on the Judiciary Committee has been Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a hawkish Republican who gained public attention as an Army officer in 2006 while serving in Iraq by attacking The New York Times for its publication of an investigative article about a counterterrorism finances program. Another Republican committee member, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, is also said to have expressed some reservations.

Mr. Trump did not give a reason for his abrupt decision to weigh in against the PRESS Act, but some of his other allies have called for rolling back protections for press freedoms.

For example, Project 2025, the consortium of conservative think tanks that devised a detailed governing agenda for Mr. Trump before he won the election, included in the Justice Department chapter of its Mandate for Leadership that a second Trump administration should rescind the Garland regulation.

Kash Patel, a confidant of Mr. Trump, also threatened to target journalists for prosecution in a podcast in December hosted by Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist.

“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media,” Mr. Patel said last year. “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” He added: “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”

A World War I-era law, the Espionage Act, makes it a crime to solicit or disclose national security secrets without authorization. While the law was written for spies gathering information for a foreign adversary, on its face it also would cover investigative journalism and the publication of information the government has deemed classified.

For most of the century since World War I, however, First Amendment norms kept prosecutors from trying to use that law to treat journalistic-style activities as a crime. But the Trump administration broke that taboo, bringing Espionage Act charges against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for publishing military and diplomatic documents in 2010 that were leaked by Chelsea Manning.

The Biden administration continued that case and won a conviction earlier this year in a plea deal, establishing a precedent that gathering and publishing information the government had deemed secret could be treated as a crime in the United States. For now, that precedent remains ambiguous, however; because Mr. Assange agreed to a deal, there was no appeal to test the constitutional legitimacy of applying the Espionage Act to publishing information.

The twin convictions were a reminder that the prosecutions of those who attacked the Capitol on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump are continuing even though Mr. Trump has vowed to pardon many, if not all, of them when he re-enters the White House in January. Mr. Trump could also end any further investigations related to the attack, which is the largest single criminal inquiry the Justice Department has ever undertaken.

Court papers say that in 2022, while Mr. Kelley was at home awaiting trial in his Jan. 6 case, he formed a group “that was preparing for armed conflict against the United States government and its personnel, specifically including F.B.I. agents.”

Prosecutors say he drew up a list of 37 people who were involved in his arrest or who helped to search his home as part of the investigation, targeting them for assassination. Mr. Kelley shared the list with two co-conspirators, prosecutors say, one of whom — Christopher Roddy — ultimately gave it to the authorities.

Accompanying the list of names that Mr. Roddy turned over, court papers say, was a computer thumb drive that contained video footage from Mr. Kelley’s home security camera showing a law enforcement officer approaching his home on the day of the arrest.

During an interview with federal investigators, Mr. Roddy, who testified at the trial, said Mr. Kelley had informed him about putting the list together in early December 2022 and asked him to reach out to his “cop buddies” about collecting information on the targets.

Mr. Roddy secretly recorded Mr. Kelley asking him at one point to attack the F.B.I.’s office in Knoxville, court papers say.

“You don’t have time to train or coordinate,” Mr. Kelley said, according to papers, “but every hit has to hurt.”

Prosecutors say Mr. Kelley was wearing a gas mask and a green tactical helmet when he showed up at the Capitol on Jan. 6. He scuffled with a Capitol Police officer on the west side of the building, throwing the officer to the ground.

He then used a long piece of wood to shatter a window near the Senate wing door, breaching the Capitol, prosecutors say. After he got in, they said, he helped kick open a nearby door, allowing more members of the mob to enter the building.