Elections

A jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay former election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, $148.1m after he spread lies about them following the 2020 election. It is one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.
There were gasps in the courtroom when the amount was read out and the judge stumbled over the number as she read out the verdict, according to media reports.
Giuliani did not appear to show any emotion as the damages were announced. Former Atlanta election workers Freeman and Moss hugged their attorney after the amount was announced.
The damages were $100m above what the women had asked for and included nearly $16.2m and $17m in compensatory damages for Freeman and Moss respectively. It also included $20m to each woman for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and an additional $75m in punitive damages. Giuliani owes approximately $275,000 in additional legal fees.
Giuliani himself dismissed the verdict and told reporters outside the Washington federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding”. “It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually,” he said.
Speaking outside court on Friday, Freeman said: “Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful. Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work.”
Freeman’s daughter, Shaye Moss, also gave a statement, saying: “The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others to keep that flame blazing changed every aspect of our lives – our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health. And we’re still working to rebuild.”
This is the end of our live coverage of the damages trial. You can read the full report by Sam Levine here:And Rachel Leingang has looked at how the multimillion-dollar ruling against Giuliani shows the cost of spreading election lies:Thanks for following along.A legal analyst for CNN explains that the punitive damages awarded to two former election workers were intended to “send a message to Rudy Giuliani and to the general public”.Elie Honig told Jake Tapper: “When we think about the inequities in this case, when we think about an extraordinarily powerful, remorseless liar like Rudy Giuliani, compared to these women or civil servants, they never signed up for this. Their lives were turned over and I think that’s why you see such a high number here from the jury.”Here are a few of the pictures that have dropped on the newswires from outside the court after the verdict:The damages included nearly $16.2m and $17m in compensatory damages for Freeman and Moss respectively.It also included $20m to each woman for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and an additional $75m in punitive damages.Giuliani owes approximately $275,000 in additional legal fees.Here’s some more reaction to the verdict:After the verdict, Giuliani appeared to be trying to rewrite history by claiming he hadn’t been able to present his side of the argument in court.Giuliani had in fact been due to testify on Thursday but declined to do so at the last moment.On Friday, he tried to paint a different picture, telling reporters: “I’ve not been allowed to present a single piece of evidence in defence, of which I have a lot.“I am quite confident when this case gets before a fair tribunal it’ll be reversed so quickly it’ll make your head spin.”Here is video of that statement:My colleague Rachel Leingang has written this analysis about the staggering damages award:
The judge had already decided Rudy Giuliani defamed the two former Georgia election workers, the question was just how much that cycle of lies and ensuing harassment should cost him.
A jury declared on Friday that it was worth an eye-popping $148m, far beyond expectations and a major blow to the former New York mayor and key Donald Trump ally.
The case was one of a handful of ways pro-democracy groups are seeking consequences for election subversion ahead of the next presidential election. The plaintiffs hope the high-dollar decision will show to Giuliani and others that there’s a financial and human cost to spreading lies. The stakes are high with the 2024 presidential election quickly approaching and Trump probably on the ballot once again.
You can read her full piece here:In her statement after the trial, Ruby Freeman gave an insight into the continued impact of Giuliani’s false claims on her life.She said:
Today is not the end of the road. We still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani wasn’t the only one who spread lies about us and others must be held accountable too.
But that is tomorrow’s work. For now I want people to understand this. Money would never solve all of my problems. I can never move back to the house that I call home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with.
I miss my home, I miss my neighbors and I miss my name.
Moss went on to thank the court and jury for listening to her and her mother’s experience in the aftermath of Giuliani’s defamatory statements.Her voice broke slightly when she added: “I know I won’t be able to retire from my job with the county like my grandma did, but I hope having taken these very big steps towards justice, I can make her proud.”Here is more from what Shaye Moss said outside the court:
The lies Rudy Giuliani told about me and my mommy after the 2020 presidential election have changed our lives and the past few years has been devastating.
The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others to keep that flame blazing changed every aspect of our lives – our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health. And we’re still working to rebuild.
As we move forward and continue to seek justice, our greatest wish is that no one … ever experiences anything like what we went through.
Today’s verdict comes at the end of an emotional week for former election workers Moss and Freeman. They had to relive their ordeal in testimony at the federal court in Washington DC and told how it had ruined their lives.Here are some of the key moments from this week’s trial:
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss both testified about the disastrous effects of lies spread by Rudy Giuliani and others who put them at the center of an election conspiracy theory. They shared examples of the racist, harassing, threatening messages they received after being publicly named by election deniers.
Freeman said she had to leave her home for safety reasons. She hired a lawyer to help keep her name off any home-related documents for her new place. She feels like she’s lost who she is, her good name, in this web.
Moss detailed how these actions made her anxious to even leave the house and caused her son to get harassed, eventually failing his classes. She said she still doesn’t really go out.
Giuliani was initially expected to testify. But after two separate incidents of him doubling down, his team did not put him on the stand. His lawyer said the women had been through enough, but also pointed to Gateway Pundit, the rightwing media outlet, as more culpable for the harassment.
Ashlee Humphreys, a professor from Northwestern University and an expert witness of Freeman and Moss, walked through the significant reputational damage done to Freeman and Moss, showing how their names are now associated with election fraud.
Freeman and Moss’ lawyer, Michael Gottlieb, said they hope the case sends a clear message to people launching smear campaigns not to do it.
The jury began deliberations on Thursday and returned their verdict on Friday afternoon.
The sum awarded to Freeman and Moss was $100m above what they had asked for – and media reports said gasps were heard in the courtroom when the final sum was read out. CNN reported the judge stumbled over her words when reading out the final sum.The verdict is likely to be far beyond Giuliani’s means. In closing arguments, his lawyer, Joseph Sibley, said the original $48m amount would be “catastrophic” for his client.Meanwhile, the plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Gottlieb argued: “Mr Giuliani thought he could get away with making Ruby and Shaye the face of election fraud because he thought they were ordinary and expendable.“He has no right to offer defenseless civil servants up to a virtual mob in order to overturn an election.”My colleague Sam Levine has more from Freeman’s statement outside the court:“Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work.“I want people to understand this,” she added. “Money will never solve all my problems. I can never move back into the house that I call home. I will always have to be careful about where I go and who I choose to share my name with. I miss my home, I miss my neighbors, and I miss my name.”Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss gave a statement outside court after they were awarded $148m in damages.Freeman said: “A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and how I answered that. I’m thankful.”The judgment adds to growing financial and legal peril for Giuliani, who was among the loudest proponents of Trump’s false claims of election fraud that are now a key part of the criminal cases against the former president, AP writes.Giuliani had already been showing signs of financial strain as he defends himself against costly lawsuits and investigations stemming from his representation of Trump. His lawyer suggested that the defamation case could financially ruin the former mayor, saying “it would be the end of Mr Giuliani.”Giuliani told reporters outside Washington’s federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding”.“It will be reversed so quickly it will make your head spin, and the absurd number that just came in will help that actually,” he said.Giuliani had already been found liable in the case and previously conceded in court documents that he falsely accused the women of ballot fraud.Even so, the former New York City mayor continued to repeat his baseless allegations about the women in comments to reporters outside the Washington DC courthouse this week.Giuliani’s lawyer acknowledged that his client was wrong but insisted that Giuliani was not fully responsible for the vitriol the women faced. The defense sought to largely pin the blame on a rightwing website that published the surveillance video of the two women counting ballots.AP has a bit more from the hearing today:
The damages verdict follows emotional testimony from Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who tearfully described becoming the target of a false conspiracy theory pushed by Giuliani and other Republicans as they tried to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election.
There was an audible gasp in the courtroom when the jury foreperson read aloud the $75 million award in punitive damages for the women. Moss and Freeman were each awarded another roughly $36 million in other damages.
Giuliani didn’t appear to show any emotion as the verdict was read after about 10 hours of deliberations. Moss and Freeman hugged their attorneys after the jury left the courtroom and didn’t look at Giuliani as he left with his lawyer.
Giuliani told reporters outside Washington’s federal courthouse that he will appeal, saying the “absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding.”
A Washington DC jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148.1m to two Atlanta election workers after he spread lies about them, one of the most significant verdicts to date seeking accountability for those who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.The verdict follows a four-day trial in which Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, her daughter, gave haunting details about the harassment and threats they faced after Giuliani falsely accused them of trying to steal the election in Georgia. The women, who are Black, described how they fled, are afraid to give their names in public, and still suffer severe emotional distress today. Their lawyers asked the jury to award them each at least $24m in damages.The case is the latest in a series of cases in which plaintiffs have used defamation law to push back on lies spread about them since the 2020 election. The voting equipment vendor Dominion settled with Fox for $787m earlier this year in a defamation case. Freeman and Moss also have a pending lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit, a far-right news outlet. Last year, they also settled with One America News, another far-right outlet. Civil rights groups are turning to defamation law as a new tool to ward off misinformation. More

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, wrongfully accused by Rudolph W. Giuliani of having tried to steal votes from Donald J. Trump in Georgia, were awarded the damages by a federal court in Washington.A jury on Friday ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani to pay $148 million to two former Georgia election workers who said he had destroyed their reputations with lies that they tried to steal the 2020 election from Donald J. Trump.Judge Beryl A. Howell of the Federal District Court in Washington had already ruled that Mr. Giuliani had defamed the two workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The jury had been asked to decide only on the amount of the damages.The jury awarded Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss a combined $75 million in punitive damages. It also ordered Mr. Giuliani to pay compensatory damages of $16.2 million to Ms. Freeman and $16.9 million to Ms. Moss, as well as $20 million to each of them for emotional suffering.“Today’s a good day,” Ms. Freeman told reporters after the jury delivered its determination. But she added that no amount of money would give her and her daughter back what they lost in the abuse they suffered after Mr. Giuliani falsely accused them of manipulating the vote count.Mr. Giuliani, who helped lead Mr. Trump’s effort to remain in office after his defeat in the 2020 election but has endured a string of legal and financial setbacks since then, was defiant after the proceeding.“I don’t regret a damn thing,” he said outside the courthouse, suggesting that he would appeal and that he stood by his assertions about the two women.He said that the torrent of attacks and threats the women received from Trump supporters were “abominable” and “deplorable,” but that he was not responsible for them.His lawyer, Joseph Sibley IV, had also argued that Mr. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and federal prosecutor, should not be held responsible for abuse directed to Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss by others.Mr. Sibley had warned that an award of the scale being sought by the women would be the civil equivalent of the death penalty for his client. Outside the courthouse on Friday, Mr. Giuliani called the amount “absurd.”Mr. Giuliani’s net worth is unknown because he refused to comply with the court’s requirement to provide that information. A lawyer familiar with his legal situation said after the verdict that Mr. Giuliani was likely to file for bankruptcy protection. But because the damages he owes Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss are considered an “intentional tort,” bankruptcy would not erase his liability, lawyers said.The case brought against Mr. Giuliani was one of a series of lawsuits in which plaintiffs have sought to use defamation claims to hold people accountable for lying about the 2020 election.Dominion Voting Systems wrested a $787.5 million settlement out of Fox News earlier this year after suing the media giant for promoting lies that its voting machines were used in a conspiracy to flip votes away from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.In October, a judge in Atlanta ruled that a Georgia man was allowed to continue his defamation claims against the right-wing author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza on claims that he had been wrongly accused of voter fraud in Mr. D’Souza’s book and film, “2000 Mules.”Over hours of emotional testimony during the civil trial in Washington, Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss described how their lives had been completely upended after Dec. 3, 2020, when Mr. Giuliani first suggested that they had engaged in election fraud to tilt the result against Mr. Trump in Georgia, a critical swing state.The women, who are Black and are mother and daughter, were soon flooded with expletive-laden phone calls and messages, threats, and racist attacks, they testified. People said they should be hanged for treason or lynched; others told them they fantasized about hearing the sound of their necks snapping.They showed up at Ms. Freeman’s home. They tried to execute a citizen’s arrest of Ms. Moss at her grandmother’s house. They called Ms. Moss’s 14-year-old son’s cellphone so much that it interfered with his virtual classes, and he finished his first year of high school with failing grades.“This all started with one tweet,” Ms. Freeman told the jury, referring to a social media post from Mr. Giuliani saying, “WATCH: Video footage from Georgia shows suitcases filled with ballots pulled from under a table AFTER supervisors told poll workers to leave room and 4 people stayed behind to keep counting votes.”Mr. Giuliani did not testify at the trial. He said afterward that was because “if I made any mistake or did anything wrong,” he thought the judge would hold him in contempt or put him in jail. “And I thought, honestly, it wouldn’t do me any good.”Mr. Giuliani is under indictment in Georgia, where a local prosecutor has brought racketeering charges against him, Mr. Trump and others in connection with their efforts to overturn the former president’s election loss there.Lawyers for Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss had asked the jury to send a message when deciding what Mr. Giuliani should pay.“Send it to Mr. Giuliani,” one of the lawyers, Michael J. Gottlieb, said in his closing argument on Thursday. “Send it to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”Ms. Moss said she and her mother would continue to fight for justice.“Our greatest wish is that no election worker or voter or school board member or anyone else ever experiences anything like what we went through,” she said.Alan Feuer More

The judge had already decided Rudy Giuliani defamed the two former Georgia election workers, the question was just how much that cycle of lies and ensuing harassment should cost him.A jury declared on Friday that it was worth an eye-popping $148m, far beyond expectations and a major blow to the former New York mayor and key Donald Trump ally.The case was one of a handful of ways pro-democracy groups are seeking consequences for election subversion ahead of the next presidential election. The plaintiffs hope the high-dollar decision will show to Giuliani and others that there’s a financial and human cost to spreading lies. The stakes are high with the 2024 presidential election quickly approaching and Trump probably on the ballot once again.This week’s case was a test for accountability for purveyors of election lies from the everyday people who get caught in their web through no fault of their own. The test worked: Giuliani will have to pay up. Whether it matters to serial liars remains to be seen, but it serves as a strong deterrent to those considering spreading unfounded election conspiracies.Beyond the money, however, this was an avenue for Freeman and her daughter, Moss, to speak directly to one of the people responsible for tearing their lives apart. A public figure such as Giuliani expects and accepts a level of intrusion into their privacy. Everyday people working elections, as Freeman and Moss were, shouldn’t have to.They took the stand this week to detail the onslaught of threats and harassment that came after Giuliani, an attorney for Trump, and Trump’s team put them at the center of an election conspiracy.Imagine this happened to you, their testimony called to mind. Imagine you were working your regular job, one you loved and found important. Imagine, then, that strangers saw surveillance video of you doing your job and twisted it into a narrative, saying that you had passed a USB drive to alter vote-counts, when in reality you passed a piece of candy. That you packed suitcases with fake votes to steal an election.Imagine some of the most powerful people in the country, with the most ardent followers, sent those lies ping-ponging around the internet to the point that your name online is attached to them forever, bringing a wave of hateful, racist, threatening messages to your inbox.It would dismantle your life. It dismantled theirs, they told the jury.Trump and his allies needed someone to scapegoat to try to overturn Georgia’s results, and they found it in these two women, said Michael Gottlieb, Freeman and Moss’s attorney.When she testified, Freeman wore a shirt with her name on it when she worked the elections in December 2020. She was proud of who she was. That’s how she was identified, she said. She no longer wears her name proudly – she had to move homes, hiring a lawyer for her new place to ensure her name wasn’t connected to it. Moss watched her son struggle in school, believing the whole ordeal was her fault. She doesn’t leave her house any more. She feels ostracized, anxious, afraid.Their testimony drove home the human cost of election lies, a harrowing tale for Americans watching democracy falter over the past few years. It was a warning sign to voters: this is the state of our politics today, that two unwitting public servants have their lives upended for political games and gain.Giuliani did not testify in the case himself, despite expectations that he would, later saying he was concerned the judge would deem any missteps as contempt of court. His lack of testimony came after his lawyer declined to cross-examine Freeman. Joe Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, said he did not take the stand or question Freeman because the women had been through enough.But Sibley also acknowledged in his closing remarks that Giuliani “hasn’t exactly helped himself with some of the things that have happened in the last few days”.The case shifted, with Giuliani’s team no longer attempting to defend his actions but instead deflect blame. Sibley pointed to another defamation case by Freeman and Moss against the rightwing media outlet Gateway Pundit, saying the outlet probably identified the women first and ignited the flood of harassment.The testimony – even the damages themselves – may not deter Giuliani and his associates. He plans to appeal and tie up any payouts as long as possible, and it’s unclear whether he has money to cover the damages. (That’s a limit of defamation law visible in the defamation verdicts against Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who owes Sandy Hook shooting families millions but largely has not yet paid them.)And after the verdict was announced, Giuliani sounded just as obstinate as ever. He called the number “absurd” and claimed it would be “reversed so quickly it will make your head spin”.The lack of reconciling with the effect of his actions tracks with the continued election denialism ever-present in Trumpworld, even as penalties slowly mount. As he tries to regain the White House, the former president himself hasn’t accepted he lost it fairly in the first place. Now, he and his team are working to sow election distrust at all levels still in 2024, despite the legal repercussions from 2020.But a verdict of this size will still resonate, if not for the loudest voices, then at least for those with lesser platforms. It sends the clear message the plaintiffs hoped for.“Today’s a good day. A jury stood witness to what Rudy Giuliani did to me and my daughter and held him accountable, and for that I’m thankful,” said Freeman, speaking at the court after the verdict. “Today is not the end of the road, we still have work to do. Rudy Giuliani was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable too. But that is tomorrow’s work. More

A binder given to the Trump White House contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods.Material from a binder with highly classified information connected to the investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 election disappeared in the final days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, two people familiar with the matter said.The disappearance of the material, known as the “Crossfire Hurricane” binder for the name given to the investigation by the F.B.I., vexed national security officials and set off concerns that sensitive information could be inappropriately shared, one of the people said.The material’s disappearance was reported earlier Friday by CNN. The matter was so concerning to officials that the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed about it last year, a U.S. official said.The binder consists of a hodgepodge of materials related to the origins and early stages of the Russia investigation that were collected by Trump administration officials. They included copies of botched F.B.I. applications for national-security surveillance warrants to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser as well as text messages between two F.B.I. officials involved in the inquiry, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, expressing animus toward Mr. Trump.The substance of the material — a redacted version of which has since been made public under the Freedom of Information Act and is posted on the website of the F.B.I. — is not considered particularly sensitive, the official said.But the raw version in the binder contained details that intelligence agencies believe could reveal secret sources and methods. (The publicly available version contains numerous portions that were whited out as classified.)It is not clear if the missing material comprises the entire original binder of material provided to the White House for Mr. Trump’s team to review and declassify in part before leaving office. Among other murky details, it is not known how many copies were made at the White House or how the government knows one set is missing.The binder has been a source of recurring attention since January 2021, just before Mr. Trump left office. At the time, Mr. Trump’s aides prepared redactions to some of the material it contained because the president — who was obsessed with the Russia investigation and believed his political enemies had used it to damage his presidency — planned to declassify it and make it public.Officials made several copies of the version with the redactions, which some Trump aides planned to release publicly.Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had a copy of material from the binder given to at least one conservative writer, according to testimony and court filings.But when Justice Department officials expressed concerns that sharing some of the material would breach the Privacy Act at a time when the department was already being sued by Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page for having publicly released some of their texts, the copies were hastily retrieved, according to two people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump was deeply focused on what was in the binder, a person close to him said. Even after leaving the White House, Mr. Trump still wanted to push information from the binder into the public eye. He suggested, during an April 2021 interview for a book about the Trump presidency, that Mr. Meadows still had the material.“I would let you look at them if you wanted,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “It’s a treasure trove.”Mr. Trump did not address a question about whether he himself had some of the material. But when a Trump aide present for the interview asked him, “Does Meadows have those?” Mr. Trump replied, “Meadows has them.”“We had pretty much won that battle,” Mr. Trump added, referring to questions about whether his 2016 campaign had worked with Russia. “There was no collusion. There was no nothing. And I think it was maybe past its prime. It would be sort of a cool book for you to look at.”George J. Terwilliger III, a lawyer for Mr. Meadows, said the former chief of staff was not responsible for any missing material. “Mark never took any copy of that binder home at any time,” he said.A person familiar with the matter said, shortly after the court-authorized search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 by F.B.I. agents looking for classified documents, that they had not found any Crossfire Hurricane material.Adding to the confusion about the material and who was in possession of it, a set of the Russia investigation documents that Mr. Trump believed he had declassified did not have their classification markings changed when they were given to the National Archives, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.At the time, Mr. Trump was in a standoff with the archives over the reams of presidential material he had taken with him upon leaving the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, and was resisting giving back. So Mr. Trump told advisers he would give back those boxes in exchange for the Russia-related documents.Aides never pursued his suggestion.In the run-up to the 2020 election, John Ratcliffe, then Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, declassified around 1,000 pages of intelligence materials related to the Russia investigation, which Trump allies used to try to discredit the inquiry.In 2022, Mr. Trump made John Solomon, a conservative writer who had been briefly given the binder before it was retrieved, one of his representatives to the National Archives. This allowed Mr. Solomon to see Trump White House records deposited with the agency. He later filed a lawsuit against the government asking a court to order the Justice Department to send the binder to the archives so that he could have access to it.A court filing he submitted in August described the binder as about 10 inches thick and containing about 2,700 pages. The publicly released version includes fewer than 600 pages, many heavily redacted; it is not clear what accounts for the discrepancy.The filing said Mr. Solomon had been allowed to thumb through a version of the binder at the White House on Jan. 19, 2021. The contents, it said, included a 2017 F.B.I. report about its interview of Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of unverified claims about Trump-Russia ties; “tasking orders” related to an F.B.I. confidential human source; “lightly-redacted” copies of botched surveillance warrant applications; and text messages between the F.B.I. officials.The filing said Mr. Solomon or an aide had gone back to the White House that evening and had been given a copy of the materials in the binder in a paper bag, and that separately a Justice Department envelope containing some of the documents had been delivered to his office.But as Mr. Solomon’s office was scanning the larger set, the filing said, the White House requested that the documents be returned so certain private details could be removed. Mr. Meadows promised Mr. Solomon he would get back the revised binder, it said, but he never did.When Mr. Solomon later tried to see the binder within the Trump White House records at the National Archives, he said, the agency denied him access to a box of 2,700 pages “with varying types of classification and declassification markings” that it said it was obligated to treat as highly classified. The agency also told him it did not have the declassified version of the binder that Mr. Solomon had briefly possessed, because the Justice Department still has it. More

Mr. Christie, attacking higher-polling opponents Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, accused them of spending too much time attacking each other.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey turned his fire on Friday from former President Donald J. Trump, his usual subject of attack, to his higher-polling Republican rivals for the nomination.Mr. Christie’s campaign released its first television advertisement of the campaign cycle, which blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, for targeting each other instead of the former president, whom they all trail by a wide margin.“Chris Christie is the only one who can beat Trump because he’s the only one trying to beat Trump,” the narrator in Mr. Christie’s 30-second spot says.The six-figure ad buy, first reported by Axios, is airing in New Hampshire on local broadcasts and on national outlets including CNN, CNBC and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”It comes as Mr. Christie tries to boost himself before the Jan. 23 primary in New Hampshire, where he is in third place behind Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley. He has bet that a strong showing in the Granite State, forgoing Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, will keep his campaign afloat in future contests.The ad cited polls that showed Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis behind Mr. Trump by double digits.“Nikki Haley, down by 26 in her home state to Trump, attacks DeSantis,” a voice-over says, citing an ad from the super PAC supporting Ms. Haley that called him “too lame to lead, too weak to win.” The ad then pivots to Mr. DeSantis: “DeSantis, down 32 to Trump in Iowa, attacks Nikki Haley,” the narrator says, airing a clip from Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC that said “you can’t trust Tricky Nikki.”“There’s only one candidate trying to stop Trump,” the ad says, before airing footage of Mr. Christie bashing Mr. Trump on the debate stage.The Times reported last month that Ms. Haley’s super PAC had spent $3.5 million on ads attacking Mr. DeSantis but none specifically attacking Mr. Trump. (On Friday, Ms. Haley called on the former president to participate in the Iowa debate, saying, “It’s getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.”)While Mr. DeSantis has attacked Mr. Trump’s record more in recent weeks, his super PAC, Never Back Down, spent 10 times more on efforts to criticize Ms. Haley than Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie trails Mr. Trump by more than 50 points in national polls, with his support hovering in the low single digits.He has spent the fewest days campaigning of the remaining Republican Party candidates, an analysis from The New York Times showed. The campaigns and super PACs supporting Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump have far outspent him. More

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Buying a home is a less attainable goal for many young people, and rents are expensive. Could that dog Democrats in the 2024 election?Cameron Ambrosy spent the first weekend of December going to 10 open houses — purely for research purposes. The 25-year-old in St. Paul, Minn., has a well-paying job and she and her husband are saving diligently, but she knows that it will be years before they can afford to buy.“It is much more of a long-term goal than for my parents or my grandparents, or even my peers who are slightly older,” said Ms. Ambrosy, adding that for many of her friends, homeownership is even farther away. “There’s a lot of nihilism around long-term goals like home buying.”As many people pay more for rent and some struggle to save for starter homes, political and economic analysts are warning that housing affordability may be adding to economic unhappiness — and is likely to be a more salient issue in the 2024 presidential election than in years past.Many Americans view the economy negatively even though unemployment is low and wage growth has been strong. Younger voters cite housing as a particular source of concern: Among respondents 18 to 34 in a recent Morning Consult survey, it placed second only to inflation overall.Wary of the issue and its political implications, President Biden has directed his economic aides to come up with new and expanded efforts for the federal government to help Americans who are struggling with the costs of buying or renting a home, aides say. The administration is using federal grants to prod local authorities to loosen zoning regulations, for instance, and is considering executive actions that focus on affordability. The White House has also dispatched top officials, including Lael Brainard, who leads the National Economic Council, to give speeches about the administration’s efforts to help people afford homes.“The president is very focused on the affordability of housing because it is the single most important monthly expense for so many families,” Ms. Brainard said in an interview.Housing is “the single most important monthly expense for so many families,” noted Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesHousing has not traditionally been a big factor motivating voters, in part because key market drivers like zoning policies tend to be local. But some political strategists and economists say the rapid run-up in prices since the pandemic could change that.Rents have climbed about 22 percent since late 2019, and a key index of home prices is up by an even heftier 46 percent. Mortgages now hover around 7 percent as the Federal Reserve has raised rates to the highest level in 22 years in a bid to contain inflation. Those factors have combined to make both monthly rent and the dream of first-time homeownership increasingly unattainable for many young families.“This is the singular economic issue of our time, and they need to figure out how to talk about that with voters in a way that resonates,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of KC Tenants, a tenant union in Kansas City, Mo., referring to the White House. The housing affordability crush comes at a time when many consumers are facing higher prices in general. A bout of rapid inflation that started in 2021 has left households paying more for everyday necessities like milk, bread, gas and many services. Even though costs are no longer increasing so quickly, those higher prices continue to weigh on consumer sentiment, eroding Mr. Biden’s approval ratings.While incomes have recently kept up with price increases, that inflationary period has left many young households devoting a bigger chunk of their budgets to rental costs. That is making it more difficult for many to save toward now-heftier down payments. The situation has spurred a bout of viral social media content about the difficulty of buying a home, which has long been a steppingstone into the middle class and a key component of wealth-building in the United States.That’s why some analysts think that housing concerns could morph into an important political issue, particularly for hard-hit demographics like younger people. While about two-thirds of American adults overall are homeowners, that share drops to less than 40 percent for those under 35.“The housing market has been incredibly volatile over the last four years in a way that has made it very salient,” said Igor Popov, the chief economist at Apartment List. “I think housing is going to be a big topic in the 2024 election.”Yet there are reasons that presidential candidates have rarely emphasized housing as an election issue: It is both a long-term problem and a tough one for the White House to tackle on its own.“Housing is sort of the problem child in economic policy,” said Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and former Obama administration economic and housing adviser. America has a housing supply shortfall that has been years in the making. Builders pulled back on construction after the 2007 housing market meltdown, and years of insufficient building have left too few properties on the market to meet recent strong demand. The shortage has recently been exacerbated as higher interest rates deter home-owning families who locked in low mortgage rates from moving.Some analysts think concerns about housing affordability could morph into an important political issue, particularly for hard-hit demographics like younger people.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesConditions could ease slightly in 2024. The Federal Reserve is expected to begin cutting borrowing costs next year as inflation eases, which could help to make mortgages slightly cheaper. A new supply of apartments are expected to be finished, which could keep a lid on rents.And even voters who feel bad about housing might still support Democrats for other reasons. Ms. Ambrosy, the would-be buyer in St. Paul, said that she had voted for President Biden in 2020 and she planned to vote for the Democratic nominee in this election purely on the basis of social issues, for instance.But housing affordability is enough of a pain point for young voters and renters — who tend to lean heavily Democrat — that it has left the Biden administration scrambling to emphasize possible solutions.After including emergency rental assistance in his 2021 economic stimulus bill, Mr. Biden has devoted less attention to housing than to other inflation-related issues, like reducing the cost of prescription drugs. His most aggressive housing proposals, like an expansion of federal housing vouchers, were dropped from last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.Still, his administration has pushed several efforts to liberalize local housing laws and expand affordable housing. It released a “Housing Supply Action” plan that aims to step up the pace of development by using federal grants and other funds to encourage state and local governments to liberalize their zoning and land use rules to make housing faster and easier to build. The plan also gives governments more leeway to use transportation and infrastructure funds to more directly produce housing (such as with a new program that supports the conversion of offices to apartments).The administration has also floated a number of ideas to help renters, such as a blueprint for future renters’ legislation and a new Federal Trade Commission proposal to prohibit “junk fees” for things like roommates, applications and utilities that hide the true cost of rent.Some affordable housing advocates say the administration could do more. One possibility they have raised in the past would be to have Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which help create a more robust market for mortgages by buying them from financial institutions, invest directly in moderately priced rental housing developments. Ms. Raghuveer, the tenant organizer, has argued that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could unilaterally impose a cap on annual rent increases for landlords whose mortgages are backed by the agencies.But several experts said that White House efforts would only help on the margins. “Without Congress, the administration is really limited in what they can do to reduce supply barriers,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist at the Mercatus Center who studies housing.Republicans control the House and have opposed nearly all of Mr. Biden’s plans to increase government spending, including for housing. But aides say Mr. Biden will press the case and seek new executive actions to help with housing costs.While it could be valuable to start talking about solutions, “nothing is going to solve the problem in one year,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics and a frequent adviser to Democrats.“This problem has been developing for 15 years, since the financial crisis, and it’s going to take another 15 years to get out of it.” More

A panel of appeals court judges appeared skeptical of the arguments on Friday on behalf of Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff.A lawyer for Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff under former President Donald J. Trump, faced tough questions from a panel of judges on Friday as Mr. Meadows renewed his bid to move a Georgia election interference case from state court to federal court.The panel of three appeals court judges heard brief oral arguments from a Georgia prosecutor and a lawyer for Mr. Meadows over the jurisdiction of the case, in which Mr. Meadows is accused of working with a group of people to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.The judges asked sharp questions of both sides but seemed particularly skeptical of the arguments advanced by Mr. Meadows, who claims that the allegations against him concern actions he took as a federal officer and thus should be dealt with in federal court.Moving the case to federal court would give Mr. Meadows advantages, including a jury pool drawn from a wider geographic area with moderately more support for Mr. Trump. But in September, a federal judge sided with the prosecutors, writing that Mr. Meadows’s conduct, as outlined in the indictment, was “not related to his role as White House chief of staff or his executive branch authority.”Mr. Meadows appealed that decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, where the three-judge panel — consisting of two Democrat-appointed judges and one Republican-appointed judge — peppered lawyers with questions on Friday in an ornate courtroom in downtown Atlanta.In her questioning of Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, Judge Nancy Abudu, an appointee of President Biden, said that Mr. Meadows’s own testimony, in August, had seemed to broadly define what actions were part of his official duties as chief of staff.“The testimony that was provided essentially didn’t provide any outer limits to what his duties were,” Judge Abudu said. “So it’s almost as if he could do anything, in that capacity, as long as he could say it was on behalf of the president.”But Mr. Meadows’s lawyer, George J. Terwilliger III, countered that Mr. Meadows did not need to establish those limits, but rather only had to “establish a nexus” to the duties of his federal job. Mr. Terwilliger’s argument focused on the idea that keeping the case in state court would be inappropriate because it would require a state judge to decide important matters relating to federal law, such as what the role of White House chief of staff entails.“That makes no sense,” Mr. Terwilliger said. “Those are federal questions that need to be resolved in federal court.”In addition to Judge Abudu, the panel included Chief Circuit Judge William Pryor, an appointee of President George W. Bush, and Judge Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of President Barack Obama. The case concerns the concept of “removal,” which means essentially transferring a case from state to federal court; if the case was removed, Mr. Meadows would continue to face the same charges.The case against Mr. Meadows stems from a lengthy investigation by Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, that led to her charging 19 people — including Mr. Trump — with racketeering and other charges related to their attempts to keep Mr. Trump in power. Four of those defendants have reached plea agreements with Ms. Willis’s office, and another four besides Mr. Meadows are seeking to have their cases moved to federal courts, including Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official. Mr. Meadows, Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark have pleaded not guilty.To move his case to federal court, Mr. Meadows’s lawyers must show that his actions — as alleged in the indictment — were within the scope of his job duties as chief of staff, and that Mr. Meadows still counts as a federal officer even though he no longer holds that position.Lawyers with Ms. Willis’s office have argued that Mr. Meadows was taking political actions in service of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, rather than operating in his role as chief of staff. Donald Wakeford, a top prosecutor in Ms. Willis’s office, also argued on Friday that Mr. Meadows no longer has the ability to move his case to federal court because he is no longer a federal officer.The judges posed several hypotheticals to Mr. Wakeford about whether that interpretation might allow states to charge unpopular federal officials shortly after they left office. Mr. Wakeford argued that regardless of such concerns, the relevant federal law does not indicate that former federal officials can move their cases out of state court.Among the criminal acts alleged in the indictment of Mr. Meadows is a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, between Mr. Trump and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump said he wanted to “find” nearly 12,000 more Trump votes, enough to reverse his defeat. Mr. Meadows testified in August that Mr. Trump had directed him to set up that phone call. In December 2020, Mr. Meadows also made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., accompanied by Secret Service agents, intending to view an audit that was in progress there. Local officials declined to let him do so because it was not open to the public.No matter what the appeals court decides, lawyers for either side could ask the Supreme Court to take up the case, potentially enmeshing the nation’s top court in a contentious political case during an election year.The challenge Mr. Meadows faces was summed up by Judge Rosenbaum. “According to him, it seems like everything was within his official duties,” she said during the proceeding. “And that just cannot be right.” More