Elections

The collapse of a plea deal and the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden mean the president could face political fallout for months to come.They thought it was over, that they could put it in the rearview mirror. All that Hunter Biden had to do was show up in a courtroom, answer a few questions, sign some paperwork and that would be it. Not that the Republicans would let it go, but any real danger would be past.Except that it did not work out that way. The criminal investigation that President Biden’s advisers believed was all but done has instead been given new life with the collapse of the plea agreement and the appointment of a special counsel who now might bring the president’s son to trial.What had been a painful but relatively contained political scandal that animated mainly partisans on the right could now extend for months just as the president is gearing up for his re-election campaign. This time, the questions about Hunter Biden’s conduct may be harder for the White House to dismiss as politically motivated. They may even break out of the conservative echo chamber to the general public, which has largely not paid much attention until now.It remained unclear whether Hunter Biden faces criminal exposure beyond the tax and gun charges lodged against him by David C. Weiss, the prosecutor first appointed in 2018 to investigate him by President Donald J. Trump’s attorney general. It may be that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s decision to designate Mr. Weiss a special counsel with more independence to run the inquiry means that there is still more potential legal peril stemming from Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign firms.Yet it may amount to less than meets the eye in the long run. Mr. Weiss’s announcement abandoning the plea agreement he originally reached with Hunter Biden on the tax and gun charges means he could take the case to trial in states other than Delaware, where he is U.S. attorney and has jurisdiction. Some analysts speculated that requesting special counsel status may be about empowering him to prosecute out of state.“Friday’s announcement feels more like a technicality allowing Weiss to bring charges outside of Delaware now that the talks between sides have broken down,” said Anthony Coley, who until recently served as the Justice Department’s director of public affairs under Mr. Garland. “It will have limited practical impact.”Even if so, a trial by a jury of Hunter Biden’s peers would be a spectacle that could prove distracting and embarrassing for the White House while providing more fodder to the president’s Republicans. The president’s advisers were frustrated as a result and resigned to months of additional torment, even if they were not alarmed by the prospect of a wider investigation.“After five years of probing Hunter’s dealings, it seems unlikely that Weiss will discover much that is new,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “On the other hand, anything that draws more attention to Hunter’s case and extends the story into the campaign year is certainly unwelcome news for the president’s team.”As it happened, Mr. Garland’s appointment of Mr. Weiss as special counsel did not solve part of the problem it was meant to address. A special counsel designation is intended to insulate an investigation from politics, but the attorney general’s decision still drew fire from Republicans who derided the choice of Mr. Weiss because he had signed off on the original plea agreement, which they had described as a “sweetheart deal.”Never mind that Mr. Weiss was a Trump administration appointee whom the Biden administration kept on to show that it was not attempting to tilt the case in favor of the president’s son. Since Mr. Trump and his allies did not like the apparent outcome of the investigation, some have painted Mr. Weiss as a lackey of the Biden administration and have showcased whistle-blowers who said the prosecutor had been hamstrung even though he insisted he was not.“This move by Attorney General Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up,” said Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee who has led congressional investigations into the president’s son.Such attacks also serve the purpose of discrediting Mr. Weiss in advance if in the end he does not confirm their unsubstantiated charges of corruption against the Biden family. Testimony and news accounts have indicated that Hunter Biden traded on his name to make money and a former business partner has said that his father was aware. But no evidence has emerged that the president personally profited from or used his power to benefit his son’s business interests.Still, other Republicans said the party should welcome the appointment of Mr. Weiss as special counsel. There would be no need for one if there was nothing to investigate, they argued, and it was Mr. Biden’s own attorney general now saying there was a need.“It shows that there is more than just smoke,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican strategist. “It makes it impossible to define this now as simply a House Republican or MAGA thing. This has to be covered differently now. And as we’ve learned from other special counsel investigations, where a special counsel starts is not necessarily where it ends up.”For the White House, the attorney general’s Friday afternoon announcement was an unpleasant surprise, a head-snapping reversal from just seven weeks ago, when the president’s team thought it had turned a corner with Hunter Biden’s agreement with Mr. Weiss to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and accept a diversion program to dismiss an unlawful gun possession charge.The Biden camp was deeply relieved that five years of investigation had added up to nothing more serious. The president made a point of inviting his son, who has struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, to a high-profile state dinner two days later in what was taken as a spike-the-ball moment declaring victory over the family’s pursuers. The fact that Mr. Garland was also at the state dinner, hanging out just across an outdoor tent from the man his department was prosecuting, left even some Democrats feeling uncomfortable.But any sense of relief was premature. When Hunter Biden showed up at the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., on July 26 to finalize the plea deal, it all unraveled under questioning from a judge in just a few hours. At the heart of the matter was a disagreement over what the agreement meant. Hunter Biden and his lawyers thought it ended the investigation, while prosecutors made clear it did not.The Hunter Biden legal team wants certainty that a guilty plea would end the matter, given that Mr. Trump has vowed to prosecute him if elected president. But as Mr. Weiss revealed on Friday, subsequent negotiations intended to iron out the disconnect have reached an impasse, making a trial all but certain to be the next step and making it easier for Republicans trying to shift attention from Mr. Trump’s three indictments.They are, of course, hardly comparable cases. Hunter Biden was never president and never will be president, and even the most damning evidence against him does not equate to trying to overturn a democratic election in order to hold onto power. But it has been a useful strategy for Republicans to complain about what they call a “two-tier justice system.”Three-quarters of Republicans believe the president’s son got preferential treatment in the plea deal, compared with 33 percent of Democrats, according to a poll by Reuters and Ipsos in June. But most voters indicated that they thought Mr. Biden was “being a good father by supporting his son,” and only 26 percent said they were less likely to vote for him as a result of Hunter’s legal troubles.The president’s strategists have argued that Republican attacks on Hunter Biden did not work in the 2020 election when Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump or in the 2022 midterm elections when Democrats did better than anticipated. Nor, they added, has the issue resonated with voters who will be important to the president’s re-election in 2024, meaning independents and disappointed Democrats.That is an assumption that in the months to come will be put on trial, in effect, at the same time as the president’s son. More

Republican presidential candidates, some of whom were stumping in the early-caucusing state of Iowa on Friday, largely derided the news that the prosecutor investigating President Biden’s son Hunter had been elevated to special counsel status.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, during a campaign stop in Audubon, Iowa, cast doubt on the independence of the special counsel, David C. Weiss, who had already been overseeing a yearslong investigation of the president’s son. “It just seems to me that they’re going to find a way to give him some type of soft-glove treatment,’’ he said. And Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, spoke disdainfully of the new title and power for Mr. Weiss.“I don’t think the American people trust the Department of Justice or anything this is going to do,” Ms. Haley said in an appearance on Fox News. “I think this was meant to be a distraction.”At the same time, she called it a “response to the pressure that the Biden family is feeling” and called on House Republicans who have been investigating the Bidens “to keep their foot on the gas.” So far, the investigations have found no hard evidence that President Biden used his influence while vice president to benefit his son’s business deals.Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota also said he doubted the independence of Mr. Weiss. In an interview while twirling around on the Iowa State Fair’s Ferris wheel, he called the move “too little, too late” and said few Republicans would view the step as a serious development, given Mr. Weiss’s role in offering Hunter Biden a plea deal in the case. That plea deal has fallen apart.Mr. Weiss is a federal prosecutor in Delaware who was originally appointed by former President Donald J. Trump. He was left in his position by President Biden to continue the Hunter Biden inquiry to avoid the appearance that the president would seek special treatment for his son.In a statement attributed to a spokesperson, Mr. Trump, who is being investigated by the special counsel Jack Smith, claimed without evidence that the Department of Justice has protected President Biden, Hunter Biden and other family members “for decades.” The statement cast doubt on Mr. Weiss’s independence and criticized him for not already bringing “proper charges after a four-year investigation” of Hunter Biden.Mr. Smith has brought two indictments against Mr. Trump.Not all of the candidates were disdainful of the appointment of the special counsel, which Republicans have urged for some time. Vivek Ramaswamy, who said last month that a special counsel was warranted, called the appointment of Mr. Weiss “good” on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. “Now let’s see if it’s more than a fig leaf,” he added.Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was flipping cuts of pork at the Iowa State Fair on Friday, said he approved of the Department of Justice’s move to upgrade Mr. Weiss’s power.“I think it’s about time that we saw the appointment of a special counsel to get to the bottom of not only what Hunter Biden was doing, but what the Biden family was doing,” Mr. Pence said. “The American people deserve answers, and I welcome the appointment.”Anjali Huynh More

Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa did not ask former Vice President Mike Pence about Donald J. Trump’s indictments, the topic about which he is most often grilled on the campaign trail. Nor did she ask him if his life had changed “since Tucker Carlson ruined your career,” as one voter shouted during his appearance at the political soapbox Thursday.Instead, the popular Republican governor struck a different tone on Friday morning, asking the former vice president what she called the “fast three”: his funniest moment on the trail, his favorite food at the fair and his favorite walkout song.At the Des Moines Register’s soapbox, a longtime fixture at the fair, candidates have 20 minutes to make their pitch to a discerning crowd of voters who relish the retail politicking that is crucial to winning Iowa. Presidential hopefuls come to the fair with the goal of avoiding awkward moments and on-the-fly responses to audience questions.But Ms. Reynolds’s new “fair-side” chats are shaping up to be more of a safe space, where the 2024 Republican field has so far answered softball questions tailored to their platforms, allowing them to speak about proposed policies at length with little follow-up.The Iowa governor also seems to have mastered the art of helping the candidates while boosting her own brand, leveling criticism at the Biden administration while promoting her legislative successes in the state between their responses.This friendly atmosphere may be why Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina are skipping the soapbox altogether, in favor of conversations with Ms. Reynolds on Saturday and Tuesday.Ms. Reynolds’ questions so far have focused on candidates’ successes in their respective offices, how to curb what she called the Biden administration’s “ridiculous” economic policies and how they plan to win the nomination.But she has also served to humanize the contenders. She laughed off accidentally introducing Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota as the governor of North Carolina. She equated “Miami nice” to “Iowa nice” with Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami. And with Mr. Pence, she joked about her husband’s likeness to the former vice president.“I can say with confidence, he’s a very handsome man,” Mr. Pence said. “I agree,” Ms. Reynolds responded. More

Ron DeSantis’s six-stop bus tour began inauspiciously on Friday, when he was drowned out by two women who heckled the Florida governor with cowbells and a bullhorn during his first event of the day, about 40 miles west of Des Moines.They greeted DeSantis with chants protesting his policies as Florida governor on L.G.B.T.Q. issues, gender identity and education. “Go back to Florida,” they shouted in unison as DeSantis emerged from his campaign bus at the Freedom Rock, a patriotically painted boulder in Menlo, Iowa.“Racist, fascist, anti-gay, Ron DeSantis, go away,” they chanted.At one point, a minor fracas ensued between one of the women and a man who was there to welcome DeSantis. Handlers for the governor and local law enforcement stepped in between them. The governor’s remarks were mostly muffled by the chants, and his aides quickly escorted journalists away from the scene to an awaiting travel van. More

Vivek Ramaswamy is a 38-year-old investor and former pharmaceutical executive who wants to be the Republican nominee for president. He’s not ahead by any means, but he’s doing better than you might expect. If Donald Trump dominates the field and Ron DeSantis is the far runner-up, then Ramaswamy is the candidate poised to rise if the Florida governor falls further behind.Ramaswamy is “anti-woke,” condemns Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday and says that “diversity is not our strength.” He thinks climate activism is a “cult” and wants to send the military to the border with Mexico. He wants to unravel the so-called deep state, thinks the Trump indictments are politically motivated and won’t say whether, if he were in Mike Pence’s shoes, he would have refused the former president’s demand to overturn the 2020 election results.In other words, he’s preoccupied by most of the same concerns as his rivals. But he does have one gimmick that DeSantis and Trump don’t: “We are a constitutional republic. We need to revive civic duty among young Americans,” Ramaswamy said on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “That’s why I’m announcing my support for a constitutional amendment to raise the voting age from 18 to 25, but to still allow 18-year-olds to vote if they either pass the same civics test required of immigrants to become naturalized citizens, or else to perform 6 months of military or first responder service.”Ramaswamy has elaborated in interviews on his call to raise the voting age for most young people. “I think we have a loss of civic pride in our country. I think people, young people included, do not value a country that they simply inherit,” he told NPR. “I think we value a country that we have a stake in building. And I think that asking a young person, asking any citizen, to know something about the country before voting, I think is a perfectly reasonable condition.”Demanding a de facto literacy test for most young Americans to vote is not actually a “perfectly reasonable condition.” It is a direct assault on the basic democratic rights of millions of citizens.To begin, there’s the fundamental fact that no aspect of political equality hinges on the ability to memorize trivia. What’s more, you do not need a formal education of any sort to embrace the duties of citizenship or to understand yourself as a political actor with a right to self-government. You do not even need one to understand your political interests and to work, individually or with others, to pursue them through our democratic institutions.To think otherwise is to believe that Americans, from the yeoman farmers of the early Republic to the freedmen of the Reconstruction South to the urban industrial workers of the early 20th century, have never been equipped to govern themselves.There’s also the practical fact that most new requirements for voting in the United States are — in intent and purpose — new restrictions on voting.For example, these days we take the secret ballot for granted as the only rational way to conduct an election. Of course the state should produce uniform, standard ballots for all elections. Of course we should vote in private. But for much of the 19th century before the introduction of the secret ballot — also known as the “Australian” ballot — American voters obtained their ballots from their political parties. “Since the ballots generally contained only the names of an individual party’s candidates, literacy was not required,” notes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” “All that a man had to do was drop a ballot in a box.”With a single, standardized ballot — cast in private without the assistance of a friend or relative or party representative — voters had to read to participate. That was the point. As one contemporaneous observer, George Gunton, an economist and social reformer, declared, “so obvious is the evil of ignorant voting that more stringent naturalization laws are being demanded, because too many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly. It is to remedy this that the Australian ballot system has been adopted in so many states.” Its purpose, he continued, was “to eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters.”We similarly take voter registration for granted — of course we should confirm our intention to vote with municipal authorities ahead of time. But that, too, was introduced to limit and restrict the electorate. “Beginning in the 1830s,” writes Keyssar, “the idea of registration became more popular, particularly among Whigs, who believed that ineligible transients and foreigners were casting their votes for the Democratic Party.” Sixty years later, Southern Democrats used highly discretionary registration laws to remove as many Republican-voting Blacks from the electorate as possible.“The key disfranchising features of the Southern registration laws were the amount of discretion granted to the registrars, the specificity of the information required of the registrant, the times and places set for registration, and the requirement that a voter bring his registration certificate to the polling place,” explained the political scientist J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.” “Registration laws were most efficiently used — as in South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina — to cut the electorate immediately before a referendum on constitutional disfranchisement.”We also can’t forget the actual literacy tests, introduced at the turn of the 20th century, that were designed to keep as many immigrants, Black Americans and laboring people from the polls as possible. The point was to limit, as much as possible, the political power of groups that might challenge the interests of those in power, from industrial barons in the North to large landowners in the South.Ramaswamy says that the goal of his proposal is to encourage civic pride and inculcate a deeper attachment to the country among the youngest American adults. But there are ways to do both without creating new obstacles to voting. There’s also no evidence or indication that a mandatory civics test would achieve the goal in question. When you consider, as well, the extent to which there are older adults — even elderly adults — who could use a little civic pride themselves, it appears that Ramaswamy’s proposal has less to do with fostering national cohesion and more to do with the Republican Party’s unenviable dilemma with young people.Democrats win most younger voters across all racial and ethnic groups. In the 2022 midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of voters under 30 backed Democrats compared with 31 percent for Republicans. And soon, young people will represent a majority of potential voters in the country.Rather than try to appeal to or persuade this bloc, Ramaswamy’s proposal is to remove a vast majority from the electorate altogether.To be clear, this isn’t a serious plan. The American public is so polarized along partisan and ideological lines as to make the Constitution effectively unamendable. Ramaswamy’s call to raise the voting age is a novelty policy for a novelty candidate. And yet it tells us something about the Republican electorate, and thus the Republican Party, that the eye-catching gimmick of an ambitious politician is a plan to disenfranchise millions of American voters.In many ways, big and small, the Republican Party has turned against the bedrock “republican principles” of majority rule and popular sovereignty. We see it in a governor removing a duly-elected official because he disagrees with the views she represents, a state legislature gerrymandering itself into a permanent majority regardless of where the votes fall, an entire state Republican Party trying (and failing) to change the rules of constitutional amendment to keep the voters from affirming their rights and a former president who would rather end the American experiment in democracy than accept defeat at the ballot box.Ramaswamy is playing the same song. There’s almost no one in the Republican Party, at this point, who isn’t.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The butter cow is carved. The pork chops are prepped. And the candidates who weren’t at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday are on their way.Six candidates for the Republican presidential nomination will be circulating through the fairgrounds on Friday, as they try to woo voters months ahead of this crucial first nominating contest.A day at the fair — one of the largest in the nation — has long been one of Iowa’s quirkiest political traditions. Presidential aspirants make their campaign pitch but also flip pork chops at a grill sponsored by the state’s pork industry, pay homage to a sculpture of a cow made of 600 pounds of butter and eat their share of fried foods — all while navigating hecklers and a media throng.It doesn’t always go as planned: In 2007, Mitt Romney flipped his chop into the gravel. (He lost the caucuses that year but won the party’s nomination four years later.) And in 2015, Donald J. Trump, walking through the fair in a navy blazer and buffed white dress shoes, offered rides at random to handfuls of Iowa children in his helicopter parked nearby. (He, too, lost the caucus but won the nomination.)Five months before the 2024 caucuses, Iowa has already emerged as a make-or-break contest in this race. With Mr. Trump leading by a double-digit margin, the state represents the best opportunity for his rivals to stop his march to the nomination. If one of them can take him down — or even come close to beating him — it would show cracks in his support and potentially undercut the narrative that he still has a stranglehold on the Republican base. If Mr. Trump wins in Iowa, party strategists say, it will be difficult to slow his momentum, particularly as the race broadens out to states across the country.Friday’s lineup at the fair is a list of Republican candidates who have been struggling to break into the top tier of the nomination race, including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami and Larry Elder, the conservative commentator.Several candidates are scheduled to deliver speeches at the political soapbox, a small podium open to the public and sponsored by the Des Moines Register. Others will participate in public Q. and A. sessions with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, opting for a more scripted encounter with a fellow Republican.While Saturday will bring Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to the event, the Friday attendees are likely to enjoy a day basking in the Iowa attention without the former president stealing the show. More

The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia has evidence to charge multiple allies of the former president involved in breaching voting machines in the state, according to two people briefed on the matter.The potential charges at issue are computer trespass felonies, the people said, though the final list of defendants and whether they will be brought as part of a racketeering case when prosecutors are expected to present evidence to the grand jury next week remain unclear.To bring a racketeering case under Georgia state law, prosecutors need to show the existence of an “enterprise” predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes, of which computer trespass is one. The Guardian has reported that prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence for a racketeering case.The statute itself prohibits the intentional use of a computer or computer network without authorization in order to remove data, either temporarily or permanently. It also prohibits interrupting or interfering with the use of a computer, as well as altering or damaging a computer.Prosecutors have taken a special interest in the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, Georgia, by Trump allies because of the brazen nature of the operation and the possibility that Trump was aware that his allies intended to covertly gain access to the machines.In a series of particularly notable incidents, forensics experts hired by Trump allies copied data from virtually every part of the voting system, which is used statewide in Georgia, before uploading them to a password-protected website that could be accessed by 2020 election deniers.The story about how a group of Trump allies gained unauthorized access to voting machines – informed by deposition transcripts, surveillance tapes and other records – can be traced back to 2020, when the top elections supervisor for Coffee county came across the “adjudication” system for mail ballots within the machines.A spokesperson for the Fulton county district attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.In Georgia, mail ballots are marked by hand. If a ballot cannot be read by the machine, because of stray marks or other errors, it goes through an adjudication process whereby a bipartisan panel reviews the ballot and agrees on the voter’s intention before telling the machine how to count it.The adjudication process became a point of controversy in local Republican party circles after the elections supervisor, Misty Hampton, said in a viral November 2020 video that the person entering the information could theoretically tell it to falsely count a ballot intended for one candidate for another.Swapping a vote through the adjudication process would be straightforwardly illegal, and there is no evidence that such conduct took place during the 2020 presidential election. If it had, it would have been detected during the subsequent statewide hand count, experts have said.On 5 January 2021, Georgia held runoff elections for the state’s two US Senate seats. That day, amid a fraught atmosphere, the Coffee county GOP chair, Cathy Latham, was the Republican member on the bipartisan adjudication panel.As Latham later recounted in depositions in a long-running lawsuit brought by the Coalition for Good Governance, the ballot scanner in Coffee county repeatedly jammed as it tried to read mail-in ballots. And in Latham’s retelling, it appeared to jam more often for ballots marked for Republican candidates.When Latham complained, the on-site Dominion Voting System technician advised her to wipe the ballot scanner with a cloth. Latham said in her statement that the wiping did not work, and it was only after the technician held his phone near the scanner that the problems were resolved.According to Latham’s account, the suspicion was that the technician had downloaded something to the ballot scanner through his phone.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere remains no such evidence to date and the Georgia secretary of state’s office has affirmed the scanners have no wireless capability. But that bizarre episode appears to have been the trigger for a number of Trump allies to see if someone could have manipulated the election.The day after the Capitol attack in Washington, on 7 January 2021, surveillance video picked up Eric Chaney, a member of the Coffee county elections board, arriving at the county’s elections office around 11am. Latham also arrived at the office around an hour later.The tapes then show Latham greeting data experts from SullivanStrickler, a firm that specializes in “imaging”, or making exact copies, of electronic devices, and Scott Hall, a bail bond business owner with ties to the local Republican party hunting for evidence of election fraud.What happened inside the elections office is only partially captured on surveillance video, but records show the SullivanStrickler team imaged almost every component of the election systems, including ballot scanners, the server used to count votes, thumb drives and flash memory cards.The company believed it had authorization to collect the data, SullivanStrickler’s director of data risk Dean Felicetti later said in a deposition, and suggested that Hampton and Latham had given their approval.Most of the imaging work apparently took place off camera, though tapes from the lobby of the Coffee county elections office show Latham, Hampton and Chaney with the SullivanStrickler experts as they bend over to look at computer screens and walk around elections equipment.Lawyers for Latham and Hampton did not respond to requests for comment. But Latham’s previous lawyer has told the Washington Post that she did not authorize the copying and had “not acted improperly or illegally”. Hall and Chaney also did not respond to requests for comment.The next day, according to text messages, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – who helped organize the clandestine operation and paid for it through her non-profit – was informed that SullivanStrickler would post the data it had gathered on to a password-protected site from where it could be downloaded.Breaches of the Coffee county voting machines appear to have happened at least two additional times. On 18 January 2021, they were accessed on a second occasion when Hampton arrived with Doug Logan, the CEO of elections security firm CyberNinjas, and a retired federal employee named Jeffrey Lenberg.The pair spent at least four hours that afternoon inside the elections office, and then returned the following day for another nine hours. Lenberg then again gained access to the elections office every day for four days starting on 25 January 2021.What Lenberg did inside remains uncertain. But in a subsequent podcast interview, Lenberg said he and Logan went to Coffee county after hearing about the Senate runoffs incident because they wanted to see if they could replicate the error but “didn’t touch” the machines themselves. More

Not long ago, Iowa was the center of the Democratic political universe.In 2019, two dozen presidential candidates roamed the Iowa State Fair to grill pork chops and admire the famed butter cow as they vied for the state’s caucusgoers. Some Democrats still saw the state’s rightward jolt in 2016 as temporary, believing that their flipping of two congressional seats in 2018 had reaffirmed Iowa’s purple status. Days before the 2020 general election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned in Des Moines.Now, as Republican presidential candidates flock to the fair, Iowa Democrats are at their lowest point in decades.“It is so bad,” said Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines. “I can’t even describe to you how bad it is.”Ms. Celsi and others described themselves as exhausted by repeated defeats at the ballot box, an inability to slow Republicans at the State Capitol and the loss to South Carolina of the first-in-the-nation status in Democratic presidential contests. Deep in the minority, Democrats in the State Legislature have squabbled among themselves, ousting their party’s State Senate leader in June after a dispute over personnel.In interviews this week, Iowa Democrats said the state now stood as a warning sign for what happens when their party falls out of touch with voters who once made up key parts of its electoral coalition.“There’s no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa,” said former Representative Dave Loebsack, whose eastern Iowa seat, which he had held for 14 years, flipped to a Republican when he chose not to seek re-election in 2020. “It’s difficult even to recruit people to run when we’re so far down.”Iowa’s transition to a deep-red state has taken place with remarkable speed. Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 2016. In 2018, Democrats won three of the state’s four congressional seats and three of the six statewide offices. But after the party’s bungling of its 2020 presidential caucuses, President Donald J. Trump cruised to victory in Iowa that November.Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines, said simply of the situation for Iowa Democrats, “It is so bad.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe midterm elections last year were a Democratic blood bath in Iowa, even though the party had over-performed in much of the rest of the country.The underfunded, little-known Democratic nominee for governor lost by 19 percentage points to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and carried only four of the state’s 99 counties. Republicans took all four congressional seats for the first time in 50 years, enacted a gun rights amendment in the State Constitution, ousted two of the three Democrats in statewide office and took supermajority control of both chambers of the Legislature.The three congressional seats Democrats held as recently as 2020 are still winnable, Democrats say, but the party doesn’t have 2024 candidates for any of them so far.“We should have candidates out there thinking, ‘If I get a few breaks, I can win,’” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in Iowa. “That we don’t is a direct reflection of having an incompetent party for the last couple of years.”Democrats, including Mr. D’Alessandro, express optimism about the party’s new chairwoman, Rita Hart, who has sought to empower county-level leaders. Ms. Hart, who in 2020 lost the congressional race for Mr. Loebsack’s seat by six votes, said Iowa Democrats would have to fight for a focus on local issues.Ms. Hart took over the party in January, after a period in which Iowa Democrats had four leaders in less than two years. She has sought to instill some continuity while reorienting the party’s priorities away from the presidential cycle and toward local needs.“The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we’ve got to talk to our fellow Iowans,” she said. “I’m very convinced that we’ve got to empower our county parties to do just that.”The struggles of Iowa Democrats reflect the broader migration of white, rural voters to Republicans, a long-term trend that has accelerated during Mr. Trump’s political career. Iowa has just two big cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and two college towns that state Democrats can still count on winning.Interviews with two dozen Democrats in the state suggest that the party has suffered from a confluence of problems, including diminished campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic; Mr. Trump’s appeal to the white, rural voters who dominate state politics; and weak messaging in the 2022 elections.Democrats have faced numerous setbacks this year, including Republicans’ passage of a six-week abortion ban — which has been temporarily halted by a court order — and a new program that allocates state money toward private school vouchers.“It’s just been so exhausting and frustrating to continue to take losses,” said Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state senator who was the party’s rare bright spot last year when she flipped a suburban Des Moines district to beat the Republican president of the chamber.She added, “If I had known everything that I was getting into, I don’t think I would have run in the first place, because it’s just been really hard, but I see so much opportunity in Iowa.”Losing the first presidential contest after the state party had suffered international ridicule for the 2020 caucuses fiasco forced what several Democrats described as a long-overdue reckoning. No longer can the party rely on a periodic influx of fund-raising and attention. Internal discussions now center on how to act more like successful red-state Democrats elsewhere, nominating moderate candidates who can attract independent voters who have been tilting more conservative with each election.“I’m hopeful that now our attention is on getting people elected and getting Democrats to turn out the vote rather than a national entity that overtakes everything,” said J.D. Scholten, a state representative from Sioux City who in 2018 nearly defeated Representative Steve King, a hard-right Republican with a history of racist remarks.Mr. Scholten, who spent years playing professional baseball in several countries, will not attend the State Fair because he’s pitching for a team in the Netherlands this summer. Ms. Celsi said she wouldn’t go because it is “Kim Reynolds’s show.” And Mr. Loebsack said he was staying home because the country music acts at the fair’s amphitheater did not appeal to him and his wife.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican, holding an interview at the State Fair. She easily won re-election last year.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s clear that Iowa Democrats have a long way to go.Republicans, with a hammerlock on the state’s politics, dominate fund-raising and media attention — and that was before the G.O.P. presidential candidates made themselves regulars at local fund-raisers and other political events.That has left Democrats doing a lot of finger-pointing and soul-searching about what has gone wrong, whether they have hit rock bottom yet and how to maneuver their way back to political relevance.“The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t prepare for the transition to understanding and using social media,” said Jack Hatch, a longtime state legislator who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. “Some individual campaigns understood, but not the party. As a result, we had one message for all campaigns, which weakened all our campaigns. One message doesn’t work in Iowa.” More