Elections

The presidential candidate who was assassinated on Wednesday had a long history in Ecuador’s public affairs, largely as an antagonist to those in power.Union leader. Muckraking journalist. Legislator. Presidential candidate. And now, assassin’s victim.Fernando Villavicencio, who was gunned down at a rally on Wednesday, had a long history in Ecuadorean public affairs, largely as an antagonist to those in power. He rose to prominence as a union leader at the state oil company, Petroecuador, and later played a crucial role in exposing a corruption scandal involving the administration of former President Rafael Correa.Mr. Correa, a socialist, was Ecuador’s longest-serving democratically elected president, leading the nation for a decade, through 2017. A commodities boom helped him lift millions out of poverty, but his authoritarian style and the corruption allegations that trailed him deeply divided the country.And Mr. Villavicencio was “always contesting the power” of Mr. Correa, according to Caroline Ávila, an Ecuadorean political analyst.As a journalist, Mr. Villavicencio obtained documents about a government surveillance program that he sent to WikiLeaks but eventually published himself. Some of his work led to death threats and charges that were widely criticized as politically motivated. He fled to Peru in 2017 to seek political asylum.There, he met with a friend from his undergraduate days at the Central University of Ecuador. He had no money to fight the charges against him, and had been forced to leave behind his wife and two young children.“He felt bullied and diminished,” said the friend, Grace Jaramillo, who is now a political scientist at the University of British Columbia.But later that year, Mr. Correa left office, and Mr. Villavicencio returned home. He won a seat in the National Assembly, where he served until May, when the legislature was dissolved by President Guillermo Lasso, who was facing impeachment proceedings over embezzlement accusations.Mr. Lasso’s move also triggered a presidential election, with a vote set for Aug. 20. For his presidential run, Mr. Villavicencio, 59, cast himself as the anticorruption candidate. He was representing the Build Ecuador Movement, a broad coalition, and also campaigned on issues like personal safety, in a country that has been consumed by violence related to narco-trafficking.Mr. Villavicencio was polling near the middle of an eight-person race, but remained hopeful about his chances, according to Ms. Jaramillo. But he was gunned down before voters could deliver their verdict.Soon after the killing, Mr. Correa, the former president, issued a lament on social media.“They have assassinated Fernando Villavicencio,” Mr. Correa wrote. “Ecuador has become a failed state.” More

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During a stop in New Mexico, the president highlighted how one of his signature pieces of legislation will benefit blue-collar workers.President Biden on Wednesday entered a wind tower manufacturing plant surrounded by desert boasting of declining unemployment, waning inflation and a manufacturing boom — all metrics that should make his three-state Southwest tour a victory lap.“Our plan is working,” Mr. Biden said, referring to his economic agenda. “When I think climate, I think jobs.”But hours before he entered Belen, the president reflected on the challenge hanging over the White House during his tour of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Even as he traverses the country to promote his economic policies, many voters are still skeptical of — or unclear on — Mr. Biden’s legislative record.He addressed the issue of voter sentiment during a fund-raiser at a private residence shortly after arriving in Albuquerque on Tuesday night.Noting recent infrastructure projects funded by his policies, Mr. Biden said: “They’re beginning to realize what we actually passed is having an impact. It’s just going to take a little while.”White House officials are hoping tours around the nation like Mr. Biden is doing this week can change that. As extreme weather rages across the country, the White House has framed one of its signature pieces of legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, as both a means to improve environmental justice and a source of manufacturing jobs for wind and solar.A day after seeking to galvanize environmental activists by designating a fifth national monument near the Grand Canyon on Tuesday, Mr. Biden traded talk of conservation for remarks focused on “renewable manufacturing” that can provide “high-paying jobs and dignity to the people who have long been waiting for that.”Mr. Biden talking to Ed Keable, the superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, on Tuesday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe president pointed to the company hosting him, Arcosa Wind Towers Inc., which received $1.1 billion of new orders for wind tower equipment after the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the White House.The message most likely resonated with people in New Mexico, where many rural communities are still focused more on job growth rooted in energy production than the fight against climate change, according to Brian Sanderoff, the president of New Mexico-based Research & Polling Inc. But it has not broken through to the nation at large, according to recent surveys.Mr. Biden remains broadly unpopular among a voting public that is pessimistic about the country’s future, and his approval rating is just 39 percent, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll. That survey found him in a neck-and-neck tie with former President Donald J. Trump.The poll did find that more Americans think the economy is in excellent or good shape: 20 percent, compared with 10 percent a year ago.On Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, defended the administration’s messaging strategy, saying on CNN that “polls don’t tell the entire story.” She then indicated that the public would see more trips like Mr. Biden’s current swing through the Southwest.The president will be “talking directly to the American people about how wages are actually going up, about how inflation is going down over a long, extended period of time,” Ms. Jean-Pierre said.In the weeks ahead, however, Mr. Biden must convince Americans that they will feel the impact of provisions of his infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductor packages — even if much of the funding may not be spent for years to come.“People live through day-to-day challenges of the economy,” Mr. Sanderoff said. “You can tout big legislation, comprehensive legislation that you passed through Congress, but people are busy getting their kids through school and dealing with the cost of bread.”Matt Bennett, the executive vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a center-left think tank, said the way Mr. Trump’s criminal indictments have dominated Americans’ attention lately makes it even more important for Mr. Biden to travel to small markets and speak directly to the American people.“People have to begin to feel it in their life or understand what the president has done,” Mr. Bennett said. “That takes time.”During his visit to the wind tower facility on Wednesday, Mr. Biden appeared to agree.“I’m not here to declare victory on the economy,” he said. “We have a lot more work to do.” More

More from our inbox:DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump LostScenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Mushroom CloudsMacho C.E.O.s Erik Isakson/DigitalVision, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “We Have a Way for Congress to Rein In Big Tech,” by Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren (Opinion guest essay, July 27):The most heartening thing about the proposal for a Digital Consumer Protection Commission is its authorship.After years of zero-sum legislative gridlock, to see Senators Warren and Graham collaborating is a ray of hope that governing may someday return to the time when opposing parties were not enemies, when each party brought valid perspectives to the table and House-Senate conference committees forged legislation encompassing the best of both perspectives.David SadkinBradenton, Fla.To the Editor:Senators Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren propose a new federal mega-regulator for the digital economy that threatens to undermine America’s global technology standing.A new “licensing and policing” authority would stall the continued growth of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence in America, leaving China and others to claw back crucial geopolitical strategic ground.America’s digital technology sector enjoyed remarkable success over the past quarter-century — and provided vast investment and job growth — because the U.S. rejected the heavy-handed regulatory model of the analog era, which stifled innovation and competition.The tech companies that Senators Graham and Warren cite (along with countless others) came about over the past quarter-century because we opened markets and rejected the monopoly-preserving regulatory regimes that had been captured by old players.The U.S. has plenty of federal bureaucracies, and many already oversee the issues that the senators want addressed. Their new technocratic digital regulator would do nothing but hobble America as we prepare for the next great global technological revolution.Adam ThiererWashingtonThe writer is a senior fellow in technology policy at the free-market R Street Institute.To the Editor:The regulation of social media, rapidly emerging A.I. and the internet in general is long overdue. Like the telephone more than a century earlier, as any new technology evolves from novelty to convenience to ubiquitous necessity used by billions of people, so must its regulation for the common good.Jay P. MaillePleasanton, Calif.DeSantis Admits the Inconvenient Truth: Trump Lost Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s Defeat: ‘Of Course He Lost’” (news article, Aug. 8):It is sad to see a politician turn toward the hard truth only in desperation, but that is what the failing and flailing Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has done.Mr. DeSantis is not stupid. He has known all along that Joe Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election, but until now, he hedged when asked about it, hoping not to alienate supporters of Donald Trump.Now Mr. DeSantis says: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden is the president.”In today’s Republican Party, telling the inconvenient truth will diminish a candidate’s support from the die-hard individuals who make up the party’s base.We have reached a sad point in the history of our country when we have come to feel that a politician who tells the truth is doing something extraordinary and laudable.Oren SpieglerPeters Township, Pa.Scenarios for a Trump Trial and the Election Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Layered Case in Indictment Reduces Risk” (news analysis, front page, Aug. 6):It may well be that the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, has fashioned an indictment ideally suited for achieving a conviction of Donald Trump. However, even in the event that the trial comes before the election, there is little reason to believe that it will relieve us of the scourge of Mr. Trump’s influence on American life.First, there is the possibility of a hung jury, even in Washington, D.C. Such an outcome would be treated by Trump supporters as an outright exoneration.A conviction would not undermine his support any more than his myriad previous shocking transgressions. While the inevitable appeals would last well past the election, his martyrdom might improve his electoral chances.And were he to lose the election, he would surely claim that he lost only because of these indictments. Here he would have a powerful argument because so many of us hope that the indictments will have precisely that effect.The alternative, that he wins the election, either before or after the trial, is too dreadful to contemplate.If there is anything that can terminate the plague of Trumpism, it is for a few prominent Republicans whose seniority makes their voices important — Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush — to speak out and unequivocally state that Donald Trump is unfit for office. That they all believe this is generally acknowledged.If they fail to defend American democracy at this time, they will be complicit in what Trumpism does to the Republican Party and to the Republic.Robert N. CahnWalnut Creek, Calif.‘Thank You, Mr. Trump’Former President Donald Trump has made his 2024 race principally about his own personal grievances — attempting to convince supporters to see themselves in him.David Degner for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Playing Indicted Martyr, Trump Draws In His Base” (news article, Aug. 9):Thank you, Mr. Trump, for sacrificing yourself for the greater good. And when you spend years and years and years in prison, we will never forget what you did to (oops, I mean for) us.Winnie BoalCincinnatiMushroom Clouds U.S. Department of DefenseTo the Editor:Re “A Symbol Evoking Both Pride and Fear,” by Nicolas Rapold (Critic’s Notebook, Arts, Aug. 1):Richland High School in Washington State is in an area, highly restricted during World War II, where plutonium essential to building the first atomic bombs was produced. As in areas of New Mexico, there have been numerous “downwind” cancer cases, as well as leakage of contaminated water into the Columbia River basin.Bizarrely, Richland High’s athletic teams are called the Bombers; a mushroom cloud is their symbol on uniforms and the gym floor. This must be the worst “mascot” on earth.Nancy AndersonSeattleMacho C.E.O.s Illustration by Taylor CalleryTo the Editor:Re “We’re in the Era of the ‘Top Gun’ C.E.O.” (Sunday Business, July 30):The propensity of the current class of business leaders to grab at team-building gimmicks knows no bounds. Simulating the role of fighter pilots at $100,000 a pop might give a C.E.O. a fleeting feeling of exhilaration, but it is a poor substitute for actual team-building.That happens when organizations and compensation levels are flattened to more down-to-earth levels. With some C.E.O.s pulling in pay rewards that are hundreds, if not thousands, of times more than their median employee, team-affirming commitment in the boardroom is far from genuine.Employees are not fooled by C.E.O.s trying to play Top Gun for a day, and making more in that short time than most employees will earn in a year.J. Richard FinlayTorontoThe writer is the founder of the Finlay Center for Corporate and Public Governance. More

The US special counsel who is investigating Donald Trump obtained a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, and the social media platform delayed complying, a court filing on Wednesday showed.The delay in compliance prompted a federal judge to hold Twitter in contempt and fine it $350,000, the filing showed.The filing says the team of US special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January directing Twitter, which recently rebranded to X, to produce “data and records” related to Trump’s Twitter account as well as a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting Twitter from disclosing the search warrant.The filing says prosecutors got the search warrant after a court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses”. The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump would “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior”, according to the filing.It’s unclear what information Smith may have sought from Trump’s Twitter account. Possibilities include data about when and where the posts were written, their engagement and the identities of other accounts that reposted Trump’s content.Twitter objected to the non-disclosure agreement, saying four days after the compliance deadline that it would not produce any of the account information, according to the ruling. The judges wrote that Twitter “did not question the validity of the search warrant” but argued that the non-disclosure agreement was a violation of the first amendment and wanted the court to assess the legality of the agreement before it handed any information over.The warrant ordered Twitter to provide the records by 27 January. A judge found Twitter to be in contempt after a court hearing on 7 February, but gave the company an opportunity to hand over the documents by 5pm that evening. Twitter, however, only turned over some records that day. It didn’t fully comply with the order until 9 February, the ruling says. The delay in compliance prompted the court to Twitter in contempt, and on Wednesday, the federal court in Washington upheld that decision.Smith has charged Trump over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in an attempt to stay in power in a criminal indictment unsealed last week.Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.Trump says he is innocent and has portrayed the investigation as politically motivated. His legal team has indicated it will argue that Trump was relying on the advice of lawyers around him in 2020 and had the right to challenge an election he believed was rigged.Trump had been a prolific user of Twitter, both before and during his presidency. Amassing more than 88 million followers, he used the platform to attack opponents, promote racist ideology, encourage violence against journalists, and even threaten nuclear war.Trump was banned from the platform following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol for inciting violence.Trump’s account was reinstated in November 2022, following Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform. The decision was condemned by online safety and civil rights advocates who say Trump’s online presence has created risks of real-world violence.Trump has yet to tweet after being allowed back on to Twitter, preferring his own platform, Truth Social. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the former president posted to Truth Social on Wednesday that the Justice Department “secretly attacked” his Twitter account, and he characterized the investigation as an attempt to “infringe” on his bid to reclaim the White House in 2024.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

New studies on social media’s influence tell a complicated story.It was the social-science equivalent of Barbenheimer weekend: four blockbuster academic papers, published in two of the world’s leading journals on the same day. Written by elite researchers from universities across the United States, the papers in Nature and Science each examined different aspects of one of the most compelling public-policy issues of our time: how social media is shaping our knowledge, beliefs and behaviors.Relying on data collected from hundreds of millions of Facebook users over several months, the researchers found that, unsurprisingly, the platform and its algorithms wielded considerable influence over what information people saw, how much time they spent scrolling and tapping online, and their knowledge about news events. Facebook also tended to show users information from sources they already agreed with, creating political “filter bubbles” that reinforced people’s worldviews, and was a vector for misinformation, primarily for politically conservative users.But the biggest news came from what the studies didn’t find: despite Facebook’s influence on the spread of information, there was no evidence that the platform had a significant effect on people’s underlying beliefs, or on levels of political polarization.These are just the latest findings to suggest that the relationship between the information we consume and the beliefs we hold is far more complex than is commonly understood. ‘Filter bubbles’ and democracySometimes the dangerous effects of social media are clear. In 2018, when I went to Sri Lanka to report on anti-Muslim pogroms, I found that Facebook’s newsfeed had been a vector for the rumors that formed a pretext for vigilante violence, and that WhatsApp groups had become platforms for organizing and carrying out the actual attacks. In Brazil last January, supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro used social media to spread false claims that fraud had cost him the election, and then turned to WhatsApp and Telegram groups to plan a mob attack on federal buildings in the capital, Brasília. It was a similar playbook to that used in the United States on Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol.But aside from discrete events like these, there have also been concerns that social media, and particularly the algorithms used to suggest content to users, might be contributing to the more general spread of misinformation and polarization.The theory, roughly, goes something like this: unlike in the past, when most people got their information from the same few mainstream sources, social media now makes it possible for people to filter news around their own interests and biases. As a result, they mostly share and see stories from people on their own side of the political spectrum. That “filter bubble” of information supposedly exposes users to increasingly skewed versions of reality, undermining consensus and reducing their understanding of people on the opposing side. The theory gained mainstream attention after Trump was elected in 2016. “The ‘Filter Bubble’ Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming,” announced a New York Magazine article a few days after the election. “Your Echo Chamber is Destroying Democracy,” Wired Magazine claimed a few weeks later.Changing information doesn’t change mindsBut without rigorous testing, it’s been hard to figure out whether the filter bubble effect was real. The four new studies are the first in a series of 16 peer-reviewed papers that arose from a collaboration between Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, and a group of researchers from universities including Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and others.Meta gave unprecedented access to the researchers during the three-month period before the 2020 U.S. election, allowing them to analyze data from more than 200 million users and also conduct randomized controlled experiments on large groups of users who agreed to participate. It’s worth noting that the social media giant spent $20 million on work from NORC at the University of Chicago (previously the National Opinion Research Center), a nonpartisan research organization that helped collect some of the data. And while Meta did not pay the researchers itself, some of its employees worked with the academics, and a few of the authors had received funding from the company in the past. But the researchers took steps to protect the independence of their work, including pre-registering their research questions in advance, and Meta was only able to veto requests that would violate users’ privacy.The studies, taken together, suggest that there is evidence for the first part of the “filter bubble” theory: Facebook users did tend to see posts from like-minded sources, and there were high degrees of “ideological segregation” with little overlap between what liberal and conservative users saw, clicked and shared. Most misinformation was concentrated in a conservative corner of the social network, making right-wing users far more likely to encounter political lies on the platform.“I think it’s a matter of supply and demand,” said Sandra González-Bailón, the lead author on the paper that studied misinformation. Facebook users skew conservative, making the potential market for partisan misinformation larger on the right. And online curation, amplified by algorithms that prioritize the most emotive content, could reinforce those market effects, she added.When it came to the second part of the theory — that this filtered content would shape people’s beliefs and worldviews, often in harmful ways — the papers found little support. One experiment deliberately reduced content from like-minded sources, so that users saw more varied information, but found no effect on polarization or political attitudes. Removing the algorithm’s influence on people’s feeds, so that they just saw content in chronological order, “did not significantly alter levels of issue polarization, affective polarization, political knowledge, or other key attitudes,” the researchers found. Nor did removing content shared by other users.Algorithms have been in lawmakers’ cross hairs for years, but many of the arguments for regulating them have presumed that they have real-world influence. This research complicates that narrative.But it also has implications that are far broader than social media itself, reaching some of the core assumptions around how we form our beliefs and political views. Brendan Nyhan, who researches political misperceptions and was a lead author of one of the studies, said the results were striking because they suggested an even looser link between information and beliefs than had been shown in previous research. “From the area that I do my research in, the finding that has emerged as the field has developed is that factual information often changes people’s factual views, but those changes don’t always translate into different attitudes,” he said. But the new studies suggested an even weaker relationship. “We’re seeing null effects on both factual views and attitudes.”As a journalist, I confess a certain personal investment in the idea that presenting people with information will affect their beliefs and decisions. But if that is not true, then the potential effects would reach beyond my own profession. If new information does not change beliefs or political support, for instance, then that will affect not just voters’ view of the world, but their ability to hold democratic leaders to account.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

The campaign of the Florida governor, who is known to be reliant on rich donors, worked with a Republican fund-raising powerhouse to prevent the disclosure of information on small contributors.When WinRed, the company that processes nearly all online Republican campaign contributions, recently released its enormous trove of donor data for the first half of the year, donations were conspicuously absent for one presidential candidate: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.It was no technical glitch. The DeSantis campaign worked with WinRed in a way that prevented the disclosure of donor information, ensuring that the campaign’s small donors would remain anonymous, according to a person familiar with the campaign.The arrangement appears to be the first of its kind for a presidential campaign since WinRed’s founding four years ago and could presage a return to an era in which far less information on small donors is made public, at least for Republicans.Representatives for Mr. DeSantis declined to describe details of the arrangement. The person familiar with the campaign said the aim was to prevent other campaigns from poaching Mr. DeSantis’s donors.But the move has other effects, including obscuring exactly how many — or how few — online donations Mr. DeSantis has received.His dependency on larger contributors has been a source of concern for his campaign, after his first financial report last month revealed that less than 15 percent of his $20 million haul had come from donors who gave less than $200. News emerged on Tuesday that Mr. DeSantis had replaced his campaign manager as part of a broad shake-up.Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant based in Texas, said he was not convinced of the value of concealing small donors — “Generally, small donors don’t care about disclosure,” he said — but he also did not see much of a threat to transparency in the campaign’s arrangement.“To me, the single most important aspect of the transparent philosophical debate is: Is somebody buying influence?” Mr. Mackowiak said. “You’re not going to buy anyone with a $200 or less donation.”Until recent years, he noted, small donations were never broken out in federal campaign finance disclosures. In a sense — and to the all but certain dismay of those who push for transparency — the move by the DeSantis campaign suggests a return to a previous era when those contributions remained anonymous.WinRed was set up in 2019 as a conservative answer to ActBlue, a nonprofit group that since 2004 has served as the central platform to process online donations for Democratic candidates and causes. ActBlue has been widely credited with establishing Democratic dominance in small-dollar fund-raising, and Republicans had long been eager for their own version.Unlike ActBlue, the heart of WinRed is a for-profit company. But its political action committee, like ActBlue’s, has served as a conduit for contributions to campaigns. Donors would give to the campaign through a webpage run by WinRed, which then distributed the money to it.In the 2020 election cycle, WinRed received and forwarded over $2.2 billion in online contributions; ActBlue was a conduit for more than $4.2 billion.While political campaigns are not required to itemize contributions under $200, the PACs for WinRed and ActBlue have to provide information on every donor. Their filings offered the public the only details about campaigns’ small-dollar contributions.WinRed has fought the requirement that it disclose every donor. It is currently in litigation with the Federal Election Commission and seeks to raise the threshold to $200, arguing that the requirement is burdensome and is not in keeping with the drastic growth of small-dollar donations.A spokesman for WinRed did not respond to requests for comment.WinRed recently started offering “merchant” accounts, in which the company acts not as a conduit, but as a typical payment processor. Mr. DeSantis’s campaign chose this option, the person familiar with the campaign said, cutting WinRed’s PAC and its disclosure requirements out of the picture.It appears to be the first time a presidential campaign has opted for this arrangement. The former chief executive of WinRed, Carl Sceusa, is currently the chief financial and chief technology officer of the DeSantis campaign.The difference in disclosure is vast.WinRed’s filing last week showed that Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising committee processed 1,328,930 donations in the first six months of the year. It showed nothing about Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign reported only 15,462 donations above $200 on his campaign’s Federal Election Commission filing. There was no information about the donors who gave less than $200. His campaign has said he has topped the 40,000 donors needed to make the first debate stage, but only a fraction of them are now disclosed.“Using the payment processor model allows them to not have to itemize those donors,” said Adav Noti, senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign ethics group. “That’s a business question, not a legal question.”The vendor arrangement raises some legal questions, Mr. Noti said: First, whether WinRed’s merchant arm is, itself, a de facto political group, which would have to register as a political action committee.“F.E.C. rules are pretty clear that payment processors can’t be partisan,” Mr. Noti said.The strategy may be most notable for what it could suggest to competitors about Mr. DeSantis’s campaign.“To the extent that unitemized contributions could tell you something about a candidate that might be valuable, it’s that they are regional, in one place,” Mr. Mackowiak, the strategist, said. “The only thing I can think of is that their small donor base may be primarily Florida-based, and they didn’t want to appear like a regional candidate.” More

A previously unseen internal memo from the 2020 Trump campaign describes in detail the plot by Donald Trump and his lawyers to subvert election results in six states, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.The memo describes a three-pronged plan to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory on 6 January 2020, that involved coordinating with Republican electors and campaign attorneys in six states, as well as Mike Pence.It also emphasized the importance of the participation by “all six states” and “messaging about this being a routine measure” as well as “logistics” regarding what is now known as the fake electors scheme.The letter was written by Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney associated with Trump who is believed to be one of six unnamed co-conspirators in the indictment against Trump over his attempt to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Much of Chesebro’s actions have been revealed through previous memos and through the January 6 investigation last year, but this memo brings further details to light about the fake electors scheme that he concocted.It was addressed to a Wisconsin lawyer, James R Troupis, the lead attorney for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, who oversaw the fake electors scheme in his state. Troupis filed a lawsuit in December 2020 asking the Wisconsin supreme court to throw out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, saying they violated voting requirements. The court ultimately rejected the lawsuit.Chesebro wrote to Troupis that “it seems feasible” the Trump campaign could subvert Biden’s victory. His plan would “force the Members of Congress, the media, and the American people to focus on the substantive evidence of illegal election and counting activities in the six contested States, provided three things happen”.He then lays out those three steps, describing a plan in detail.According to Chesebro’s plan, Republican electors in all six states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – would meet and cast votes for Trump on 14 December 2020, the deadline for electors to send their votes to Congress for certification in January.Attorneys in each of the six states would simultaneously file lawsuits that would lead to either a Trump victory or a Biden loss – which would be pending on 6 January, the certification date.Finally, on the day Congress meets to certify the electors’ votes, “Pence, presiding over the joint session, takes the position that it is his constitutional power and duty, alone, as president of the Senate, to both open and count the votes, and that anything in the Electoral Count Act to the contrary is unconstitutional,” according to language from the memo.Pence, who is running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has lashed out against his former ticket-mate and his “gaggle of crackpot lawyers” for plotting to overturn the election.According to the indictment, Trump repeatedly “pressured” Pence to participate in the plan, to which the vice-president replied: “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome”.The indictment identified six co-conspirators, including one who is widely believed to be Chesebro. Co-Conspirator 5, thought to be Chesebro, “assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding”.The indictment also described the previously unseen 6 December 2020 memo as a “sharp departure” from an earlier and previously reported memo that Chesebro sent to Troupis outlining a plan to use “alternate” electors to send votes for Trump to Congress for certification amid a recount – even though Biden won the state.“I recognize that what I suggest is a bold, controversial strategy, and that there are many reasons why it might not end up being executed on January 6,” Chesebro wrote in the 6 December 2020 memo. “But as long as it is one possible option, to preserve it as a possibility it is important that the Trump-Pence electors cast their electoral votes on December 14.”Trump pleaded not guilty on all counts in the 6 January case, which charged him with three counts of conspiracy and one count of obstruction of an official proceeding – certifying the electoral vote. More