Elections

The new voting system was used in the mayor’s race in 2021. It is back this month for the primary races for the City Council.The last time New Yorkers went to the polls, they had to contemplate a governor’s race and a slew of congressional races in the critical 2022 midterm elections.But there was one variable that they did not have to deal with: ranked-choice voting, which had been used the previous year in the mayoral election.For the City Council races on the ballot this year, ranked-choice voting returns for the June 27 primaries, with early voting beginning Saturday, June 17.Here’s what you need to know about the voting system:Ranked-choice voting was used in the 2021 primaries in New York City.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesHow does ranked-choice voting work?The voting system, overwhelmingly approved by the city’s voters in 2019, is used in primary and special elections for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and the City Council.Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference.If a candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, they win.If no candidate does, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: The lowest-polling candidate is removed from each round, and their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next until only two candidates are left. The candidate with the most votes wins.That might sound complicated. But all you need to know as a voter is this: Rank your favorite candidate first and then pick as many as four other choices, in order of preference.How Does Ranked-Choice Voting Work in New York?New Yorkers first used the new voting system in the mayor’s race in 2021. Confused? We can help.Did the voting system help Eric Adams become mayor?Maybe.Mr. Adams had expressed doubts about ranked-choice voting, but it might have helped him win — even if the process was messy.Initially, early unofficial results showed Mr. Adams with a narrow lead. But then election officials announced they had miscounted the ballots. A new tabulation still found that Mr. Adams had collected the most first-round votes, but he was not declared the winner until weeks later, when voters’ secondary choices were tabulated.Under the old system, Mr. Adams would have faced a runoff because he did not receive at least 40 percent of votes. In a runoff, he would have faced his closest first-round rival in the 2021 Democratic primary: Maya Wiley, a lawyer and MSNBC contributor. Voters would have faced a clear choice between two candidates, and it is not clear who might have won.But after voters’ ranked choices were considered, Ms. Wiley was eliminated, and in the last round, only Mr. Adams and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, remained.Mr. Adams won the primary by a slim margin: only 7,197 votes. The ranked-choice system also aided Ms. Garcia; she was in third place after the initial count of first-place votes, but moved up to second as other candidates were eliminated, and their supporters’ votes were reallocated.Will ranked-choice be a factor in the Council primaries?Every member of the 51-member City Council is running to keep their seat, including candidates who won two years ago under unusual rules that were part of the City Charter.Less than half of races are being contested, and of those, 13 races feature more than two candidates — making ranked-choice voting necessary.The most interesting of those races is in Harlem, where the current council member, Kristin Richardson Jordan, a democratic socialist, recently bowed out of the race.Are there benefits to ranked-choice voting?Proponents say the system enables people to more fully express their preferences and to have a greater chance of not wasting their vote on a less popular candidate. Voters can leave a candidate they really don’t like off their ballot and make sure their vote helps one of their opponents.There is also evidence that ranked-choice voting encourages more candidates to run, especially women and people of color, and that it discourages negative campaigning, since candidates are no longer competing for a person’s only vote.Candidates sometimes cross endorse each other to boost like-minded allies. Some political experts believe that if Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley had cross-endorsed each other in the primary, one of them would have become New York City’s first female mayor.Ranked-choice voting is used in Maine and Alaska, and in dozens of cities including San Francisco and Minneapolis. Opponents believe that it confuses many voters, and may discourage some to vote.Will cross-endorsements be a factor this year?Yes.Just days before early voting started, two Democratic candidates in the competitive City Council race in Harlem endorsed each other: Yusef Salaam, an activist who was wrongly imprisoned in the Central Park rape case, and Al Taylor, a state assemblyman.The move appeared aimed at stopping Inez E. Dickens, a Democratic state assemblywoman who formerly held the Council seat. More

Mr. Suarez, who is entering the Republican presidential race, is a cryptocurrency enthusiast who holds a largely ceremonial job as mayor of Miami.Francis X. Suarez, the two-term mayor of Miami who formally announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race on Thursday, is presenting himself as a fresh face for the Republican Party: a 45-year-old in a field led by a septuagenarian, and a Cuban American in a party whose elected officials are overwhelmingly white.In a speech at the Reagan Library in California on Thursday evening, brimming with callbacks to decades-old Republican catchphrases like George H.W. Bush’s “thousand points of light,” Mr. Suarez declared his candidacy with a reference to one more — and to his own catchphrase from a Twitter post he made in 2021 in response to a venture capitalist who suggested moving Silicon Valley to Miami.“I believe America is still a shining city on a hill whose eyes of the world are upon us and whose promise needs to be restored,” he said, a day after filing paperwork for his run. “And I believe the city needs more than a shouter or a fighter. I believe it needs a servant. It needs a mayor. My name is Francis Suarez, and I am here to help.”Here are five things to know about Mr. Suarez.His current job is largely ceremonial.Mr. Suarez was elected as mayor in 2017 with 86 percent of the vote and re-elected in 2021 with 79 percent of the vote — striking margins made possible by the fact that he faced only token opposition. (Miami’s mayoral elections are officially nonpartisan.)He will be running largely on his mayoral experience, since the only other elected office he has held was on the City Commission, not a job known for kick-starting presidential campaigns. But the Miami mayoralty is part time and largely ceremonial.Mr. Suarez’s main powers are vetoing legislation and hiring and firing the city manager. He does not have a vote on the City Commission. Shortly after taking office, he put forward a proposal to give himself more power, including authority over Miami’s budget and work force, but voters soundly rejected it.This distinguishes Mr. Suarez from other sitting or former mayors who have run for president, who already faced long odds. The three who ran prominent campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 2020 — Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., and Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio of New York City — had more authority than Mr. Suarez does.He is enthusiastic about Silicon Valley and cryptocurrency.In 2021, Mr. Suarez drew headlines for announcing that he would take his salary in Bitcoin and for suggesting that Miami pay city workers, accept tax payments and invest public funds in Bitcoin, too.He praised a deal in which the cryptocurrency exchange FTX — founded by the now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried — acquired naming rights to Miami’s N.B.A. arena. (The deal was terminated this year after FTX collapsed.)Mr. Suarez embraced cryptocurrency before the industry’s tumult last year.Marco Bello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe also promoted a branded cryptocurrency called MiamiCoin. Part of the proceeds went into city coffers, and Mr. Suarez suggested it could eventually allow Miami to eliminate taxes. The initial results were promising, but the currency’s value soon plummeted, and the exchange that had hosted it suspended trading of MiamiCoin this year.Mr. Suarez continued to support cryptocurrency even as the industry crashed last year. “I call them tsunamis of opportunity,” he told The Washington Post. “And we have two options. We can take out a surfboard and surf the wave like a tsunami. Or we can hide and try to run from it and pretend it’s not there and potentially get washed away.”He has been accused of influence peddling.Mr. Suarez has come under fire over reports that he was paid tens of thousands of dollars by a company looking for help advancing a luxury condominium project.The Miami Herald reported last month that a developer, Location Ventures, had paid Mr. Suarez — who is a real estate lawyer — at least $170,000 to consult for it and “to help cut through red tape and secure critical permits.” This month, The Herald reported that the F.B.I. was investigating “whether the payments constitute bribes in exchange for securing permits or other favors from the mayor” for a project in the Coconut Grove neighborhood.Mr. Suarez has denied wrongdoing and dismissed The Herald’s reporting as a product of political bias. In an interview on Fox News a few days before he announced his campaign, he suggested that his moves toward a presidential run had motivated journalists to attack him after “an unblemished 13 years in public service.”He has sometimes bucked the Republican line.Mr. Suarez did not vote for Donald J. Trump’s re-election as president in 2020. Nor did he vote for Ron DeSantis for Florida governor in 2018; he voted for Mr. DeSantis’s Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, and said he supported Mr. Gillum’s calls for a higher minimum wage because a “basic standard of living” was “a fundamental human right.”Mr. Suarez voted for Andrew Gillum, a Democrat, in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.Steve Cannon/Associated PressIn early 2021, he criticized Mr. DeSantis for forbidding local leaders to enforce mask mandates as Covid-19 cases surged, telling CBS News that he had tried unsuccessfully to reach Mr. DeSantis and persuade him to let officials “institute things that we think are common-sense, that we think are backed up by science, that we can demonstrate are backed up by science.”And two years earlier, he co-wrote a New York Times opinion essay with Ban Ki-moon, the former secretary general of the United Nations, emphasizing the damage climate change was already doing in Miami. “There isn’t a single aspect of our daily lives that isn’t affected by climate change,” he and Mr. Ban wrote.He opposed Trump in 2020, but defends him now.When other Republicans have changed their minds about Mr. Trump, it has generally been to oppose him after previously supporting him, à la Chris Christie. Mr. Suarez has gone in the opposite direction: Though he did not vote for Mr. Trump in 2020, he has said he will in 2024 if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee.He told Fox News this month that he was motivated by “a fear of Joe Biden’s America.”“It’s an America where the poor get poorer, it’s an America where America gets weaker, and it’s an America where the possibility of China being the lone superpower is something that frightens me to no end,” he said.“What has changed and what has happened is we’ve gotten a taste of what a dysfunctional government can do to destroy our country in a short period of time,” Mr. Suarez added, “and if you take that out into the future, it is incredibly scary.”When Mr. Trump was indicted in New York this year, Mr. Suarez told The Miami Herald that he saw the Manhattan district attorney’s decision to pursue the case as “a slippery slope.” After Mr. Trump’s second indictment this month, he went further, saying in the Fox News interview that it “feels un-American.”Patricia Mazzei More

I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes. Over the decades, I’ve built up certain expectations about how the world works and how people behave. I rely on those expectations as I do my job, analyzing events and anticipating what will happen next.And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.I’ve been thinking about all this while bracing for the 17 months of campaigning that apparently lie ahead, with Trump probably once again the central focus of the nation’s consciousness. I’m thinking about how we will once again be forced to defend our inner sanctums as he seeks, on a minute-by-minute basis, to take up residence in our brains.I cling to a worldview that is easy to ridicule. I hold the belief that most people, while flawed, seek to be good. I hold the belief that our institutions, while fraying, are basically legitimate and deserve our respect. I hold the belief that character matters, and that good people ultimately prosper and unethical people are ultimately undone.I don’t think this worldview is born of childish innocence. It comes out of my direct experience with life, and after thousands of interviews, covering real-life politicians like Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney.Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary. Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. Under cultural tyranny internal values become arbitrary too — based on his whims and lusts of the moment.The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.Trump has already corroded the Republican Party in just this way. Let me focus on one value that Trump has already dissolved: the idea that there should be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least have a twinge of guilt about your hypocrisy.I used to at least hear Republicans express guilt privately when they publicly supported a guy they held in contempt. That guilt seems to have gone away. Even the contempt has gone away. Many Republicans have switched off the moral faculty, having apparently concluded that personal morality doesn’t matter.Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and faith that the people who have been given authority have a right to govern. They wield power for the common good.Trump assaults this value too. Prosecutors are not serving the rule of law, he insists, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. Civil servants are nothing but “deep state” operatives to take Trump down. This cynical attitude has become pervasive in our society. Proper skepticism toward our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a jaundiced cynicism that says: I’m onto the game; it’s corruption all the way down.Over the coming months, we face not merely a political contest, but a battle between those of us who believe in ideals, even though it can make us seem naïve at times, and those who argue that life is a remorseless struggle for selfish gain. Their victory would be a step toward cultural barbarism.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

New York City’s Conflicts of Interest Board said the former mayor must reimburse the city for police officers’ travel, and pay a record fine.Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, must reimburse the city nearly $320,000 and pay a $155,000 fine for bringing his security detail on trips during his failed presidential campaign, the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board ordered on Thursday.The hefty fine and repayment — both the highest penalty and the largest amount the board said it has ever issued — may be the most lasting impact to date of Mr. de Blasio’s doomed run for president.The former mayor’s campaign lasted just four months in 2019 and damaged his standing with city residents, who griped that their mayor was making an ill-considered play for national relevance at the expense of addressing problems at home.According to the Conflicts of Interest Board, the city spent $319,794.20 in travel-related costs for members of Mr. de Blasio’s security detail to accompany either him or his wife, Chirlane McCray, on 31 out-of-state trips related to the campaign. The expenses included airfare, car rentals, overnight lodging, meals and other incidentals.Shortly before Mr. de Blasio launched his campaign, the board — an independent body with five members appointed by the mayor, comptroller and public advocate — told Mr. de Blasio that the city could pay for salary and overtime for his security detail. But it advised him that paying for the officers’ travel costs would be a “misuse of city resources,” it said.But Mr. de Blasio did not heed the board’s guidance, it said. His failure to do so was one of several issues addressed in a 47-page report by the city’s Department of Investigation, which found that Mr. de Blasio misused public resources for both political and personal purposes, including having a police van and officers help move his daughter to Gracie Mansion.Jocelyn Strauber, the investigations commissioner, said in a statement that the Conflicts of Interest Board’s order backed her department’s report and showed “that public officials — including the most senior — will be held accountable when they violate the rules.”The board, which still has two members appointed by Mr. de Blasio, ordered the former mayor to repay the expenses borne by the city and fined him $5,000 for each out-of-state trip.Mr. de Blasio’s presidential campaign reported having just $1,422.76 on hand in its last filing with the Federal Election Commission, in December 2020. A political action committee associated with Mr. de Blasio, Fairness PAC, last reported having more than $32,000 in debt and less than $3,000 on hand.Mr. de Blasio, who ran New York City from 2014 through 2021, was plagued by ethics questions during his time in office. He was the subject of a number of investigations into whether his fund-raising methods violated the city’s ethics law, a ban against soliciting contributions from people who had business in front of the city.In April, the Federal Election Commission fined his presidential campaign for accepting improper contributions from two political action committees he and others had set up.Since leaving his post, Mr. de Blasio made a short-lived run for an open House seat that ended after two months on the campaign trail. (His House campaign reported having roughly $156,000 in its coffers at the end of March, but it is not clear whether he could use that money to pay expenses associated with his presidential run.)Mr. de Blasio left politics behind and moved into academia, becoming a visiting teaching fellow at Harvard University and teaching a class at New York University.He has recently become more candid about his time in office. In an uncommonly frank interview with New York Magazine published on Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio opened up about criticisms he received as mayor, including an infamous moment when he dropped a groundhog in 2014. He also expressed some regret about seeking the presidency.“It was a mistake,” he said. “I think my values were the right values, and I think I had something to offer, but it was not right on a variety of levels.”Mr. de Blasio did not respond to a message seeking comment. One of his lawyers, Andrew G. Celli Jr., said in a statement that Mr. de Blasio’s legal team had already filed a lawsuit to appeal the ruling and block the board’s order. He accused the board of breaking “decades of N.Y.P.D. policy and precedent” and violating the Constitution.“In the wake of the January 6th insurrection, the shootings of Congress members Giffords and Scalise, and almost daily threats directed at local leaders around the country, the C.O.I.B.’s action — which seeks to saddle elected officials with security costs that the city has properly borne for decades — is dangerous, beyond the scope of their powers, and illegal,” Mr. Celli said. More

Conservatives with close ties to Donald J. Trump are laying out a “paradigm-shifting” legal rationale to erase the Justice Department’s independence from the president.When Donald J. Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” Mr. Trump said at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday night after his arraignment earlier that day in Miami. “I will totally obliterate the Deep State.”Mr. Trump’s message was that the Justice Department charged him only because he is Mr. Biden’s political opponent, so he would invert that supposed politicization. In reality, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, two Trump-appointed prosecutors are already investigating Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents and the financial dealings of his son, Hunter.But by suggesting the current prosecutors investigating the Bidens were not “real,” Mr. Trump appeared to be promising his supporters that he would appoint an ally who would bring charges against his political enemies regardless of the facts.The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been “weaponized” against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.Two of the most important figures in this effort work at the same Washington-based organization, the Center for Renewing America: Jeffrey B. Clark and Russell T. Vought. During the Trump presidency, Mr. Vought served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Clark, who oversaw the Justice Department’s civil and environmental divisions, was the only senior official at the department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.Jeffrey B. Clark was the only senior official in the Justice Department who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAlong with Mr. Clark, Russell T. Vought argues that presidents should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesMr. Trump wanted to make Mr. Clark attorney general during his final days in office but stopped after the senior leadership of the Justice Department threatened to resign en masse. Mr. Clark is now a figure in one of the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s attempts to stay in power.Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency. They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.Mr. Clark, who is a favorite of Mr. Trump’s and is likely to be in contention for a senior Justice Department position if Mr. Trump wins re-election in 2024, wrote a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” that will most likely serve as a blueprint for a second Trump administration.Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.There are debates among conservatives about how far to push that doctrine — and whether some agencies should be allowed to operate independently — but Mr. Clark takes a maximalist view. Mr. Trump does, too, though he’s never been caught reading the Federalist Papers.In statements to The New York Times, both Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought leaned into their battle against the Justice Department, with Mr. Clark framing it as a fight over the survival of America itself.Conservatives have been attacking President Biden and the Justice Department, claiming it has been “weaponized.”Doug Mills/The New York Times“Biden and D.O.J. are baying for Trump’s blood so they can put fear into America,” Mr. Clark wrote in his statement. “The Constitution and our Article IV ‘Republican Form of Government’ cannot survive like this.”Mr. Vought wrote in his statement that the Justice Department was “ground zero for the weaponization of the government against the American people.” He added, “Conservatives are waking up to the fact that federal law enforcement is weaponized against them and as a result are embracing paradigm-shifting policies to reverse that trend.”Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.As the Republican Party has morphed in response to Mr. Trump’s influence, his attacks on federal law enforcement — which trace back to the early Russia investigation in 2017, the backlash to his firing of then-F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. and the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel — have become enmeshed in the ideology of his supporters.Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.Gov. Ron DeSantis has likewise argued that the Justice Department should be an extension of the executive branch.Kate Medley for The New York Times“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”Several other Republican candidates acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents — as outlined in the indictment prepared by the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team — was a serious problem. But even these candidates — including Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Vice President Mike Pence — have also accused the Justice Department of being overly politicized and meting out unequal justice.The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.Senator Tim Scott is among the other Republican presidential candidates who say the Justice Department is politicized.Travis Dove for The New York TimesOn its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency. Mr. Barr had an expansive view of a president’s constitutionally prescribed powers, and shared Mr. Trump’s critical views of the origins of the Russia investigation.Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020. More

The New York Times Audio app includes podcasts, narrated articles from the newsroom and other publishers, as well as exclusive new shows — including this one — which we’re making available to readers for a limited time. Download the audio app here.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Former President Donald J. Trump’s Republican competitors are desperate to get media coverage for their campaigns and are dreading what threatens to be an endless indictment news cycle.Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesOn Today’s Episode:G.O.P. Rivals See Trump’s Indictment as a Big Problem (for Them), with our political reporter Jonathan SwanAt Least 79 Die as Boat Carrying Migrants Sinks Near Greece, with our correspondent Niki KitsantonisSouthern Baptists Vote to Further Expand Restrictions on Women as Leaders, with our national religion correspondent Elizabeth DiasEli Cohen More

Activists say the case against the candidate, Pita Limjaroenrat, is part of a broader effort to nullify election results and further erode democracy in Thailand.Thailand’s Election Commission has announced that it will investigate Pita Limjaroenrat, the front-runner in the May general election, to determine whether he violated election rules that would disqualify him from becoming the country’s next prime minister.The investigation, announced last week, is centered on Mr. Pita’s shares of iTV, a company that used to be a news broadcaster but is now focused on advertising. Mr. Pita, 42, said he inherited the shares from his father. Thai law prohibits parliamentary candidates from owning media shares.Thailand’s Election Commission said it needs 60 days to certify the results of the vote, after which the House of Representatives and the military-appointed Senate are expected to jointly vote for the prime minister in August.But a month after Thai voters delivered a stinging rebuke to the military junta and handed Mr. Pita’s Move Forward Party a decisive victory, his fate as an elected leader remained unclear. Here’s what to know about the investigation.What’s at stake?Activists say the case against Mr. Pita and the Move Forward Party is part of a broader effort to roll back the results of the election and erode democracy in Thailand.The May election had a record turnout and was seen by many to be a vote against military rule. It also showed broad support for Move Forward, one of the few major political parties in Southeast Asia with a progressive platform.Arnon Nampa, a prominent Thai human rights lawyer, wrote on Facebook on Saturday that “people will take to the streets if the Thai elite makes elections meaningless.”Mr. Pita’s party wants to overhaul the old power structures that have dominated Thailand for decades, shrink the military’s budget, eliminate conscription and weaken a law that criminalizes criticism of the Thai monarchy.Move Forward has also said it wants to abolish monopolies, threatening the fortunes of the country’s wealthy aristocrats.What happens next?On June 20, a Senate committee will review the election commission’s order to investigate Mr. Pita, according to Senator Seree Suwanpanont.A former elections commissioner, Somchai Srisutthiyakorn, said the iTV case could go to the Constitutional Court if at least 50 members of Parliament or 25 senators sign a petition against Mr. Pita’s bid for prime minister.Even before this case, Mr. Pita was contending with an obstinate Senate unlikely to support him as prime minister. Mr. Somchai wrote on Facebook that now, the investigation could result in more senators refusing to back him.If Mr. Pita’s bid for prime minister fails, Pheu Thai, the second-largest party in Mr. Pita’s coalition, could field a candidate on its own as an alternative. Many expect Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the youngest daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister now living in exile, to be in the running.Pheu Thai could also break away from Move Forward to form a new coalition that is more aligned with conservative parties. Pheu Thai has denied such plans.Has this happened before?Mr. Pita’s case echoes one filed against his predecessor, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, in 2019. That year, the Constitutional Court disqualified Mr. Thanathorn from elected office because he was found to have held shares in a media company. He argued unsuccessfully that he had sold the shares to his mother before running for Parliament.Mr. Thanathorn was the leader of the Future Forward Party, which was disbanded in 2020 by the Constitutional Court and is the predecessor of the Move Forward Party.Last week, the Election Commission dismissed several complaints from critics of Mr. Pita seeking to disqualify his candidacy, but the commission decided to launch its own criminal probe to find out if Mr. Pita ran for Parliament knowing he was ineligible because of his iTV shares.If he is found guilty, Mr. Pita could face up to 10 years in prison and a 20-year ban on voting.On Tuesday, Mr. Pita told reporters that he was confident about his legal standing, saying the investigation “will not be an obstacle to me becoming Thailand’s 30th prime minister.”On Thursday, iTV said that the minutes of the meeting did not intend to imply that it was still operating as a media company.What are the details of the complaint?Politicians from the Move Forward Party have said the case is a blatant attempt to prevent them from forming a new government and taking back power from the conservative establishment and military-appointed Senate.Earlier this month, Mr. Pita posted on Facebook that iTV had not operated as a media company since March 2007.Thailand has been roiled by a leaked audio recording released last weekend of an April 26 iTV shareholders’ meeting. In the recording, the president of the company tells a shareholder that iTV is no longer in the media business.But the recording contradicts the minutes of the same meeting, in which the president calls iTV a media entity. Those minutes have been submitted in the complaint against Mr. Pita.In his Facebook post, Mr. Pita said that the shareholder raised the question a few days before he applied to run for prime minister and suggested that the inquiry was politically motivated.Muktita Suhartono More

Los republicanos han comparado cada vez más los casos judiciales del expresidente con la corrupción y la opresión política en la región.Después de su comparecencia del martes, el expresidente Donald Trump visitó la Pequeña Habana, en Miami, en su más reciente intento de presentarse como un hombre perseguido por sus adversarios políticos.Fue un intento nada sutil de buscar la solidaridad de los latinos de Florida y de otros lugares.La visita de Trump al restaurante Versailles, un punto de referencia emblemático de la diáspora cubana, coincidió con la comparación, cada vez más frecuente, que hacen los republicanos de su caso con la corrupción y la opresión política en los países latinoamericanos.Afuera del juzgado federal de Miami donde se hizo la comparecencia, Alina Habba, abogada y vocera de Trump insinuó que él no era diferente de los disidentes políticos de Latinoamérica.“La persecución y enjuiciamiento de un opositor político importante es el tipo de cosas que se ven en dictaduras como Cuba y Venezuela. En esos sitios, es un lugar común que los candidatos rivales sean juzgados, perseguidos y encarcelados”, señaló.El día previo a su comparecencia, Trump afirmó que los latinos del sur de Florida se solidarizaban con él porque están familiarizados con los gobiernos que persiguen a sus adversarios.“En verdad pueden verlo mejor de lo que lo ven las demás personas”, dijo en una entrevista con Americano Media, un medio conservador en idioma español del sur de Florida.Trump ha contado con un apoyo relativamente fuerte entre las comunidades latinas, sobre todo en el sur de Florida. Eduardo A. Gamarra, profesor de Política y Relaciones Internacionales en la Universidad Internacional de Florida que también forma parte del Instituto de Estudios Cubanos, comentó que la narrativa urdida por Trump y sus partidarios, aunque falsa, era astuta.“Se ve reforzada por los medios locales, por mucho de lo que la campaña de Trump y otros republicanos están diciendo: que este gobierno, el de Biden, se está comportando como se comportan las repúblicas bananeras, así que eso ha resonado con mucha intensidad aquí. A nivel político, es buena, pero no es veraz”, afirmó el académico.Gamarra, quien nació en Bolivia, destacó que Trump también había intentado obtener el apoyo de los electores latinos al arremeter contra el socialismo y el comunismo. Lamentó la manera en que Trump y sus aliados habían mencionado a Latinoamérica en muchas ocasiones.“Es una narrativa muy poco afortunada. Creo que solo difunde los estereotipos existentes sobre Latinoamérica. Es mucho más complejo que solo la imagen de la república bananera”, dijo.La breve aparición de Trump en el restaurante fue la más reciente de él y de una larga lista de políticos que incluye a los expresidentes Bill Clinton y George W. Bush. En 2016, el restaurante recibió a Trump y a Rudy Giuliani juntos después del primer debate del exmandatario contra Hillary Clinton.Paloma Marcos, quien ha sido ciudadana estadounidense desde hace 15 años y es oriunda de Nicaragua, llegó al Versalles con una gorra de Trump y un letrero que decía “Estoy con Trump”.Comentó que muchos nicaragüenses como ella tenían afinidad por el expresidente, porque está contra el comunismo. También agregó que la gente como ella, así como los cubanos y venezolanos, habían visto que esa forma de gobierno destrozaba a sus países de origen.“Sabe él que siempre lo hemos apoyado acá. Los latinos estamos bien concientizados”, dijo Marcos. “Hemos podido quitarnos el velo, digamos, un despertar”.La reverenda Yoelis Sánchez, pastora en una iglesia local y oriunda de la República Dominicana, dijo que cuando le pidieron que fuera al restaurante Versalles a orar con Trump no dudó en acudir. Varias personas religiosas, entre evangélicas y católicas, oraban con él mientras su hija cantaba.Comentó que había orado “para que Dios le dé fortaleza y le ayude”, comentó. “Y que toda la verdad salga a la luz”. Y añadió que estaban “preocupados por el bienestar de él”.Sánchez, que vive en Doral, una ciudad que forma parte del condado de Miami-Dade y donde Trump tiene un club de golf, no era ciudadana en 2020. No quiso decir si planea votar por él en 2024.“No creo que haya venido porque le interese el voto latino solamente”, dijo. “Sino el voto de todas las personas que estamos de acuerdo en mantener los valores bíblicos”. Y añadió que como él, “los latinos de por sí nos identificamos con lo que es la familia, la vida”.Trump enfrenta acusaciones penales relacionadas con el mal manejo de documentos clasificados y la posterior obstrucción de los intentos de recuperarlos por parte del gobierno. En Estados Unidos no tiene precedentes el enjuiciamiento federal a un expresidente, pero muchos presidentes latinoamericanos han sido juzgados tras dejar el poder.El actual presidente de Brasil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, pasó más de un año en la cárcel después de salir de la presidencia la primera vez. El año pasado, la expresidenta de Argentina, Cristina Fernández, fue sentenciada a seis años por corrupción. En Perú, Alejandro Toledo fue extraditado hace poco para enfrentar una acusación de soborno. El exmandatario, Alberto Fujimori, está cumpliendo una condena de 25 años en prisión.Arnoldo Alemán, de Nicaragua, es uno de los pocos expresidentes que fue arrestado en un caso de corrupción a pesar de que su propio partido estaba en el poder.“Es algo que se ve mucho en Latinoamérica, sobre todo en Perú y ahora en El Salvador”, comentó Mario García, un cliente habitual del Versailles a quien le hizo gracia ver a Trump en el restaurante. “Pero en nuestros países, en Latinoamérica, hay justificación porque lo roban todo” los presidentes, explicó García y afirmó que creía que el gobierno estaba persiguiendo a Trump porque no tiene “otra manera de detenerlo”.García señaló que no pensaba que Trump fuera al Versailles en busca de los votos de los latinos. “Los votos de aquí ya los tiene. Es muy bonito rodearse de cariño cuando a uno todo el mundo lo está atacando”.Maggie Haberman More