Elections

Representative Lee M. Zeldin, a four-term congressman from Long Island, won the Republican primary for governor of New York on Tuesday, fending off a spirited challenge in a four-way race where fealty to conservative values — and Donald J. Trump — proved critical.Mr. Zeldin, 42, will face Gov. Kathy Hochul in November in a contest that Republicans hope will break a two-decade losing streak in statewide races. Ms. Hochul easily won her primary, but has suffered from middling poll numbers in recent months amid voters’ concerns about crime and the economy.Mr. Zeldin was the putative favorite in the primary, having won the backing of state leaders at a convention this winter, held not far from his district.But that imprimatur did not stop three other Republicans from mounting monthslong efforts to gain the nomination via the primary: Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive making his second run for governor; Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani; and Harry Wilson, a corporate turnaround specialist.Each had tried to find a lane to challenge Mr. Zeldin, with Mr. Astorino emphasizing his executive experience, and Mr. Wilson leaning into his economic bona fides. Mr. Giuliani, however, was perhaps the candidate who drew the most attention, a newcomer making his first run for public office, leaning on his father and his experience working for four years in the Trump administration.A Guide to New York’s 2022 Primary ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.Governor’s Race: Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying to fend off energetic challenges from two fellow Democrats, while the four-way G.O.P. contest has been playing in part like a referendum on Donald J. Trump.Where the Candidates Stand: Ahead of the primaries for governor on June 28, our political reporters questioned the seven candidates on crime, taxes, abortion and more.Maloney vs. Nadler: New congressional lines have put the two stalwart Manhattan Democrats — including New York City’s last remaining Jewish congressman — on a collision course in the Aug. 23 primary.15 Democrats, 1 Seat: A newly redrawn House district in New York City may be one of the largest and most freewheeling primaries in the nation.Offensive Remarks: Carl P. Paladino, a Republican running for a House seat in Western New York, recently drew backlash for praising Adolf Hitler in an interview dating back to 2021.Mr. Zeldin had won about 42 percent of the Republican primary vote, with a little more than 40 percent of the expected vote counted. He was followed by Mr. Giuliani with some 24 percent; 19 percent for Mr. Astorino; and about 14 percent for Mr. Wilson. The race was called by The Associated Press about 90 minutes after the polls had closed.Mr. Giuliani had openly courted the right-wing vote, voicing belief in Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election and promising to emulate the former president, and his father, if elected governor. The primary had little definitive polling, but some surveys had shown Mr. Giuliani running a close second, or even surpassing, Mr. Zeldin in the closing weeks of the campaign.For his part, Mr. Zeldin had also hewed closely to Mr. Trump’s policies when he was president, going so far as to vote to to overturn the results of the 2020 election in key swing states. As a candidate for governor, Mr. Zeldin has somewhat moderated those conservative opinions — voicing skepticism about outlawing abortion in New York, for instance, and giving only muted support to the idea of another Trump candidacy — yet still managed to appeal to the die-hard Republican voters who typically vote in primaries.The resulting general election campaign will still be an uphill climb for Mr. Zeldin, considering that registered Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by more than two to one in New York. In order to win in November, Mr. Zeldin will need not only to galvanize his base but also to attract moderate swing voters who may be dissatisfied with Democrats, including President Biden and Ms. Hochul.No Republican has been elected governor in the state since George Pataki defeated Carl McCall, a Democrat, and a billionaire third-party candidate, Tom Golisano, in 2002. The three most recent contests were easily won by Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat who served until his resignation last August.Mr. Zeldin, who is married with twin daughters, has since 2015 represented the eastern part of Long Island, encompassing a mix of suburban districts that could be critical in a general election. In 2021, Democrat-backed changes to bail laws, for instance, were potent issues for Republicans on Long Island, leading to a surge of wins in elections in Nassau County, adjacent to Mr. Zeldin’s district.A precocious legal student — he became a lawyer at 23 — Mr. Zeldin also served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer and prosecutor, as well as being deployed to Iraq with the 82nd Airborne in 2006. He still serves in the Army Reserve.His stump speech has included both a raft of policy plans — including allowing fracking, cutting taxes and fighting crime — and a call to arms for his party.“I’m not in this race to win a primary,” Mr. Zeldin said, in a recent interview. “I’m in this race to win in November.” More

Tina Peters, a county clerk who has been charged with seven felonies related to a scheme to surreptitiously copy sensitive voting data, lost her bid for the Republican nomination for Colorado secretary of state on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.She was defeated by Pam Anderson, a longtime local election official who served as a clerk and recorder for Jefferson County and as president of the statewide county clerks’ association. Late Tuesday, Ms. Peters was also trailing Mike O’Donnell, a former nonprofit executive who has promoted numerous falsehoods about the 2020 presidential contest. Ms. Peters is part of a movement of Trump-inspired Republicans who deny the 2020 election’s legitimacy and are running to be the top election official in their states, including Jim Marchant in Nevada, Audrey Trujillo in New Mexico and Kristina Karamo in Michigan.Ms. Anderson, by contrast, has vocally opposed misinformation about the 2020 election and has a page on her campaign website dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories about voting machines and the role of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, in funding elections.She has, however, pushed to expand auditing processes performed by local election officials in Colorado.In Colorado, a former swing state that has leaned toward Democrats in recent years, Ms. Anderson faces what is likely to be an uphill battle against Jena Griswold, the current secretary of state and a Democrat.Ms. Peters’s arraignment on 10 criminal charges, including seven felonies, is set for early August. She has pleaded not guilty.A former flight attendant who ran a construction company with her ex-husband, Ms. Peters was elected in 2018 as the clerk and recorder in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold amid the red-rocked canyons of western Colorado.After the 2020 presidential election, Ms. Peters grew suspicious of the national results, and attended a local event where a presentation was delivered by a high school teacher from Ohio known for spreading false election conspiracy theories.By May 2021, according to court documents, Ms. Peters was helping orchestrate an operation to copy voting machine data before and after a software update process known as a trusted build, in an attempt to prove that the machines were faulty.After her office ordered security cameras shut off in a secured area holding voting machines, court records say, Ms. Peters helped Conan Hayes, a former professional surfer who had worked with Mr. Trump’s legal team as it challenged the 2020 results, sneak into the trusted build process under a false identity.In early August, passwords to the Mesa County election equipment appeared on a QAnon figure’s Telegram channel and then on a right-wing website, leading to an investigation by the Colorado secretary of state that quickly garnered national attention.Ms. Peters’s newfound celebrity on the right soon led to appearances across the conservative media ecosystem, including on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast.This February, Ms. Peters announced her bid for secretary of state.In March, she was indicted on 10 criminal counts related to the effort to copy voting equipment software, including attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, identity theft and first-degree official misconduct. More

PEORIA, Ill. — Darren Bailey, a far-right state senator who was the beneficiary of an extraordinary effort by Democrats to help his candidacy, has won the Republican primary for governor in Illinois.Mr. Bailey, whose crushing victory was called by The Associated Press on Tuesday, topped a field of five other Republicans in the contest to oppose Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire Democrat who invested $35 million to influence the G.O.P. primary.The Illinois governor’s race is on track to become the most expensive campaign for a nonpresidential office in American history. More than $100 million has been spent on television advertising in the primary.A farmer from Southern Illinois who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump at a rally on Saturday, Mr. Bailey was virtually unknown in state politics before he upset a Republican incumbent in a 2018 primary for a State House district.One of his first legislative proposals once in office was a bill to remove Chicago from the state. When the pandemic began, he refused to wear a mask during legislative sessions and sued Mr. Pritzker to block public health mitigation efforts.In 2020, Mr. Bailey advanced to the State Senate, where he and a few other conservative legislators from Southern and southeastern Illinois are collectively known as “the Eastern Bloc.”Mr. Bailey, 56, began his campaign for governor in February 2021, a month into his State Senate tenure. He has spent the last 16 months barnstorming the state’s Republican precincts.In that time, he gathered sufficient support from conservative voters aligned with Mr. Trump to survive a $50 million primary campaign from Mayor Richard C. Irvin of Aurora, who was backed by the hedge fund executive Kenneth Griffin, and a $12.6 million campaign from Jesse Sullivan, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who relocated to Petersburg, his Central Illinois hometown, to run for governor.Mr. Bailey had two patrons in the primary: Mr. Pritzker, whose relentless advertising campaign bashed Mr. Irvin while highlighting Mr. Bailey’s conservative credentials, and Richard Uihlein, the Chicago-area megadonor who has supported an array of far-right Republican candidates. Mr. Uihlein has spent $17 million so far on Mr. Bailey’s campaign and on a political action committee that attacked Mr. Irvin.Mr. Pritzker will now be a heavy favorite to win the general election against Mr. Bailey. Had Mr. Irvin, a moderate with an inspiring personal story, no ties to Mr. Trump and access to hundreds of millions more dollars, advanced, the race was expected to be highly competitive in November.In an interview last week in Green Valley, Ill., Mr. Bailey expressed confidence that he would be competitive with Mr. Pritzker in a general election even though Mr. Trump lost Illinois by 17 percentage points.“Life is different now under Joe Biden, and especially with J.B. Pritzker,” Mr. Bailey said. “Life’s a lot different now for Illinois than it was then. And I think people realize that.” More

‘He thinks Mike deserves it’: Trump said rioters were right to call for vice-president’s deathTrump aides wanted to be ‘doing something more’ to stop the riot, Cassidy Hutchinson told January 6 committee A crucial witness before the House January 6 committee testified that senior aides had described how Donald Trump thought his vice-president, Mike Pence, deserved to be hanged for not blocking certification of election results, as demanded by the mob that attacked the US Capitol.Trump knew crowd at rally was armed yet demanded they be allowed closerRead moreDescribing events at the White House on the afternoon of 6 January 2021, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said: “I remember Pat [Cipollone, the White House counsel] saying something to the effect of, ‘Mark, we need to do something more. They’re literally calling for the vice-president to be fucking hung.’“And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’“To which Pat said something like, “This is fucking crazy. We need to be doing something more.”Liz Cheney, the committee vice-chair, repeated: “When rioters chanted ‘hang Mike Pence’, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, said that, quote, ‘Mike deserves it’ and that those rioters were not doing anything wrong.”Hutchinson’s description of Trump’s words was included in a previous hearing, via recorded testimony. The committee had also previously shown that at one point the mob was just 40ft away from Pence.Hutchinson appeared in person on Tuesday, in a sixth public session announced at short notice and full of explosive revelations.Cheney, from Wyoming and one of two anti-Trump Republicans on the January 6 committee, played a recording in which Trump, speaking to Jon Karl of ABC News, refused to condemn the rioters who chanted for Pence to be hanged.“Because it’s common sense,” Trump said. “It’s common sense that you’re supposed to protect … if you know a vote is fraudulent, how can you pass on a fraudulent vote to Congress?”Electoral college results confirming Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden were not fraudulent. Trump’s claim that they were and his instruction to “fight like hell” in service of his lie fueled the mob that attacked the Capitol.Cheney said: “President Trump’s view that the rioters were not doing anything wrong and that, quote, ‘Mike deserved it’, helps us to understand why the president did not ask the rioters to leave the Capitol for multiple hours.”The mob did not succeed in stopping certification of election results. A bipartisan Senate committee linked seven deaths to the riot. More than 840 people, some members of far-right groups, have been charged with seditious conspiracy.TopicsDonald TrumpJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackMike PencenewsReuse this content More

It’s worth noting that Cassidy Hutchinson recently changed her legal representation in connection to the January 6 investigation.Hutchinson’s decision to replace her former lawyer, Stefan Passantino, with Jody Hunt of the law firm Alston Bird was interpreted as a signal of her increased willingness to cooperate with the January 6 committee’s requests for information.Politico reported earlier this month:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Hutchinson’s former attorney, Stefan Passantino, has deep Trump World connections. Her new lawyer, Jody Hunt, is a longtime close ally of Jeff Sessions and served as his chief of staff when the former attorney general enraged Trump by recusing from the Russia probe. …
Passantino, Hutchinson’s former attorney, was the Trump White House’s chief ethics lawyer. And Passantino’s firm, Michael Best, has Trump World connections; its president is former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and Justin Clark — also a top Trump World lawyer — is currently on leave from the firm, according to its website.Today’s testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson could also reveal more details about Donald Trump’s response to insurrectionists’ chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” on January 6.At the January 6 committee’s first public hearing earlier this month, Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the panel, said witness testimony indicated Trump was informed of the chants and reacted approvingly to them.“You will hear that President Trump was yelling and ‘really angry’ at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more,” Cheney said at the first hearing. “And aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves it.’”According to CNN, Hutchinson was the witness who provided the committee with that information, so today’s hearing could give her an opportunity to offer valuable new insight into how Trump reacted as January 6 turned violent. The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is expected to hear live public testimony on Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, suggesting a sense of urgency to disclose what it said was “recently obtained evidence”. The committee had previously said it would not hold any more hearings until next month.It is the sixth public hearing held by the committee after a year-long investigation into the Capitol attack. Two more hearings are expected next month.The hearings next month are expected to delve into the role of far-right and paramilitary groups organized and prepared for the January 6 attack and Trump’s abdication of leadership during the hours-long siege of the Capitol.January 6 committee schedules surprise session to hear new evidenceRead moreJoe Biden will meet tomorrow with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the two leaders attend the Nato summit in Madrid, Spain.The White House announced the planned meeting during the daily press briefing, which was held today aboard Air Force One as Biden flew from Germany, where he attended the G7 summit, to Spain.Biden has just arrived in Madrid, where he will soon meet with the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and King Felipe VI.The exact format and timing of the Erdoğan meeting is still unclear, but Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters that the focus of the discussion would be on US-Turkish relations and the bids from Finland and Sweden to join Nato.Turkey has raised objections to Finland and Sweden’s bids, which were submitted in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Erdoğan has specifically accused Sweden of being a “hatchery” for terrorist organizations, per Reuters.The meeting tomorrow could give Biden an opportunity to press Erdoğan on those reservations and attempt to convince him to support Nato membership for Finland and Sweden.It remains unclear what new information Cassidy Hutchinson, former senior aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, might provide in her testimony today before the January 6 committee.But according to Brendan Buck, a longtime adviser to former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan, Hutchinson joined every meeting that Meadows participated in as a congressman. (Meadows served in the House from 2013 to 2020.)“I don’t know Cassidy Hutchinson, and I can’t speak to how things worked at the White House, but when Meadows was on the Hill he always insisted that she be in *every* meeting he had, no matter how small,” Buck said on Twitter. “It was odd then, and [doesn’t] seem to be working out for him now.”I don’t know Cassidy Hutchinson, and I can’t speak to how things worked at the White House, but when Meadows was on the Hill he always insisted that she be in *every* meeting he had, no matter how small. It was odd then, and doesnt seem to be working out for him now.— Brendan Buck (@BrendanBuck) June 28, 2022
The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.House investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.Read the Guardian’s full report:January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aidesRead moreGreetings from Washington, live blog readers.The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection will hold its sixth public hearing of the month at 1pm ET, after the panel surprisingly announced the event yesterday.According to multiple reports, the star witness for today’s surprise hearing will be Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, who served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. (Punchbowl News first reported Hutchinson’s expected appearance.)Hutchinson has already spoken to investigators behind closed doors, and she provided the committee with some of its most damning evidence about the Trump White House’s ties to the attack on the Capitol.In a clip of her private testimony played at a hearing last week, Hutchinson named several Republican members of Congress who sought president pardons in connection to their involvement in the insurrection.Today could give Hutchinson her first opportunity to speak directly to the American people about what she witnessed in the White House on January 6 and in the aftermath of that violent day.The hearing will kick off in a few hours, and the blog will have updates and analysis once it starts. Stay tuned.And here’s what else is happening today:
Joe Biden is traveling from Germany to Spain. Biden is participating in the final day of the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany, before traveling on to Madrid, Spain, for the start of the Nato summit.
Karine Jean-Pierre will gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Madrid. The White House press secretary will be joined by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the supreme court’s decision to uphold key portions of the Affordable Care Act. The anniversary comes as the country awaits the court’s final four decisions of the term, which has already seen conservative justices overturn Roe v Wade and deliver a major victory to gun rights groups.
The blog will have more coming up, so stick around. More

Cassidy Hutchinson: who is the ex-aide testifying in the January 6 hearings?The former executive assistant to Mark Meadows will be the first ex-Trump White House employee to testify in person The House January 6 hearings into the attack on the Capitol may not yet have found their John Dean – the White House counsel who turned on President Richard Nixon during Watergate – but in Cassidy Hutchinson they have turned up a surprisingly potent witness.January 6 hearing: former aide to Mark Meadows to reportedly testify – liveRead moreHutchinson was an executive assistant to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, and a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs.In taped testimony, she has described Trump’s approval of chants from Capitol rioters about hanging the then vice-president, Mike Pence, and attempts by Republicans in Congress to have Trump issue pardons before leaving office.On Tuesday, she is expected to testify in person – the first former Trump White House employee to do so.According to Hutchinson’s LinkedIn page, she studied political science and American studies at Christopher Newport University, a public school in Virginia. Hutchinson’s page also follows St Andrew’s Episcopal school, in Austin, Texas.While in college, Hutchinson interned at the Trump White House. In October 2018, she told her student newspaper she was “brought to tears when I received the email that I had been selected to participate”, and called the internship “an honor and a tremendous growing experience”.Hutchinson also interned and for two powerful figures on the hard right of a hard-right party: Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, and the Texas senator Ted Cruz.According to the Washington Post, Hutchinson recently switched lawyers, swapping a former Trump White House ethics lawyer for an attorney with links to Jeff Sessions, the former Alabama senator who became the attorney general Trump fired in 2018.That move, the Post said, indicated a new willingness to cooperate with the January 6 committee.Hutchinson’s former boss, Meadows, first flirted with cooperating with the committee then refused to do so. The committee referred him to the Department of Justice (DoJ), for criminal contempt of Congress. The DoJ declined to pursue charges.In the absence of testimony from Meadows, Hutchinson’s voice has come to the fore in a series of explosive hearings.Earlier this month, Norm Eisen, a former ethics tsar in the Obama White House, told the Post: “Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackTrump administrationUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More

Shane Goldmacher
June 21, 2022 More