Elections

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

Nick Corasaniti
May 24, 2022 More

ANCHORAGE — The race began, fittingly, in the spring season known here as breakup.As sheets of ice cracked into pieces across the rivers, melting snow exposed the gravel and dust on roads, and preparations began for hunting and fishing, dozens of congressional campaigns were springing to life with barely a few days of planning. Candidates held solemn conversations with their families, advisers hastily secured website domains and the endorsements and donations began flooding in.The unexpected death in March of Representative Don Young, the Republican who represented Alaska’s sole congressional district for nearly half a century, has given rise to a crowded and raucous race to succeed him. No fewer than four dozen Alaskans — political veterans, gadflies, and even a man legally named Santa Claus — are running to succeed Mr. Young as the lone representative in the House for the state’s 734,000 people.The list of candidates is sprawling. It includes former Gov. Sarah Palin, who is endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump; Nick Begich III, whose grandfather held the seat before Mr. Young; four Alaska Natives, including one, Tara Sweeney, who served in the Trump administration; Jeff Lowenfels, a retired lawyer and a prolific local gardening columnist; and Mr. Claus, a portly, bearded North Pole councilman and socialist.“That’s a lot of people to do research on and figure out,” said Morgan Johnson, 25, as her black cat, Edgar, prowled across the counter of her plant shop in Juneau. “I get stuck on one person’s Instagram for an hour — now I have to do that for 48 people.”Morgan Johnson, of Juneau, is just one voter doing research before choosing which primary candidate will get her vote.Ash Adams for The New York TimesFurther complicating the picture, four separate elections in five months will determine Mr. Young’s successor. First, the throng of candidates will compete in a primary contest on June 11. The top four finishers will then advance in August to a special election to complete the remainder of Mr. Young’s term. That same August day, the candidates who choose to do so will compete in yet another primary to determine which four advance to the general election. And finally in November, voters will choose a winner to be sworn in in January 2023.The sheer volume of candidates owes in part to a new electoral system in Alaska, which opens primaries to all comers, regardless of political affiliation. Under the rules, voters can choose one candidate, and the four who draw the most votes then compete in a runoff of sorts, in which voters then rank their choices. The preferences are counted until someone secures a majority.State officials and advocacy groups are rushing to pull off the rapid-fire contests and ensure that voters understand how the new rules work.“We’re compressing everything that usually is done in about seven months in 90 days,” said Gail Fenumiai, Alaska’s director of elections, who said her team would mail and process more than 586,000 ballots. “There’s a significant amount of work involved.”State officials decided to hold the special election by mail, in part because there was not enough time for the necessary hiring and training of more than 2,000 new election workers, as well as testing and sending election equipment across the state. A ballot was carefully designed to fit all the names on one side of paper, with the first ones sent out less than six weeks after Mr. Young died.Understand the 2022 Midterm Elections So FarAfter key races in Georgia, Pennsylvania and other states, here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Invincibility in Doubt: With many of Donald J. Trump’s endorsed candidates failing to win, some Republicans see an opening for a post-Trump candidate in 2024.G.O.P. Governors Emboldened: Many Republican governors are in strong political shape. And some are openly opposing Mr. Trump.Voter Fraud Claims Fade: Republicans have been accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Mr. Trump’s 2020 loss.The Politics of Guns: Republicans have been far more likely than Democrats to use messaging about guns to galvanize their base in the midterms. Here’s why.Candidates have also had little time to build a campaign that stands out or crisscross a mountainous state where villages and towns are often accessible only by plane or ferry.“When you’re vying for a limited set of first-round votes, you have to figure out how to put yourself forward in a way that people will hear it and resonate with it,” said Christopher Constant, an Anchorage assemblyman and Democrat who announced his intent to challenge Mr. Young in February.The broad field has roiled the close-knit political circles here, pitting longtime colleagues and friends against one another.“This seat has been held for 49 years by one guy, and people are just hungry to have a different voice in Congress, and they think that they can add to it,” said John Coghill, a former state senator who is among the candidates.Christopher Constant, a Democrat, announced his plan to challenge Mr. Young in February.Ash Adams for The New York TimesMary Peltola, a Democrat, is an enrolled member of the Yupik tribe.Ash Adams for The New York TimesIt has also cracked the door open for a series of history-making bids, including four candidates who would be the first Alaska Native to represent a state where more than 15 percent of the population identifies as Indigenous.“It is long past time that an Indigenous person was sent to D.C. to work on behalf of Alaska,” Mary Peltola, a Democrat who spent a decade in the state Legislature and is Yup’ik, said in an interview in Anchorage. Ms. Peltola is among the candidates who have gone to great lengths to highlight a personal connection or appreciation for Mr. Young.The fiercest competition is inside the Republican Party, where younger conservatives who had waited their entire lives in Mr. Young’s shadow are contending for the mantle of his successor. The filing deadline was on April 1, two weeks after Mr. Young died, meaning that candidates had to decide whether to run before funeral services for the congressman had concluded.“It stunned the entire state, and then having to figure out what this new reality was going to look like and what processes were in front of Alaskans with respect to this vacancy — it’s been exhausting,” said Ms. Sweeney, a co-chair of Mr. Young’s campaign and now a candidate for his seat.Tara Sweeney, a Republican, has campaigned on her personal connection to Mr. Young and her experience in Washington.Mark Thiessen/Associated PressMs. Sweeney, who is Inupiaq and the first Alaska Native woman to serve as assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, has emerged as a leading contender for Republicans, with top Alaska Native-owned corporations banding together to back her campaign. Mr. Begich, a conservative whose grandfather of the same name held the seat as a Democrat until his disappearance in a plane crash in 1972, angered many in Mr. Young’s inner circle by jumping into the race in October as a challenger, dangling what they saw as insinuations that the congressman was too old.The chosen candidate of the state Republican Party, Mr. Begich has disavowed the $1 trillion infrastructure bill Mr. Young proudly championed and the congressman’s penchant for earmarking federal dollars for Alaska.“For too long, the formula in Alaska has been to sacrifice the good of the nation for the good of the state, and I don’t think that that’s a formula that we need to be practicing going forward,” Mr. Begich said in an interview. Mr. Young’s allies have gravitated toward less conservative candidates.Those include Ms. Sweeney and Josh Revak, a state senator and an Iraq war veteran who secured a coveted endorsement from Mr. Young’s widow, Anne. Nick Begich’s grandfather held the sole Alaska congressional seat before Mr. Young.Ash Adams for The New York TimesMr. Revak secured a coveted endorsement from Mr. Young’s widow, Anne.Ash Adams for The New York Times“It was a really difficult choice, but if he believed in me and others believe in me, that I have the heart and the work ethic and the experience to do the job, then I’ll walk through fire to do it,” Mr. Revak, wearing an ivory bolo tie with the Alaska Senate seal and his Purple Heart pin, said after a recent fund-raiser at an Anchorage home.Ms. Palin’s late entry into the race — and Mr. Trump’s near-immediate endorsement of her — has further scrambled the political picture. As a former governor and vice-presidential candidate, Ms. Palin, whose campaign did not respond to requests for an interview, easily has the strongest name recognition in the field of candidates.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

The Democratic-linked lawyer was accused of lying to the F.B.I. about his clients when he passed on a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.WASHINGTON — Michael Sussmann, a prominent cybersecurity lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was acquitted on Tuesday of lying to the F.B.I. in 2016 when he shared a tip about possible connections between Donald J. Trump and Russia.The verdict was a significant blow to the special counsel, John H. Durham, who was appointed by the Trump administration three years ago to scour the Trump-Russia investigation for any wrongdoing.But Mr. Durham has yet to fulfill expectations from Mr. Trump and his supporters that he would uncover and prosecute a “deep state” conspiracy against the former president. Instead, he has developed only two cases that led to charges: the one against Mr. Sussmann and another against a researcher for the so-called Steele dossier, whose trial is set for later this year.Both consist of simple charges of making false statements, rather than a more sweeping charge like conspiracy to defraud the government. And both involve thin or dubious allegations about Mr. Trump’s purported ties to Russia that were put forward not by government officials, but by outside investigators.The case against Mr. Sussmann centered on odd internet data that cybersecurity researchers discovered in 2016 after it became public that Russia had hacked Democrats and Mr. Trump had encouraged the country to target Mrs. Clinton’s emails.The researchers said the data might reflect a covert communications channel using servers for the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which has ties to the Kremlin. The F.B.I. briefly looked at the suspicions and dismissed them.On Sept. 19, 2016, Mr. Sussmann brought those suspicions to a senior F.B.I. official. In charging Mr. Sussmann with a felony, prosecutors contended that he falsely told the official that he was not there on behalf of any client, concealing that he was working for both Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and a technology executive who had given him the tip.Mr. Durham and prosecutors used court filings and trial testimony to describe how Mr. Sussmann, while working for a Democratic-linked law firm and logging his time to the Clinton campaign, had been trying to get reporters to write about the Alfa Bank suspicions.But trying to persuade reporters to write about such suspicions is not a crime. Mr. Sussmann’s guilt or innocence turned on a narrow issue: whether he made a false statement to the senior F.B.I. official at the 2016 meeting by saying he was sharing those suspicions on his own.Mr. Durham used the Sussmann case to put forward a larger conspiracy: that there was a joint enterprise to essentially frame Mr. Trump for collusion with Russia by getting the F.B.I. to investigate the suspicions so reporters would write about it. The scheme, Mr. Durham implied, involved the Clinton campaign; its opposition research firm, Fusion GPS; Mr. Sussmann; and the cybersecurity expert who had brought the odd data and analysis to him.That insinuation thrilled Mr. Trump’s supporters, who have embraced his claim that the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and have sought to conflate the official inquiry with sometimes dubious accusations. In reality, the Alfa Bank matter was a sideshow: The F.B.I. had already opened its inquiry on other grounds before Mr. Sussmann passed on the tip; the final report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made no mention of the Alfa Bank suspicions.But the case Mr. Durham and his team used to float their broad insinuations was thin: one count of making a false statement in a meeting with no other witnesses. In a rebuke to Mr. Durham; the lead lawyer on the trial team, Andrew DeFilippis; and his colleagues, the 12 jurors voted unanimously to find Mr. Sussmann not guilty.Some supporters of Mr. Trump had been bracing for that outcome. They pointed to the District of Columbia’s reputation as a heavily Democratic area and suggested that a jury might be politically biased against a Trump-era prosecutor trying to convict a defendant who was working for the Clinton campaign.The judge had told the jurors that they were not to account for their political views when deciding the facts. The jury forewoman, who did not give her name, told reporters afterward that “politics were not a factor” and that she thought bringing the case had been unwise.Mr. Durham expressed disappointment in the verdict but said he respected the decision by the jury, which deliberated for about six hours.“I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” he said in a statement.Outside the courthouse, Mr. Sussmann read a brief statement to reporters, praising the jury, his defense team and those who supported him during what had been a difficult year.“I told the truth to the F.B.I., and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today,” he said, adding, “Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case.”During the trial, the defense had argued that Mr. Sussmann brought the matter to the F.B.I. only when he thought The New York Times was on the verge of writing an article about the matter, so that the bureau would not be caught flat-footed.Officials for the Clinton campaign testified that they had not told or authorized Mr. Sussmann to go to the F.B.I. Doing so was against their interests because they did not trust the bureau, and it could slow down the publication of any article, they said.James Baker, as the F.B.I.’s general counsel in 2016, met with Mr. Sussmann that September. Mr. Baker testified that he had asked Eric Lichtblau, then a reporter at The Times working on the Alfa Bank matter, to slow down so the bureau could have time to investigate it.Mr. Sussmann’s defense team offered the jurors many potential paths to acquittal, contending that the prosecution had yet to prove multiple necessary elements beyond a reasonable doubt.His lawyers attacked as doubtful whether Mr. Sussmann actually uttered the words that he had no client at his meeting with the F.B.I. in September.That issue was complicated after a text message came to light in which Mr. Sussmann, arranging for the meeting a day earlier, indicated that he was reaching out on his own. But it was what, if anything, he said at the meeting itself that was at issue.Mr. Baker testified that he was “100 percent” certain that Mr. Sussmann repeated those words to his face. But defense lawyers pointed out that he had recalled the meeting differently on many other occasions.The defense team also argued that Mr. Sussmann was in fact not there on behalf of any client, even though he had clients with an interest in the topic. And they questioned whether it mattered, since the F.B.I. knew he represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign on other issues, and agents would have investigated the allegations regardless.Midmorning, the jury asked to see a trial exhibit meant to bolster the defense’s argument that Mr. Sussmann did not consider himself to be representing the Clinton campaign. It was a record of taxi rides Mr. Sussmann expensed for the Sept. 19 meeting at F.B.I. headquarters.He logged those rides to the firm rather than to the Clinton campaign or to the technology executive, Rodney Joffe, who had worked with the data scientists who developed the suspicions and brought them to Mr. Sussmann. Prosecutors asserted that Mr. Joffe was his other hidden client in the meeting.During the trial, prosecutors had made much of how Mr. Sussmann logged extensive hours on the Alfa Bank matter to the Clinton campaign in law firm billing records — including phone calls and meetings with reporters and with his partner at the time, Marc Elias, the general counsel of the Clinton campaign.Defense lawyers acknowledged that the Clinton campaign had been Mr. Sussmann’s client for the purpose of trying to persuade reporters to write about the matter, but argued that he was not working for anyone when he brought the same materials to the F.B.I.In a statement, Sean Berkowitz and Michael Bosworth, two of Mr. Sussmann’s defense lawyers, criticized Mr. Durham for bringing the indictment.“Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place,” they said. “This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: Politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice.” More

Republicans are accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Donald J. Trump’s loss.This spring, when Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama was fighting to win over conservatives in his campaign for Senate, he ran a television ad that boasted, “On Jan. 6, I proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud.”But when Mr. Brooks placed second in Alabama’s Republican primary last week, leaving him in a runoff, he said he was not concerned about fraud in his election.“If it’s a close race and you’re talking about a five- or 10-vote difference, well, then, it becomes a greater concern,” he said of his primary results. “But I’ve got more important fish to fry. And so, at some point, you have to hope that the election system is going to be honest.”Mr. Brooks was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hundreds more Republican state legislators across the country took similar action in their own capitals. President Biden’s victory, they said, was corrupted by either outright fraud or pandemic-related changes to voting.Now, many of those Republicans are accepting the results of their primaries without complaint. Already this year, 55 of the lawmakers who objected in 2020 have run in competitive primaries, contests conducted largely under the same rules and regulations as those in 2020. None have raised doubts about vote counts. No conspiracy theories about mail ballots have surfaced. And no one has called for a “forensic audit” or further investigations of the 2022 primary results.Republicans’ easy acceptance of a voting system they once slammed as broken exposes a fundamental contradiction in their complaints about the 2020 election. Claims about fraud and stolen elections are often situational — used in some races (against Democrats) but not others (against other Republicans), and to challenge some outcomes (losing) but not others (winning).Mr. Brooks placed second in last week’s Republican primary, but made it into the June 21 runoff.Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesThis phenomenon was on clear display in 2020, when scores of Republicans who repeated allegations about a “rigged” presidential race accepted their own victories based on the same ballots.But the lack of discussion about fraud in this year’s primaries highlights a particular strain of partisanship driving many of the myths about stolen elections.Mr. Brooks offered a simple answer to why he’s not worried about his race: There’s no fraud in Republican primaries, he said.After the Georgia Primary ElectionThe May 24 races were among the most consequential so far of the 2022 midterm cycle.Takeaways: G.O.P. voters rejected Donald Trump’s 2020 fixation, and Democrats backed a gun-control champion. Here’s what else we learned.Rebuking Trump: The ex-president picked losers up and down the ballot in Georgia, raising questions about the firmness of his grip on the G.O.P.G.O.P. Governor’s Race: Brian Kemp scored a landslide victory over David Perdue, delivering Mr. Trump his biggest setback of the 2022 primaries.2018 Rematch: Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor, will again face Mr. Kemp — but in a vastly different political climate.“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. “In a Republican primary or a Democrat primary, the motivation to steal elections is less because the candidates’ philosophy-of-government differences are minor.”Noncitizens don’t vote in any federal elections in significant numbers, in Alabama or elsewhere, according to a 2020 report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Investigators from both parties have unearthed only minuscule numbers of any type of voter fraud. In recent years, the rare instances of broad fraud schemes that have become public have been engineered by Republicans, including an absentee ballot scheme in North Carolina that led the state’s Board of Elections to order a redo of a House race in 2018.Not all Republicans who spread false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election considered their own races to be exempt. Some said that “fraud existed” in their own elections and that investigations were needed. Still, they accepted their victories.“We don’t know how much fraud exists or existed because we weren’t able to see,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania told a local CBS affiliate a week after the 2020 election. Mr. Perry focused on Philadelphia as a source for fraud in the presidential race and called for additional review. He also said he was “humbled” to take his seat in the House.In the Pennsylvania primaries last week, Mr. Perry ran for re-election unopposed. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone, and his campaign did not return requests for comment.The Republican effort to sow skepticism about elections in racially diverse Democratic cities is a generations-long project, with roots as far back as Richard Nixon’s 1960 defeat against John F. Kennedy. By the time Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, he and millions of his supporters were primed to believe false allegations about “ballot harvesting” and machines miscounting in America’s populous cities. Mr. Brooks said in an interview that, in Alabama, fraud occurred “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.”Part of the reason Republican candidates are accepting primary results without talking about fraud is they don’t have Democrats to blame, said Trey Grayson, the former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.“They’re thinking it’s a primary, it’s our side. We didn’t lose to somebody on the other side who is evil, who’s going to change policy more dramatically,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview. “There’s a tribal, ‘my side’s always right, your side is always wrong. We’re not stealing elections, your side is stealing elections.’”Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina accepted his defeat in the Republican primary on May 17.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York TimesEven candidates who lost this year, either in close elections or decisive defeats, have accepted the results. Representative Madison Cawthorn, who had still been promoting falsehoods about the 2020 election on social media a week before his primary election, conceded and called his rival, Chuck Edwards, the night of his loss.When asked if Mr. Cawthorn had any concerns about fraud in the election, a spokesman for his congressional office declined to comment.In Georgia, the statewide Republican primaries were high-profile contests between Trump-aligned election deniers and officials who blocked Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results. Representative Jody Hice spent much of his campaign railing about Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and his mismanaging elections.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More