Elections

Mr. Boric, 35, is now the most prominent face of a generation of Chileans who are calling for a break with the past.Gabriel Boric rose to prominence in Chile ten years ago as a shaggy-haired student leading massive demonstrations for free quality public education. He ran for president this year, calling for a square deal for more Chileans, with more social protections for the poor and higher taxes on the rich.Now, having won the presidency on Sunday — with more votes than any other candidate in history — Mr. Boric is poised to oversee what could be the most profound transformation of Chilean society in decades.It’s not just that he wants to bury the legacy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship by overhauling the conservative economic model the country inherited at the end of his tenure in 1990. Mr. Boric’s government will also oversee the final stages of the writing of a new Constitution to replace the dictatorship-era document that continues to define the nation.And then there’s who he is: Elected at 35, Mr. Boric will be the youngest president in the country’s history when he takes office in March. He never completed his law degree — the protests got in the way. He speaks openly about his obsessive-compulsive disorder. And he scandalized the Chilean establishment by showing up for his first day as a congressman in 2014 in a beige trench coat — and no tie.For many Chileans, Mr. Boric’s win is the natural institutionalization of generational howl that has echoed throughout the country for at least a decade. He is seen as the voice of a generation that is ready to break with the past and that has taken to the streets by the tens and even hundreds of thousands to demand a more equal, inclusive country.Mr. Boric, as president of the student federation at the University of Chile, leading a demonstration in Santiago in 2012. Claudio Santana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Chile had already changed even before Boric was elected,” said Fernanda Azócar, 35, a voter who participated in weekslong protests in 2006 and 2011. “It’s just that now we have a president who can make these changes permanent.”Central to the protesters’ claims has been the idea that the promises of the establishment — that the market will produce prosperity, and that prosperity will fix their problems — have failed them. More than 25 percent of the wealth produced in the country is owned by one percent of the population, according to the United Nations. Low wages, high levels of debt and underfunded public health and educations systems continue to keep people waiting for opportunity.Looming over those protests, and over the presidential campaign, has been the legacy of Chile’s bloody dictatorship. General Pinochet came to power in a violent coup in 1973, and his years in power were mired in reports of corruption and repression, including torture and extrajudicial killings.Mr. Boric is a child of Chilean democracy. He was just four years old when General Pinochet ceded power, and he did not often mention the general on the campaign trail. But his election was in many ways a full-throated rejection of the dictator and what he meant for the country.First, because General Pinochet was the architect of both the free market economic model and the Constitution that Mr. Boric and his allies have criticized for so long, saying that they have favored the rich and the private sector at the expense of everyone else.“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism it will also be its grave,” Mr. Boric shouted before a crowd after his primary win earlier this year.And second, because the man Mr. Boric beat on Sunday, José Antonio Kast, is the brother of a former adviser to General Pinochet who has spoken favorably of aspects of the dictatorship and had proposed hard-line security measures that reminded some of the days of military rule.Manuel Antonio Garretón, a sociologist and professor at the University of Chile, called the confluence of Mr. Boric’s election with the national vote to rewrite the Constitution “the second most important moment” in moving past the dictatorship — behind only the 1988 popular vote with which Chileans ended Pinochet’s reign.Mr. Boric at a campaign rally in Santiago in November.Esteban Felix/Associated PressMr. Boric was born in Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, on Feb. 11, 1986. He has two younger brothers, and he comes from a middle class family of Croatian origin, descendants of immigrants who arrived in the late 1800s. (His last name is pronounced “Boritch.”) His father and grandfather worked in the oil industry in the province of Magallanes.Mr. Boric attended the local private British school, where Pinochet’s rule was debated openly — not the case in many parts of Chile.In an interview, his brother, Simón, 33, said that the family was not fiercely political, but had opposed Pinochet. One uncle was co-owner of a radio station that blasted the crimes of the regime. “More than once my family received threats,” he said, adding that “anonymous letters arrived because of my uncle’s activities.”Months after winning his first term in congress, Mr. Boric described his early determination to understand politics. He came from a fairly protected environment and his father’s politics were centrist. But even as a high school student in Punta Arenas, he said, he started reading up on revolutionary leaders and political processes. It was a lonely endeavor — he didn’t have a group he could discuss politics with.So, still in high school, he decided he wanted to become a member of a far-left group that had supported armed struggle, the Revolutionary Left Movement, or MIR. The group had been largely crushed during the dictatorship. So Mr. Boric went to Google, found an email for one of its small surviving factions and wrote a letter asking how he could contribute to the revolution. No one ever answered.In Punta Arenas, Mr. Boric helped restart his city’s high school student federation. Then, in 2004, he moved to Santiago, the capital, to study law. He completed his studies in 2009, but failed a part of the final exam, said his brother. He could have taken the test again and gotten his degree, but soon he was swept up in student activism and politics, and never went back.In 2011, as protesters took to the streets to call for better public education, he ran for president of the University of Chile’s student federation and won, becoming one of the key leaders of the movement.Mr. Boric during a student protest in 2012.Fernando Lavoz/Getty ImagesFrom there, he made a bid for office, becoming one of four student protest leaders to enter congress in 2014.For 30 years in Chile, two coalitions have alternated power — but Mr. Boric is aligned with neither.Matías Meza, 41, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Boric is motivated by his understanding of the past, which informs his desire to move the country definitively out of the shadow of the dictatorship.“He has a strong grasp of history and is acutely aware of his position in society and the privileges he has had,” said Mr. Meza.Mr. Boric won the election on Sunday with 55 percent of the vote, 11 points ahead of Mr. Kast — a strong popular mandate to restructure the country in light of his promises.They include shifting from a private pension system to a public one; pardoning student debt; increasing investment in education and public health care; and creating a care giving system that would relieve the burden on women, who do most of the work of tending to children, older relatives and others. He has vowed to restore territory to Indigenous communities and to support unrestricted access to abortion.But now that he’s won, major hurdles stand in the way of the transformation he envisions.Mr. Boric will face a pandemic-battered economy, a divided Congress, and the high expectations of voters: those on the left, who rallied behind him in the first round of the presidential election, and those in the center, who flocked to him in the second round, when his rhetoric became more moderate.“He’s going to have to choose between going moderate or being radical,” said Patricio Navia, a professor of political studies at Diego Portales University in Chile. “Whatever he chooses, it’s going to alienate many voters.”The 35-year-old former student activist is set to become the nation’s youngest leader and its most liberal since President Salvador Allende.Juan Carlos Avendano/ReutersThis election left clear that the majority of Chileans are demanding significant change, said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch (and a Chilean himself).The question is what comes next, he said, because Mr. Boric “will be judged on whether has the capacity to deliver.” More

Case 8:21-cv-02956-KKM-SPF Document 1 Filed 12/21/21 Page 23 of 42 PageID 23

o. “All documents and communications relating to protests, marches, public

p. “Documents or other materials referring or relating to the financing or

q. “All recordings, transcripts, notes (including electronic and hand-written

r. “All documents and communications relating to the January 6, 2021, attack

s. “All documents and communications related to your January 2021 meetings

assemblies, rallies, and speeches in Washington, DC, on November 14,

2020, December 12, 2020, January 5, 2021, and January 6, 2021

(collectively, ‘Washington Rallies’).”

fundraising associated with the Washington Rallies and any individual or

organization’s travel to or accommodation in Washington, D.C., to attend or

participate in the Washington Rallies.”

notes), summaries, memoranda of conversation, readouts, or other

documents memorializing communications between you and President

Trump, any members of the White House staff, and/or Members of Congress

on January 5 or January 6, 2021, relating or referring in any way to the fall

2020 election or the attack on the Capitol.”

on the U.S. Capitol.”

with individuals associated with President Trump and his re-election

campaign, including, but not limited to, meetings held at the Willard Hotel.”

23 More

Mr. Thune, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is considering giving up his South Dakota seat because of both family concerns and Donald Trump’s enduring hold on the G.O.P.WASHINGTON — Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Senate Republican and a potential future leader, is seriously considering retiring after next year, a prospect that has set off an intensifying private campaign from other Republicans urging him to seek re-election.Mr. Thune is only 60, but a combination of family concerns and former President Donald J. Trump’s enduring grip on the Republican Party have prompted the senator, who is in his third term, to tell associates and reporters in his home state that 2022 could be his last year in Congress.His departure would be a blow to South Dakota, which has enjoyed outsize influence in Washington, and could upend Senate Republicans’ line of succession. Mr. Thune has been open about his ambition to lead his party’s caucus after Senator Mitch McConnell makes way, and quiet but unmistakable jockeying is already underway between him and Senators John Cornyn of Texas and John Barrasso of Wyoming.“John is the logical successor should Mitch decide to not run again for leader,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine said of Mr. Thune, while noting that Mr. McConnell’s hold on their caucus remained “very secure.”That Mr. Thune would even entertain retirement with the chance to ascend to Senate Republican leader illustrates both the strain of today’s Congress and the shadow Mr. Trump casts over the party. The senator’s departure would represent yet another exit, perhaps the most revealing one yet, by a mainstream Senate Republican who has grown frustrated with the capital’s political environment and the former president’s loyalty demands. The exodus began in 2018 with Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker retiring rather than facing primaries, and has accelerated this year.Part of Mr. Thune’s hesitation owes to Mr. Trump and the potential for the former president — who lashed out at Mr. Thune early this year when the senator rejected his attempts to overturn the election — to intervene in South Dakota’s Senate primary race. But the larger factor may be the longer-range prospect of taking over the Senate Republican caucus with Mr. Trump still in the wings or as the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.Mr. Thune has said he will decide his intentions over the holidays. Yet a number of his friends and colleagues have become convinced that he is serious about leaving public life.Among those alarmed is Mr. McConnell himself, who one adviser said had “leaned in” on pushing Mr. Thune to run again.“I certainly hope that he will run for re-election, and that’s certainly what I and others have been encouraging him to do all year long,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview.He is hardly alone.A range of Senate Republicans — from moderates and Trump targets like Ms. Collins to Trump allies like Kevin Cramer of North Dakota — have lobbied Mr. Thune over dinner, on the Senate floor and, since lawmakers went home for Christmas recess, via text messages.“I let him know how much I appreciate him,” said Mr. Cramer, who has known Mr. Thune since they were young executive directors of their state parties. “He knows both Dakotas really need him.”Mr. Thune first angered Mr. Trump during the former president’s final days in office, when Mr. Thune said any challenge to the election results “would go down like a shot dog.” Mr. Trump derided the senator as “Mitch’s boy” and urged Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota to run against him in the state’s primary.Since then, though, Mr. Trump has trained his fire on Mr. McConnell, whom he has labeled “Old Crow,” and largely ignored Mr. Thune.Two top Senate Republican allies of Mr. Trump said he would probably refrain from targeting Mr. Thune simply because the senator, who is popular at home and has a well-stocked campaign war chest, is unlikely to lose a primary in the state that first elected him to Congress in 1996.“He likes winners, and John Thune is a winner,” said Mr. Cramer, predicting that Mr. Trump would at most be “a nuisance” to Mr. Thune.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was similarly blunt about why Mr. Thune need not sweat a competitive primary. “Trump worries about his win-loss record,” said Mr. Graham, who is the de facto liaison between the former president and Senate Republicans.Mr. Graham, who along with Mr. Thune and Ms. Collins is part of a small group of senators who often dine together in Washington, said that before they left for the holidays, he had reassured Mr. Thune about any Trumpian intervention.“I told John that’ll be fine,” Mr. Graham recalled. “John will be fine.”Asked if he thought the threat of a Trump-inspired primary bothered Mr. Thune, Mr. McConnell said, “No. No, I don’t.”But if Mr. Thune ascended to Republican Senate leadership, Mr. Trump could still prove a headache.The former president does not have the influence in the Senate, where 19 Republicans defied him to support the infrastructure bill, that he does in the House. Yet Mr. Trump’s regular attacks on Mr. McConnell and on anything that has the air of cooperation with President Biden are not lost on Senate Republicans.The Infrastructure Bill at a GlanceCard 1 of 5The bill receives final approval. More

Phil Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, is a case study in how pro-Trump fringe players managed to get a hearing for conspiracy theories at the highest level during the presidential transition.A few days after President Biden’s inauguration put to rest one of the most chaotic transitions in U.S. history, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare appeared on a Christian conservative podcast and offered a detailed account of his monthslong effort to challenge the validity of the 2020 vote count.In a pleasant Texas drawl, the former officer, Phil Waldron, told the hosts a story that was almost inconceivable: how a cabal of bad actors, including Chinese Communist officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros, had quietly conspired to hack into U.S. voting machines in a “globalist/socialist” plot to steal the election.In normal times, a tale like that — full of wild and baseless claims — might have been dismissed as the overheated rantings of a conspiracy theorist. But the postelection period was not normal, providing all sorts of fringe players an opportunity to find an audience in the White House.Mr. Waldron stands as a case study. Working in conjunction with allies of President Donald J. Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — and in tandem with others like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser and a retired lieutenant general — Mr. Waldron managed to get a hearing for elements of his story in the very center of power in Washington.Last week, the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a subpoena to Mr. Waldron, saying that it wanted to know more about his role in circulating an explosive PowerPoint presentation on Capitol Hill and to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff.The presentation, which Mr. Meadows gave to the committee (and which he said he never acted on), counseled Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency and to invalidate all digital votes in a bid to stay in power — the same advice that other election deniers gave him at the time.Committee officials have given Mr. Waldron, who retired from the military in 2016 and now owns a bar in Central Texas, until Jan. 10 to turn over any relevant documents. They have also tentatively set a deposition for the week after.When The New York Times sent a reporter last week to Mr. Waldron’s bar, outside of Austin, he told the reporter to leave his property immediately. He then called the local sheriff and described the reporter’s car, adding that the reporter was slurring his words and seemed impaired.Mr. Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, above, became part of a network of Trump supporters pushing election fraud claims.ReutersIt remains unclear whether Mr. Waldron will cooperate with the House committee. But the account he gave in January to the podcast, Flyover Conservatives, and in recent news articles, may give investigators plenty to work with.Mr. Waldron opened his story by saying that his “research” into the 2020 election began that summer, when he started to examine what he described as a network of nonprofit groups connected to Mr. Soros, an outspoken supporter of liberal causes who has long been at the center of right-wing, often antisemitic conspiracies.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Around that time, Mr. Waldron said, he and his associates — whom he has never named — developed a relationship with a Texas cybersecurity company, Allied Security Operations Group, which was co-founded by a man named Russell J. Ramsland Jr.According to Mr. Waldron, Mr. Ramsland and his team had made a startling discovery: that the Chinese Communist Party, through software companies it controlled, had developed a way to flip votes on American tabulation machines, particularly those built by Dominion Voting Systems. (Dominion has adamantly denied its machines have security flaws and has filed defamation suits against some of those who have repeated the claims, including Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.)Beginning in August last year, months before Election Day, Mr. Waldron started to “raise an alarm,” as he put it, and tried to get anyone he could interested in his claim that the country’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking.He told the podcast hosts that he and his partners had reached out to officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, all of which were run by Trump appointees at the time. Mr. Waldron said he also sent an email to Mr. Trump’s director of strategic communications, but all of it “fell on deaf ears.”But there was one person who listened, Mr. Waldron said: Mr. Gohmert, the Texas Republican and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that was traditionally loyal to Mr. Trump and ultimately played an outsize role in his efforts to overturn the election. By Mr. Waldron’s account, Mr. Gohmert promised to pass along his concerns about voting machines to the president, but apparently failed to do so until after the election. (Mr. Gohmert did not respond to questions seeking comment.)Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, expressed concern this month over the treatment of the Capitol rioters.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesOnce the votes were cast and Mr. Trump was declared the loser, Mr. Waldron embarked on what amounted to a two-pronged assault on the election. First, with Mr. Ramsland’s company, Allied Security, he funneled information about supposedly suspicious spikes in votes and other dirt on Dominion Voting Systems to Ms. Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who filed four unsuccessful lawsuits accusing Dominion of a conspiracy to hack the election.According to court papers filed by Dominion, Mr. Ramsland was hired that summer by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and a Trump supporter, to “reverse engineer” the evidence needed to “mislead people into believing” that the 2020 election had been rigged.When the legal challenges failed, Mr. Waldron took a new tack. He partnered with Mr. Giuliani, who was spearheading Mr. Trump’s attack on the election, and joined him at a series of unofficial election fraud hearings conducted by lawmakers in a handful of swing states. Mr. Giuliani did not respond to questions seeking comment on Mr. Waldron, but he has testified in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion that he not only knew and admired Mr. Waldron, but also had “substantial dealings” with him.Even as he toured the country with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Waldron appeared to have been working on a third attack on the election results: assembling the 38-slide PowerPoint presentation that ended up in Mr. Meadows’s possession. In his podcast interview, Mr. Waldron said that he and his associates had managed to get a nascent version of the proposal — to declare a national emergency and use the crisis to order a recount of paper ballots in eight key counties — to Mr. Trump around Thanksgiving, far earlier than public accounts had suggested.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

A postponement raises the possibility that the oil-rich North African nation could again descend into the fragmentation and violence that have marked the decade since its dictator was toppled.TUNIS — Nearly 100 candidates declared they were running for president, a few of them among the most prominent in Libyan politics. More than a third of Libyans registered to vote, and most signaled their intention to cast ballots.Western leaders and United Nations officials had thrown their support behind the election, one they said represented the best hope of reunifying and pacifying a country still largely divided in two and dazed from nearly a decade of internecine fighting.For more than a year now, Libya has been hurtling toward a long-awaited presidential election scheduled for Friday, the 70th anniversary of the country’s independence. But with just a few days to go, the vote looks virtually sure to be postponed as questions swirl about the legitimacy of major candidates and the election’s legal basis.Amid the uncertainty, the national election commission dissolved the committees that had been preparing for the vote, essentially conceding that it would not occur on schedule. For now, it was the closest thing Libyans were likely to get to a formal announcement, given all parties’ reluctance to make such a declaration and take the blame.A delay poses the risk that the oil-rich North African nation will again descend into the fragmentation and violence that have marked the decade since the dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was toppled and killed in the 2011 revolution.Though no one has formally announced a change in plans, government officials, diplomats and Libyan voters alike have acknowledged that voting on Friday would be impossible. The question now is not only when a vote might take place, but whether a postponed election would be any less brittle — and who would control Libya in the interim.Registering to vote in Tripoli in November.Mahmud Turkia/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“There will definitely be a conflict,” said Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow and Libya analyst at the Atlantic Council who was in Tripoli on Tuesday, “one that could potentially devolve into a broader war.”On Tuesday, tanks and armed militiamen deployed in some parts of Tripoli, closing the road to the presidential palace in a show of force that led to no violence, but raised the tension level.The election of a new president is regarded as the key to begin evicting the armies of foreign fighters brought in over the past years to wage civil conflicts, to start building Libya’s multiple militias into a single national army, and to reunifying government institutions.So far, predictions of large-scale violence surrounding the election have not materialized, although militias in Tripoli last week surrounded government buildings, clashes broke out in the south and militia fighters shut down two major oil pipelines on Monday, denting oil production.International mediators may still be able to salvage the election with a minor postponement of a month or so, though analysts and diplomats said this was unlikely.Stephanie Williams, the United Nations diplomat who brokered the peace process that led to the election agreement, recently returned as the U.N.’s top envoy to Libya and has been crisscrossing the country in hopes of winning a best-case-scenario postponement of weeks, not months or — worst of all — indefinitely.“It’s never too late for international mediation,” she said on the One Decision global affairs podcast earlier this month.The interim prime minister and presidential candidate, Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, spoke at the reopening of a road in June.Mahmud Turkia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe United States ambassador to Libya, Richard Norland, visited Tripoli on Monday to tour a polling station and meet with civil society workers who had been preparing for the vote.“The United States continues to support the vast majority of Libyans who want elections and to cast a vote for their country’s future,” he said in a statement. “We are working to be partners in this process, allowing Libyans to make the choice.”But analysts and a senior diplomat acknowledged that the international drive toward a Dec. 24 election had overlooked crucial issues, which ultimately scuppered the vote.The three front-runners were all highly polarizing, raising fears that if one of them won, others would bitterly, and perhaps violently, contest the result.One of the three, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, is the son of the former dictator, who was killed by rebels in 2011. Another, the strongman Khalifa Hifter, who controls eastern Libya, waged a military campaign from 2019 to 2020 to try to wrest the capital, Tripoli, out of the hands of an internationally recognized government.The third front-runner is Abdul Hamid Dbeiba, the interim prime minister in the current government who has been accused by other candidates of misusing public funds to win voter support by shelling out cash grants to young Libyans.All three face challenges to the legitimacy of their candidacies.Mr. el-Qaddafi is charged with war crimes in the International Criminal Court stemming from his attempts to help his father put down the 2011 revolution. Mr. Dbeiba did not step down from his post in time to run, as required by electoral law. Diplomats said both men had pressured courts in friendly jurisdictions to rule that they were eligible to run.Protesting the presidential candidacy of Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the son of Muammar el-Qaddafi, in  Tripoli last month.Mahmud Turkia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe election also lacked a constitutional basis and rested on legal quicksand, experts said.Since the revolution, Libya has been divided in two. The western side has an internationally recognized government based in the Tripoli, while the eastern side, Mr. Hifter’s base of power, has a rival government.An election law that was rushed through Libya’s eastern parliamentary body, but not the western one, was roundly criticized across Libya and amended multiple times, in part to allow Mr. Hifter to run.Even had the election gone forward, there was never much chance that one elected leader could have cured all of Libya’s ills. Instead, some of the country’s underlying issues must be resolved first to empower a newly elected president to work effectively, analysts say.“I think that this is all wishful thinking,” Hanan Salah, the Libya director for Human Rights Watch, said at a panel discussion last week.She noted that the militias continue to operate with impunity, even government-linked ones, and that there had been outbreaks of violence tied to the election. Libya is so fragmented that some candidates could not even set foot in certain parts of the country to campaign.“Our concern is the lack of rule of law, justice and accountability mean no free and fair elections are possible in the current environment,” Ms. Salah said.A portrait of the strongman and presidential candidate Khalifa Hifter in the eastern city of Benghazi.Esam Omran Al-Fetori/ReutersYet millions of Libyans expressed a commitment to voting, whether for a better future or just to try to knock out controversial candidates.“After seven years of civil conflict and dysfunctional politics, Libyans are eager to vote,” said Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya specialist and nonresident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.More than 2.4 million out of 2.8 million registered voters collected their voting cards over the past month, she noted. “That’s a clear sign that there is tremendous enthusiasm for these elections — whenever they may happen — and a huge appetite for change,” Ms. Fitzgerald said.But with Dec. 24 most likely to come and go without a vote, some Libyan politicians have already been jockeying for control of the country after Friday, two senior diplomats said.On Tuesday, several of the most prominent presidential candidates met with Mr. Hifter in Benghazi, the de facto capital of eastern Libya, forming an alliance that might seek to fill any post-Dec. 24 power vacuum. They appeared to be trying to paint themselves as a credible alternative to the current government, which these politicians argue will lose legitimacy after Dec. 24.“It’s a power grab disguised as deliverance,” said Mr. Badi, the Atlantic Council analyst.There does not appear to be any single candidate who could command broad enough support to lead a new unity government, diplomats and analysts said.If the election is not held soon, a senior Western diplomat said, Libya runs the risk of derailing progress toward reunification, with Mr. Dbeiba in charge of western Libya and someone else running a de facto government in the east.Kamal Mohammed, 39, a clothing store salesman from Tripoli, said he hoped the election would eventually occur, and that it was worth the effort.“We’re worried, but we can’t lose hope,” he said. “We feel that this is the last step for a better future. The ballot box is the best solution — the people have to choose who their leader is.” More

The committee is requesting testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who was deeply involved in efforts to overturn the election.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is seeking testimony and documents from Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the first public step the panel has taken to try to get information from any of the Republican members of Congress deeply involved in President Donald J. Trump’s effort to stay in power.The committee sent a letter on Monday to Mr. Perry, the incoming chairman of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, asking for him to meet with its investigators and voluntarily turn over his communications during the buildup to the riot.To date, the panel has been reluctant to issue subpoenas for information from sitting members of Congress, citing the deference and respect lawmakers in the chamber are supposed to show one another. But Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the panel, has pledged to take such a step if needed.“The select committee has tremendous respect for the prerogatives of Congress and the privacy of its members,” Mr. Thompson said in his letter to Mr. Perry. “At the same time, we have a solemn responsibility to investigate fully all of these facts and circumstances.”A spokesman for Mr. Perry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In the weeks after the 2020 election, Mr. Perry, a member of Congress since 2013, compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations and coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general, who was resisting Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, with a more compliant official.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?A former Army helicopter pilot and a retired brigadier general in the National Guard whose colleagues call him General Perry, Mr. Perry introduced Mr. Trump to Jeffrey Clark, the acting head of the Justice Department’s civil division who became one of the Stop the Steal movement’s most ardent supporters. Around this time, the committee said, investigators believe Mr. Perry was communicating with Mark Meadows, who was then the White House chief of staff, via an encrypted app, Signal.Mr. Clark has said he will invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when he next appears before the panel.“We have received evidence from multiple witnesses that you had an important role in the efforts to install Mr. Clark as acting attorney general,” Mr. Thompson wrote to Mr. Perry. “When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics.”Shortly after Mr. Trump lost the election, Mr. Perry joined Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, as they huddled with senior White House officials at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington County, Va., and came up with a strategy that would become a blueprint for Mr. Trump’s supporters in Congress: hammer home the idea that the election was tainted, announce legal actions being taken by the campaign and bolster the case with allegations of fraud.Mr. Perry pressed the case for weeks, and in January circulated a letter written by Pennsylvania state legislators to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republicans in each chamber, asking Congress to delay certification. “I’m obliged to concur,” Mr. Perry wrote.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

The House panel is examining whether there is enough evidence to recommend that the Justice Department pursue cases against Donald J. Trump and others.When the House formed a special committee this summer to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, its stated goal was to compile the most authoritative account of what occurred and make recommendations to ensure it never happens again.But as investigators sifted through troves of documents, metadata and interview transcripts, they started considering whether the inquiry could yield something potentially more consequential: evidence of criminal conduct by President Donald J. Trump or others that they could send to the Justice Department urging an investigation.That move — known as sending a criminal referral — has no legal weight, as Congress has little ability to tell the Justice Department what investigations it should undertake. But it could have a substantial political impact by increasing public pressure on Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who in his first year in office has largely sidestepped questions about what prosecutors are doing to examine the conduct of Mr. Trump and his aides as they promoted baseless allegations of voter fraud.The questions of criminality go far beyond the contempt of Congress referrals that the House has sent to the Justice Department for Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, and his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, for their refusal to cooperate with the investigation. (Federal law requires prosecutors to bring contempt of Congress charges before a grand jury upon receiving such a referral.)According to people briefed on their efforts, investigators for the committee are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed, including two in particular: whether there was wire fraud by Republicans who raised millions of dollars off assertions that the election was stolen, despite knowing the claims were not true; and whether Mr. Trump and his allies obstructed Congress by trying to stop the certification of electoral votes.It is not clear what, if any, new evidence the committee has that might support a criminal referral, when and how it will determine whether to pursue that option and whether the committee could produce a case strong enough to hold up against inevitable accusations that it acted in a partisan manner.Behind the scenes, the committee’s day-to-day work is being carried out by a team of 40 investigators and staff members, including former federal prosecutors. The panel has obtained more than 30,000 records and interviewed more than 300 witnesses, including about a dozen last week whom committee members say provided “key” testimony.In recent weeks, the committee has publicly signaled its interest in the question of criminality. Shortly after obtaining from Mr. Meadows 9,000 pages of documents — including text messages and a PowerPoint presentation — the panel’s top Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, read from the criminal code at a televised hearing.She suggested that Mr. Trump, by failing to stop the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, might have violated the federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding before Congress.“We know hours passed with no action by the president to defend the Congress of the United States from an assault while we were trying to count electoral votes,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?”Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?The question is one of the most significant to emerge in the first six months of the investigation.The panel has nine House members — including two Republicans — and is modeling itself on the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The committee plans to produce the authoritative report about Jan. 6.It plans to hold televised hearings early next year to lay out for the public how the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement helped lead to the Capitol riot. And it ultimately may propose changes to federal laws, toughening statutes to rein in a president’s conduct and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to exploit in his attempt to cling to power.One of the challenges the committee faces is that so much has been reported about Mr. Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and the attacks themselves. So far, the numerous disclosures about the role of Mr. Trump, his aides and others who promoted the baseless idea that the election had been stolen from him have had little impact on his Republican support in Congress.But a credible criminal referral could provide the committee an opportunity to underscore the gravity of what happened while potentially subjecting Mr. Trump and others to intensified legal scrutiny.Although congressional investigators have no powers to charge a crime, their ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify allows them to reveal new details about events. At times, that process leads to witnesses disclosing potential criminality about themselves or others.When that occurs, Congress can make a criminal referral to the Justice Department — often in the form of a public letter — that can increase pressure on the department to open investigations. Sometimes members of Congress, amid partisan squabbling, overstate the evidence of criminality and make referrals to the Justice Department that are ignored because they appear political.Congressional investigations also create problems for witnesses because it is against the law to make false or misleading statements to Congress. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, indicted Roger J. Stone Jr. in 2019 for lying to congressional investigators examining Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and for obstructing that inquiry. Mr. Stone was ultimately convicted and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stone appeared before the Jan. 6 committee on Friday to face questions about his role in the “Stop the Steal” movement. But rather than answer questions, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination because he said he feared that Democrats would again accuse him of lying under oath.During his meeting with the Jan. 6 committee last week, Roger J. Stone Jr., right, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAt a hearing this month, Ms. Cheney suggested that the committee could subpoena Mr. Trump to answer questions and that criminal penalties would hang over his head if he lied.“Any communication Mr. Trump has with this committee will be under oath,” she said. “And if he persists in lying then, he will be accountable under the laws of this great nation and subject to criminal penalties for every false word he speaks.”Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee, said it was “certainly possible” that the panel would make criminal referrals before the investigation concluded.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

Los milénials jugarán un papel importante para ayudar a dar forma a un nuevo marco legal para una nación sacudida por la agitación social.SANTIAGO — Los chilenos eligieron el domingo a Gabriel Boric como su próximo presidente, y confiaron en el joven diputado de izquierda para que ayude a definir el futuro de una nación que ha sido sacudida por protestas y en este momento se encuentra en proceso de escribir una nueva Constitución.Con 35 años, Boric será el líder más joven de la nación y, con mucho, el político más progresista desde que llegó al poder el presidente Salvador Allende, quien se suicidó durante el golpe militar de 1973 que marcó el comienzo de una brutal dictadura que se prolongó por 17 años.Asumirá el cargo en la etapa final de una asamblea para redactar una nueva Constitución, un esfuerzo que debe durar un año y que probablemente genere cambios legales y políticos profundos en temas que incluyen la igualdad de género, los derechos de las comunidades indígenas y la protección del medioambiente.Boric aprovechó el descontento generalizado con las facciones políticas que se han alternado el poder en las últimas décadas y obtuvo el apoyo de los votantes al prometer reducir la desigualdad y aumentar los impuestos a los ricos para financiar una expansión sustancial de la red de seguridad social, pensiones más generosas y una economía más limpia.El presidente electo derrotó a José Antonio Kast, un exdiputado de extrema derecha que buscaba retratar a Boric como un comunista radical que destrozaría una de las economías más sólidas de la región. La coalición de Boric incluye al Partido Comunista.Kast concedió la derrota al anunciar que había llamado a Boric para felicitarlo.“Desde hoy es el presidente electo de Chile y merece todo nuestro respeto y colaboración constructiva”, Kast escribió en Twitter.Con más del 98 por ciento de los votos contados, Boric había ganado más del 55 por ciento de los votos y Kast tenía el 44 por ciento. El margen sorprendió a los analistas políticos porque encuestas recientes sugirieron que la contienda estaba más reñida.“Voy a dar lo mejor de mí para estar a la altura de este tremendo desafío”, dijo Boric durante una videollamada televisada con el presidente saliente, Sebastián Piñera, quien siguió la tradición en la política chilena.Boric también dijo que esperaba unir a la nación después de una elección muy disputada. “Voy a ser el presidente de todos los chilenos y chilenas”.Piñera dijo que estaba contento de que “la democracia cumplió y los chilenos han dado un nuevo ejemplo de democracia, usted fue parte de eso”.Los jubilosos partidarios de Boric salieron a las calles el domingo por la noche en varias ciudades de Chile. Muchos agitaron la bandera nacional y corearon eslóganes de campaña mientras se pasaban botellas de champán.Dirigiéndose a sus partidarios desde un escenario en una plaza abarrotada de Santiago a última hora de la noche, Boric dijo que pretendía unir a la nación y poner en marcha cambios estructurales para hacer que Chile fuera más igualitario. “Hoy día la esperanza le ganó al miedo”, dijo.Una celebración de partidarios de Gabriel Boric tras las elecciones presidenciales en Santiago el domingo.Rodrigo Garrido/ReutersFue la contienda más polarizada y enconada en la historia reciente y planteaba a los chilenos visiones marcadamente diferentes sobre temas que incluyen el papel del Estado en la economía, los derechos de comunidades históricamente marginadas y la seguridad pública.Y lo que estaba en juego era más sensible que en otras elecciones presidenciales: el presidente entrante apoya encaminar profundamente el esfuerzo por reemplazar la Constitución de Chile, impuesta en 1980, cuando el país estaba bajo un régimen militar. El año pasado, los chilenos votaron de manera abrumadora a favor de redactar una nueva carta magna.Boric, líder de la coalición de izquierda Frente Amplio, ha sido un firme partidario del impulso para actualizar el documento, una petición que ganó arrastre después de una ola de protestas a fines de 2019 originada por la desigualdad, el alto costo de vida y la economía de libre mercado del país.En cambio, Kast lanzó una campaña vigorosa contra la creación de una convención constitucional, cuyos integrantes fueron elegidos en mayo. El organismo está redactando una nueva constitución que los ciudadanos aprobarán o rechazarán en una votación directa en septiembre.Los constituyentes de la convención consideraron el ascenso de Kast una amenaza existencial para sus esfuerzos, y temían que pudiera reunir los recursos y la tribuna presidencial para convencer a los votantes de rechazar una nueva constitución.“Son muchas las cosas en juego”, dijo Patricia Politzer, constituyente de la convención por Santiago. “El poder de un presidente es grande y tiene todo el poder del Estado para hacer campaña contra la nueva Constitución”.Kast y Boric se enfrentaron con fuerza durante los últimos días de la carrera presidencial, y ambos presentaron la posibilidad de su derrota como una catástrofe para la nación sudamericana de 19 millones de personas.Boric se llegó a referir a su contrincante como un fascista y atacó varios de sus proyectos, que incluían ampliar el sistema penitenciario y empoderar a las fuerzas de seguridad para tomar medidas enérgicas contra los desafíos indígenas a los derechos territoriales en el sur del país.Kast planteó a los votantes que una presidencia de Boric destruiría los cimientos de la economía de Chile y probablemente pondría a la nación en el camino de convertirse en un Estado fallido como Venezuela.José Antonio Kast había prometido tomar medidas enérgicas contra el crimen y los disturbios civiles. Se opuso a la iniciativa de reescribir la Constitución de Chile.Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Esta ha sido una campaña como nunca antes enfocada en el miedo”, dijo Claudia Heiss, profesora de ciencias políticas en la Universidad de Chile. “Eso puede ser un daño a largo plazo porque deteriora el clima político”.Boric y Kast tuvieron tracción entre los votantes que se habían cansado de las facciones políticas de centroizquierda y centroderecha que han llegado el poder en Chile en las últimas décadas. En los últimos dos años, el presidente saliente, el conservador Sebastián Piñera, ha caído en los índices de aprobación hasta llegar por debajo del 20 por ciento.Boric se inició en la política como un organizador destacado de las grandes manifestaciones estudiantiles de 2011 que convencieron al gobierno de garantizar la educación gratuita a los estudiantes de bajos ingresos. Fue elegido a la Cámara de Diputados por primera vez en 2014.Nacido en Punta Arenas, la provincia más austral de Chile, una de las principales promesas de la campaña de Boric fue tomar medidas audaces para frenar el calentamiento global. Esto incluyó una propuesta políticamente arriesgada: aumentar los impuestos sobre el combustible.Boric, quien tiene tatuajes y no le gusta usar corbatas, se aparta del molde tradicional de los candidatos presidenciales. También ha hablado de manera pública sobre haber sido diagnosticado con trastorno obsesivo-compulsivo, una condición por la que estuvo hospitalizado brevemente en 2018.A raíz de las protestas callejeras, que en ocasiones fueron violentas, y la agitación política provocada por un aumento en las tarifas del metro en octubre de 2019, prometió convertir una letanía de quejas que se habían ido acumulando durante generaciones en un examen de las políticas públicas. Boric dijo que era necesario aumentar los impuestos a las corporaciones y a los ultrarricos para ensanchar la red de seguridad social y crear una sociedad más igualitaria.“Hoy, hay muchas personas mayores que están trabajando hasta la muerte después de haberse descrestado el lomo durante toda su vida”, dijo durante el debate final de la carrera, prometiendo crear un sistema de pensiones más generoso. “Eso es injusto”.Partidarios de Boric se reunieron en la capital el 16 de diciembre.Marcelo Hernandez/Getty ImagesKast, hijo de inmigrantes alemanes, fue diputado federal de 2002 a 2018. Padre de nueve hijos, se ha opuesto abiertamente al aborto y al matrimonio igualitario. Su perfil nacional se elevó durante las elecciones presidenciales de 2017, cuando obtuvo casi el 8 por ciento de los votos.Kast dijo que la propuesta de expansión del gasto de su contrincante era imprudente y aseguró que lo que Chile necesitaba era un Estado mucho más reducido y eficiente. También advirtió que elegir a su rival profundizaría los disturbios y avivaría la violencia.Kast planteó una advertencia sobre la “pobreza que ha arrastrado a Venezuela, Nicaragua y Cuba”. “Las personas huyen de ahí, porque esa narcodictadura solo trae pobreza y miseria”, dijo.Antonia Vera, una estudiante recién graduada de la secundaria que hizo campaña a favor de Boric, dijo que consideraba que elegirlo era el único medio para convertir en realidad un movimiento de base a favor de una nación más justa y próspera.“Cuando habla de esperanza, habla sobre el futuro a largo plazo y tiene que ver con un movimiento que se empezó a gestar hace muchos años y que explotó en 2019”, dijo.El nuevo presidente tendrá dificultades para llevar a cabo cambios radicales a corto plazo, dijo Claudio Fuentes, profesor de ciencias políticas en la Universidad Diego Portales en Santiago, y señaló que el Congreso entrante está dividido en partes iguales.“Se trata de un escenario donde será más difícil avanzar reformas”, dijo.Ernesto Londoño es el jefe del buró de Brasil, con sede en Río de Janeiro. Anteriormente fue parte del Consejo Editorial del Times y, antes de unirse al diario en 2014, trabajó para The Washington Post. @londonoe • FacebookPascale Bonnefoy More