Elections

A conservative Christian and wealthy businessman, he gave millions to Rick Santorum and Donald Trump in their presidential bids.Foster Friess, a Wyoming businessman who founded an investment firm, made a fortune and gave a lot of it away to Republican presidential candidates and charities, sometimes with flair, died on Thursday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 81.His organization, Foster’s Outriders, which confirmed the death, said he had been receiving care at the Mayo Clinic there for myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder of the blood cells and bone marrow.Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming, who defeated Mr. Friess in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 2018, writing on Twitter, called Mr. Friess “a strong and steady voice for Republican and Christian values.”Mr. Friess’s run for governor was his only try at major elected office. In the political arena he was primarily known for his donations, particularly to the presidential bids of Rick Santorum, the former United States senator from Pennsylvania, in the 2012 and 2016 campaigns. After Mr. Santorum left the 2016 race, Mr. Friess became one of the first Republican megadonors to embrace Donald J. Trump.But to many, the most important support that Mr. Friess, an evangelical Christian, and his wife, Lynnette, provided was to charities. Foster’s Outriders and the Lynn and Foster Friess Family Foundation have provided scholarships, financed work for homeless people, supported water projects in Africa and much more. His organization said Mr. Friess had donated $500 million in his lifetime.His 70th birthday party in 2010 in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he lived much of the year, was the stuff of legend. The website wyofile.com described it.“In the invitations to the party, Friess, a born-again Christian, had asked the guests to identify their favorite charity that reflected the values of his favorite quote from Galatians: ‘Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ,’” it wrote in 2011. “He vowed to give $70,000 to the most worthy nominee.”When the time came to announce the winner, the servers at the Four Seasons Resort, where the party was being held, distributed envelopes to the guests.“Friess asked the lucky winner to stand up and shout, and for the other guests to remain seated,” the account continued. “Then he sat back and waited for the mayhem.”As people opened the envelopes, someone at every table stood and shouted, “I won!” He had funded every request, at a cost of $7.7 million.Mr. Friess thanking supporters in 2018 after conceding the Republican nomination to Gov. Mark Gordon of Wyoming. He had been endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. Alan Rogers/The Casper Star-Tribune, via Associated PressFoster Stephen Friess was born on April 2, 1940, in Rice Lake, Wis. His father, Albert, was a cattle rancher, and his mother, Ethel (Foster) Friess, was a homemaker.“I came from nothing,” he told The New York Times in 2018 during his campaign for governor when asked if he himself might be considered one of the “elites” he was railing against. “My mom dropped out of school in eighth grade to pick cotton and save the family farm. My dad had a high school education.”He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison with a degree in business administration and served in the Army as an intelligence officer for a guided-missile brigade at Fort Bliss in Texas.After working in finance for several years, he founded the investment management firm Friess Associates in 1974 and was soon regarded as a first-rate stock picker. His flagship asset, the Brandywine Fund, swelled to more than $15 billion. He sold a controlling interest in Friess Associates to the Affiliated Managers Group in 2001.On the political side, Mr. Friess did more than support candidates. In 2010, he was a founding investor in The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel’s conservative news and opinion website.In 2012 Mr. Friess supported Mr. Santorum not so much because he agreed with all his policies — “I try to talk him out of them,” he told the broadcaster Lou Dobbs in February 2012 — but because he thought the Republican Party needed a new face.“These old veteran war horses, they have a hard time making it,” he said on “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” “Dole couldn’t make it, McCain couldn’t make it. On the Democratic side, Gore couldn’t make it and Kerry couldn’t make it. So the Democrats bring these fresh faces, they bring Carter from out of nowhere, they bring Clinton from out of nowhere, they bring Obama from beyond nowhere.”Later that month Mr. Friess made headlines when, on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell asked him whether Mr. Santorum’s statements on “the dangers of contraception” would hurt his campaign.“Back in my days,” Mr. Friess said, “they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”Mr. Santorum’s primary campaign started strong but foundered, and Mr. Obama was elected to a second term, defeating Mitt Romney.In the next presidential campaign, Mr. Friess also supported Mr. Santorum initially. In mid-2015, with the Republican field choked with candidates and the nastiness level increasing, he called on the candidates not to “drift off the civility reservation.”In May 2016, with Mr. Santorum out of the race and Mr. Trump having secured the Republican nomination, Mr. Friess threw his support to the Trump cause, though acknowledging that Mr. Trump had advanced by showing the very incivility he had decried — something he expected would change to a more presidential tenor.“Donald’s strategy seems to work,” Mr. Friess told CNN that month, “but I’m convinced he’s going to shift.”Mr. Friess supported Mr. Trump throughout his administration, and when he ran for governor, the Trump family tried to return the favor — the president’s son Donald Jr. endorsed him in an opinion article in The Star Tribune of Casper, Wyo. President Trump himself was quieter, although he did offer a Twitter post late in the campaign endorsing Mr. Friess. Mr. Gordon’s victory was cited by some of as evidence of Mr. Trump’s vulnerability, though others saw it more as a local matter.Three weeks ago, when Darin Smith, a lawyer and businessman who has contended that Mr. Trump “probably” won the 2020 election, announced that he would challenge Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, who has been critical of Mr. Trump, in the 2022 primaries, he said that Mr. Friess would be his campaign chairman.Mr. Friess’s wife of 58 years, Lynnette Estes Friess, survives him, as do their four children, Traci, Stephen, Carrie, and Michael; a brother, Herman; and 15 grandchildren. More

Potential rivals to Ebrahim Raisi, Ayatollah Khamenei’s favored choice, were barred from the June 18 election, and the remaining candidates do not present a serious challenge.Candidates in Iran’s presidential elections have always been strictly vetted, and those deemed insufficiently loyal to the Islamic Revolution were disqualified. Within those limits, contenders held differing views on easing domestic restrictions or dealing with the West, and sometimes the victor was even a surprise.Now even minor differences that give voters some semblance of a choice appear to have been erased.The candidates in the election scheduled for June 18 either espouse deeply conservative positions aligned with those of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or are little known, with no voter base and no chance to win.And one candidate in particular is leading: Ebrahim Raisi, the current judiciary chief, appointed by Mr. Khamenei, who has a long history of involvement in human rights abuses, and who lost in 2013 in a surprise victory by the outgoing president, Hassan Rouhani.With no credible challenger, Mr. Raisi is expected to win this time. Any serious competition has been winnowed from the race. Even some members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, known for their strong hostility to any political dissent, described the election as anti-democratic.The Guardian Council, a 12-person body responsible for approving candidates, disqualified anyone who might shift the vote against Mr. Raisi, who, as a prosecutor and as a judge, has overseen the executions of minors and dissidents.On Thursday, Mr. Khamenei publicly endorsed the Guardian Council’s final decision. He said council members had conducted their duty and called on the public to “not listen to anyone saying it’s useless, don’t go to the election polls, we won’t go.”Ebrahim Raisi, the current judiciary chief, is expected to win the race.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesThe council’s decision and Mr. Khamenei’s endorsement of it have rattled political circles. The reformist party announced for the first time that it has no candidate in the race.Analysts say Mr. Raisi’s presidency would finalize a plan years in the making for conservatives to consolidate power, take over all branches of the government, marginalize any reform faction and severely restrict the internal power fights within the Islamic Republic.“Today we are witnessing an unabashed attack on any semblance of republican principles in favor of the absolute power of the supreme leader,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University.The appearance of an engineered victory for Mr. Raisi, 60, has prompted louder and wider calls for an election boycott and increased voter apathy among ordinary Iranians. Polls predict a low turnout. The most recent survey conducted this week by the Student Polling Agency, ISPA, showed only 37 percent of voters want to cast ballots.With Mr. Khamenei’s allies already in control of the Parliament and judiciary, the takeover of the presidency could reshape the current negotiations on how to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.President Donald Trump renounced the pact three years ago, in what he called a “maximum pressure” campaign to squeeze more concessions from Iran, but his policy appears to have only strengthened the hard-liners.President Biden wants to seek a wider agreement with Iran that would constrain not only its nuclear program, but also its missile development and its involvement in conflicts around the region. But Mr. Raisi and his faction oppose making concessions to the West.What particularly astonished political circles in Iran was the Guardian Council’s disqualification of prominent political figures such as Ali Larijani, a centrist conservative and former speaker of the Parliament, and the current vice president, Eshaq Jahangiri, considered a reformist most closely aligned with Mr. Rouhani.Centrist conservative Ali Larijani, center, registering in Tehran.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesMr. Larijani belongs to a very prominent political family, and was appointed by Mr. Khamenei to lead negotiations for a 25-year economic deal between Iran and China. Mr. Larijani was seen as a candidate who could attract reformist votes.While a former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a former government minister, Mostafa Tajzadeh, the leading reformist candidate, were also disqualified, their removal from the race came as little surprise. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was once considered close to Mr. Khamenei, has increasingly taken the posture of an eccentric opposition figure. Mr. Tajzadeh, who was imprisoned for several years for his political activism, had called for a revision of the Constitution.“This is an election coup,” Mr. Tajzadeh said on Wednesday in a virtual town hall he hosted on the Clubhouse communal chat site, attended by at least 12,000 Iranians. “We must all speak up and say people will not accept the legitimacy of the result. People will not participate in this theater.”Mr. Ahmadinejad has also said he will not vote and has denounced the Guardian Council. “Why don’t you just take out the Republic altogether and say this regime is all ours and nobody has the right to even protest?” said Mr. Ahmadinejad in a live Instagram talk he hosted on Wednesday with an audience of thousands.Even Mr. Raisi voiced some concern and said that he had lobbied with the Guardian Council to reinstate some of the candidates so that elections would be more competitive.Officials registering presidential candidates in Tehran.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesThe council has not made public its reasons for disqualifying candidates and has only said that it approved those deemed suitable to lead the country in the current circumstances.In early May the council announced new eligibility requirements to narrow the race, excluding anyone who holds dual citizenship, is younger than 40 or older than 75, has a detention record or lacks governing experience.Kian Abdullahi, the editor in chief of the Tasnim News Agency, affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards, criticized the Council’s final list of candidates on Twitter, a striking note of discord from a group that has long symbolized Iran’s power base.He said candidates must be acceptable to the public and that “the people must decide.”Elections in the Islamic Republic have never been considered democratic by Western definition. Government opponents cannot run, and the process of vetting candidates and counting ballots is not transparent. In 2009, the election result was widely seen as rigged and led to months of anti-government unrest.But even so, in elections past candidates representing different factions and policies were on the ballot, and the victor was not a foregone conclusion — rivals campaigned and competed vigorously. The public was engaged. Celebrities and pop stars were even enlisted to endorse contenders.The months leading to presidential elections in Iran typically brought a party-like atmosphere to cities where young people rallied in the streets at night carrying posters, chanting slogans and waving flags of their favorite candidate. The security apparatus tolerated these fleeting moments of open civic discourse, partly because they gave the appearance of a population that endorsed the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy and participated in its elections.Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressing supporters in Tehran in May. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was disqualified from running again, said he would not vote and slammed the Guardian Council.Arash Khamooshi for The New York TimesThis time around, election fever appears extremely subdued — partly because of the pandemic but also from an underlying apathy. Tehran and most cities are quiet, campaign posters are scarce and rallies and town halls are held online. Iranians have struggled through a year of pandemic mismanagement, slow vaccine enrollment, a collapsing economy and social oppression.“I don’t know anyone around me who is voting,” said Aliyar, a 44-year-old engineer who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retribution. “Because it has proved over and over to us that nothing will change with us voting. It’s hopeless.”Besides Mr. Raisi, the other candidates are Mohsen Rezaee, former commander in chief of the Revolutionary Guards; Abdolnasser Hemmati, the governor of Iran’s central bank; Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former governor of Isfahan Province; Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, a hard-line lawmaker; Alireza Zakani, a former hard-line lawmaker; and Saeed Jalili, a hard-line conservative and former nuclear negotiator.Mr. Raisi, Mr. Rezaee and Mr. Jalili have run unsuccessfully for the presidency before. The other candidates are not widely known.Abdullah Momeni, a Tehran-based political activist aligned with the reform faction, said the final list showed that the hard-line conservatives had strengthened power.The Islamic Republic, he said, had “displayed a total disregard for public opinion and it’s doing it without paying any cost and crushing all potential chances of dissent.” More

A federal judge in Manhattan on Friday ordered the appointment of a so-called special master to review whether materials seized from Rudolph W. Giuliani’s apartment and office during an F.B.I. search in April are protected by attorney-client privilege.The searches were part of a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Giuliani broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine before the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani was President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer at the time.Mr. Giuliani was seeking to uncover damaging information on President Biden, then a leading presidential candidate. The authorities are examining whether Mr. Giuliani was also lobbying the Trump administration on behalf of Ukrainian officials who were assisting him in his dirt-digging mission, The New York Times has reported.Mr. Giuliani has not been accused of any wrongdoing. He has said he never lobbied on behalf of the Ukrainians.The judge, J. Paul Oetken of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said the appointment of the special master — usually a retired judge or magistrate — was “warranted here to ensure the perception of fairness.”The special master would conduct a review to determine whether any of the material seized from Mr. Giuliani’s cellphones and computers was potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and should be made off-limits to prosecutors.In response to the ruling, one of Mr. Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert J. Costello, said, “We knew that a special master was inevitable, which is why we did not oppose it, so this ruling comes as no surprise to us.”The U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had sought the appointment of the special master, declined to comment.Judge Oetken also denied Mr. Giuliani’s request for copies of the confidential government documents detailing the basis for the warrants issued in support of the searches in April, and an earlier search of Mr. Giuliani’s iCloud account. Typically, such records are only made available to defendants after they are indicted and before a trial.Mr. Giuliani was “not entitled to a preview of the government’s evidence in an ongoing investigation before he has been charged with a crime,” the judge said.Judge Oetken asked that the parties submit to the court proposed candidates for special master by next Friday.Ben Protess More

Senate Republicans have blocked the creation of a special commission to study the deadly 6 January attack on the Capitol, dashing hopes for a bipartisan panel amid a Republican push to put the violent insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters behind them.Republicans killed the effort to set up a 9/11-style inquiry into the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob despite broad popular support for such an investigation and pleas from the family of a Capitol police officer who collapsed and died after the siege and other officers who battled the rioters.In a procedural vote in the Senate on Friday, six Republican senators broke ranks to back the commission, which was more than expected, but four fewer than the 10 needed to overcome a filibuster and for it to advance.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned Republican colleagues for blocking a bipartisan commission. “Shame on the Republican party for trying to sweep the horrors of that day under the rug because they’re afraid of Donald Trump,” Schumer said in a Senate floor speech immediately after the vote.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, argued the vote on the commission bill brought “shame” to the Senate and would make the country less safe. She indicated that House committees, which are under Democratic leadership, would continue to investigate the attack. “Democrats will proceed to find the truth,” Pelosi said.The insurrection was the worst attack on the Capitol in 200 years and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s win over Trump.But the Republican party remains firmly in the grip of Trump who had made his opposition to the commission very clear. Observers believe that senior party figures do not want to anger the former president or his legion of supporters and may also fear what the commission might uncover in terms of links between some of the rioters and Republican lawmakers.Though the commission bill passed the House earlier this month with the support of almost three dozen Republicans, Republican senators said they believe the commission would eventually be used against them politically.Trump has called it a “Democrat trap”.While initially saying he was open to the idea of the commission, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, turned firmly against it in recent days. He has said he believes the panel’s investigation would be partisan despite the even split among party members. McConnell, who once said Trump was responsible for provoking the mob attack on the Capitol, said of Democrats: “They’d like to continue to litigate the former president, into the future.”The Republican opposition to the bipartisan panel has revived Democratic pressure to do away with the filibuster, a time-honored Senate tradition that requires a vote by 60 of the 100 senators to cut off debate and advance a bill.With the Senate evenly split 50-50, Democrats needed the support of 10 Republicans to move to the commission bill, because Republicans invoked the filibuster. The episode has sparked fresh debate over whether the time has come to change the rules and lower the threshold to 51 votes to take up legislation.On Friday, the Democrats only got 54 votes by the time the vote was gaveled out.Friday’s vote marked Senate Republicans’ first official use of the filibuster to defeat a bill, and Schumer said he hoped this was not the beginning of a trend of Republicans blocking “reasonable, commonsense legislation”.The six Republicans who voted for the commission to proceed were Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rob Portman of Ohio.A spokesperson for the Republican senator Pat Toomey told HuffPost that he was not in Washington for the commission bill vote because of a family obligation However, the spokesperson said, Toomey would have voted in favor of starting debate on the bill.Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter: “If Senate Republicans can block an independent commission investigating a deadly armed attack on the Capitol because it might hurt their poll numbers with insurrectionists, then something is badly wrong with the Senate. We must get rid of the filibuster to protect our democracy.”The Republicans’ political arguments over the violent siege – which is still raw for many in the Capitol, almost five months later – have frustrated not only Democrats but also those who fought off the rioters.Michael Fanone, a Metropolitan police department officer who responded to the attack, said between meetings with Republican senators that a commission is “necessary for us to heal as a nation from the trauma that we all experienced that day”. Fanone has described being dragged down the Capitol steps by rioters who shocked him with a stun gun and beat him. “So I don’t understand why they would resist getting to the bottom of what happened that day and fully understanding how to prevent it. Just boggles my mind,” she said. Video of the rioting shows two men spraying Sicknick and another officer with a chemical, but the Washington medical examiner said he suffered a stroke and died from natural causes. More

Some candidates for Manhattan’s district attorney are agents of change who want to cut the police budget. Others are very comfortable with long-established established power networks.During its 20 year run, “Law & Order” cast five different actors in the role of Manhattan district attorney, a rate of turnover that feels like science fiction given that, in reality, four people have been elected to the office in 83 years. For the past 46 of them, the position, one of the most important prosecutorial posts in the country, has been held by two people, each an aristocrat born to a political dynasty: First, Robert M. Morgenthau, son of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as treasury secretary under two presidents (and who was himself the son of the United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire); and since 2010, Cy Vance, son of the former secretary of state for whom he is named.In three weeks, Manhattanites will have the opportunity to vote for someone new at a pivotal moment in the history of race and social reform, during a period when leading prosecutors around the country — in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston — have been on the vanguard of the movement to reduce incarceration. The stakes would suggest a certain amount of heat, but engagement with the election has been strikingly low. In a recent poll of likely Democratic voters living in Manhattan, 44 percent said that they did not know whom they would vote for among the eight available D.A. candidates.The contender who has received the most attention is the one who has spent the most money to get it. Tali Farhadian Weinstein, a highly qualified prosecutor, leads the field in two areas: financing, having raised close to $4.5 million, an astonishing sum for a race of this kind, and the elite credentials that often make that possible. A graduate of Yale and Yale Law School, a Rhodes scholar who clerked for Merrick B. Garland and Sandra Day O’Connor, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has been, among other things, a chief adviser to Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney known for his reform work around bail, juvenile justice and diverting low-level drug offenders from the prison system.With the exception of Elizabeth Crotty, who is running a campaign so traditionally focused on public safety that police unions can’t stop endorsing her, everyone else has produced a platform that lands somewhere along the spectrum of a contemporary progressive mandate. (There is a single Republican candidate, Thomas Kenniff, but Manhattan has not elected a Republican D.A. since Thomas E. Dewey in 1937.)The issue with Ms. Farhadian Weinstein is not that she lacks the sensitivities this particular moment is calling for; rather, she offers no break in the long and dubious tradition of handing the office over to those who live at the top of an intricately knit network of wealth and power, far from the ordinary realities.The wife of hedge-fund manager Boaz Weinstein, with whom she bought a $25.5 million Fifth Avenue apartment formerly belonging to the copper heiress Huguette Clark, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised tens of thousands of dollars from her husband’s friends and colleagues on Wall Street. (Among them is the billionaire Ken Griffin, who built his own stunning relationship to New York real estate when he bought a condominium on Central Park South for $238 million, at the time the most expensive home ever sold in the United States.)Throughout her campaign, Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has argued that none of these connections would impede her judgment, that she would prosecute financial crime fearlessly. When asked in a debate earlier this month about whether she would recuse herself from prosecuting cases involving donors to her campaign, she said that she would not. But what about all the other potential conflicts — and appearances of conflict — that could arise from her position as the spouse of a famous and hugely successful investor? When you elect a gifted lawyer to run an influential office, the hope is that she’ll be available, game in hand, to advise on the biggest and most sensational cases.The chief criticism of the Vance era is that his office kowtowed to the moneyed class over and over. It laid bare the danger that comes from intimacy with the opposition and revealed the high costs of recusal. A decade ago, for instance, when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in a Midtown hotel, he retained the counsel of Marc Agnifilo. As it happened, the lawyer was married to someone high up in Mr. Vance’s office — the chief of the trial division, who ordinarily would have supervised the case.Given that Karen Friedman Agnifilo had a lot of experience in sex crimes, her involvement would have been invaluable. Instead she was forced to tuck herself away. Eventually the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn were dismissed under a case that famously collapsed. During the preceding 18 months, the Agnifilos had found themselves in similarly entangled situations two dozen times.In his acclaimed 2017 book, “The Chickenshit Club,” the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jesse Eisinger begins with the question of how it came to pass that virtually no one was prosecuted in regard to the 2008 financial crisis. He determines that a growing sense of coziness and collusion between the business and legal professions, emergent since the beginning of the current century, have limited both the ability and commitment of prosecutors to tackle corporations and the people who run them. Several years ago, Eric Holder, who has endorsed Ms. Farhadian Weinstein (she worked for him in the Obama Justice Department), briefly embraced the idea that certain banks are “too big to jail.”Tahanie Aboushi, a civil rights lawyer who is essentially a dismantlist, sits at a very different end of the continuum. She is in favor of cutting the budget of the police department by 50 percent, and her antipathy to incarceration extends to a refusal to prosecute a long list of offenses, including harassment in the second degree, which, as Ms. Farhadian Weinstein astutely pointed out in the most recent debate, would include shoving a person on a subway platform out of bias.Even the Five Boro Defenders, a group of lawyers and social justice advocates deeply sympathetic to Ms. Aboushi’s worldview, pointed out in their voting guide that they found it “concerning” that “she frequently lacked a clear understanding or vision” for accomplishing her objectives. Some opposed to Ms. Aboushi’s approach resent her inclusion in a race that they worry could detract from the other leading progressive, Alvin Bragg, the only Black candidate in the field. Nonetheless, Ms. Aboushi has the support of the influential Working Families Party.A native of Harlem, the son of a math teacher and a father who worked in social welfare, Mr. Bragg has a long and impressive résumé, having served as a federal prosecutor under Preet Bharara (who has endorsed him) and in various top positions in the state attorney general’s office. There he oversaw an investigation into the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program and found that only one-tenth of 1 percent of stops, over a period of three years, resulted in convictions for a violent crime. He also worked to repeal 50-a, the law that shielded the misbehaviors of the police from the public for so long.“The thing about Alvin is that you don’t have to worry about his sincerity as a reformer,” Zephyr Teachout, the legal scholar who challenged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo from the left in the Democratic primary six years ago. “He has done the work.”Whoever becomes the next D.A. will inherit the case against the Trump Organization and all the major legacy potential that comes along with it. In the eyes of many New Yorkers, Manhattan’s next district attorney will either be the one to finally bring Donald Trump to account — or be remembered as the one who failed to do so. For the moment at least, there is no evidence that anyone running would need to back away from the challenge of that. More

The competition for the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City is wide open. It’s the kind of race that ranked-choice voting is meant to help, by letting voters support their top choice without forfeiting the opportunity to weigh in on the most viable candidates.It’s also the kind of race that might test one of the major risks of ranked-choice voting: a phenomenon known as ballot exhaustion. A ballot is said to be “exhausted” when every candidate ranked by a voter has been eliminated and that ballot thus no longer factors into the election.With so many viable candidates and most New Yorkers using ranked choice for the first time, all of the ingredients are in place for a large number of exhausted ballots. If the race is close enough, it’s a factor that could even decide the election.That possibility doesn’t necessarily mean that New Yorkers are worse off with ranked-choice voting. But the risk of ballot exhaustion is an underappreciated reason that ranked-choice voting doesn’t always realize its purported advantages.Ranked-choice voting has been implemented by cities and other local governments in eight states, and statewide in Maine. It will be used in the New York mayoral race for the first time this year, allowing voters to rank up to five candidates in their order of preference.If no candidate receives a majority of first preference votes, the race is decided by an instant runoff: The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and the votes of those who preferred the eliminated candidate will be transferred to those voters’ second choices. The process continues until one candidate wins a majority of the remaining ballots.But such a system is complicated. It asks voters to make many more decisions than they would usually need to make, with a new and unusual set of rules. As a result, many won’t rank the maximum number of candidates. It creates the possibility that the election outcome might be different if every voter had filled out a full ballot. A recent Manhattan Institute/Public Opinion Strategies surveys showed signs that ballot exhaustion might play a significant role in New York’s mayoral election. The poll, which asked voters to complete the full ranked-choice ballot, found Eric Adams leading Andrew Yang in a simulated instant runoff, 52 percent to 48 percent. Lurking behind the top-line results was a group comprising 23 percent of respondents who had ranked some candidates but had not ranked either Mr. Yang or Mr. Adams. If those voters had preferred Mr. Yang, the outcome of the poll might have been different.A 23 percent ballot exhaustion rate would be quite high, but it would not be without precedent. In the 2011 San Francisco mayoral race, 27 percent of ballots did not rank either of the two candidates who reached the final round. And on average, 12 percent of ballots were exhausted in the three ranked-choice special elections for City Council held this year in New York City.Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia campaigned in Queens last month.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesEven a smaller percentage of exhausted ballots can be decisive in a close race. One analogous case is the special mayoral election in San Francisco in 2018, when London Breed narrowly prevailed by one percentage point. In that race, 9 percent of ballots didn’t rank either Ms. Breed or the runner-up, Mark Leno.It is impossible to know for sure, but there are plausible reasons to believe that Mr. Leno would have won the election if every voter had ranked one of the two final candidates. Mr. Leno, for example, won transferred votes — those cast by voters who had not selected either Ms. Breed or Mr. Leno as their first choice — by a margin of 69 percent to 31 percent; he would have won if the exhausted ballots had expressed a similar preference.The large number of exhausted ballots in ranked-choice elections might be a bit of a surprise, given that the format is supposed to ensure that voters don’t waste their ballots by supporting nonviable candidates. In the archetypal case, ranked choice might allow voters to support a minor-party candidate, like Ralph Nader, without any risk of endangering their preferred major-party candidate, whom they could safely rank second.But voters won’t always have the same clarity about which candidates will make the final round of voting as would have had in the 2000 presidential election, when Mr. Nader finished third as the Green Party candidate with almost three million votes. Even without ranked-choice voting, primary elections often feature fluid, multicandidate fields in which clear favorites are not nearly as obvious as a Democrat versus a Republican in the general election.For good measure, ranked-choice voting tends to expand the number of options available to voters, clouding what might have otherwise been a relatively clear final choice. Interest groups and ideological factions have less incentive to coalesce behind a single candidate in a ranked-choice election, since they know their voters can still consolidate behind a single candidate on Election Day.Partly as a result, the number of exhausted ballots tends to be highest in wide-open races, in which voters have the least clarity about the likely final matchup.In the three special elections for New York City Council seats in which ranked choice has been used, the numbers of exhausted ballots were higher in races without a strong candidate on the first ballot. When the leading candidate had just 28 percent of the vote on the first ballot in the 15th District, for instance, 18 percent of voters had not ranked one of the top two candidates..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In the mayoral primary, New York City Democrats today can’t be sure about the likely final matchup. There are currently 13 Democratic candidates in the race, at least five of whom can be considered as in the top tier. Andrew Yang, the leading candidate in the polls for most of the year, has been sliding in recent surveys; others, like Kathryn Garcia, appear to be on the rise. With so much uncertainty, even political junkies may not be entirely sure whether their ballot will have an impact in the final round.Eric Adams greeted supporters in Queens this month.Ahmed Gaber for The New York TimesVoters who are not political junkies have a very different kind of challenge. Ranked-choice voting is demanding. It requires voters to reach informed judgments about many more candidates than they would otherwise. Less informed voters may be less likely to reach such judgments and may therefore be less likely to rank the maximum number of candidates, increasing the possibility that they do not list one of the final two candidates on the ballot.Other voters may not fully understand how ranked choice works. In an NY1/Ipsos poll in April, only 53 percent of likely voters said they were very familiar with ranked choice, and 28 percent said they weren’t comfortable using it.According to a 2004 study by the Public Research Institute, only 36 percent of San Francisco voters who did not entirely understand ranked choice ranked the maximum number of candidates in the 2004 mayoral race, compared with 63 percent of those who said they understood it at least fairly well.To fully take advantage of ranked choice, voters need to know something that often goes unstated: It works through the instant runoff. This might seem obvious, but it’s not mentioned on the ballot, it’s not mentioned in the instructional material that was sent by the city (and received at my address), and it’s not emphasized on the city’s election website. There’s not even an explanation for why candidates are being ranked.Without any explanation of how their ballots translate to electoral outcomes, voters might not understand why it’s in their interest to rank the maximum number of candidates. More

Good morning.Senate Republicans are expected to stymie the Democrats’ efforts on Friday to set up a bipartisan, 9/11-style investigative commission into the 6 January Capitol attack.Debate on legislation to form the commission was set to begin late on Thursday, but work on another bill pushed consideration to Friday after the Senate adjourned at 3am. Friday is set to be another long day, with the Republicans expected to filibuster the House-approved commission.
If successful, “Filibuster Friday” will be the first filibuster in the Biden presidency to halt Senate legislative action, with the Senate evenly split 50-50 and a filibuster requiring a vote of 60 to cut off debate.
Today’s vote comes as a Guardian analysis found that at least 70% of people charged over the 6 January attack had been released as they wait for trial, in stark contrast to the 25% of federal defendants who are typically released before their trial.
Legal experts believe the disparity indicates a likelihood that many of the alleged rioters may not serve any prison time at all, even if they are convicted or plead guilty.
US investigating if Ukraine interfered in 2020 electionFederal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether Ukrainian officials attempted to undermine Joe Biden and help Donald Trump win the 2020 presidential election, according to a report from the New York Times.Part of the investigation includes looking into whether the officials used Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to spread misleading claims about Biden.Arizona preparing to start killing death row inmates againArizona has “refurbished” its gas chamber after 22 years of disuse as the state prepares to restart executions.The move comes seven years after the botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014, and after the Guardian revealed last month that Arizona had spent $1.5m on a batch of pentobarbital, a sedative which it intends to use as its main lethal injection.10 dead in mass shooting in San Jose, CaliforniaMore details have emerged about the shooting at a San Jose rail yard this week that left 10 people dead, including the shooter.
Authorities have identified the victims as bus and light rail operators, mechanics, linemen and an assistant superintendent: Paul Delacruz Megia, 42; Taptejdeep Singh, 36; Adrian Balleza, 29; Jose Dejesus Hernandez III, 35; Timothy Michael Romo, 49; Michael Joseph Rudometkin, 40; Abdolvahab Alaghmandan, 63, and Lars Kepler Lane, 63. A ninth victim, Alex Ward Fritch, 49, was transported to a local hospital in critical condition and died on Wednesday evening, the coroner’s office said.
The county sheriff has identified the shooter as a longtime maintenance worker at the facility. The shooter’s ex-wife said he had talked about killing people at work more than a decade ago.
In other news…
Three Washington state police officers charged in killing of Manuel Ellis: Moments before his death, the 33-year-old Black father of two called out: “I can’t breathe.” The charges filed against three Tacoma police officers mark the first time first time the state attorney general’s office has filed criminal charges against police officers for unlawful use of deadly force.
California launches a $1.5m Covid vaccine lottery, becoming the latest state to incentivize people to get vaccinated with the country’s largest single prize draw.
Whistleblower known to speak out about UFOs claims Pentagon tried to discredit him: Luis Elizondo, who headed the Pentagon’s now-defunct Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, lodged a complaint with the defense department’s inspector general alleging that his former agency threatened to tell people he was crazy.
Vaccination rate patterns in Wisconsin reflect those nationwide in that they vary widely between rural and urban areas and political, religious and racial groups.
The Biden administration is facing criticism for backing a Trump-era oil drilling project in Alaska.
Texas Democratic lawmakers killed a transphobic bill intended for student athletes by stalling until it passed its deadline.
Bill Cosby’s parole petition was denied after he refused therapy for sex offenders.
Stat of the day: 89% of new tobacco smokers are addicted by the age of 25The number of smokers worldwide has reached an all-time high of 1.1 billion, with 8 million killed in 2019, according to a new study.Don’t miss this: a conversation about American colonialism and sovereigntyJacqueline Keeler, founder of the #notyourmascot hashtag that highlighted the way sports teams use Native American mascots to perpetuate racist caricatures, spoke to the Guardian about her new book, Standoff, which explores the differences between two recent attempts to assert sovereignty on American soil: the Bundy clan’s far-right interpretation of Oregon’s constitution, and the Standing Rock Sioux protest over the Dakota Access pipeline.Last Thing: A glass case of emotionAmazon was torn apart on the internet on Thursday after sharing a video of “AmaZen”, a booth installed in an Amazon warehouse for employees to go focus on their mental health. “I feel like liveable wages and working conditions are better than a mobile Despair Closet,” writer Talia Levin tweeted.Sign upSign up for the US morning briefingFirst Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you’re not already signed up, subscribe now.Get in TouchIf you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email [email protected] More

At least 70% of people charged in the Capitol riot have been released as they wait for trial, according to a Guardian analysis.That high pretrial release rate stands in stark contrast with the usual detention rates in the federal system, where only 25% of defendants nationwide are typically released before their trial.Eric Munchel, known as “Zip Tie Guy”, who was allegedly photographed wearing tactical gear and carrying wrist restraints in the Senate chamber, was released in late March, along with his mother, after an appeals court questioned whether he posed any danger outside the specific context of 6 January.Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man photographed with his foot on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, was released in late April, nearly two months after screaming during a court hearing that “it’s not fair” that he was still in custody when “everybody else who did things much worse are already home”.Multiple alleged members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two groups facing the most serious conspiracy charges related to their alleged plans for violence, have been released before trial, though some prominent leaders in these groups remain in custody.The disparity in pretrial detention rates highlights what legal experts said was a broader development in the 6 January cases: the likelihood that a substantial swathe of the alleged rioters may not serve any prison time at all, even if they are convicted or plead guilty.Many Capitol defendants are being released ahead of trial because they are facing relatively low-level charges, experts said, though other factors, including racial bias, may also play a role.“I’m both surprised and not surprised. Most of these people are white,” said Erica Zunkel, associate director of the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “The majority of people in the federal system are people of color.”The US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which is prosecuting the cases, said in a statement that the alleged Capitol rioters were facing very different kinds of charges than most people in the federal system.“Comparing the per cent of January 6 defendants detained with the overall federal average is comparing apples and oranges,” a spokesperson for the office said. “The majority of federal defendants are charged with immigration or drug crimes, both of which are typically accompanied by detention. The January 6 defendants are charged with a variety of obstruction, assault, and trespassing charges. The comparison makes no sense.”Zunkel, a former federal defense attorney, argued that it was absolutely fair to ask why prosecutors and judges were making different detention decisions for drug and immigration cases than for the people charged with participating in the 6 January attack, who are more than 90% white.More than 96% of the people charged with federal immigration crimes are Hispanic, and more than 70% of those charged with federal drug crimes are Hispanic and Black, Zunkel said, citing federal sentencing data.“We have a problem with our system, something has gone wildly wrong, if we have a 75% detention rate nationwide, and we have a subset where we have a more than 70% release rate,” she said.Zunkel and a colleague, Judith P Miller, both former federal defense attorneys, said that the level of skepticism and care federal judges were bringing to the decision of whether Capitol defendants were truly dangerous enough to keep incarcerated was not at all the norm.The problem, they said, was not that judges were making the wrong call in releasing Capitol defendants, but that judges were not making similar calls for the majority of people in the federal system.“For my Black and brown clients, it feels like they have to meet such an impossibly high threshold to be released,” Miller, a University of Chicago law professor, said. “The kind of sensitivity the courts have shown to the capitol defendants’ claims for relief – I wish some of that sensitivity would be shown more broadly.”The US attorney’s office for the District of Columbia declined to confirm how many Capitol defendants were currently in pretrial detention, noting that the number “has the potential to fluctuate frequently based on ongoing detention decisions”.By mid-May, at least 440 people had been arrested on charges related to the 6 January Capitol breach, according to the justice department, including at least 125 charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.Of 398 defendants listed on the justice department’s Capitol breach case site as of 10 May, at least 330 were listed on the site, or in federal court records, as released from custody. At least 56 of those defendants remained in detention.The precise number and percentage of Capitol defendants who are released versus in detention changes often, as new alleged rioters are arrested, others secure release, and a few risk re-arrest for violating the conditions of their release. The number and status of cases on the justice department’s Capitol breach website also lags behind court filings.But the broader trend in the cases is clear: the overwhelming majority of Capitol defendants are not being detained ahead of trial.Based on their likelihood of flight risk or danger to their communities, some of the Capitol defendants have been required to meet more intensive release conditions, including GPS monitoring, curfews or home detention, and limitations on their access to the Internet or social media, according to court records.Many of the Capitol defendants are facing only relatively low-level federal charges, such as entering a restricted building or disorderly conduct within a restricted building. A Washington Post analysis of court documents in mid-May concluded that 44% of the Capitol defendants faced only misdemeanor charges.Some of the federal judges hearing the Capitol cases have expressed concern that certain defendants may have already spent more time in custody than they are likely to face as a punishment for their crimes.“For those who end up only charged with misdemeanors, it’s likely that they won’t serve any substantial time, or potentially no time at all,” said Mary McCord, an expert on extremism who served for nearly 20 years as a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Washington DC. “It’s quite possible if they were to plead guilty, they would be sentenced to whatever time was served, or 30 days.”There is a tension between the dramatic collective effect of the 6 January mob, which halted the official certification of Biden’s election as president and threatened the legitimacy of American democracy, legal experts said, and what federal prosecutors can prove that individual people did.“The irony is that we have so many laws – so many things are illegal – it’s somewhat surprising that they’re not able to find charges that are more serious,” Zunkel said.Some more serious potential charges, like conspiracy or seditious conspiracy, would require evidence of prior agreement to commit a crime that appears to be lacking for many participants in the chaotic Capitol mob, said Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor.“When you look at each individual, what they did might amount to destruction of property or illegal entry, and that’s in all likelihood what they’ll be charged with, but the larger dimension of their participation in a massive attack falls by the wayside,” Richman said.Part of the current dynamic of the Capitol cases, Richman cautioned, was seeing the very normal limitations of the criminal justice system come up against the heightened expectations of a public who watched the shocking violence of 6 January unfold in real time.“Criminal prosecutions never end in these glorious accountability moments where everyone is satisfied that right was done,” Richman said.For many Capitol defendants facing these lower-level charges, justice department prosecutors did not even attempt to keep them detained ahead of trial, and they were quickly released on standard conditions.Federal prosecutors did fight for months to keep other defendants in custody, with federal judges eventually overruling them, particularly after the pivotal appeals court ruling questioning the detention of Munchel, the alleged “Zip Tie Guy”, and his mother, who both gave interviews talking about their willingness to engage in violence to further their beliefs but were not accused of any specific acts of violence or vandalism as they roamed the Capitol, wrist restraints in hand.“My guess is the judges who decided to release some of these folks on bond were thinking: on January 6, there were an ideal storm of conditions for these people to commit a crime, and now there aren’t those ideal conditions any more, so they’re not likely to do it again,” said Wanda Bertram, a communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit that focuses on the harms of mass incarceration.But the same logic could be applied to low-level crimes: “investing in people’s communities” to “create different conditions” that would make it unlikely for them to repeat the same behavior, Bertram said.“The treatment of the people who are involved in the Capitol riot should show us what is possible and what is logical in terms of how to treat people in the future.”Former prosecutors defended the justice department’s work in the Capitol cases, and said that the continuing effort to identify and arrest a large proportion of the hundreds of people who stormed the Capitol was a massive, demanding endeavor, and showed how much the government wanted to ensure that there were real consequences for participating in the attack.“They’ve been aggressive, and continue to be, in trying to find everybody who was at that riot,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School. “For the attorney general, numbers matter. It really matters that hundreds of people are held responsible. That’s the message to people: you don’t want to game the system.”“I think they pretty much want on everyone’s records that they were responsible for these actions,” Levenson added. “It means something that these people are going to walk away with even a federal misdemeanor record. That has an impact on their employment, on their life, on their situation in their community. Even if they just get probation, they’re going to have to watch their step.” More