Elections

Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas, the main opposition candidate in the Republic of Congo, gave his final speech from his hospital bed, urging his fellow citizens to vote to expel an entrenched government.DAKAR, Senegal — The opposition leader was too sick to make it to his final appointments before Sunday’s election.“I am fighting death,” he said in a weak voice on Friday, removing an oxygen mask from his face to film a message addressed to the citizens of the Republic of Congo. “But I ask you to stand up and vote for change.”Three days later, hours after the election, he was dead. He had tested positive for Covid-19.The candidate, Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas, was trying to unseat President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who has been in power for 36 years. But on Friday, Mr. Kolélas fell ill.As voters went to the polls on Sunday, Mr. Kolélas was evacuated by air to France for treatment. But he died on the plane on his way there, his campaign director said Monday morning at a meeting of Mr. Kolélas’s political party in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital.Mr. Kolélas urged supporters to vote last week.Reuters TVFew observers expected Mr. Kolélas to win the election. But his death is nevertheless a blow for a Central African country mired in an economic crisis. The country has reported 9,564 coronavirus cases so far, and has been averaging about 34 new cases a day lately, according to a New York Times database. As in many countries, this is likely an underestimate because testing levels are low.A number of prominent African politicians have died in the past year. Some, like the Nigerian president’s right-hand man Abba Kyari and the South African cabinet minister Jackson Mphikwa Mthembu, are known to have died of Covid-19 complications. Official announcements for some others, like President John Magufuli of Tanzania and President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi, have said they died of heart problems, though rumors have swirled that the coronavirus played a role in their deaths.In the video recorded from his hospital bed, Mr. Kolélas told Congolese voters that they owed it to their children to cast a ballot in the election.“Fight. I will not have fought in vain,” he said in the video. “Rise up as one people. Make me happy. I’m fighting on my deathbed. You, too, fight for your change.”The son of a former prime minister who also spent many years in opposition, Mr. Kolélas served as a minister under Mr. Nguesso for six years. But in the run-up to this year’s election, he said that the Republic of Congo had become a “police state.”The internet was blocked across the country on Election Day, according to the monitoring organization Netblocks. Otherwise, the election seemed to go ahead without incident. Election results are expected later this week.“Democracy is working in our country,” Mr. Nguesso said Monday.A former military officer, Mr. Nguesso first came to power in 1977, after his predecessor was assassinated. He lost the country’s first multiparty election in 1992, but returned to power in 1997. In 2019 the nonprofit campaigning group Global Witness accused his son of stealing $50 million in state funds.Almost half the population lives in poverty in the Republic of Congo, which is one of the main oil producers on the African continent. More

By supporting a challenger to Georgia’s current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, the former president signaled that he wants Republicans who opposed his election falsehoods to pay politically.Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday took aim at a Georgia official he considers one of his biggest enemies: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the state’s election results last year.By endorsing Jody Hice, a Republican congressman, in his bid to unseat Mr. Raffensperger, the former president made his most prominent effort yet to try to punish elected officials who he believes have crossed him. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is among the top targets for Mr. Trump, along with the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.Mr. Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials certified President Biden’s victory after conducting several recounts. They have said the results were fair and accurate, dismissing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.In a statement issued shortly after Mr. Hice announced his candidacy for the position on Monday, Mr. Trump praised him as “one of our most outstanding congressmen,” and alluded to his own baseless claims of voter fraud, which he has said deprived him of victory in the state. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said. “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”The race in Georgia for secretary of state — until the 2020 election a relatively low-profile job across the country — carries outsize implications in the battleground state, with Republicans there working to roll back voting rights and Democrats fighting those efforts.Should Mr. Hice beat Mr. Raffensperger in the Republican primary, his nomination could energize Democrats who are alarmed by the prospect of elections in the state being run by a Trump loyalist. No date for the primary has been set yet.Mr. Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, stretching south and east from Atlanta, in January condemned the second House impeachment of Mr. Trump as “misguided” and aimed at “scoring cheap political points.” In the weeks after the November election, he supported Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, including a challenge before the Supreme Court that sought to overturn the results in states Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hice also served in the House Freedom Caucus with former Representative Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s fourth and last chief of staff. Mr. Meadows was integral in Mr. Trump’s efforts to recruit Mr. Hice, two Republicans briefed on the discussions said.As he seeks to retain control of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is determined to remain a kingmaker for down-ballot elections, while seeking retribution against those he perceives as having betrayed him.So far, he has endorsed only one other candidate running against someone he feels personally aggrieved by: Max Miller, a former White House aide, who is challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican representing Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District. Mr. Gonzalez was one of 10 House members who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Hice’s challenge — against a Trump nemesis in a critical swing state — will be a higher-profile test of Mr. Trump’s political clout among Republicans.The move to back Mr. Hice against the sitting secretary of state is also extraordinary given that Mr. Raffensperger has confirmed his office is investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results, including a phone call the former president made to him. Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Fulton County prosecutors into whether he and others tried to improperly influence the election.Mr. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of a now-infamous call in early January, in which Mr. Trump pushed baseless claims of widespread election irregularities and asked the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the win for Mr. Biden.“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Mr. Trump said during the call.Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly told him his data was wrong. “We have to stand by our numbers,” he said. “We believe our numbers are right.”Mr. Trump, when he had a Twitter feed, repeatedly attacked Mr. Raffensperger for not acceding to his demands.In a statement on Monday afternoon, Mr. Raffensperger was scathing about his future opponent. “Few have done more to cynically undermine faith in our election than Jody Hice,” he said, adding, “Georgia Republicans seeking a candidate who’s accomplished nothing now have one.”Richard Fausset More

The Israeli prime minister has presented himself as a global leader, but that image has been tarnished by tensions with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates as Israeli voters head to the polls on Tuesday.JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel presents himself as a global leader who is in a different league than his rivals — one who can keep Israel safe and promote its interests on the world stage. But strains in his relations with two important Arab allies, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, have dented that image in the fraught run-up to Israel’s do-over election.Mr. Netanyahu’s personal ties with King Abdullah II of Jordan have long been frosty, even though their countries have had diplomatic relations for decades, and recently took a turn for the worse. And the Israeli leader’s efforts to capitalize on his new partnership with the United Arab Emirates before the close-fought election on Tuesday have injected a sour note into the budding relationship between the two countries.Senior Emirati officials sent clear signals over the past week that the Persian Gulf country would not be drawn into Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election, a rebuke that dented his much-vaunted foreign policy credentials.Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, has always portrayed himself as the only candidate who can protect Israel’s security and ensure its survival in what has mostly been a hostile region. He has touted peaceful relations with moderate Arab states, including Jordan and the Emirates, as crucial to defending Israel’s borders and as a buttress against Iranian ambitions in the region.But the tensions with Jordan and the U.A.E. undermine Mr. Netanyahu’s attempts to present himself as a Middle East peacemaker as part of his bid to remain in power while on trial on corruption charges.The first signs of trouble came after plans for Mr. Netanyahu’s first open visit to the Emirates were canceled. Israel and the United Arab Emirates reached a landmark agreement last August to normalize their relations, the first step in a broader regional process that came to be known as the Abraham Accords and that was a signature foreign policy achievement of the Trump administration.Mr. Netanyahu was supposed to fly to the Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, on March 11 for a whirlwind meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the country’s de facto ruler. But the plan went awry amid a separate diplomatic spat with Jordan, one of the first Arab countries to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1994.The day before the scheduled trip, a rare visit by the Jordanian crown prince to the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem — one of Islam’s holiest sites — was scuttled because of a disagreement between Jordan and Israel over security arrangements for the prince.That led Jordan, which borders Israel, to delay granting permission for the departure of a private jet that was waiting there to take Mr. Netanyahu to the Emirates. By the time permission came through, it was too late and Mr. Netanyahu had to cancel the trip.The signing of the Abraham Accords at the White House in September. Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Netanyahu said later that day that the visit had been put off “due to misunderstandings and difficulties in coordinating our flights” that stemmed from the disagreement with Jordan. He said that he had spoken with the “great leader of the U.A.E.” and that the visit would be rescheduled very soon.Mr. Netanyahu told Israel’s Army Radio last week that his visit to Abu Dhabi had been postponed several times over the past few months “due to the lockdowns and other reasons.”But he made things worse by publicly boasting after his call with Prince Mohammed that the Emirates intended to invest “the vast sum of $10 billion” in various projects in Israel.“It became clear to Prince Mohammed that Netanyahu was just using him for electoral purposes,” said Martin S. Indyk, a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who was formerly a special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.The Emiratis threw aside their usual discretion and made no secret of their displeasure.“From the UAE’s perspective, the purpose of the Abrahamic Accords is to provide a robust strategic foundation to foster peace and prosperity with the State of Israel and in the wider region,” Anwar Gargash, who served until last month as the Emirates’ minister of state for foreign affairs and who is now an adviser to the country’s president, wrote on Twitter.“The UAE will not be a part in any internal electioneering in Israel, now or ever,” he added.Representatives of Israeli businesses  in a V.I.P. room in the Burj Khalifa, a Dubai landmark, in October. Dan Balilty for The New York TimesSultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the Emirati minister of industry and advanced technology, told The Nation, an Emirati newspaper, last week that the Emiratis were still examining investment prospects but that they would be “commercially driven and not politically associated.” The country is “at a very early stage in studying the laws and policies in Israel,” he said.Mr. Netanyahu’s aborted push to visit the Emirates before the Israeli election on Tuesday also upended a plan for the Arab country to host an Abraham Accords summit meeting in April, according to an individual who had been briefed on the details of the episode.That gathering would have assembled Mr. Netanyahu, leaders of the Emirates and of Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan — the other countries with which Israel signed normalization deals in recent months — and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.Mr. Indyk described Mr. Netanyahu’s relationships with Prince Mohammed of the U.A.E. and King Abdullah II of Jordan as “broken” and in need of mending.In the first heady months after the deal between Israel and the Emirates, Israeli tech executives and tourists flooded into Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the country, despite pandemic restrictions. Now, analysts said, the honeymoon is over even though there has been no indication the normalization deal is in danger of collapse.The relationship is essentially “on hold,” said Oded Eran, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a former Israeli ambassador to the European Union and Jordan.Beyond Mr. Netanyahu’s electioneering, Mr. Eran said, the Emiratis were upset because as part of the normalization deal, Israel dropped its opposition to the Emiratis’ buying F-35 fighter jets and other advanced weaponry from the United States, but that transaction is now stalled and under review by the Biden administration.In addition, he said, the Emirati leaders were concerned about what might happen after the election in Israel. Mr. Netanyahu has said his goal is to form a right-wing coalition with parties that put a priority on annexing West Bank territory in one way or another.“They are not canceling the deal, but they don’t want more at this point,” Mr. Eran said of the Emiratis. “They want to see what the agenda of the new government will be.”Supporters of Mr. Netanyahu campaigning last month in Jerusalem. Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Netanyahu’s political opponents have seized upon the diplomatic debacle.“Unfortunately, Netanyahu’s conduct in recent years has done significant damage to our relations with Jordan, causing Israel to lose considerable defensive, diplomatic and economic assets,” said Benny Gantz, the Israeli defense minister and a centrist political rival.“I will personally work alongside the entire Israeli defense establishment to continue strengthening our relationship with Jordan,” he added, “while also deepening ties with other countries in the region.”Mr. Netanyahu has said that four more countries were waiting to sign normalization agreements with Israel, without specifying which ones. More

Jody Hice, a Republican congressman, announced Monday a run against the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to overturn the state’s Nov. 3 election results, and former President Donald J. Trump immediately endorsed the new candidate. Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Hice is the most prominent effort the former president and his aides have made to try to punish elected officials who they believe crossed Mr. Trump. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is among the top targets for Mr. Trump, along with the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.In a statement issued shortly after Mr. Hice announced his candidacy, Mr. Trump praised him as “one of our most outstanding congressmen,” and alluded to his own baseless claims of voter fraud, which he has said deprived him of victory in the state. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,’’ Mr. Trump said, adding “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!’’ Mr. Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials certified President Biden’s victory after conducting several recounts, and have said the results are fair and accurate. Mr. Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th congressional district, stretching south and east from Atlanta, is a Trump loyalist who in January condemned the second House impeachment of the former president as “misguided” and aimed at “scoring cheap political points.” In the weeks after the November election, he supported Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, including a challenge before the Supreme Court that sought to overturn the results in states Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hice also served in the House Freedom Caucus with former Rep. Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s fourth and last chief of staff.As he seeks to retain control of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is determined to remain a kingmaker for down-ballot elections, while seeking retribution against those he perceives as having betrayed him. So far, he has endorsed only one other candidate running against someone he feels personally aggrieved by: Max Miller, a former White House aide, who is currently challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican representing Ohio’s 6th congressional district. Mr. Gonzalez was one of 10 House members who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Hice’s challenge — against a Trump nemesis in a critical swing state — will be a more high-profile test of Mr. Trump’s political clout among Republicans.The move to back Mr. Hice against the sitting secretary of state is also extraordinary given that Mr. Raffensperger has confirmed his office is investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to influence the election, including the phone call the former president made to him. Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Fulton County prosecutors into whether he and others tried to improperly influence the election.Mr. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of a now-infamous call in early January, in which Mr. Trump pushed baseless claims of widespread irregularities and asked the secretary of state to “find’’ enough votes to reverse the win for President Biden.“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Mr. Trump said during the call.Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly told him his data was wrong. “We have to stand by our numbers,” Mr. Raffensperger said. “We believe our numbers are right.”Mr. Trump, when he had a Twitter feed, repeatedly attacked Mr. Raffensperger for not acceding to his demands. More

Federal investigators are still examining Donald Trump’s role in inciting the attack on the US Capitol.Michael Sherwin, the departing acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, confirmed that the former president is still under investigation over the 6 January putsch in an interview with CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday.“Maybe the president is culpable,” he said.Sherwin also said there were now more than 400 cases against participants in the riot and said that if it is determined Brian Sicknick, the Capitol police officer who died, did so because he was hit with bear spray, murder charges would likely follow.“It’s unequivocal that Trump was the magnet that brought the people to DC on 6 January,” Sherwin said. “Now the question is, is he criminally culpable for everything that happened during the siege, during the breach?“…Based upon what we see in the public record and what we see in public statements in court, we have plenty of people – we have soccer moms from Ohio that were arrested saying, ‘Well, I did this because my president said I had to take back our house.’ That moves the needle towards that direction. Maybe the president is culpable for those actions.“But also, you see in the public record, too, militia members saying, ‘You know what? We did this because Trump just talks a big game. He’s just all talk. We did what he wouldn’t do.’”Trump addressed a rally outside the White House on 6 January, telling supporters to “fight like hell” to stop Congress certifying his election defeat by Joe Biden, which he falsely claims was the result of voter fraud. A mob broke into the Capitol, leading to five deaths, including a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement.Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when only seven Republican senators could be convinced to vote him guilty.Lawsuits over the insurrection, one brought by the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, are among proliferating legal threats to Trump now he has lost the protections of office.More than 100 police officers were allegedly assaulted during the riot. Sicknick died the next day. Cause of death has not been released. But two men have been charged with assaulting the 42-year-old officer with a spray meant to repel bears.Asked if a determination that Sicknick’s death was a direct result of being attacked with the spray would lead to murder charges, Sherwin said: “If evidence directly relates that chemical to his death, yeah. We have causation, we have a link. Yes. In that scenario, correct, that’s a murder case.”[embedded content]He also said: “That day, as bad as it was, could have been a lot worse. It’s actually amazing more people weren’t killed. We found ammunition in [one] vehicle. And also, in the bed of the vehicle were found 11 Molotov cocktails. They were filled with gasoline and Styrofoam. [Lonnie Coffman, the man charged] put Styrofoam in those, according to the [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives], because when you throw those, when they explode, the Styrofoam will stick to you and act like napalm.”He also said pipe bombs placed near the Capitol by an unidentified suspect were not armed properly.“They were not hoax devices, they were real devices,” Sherwin said.Sherwin also said sedition charges, as yet not part of cases against participants in the riot, were likely.“We tried to move quickly to ensure that there is trust in the rule of law,” he said. “You are gonna be charged based upon your conduct and your conduct only.“… The world looks to us for the rule of law and order and democracy. And that was shattered, I think, on that day. And we have to build ourselves up again. The only way to build ourselves up again is the equal application of the law, to show the rule of law is gonna treat these people fairly under the law.” More

As Andrew Yang appears to be solidifying his role as the front-runner in the contest, his Democratic rivals have begun to focus their lines of attack on him.Since even before he officially entered the New York City mayoral contest, Andrew Yang has attracted more criticism from his rivals than any other contender in the sprawling field, a reflection of both missteps he has made and, as the race has unfolded, his standing as the leading candidate.Last week, the criticisms became even sharper, signaling the beginning of a more intense phase of the campaign.Here are the race’s latest developments:The candidates take direct aim at YangPart of Mr. Yang’s appeal to his supporters is his willingness to shed the conventions of political caution and speak frankly — a trait that sometimes gets him in trouble.The most recent example came last week, when Mr. Yang, in an interview with Politico, criticized the United Federation of Teachers, suggesting that the union was “a significant reason why our schools have been slow” to open amid the pandemic.The remarks drew pointed criticism from Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, as well as more muted criticism from other candidates, as they defended the work teachers have done under challenging circumstances. They are all also aware that the union’s coveted endorsement is still up for grabs.Mr. Stringer — who trails Mr. Yang and Mr. Adams in the little public polling available — laced into Mr. Yang in perhaps his most direct and sustained attack to date, seeking to cast his rival as an unserious candidate at a moment of significant challenges for the city — and appearing to make a barely veiled comparison to former President Donald J. Trump.“Whether it’s an illegal casino on Governors Island, housing for TikTok stars or being baffled by parents who live and work in two-bedroom apartments, kids in virtual school, we don’t need another leader who tweets first and thinks later,” he said in a Friday morning speech. He also noted that Mr. Yang had spent much of the pandemic outside the city before deciding to run for mayor.Mr. Stringer, Mr. Adams and Raymond J. McGuire, a former Citi executive, have also been critical of the details around Mr. Yang’s proposal for basic income — and on Twitter, exchanges between strategists for Mr. Yang and Mr. Stringer in particular have become even more contentious.“Andrew Yang is going to keep talking to New Yorkers about his plans to get the city safely reopen and people back to work as fast as we can,” said Chris Coffey, Mr. Yang’s co-campaign manager, about the mounting attacks. “We’ll leave the tired, 1990s negative campaigning to others.”Candidates reluctant to decriminalize all drugsThis year, Oregon became the first state in the nation to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of all drugs. If the next mayor of New York City has his or her way, the city may finally open sites to allow for the safer injection of drugs. But based on responses at a recent forum, mayoral candidates do not favor following Oregon’s lead on full-scale decriminalization.“I do have concerns about the devastation I’ve seen with highly, highly addictive and deadly drugs, where even small amounts can have life-altering consequences and even cause death,” said Shaun Donovan, a former cabinet member in the Obama administration, citing fentanyl as an example.Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, echoed Mr. Donovan’s concerns and expressed particular unease with cocaine, saying, “Back in the day, when it was super- popular in the ’80s, we had young basketball players who died of heart attacks after their first use.”Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, avoided directly addressing the issue. Mr. Adams was forthright in his opposition, though he said he supports legalizing marijuana.“You guys know I’m ex-po-po,” said Mr. Adams, the former head of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, using an expression to describe a police officer.The candidates’ responses seemed to elicit some frustration from one of the moderators, Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of VOCAL-NY, which hosted the forum.“Drugs have always been illegal, and the devastation and the overdoses are continuing to happen,” she said. “Clearly 40 years of that hasn’t worked, and we’re hopeful that the next mayor will take a different approach.”The only candidates to offer more support for the idea were Mr. Yang — who favors the legalization of psilocybin mushrooms — and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive running to the far left in the Democratic primary.“We need to move towards that, in response to the war on drugs,” Ms. Morales said, referring to the decriminalization of all personal drug possession.Friends with moneyNorman Lear, the creator of the television show “All in the Family,” was among a few Hollywood-related donors to Maya Wiley’s campaign. David Dee Delgado/Getty ImagesThe latest campaign filing revealed that Ms. Wiley has many friends in Hollywood.The former MSNBC analyst received donations recently from the director Steven Spielberg; Norman Lear, the creator of the television show “All in the Family”; Alan Horn, the former head of Walt Disney Studios; and Christopher Guest, the director of beloved mockumentaries like “Best in Show.”Mr. Yang received a $2,000 donation from Jessica Seinfeld, wife of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and had support from two snack magnates: Siggi Hilmarsson, the founder of Siggi’s yogurt, and Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND bars.Mr. Adams has the most money on hand — more than $7.5 million — but Ms. Morales has the most individual donors in New York City. Ms. Morales has received smaller donations from more than 9,000 New Yorkers, and said she expects to qualify for public matching funds — a major boost for her campaign.Several candidates in the Democratic field have pledged not to take money from the real estate industry, but Mr. Adams is not one of them. He received donations from Brett Herschenfeld and Harrison Sitomer, two leaders of SL Green, the powerful commercial real estate company. A PAC affiliated with Madison Square Garden also donated $2,000 to his campaign.In the Republican field, Sara Tirschwell, a former Wall Street executive, has raised about $320,000, while Fernando Mateo, a restaurant operator, raised nearly $200,000. They are far behind the Democratic candidates.Donovan vs. The Wall Street JournalEvery election cycle, candidates perform the campaign ritual of visiting prominent newspapers’ editorial boards to discuss their ideas. The meetings are normally closed-door affairs, but Mr. Donovan has made his interview with The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board a public part of his campaign.Mr. Donovan’s campaign distributed a news release and video of his remarks to The Journal, criticizing the editorial board for “turning a blind eye to the racist and un-American” remarks by Mr. Trump that he suggested may have contributed to the shootings in Atlanta where eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed.The board, Mr. Donovan said, had shown a “willful disregard” for Mr. Trump’s “racist and hateful remarks about immigrants, about Asian-Americans, calling this virus the ‘Kung Flu,’ and the contribution that has to the hate crimes we have seen, even yesterday in Atlanta.”Mr. Donovan, speaking out against violence against Asian-Americans at the headquarters of the National Action Network in Harlem last week, mentioned his visit to The Journal’s editorial board and his criticism of how the board had normalized Mr. Trump’s racist remarks.“We need to stop explaining away the hate behind these crimes, these crimes that we’re living with because of what we’ve seen in the White House and across the country these last four years, and call them what they really are, acts of terror,” Mr. Donovan said.Paul Gigot, the editorial page editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, strongly disagreed with Mr. Donovan’s remarks. The board had been critical of Mr. Trump around immigration and his response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where Heather D. Heyer, 32, was killed after a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters, he said.“I can point you to any number of pieces where we took his falsehoods on, and I can point you to any number of pieces where Donald Trump, tweets and everything else, was most unhappy with our coverage,” Mr. Gigot said before moving the conversation back to the topic at hand.The story behind Yang’s omnipresent scarfMr. McGuire is a proud self-described “sneakerhead” who can sometimes be spotted in red-soled Air Jordans — the 11 Retro (Bred) edition that can retail for a few hundred dollars.Ms. Wiley often favors the color purple.But few candidates seem as attached to any item of clothing as Mr. Yang is to his scarves — a gift from his wife, Evelyn.The three identical orange and blue Paul Smith scarves, which she bought on sale for $95 each from countryattire.us (a store she found via Google), evoke the colors of both the New York Mets and New York City’s flag.“She said, ‘Hey, this is going to be your new scarf,’ and I said, ‘Fantastic,’” Mr. Yang recalled.The scarf has fast become Mr. Yang’s signature fashion accessory, along with a black mask emblazoned with “Yang for New York” in white letters across the mouth.Ms. Yang wanted Mr. Yang to have a “splash of color,” he said, one that was “going to be identifiable and preferably somewhat New York-related.” More

As the federal investigation of the 6 January Capitol insurrection expands, scrutiny of Donald Trump’s decades-long ally Roger Stone is expected to intensify, given his links to at least four far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who had been charged, plus Stone’s incendiary comments at rallies the night before the riot and in prior weeks, say ex-prosecutors and Stone associatesAlthough Stone was not part of the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that shocked America, the self-styled “dirty trickster” – who was convicted on seven counts in the Russia investigations into the 2016 elections but later pardoned by Trump – had numerous contacts with key groups and figures involved in the riot in the weeks before and just prior to its start.The night before the riot, Stone spoke at a Washington DC “Rally to Save America” where the former president’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen by Democrats were pushed and Stone urged an “epic struggle for the future of this country, between dark and light, between the godly and the godless, between good and evil”.Early on 6 January, Stone was seen in cellphone videos near a Washington hotel hanging out with six members of the far-right militia Oath Keepers serving as his “bodyguards”, including three who have been charged in the federal investigation. Stone, according to Mother Jones, also raised funds for “private security” events on 5 January and 6 January before the Capitol attack, which included a rambling talk by Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell”.Back on 12 December, Stone also spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally that amplified Trump’s erroneous claims of massive election fraud, and urged hundreds of Trump loyalists to “fight until the bitter end … Never give up, never quit, never surrender, and fight for America,” Stone implored the crowdCongressional investigators looking into the far-right Proud Boys, including some charged in the riot, have also reportedly been looking into ties that Stone had with their leaders Enrique Tarrio and Ethan Nordean, who were seen in a video in contact with Stone at another demonstration in DC the night before the December 12 rally, according to Just SecurityNordean is one of at least a dozen Proud Boys who have been charged so far in the riot investigation, and one of several who are facing conspiracy chargesTarrio, who attended Stone’s trial and had other contacts with him, was arrested in DC two days before the riot and charged with setting fire in December to a Black Lives Matter flag and for carrying high capacity magazines for weaponsBack in 2016, Stone first set up the group “Stop the Steal” which raised false claims that the election would be stolen from Trump, a baseless charge that grew exponentially post election in 2020 to try to undermine Biden’s victory.Last year Trump railed against Stone’s conviction in the Russia inquiry which included lying to Congress and drew a 40-month jail sentence. But shortly before Stone was to enter prison in mid 2020 Trump commuted his sentence, and in December gave him a full pardon.Former senior prosecutors say that Stone could be a growing focus of the federal inquiry of the riot which has already charged more than 300 people including at least a dozen Proud Boys and 10 Oath Keepers for illegal acts related to their roles in the Capitol attack.“Prosecutors follow the facts and evidence where they lead, and certainly should be investigating any connections between Stone and those who were responsible for the insurrection on January 6,” Mary McCord, a veteran prosecutor who led the national security division at Justice at the end of the Obama administration until May 2017, said in an interviewOther ex-prosecutors go further and see Stone as a potential target.“As a result of the pardon corruptly granted by Trump, it would not be surprising for Roger Stone to become a federal prosecutor’s holy grail,” said Phil Halpern, who retired last year after 36 years as an assistant US attorney who specialized in corruption cases. “In this quest, the charged Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are merely pawns leading to the ultimate prize. Rest assured, prosecutors will be dangling lenient treatment and other inducements in return for any testimony implicating Stone in the Capitol riot.”But some ex-prosecutors caution that charging Stone will be difficult “absent direct evidence of an intent to commit or aid and abet treason or seditious conspiracy”, said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the justice department’s fraud sectionThe Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Stone and Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy driven InfoWars talk show where Stone has often appeared as a guest and promoted disinformation, are being investigated related to their ties with figures in the riot and if they had any role in its planning.Jones, who has boasted he paid $500,000 for the rally on 6 January, and Stone have had close links since at least the 2016 campaign, when Stone spoke glowingly of Jones declaring in an interview that his show is “the major source of everything”.In an email, Stone vehemently denied having anything to do with the Capitol riot.“Any statement, claim, insinuation, or report alleging, or even implying, that I had any involvement in or knowledge, whether advance or contemporaneous, about the commission of any unlawful acts by any person or group in or around the US Capitol or anywhere in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, is categorically false.”Stone has previously said that he simply wanted to spur “peaceful” protests of Congress on 6 January and stressed that he “denounced the violence at the Capitol”.On his website, StoneColdTruth, he has launched appeals to help with legal expenses by requesting checks for “the STONE LEGAL DEFENSE FUND to help prepare to fend off this malicious assault on me once again”.Stone’s denials notwithstanding, some former lobbying partners of his at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly voice dismay at his decades long fealty to Trump, a client of the firm in the 1980s, about a decade after Stone earned notoriety for playing a small part in the scandal-ridden 1972 Richard Nixon campaign.“Roger has been totally devoted to Trump for over 30 years and that has clouded his judgment about his own ethical values and led to a criminal conviction,” said Charlie Black in an interview.“I’m not surprised that the devotion is still there, even post-election and post-pardon.”Similarly, ex-Stone partner Peter Kelly said he’s been shocked by Stone’s recent drive to discredit the election results – and similar efforts by Michael Flynn, who was also convicted in the Russia inquiry and pardoned by Trump. “To see people like Gen Flynn and Stone who just escaped a serious encounter with the law, walking the edge again is stunning,’” Kelly said in an interview.In 2016, Kelly blasted Stone’s modus operandi, telling the Guardian that “Roger operates by a different set of rules, and his object is to disrupt. He traffics in the unusual.” More

Pushing false theories on the virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has absorbed his party’s transformation under Donald Trump.BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Senator Ron Johnson incited widespread outrage when he said recently that he would have been more afraid of the rioters who rampaged the Capitol on Jan. 6 had they been members of Black Lives Matter and antifa.But his revealing and incendiary comment, which quickly prompted accusations of racism, came as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Johnson’s career in Washington or back home in Wisconsin. He has become the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation now that Donald Trump himself is banned from social media and largely avoiding appearances on cable television.Mr. Johnson is an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change.In recent months, Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection, promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments, said he saw no need to get the coronavirus vaccine himself and claimed that the United States could have ended the pandemic a year ago with the development of a generic drug if the government had wanted that to happen.Last year, he spent months as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee seeking evidence that Mr. Biden had tried to pressure Ukrainian officials to aid his son Hunter, which an Intelligence Community report released on Monday said was misinformation that was spread by Russia to help Mr. Trump’s re-election.Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection and promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Johnson has also become the leading Republican proponent of a revisionist effort to deny the motives and violence of the mob that breached the Capitol. At a Senate hearing to examine the events of that day, Mr. Johnson read into the record an account from a far-right website attributing the violence to “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters.” On Saturday, he told a conference of conservative political organizers in Wisconsin that “there was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.” In fact, Trump supporters stormed the chamber shortly after senators were evacuated.His continuing assault on the truth, often under the guise of simply “asking questions” about established facts, is helping to diminish confidence in American institutions at a perilous moment, when the health and economic well-being of the nation relies heavily on mass vaccinations, and when faith in democracy is shaken by right-wing falsehoods about voting.Republicans are 27 percentage points less likely than Democrats to say they plan to get, or have already received, a vaccine, a Pew Research Center study released this month found. In an interview, Mr. Johnson repeatedly refused to say that vaccines were safe or to encourage people to get them, resorting instead to insinuations — “there’s still so much we don’t know about all of this” — that undermine efforts to defeat the pandemic.The drumbeat of distortions, false theories and lies reminds some Wisconsin Republicans of a figure from the state’s past who also rarely let facts get in the way of his agenda: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose witch hunt for communists in and out of government in the 1950s ruined lives and bitterly divided the country.“Wisconsin voters love mavericks, they really love mavericks — you go way back to Joe McCarthy,” said Jim Sensenbrenner, a long-serving Republican congressman from the Milwaukee suburbs who retired in January. “They do love people who rattle the cage an awful lot and bring up topics that maybe people don’t want to talk about.”For Democrats, who have never forgotten Mr. Johnson’s defeat of the liberal darling Russ Feingold in 2010, and again in a 2016 rematch, regaining the Senate seat in 2022 is a top priority. Though he has yet to announce whether he would be seeking a third term, Mr. Johnson recently said that the fury that Democrats had directed his way had made him want to stay in the fight. Still, he has raised just $590,000 in the past two years — a paltry sum for an incumbent senator.Mr. Johnson’s most recent provocation came on March 12, when he contrasted Black Lives Matter protesters to the Trump supporters “who love this country” and stormed the Capitol, the carnage resulting in 140 injured police officers and more than 300 arrests by federal authorities. During an interview with a right-wing radio host, Joe Pagliarulo, Mr. Johnson said: “Joe, this will get me in trouble. Had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”Research on the protests against racial injustice over the summer showed that they were largely nonviolent.In the interview with The Times, Mr. Johnson rejected comparisons to McCarthy. And he insisted he had no racist intent in making his argument.Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated right-wing media. Erin Schaff/The New York Times“I didn’t feel threatened,” he said. “So it’s a true statement. And then people said, ‘Well, why?’ Well, because I’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies. I spend three hours with thousands of Trump supporters. And I think I know them pretty well. I don’t know any Trump supporter who would have done what the rioters did.”On Sunday, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, denounced Mr. Johnson’s distortion of the events of Jan. 6. “We don’t need to try and explain away or come up with alternative versions,” he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “We all saw what happened.”Mr. Johnson, in the Times interview, also faulted the federal government for what he called its “tunnel vision” pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine while not more deeply studying treatments such as hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug promoted by Mr. Trump that the Food and Drug Administration says is not effective against the virus. That strategy, he said, cost “tens of thousands of lives.”Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010 — notably in the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin two years earlier. But under Mr. Trump, the fringe became the mainstream. Fact-free assertions by the president, from the size of his inaugural crowd in 2017 to the “big lie” of a stolen election in 2020, required Republican officials to fall in line with his gaslighting or lose the support of the party’s base voters.Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated Fox News commentators and right-wing talk radio.“Through the years, as the party has morphed into a muscular ignorance, Q-Anon sect, he’s followed along with them,” said Christian Schneider, a former Republican political operative in Wisconsin who embedded with the Johnson campaign in 2010 to write a glowing account for a local conservative magazine. “Now, he’s a perfect example of that type of politics.”Mr. Johnson entered politics as a businessman concerned about federal spending and debt in 2010, defeating the Democratic senator Russ Feingold.Narayan Mahon for The New York TimesMr. Johnson was the chief executive of a plastics company started by his wife’s family when he first ran for the Senate in 2010. He campaigned as a new-to-politics businessman concerned about federal spending and debt, and he spent $9 million of his own money on the race.But there were signs in that first campaign of Mr. Johnson’s predilection for anti-intellectualism. On several occasions, he declared that climate change was not man-made but instead caused by “sun spots” and said excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “helps the trees grow.” He also offered a false history of Greenland to dismiss the effects of global warming.“You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” Mr. Johnson told WKOW-TV in Madison back then. “It was actually green at one point in time. And it’s been, you know, since, it’s a whole lot whiter now so we’ve experienced climate change throughout geologic time.”In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Johnson was still misinformed about the etymology of Greenland, which got its name from the explorer Erik the Red’s attempt to lure settlers to the ice-covered island.“I could be wrong there, but that’s always been my assumption that, at some point in time, those early explorers saw green,” Mr. Johnson said. “I have no idea.”Just as Mr. Trump would later use Fox News to build a national political persona, Mr. Johnson did so on Wisconsin’s wide network of conservative talk-radio shows. His political rise would not have been possible without support from Charlie Sykes, then an influential radio host in Milwaukee who once read an entire 20-minute speech by Mr. Johnson on the air.Mr. Sykes, who since 2016 has been a harsh critic of Trump-era Republicans, said last week of Mr. Johnson: “I don’t know how he went from being a chamber of commerce guy to somebody who sounds like he reads the Gateway Pundit every day. He’s turned into Joe McCarthy.”This month alone, Mr. Johnson has made at least 15 appearances on 11 different radio shows.Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010.Morry Gash/Associated PressOn Tuesday he appeared with Vicki McKenna, whose right-wing show is popular with Wisconsin conservatives. She began by attacking public-health guidance on wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, arguing it is a Democratic plot to control Americans. Mr. Johnson agreed with Ms. McKenna and her assessment that public-health experts in the federal government are misleading the country when they promote the coronavirus vaccine.“We’ve closed our minds to all of these other potentially useful and cheap therapies all on the holy grail of a vaccine,” he said. Dr. Fauci, he added, is “not a god.”In the interview, the senator said it was not his responsibility to to use his public prominence to encourage Americans to get vaccinated.“I don’t have all the information to say, ‘Do this,’” Mr. Johnson said.His false theories about the virus and the vaccine are reminiscent of other misinformation that Mr. Johnson has amplified. During a 2014 appearance on Newsmax TV, he warned of Islamic State militants infecting themselves with the Ebola virus and then traveling to the United States. In 2015, he introduced legislation directing the federal government to protect itself against the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a conspiracy theory that has long lived on the far right of American politics.Last year’s monthslong investigation by Mr. Johnson’s Homeland Security committee into the Bidens and Ukraine concluded with the G.O.P. majority report finding no wrongdoing by the former vice president. An Intelligence Community assessment declassified and released on Monday concluded that Russia had spread misinformation about Hunter Biden to damage his father’s campaign and to help Mr. Trump win re-election.Mr. Johnson, who was not named in the assessment, was adamant that his work was not directly, or unwittingly, influenced by Russians.“Read the report — show me where there’s any Russian disinformation,” he said. “Anybody who thinks I spread disinformation is uninformed because I haven’t.”For weeks after the November election, Mr. Johnson refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the winner while echoing Mr. Trump’s false statements about rampant fraud. He convened his committee in December to air baseless claims of fraud and mishandling of ballots, even as dozens of claims of fraud made by the Trump campaign were being tossed out of courts across the country.Mr. Johnson has refused to say that coronavirus vaccines are safe or to encourage people to get them.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn a cascade of interviews with friendly conservative outlets, Mr. Johnson has lately portrayed himself as a victim of “the radical left” that is waging a scorched-earth campaign to flip his Senate seat.“The best way to maintain power is to destroy your political opposition, and they’re targeting me,” he told the Oshkosh radio host Bob Burnell on Tuesday. “This is obviously a vulnerable Senate seat in a swing state so they think I’d probably be the target No. 1. And I am target No. 1.”Mr. Johnson’s defenders say he is fighting the liberal media’s attempts to silence him.“I see the same thing happening with Senator Johnson that the media did with Donald Trump,” said Gerard Randall, the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s African-American Advisory Council. “I know Senator Johnson personally, and I know that he is not a racist.”If Mr. Johnson seeks a third term, the race is likely to be decided in the Milwaukee suburbs, which used to deliver Republican landslides but have moved away from the party since the Trump era.The city of Brookfield, for example, backed Mr. Trump by a margin of just nine percentage points in November, after voting for him by 20 points in 2016 and President George W. Bush by 39 points in 2004.“There was a lot of eye-rolling” about Mr. Johnson’s recent comments about the Capitol siege, said Scott Berg, a conservative who has served as a Brookfield city alderman for 20 years. “If I were in the leadership of the Wisconsin Republican Party, I’d be out shopping for candidates” for the Senate in 2022, he added.Still, in 2016, Mr. Johnson ran 10 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump in Brookfield. Voters there suggested the suburb might not be drifting from Republicans as fast as some Democrats had hoped.“I’m a Johnson supporter — I voted for him twice — but I think he’s going down a rabbit hole I don’t want any part of,” said John Raschig, a retiree who was leaving a Pick ‘n Save supermarket. “It’s sort of like Trump: I’d vote for him because the other side’s awful, but I’d prefer somebody else.”Trip Gabriel More