Elections

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storythe media equationWe Worked Together on the Internet. Last Week, He Stormed the Capitol.At BuzzFeed, we followed the signals of social media. A young employee followed them all the way to Charlottesville and Capitol Hill.Loyalists to President Trump at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via ShutterstockJan. 10, 2021Updated 9:43 p.m. ETHe fit in as well as anyone did at our Los Angeles studio, a place full of ambitious misfits with an unusual gift. They knew how to make web videos people wanted to watch.His real name was Anthime Joseph Gionet, though he preferred others. His value to BuzzFeed was clear: He’d do anything for the Vine, the short video platform that had a brief cultural moment before being crushed by Instagram and Snapchat in 2017.Once, he poured a gallon of milk on his face and a clip of it drew millions of views, back when mostly harmless stunts amused millions of American viewers on the platform.He was, in that way, a natural for BuzzFeed when he arrived in the spring of 2015, where I was editor in chief, overseeing the website. Mr. Gionet was hired to run the Vine account for our video operation, and his job mostly consisted of editing down to six seconds the silly, fun videos his colleagues produced. Within months, he took over a BuzzFeed Twitter account, too, drawing on his same intuition for what kind of video people would share.We were better than anyone in those days at making things for social media, mostly lists and quizzes and short videos, but also occasionally spectacular live streams, most famously the one where two of my colleagues exploded a watermelon, one rubber band at a time.And so the language I heard from Mr. Gionet, now 33, on his livestream last Wednesday was familiar. “We’ve got over 10,000 people live, watching, let’s go!” he said excitedly. “Hit that follow button — I appreciate you guys.”Mr. Gionet was standing inside the trashed office of Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, streaming from one of the few platforms yet to ban him, alongside other Trump loyalists who played with the telephone receiver and draped themselves over the furniture. It seemed an apt conclusion to a recent career arc that some might see as trolling or internet pranks, but is probably best described as performative violence.Anthime Joseph Gionet last Wednesday in a scene from his livestream.Credit…LiveLeakAfter I saw Mr. Gionet, I called up some of my old colleagues, who recalled him with a mixture of perplexity and repulsion. He was sensitive and almost desperate to be liked, they said, once getting extremely upset when someone made fun of his thick mustache and blond mullet. Two of his closest friends at the office at the time had different ethnic backgrounds and gender identities than he did, and they sometimes bonded over a sense of being outsiders. One of those friends remembered him as a sad character who didn’t really express political views beyond the broadly bro-ey and insensitive culture of Vine, and who confided that he was haunted by a lonely childhood in Alaska. He seemed, three of them said, to be missing something — to be hollow inside.As the 2016 election took hold, he started to flirt with a political persona. He first put a Bernie Sanders portrait on his desk, two former colleagues said. Then, he moved on to wearing MAGA hats around the office, which raised eyebrows among his more progressive, if fairly apolitical, co-workers, though that was when some people still imagined the far right could be “ironic.”When he left BuzzFeed later that year to work as the “tour manager” for Milo Yiannopoulos, a darling of the racist and anti-Semitic “alt-right,” colleagues were momentarily shocked. Then, they scrolled through Mr. Gionet’s Twitter account, where his increasingly vile statements were getting him retweets from far-right figures, and realized that they shouldn’t have been.Still, it’s not clear what Mr. Gionet actually believes, if anything. And really, I’m not sure I care.This isn’t a sympathetic profile of a young man gone wrong. I can’t muster much pity for a guy who, before he was attacking his Capitol, spent his time shooting some kind of bottled irritant (he called it “content spray”) into the eyes of innocent people for YouTube views and shouting at store clerks who asked him to wear a mask.To me, this story is about something different, a sort of social media power that we helped sharpen at BuzzFeed that can exert an almost irresistible gravitational pull.If you haven’t had the experience of posting something on social media that goes truly viral, you may not understand its profound emotional attraction. You’re suddenly the center of a digital universe, getting more attention from more people than you ever have. The rush of affirmation can be giddy, and addictive. And if you have little else to hold on to, you can lose yourself to it.Even as we sought to make our work spread at BuzzFeed, we faced constraints — by truth in our news division, by hewing to a broadly positive set of values on our entertainment side. But Mr. Gionet ultimately broke loose of those boundaries, seeming to follow the signals he found on social media without any scruple. The only through line was his desire to build an audience. He was boosting Bernie Sanders before he was chanting anti-Semitic slogans in Charlottesville, Va., then temporarily recanting those extreme views and later committing violent crimes to get views on YouTube. He built an audience among coronavirus deniers and then, when he apparently contracted the disease, posted the screenshot of his own positive test to Instagram with a tearful emoji. A few weeks later, he joined the pro-Trump uprising in the Capitol.“His politics have been guided by platform metrics,” reflected Andrew Gauthier, who was a top video producer at BuzzFeed and later worked for Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidential campaign. “You always think that evil is going to come from movie villain evil, and then you’re like — oh no, evil can just start with bad jokes and nihilistic behavior that is fueled by positive reinforcement on various platforms.”And so Mr. Gionet’s story isn’t quite the familiar one of a lonely young man in his bedroom falling down a rabbit hole of videos that poison his worldview. It’s the story of a man being rewarded for being a violent white nationalist, and getting the attention and affirmation that he’s apparently desperate for.We spent a lot of time at BuzzFeed thinking about how to optimize our content for an online audience; he optimized himself.When he was arrested in Scottsdale, Ariz., last month for spraying mace into the eyes of a bouncer, an officer reported that Mr. Gionet “informed me that he was a ‘influencer’ and had a large following on social media,” according to a police report. He was released on his own recognizance, a Scottsdale police spokesman said, and is awaiting trial. Nonetheless, in the Capitol, he yelled “A.C.A.F.” — All Cops Are Friends (though the original meaning of the acronym is less friendly).His story leaves me wondering what share of blame those of us who pioneered the use of social media to deliver information deserve at this moment. Did we, along with the creators of those platforms, help open Pandora’s box?I didn’t work directly with Mr. Gionet. But in 2012, I did hire a writer named Benny Johnson who was cultivating a voice that blended social media savvy and right-wing politics. I thought, wrongly, of his politics at the time as just conservative. And I imagined him thriving, as conservative writers have done for generations in mainstream newsrooms, where they shared their colleagues’ interest in finding shared facts.I was slow to realize that his interests weren’t journalistic, or even ideological, as much as they were aesthetic, thrilled by the imagery of raw power. In the tradition of authoritarian propagandists, he was awed by neoclassical buildings, guns and, later, Donald Trump’s crowds. And, after we fired him for plagiarism in 2014, he went on to lead the content arm of Mr. Trump’s youth wing, Turning Point USA, and host a show on Newsmax. Last week, he was cheerleading attempts to overturn the election (though he pulled back when the violence began and later blamed leftists for it). He’s also selling his skills in the “viral political storytelling” that we worked together on at BuzzFeed to a generation of new right-wing figures like Representative Lauren Boebert, who has won attention for vowing to bring her handgun to work in Congress. (Neither Mr. Gionet nor Mr. Johnson responded to email inquiries.)While we were refining the new practice of social media at BuzzFeed, we were slow to realize that the far right was watching closely and eventually imitating us. Jonah Peretti, who founded The Huffington Post as well as BuzzFeed, was surprised when Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart, recalled to a writer that he’d borrowed elements of his strategy from Mr. Peretti in the run-up to the 2016 election. Mr. Bannon told me before that election, in an interview in Trump Tower, that he was surprised we hadn’t turned BuzzFeed to pure Bernie Sanders boosterism, as Breitbart did for Donald Trump. He noted, probably correctly, that the traffic for a pro-Sanders propaganda outlet would have greatly exceeded what we got for fair coverage of the Democratic primary.“Some of the innovative things we did early on, in understanding social media and digital media, have been taken up by alt-right groups, racist groups, MAGA groups,” my old boss, Mr. Peretti, told me in an interview last week. But Mr. Peretti, an eternal optimist, noted that some of the same social mechanisms that Mr. Gionet exploited were also crucial to the sweeping progressive social movements of the last few years, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo. “The story’s not done and there’s an opportunity to fight for a good internet,” he said. (Disclosure: I don’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, and The Times has required that I not do so until I divest my stock options in the company.)I’m already hearing what seem to be two competing explanations of what happened in Washington last week: that the overwhelmingly white, sometimes overtly racist, mob embodied old, deep unexpurgated American evil; or that social media reshaped some Americans’ blank slate identities into something radical.But Mr. Gionet’s story shows how those explanations don’t really conflict. A man his colleagues saw as empty and driftless turned his identity into a kind of a mirror of that old American evil, and has become what many Americans told him they wanted him to be.At one point in Mr. Gionet’s livestream during the siege of the Capitol, an unseen voice off camera warns that President Trump “would be very upset” with the antics of the rioters.“No, he’ll be happy,” Mr. Gionet responded. “We’re fighting for Trump.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

US Congresswoman Mary Miller of Illinois tells a crowd outside the US Capitol: Hitler was right on one thing – “Whoever has the youth has the future.” Our children are being propagandised.’ Miller has since apologised for quoting the Nazi leader at the right-wing rally, issuing a statement on Twitter saying: ‘I sincerely apologize for any harm my words caused and regret using a reference to one of the most evil dictators in history’
Illinois Republican Mary Miller sorry for quoting Hitler in Capitol speech
Capitol attack: two men believed to have brought zip-tie handcuffs arrested More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIncitement to Riot? What Trump Told Supporters Before Mob Stormed CapitolHere is a closer look at what the president said at a rally of his supporters, which is a central focus of the impeachment case being prepared against him.In a speech just before the riot at the Capitol on Wednesday, President Trump told his supporters that they would have to “fight much harder.”Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesJan. 10, 2021Updated 7:00 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The speech that President Trump delivered to his supporters just before they attacked the Capitol last week is a central focus as House Democrats prepare an article of impeachment against him for inciting the deadly riot.Mr. Trump had urged supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on Wednesday, when Congress would ceremonially count President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win, telling them to “be there, will be wild!” At a rally just before the violence, he repeated many of his falsehoods about how the election was stolen, then dispatched the marchers to the Capitol as those proceedings were about to start.Here are some notable excerpts from Mr. Trump’s remarks, with analysis.Trump urged his supporters to ‘fight much harder’ against ‘bad people’ and ‘show strength’ at the Capitol.“Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back. It’s like a boxer. And we want to be so nice. We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we’re going to have to fight much harder. …“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”The president’s speech was riddled with violent imagery and calls to fight harder than before. By contrast, he made only a passing suggestion that the protest should be nonviolent, saying, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”During Mr. Trump’s impeachment last year, one of his defenses was that the primary accusation against him — that he abused his power by withholding aid to Ukraine in an attempt to get its president to announce a corruption investigation into Mr. Biden — was not an ordinary crime, so it did not matter even if it were true. Most legal specialists said that made no difference for impeachment purposes, but in any case that argument would not be a defense here. Several laws clearly make it a crime to incite a riot or otherwise try to get another person to engage in a violent crime against property or people.Trump told the crowd that ‘very different rules’ applied.“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”Whipping up anger against Republicans who were not going along with his plan for subverting the election, like Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Trump told the crowd that “different rules” now applied. At the most obvious level, the president was arguing that what he wanted Mr. Pence to do — reject the state-certified Electoral College results — would be legitimate, but the notion of “very different rules” applying carried broader overtones of extraordinary permission as well. (“RINO” is a term of abuse used by highly partisan Republicans against more moderate colleagues they deem to be “Republicans in Name Only.”)Trump insinuated that Republican officials, including Pence, would endanger themselves by accepting Biden’s win.“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … And I actually — I just spoke to Mike. I said: ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing. That takes courage.’”“I also want to thank our 13 most courageous members of the U.S. Senate, Senator Ted Cruz, Senator Ron Johnson, Senator Josh Hawley. … Senators have stepped up. We want to thank them. I actually think, though, it takes, again, more courage not to step up, and I think a lot of those people are going to find that out. And you better start looking at your leadership, because your leadership has led you down the tubes.”Mr. Trump twice told the crowd that Republicans who did not go along with his effort to overturn the election — Mr. Pence as well as senators like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, who did not join in the performative objections led by Mr. Hawley and Mr. Cruz — were actually the ones being courageous. In context, the president’s implication is that they were putting themselves at risk because it would be safer to go along with what he wanted. During the ensuing riot, the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”Trump suggested that he wanted his supporters to stop the certification of Biden’s electoral win, not just protest it.“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”Two months after he lost the election, Mr. Trump repeatedly told his followers that they could still stop Mr. Biden from becoming president if they “fight like hell,” a formulation that suggested they act and change things, not merely raise their voices in protest.As he dispatched his supporters into what became deadly chaos, Trump falsely told them that he would come, too.Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. … We are going to the Capitol, and we are going to try and give — the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote, but we are going to try — give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re try — going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”As he sicced his supporters on Congress, Mr. Trump assured them that he would personally accompany them to the Capitol. In fact, as several of his followers and police officers were being injured or dying in the ensuing chaos, the president was watching the violence play out on television from the safety of the White House.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesHouse Moves to Remove TrumpHow Impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesCabinet PicksAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWith Trump Presidency Winding Down, Push for Assange Pardon Ramps UpSupporters of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have enlisted a lobbyist with connections to the president and filed a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Julian Assange; the Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking his extradition to the United States.Credit…Henry Nicholls/ReutersJan. 10, 2021, 6:53 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Allies of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have ramped up a push for a last-minute pardon from President Trump, enlisting a lobbyist with connections to the administration, trying to rally supporters across the political spectrum and filing a clemency petition with the White House.The effort comes at a delicate moment for Mr. Assange and during a period of tension between the United States and Britain over a case that his supporters say has substantial implications for press freedoms.The Justice Department announced last week that it would appeal a British judge’s ruling blocking the extradition of Mr. Assange to the United States to face trial on charges of violating the Espionage Act and conspiring to hack government computers. The charges stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication in 2010 of classified documents related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Mr. Assange’s supporters had been optimistic about the prospects of a pardon from Mr. Trump, who has issued dozens of contentious clemency grants since losing his re-election bid. But they now worry that pressure over his supporters’ ransacking of the Capitol last week could derail plans for additional clemencies before he leaves office on Jan. 20.As unlikely as the prospect of a pardon from Mr. Trump might be, Mr. Assange’s supporters are eager to try before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.As vice president, Mr. Biden called the WikiLeaks founder a “high-tech terrorist.” Some of his top advisers blame Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks for helping Mr. Trump win the presidency in 2016 by publishing emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which U.S. officials say were stolen by Russian intelligence to damage her candidacy. Mr. Trump has long downplayed Russia’s role in the 2016 election.For Mr. Assange’s supporters and press freedom advocates, though, the issues at stake transcend him or politics.“This is so much bigger than Julian,” said Mark Davis, a former journalist who worked with Mr. Assange in Australia, where they are from. If Mr. Assange is prosecuted, “it will have a chilling effect on all national security journalism,” Mr. Davis said, adding: “If we can get Julian off, then the precedent hasn’t been set. If Julian goes down, then it’s bad for all of us.”Mr. Davis, who is now a lawyer specializing in national security and whistle-blower cases, is on the board of Blueprint for Free Speech, an Australia-based nonprofit group that advocates for press freedoms and whistle-blower protections. The group, which was started by Suelette Dreyfus, a former journalist who is an old friend and collaborator with Mr. Assange, signed a pro bono contract on Saturday with the lobbyist Robert Stryk to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange.During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Stryk, who is well connected in Trump administration circles, has developed a lucrative business representing foreign clients in precarious geopolitical situations.He has worked for a jailed Saudi prince who had fallen out of favor with his country’s powerful de facto leader, as well as the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, which the Trump administration considers illegitimate. Mr. Styrk also worked for Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars from a state oil company she once headed, as well as the government of the former Congolese president Joseph Kabila, which had faced American sanctions for human rights abuses and corruption.Mr. Stryk said that he was representing Blueprint for Free Speech to seek a pardon for Mr. Assange without pay because of his belief in free speech, and that he would continue pushing for the pardon in the Biden administration if Mr. Trump did not grant it.“This is not a partisan issue,” Mr. Stryk said.The contract, which he said he had disclosed to the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, calls for his company, Stryk Global Diplomacy, to “facilitate meetings and interactions with the president and the president-elect’s administrations” to “obtain a full pardon” for Mr. Assange.Mr. Davis said Mr. Stryk had been chosen partly because of his entree into Mr. Trump’s administration, which the group sees as its best chance to secure a pardon.Mr. Davis noted that Mr. Assange, 49, was indicted during Mr. Trump’s presidency. “We are unabashedly reaching out to the Republican Party on this issue in the final weeks to correct something before it’s too late, and before it become part of Trump’s legacy,” Mr. Davis said.He said, “If Joe Biden is sympathetic, that’s well and good, and we certainly hope he is.” But, he added, “it’s a far simpler process for an outgoing president than an incoming president.”Mr. Assange’s cause has been taken up by a range of media freedom and human rights organizations, public officials and celebrities, including the actress Pamela Anderson.Blueprint for Free Speech is working to harness some of that support, including from Ms. Anderson, a friend of Mr. Assange, who said in an interview that she had been trying to connect with Mr. Trump to plead the case. “I just hate to see him deteriorate in jail right now,” she said of Mr. Assange, describing the pardon push as “a last-ditch effort for all of us who are Julian Assange supporters.”Asked about the effort by Blueprint, Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer representing Mr. Assange, said he “is encouraged by and supports efforts” by a variety of prominent supporters around the world.Mr. Davis stressed that Blueprint’s push was independent of parallel efforts by Mr. Assange’s family and his lawyers, though Mr. Stryk has been in contact with Barry J. Pollack, Mr. Assange’s Washington-based lawyer, who is representing him against the criminal charges.Prosecutors have argued that Mr. Assange unlawfully obtained secret documents and put lives at risk by revealing the names of people who had provided information to the United States in war zones.Mr. Assange’s lawyers have framed the prosecution as a politically driven attack on press freedom.Last month, Mr. Pollack filed a petition for a pardon with the White House Counsel’s Office, which has been vetting clemency requests for Mr. Trump, arguing that Mr. Assange was “being prosecuted for his news gathering and publication of truthful information.”Mr. Pollack declined to comment on the petition, which was obtained by The New York Times, except to say that it was pending.The petition appears to be geared toward appealing to Mr. Trump, who has wielded the unchecked presidential clemency power to aid people with personal connections to him or whose causes resonate with him politically, including a handful of people ensnared in the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and ties to his campaign.The petition highlighted that the charges against Mr. Assange stemmed from WikiLeaks’s publication of material that “exposed misconduct committed in Iraq and Afghanistan during wars initiated by a prior administration.” And it notes that the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks in 2016, which showed some in the party apparatus conspiring to sabotage the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont and Mrs. Clinton’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, resulted in the resignations of party officials.The petition does not address the United States government’s findings about Russia’s role in the theft of the emails as part of its effort to undermine Mrs. Clinton, which has long been a sore spot for Mr. Trump.The petition notes that the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided the military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks that led to the charges against Mr. Assange, was commuted by President Barack Obama in the final days of his term.Like Mr. Assange’s lawyers in Britain, Mr. Pollack’s petition raises concerns about Mr. Assange’s health, noting that the prison in which he is being held has been under lockdown after a coronavirus outbreak.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sU.S. Attorney James Comey in his office, December 2002.Credit…Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 10, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETSAVING JUSTICETruth, Transparency, and TrustBy James ComeyIn his second debate against Joe Biden last October, Donald Trump inadvertently stated his philosophy of life. The issue was refugees. He said that “low I.Q.” immigrants were the only ones who abided by the law and showed up for their refugee status hearings. A week or so later, The Washington Post reported a similar statement Trump made when he admitted to stiffing his creditors on a Chicago high-rise. He said the chicanery made him “a smart guy, rather than a bad guy.”A smart guy, according to Trump, is someone who is wise enough to cheat. Stupid people abide by the law and attend their refugee status hearings; smart ones abscond. Stupid people pay their debts; smart ones stiff their lenders and dare them to sue. Stupid people believe their elected officials; smart people know the game is rigged. The most distressing aspect of Trump’s enduring appeal, even in defeat, is how many Americans seem to agree with him.The former F.B.I. director James Comey is appalled. In his second attempt at a memoir, “Saving Justice,” there is a story about a small-time drug dealer named Vinnie who is placed in the federal witness protection program. Vinnie begins his new life, falls in love and gets married. The trouble is, Vinnie also was married in his old life. He now has two wives, which makes him a bigamist, which is a crime. “The Department of Justice has an obligation to tell defendants and their lawyers bad stuff about the government’s witnesses,” Comey writes. This is true, even if the “bad stuff” has nothing to do with the facts of the case — Vinnie’s testimony can convict a major drug dealer — and even if the revelation might ruin Vinnie’s new happiness, since Wife No. 2 doesn’t know about Wife No. 1. “I felt sorry for Vinnie in that moment,” Comey concludes. “But the truth was more important than his pain.” We never learn the fate of Vinnie’s marriages or the case in question — he is, after all, in the witness protection program — but Comey hammers the larger point: “The Department of Justice could not accept anything short of the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”Comey’s view of justice — both the concept and the department — is ecclesiastical. U.S. attorneys are members of a sacred order. They make an unequivocal vow to tell the truth, and they do so with a certain style: “They were almost always younger than the other lawyers and stood straighter, buttoned their jackets more quickly, answered more directly, met deadlines and admitted what they didn’t know.”In other words, they are the precise opposite of Donald Trump, who demanded “loyalty” rather than “honesty” from Comey, and fired him as director of the F.B.I. “Saving Justice” is a slight and repetitive book, but not an insignificant one. Comey revealed the crucial moments of his confrontation with the president in his 2018 memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.” They are rehashed here, but within the context of a larger theme: the national descent from strict, fact-based truth into a feckless mirage of “truthiness,” to use Stephen Colbert’s brilliant formulation. Can an institution religiously devoted to the truth, like the Justice Department, survive in a democracy where vast numbers of people believe that the 2020 election was a fraud?Comey is a curious figure. He is smart, admirable, hard-working — and yet slightly smarmy in his rectitude. He begins each chapter with a quote from sources ranging from Virginia Woolf to Malcolm X to the inevitable Dalai Lama. He tries to leaven his supreme pontification with stories of his own flaws, mixed emotions and humility. His height — 6-foot-8 — makes him testy in cramped spaces. His government salary makes it hard for him and his wife to raise five children. Annoyed, he throws his daughter’s obnoxious talking doll out the window of his automobile (of course, he drives back to retrieve it). His pursuit of transparency is rigorous to the point of myopia.But, of course, he is right: You can’t have a working democracy without an agreed-upon standard of truth. You need a “reservoir of trust” in our institutions if the government’s truth-work is to proceed. Conspiracy theories about the Deep State are debilitating. The Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence community have to be perceived as honest to a fault — even about their own faults.Comey is surprisingly tough on Robert Mueller. He believes Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is devastating, but too complicated for mass consumption. Attorney General William P. Barr spins up a dust storm of inaccuracies while Mueller “chose to submit his unreadable — and unread — report and then go away without a sound,” Comey writes. “He could have found a way to speak to the American people in their language. … Department policy and tradition gave him plenty of flexibility to speak in the public interest. He chose not to, and, in the end, the only voices most Americans heard were lying to them. No truth, no transparency, and Justice paid the price in lost trust.”He should talk. It was Comey’s epic mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email case in 2016 that, arguably, gave Donald Trump the presidency. Comey defends his Clinton actions in both memoirs. He admits only to sins of honesty. The public was clamoring for a judgment. And the F.B.I.’s conclusion, after overwhelming work on the case, was that Clinton had been sloppy but not venal. “If we couldn’t prove bad intent, there was no prosecutable case,” he writes. Comey chose to announce this dramatically, in public, but not without a bone to his fellow Republicans: Clinton had been “extremely careless,” Comey said. He stewed about the adverb, which turned his report into an op-ed. And then, on the brink of the election, he reopened the case. A computer containing more Clinton emails was found in the possession of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose wife, Huma Abedin, worked for Clinton. Now, if there ever was a time for transparency, this was it. Comey could have said: “Look, we found no evidence of criminality in the Clinton case, and I would be very surprised — given the nature of the thousands of emails we’ve read — if this new batch proves otherwise. But we’ve got to look at them, and so we will.” Instead, he sent a damning letter to Congress, announcing that the investigation had been reopened. As Comey might say: No context, no transparency.In fairness, there was probably nothing that Comey could say about the Clinton case that would have stanched the “lock her up” conspiracy-mongering. His battle, and Mueller’s, is against a powerful sludge-tide of cynicism that has been flowing, especially in the media, for 50 years — and, for the past four years, from the White House itself. All politicians are crooked, aren’t they? All politicians lie.If nothing else, Comey has laid out the challenge of the next four years. Joe Biden’s quiet humanity will confront a noisy nation where too many citizens have become so sour that they’ve found solace, and entertainment, in an alternative reality. It will not be easy to lure them away from their noxious fantasies, but fact-based truth is not negotiable.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesMoves to ImpeachHow impeachment Might WorkBiden Focuses on CrisesHow Mob Stormed CapitolAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDespite Chaos and Big Losses, Republicans Still Control Most of GeorgiaDemocrats had huge breakthroughs in winning the presidential vote and two Senate runoff elections. But power in the state’s government largely remains in the hands of Republicans.Republicans prayed at their election night party in Atlanta on Tuesday. The party lost both Senate races after earlier losing the presidential vote in the state.Credit…Brandon Bell/Getty ImagesRichard Fausset and Jan. 10, 2021Updated 8:40 a.m. ETATLANTA — For two months, Georgia Republicans have watched their party descend into a morass of betrayal, chaos and blame. A top state election official accused President Trump of fomenting a “civil war” among fellow Republicans as he pressured the governor and the secretary of state to help overturn his electoral defeat.And, of course, there was the sting of defeat itself — in both the presidential race and the two Georgia Senate runoff elections last week, which relegated Republicans to minority status in both houses of Congress.But then there was Lauren McDonald Jr., a veteran state public service commissioner who goes by Bubba.Mr. McDonald was the third Republican candidate on Tuesday’s runoff ballot. And his 42,000-vote victory in a race in which many voters’ likely motivation was simple party affiliation was a comforting signal to many Georgia Republicans that their party was in better shape than shocking defeats at the top of the ballot might have indicated.Brian Robinson, a longtime Republican and a Georgia political consultant, said the party had certainly been left shaken by it all. However, he added, “Bubba McDonald showed there’s still a pretty strong generic Republican vote out there.”The recent trio of high-stakes Democratic victories in Georgia, fueled by the state’s changing demographics and by distaste for Mr. Trump, may mean that Georgia has finally achieved battleground status. And Democrats, observing a Republican house divided, are hoping for more. They are particularly focused on defeating incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp in 2022, anticipating that Stacey Abrams — Georgia Democrats’ biggest national star since Jimmy Carter — will take on Mr. Kemp in a rematch of their close and bitter 2018 race.But none of that will be easy in a state that retains a strong conservative streak, and where Republicans control most of the levers of power. Every statewide elected office in state government is currently in Republican hands. And Democrats, who had hoped to make big inroads in the state legislature, netted only two State House seats and one State Senate seat in November’s elections, leaving Republicans with comfortable majorities in both houses. Indeed, the possibility of enduring Republican strength in Georgia may illustrate the limits of the damage the Trump era may end up having beyond Washington, particularly in places where the G.O.P. has spent years building solid state parties that cater to a receptive conservative voting base. Republicans cemented or broadened gains in legislatures and state offices around the country even while they were losing the White House and the Senate.Mr. McDonald, in an interview on Friday, noted that he had been an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s and continued to count himself as one. “In my opinion, he’s been a very strong president,” he said. “But let’s turn the page and move on.”Even optimistic Georgia Republicans concede that it is difficult to know how badly the Republican brand has been damaged by Mr. Trump, particularly after he incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, and after his incessant and baseless argument that the election was stolen from him in Georgia and elsewhere. (Mr. McDonald declined to comment when asked his opinion about the storming of the Capitol.)Lauren McDonald, the Georgia public service commissioner, who goes by Bubba, was the only Republican to win in the runoff election last week.Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockIt is also difficult to assess Mr. Trump’s influence after he leaves the White House. In Georgia, for instance, he has threatened to back a Republican primary challenger for governor as a means of punishing Mr. Kemp for his lack of fealty.Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, noted that Mr. Trump continued to have many ardent fans in the state and that many of them believed the election had been stolen. Even if Mr. Kemp were to survive a primary challenge from a Trumpist candidate, such a challenge could siphon off supporters and contributors before he even had the chance to square off against the formidable Ms. Abrams.More generally, Dr. Bullock said, Republicans should be nervous with their margins in statewide races having dwindled year after year. “The two parties may be just about evenly matched going into 2022,” he said. “But the trends have been moving toward the Democrats.”Some hoped that the widespread disgust over the storming of the Capitol would “break the spell of the cult” surrounding Mr. Trump, as Mr. Robinson described it. Mr. Kemp strongly condemned the action Wednesday, calling it “un-American.”The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 10, 2021, 10:04 a.m. ETPatrick Toomey becomes the second Republican senator to call for Trump’s resignation.Federal authorities charge a man they say traveled to Washington for the rally and texted about shooting Pelosi.Inaugural donor list includes tech companies.Mr. Trump has been a dominant and fearsome force among Georgia Republicans, capable of elevating or debilitating the prospects of a candidate with a tweet. Yet after losing his own re-election campaign and then being blamed for the defeats in the Senate races, his grasp has eroded considerably, so much so that some party leaders and elected officials saw him as a liability and a cautionary tale of what could happen when a party was commandeered by a single personality.Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, one of the Republican state officials who became a target after resisting the president’s campaign of pressure to overturn his loss, contends that, ultimately, he will be vindicated.“I think that an overwhelming majority of the voters will come back our direction and reward us,” Mr. Duncan said. “And if they don’t see that as a valuable trait of their lieutenant governor, then I don’t want to represent them. I’ll be perfectly fine getting defeated if they don’t reward or recognize the value of honesty and integrity. I’m not their guy.”When Mr. Trump is taken out of the equation, Republicans’ fundamentals are indeed strong in Georgia, at least for the immediate future. Their legislative dominance means that Republicans this year will control the decennial redrawing of state legislative and congressional district maps, giving them the ability to protect their own and create new problems for some sitting Democratic office holders. In the legislative session that begins Monday, Republicans are promising to impose strict new limits on voting in the wake of record voter turnout.Republican legislators and state officials have discussed eliminating no-excuse absentee voting, which surged in popularity in the pandemic. They have also considered eliminating drop boxes for absentee ballots, curbing unsolicited absentee ballot applications and requiring a photo identification requirement for mail-in ballots.Georgia’s Republican House speaker, David Ralston, said he was unlikely to support eliminating no-excuse absentee voting. But any attempts to curtail the current system are likely to be cited by Democrats as examples of voter suppression, a charge they have leveled against Mr. Kemp, a former secretary of state, for years.Moreover, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, one of the two Democratic Senate victors this week along with Jon Ossoff, will have to run for re-election in 2022, because, in defeating Senator Kelly Loeffler, he is technically finishing out the term of the retired former Senator Johnny Isakson. He is likely to be a top target for national Republicans.The activists who have been helping drive turnout and bolster Democrats know they have their work cut out for them.President Trump threatened to back a different Republican candidate for governor as a means of punishing Gov. Brian Kemp, above, for his lack of fealty.Credit…Dustin Chambers for The New York Times“It’s going to remain a purple state,” said Esteban Garces, a co-executive director of Poder Latinx, an organization that had been heavily involved in registering and mobilizing Latino voters in Georgia during the recent elections.“They were narrow, and that’s the truth of it,” Mr. Garces said of the recent wins by Democrats in the presidential and Senate races. “That means the work on the ground is going to have to be replicated time and again.”Kelly Dietrich, the chief executive of the National Democratic Training Committee, an organization that prepares Democrats to run for elected office, said he was “bullish” on Mr. Warnock’s 2022 run, as well as for other Democratic candidates in Georgia. “It’s that long-term infrastructure required to build long-term power,” he said of the work being done.He added that Republicans would be weighed down by the identity crisis left in the wake of the Trump administration.“This reckoning is their own doing,” Mr. Dietrich said. “They’ve created a monster, and they can’t control it.”Some reckoning has already begun. This week, Erick Erickson, the influential conservative radio host and Trump critic, called for the resignation of the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, David Shafer, a staunch supporter of the president who also promulgated claims of electoral fraud after Mr. Trump’s loss. Mr. Erickson argued that that strategy, which might have depressed Republicans’ desire to turn out in the runoff, ran counter to Republicans’ interests. (Mr. Shafer could not be reached for comment.)The invasion of the U.S. Capitol may also continue to have political repercussions in Georgia. On Friday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that a robocall telling Trump supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight to protect the integrity of our elections” had been put out by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, an arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association. That group is chaired by Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general.Katie Byrd, a spokeswoman for Mr. Carr, said Friday that Mr. Carr had “no knowledge” of the decision to put out the robocall and noted that he had publicly condemned “the violence and destruction we saw at the U.S. Capitol.”And despite some of the positive signs, Republicans are also weighing how the last days of the Trump era have weakened them and are ruminating on the future of their party’s collective identity. Trey Allen, a Republican commissioner in Columbia County, near Augusta, said the party would have to move beyond being defined by a single personality and focus on classic conservative themes that are still popular with many Georgia voters.“We will hopefully tighten up our platform,” said Mr. Allen, a self-described Reagan Republican who voted for Mr. Trump twice, “and focus on the things that make conservatives who they are: strong economy, strong military, less government, more freedoms.”Mr. Duncan said that Republicans needed to prioritize policy over personality. He imagined what he described as “G.O.P. 2.0,” a version of the party that embraced traditional conservative ideals while also being more empathetic and having a more gentle tone, to win back voters who rejected Mr. Trump’s vitriolic style.“If we don’t learn from our mistakes,” he said, “we’re going to continue to lose from our mistakes. This is the perfect moment in time to start G.O.P. 2.0 and realize we can never let a person be more important than a party.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

While election officials in Georgia were verifying signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in one metro Atlanta county, Donald Trump pressed a lead investigator to “find the fraud” and said it would make the investigator a national hero.The December call, described by a person familiar with it, is yet another link in the chain of the extraordinary pressure campaign waged by the US president on state officials as he sought to overturn the results of the November election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.It is one of at least three phone calls, held over the course of a month between early December and early January, where Trump sought help from high-level Georgia officials in subverting the election – only to be rebuffed each time. Trump lost to Biden in Georgia by 11,779 votes.The call to the investigator preceded Trump’s call on 2 January to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, where he asked election officials to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s win in the state. It occurred as election officials were conducting an audit of signatures on absentee ballot envelopes in Cobb County.The audit, which reviewed more than 15,000 signatures, found no cases of fraud. The Georgia bureau of investigation helped conduct the signature audit.Trump and his allies have for months made false claims about Georgia’s signature verification process for absentee ballots and about the results of the November election. Among other things, they demanded an audit of the signature matches.The White House had no immediate comment. The call was first reported on Saturday by the Washington Post, which said it was withholding the name of the investigator, who did not respond to requests for comment, because of the risk of threats and harassment directed at election officials.Various election officials across the country and Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, have said there was no widespread fraud in the election. Raffensperger and other officials in Georgia have repeatedly disputed Trump’s false claims about the election and said it was conducted freely and fairly.Congress certified Biden’s electoral college win early on Thursday – hours after a violent throng of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol.During another call in early December, Trump pressed Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to order a special session of the state legislature to subvert Biden’s victory. Kemp refused.Trump repeatedly lashed out at Raffensperger and Kemp, both fellow Republicans, and others he saw as standing in his way of overturning the election loss.In last week’s call with Raffensperger, Trump urged the secretary of state to change the certified results. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” Trump said. “Because we won the state.”Raffensperger said in response: “President Trump, we’ve had several lawsuits, and we’ve had to respond in court to the lawsuits and the contentions. We don’t agree that you have won.”Legal experts said the call raised questions about possible election law violations by Trump, and several Democrats in the state have called for an investigation to be opened. More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTexas City Settles Mayor’s Race by Pulling Ping-Pong Balls From a Top HatThe random drawing came after a December runoff ended with 1,010 votes each for the two candidates running for mayor of Dickinson, a Houston suburb.Mike Foreman, the mayor of Friendswood, Texas, and Julie Masters, the mayor of Dickinson, Texas, settling a tie vote for mayor in Dickinson with a random drawing.Credit…Stuart Villanueva/The Galveston County Daily News, via Associated PressJan. 10, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ETThere were no lawsuits, no cries of election fraud and certainly no angry mobs storming the seat of government. Instead, a tie between two candidates running for mayor of a Houston suburb was settled after their names were drawn from a top hat.“It was as fair as you can make it,” said Jennifer Lawrence, who lost the random drawing on Thursday night. “I feel like this is how it was supposed to go. It’s disappointing, but it is what it is.”The winner, Sean Skipworth, said that while he was certainly pleased that he had won, he had his reservations about handing democracy over to fate — in this case, two Ping-Pong balls, each one signed in black pen by one of the candidates, that were placed inside the hat.“It was really exciting, but it’s a horrible way to resolve an election,” he said. “It’s always better to have people decide elections, not random chance.”The drawing in Dickinson, a city of about 21,000, roughly 30 miles southeast of Houston, was allowed under a Texas election law that permits ties to be resolved by the “casting of lots,” or a game of chance, said Elizabeth Alvarez, a Texas election lawyer. It could be darts, a coin toss or a roll of the dice, she said.It doesn’t happen often, she said, given the improbability of an exact tie, but it has happened before. In 2012, a tie between two candidates running for City Council in Wolfforth, Texas, was decided with the flip of a 1974 Eisenhower silver dollar.“It sounds dumb,” Ms. Alvarez said, but the preference for quickly settling a tie is rooted in Texas’ deep-seated aversion to big government, which in this case would mean holding another election.“We think, ‘You know, if it’s a tie, they ought to settle it among themselves, if they want,’” Ms. Alvarez said. “Why cost the city a bunch of money if we can flip a coin and shake hands?”In Dickinson, the ceremony was held inside City Hall.It came after a runoff election in December between Ms. Lawrence, a mechanical engineer, and Mr. Skipworth, a former City Council member and a professor of government at the College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas, ended with exactly 1,010 votes for each. A recount certified the unlikely outcome on Tuesday.Together, the two candidates received 2,020 votes, which Mr. Skipworth said seemed like “evidence of higher intelligence in the universe.”About 100 people were in attendance at the drawing. The top hat was placed on a table that had been draped in a sparkly gold sheet. Dickinson’s current mayor, Julie Masters, presided.“Welcome, everybody, to this historic event in our community,” Ms. Masters said, before lifting the top hat for all to see, according to a video posted on the city’s Facebook page.“I just want to show everybody — the hat is empty,” Ms. Masters said, as someone cracked a joke about a rabbit.After Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Skipworth placed their signed Ping-Pong balls in the hat, Ms. Masters lifted the hat and rattled them around.The honor of plucking the names fell to Mike Foreman, the mayor of Friendswood, Texas, who said Ms. Masters, his friend, had asked him to serve as an “unbiased ball-picker.”“I got one!” Mr. Foreman declared, holding the ball up high, before Ms. Masters read the name aloud: “Sean Skipworth!”As camera shutters clicked, Mr. Skipworth fell into the arms of his wife, Melissa, and son Christopher, 8, and then hugged Ms. Lawrence. He takes office on Tuesday.The graciousness shown by the candidates, both of whom accepted the outcome, wasn’t lost on anyone at the ceremony, which happened one day after a violent mob, egged on by President Trump’s refusal to accept his election loss, rampaged through the Capitol and disrupted Congress as it was certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.“It was palpable,” Mr. Foreman said. “You realize, ‘Hey, there’s all this stuff going on nationally, but here they are — friendly, gracious, there’s no us against them. It was all of our residents and citizens coming together. It was a cool, friendly atmosphere, and I was proud of that.”Ms. Lawrence, who was running for office for the first time, said the loss was a heavy blow but also a relief after a tough, 10-month campaign. She said she had had a feeling that she was going to lose the drawing.“I had respect for Sean, and I knew if I was going to lose, I was going to lose with grace,” she said. “This is about our community. This is not about me winning or him winning. It’s about how we get something done for our citizens.”Mr. Skipworth said he was moved by Ms. Lawrence’s hard work and civility.“Given what happened, it is refreshing for people to see this in everyday America,” he said. “At the end of the day, we came and hugged it out and shook hands, and that was it. And that’s how it should be.”Still, Mr. Skipworth said he wanted to amend the City Charter to ensure that if a future election ends in a tie, it prompts another election, not a random drawing. He said he planned to turn his strange victory into an object lesson for his students on the importance of voting.“Every vote counts,” he said, “and I’m living proof of that — literally.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More