Elections

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration imposed sweeping economic sanctions against Iran’s oil sector on Monday as tensions between Washington and Tehran continue to escalate in the days leading up to the American presidential election.The Treasury Department announced sanctions on Iran’s Ministry of Petroleum, the National Iranian Oil Company and its oil-tanker subsidiary for providing financial support to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the elite military unit that is designated as a terrorist group by the United States. The sanctions are expected to create a new obstacle should any future president seek to open negotiations with Iran.The department also penalized multiple front companies, subsidiaries and executives affiliated with those organizations, including Iran’s petroleum minister, Bijan N. Zanganeh. Four people involved in selling Iranian gasoline to the Maduro government in Venezuela were also named.Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said the Iranian government “uses the petroleum sector to fund the destabilizing activities” of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, adding that Iranian leaders continue “to prioritize its support for terrorist entities and its nuclear program over the needs of the Iranian people.”A spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations denounced the sanctions.“The U.S.’s hostility towards the Iranian people has no limit,” said the spokesman, Alireza Miryousefi. “The U.S. is sanctioning Iranian entities that have already been sanctioned under another phony charge. However, the U.S.’s addiction to sanctions has not paid off.”Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential candidate, has promised that if elected he will discuss re-entering the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that Mr. Trump withdrew from in 2018.That negotiating process could require unwinding a series of sanctions that Mr. Trump has levied on Iran. But given the number of actions Mr. Trump has enacted, it could become difficult for Mr. Biden to undo them.“It makes it more politically perilous for Biden,” said Brian O’Toole, a former senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Essentially, ‘the U.S. is giving up a lot more than Iran is giving up’ is how it will be pitched by the Republicans.”The Treasury Department’s actions put nearly all of Iran’s petroleum sector under sanctions authorized by counterterrorism provisions enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which experts said carried a political and symbolic weight.“A future President Biden would have a tough time lifting these sanctions given the inextricable link of the energy sector to terrorism and the I.R.G.C.,” said Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a think tank whose analysis has taken a hard stance against Iran, referring to the Revolutionary Guards. “International companies will have an enormously difficult time investing in Iran’s energy sector or even buying oil from Iran without running afoul of these sanctions.”In recent months, Mr. Trump has increased economic pressure against Iran, including reimposing sanctions against the country and enforcing penalties on companies that do business with Tehran.Election 2020 More

Joseph R. Biden Jr. will travel to Iowa this week, he announced on Monday, a sign of confidence that suggests his campaign is significantly expanding its electoral map with just eight days left in the presidential race.“I’m going to be going to Iowa, be going to Wisconsin, I’m going to Georgia, I’m going to Florida and maybe other places as well,” Mr. Biden said during a stop at a voter center in Chester, Pa.And in a remarkably bold pronouncement for a Democratic presidential candidate, Mr. Biden declared that he would win Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, three critical battleground states that might be his key to victory. He also said he thought he had a “fighting chance” in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Iowa, states that were once thought to be a reach for Democrats but that recent polls indicate are now up for grabs.“I am not overconfident about anything,” Mr. Biden said. “I just want to make sure we can earn every vote possible.”“That blue wall has to be re-established,” he added, referring to the Northern battleground states, which are traditionally Democratic.Mr. Biden’s call to resurrect the “blue wall,” which Donald J. Trump knocked down in 2016, and his announcement of an intense final push that includes visits to Iowa and Georgia, both states that Mr. Trump won handily, suggest that the Biden campaign feels it is in a position of strength heading into the final stretch.It also comes as some Democrats have privately expressed concern about Mr. Biden’s relatively light schedule during the coronavirus pandemic even as he is leading in polls. He traveled to Pennsylvania on Saturday, but his only in-person appearance on Sunday was going to church near his home in Delaware. (He also made a brief appearance during a virtual concert held by his campaign.)His cautious approach to campaigning has drawn ridicule from Mr. Trump, who poked fun at his opponent while at his third rally of the day in Martinsburg, Pa. “He said he doesn’t do these kinds of rallies because of Covid,” Mr. Trump told a large crowd gathered at an airport hangar, after throwing red caps into the audience. “No, he doesn’t do them because nobody shows up.”And at another rally on Monday in Lititz, Pa., the president mocked Mr. Biden for his sparse travel schedule, saying that if the former vice president lost, “he should be ashamed of himself because he didn’t work.”Moments after Mr. Biden revealed his plans, his campaign provided more details about his travel schedule, indicating he would travel to Iowa and Wisconsin on Friday. His campaign had already announced his plans to travel to Georgia on Tuesday and Florida on Thursday.Trying to stave off any criticism about his travel, Mr. Biden on Monday offered an explanation for his careful approach to campaigning during the pandemic.Election 2020 More

Local election officials, politicians and disinformation researchers continue to express concern about how misinformation about voting could disrupt Election Day next week. False and misleading information, research shows, has already been spreading widely.The 2019 race for governor of Kentucky illustrates what can go wrong, as we explored in the latest episode of “Stressed Election.” In that race, the standing governor, Matt Bevin, a Republican, disputed the results when the vote tally showed him narrowly losing to his Democratic challenger, Andy Beshear.Mr. Bevin and some of his allies argued, without showing any evidence, that there were voting irregularities and fraud, echoing some false and misleading statements made on social media. The governor initially refused to concede even though returns showed him trailing by about 5,000 votes. Mr. Bevin conceded about a week later.The race offers some lessons about the power of disinformation in American elections:1. Misinformation efforts don’t need to be sophisticated to be successful. In Kentucky, an account with just 19 followers sent out a tweet on election night that claimed to have “shredded a box of Republican ballots.” The tweet, sent as a joke by a college student, would eventually reach thousands.2. Stopping the spread of misleading election information is not easy. Election officials noticed the false “shredded” tweet, which was retweeted by a few popular conservative accounts, and reported it to Twitter. The company removed the post within an hour, but screenshots of the post were retweeted by dozens of accounts, with retweets reaching well into the thousands. Tracking all of those screenshots proved difficult for both election officials and Twitter.3. One piece of misinformation can beget much more. The sudden spread of the false tweet about shredding ballots seemed to be a green light for other claims. Some tweets started to question the accuracy of voter rolls in Kentucky, others wondered about “hackers” attacking the “cloud” where election results were stored, except there is no “cloud” used in Kentucky elections. And baseless claims of voter fraud were rampant.4. There are networks ready to amplify and spread misinformation. Some groups on Twitter spread countless conspiracies, be it the QAnon cabal conspiracy or an anti-mask conspiracy. These networks can quickly seize on a piece of conspiratorial misinformation and amplify and accelerate its spread, which is part of why a single tweet from an obscure account reached so many in Kentucky.5. An extremely close election is particularly ripe for misinformation. Following election night in Kentucky, the brush fire of misinformation that was spreading online quickly took hold offline. Mr. Bevin’s supporters staged news conferences with baseless claims of fraud, and set up a robocall network telling people to “please report suspected voter fraud” to the state elections board. Online, the discussion had now moved far beyond a case of shredded ballots to accusations of a stolen or rigged election. More

Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in architecture and American industry. He last photographed The Times’s printing plant in College Point, Queens. Malia Wollan writes the weekly Tip column for the magazine. She lives in Oakland, Calif. Additional design and development by Jacky Myint. More

WASHINGTON — At least nine times since April, the Supreme Court has issued rulings in election disputes. Or perhaps “rulings” is too generous a word for those unsigned orders, which addressed matters as consequential as absentee voting during the pandemic in Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, and the potential disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of people with felony convictions in Florida.Most of the orders, issued on what scholars call the court’s “shadow docket,” did not bother to supply even a whisper of reasoning.“This idea of unexplained, unreasoned court orders seems so contrary to what courts are supposed to be all about,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard. “If courts don’t have to defend their decisions, then they’re just acts of will, of power. They’re not even pretending to be legal decisions.”The orders were responses to emergency applications, and they were issued quickly, without full briefing or oral arguments (hence the “shadow docket”).Compare the shadow docket with the court’s regular docket, the one with real briefs, arguments and elaborate signed opinions. On that docket — the “merits docket” — the court ordinarily agrees to hear about 1 percent of the petitions asking it to intercede. In its last term, it decided just 53 merits cases.If the court is going to treat emergency applications with something like equal care, it might consider explaining what it is doing. Explaining, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote in 2000, is what distinguishes judges from politicians.“The political branches of government claim legitimacy by election, judges by reason,” he wrote. “Any step that withdraws an element of the judicial process from public view makes the ensuing decision look more like fiat, which requires compelling justification.” Terse rulings on emergency applications are not new. But “the shadow docket has truly exploded in the last few years,” Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, wrote on Scotusblog last week.The Trump administration has been a major contributor to the trend, Professor Vladeck wrote, having filed 36 emergency applications in its first three and a half years. By contrast, the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama filed just eight such applications over 16 years.More recently, emergency applications in voting cases have spiked. Lower courts have struggled to make sense of the court’s orders, which are something less than precedents but nonetheless cannot be ignored by responsible judges.Is it possible to trace some themes in the court’s election orders? Sure.One is that Republicans tend to win. Another, as Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion this month, speaking only for himself, is that “federal courts ordinarily should not alter state election rules in the period close to an election.”He cited the 2006 ruling that has come to stand for that proposition, Purcell v. Gonzalez. Or perhaps “ruling” is too generous a word, as Purcell itself was an unsigned, cryptic, tentative and equivocal product of the court’s shadow docket. It has given rise to a “shadow doctrine,” Professor Stephanopoulos wrote last month in an essay on Take Care, a legal blog.Election 2020 More

Gail Collins: Well Bret, the election’s next week. OK, you probably knew that. But let’s take a look back. Which part are you going to miss most? The debates? The polls? The chance to hear Donald Trump announce that he’s done more for Black Americans than any other president, with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln?Bret Stephens: Gail, the only thing I can possibly imagine missing about this election season would be the expression on the faces of certain Fox News hosts in the event of a Joe Biden landslide. Otherwise, 2020 just felt like a long hostage crisis, this time with every American being held captive.Then again, the moment I start dreaming about a Biden victory, a voice in my head screams: Jinx! At this point, do you see any prospect of Trump winning?Gail: I bet every single dedicated citizen is thinking: Obviously it’s going to be Biden. And then: Hey, remember Hillary?Bret: I’m worried. When it comes to the top battleground states, Trump is polling almost exactly the same against Biden as he was four years ago against Clinton.Biden has higher personal ratings than Clinton, which is good news, but Trump seems to be campaigning much harder than Biden. And when I see a reputable poll that puts Biden neck and neck with Trump in Texas, it can mean only two things: Either we are headed toward the biggest electoral landslide in a generation, or pollsters are once again clueless about who is really going to turn out to vote.In other words, pass the Maalox.Gail: We’re superstitious and trying to hold off a jinx. But yeah, I predict Biden’s gonna win.Bret: Sssshhhh!Gail: But presuming I’m right, do you think we’ll have a normal transfer of power or the scenario where Trump cries foul and chains himself to his desk in the Oval Office?Bret: Even if he remains chained to the desk, he’ll go. I think.Gail: Depends on how close he comes. If he’s just walloped, I’m presuming his friends and family will try to ease him out the door. But if it’s even vaguely close in the critical states he’ll go on missing-ballot meltdown.Bret: I was struck by a recent column by our colleague Ross Douthat, bluntly headlined “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” Ross’s argument is that, as aspiring autocrats go, Trump is too incompetent to pull off anything so ambitious as stealing an election.Gail: Reading it I was struck by how little it takes to make me happy these days.Bret: Successful strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan spend years carefully laying the groundwork for autocracy by first gaining broad public support, then by getting their allies to control the mainstream media, then by appointing their toadies to key positions in the military, and so on. Trump, by contrast, is despised by more than half the country, most of the media and his own secretary of defense. If someone ever uncovers his college transcript, I’m guessing he got a C- in the class on dictatorship, which is better than the D’s and F’s that I’m guessing he got in his classes on business analytics, financial accounting and management essentials.Gail: Yeah if we’re going to be under the thumb of a dictator you want one who got a good grade in his autocracy seminar.Bret: On the other hand, Gail, this year has been so full of unpleasant surprises that I won’t be surprised by another one.Gail: Then, Bret, we will have a very interesting holiday season. Hope you haven’t planned any family trips.Bret: I was thinking: “The Mosquito Coast,” Paul Theroux edition. Actually, I’ve been leafing through a book my wife gave me as a gift a few years ago, “Atlas of Remote Islands.” It’ll come in handy in the event that things get really ugly here. Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic looks very intriguing, assuming I could get there.Before that happens, Gail, any thoughts on the Hunter-Joe Biden corruption allegations?Gail: On the real-life level I continue to feel that while Hunter pretty clearly got some swell-paying jobs because of who he’s related to, the relative in question didn’t do anything that remotely resembles a payback.On the political impact level, the voters are aware of the personal loss Biden’s suffered — most recently with the death of his son Beau. And that they might be privately prepared to cut him a little slack on the familial front.Bret: Part of the problem is that I haven’t yet seen a really deep dive by a fully credible news source into the Hunter story. So it’s hard to tell what kind of scandal (assuming it’s any scandal at all) we are dealing with here. Is it a Billy Carter-style issue, in which a close relative trades off his family name without the involvement of or consent of the officeholder? Is it something far less nefarious — or more? I’m skeptical that we’re dealing with Russian disinformation here, but we might well be dealing with Trumpian disinformation.Whatever turns out to be the case, I doubt it’s going to approach the level of influence peddling and implicit corruption connected to Trump and his family. Can anyone say “666 Fifth Avenue”? Or Trump’s hotel in Washington? Trump accusing the Biden family of corruption is a good way of teaching children what is meant by the expression, “the pot calling the kettle black.”Gail: But hey, we’ve got more than a president to pick next week. What have you been watching in the Senate races?Bret: My friend Richard North Patterson had a very useful rundown of Senate races in The Bulwark: He hints at a 50-50 Senate split. My guess is that Susan Collins loses her race in Maine, so that’s a Democratic pickup, while Doug Jones loses his in Alabama, for a Republican pick up. I’m going to bet that Lindsey Graham holds his seat in South Carolina, as do Republicans Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Joni Ernst in Iowa. But I think Mark Kelly, the astronaut and Gabby Giffords’s husband, beats Martha McSally in Arizona, for a Democratic gain. In fact, I suspect Arizona is going to replace Ohio as a national bellwether: As it goes, so goes the rest of the country.Gail: Colorado looks good for the Democrats — Senator Cory Gardner hasn’t been what you’d call a legislative star. I’m betting John Hickenlooper, the former Democratic governor, will whomp him.Bret: Gail, it’s strange to think that in a little more than a week we’re either going to be toasting Gerald Ford’s memory by saying, “Our long national nightmare is over” — or we’re going to be reading Dante’s “Inferno” in the original Tuscan dialect: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/ mi ritrovai per una selva oscura …My mom taught me that. She thinks Trump’s going to win.Gail: Your mom is so classy. If Trump wins I think I’m going to spend the next four years huddled in bed watching reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”But I like to think we’ll be getting together outside somewhere for a celebratory drink or three. We could watch the reports on the Trump Family’s Last White House Christmas and ring in a happy new year.We won’t be agreeing as much in Biden’s administration, but we’re going to be two very happy quarrelers.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Political tensions over the upcoming presidential election escalated on New York City’s streets on Sunday, as supporters of President Trump clashed with counterprotesters during a day of demonstrations.Seven people were arrested during skirmishes between opposing sides in Manhattan, where Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and the city’s former mayor, encountered protesters targeting a caravan of cars organized by a group that identifies itself as Jews for Trump.In one video, Mr. Giuliani could be seen in the passenger side of a vehicle with the window rolled down as anti-Trump protesters screamed at him.In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said that he had encountered the caravan and the protesters while driving down Fifth Avenue after taping his radio show.“I would love to have had a campaign commercial of it and put it on in the middle of America and say, ‘Who would you prefer for the next four years?” he said. “This group of foul-mouthed people who don’t seem to have a vocabulary beyond three words, or these very nice Jewish people who are driving in the car and not saying anything back and not doing anything other than exercising their right to say they’re for Donald Trump.”According to the police, the pro-Trump caravan passed through Times Square, where it converged with a group of anti-Trump protesters who had marched from Brooklyn. The cars in the convoy were then blocked by counterprotesters, and some drivers got out of their cars to confront the anti-Trump demonstrators.The two sides hurled political slurs — calling each other “fascists” and “anarchists”— traded blows, and fought over the Trump supporters’ flags before the police broke them apart, according to videos posted online.In some videos, a group of people can be seen yelling expletives and throwing eggs and other projectiles at passing cars flying pro-Trump flags in Midtown, while in another, a group of people holding pro-Trump banners march on one side of the street as people across the street yell, “New York hates you.”The clashes came as the Police Department was preparing for more possible unrest as Election Day approached, including days or weeks of protests in the aftermath of the vote. Hundreds of police officers have been assigned to polling stations for both early voting and Election Day, with thousands more on standby for protests.Top police officials have stressed the need for officers to remain neutral, despite their unions’ open embrace of Mr. Trump. But officials said an officer crossed the line late Saturday, when he used a police loudspeaker to voice support for the president while arguing with a man on the street in Flatbush, Brooklyn, who called him a “fascist.”“Trump 2020,” the officer responded. “Put it on YouTube. Put it on Facebook. Trump 2020.”The officer, whose name the police withheld, was suspended without pay on Sunday after videos of the incident went viral on social media. Department policy prohibits officers from engaging in political activity on duty or in uniform, including endorsing a candidate or party.“One hundred percent unacceptable. Period,” Commissioner Dermot F. Shea commented on one of the videos of the suspended officer on Twitter. “Law Enforcement must remain apolitical, it is essential in our role to serve ALL New Yorkers regardless of any political beliefs. It is essential for New Yorkers to trust their Police.”The Police Benevolent Association, the officer’s labor union, declined to comment.It is unclear whether two other officers who were with the suspended officer will face discipline.Election 2020 More