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      Voter Fraud Unit in Arizona Will Shift Focus to Voter Rights

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      Kris Mayes, the state’s new Democratic attorney general, is shifting gears on election issues in an office her Republican predecessor created.Arizona’s new Democratic attorney general, Kris Mayes, is redirecting an election integrity unit her Republican predecessor created, focusing its work instead on addressing voter suppression. The shift by Ms. Mayes is one of her first acts since she took office this month.The unit’s former leader, Jennifer Wright, meanwhile, has joined a legal effort to invalidate Ms. Mayes’s narrow victory in the November election.“Under my predecessor’s administration, the election integrity unit searched widely for voter fraud and found scant evidence of it occurring in Arizona,” Ms. Mayes said in a statement provided by her office on Monday. “That’s because instances of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.”The former attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate last year, created the office to investigate voter fraud complaints in Arizona, a battleground state.Ms. Mayes said in the statement that she did not share the priorities of Mr. Brnovich, whom she described as being preoccupied with voter fraud despite isolated cases. The office has five pending voter fraud investigations, as of late October, and a spokesman for Ms. Mayes said on Monday that there was no plan yet for how to proceed with them.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.2023 Races: Governors’ contests in Kentucky, Louisiana and Mississippi and mayoral elections in Chicago and Philadelphia are among the races to watch this year.Voting Laws: The tug of war over voting rights is playing out with fresh urgency at the state level, as Republicans and Democrats seek to pass new laws before the next presidential election.2024 Presidential Race: As the 2024 primary approaches, the wavering support of evangelical leaders for Donald J. Trump could have far-reaching implications for Republicans.Democrats’ New Power: After winning trifectas in four state governments in the midterms, Democrats have a level of control in statehouses not seen since 2009.Mr. Brnovich did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Republicans in Arizona have amplified conspiracy theories and fraud claims since the 2020 election and the midterms last year, when the attorney general’s race ended with a recount that was decided by 280 votes.Ms. Mayes said that protecting voting access and limiting voter suppression would be at the forefront of her administration.“I will also use this unit to protect elections officials, election volunteers and poll workers against threats of violence and against interference in our elections,” she said. In addition, the unit will seek to defend vote-by-mail rules, which she said “90 percent of Arizonans enjoy and in many cases depend on.”Ms. Wright, a former assistant attorney general who had led the election integrity unit for Mr. Brnovich, announced last week that she had begun a new role as a lawyer for Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican who lost to Ms. Mayes and is planning to continue his legal efforts to try to overturn the election.Ms. Wright referred questions on Monday about her new role to the campaign of Mr. Hamadeh, who was part of a group of prominent election deniers seeking statewide office in Arizona during the midterms.In December, his legal efforts to overturn his election loss were dismissed in court and a recount confirmed his defeat. The outcome dealt another blow to Arizona Republicans who entered the midterms with heightened expectations for victory, seizing on high inflation and President Biden’s flagging job approval numbers. Instead, Democrats won most of the marquee statewide offices.Election deniers pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims. They also tried to seize on the undercounting of 500 ballots in Pinal County, outside Phoenix, which officials attributed to human error and which has been the basis of Mr. Hamadeh’s latest efforts to overturn the election.“Not only do I believe Abe is right, but I also believe that he will be successful in his election contest, and that is why I have joined this fight,” Ms. Wright said in a statement provided by Mr. Hamadeh’s campaign. “I look forward to getting Kris Mayes out of the office she should have never occupied in the first place.”In Arizona, a cauldron of election denialism, Mr. Brnovich represented somewhat of an enigma, defending the state’s vote count after the 2020 presidential election. His stance drew the ire of former President Donald J. Trump, who sharply criticized Mr. Brnovich last June and endorsed Mr. Brnovich’s Republican opponent, Blake Masters, who won the Senate primary but lost in the general election.But Mr. Brnovich has also suggested that the 2020 election revealed “serious vulnerabilities” in the electoral system and said cryptically on the former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon’s podcast last spring, “I think we all know what happened in 2020.” More

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      Adam Schiff: Don’t Forget That Many Republicans in Congress Enabled Trump’s Big Lie

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      On Dec. 27, 2020, more than six weeks after losing re-election, an infuriated President Donald Trump telephoned his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, had announced his resignation less than two weeks earlier, after telling the president that the claims of election fraud Mr. Trump had been trumpeting were — as Mr. Barr later bluntly put it in testimony — “bullshit” and publicly affirming that there was no fraud on a scale that would affect the outcome of the election.With Mr. Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, also on the line, Mr. Trump launched into the same tired, disproved and discredited allegations he had propagated so often at rallies, during news conferences and on social media. None of it was true, and Mr. Donoghue told him so. According to Mr. Donoghue, Mr. Trump, exasperated that his own handpicked top appointees at the Justice Department would not affirm his baseless allegations, responded: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”It was a remarkable statement, even for a president who had serially abused the powers of his office. Having been told by the very department that had investigated his claims of fraud that they were untrue, Mr. Trump told the acting attorney general and his deputy to lie about it and said he would take it from there.That Mr. Trump was willing to lie so baldly about a matter at the heart of our democracy — whether the American people can rely on elections to ensure the peaceful transfer of power — now seems self-evident, even unremarkable, when we consider the violent attack on the Capitol he incited days later. But Americans shouldn’t lose sight of how this behavior indicts the former president, and not just the former president but the Republican members of Congress whom he knew would go along with his big lie.The report released Thursday from the Jan. 6 committee, on which I served, makes abundantly clear that there were multiple lines of effort to overturn the 2020 election. Some involved attempts to pressure state legislatures to declare the loser to be the winner. Others involved a fake electors plot, pressure on the vice president to violate his constitutional duty and efforts to force an elections official to “find” thousands of votes that didn’t exist. It was only when all of these other efforts failed that the president resorted to inciting mob violence to try to stop the transfer of power.But one line of effort to overturn the election is given scant attention, and that involved the willingness of so many members of Congress to vote to overturn it. Even after Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police put down the insurrection at great cost to themselves, the majority of Republicans in the House picked up right where they left off, still voting to overturn the results in important states.At one of our Jan. 6 committee hearings, the committee vice chair Liz Cheney, a Republican, called out her colleagues in Congress for their duplicity in the most searing terms: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”With our work on the committee largely concluded, it will now fall to the Justice Department to ensure a form of accountability that Congress is not empowered to provide, and to vindicate the rule of law in a manner beyond our reach: through prosecution. Multiple laws were violated in the course of a broad attempt to overturn the election, and not just by the foot soldiers who broke into the Capitol building that day and brutally assaulted police officers, but also by those who incited them, encouraged them and, when it was all over, gave them aid and comfort. Bringing a former president to justice who even now calls for the “termination” of our Constitution is a perilous endeavor. Not doing so is far more dangerous.There is a growing disdain for the law and for our country’s institutions, and a frightening acceptance of the use of violence to resolve political disputes. Mr. Trump’s big lie has been one of the most powerful instigators of political violence, since it persuaded millions of people that the election they lost must have been rigged or fraudulent. If people can be convinced of that, what is left but violence to decide who should govern? The attack on the Capitol was an all too foreseeable consequence of Mr. Trump’s relentless effort to alienate the people from their government and from the most important foundation of governance: their right to vote.Even the Constitution cannot protect us if the people sworn to uphold it do not give meaning to their oath of office, if that oath is not informed by ideas of right and wrong, and if people are unwilling to accept the basic truth of things. None of it will be enough.But if we allow ourselves to be guided by facts — not factions — and if we choose our representatives based on their allegiance to the law and to the Constitution, then we should have every confidence that our proud legacy of self-government will go on. It is our hope that this report will make a small contribution to that effort. Our country has never before faced the kind of threat we documented. May it never again.Adam B. Schiff is a Democratic member of Congress from California and the author, most recently, of “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.”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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      This Minnesota Race Will Show the Potency of Crime vs. Abortion

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      Keith Ellison, the state’s progressive attorney general, faces a Republican challenger who is looking to harness public unease since George Floyd’s murder.WAYZATA, Minn. — Here in light-blue Minnesota, where I’m traveling this week, there’s a race that offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.Keith Ellison, the incumbent attorney general and a Democrat, insists that his bid for re-election will hinge on abortion, which remains legal in Minnesota.But his Republican challenger, Jim Schultz, says the contest is about public safety and what he argues are “extreme” policies that Ellison endorsed after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — the aftermath of which Minnesota is still wrestling with.Schultz, a lawyer and first-time candidate, said in an interview that watching Floyd’s death under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a police officer who was later convicted of murder, had made him “physically ill.” He added that Ellison’s prosecution of Chauvin was “appropriate” and that he supported banning the use of chokeholds and what he called “warrior-style police training.”But Schultz, a 36-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School who has worked most recently as the in-house counsel for an investment firm, was scathing in his assessment of Ellison, presenting himself as the common-sense opponent of what he characterized as a “crazy anti-police ideology.”He decided to run against Ellison, he said, because he thought it was “immoral to embrace policies that led to an increase in crime in at-risk communities.”Ellison fired right back, accusing Schultz of misrepresenting the job of attorney general, which has traditionally focused on protecting consumers. County prosecutors, he said in an interview, were the ones primarily responsible for crime under Minnesota law — but he noted that his office had prosecuted nearly 50 people of violent crimes and had always helped counties when asked.“He’s trying to demagogue crime, Willie Horton-style,” Ellison said, referring to a Black man who was used in a notorious attack ad in the 1988 presidential election that was widely seen as racist fearmongering. Schultz’s plans, he warned, would “demolish” the attorney general’s office and undermine its work on “corporate accountability.”“He’s never tried a case or stepped in a courtroom in his life,” Ellison added.An upset victory by Schultz would reverberate: He would be the first Republican to win statewide office since Tim Pawlenty was re-elected as governor in 2006.Ellison, 59, served six terms in Congress and rose to become a deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. Before leaving Washington and winning his current office in 2018 — by only four percentage points — he was a rising star of the party’s progressive wing.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.Debates Dwindle: Direct political engagement with voters is waning as candidates surround themselves with their supporters. Nowhere is the trend clearer than on the shrinking debate stage.As one of the most prominent Democratic attorneys general of the Trump era, he has sued oil companies for what he called a “a campaign of deception” on climate change and has gone after pharmaceutical companies for promoting opioids.But the politics of crime and criminal justice have shifted since Floyd’s killing, and not necessarily to Ellison’s advantage. In a recent poll of Minnesota voters, 20 percent listed crime as the most important issue facing the state, above even inflation.Maneuvering on abortion rightsDemocrats would prefer to talk about Schultz’s view on abortion. They point to his former position on the board of the Human Life Alliance, a conservative group that opposes abortion rights and falsely suggests that abortion can increase the risk of breast cancer, as evidence that his real agenda is “an attempt to chip away at abortion access until it can be banned outright,” as Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic Party, put it. Democratic operatives told me that in their door-knocking forays, abortion was the topic most on voters’ minds — even among independents and moderate voters.So Ellison has been talking up his plans to defend abortion rights and warning that Schultz would do the opposite.“We will fight extradition if they come from another state, and we’ll go to court to fight for people’s right to travel and to do what is legal to do in the state of Minnesota,” Ellison said at a recent campaign stop. Schultz, he argued, “will use the office to interfere and undermine people’s right to make their own choices about reproductive health.”Schultz denies having an aggressive anti-abortion agenda. Although he said he was “pro-life” and described himself as a “person of faith” — he is a practicing Catholic — he told me he “hadn’t gotten into this to drive abortion policy.” Abortion, he said, was a “peripheral issue” to the attorney general’s office he hopes to lead, and he pointed out that the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled the practice legal in 1995.Historically, the attorney general’s office in Minnesota has focused on protecting consumers, leaving most criminal cases to local or federal prosecutors.But none of that, Schultz insisted, is “written in stone.” The uptick in crime in Minneapolis, he said, was a “man-made disaster” that could be reversed with the right policies.Ellison countered that Schultz “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and cited four statutes that would have to be changed to shift the focus of the attorney general’s office from consumer protection to crime.Schultz acknowledged his lack of courtroom experience but said he would hire aggressive criminal prosecutors if he won. He is promising to beef up the attorney general’s criminal division from its current staff of three lawyers to as many as three dozen and to use organized crime statutes to pursue “carjacking gangs.”He’s been endorsed by sheriffs and police unions from across the state, many of whom are critical of Ellison’s embrace of a proposed overhaul of the Minneapolis Police Department, which fell apart in acrimony. Had it passed, the city would have renamed the police the Department of Public Safety and reallocated some of its budget to other uses.Ellison, who lives in Minneapolis and whose son is a progressive member of the City Council, seems to recognize his political danger. But what he called Schultz’s “obsessive” focus on crime clearly frustrates him.“He doesn’t really care about crime,” Ellison said at one point.He also defended his support for the police overhaul in Minneapolis as necessary to create some space for meaningful change and challenged me to find an example of his having called to “defund the police” — “there isn’t one,” he said. And he noted that he had supported the governor’s budget, which included additional money for police departments.In George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which shows lingering signs of the anger that followed Floyd’s murder.Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesWhere it all beganDemocrats in Minnesota insist that the crime issue is overblown — and murders, robberies, sex offenses and gun violence are down since last year. But according to the City of Minneapolis’s official numbers, other crimes are up: assault, burglaries, vandalism, car thefts and carjacking.And it’s hard, traveling around the area where Floyd’s murder took place, to avoid the impression that Minneapolis is still reeling from the 2020 unrest. But there’s little agreement on who is to blame.Boarded-up storefronts dot Uptown, a retail area where shopkeepers told me that the combination of the pandemic and the 2020 riots, which reached the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare of Hennepin Avenue, had driven customers away.A couple of miles away, on a frigid Tuesday morning, I visited George Floyd Square, as the corner where he was killed is known. Iron sculptures in the shape of fists mark the four entrances to the intersection, which is covered in street art and shows lingering signs of the eruption of anger that followed Floyd’s murder.A burned-out and graffitied former Speedway gas station now hosts a lengthy list of community demands, including the end of qualified immunity for police officers, which Schultz opposes. In an independent coffee shop on the adjoining corner, the proprietor showed me a photograph he had taken with Ellison — the lone Democratic politician, he said, to visit in recent months.I was intercepted at the square by Marquise Bowie, a former felon and community activist who has become its self-appointed tour guide. Bowie runs a group called the George Floyd Global Memorial, and he invited me on a solemn “pilgrimage” of the site — stopping by murals depicting civil rights heroes of the past, the hallowed spot of asphalt where Floyd took his last breath and a nearby field of mock gravestones bearing the names of victims of police violence.Bowie, who said he didn’t support defunding the police, complained that law enforcement agencies had abandoned the community. Little had changed since Floyd’s death, he said. And he confessed to wondering, as he intercepted two women who were visiting from Chicago, why so many people wanted to see the site but offer little in return.“What good does taking a selfie at a place where a man died do?” he asked me. “This community is struggling with addiction, homelessness, poverty. They need help.”What to read tonightHerschel Walker, the embattled Republican nominee for Senate in Georgia, often says he has overcome mental illness in his past. But experts say that assertion is simplistic at best, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports.As we wrote yesterday, swing voters appear to be tilting increasingly toward Republicans. On The Daily, our chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, breaks down why.Oil and gas industry lobbyists are already preparing for a Republican-controlled House, Eric Lipton writes from Washington.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      These Republicans Questioned the 2020 Election — and Most Are Still Doing It. Many Will Win.

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      Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Hundreds of Republican midterm candidates have questioned or spread misinformation about the 2020 election. Together they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party, and a potential threat to American democracy. Together they represent a growing consensus in the Republican Party, […] More

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      Maura Healey Could Make History in Run for Massachusetts Governor

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      Maura Healey, the barrier-breaking attorney general of Massachusetts, secured the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, putting her on track to become the first woman to be elected governor in the state.If Ms. Healey wins in November, and if another Democrat running for governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, also wins, they would become the first two openly lesbian governors in the country.Ms. Healey cleared the Democratic field earlier this summer in a state that has elected a string of moderate Republican governors but where Ms. Healey is favored this time, making Massachusetts one of the Democrats’ best opportunities to flip a governor’s seat.In the race to succeed Gov. Charlie Baker, Ms. Healey will face Geoff Diehl, a right-wing former state lawmaker who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump and who defeated Chris Doughty, a businessman and more moderate Republican. Mr. Baker is a popular centrist Republican who decided against running for re-election after Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Diehl.“The choice in this election could not be more clear,” Ms. Healey told a crowd of supporters at a watch party in Dorchester earlier on Tuesday night, warning that whoever emerged from the Republican primary would “bring Trumpism to Massachusetts.” She added: “I will be a governor as tough as the state she serves.”Ms. Healey was the first openly gay attorney general in the nation — she was elected to that office in 2014 — and her history-making potential this year has energized some Democrats in a proudly progressive state that has never elected a woman to serve as governor. Jane M. Swift served as the state’s first female governor; as lieutenant governor she assumed the role after then-Gov. Paul Cellucci became ambassador to Canada in 2001.“For women who have been around for awhile, and for young women wanting to look up to what’s possible — I can’t believe this is actually happening,” Deb Kozikowski, the vice chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said of Ms. Healey. “She’s breaking barriers right, left and sideways.”Ms. Kotek, the former speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives and the Democratic nominee for governor in that state, faces a more competitive race in November.“There are over 20 million openly L.G.B.T.Q. adults in this country as we speak right now, and in terms of elected officials to the highest seats in their states, or in this country, we still have work to do, right, to be represented,” said JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president for policy and political affairs at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest L.G.B.T.Q. rights organization. Referring to both Ms. Kotek and Ms. Healey, she added, “It’s really an exciting time that we would not only break the record, we would double the number on election night.” In another statewide race, Bill Galvin, a Democrat who has been Massachusetts’ secretary of state for more than 25 years, defeated a primary challenge on Tuesday. He had presented himself as an experienced hand who could protect the election system from right-wing interference. His opponent, Tanisha Sullivan, an N.A.A.C.P. branch president, had argued that Massachusetts should do more to increase voter participation among marginalized groups.And Andrea Campbell, a former Boston councilwoman, won the Democratic nomination for attorney general over Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer — positioning Ms. Campbell to be the first Black woman elected to a statewide office in Massachusetts.Another milestone is likely after Kim Driscoll, the mayor of Salem, Mass., won the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor: No state has ever elected women to both the governorship and the lieutenant governorship at the same time. Voters in at least two other states — Republicans in Arkansas and Democrats in Ohio — also nominated women for both offices this year.Like other states in the East, Massachusetts has a track record of embracing Republican governors, such as Mr. Baker and Mitt Romney, despite the liberal bent of the electorate. But polls have shown Ms. Healey with a strong lead, as relative moderates like Mr. Baker and Mr. Romney find themselves increasingly isolated in a Republican Party lurching ever farther to the right. In her speech on Tuesday night, Ms. Healey praised Mr. Baker, saying he had “led with respect” and “refused to engage in the politics of division and destruction that we’ve seen across this country.” When she thanked him for his service to the state, the audience applauded.“Unfortunately, Geoff Diehl and Chris Doughty will put us on a different path,” she said, before the Republican race was called.Mr. Trump, who lost Massachusetts by 33.5 percentage points in the 2020 general election, attended a tele-rally for Mr. Diehl on Monday, declaring that Mr. Diehl would “rule your state with an iron fist” and push back on the “ultraliberal extremists.” Mr. Doughty, for his part, campaigned with moderates like Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and was endorsed by the editorial board of The Boston Globe in the primary.“President Trump still has a powerful message and an impact on politics in Massachusetts,” said Jim Lyons, the chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, which formally backed Mr. Diehl.Mr. Diehl was the overwhelming favorite at the state Republican convention. His primary victory is the latest sign that Mr. Trump has refashioned the Republican Party in his image up and down the ballot and across the country, including in the Northeast, where moderate Republicans long thrived even as they shrank in number. Indeed, Mr. Baker, who defied Mr. Trump during his time in office and carved out a distinctive brand, has topped lists as the most popular governor in the country.On the other side of the aisle, Democratic-leaning women, in particular, have appeared especially energized since the overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier this summer.Ms. Healey, bolstered by a raft of endorsements from liberal organizations, labor and the political establishment, has had the field to herself since State Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz exited the primary contest in June, although Ms. Chang-Díaz was still listed on the ballot. That has given Ms. Healey a significant runway to focus on the general election and to engage in down-ballot races. Ms. Healey, who was a college basketball captain at Harvard and played on a professional team overseas, has often used discussion of sports in her campaigns. In her Twitter bio, she describes herself as, among other things, a “baller.”“I believe in teamwork,” she said in a recent campaign ad. “I’ve seen it on the court and in the court as your attorney general.”During her time as attorney general, the state participated in major cases, including against Purdue Pharma for its role in the opioid addiction crisis, and in a climate-related investigation of Exxon. She has also focused on assisting student borrowers and homeowners, and drew national attention for repeatedly suing the Trump administration.“I have a message for President Trump,” she declared at the 2017 Women’s March in Boston, after Mr. Trump was inaugurated. “The message from the people of Massachusetts: We’ll see you in court.”She has also worked to recruit more women to become Democratic attorneys general. In the race to succeed her in the attorney general’s office, Ms. Healey endorsed Ms. Campbell.At her election night party, Ms. Healey alluded to her frustrations with a toxic political climate, saying that she was “tired of the anger” and of the division. “When we see what’s happening with the Supreme Court and across this country, we need to lead — this is a time when Massachusetts must lead,” Ms. Healey said.She wrapped up with a plea that nodded to her basketball days: “I ask you, as a former point guard, to leave it all with me on the court.” More

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      Garland Adds Limits at Justice Dept. on Political Activity of Staff

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      Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Tuesday imposed new restrictions on partisan activity by political appointees at the Justice Department, a policy change that comes ahead of the midterm elections.The new rules prohibit employees who are appointed to serve for the duration of a presidential administration from attending rallies for candidates or fund-raising events, even as passive observers.Under the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job, the department had previously allowed appointees to attend such events as passive participants provided they had permission from a supervisor.That is now banned. Under the new policy, the department also prohibits appointees from appearing at events on election night or to support relatives who are running for office. Both had been allowed in the past with prior approval.“We have been entrusted with the authority and responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States in a neutral and impartial manner,” Mr. Garland wrote in a memo sent to department employees.“In fulfilling this responsibility, we must do all we can to maintain public trust and ensure that politics — both in fact and appearance — does not compromise or affect the integrity of our work,” he added.Mr. Garland’s memo was accompanied by a pair of notices from Jolene Ann Lauria, acting assistant attorney general for administration, reminding employees of the department’s existing regulations under the Hatch Act.All department employees are prohibited from engaging in political activity at work, and when using a government-issued phone, email account or vehicle. They are not allowed to seek partisan elective office, enlist subordinates in campaigns or ask co-workers for political donations.Other career employees, including F.B.I. employees and administrative law judges, are banned from a much broader array of partisan activity; they are prohibited, for example, from addressing a political rally or helping a political group with driving voters to the polls on Election Day.The policy change coincides with intensifying government investigations into former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Trump has lashed out at the attorney general and President Biden, baselessly claiming that they conducted a partisan witch hunt in the search of his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida on Aug. 8.After the search, the F.B.I. reported a surge in threats against its agents; an armed man tried to breach the bureau’s Cincinnati field office, before being killed in a shootout with the local police.Mr. Garland is also overseeing the sprawling investigation into the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which has increasingly focused on the actions of Mr. Trump and his supporters.The attorney general has repeatedly said he will go where the evidence leads him, unmoved by political considerations or concerns about a backlash, without “fear or favor.” More

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      There Is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem

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      Debate about the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has settled into well-worn grooves. Mr. Trump and many Republicans have denounced the act as illegitimate. Attorney General Merrick Garland is staying mostly mum. And Democrats are struggling to contain their enthusiasm.Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.But this is a fantasy. There is no scenario following from the present that culminates in a happy ending for anyone, even for Democrats.Down one path is the prosecution of the former president. This would be a Democratic administration putting the previous occupant of the White House, the ostensible head of the Republican Party and the current favorite to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 2024, on trial. That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.Some will say that Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves it — and he does. If Mr. Garland does not press charges against him for Jan. 6 or the potential mishandling of classified government documents, Mr. Trump will have learned that becoming president has effectively immunized him from prosecution. That means the country would be facing a potential second term for Mr. Trump in which he is convinced that he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.That seems to point to the need to push forward with a case, despite the risk of turning it into a regular occurrence. As many of Mr. Trump’s detractors argue, the rule of law demands it — and failing to fulfill that demand could end up being extremely dangerous.But we’ve been through a version of the turbulent Trump experience before. During the Trump years, the system passed its stress test. We have reason to think it would do so again, especially with reforms to the Electoral Count Act likely to pass during the lame duck session following the upcoming midterm elections, if not before. Having to combat an emboldened Mr. Trump or another bad actor would certainly be unnerving and risky. But the alternatives would be too.We caught a glimpse of those alternative risks as soon as the Mar-a-Lago raid was announced. Within hours, leading Republicans had issued inflammatory statements, and these statements would likely grow louder and more incendiary through any trial, both from Mr. Trump himself and from members of his party and its media rabble-rousers. (Though at a federal judge’s order a redacted version of the warrant affidavit may soon be released, so Mr. Trump and the rest of his party would have to contend with the government’s actual justification of the raid itself.)If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.The instinct of Democrats is to angrily dismiss such concerns. But that doesn’t mean these consequences wouldn’t happen. Even if Mr. Garland’s motives and methods are models of judiciousness and restraint, the act of an attorney general of one party seeking to indict and convict a former and possibly future president of the other party is the ringing of a bell that cannot be unrung. It is guaranteed to be undertaken again, regardless of whether present and future accusations are justified.As we’ve seen over and over again since Mr. Trump won the presidency, our system of governance presumes a certain base level of public spiritedness — at the level of the presidency, in Congress and in the electorate at large. When that is lacking — when an aspersive figure is elected, when he maintains strong popular support within his party and when that party remains electorally viable — high-minded efforts to act as antibodies defending the body politic from the spread of infection can end up doing enduring harm to the patient. Think of all those times during the Trump presidency when well-meaning sources inside and outside the administration ended up undermining their own credibility by hyping threats and overpromising evidence of wrongdoing and criminality.That’s why it’s imperative we set aside the Plan A of prosecuting Mr. Trump. In its place, we should embrace a Plan B that defers the dream of a post-presidential perp walk in favor of allowing the political process to run its course. If Mr. Trump is the G.O.P. nominee again in 2024, Democrats will have no choice but to defeat him yet again, hopefully by an even larger margin than they did last time.Mr. Trump himself and his most devoted supporters will be no more likely to accept that outcome than they were after the 2020 election. The bigger the margin of his loss, the harder it will be for Mr. Trump to avoid looking like a loser, which is the outcome he dreads more than anything — and one that would be most likely to loosen his grip on his party.There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win. But that’s a risk we can’t avoid — which is why we may well have found ourselves in a situation with no unambivalently good options.Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right” and is a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Garland Becomes Trump’s Target After F.B.I.’s Mar-a-Lago Search

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      The F.B.I. had scarcely decamped from Mar-a-Lago when former President Donald J. Trump’s allies, led by Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, began a bombardment of vitriol and threats against the man they see as a foe and foil: Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.Mr. Garland, a bookish former judge who during his unsuccessful Supreme Court nomination in 2016 told senators that he did not have “a political bone” in his body, responded, as he so often does, by not responding.The Justice Department would not acknowledge the execution of a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s home on Monday, nor would Mr. Garland’s aides confirm his involvement in the decision or even whether he knew about the search before it was conducted. They declined to comment on every fact brought to their attention. Mr. Garland’s schedule this week is devoid of any public events where he could be questioned by reporters.Like a captain trying to keep from drifting out of the eye and into the hurricane, Mr. Garland is hoping to navigate the sprawling and multifaceted investigation into the actions of Mr. Trump and his supporters after the 2020 election without compromising the integrity of the prosecution or wrecking his legacy.Toward that end, the attorney general is operating with a maximum of stealth and a minimum of public comment, a course similar to the one charted by Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel, during his two-year investigation of Mr. Trump’s connections to Russia.That tight-lipped approach may avoid the pitfalls of the comparatively more public-facing investigations into Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election by James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time. But it comes with its own peril — ceding control of the public narrative to Mr. Trump and his allies, who are not constrained by law, or even fact, in fighting back.“Garland has said that he wants his investigation to be apolitical, but nothing he does will stop Trump from distorting the perception of the investigation, given the asymmetrical rules,” said Andrew Weissmann, who was one of Mr. Mueller’s top aides in the special counsel’s office.“Under Justice Department policy, we were not allowed to take on those criticisms,” Mr. Weissmann added. “Playing by the Justice Department rules sadly but necessarily leaves the playing field open to this abuse.”Mr. Mueller’s refusal to engage with his critics, or even to defend himself against obvious smears and lies, allowed Mr. Trump to fill the political void with reckless accusations of a witch hunt while the special counsel confined his public statements to dense legal jargon. Mr. Trump’s broadsides helped define the Russia investigation as a partisan attack, despite the fact that Mr. Mueller was a Republican.Some of the most senior Justice Department officials making the decisions now have deep connections to Mr. Mueller and view Mr. Comey’s willingness to openly discuss his 2016 investigations related to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump as a gross violation of the Justice Manual, the department’s procedural guidebook.The Mar-a-Lago search warrant was requested by the Justice Department’s national security division, whose head, Matthew G. Olsen, served under Mr. Mueller when he was the F.B.I. director. In 2019, Mr. Olsen expressed astonishment that the publicity-shy Mr. Mueller was even willing to appear at a news conference announcing his decision to lay out Mr. Trump’s conduct but not recommend that he be prosecuted or held accountable for interfering in the Russia investigation.But people close to Mr. Garland say that while his team respects Mr. Mueller, they have learned from his mistakes. Mr. Garland, despite his silence this week, has made a point of talking publicly about the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on many occasions — even if it has only been to explain why he cannot talk publicly about the investigation.“I understand that this may not be the answer some are looking for,” he said during a speech marking the first anniversary of the Capitol attack. “But we will and we must speak through our work. Anything else jeopardizes the viability of our investigations and the civil liberties of our citizens.” More