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      Judge Says States Can Investigate WinRed’s Fund-Raising Tactics

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      The Republican digital donation platform is facing inquiries from four state attorneys general into its use of prechecked boxes to withdraw donations automatically.A federal judge in Minnesota on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by WinRed, a company that processes online donations for Republicans, that sought to block state attorneys general from investigating fund-raising tactics that have triggered complaints of fraud.The attorneys general from four states — New York, Minnesota, Maryland and Connecticut — first sent letters to WinRed last April, asking for documents after a New York Times investigation revealed the company’s use of prechecked boxes to automatically enroll donors in recurring contribution programs. The boxes resulted in a surge in demands for refunds from supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.WinRed declined to provide the documents and instead went to federal court to argue that federal law should pre-empt any state-level consumer investigations. Chief Judge John R. Tunheim of the U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled against the company on Wednesday.Judge Tunheim dismissed WinRed’s attempt to stop the attorneys general investigating outside Minnesota, ruling that he did not have jurisdiction. He ruled in favor of the Minnesota attorney general, Keith Ellison, writing that federal law would not pre-empt a state inquiry.“The court has confirmed an important principle that has nothing to do with politics: State attorneys general can use the laws and investigatory tools of their states to protect the consumers of their states from harm, deception, and abuse,” Mr. Ellison said.Judge Tunheim also denied a request to block a subpoena from the attorneys general, which was issued last July 16, shortly after WinRed went to federal court, according to the ruling issued on Wednesday.“WinRed will appeal,” the company said in an emailed statement.WinRed has argued that the attorneys general, all Democrats, are politically motivated. However, the four also sent a similar request for documents last year to ActBlue, the leading Democratic donation-processing platform. ActBlue said on Wednesday that it had also received a subpoena and that it had shared the requested information.After the ruling Wednesday, Attorney General Brian Frosh of Maryland urged WinRed to cooperate with the inquiry.“Now that its case has been dismissed, it is our hope that WinRed moves from a strategy of attack, attack, attack and cooperates in the investigation of allegations that it deceived consumers around the nation,” he said in a statement.New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, said, “It’s their responsibility to be honest and transparent with their services, and it’s the responsibility of the states to fight back against deceptive behavior in all its forms.”In the fall of 2020, the Trump campaign used prechecked boxes to get a donor’s permission to withdraw extra donations every week — then obscured that fact below extra text unrelated to the additional withdrawals. In the following weeks and months, demands for refunds increased sharply as supporters said they were duped into unwitting contributions.All told, the Trump operation, working with the Republican Party, refunded more than 10 percent of every dollar raised through WinRed in the 2020 campaign — a rate more than four times that of the Democrat Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s operation.The bipartisan Federal Election Commission voted unanimously last year to recommend that Congress outlaw the practice of prechecked recurring donation boxes. Legislation has since been introduced in both the House and the Senate.Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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      Zephyr Teachout Will Run for New York Attorney General

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      The law professor, a darling of New York’s left wing, wants to be attorney general.In the three years since she last ran for office, Zephyr Teachout has taught, written a book (“Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money”), stumped for progressive female candidates, advised Congress and prosecutors across the country on antitrust issues, given birth for the first time at the age of 47, and watched her adversary Andrew Cuomo expelled from the kingdom.If not for the last occurrence, her political career might have belonged to a vanished idealistic vision. But on Monday she plans to formally announce her candidacy for New York State attorney general, a turn she could not have foreseen a year ago when the former governor, with his Must See TV Covid briefings, was still holding on to a 65 percent approval rating, and the state’s top prosecutor, Letitia James, now making a bid for his old job, seemed happy to be exactly where she was.“The A.G.’s office is the best legal job in the country for people’s lawyering, and there’s no other job I would run for,” she told me recently. “I just didn’t expect it to open up for a long time.” Ms. Teachout made a play once before, when the job was last available in 2018, but it went to Ms. James, who had Mr. Cuomo’s support and who, in Shakespearean fashion, would later become central to his fall.At the moment, Ms. Teachout, seems to be one of the most obvious beneficiaries of that erasure, given that any political aspirations she had were unlikely to thrive while Mr. Cuomo remained in power, drinking thirstily from the spigot of retribution.Seven years ago, she emerged from relative obscurity as a legal academic with an expertise in corruption to help successfully shift state politics leftward when she challenged Mr. Cuomo’s re-election, receiving an astonishing third of the primary vote. Threatened by her showing and what it said about the magnitude of progressive sentiment, the governor eventually began supporting measures like a $15 an hour minimum wage and paid family leave. After years of pressure, he broke up a faction of independent Democrats in the State Senate who caucused with Republicans and stymied liberal lawmakers.Ms. Teachout is re-entering politics now in a much different position, with a national profile. At the same time the pendulum isn’t necessarily in the same place that it was in 2014 or even 2018. The latest election cycle, in which Democrats in New York found themselves stunned by losses to Republicans both upstate and down, suggests a challenging moment for progressives. Beyond that, Ms. Teachout has lost all three of the elections in which she participated.As the country has fallen deeper into the throes of polarization, both Democrats and Republicans have directed more hope and faith at state prosecutors to address grievances the federal government now seems impotent to resolve, creating increasingly ambitious agendas. On a recent morning, after her son was dropped off at day care and before her property law class was set to begin at Fordham, where she has taught for 12 years, Ms. Teachout conveyed her plans. She explained, for example, how she would expand the attorney general’s focus on worker safety, wage theft and issues of climate and environmental justice, making fossil-fuel companies liable for the damage they cause.“I think it can be helpful to think of the A.G. as the largest public interest law firm in the country,” she wrote me later. “We all know that big pharma, polluters and fossil fuel companies cause enormous harm, and big landlords don’t provide healthy housing — people spend 90 percent of their time indoors; mold is a climate issue — but I don’t think people realize the awesome power of the office to make it too costly for these big companies to keep harming us.”Around the country, state prosecutors have been experimenting with ways in which oil and gas companies might be held accountable for climate change. The litigation relies, in part, on a successful model deployed by states in the 1990s which argued that the chronic and deadly illnesses caused by cigarettes significantly drove up public health costs. These types of suits are still uncharted territory when it comes to the fossil-fuel industry. New York State lost a related case two years ago when a judge determined that Ms. James’s office had failed to prove that Exxon had committed shareholder fraud in its statements around its accounting for the cost of climate-change regulation.Still, Ms. Teachout maintains it was the right case for the attorney general’s office to bring. “The evidence was strong — the industry had the science cases 30 years ago, and, like opioids, its clear that part of the business model of fossil fuel companies is lying for profit,” she said.Not long after he took office, Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, who later prosecuted Officer Derek Chauvin, brought suit against Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries and the American Petroleum Institute over what he identified as “a campaign of deception” around the effects on climate. Although coming from academia is hardly considered an advantage in American politics, Mr. Ellison, who has known Ms. Teachout for years, pointed out that it is a particular kind of intellectual depth that is needed to pursue these new and increasingly complex frontiers in civil litigation. “It’s not always clear how to redress a tremendous wrong,” he said. From lead paint to guns, to oil and gas, there are cases that prosecutors don’t always have the most useful legal frameworks for, he said.Ms. Teachout, the daughter of a law professor and a judge, is likely to face off against several Democratic challengers that could include Brooklyn’s district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, as well as Daniel S. Goldman, a former federal prosecutor hired by House democrats to join the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. The New York state senator Shelley Mayer announced that she was running earlier this month.Never having held elected office, never having earned millions of dollars at a white-shoe firm, Ms. Teachout might proceed with a candidacy that serves as a test of just how much independence voters are — or aren’t — actually seeking. Driven by indignation more than ideology, in a kind of race where divisive culture-war issues are not especially relevant, she might speak to populists of all kinds — the world of people united in their hatred for Mark Zuckerberg.“I first really started paying attention to Zephyr when she took on Cuomo in that primary,’’ the environmentalist Bill McKibben told me. “Everybody had been working really hard on fracking in New York State. There was a wonderful citizens’ movement upstate, but because it was upstate no one really paid attention to it. Even I had not realized how big and deep it had gotten until Zephyr ran for governor. And she was really hitting it hard.”Though she fell short in her long-shot run for the nomination for governor, she swept certain upstate counties. “I was looking at the election returns that night and I said, ‘OK we’re going to have a ban on fracking in a few weeks.’” Gov. Cuomo, not long after, enacted one.“I’ve spent a lot of time with politicians, and there aren’t that many who are really that willing to take on, in serious ways, entrenched concentrations of power,” Mr. McKibben said. “It’s very hard to see a path where Congress and the judiciary stand up to Exxon or Facebook or forces like them,’’ he said, which makes the jobs of attorney general in New York and California some of the most influential in the country. “There are things that desperately need to change and she strikes me as a very useful crowbar.” More

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      Letitia James Is Running for Governor of New York

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      The attorney general, who oversaw the inquiry into sexual harassment allegations against Andrew Cuomo, will challenge Gov. Kathy Hochul for the Democratic nomination.Letitia James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the inquiry into sexual harassment claims against former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that ultimately led to his resignation, declared her candidacy for governor on Friday, setting up a history-making, high-profile matchup in the Democratic primary.She begins the campaign as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger, and her announcement triggers a start to what may be an extraordinarily competitive primary — a contest set to be shaped by issues of ideology, race and region in a state still battling its way out of the pandemic.Her announcement comes at a volatile moment in state politics, a day after Mr. Cuomo was charged in a sexual misconduct complaint based on the account of one of the women whose claims of sexual harassment were detailed in the attorney general’s report.That development, Ms. James said, validated “the findings in our report,” and to her allies it further cemented the case for her leadership. But it has also added fresh fuel to Mr. Cuomo’s suggestion that her investigation was politically motivated, a message that may resonate with some of the voters who still view him favorably.“I’m running for governor of New York because I have the experience, vision, and courage to take on the powerful on behalf of all New Yorkers,” Ms. James wrote on Twitter as she released her announcement video on Friday.In the video, a narrator said that Ms. James was running “for good-paying jobs, a health care system that puts people ahead of profits, to protect the environment, make housing more affordable and lift up our schools in every neighborhood.” The video did not mention Mr. Cuomo by name.Ms. James, a veteran Brooklyn politician and the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in New York, is seeking to become the first Black female governor in the country; Ms. Hochul, who is white, is the state’s first female chief executive and the first governor in more than a century to have deep roots in western New York.The race may have even broader implications as a key barometer of the direction of the Democratic Party in the Biden era. Ms. Hochul, of the Buffalo area, was once known as a more conservative Democrat, but she has increasingly moved leftward.Ms. James, by turn, has plenty of connections to the relatively moderate Democratic establishment, but also has longstanding ties to the left-wing Working Families Party. It is not yet clear what issues she will use to differentiate herself politically from Ms. Hochul, but there is plainly the potential for vigorous clashes over how best to move the state and party forward.Her announcement came two days after The New York Times and other outlets reported that she and her team had begun informing key political players of her intentions.“Since she was first elected as a Working Families Party candidate nearly 20 years ago, Tish has been a courageous fighter for everyday New Yorkers,” said Sochie Nnaemeka, the state director of the New York Working Families Party. “We expect that Tish will campaign with a clear progressive vision for New York.”Ms. James enters the race with a record that has drawn acclaim from many liberals in the state. As attorney general, she made headlines for suing the National Rifle Association, investigating President Donald J. Trump and presiding over the Cuomo inquiry, which was conducted by outside lawyers.“I’ve sued the Trump administration 76 times — but who’s counting?” she deadpanned in the video.She appeared to make several allusions to Mr. Cuomo. “I’ve held accountable those who mistreat and harass women in the workplace, no matter how powerful the offenders,” she said at one point.“I’ve spent my career guided by a simple principle: Stand up to the powerful on behalf of the vulnerable,” she said at another. “To be a force for change.”Ms. James’s allies believe that she could assemble a powerful coalition that includes Black voters of varying ideological views, a broad swath of left-leaning voters who welcomed her probes of Mr. Cuomo, national donors interested in her history-making potential, and a base in the most vote-rich part of the state.She has deep connections to some labor leaders, too; John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, declared minutes after Ms. James’s announcement that she “will be a governor that working New Yorkers can trust.” His union officially endorsed Ms. James a few hours later — the first union endorsement in the race for governor, her campaign noted.In recent weeks, Ms. James has moved to build out her political and fund-raising teams, and she begins the contest with significant New York City connections after serving on the City Council and as public advocate.She has also spent time traveling across New York — in her official capacity and for purely political outings — and she and her team have sounded out donors, labor leaders and elected officials as she moved toward a bid. Her team has begun seeking commitments for early endorsements that could help her build momentum quickly.But Ms. Hochul begins the race with her own significant advantages. She has been racing to cement an overwhelming fund-raising edge; receptive donors are one of the many benefits of incumbency.Ms. Hochul is strong upstate and already has several key endorsements.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesShe is likely to perform strongly upstate, and she has spent years building relationships on Long Island. Since becoming governor, she has maintained a breakneck public schedule heavily concentrated in the five boroughs, working to shore up her downstate strength and tapping a lieutenant governor, Brian A. Benjamin, who hails from Harlem.And she has already locked down significant institutional support from groups including the Democratic Governors Association and Emily’s List, the fund-raising powerhouse that backs female candidates who support abortion rights. She has been endorsed by county chairs across the state, the state Democratic chairman and the president of the N.A.A.C.P. New York State Conference.Many New Yorkers approve of the way she has handled the transition from a decade of Mr. Cuomo’s iron-fisted reign and appear inclined to give her more time to acclimate to the job — while some Democrats would prefer Ms. James to stay as attorney general to see through existing cases, including one involving Mr. Trump and his business dealings.Ms. Hochul and Ms. James are unlikely to be the only contenders for the nomination, and there is a real possibility of the kind of messy, crowded primary that some party leaders, wary of Democratic infighting, had hoped to avoid.Two of Ms. James’s fellow Brooklynites, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Jumaane D. Williams, the public advocate, are both taking steps toward campaigns for governor and could cut into her coalition in New York City.Jumaane D. Williams, the public advocate, has formed an exploratory committee ahead of a possible bid for governor.Thalia Juarez for The New York TimesRepresentative Thomas Suozzi, who represents Long Island and a sliver of Queens, has also been considering a run. Unlike the other possible contenders, he would seek to outflank Ms. Hochul as a moderate option in the race as she works to build strength in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Steven Bellone, the Suffolk County executive, is also weighing a campaign.But for months, the question of whether Ms. James would run was the defining issue of the nascent primary contest, with some allies describing her as deliberative, and others growing increasingly eager to learn her decision as other aspects of the race came into focus.Her answer goes a long way toward cementing the contours of the field.Now, perhaps the biggest unknown is the question of how Mr. Cuomo may seek to involve himself in the race. The former governor, who as of the most recent filings continued to maintain a large war chest, and his team have repeatedly sought to question Ms. James’s integrity, attacking her in emails and letters sent to onetime supporters.“The fact that the attorney general — as predicted — is about to announce a run for governor is lost on no one,” Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said in response to the complaint on Thursday.Ms. James, for her part, laced into those efforts at a recent speech in New York City as she defended her work.“No one is above the law,” she said. “Our state can do better.” More

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      Trump Pressed Rosen to Wield Justice Dept. to Back 2020 Election Claims

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      The former president began pressuring his incoming acting attorney general even before announcing that his predecessor was stepping down, emails show.WASHINGTON — An hour before President Donald J. Trump announced in December that William P. Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Mr. Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.Mr. Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.Another email from Mr. Trump to Mr. Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Mr. Trump to speak with him.The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results.They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s frenzied drive to subvert the election results in the final weeks of his presidency, including ratcheting up pressure on the Justice Department. And they show that Mr. Trump flouted an established anticorruption norm that the Justice Department acts independently of the White House on criminal investigations or law enforcement actions, a gap that steadily eroded during Mr. Trump’s term.The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, asking Mr. Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.Mr. Trump in June 2020. The president emailed Mr. Rosen via his assistant, sending documents that purported to show election fraud.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMuch of the correspondence also occurred during a tense week within the Justice Department, when Mr. Rosen and his top deputies realized that one of their peers had plotted with Mr. Trump to first oust Mr. Rosen and then to try to use federal law enforcement to force Georgia to overturn its election results. Mr. Trump nearly replaced Mr. Rosen with that colleague, Jeffrey Clark, then the acting head of the civil division.Mr. Rosen made clear to his top deputy in one message that he would have nothing to do with the Italy conspiracy theory, arrange a meeting between the F.B.I. and one of the proponents of the conspiracy, Brad Johnson, or speak about it with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.“I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as an ‘insult,’” Mr. Rosen wrote in the email. “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Mr. Rosen declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.The documents “show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who is the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.Ms. Maloney, whose committee is looking into the events leading up the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd protesting the election results, including Mr. Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department, said she has asked former Trump administration officials to sit for interviews, including Mr. Meadows, Mr. Clark and others. The House Oversight Committee requested the documents in May as part of the inquiry, and the Justice Department complied.The draft brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file before the Supreme Court mirrored a lawsuit that Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas had filed to the court, alleging that a handful of battleground states had used the pandemic to make unconstitutional changes to their election laws that affected the election outcome. The states argued in response that Texas lacked standing to file the suit, and the Supreme Court rejected the case.The version of the lawsuit that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file made similar claims, saying that officials in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania had used the pandemic to unconstitutionally revise or violate their own election laws and weaken election security.To try to prove its case, the lawsuit relied on descriptions of an election monitoring video that appeared similar to one that Republican officials in Georgia rejected as doctored, as well as the debunked notion, promoted by Mr. Trump, that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked.Eager to speak with Mr. Rosen about the draft Supreme Court lawsuit, a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, who had advised on Mr. Paxton’s effort, tried unsuccessfully to reach him multiple times, according to emails sent between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Dec. 29 and obtained by the House Oversight Committee investigators.Mr. Olsen first reached out to Jeffrey B. Wall, the acting solicitor general who would have argued the brief before the Supreme Court. “Last night the President directed me to meet with AG Rosen today to discuss a similar action to be brought by the United States,” Mr. Olsen wrote. “I have not been able to reach him despite multiple calls/texts. This is an urgent matter.”Mr. Rosen’s chief of staff, John S. Moran, told Mr. Olsen that the acting attorney general was busy with other business at the White House. About an hour later, Mr. Olsen drove from Maryland to Washington “in the hopes of meeting” with Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, the emails show.When Mr. Olsen could not get through to Mr. Rosen or Mr. Moran, he called an employee in the department’s antitrust division, according to the documents.The emails do not make clear whether Mr. Olsen met with Mr. Rosen, but a person who discussed the matter with Mr. Rosen said that a meeting never occurred. Rather, Mr. Olsen eventually cold-called the official’s private cellphone and was politely rebuffed, the person said, requesting anonymity because the matter is part of an ongoing investigation.Mr. Olsen provided more fodder for his case in an email sent later that night to Mr. Moran, saying that it was at Mr. Rosen’s request.On the day that Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Rosen would be the acting attorney general, he wanted him to look at materials about potential fraud in northern Michigan, according to an email obtained by the committee. That fraud claim had been the subject of a lawsuit filed by the former Trump adviser Sidney Powell, who argued that Dominion voting machines had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The state’s Republican clerk had said that human error was to blame for mistakes there that initially gave more votes to Mr. Biden, and a hand recount at the county level conducted in December confirmed that the machines had worked properly.A federal judge threw out Ms. Powell’s lawsuit on Jan. 7, saying that it was based on “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” She has been accused of defamation in a lawsuit by Dominion in part because of the Michigan claims.Mr. Rosen is in the process of negotiating to give a single interview with investigators from the House Oversight Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee and others who are looking into the final days of the Trump administration; and he has asked the Justice Department’s current leaders to sort what he can and cannot say about the core facts that involve meetings at the Oval Office with Mr. Trump, which could be privileged.Mr. Rosen met with department officials and spoke with Mr. Trump’s representatives within the last week to discuss these matters, according to a person briefed on the meetings. If the parties cannot come to an agreement, the issue could be thrown into court, where it most likely would languish for months, if not years. More

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      Oklahoma A.G. Mike Hunter Resigns, Citing ‘Personal Matters’

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      Attorney General Mike Hunter announced his resignation one day after The Oklahoman said it had sent him questions about an extramarital affair.Attorney General Mike Hunter of Oklahoma announced his resignation on Wednesday, a day after a local newspaper said it had questioned him about an extramarital affair.“Regrettably, certain personal matters that are becoming public will become a distraction for this office,” Mr. Hunter said in a statement on Wednesday. “I cannot allow a personal issue to overshadow the vital work the attorneys, agents and support staff do on behalf of Oklahomans.”He said he would officially step down on Tuesday.His abrupt announcement came after The Oklahoman said it had sent him questions on Tuesday night about an extramarital affair that it said it had confirmed through people familiar with the situation.Mr. Hunter, a Republican, filed for divorce on Friday from Cheryl Hunter, his wife of 39 years, the newspaper reported. The Oklahoman reported that, according to the people it had spoken with, the affair had been with an employee of the state Insurance Department who had filed for divorce in April from her husband of 25 years.Under the state Constitution, Gov. Kevin Stitt, a fellow Republican, can appoint Mr. Hunter’s replacement to serve until the next election in 2022, Mr. Stitt’s spokeswoman, Carly Atchison, said.“The Attorney General informed me of his resignation this morning and I respect his decision to do what he thinks is best for his office and the State of Oklahoma,” Mr. Stitt said in a statement on Wednesday. “I know he is going through a difficult time and I wish him, his family, and the employees of his office well.”Ms. Hunter declined to comment on Wednesday. She told The Oklahoman on Tuesday that “I am heartbroken and my priorities are to take care of my sons, my daughter-in-law, my grandson and my parents.”Gov. Mary Fallin had appointed Mr. Hunter to serve as attorney general in February 2017 after Scott Pruitt, the previous attorney general, resigned to become administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Hunter had previously served as first assistant attorney general under Mr. Pruitt before Ms. Fallin named him secretary of state and special legal counsel.From 2010 to 2015, Mr. Hunter was the chief operating officer of the American Bankers Association, and from 2002 to 2009, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of the American Council of Life Insurers, Ms. Fallin’s office said when she announced his appointment as attorney general.Mr. Hunter also served six years in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, representing District 85 in Oklahoma City, according to his office.In 2018, he was elected to a full four-year term as attorney general after he defeated a Democratic candidate in the November general election and a Republican challenger in the primary.As attorney general, Mr. Hunter was one of a number of Republicans who joined in support of a lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general that challenged the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, four states that Mr. Trump had lost to President Biden. The Supreme Court rejected the lawsuit in December.Mr. Hunter had also made fighting the opioid crisis a top priority.In 2019, he led the state’s case in the first civil trial against an opioid manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey-based medical giant, which produced a fentanyl patch. In August of that year, a judge in Oklahoma ruled that Johnson & Johnson had intentionally played down the dangers and oversold the benefits of opioids and ordered the company to pay the state $572 million.Mr. Hunter said the ruling was the first in the country to find an opioid manufacturer liable for the harm caused by the opioid crisis in the United States. More

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      Barr Leaves a Legacy Defined by Trump

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      Barr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden, Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden or the ElectionThe departing attorney general, William P. Barr, again broke with President Trump on his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and the need to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president-elect’s son.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsDec. 21, 2020Updated 9:12 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr distanced himself again from President Trump on Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint special counsels to oversee the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., or to investigate Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.At a news conference to announce charges in an unrelated terrorism case, Mr. Barr, who is stepping down in two days, said that he did not “see any reason to appoint a special counsel” to oversee the tax investigation into the younger Mr. Biden.“I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Mr. Barr said. “To the extent that there is an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally.”He also said that he would name a special counsel to oversee an inquiry into election fraud if he felt one were warranted. “But I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Mr. Barr said.After Mr. Trump’s loss to Mr. Biden, the president and his allies have seized on conspiracy theories about election fraud and considered legally questionable actions to cast doubt on the validity of the outcome or even seek to overturn it. Mr. Barr’s statements, in his final days on the job, seemed to signal that there was no appetite at the Justice Department to be drawn into any such efforts.But it is unclear how much pressure Mr. Trump might put on Mr. Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the current deputy attorney general, who will lead the department on an acting basis for the remaining weeks of the president’s term and whose approach to dealing with Mr. Trump is unknown.At a minimum, Mr. Barr’s statements on Monday give Mr. Rosen cover not to appoint special counsels to look into voter fraud or Hunter Biden, and would make the optics of any decision to go ahead with such appointments more difficult for both Mr. Rosen and Mr. Trump.Mr. Rosen has not signaled his specific intentions. But he has held discussions about the ramifications of appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with those conversations who is not authorized to publicly discuss them.He said in an interview with Reuters last week that he would make decisions on all issues, including the potential appointment of a special counsel, “on the basis of the law and the facts.”Mr. Barr’s comments are certain to further poison his relationship with Mr. Trump, who believes that the attorney general should have more forcefully used the Justice Department to attack Mr. Biden and his family in the weeks before the election and to cast doubt on the results after the votes were cast.Long been regarded as Mr. Trump’s most loyal and effective cabinet member, Mr. Barr, a believer in strong presidential power, brought the Justice Department closer to the White House than any attorney general since John Mitchell, who ran President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign and was deeply involved in Watergate.Mr. Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation into the intersection of Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign amounted to a gift to the president. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr. Trump before its public release and ultimately concluded that the president had not obstructed justice, despite his efforts to shut down the inquiry.The Justice Department’s independent inspector general found that the senior officials at the bureau had sufficient reason to open the investigation. A judge later called Mr. Barr’s summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, misleading.Convinced that the F.B.I. had overstepped its authority in investigating the Trump campaign, Mr. Barr asked a federal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to look into the origins of the Russia investigation. In October, the attorney general appointed him to be a special counsel with a mandate to continue exploring whether the inquiry was wrongfully opened.Mr. Barr broke with longstanding norms when he spent the months leading up to the election echoing Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots would result in widespread voter fraud. In strikingly political remarks for an attorney general, he later said the country would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if the president were not re-elected.He also approved the withdrawal of criminal charges against Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and overruled prosecutors who requested a long sentencing recommendation for Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s longtime advisers.But his relationship with the president fractured after the election after he said in an interview this month that he had not seen voter fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Tensions between them escalated after it became clear that Mr. Barr had kept the investigation in Mr. Biden’s son under wraps during the presidential race. While it is department policy not to discuss investigations that could affect the outcome of an election, Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the matter during the campaign.With the president growing more furious and his allies constantly attacking Mr. Barr on social media and cable news for his perceived disloyalty, the president said last week that Mr. Barr would depart on Wednesday.Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have grown more frantic since he announced that Mr. Barr would step down. On Friday, he discussed with aides in the Oval Office about naming Sidney Powell to be a special counsel overseeing a voter fraud inquiry. Ms. Powell, who worked as a lawyer for his campaign, has promoted unfounded conspiracy theories that Venezuela rigged the presidential election using doctored voting machines.Ms. Powell met briefly with Mr. Trump on Monday, a person briefed on their discussion said. Separately, the president met with a group of House Republicans, including Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is pushing a congressional challenge of electoral votes from a half-dozen battleground states that were won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Brooks said that he and “people with firsthand knowledge of voter fraud” met over the course of several hours with Mr. Trump and others. “All in all, our effort to object to states that have such flawed election systems as to render them untrustworthy is full speed ahead,” Mr. Brooks said.The president has raised the possibility of an executive order to have the Department of Homeland Security seize and examine voting machines for evidence of tampering. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has also sought to have the department seize the machines, an idea rejected by homeland security officials.On Monday, Mr. Barr said he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.”White House lawyers have told Mr. Trump that he does not have the authority to take these actions, but his allies have pushed the president not to heed their advice.Now Mr. Rosen will have to contend with the possibility that Mr. Trump will run a parallel pressure campaign on the Justice Department.Mr. Rosen, a longtime corporate lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor, had never worked at the Justice Department before he became Mr. Barr’s top deputy in May 2019. His previous government service includes a stint as general counsel of the Transportation Department and of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, as well as as the No. 2 official of the Transportation Department under Mr. Trump.The question of how far an attorney general can and should go to further Mr. Trump’s political agenda has defined the tenures of both Mr. Barr and his most recent predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But Mr. Rosen will be stepping into the role at a time when the question is as intense as it has ever been.Unlike Mr. Barr and Mr. Sessions, Mr. Rosen does not have a long relationship with the department and no one is sure how much he is inclined to be a check on the president and protect the long-term interests of the department.Mr. Rosen worked largely in Mr. Barr’s shadow at the department. After Mr. Barr announced that he would leave, Mr. Rosen said that he was “honored at the trust and confidence” that Mr. Trump had placed in him to lead the department and that he would “continue to focus the implementation of the department’s key priorities” and maintain “the rule of law.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More